 Coming up on DTNS the Libra Association insists. It's still viable Apple TV comes to Roku You heard that right and Google announces the Pixel 4 and more This is the Daily Tech news for Tuesday October 15th 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt And oh my god, there's no studio feline in the lovely illuminated Paris. I'm Patrick Beja And I'm Roger Chang the show's producer. Yes, Sarah out sick today, but we apologize for that But we have been having a great time on good day internet Patrick has been evaluating my French We talked a lot about fortnight and how epic got away with what they got away with This weekend. We'll tell you a tiny bit about that here in a second But if you want that full expanded discussion, you got to check out good day internet at patreon.com slash DTNS All right, let's start with a few tech things you should know AMC theaters launched an on-demand video store in the United States AMC theaters on demand It'll make 2,000 films from major US studios available for purchase or rental AMC stubs members That's their loyalty program who use their first transaction to buy or rent a movie from Lionsgate or paramount pictures Can choose an additional three movies from a selection of that studio's films little promotion You can use AMC theaters on demand at AMC theaters comm the AMC theaters mobile app on a Roku and on some smart TVs With more services and devices to be added in the near future Welcome to 2008 after After taking the fortnight game down for a couple of days after an asteroid Destroyed the map in-game fortnight chapter 2 has launched it features as expected a new map and new skins as well as new ways to level Sony will launch its 360 reality audio technology later this year for Amazon music HD Deezer title and nugs net the format places elements of a music track around the listener in a virtual sphere kind of Surrounding them with sound Sony says about a thousand songs will be available at launch Including tracks from Pharrell Bob Dylan and Billy Joel with live performances from Charlie XCX and Codeline Amazon Echo studio will support 360 reality audio with other speakers requiring a Sony decoder And it also works with most headphones if you just want to plug it in that way All right, let's follow up on something that happened kind of at the end of last week after we finished DTNS Patrick Indeed late Friday Blizzard changed its position on punishing Hearthstone competitor named Blitzchung Blitzchung Chung He was oh, I'm sorry the text is confusing me For saying a Hong Kong protest movement slogan during a post game interview So he said something pro Hong Kong and then was punished for it Blitzchung's outright ban has been reduced to a six-month Suspension it was a one-month ban and he will a one-year ban that was turned into six months Suspension and he will now get to keep his prize money The two casters who interviewed him had their firings changed to six months suspensions as well President Blizzard president Jane that We Focused on the game and claim the specific views expressed were not at issue and relationships in China had no influence on the decision mixed reactions to To this change a lot of people and I think fairly so saying well, okay at least they they took a second look and and let Blitzchung keep his money Those are the positives out of it, but quite a few people also saying This is still not okay with them that they punished him at all for that Blizzard trying to walk the line of saying it's not because China told us to it's because we want the focus to be on the game And he was saying something that turned the focus away from the game Yeah, which is a difficult Claim to accept that the problem is the language I felt of the Communication didn't feel very genuine and I should add that I used to work for Blizzard work there for five years So keep that in mind but it didn't feel very genuine when sincerity was what was what was needed in that instance in my opinion and they made it sound like he was trying to tickle the boxes about corporate values and Defending those values in a situation which is clearly difficult for them. So it didn't feel very appropriate for the situation and the claim that China had nothing to do with it is Impossible to believe. Yeah, severity and the swiftness of the initial punishment Was so strong that even if it wasn't like they directly thought. Oh, do you think China would like it? I mean it it obviously influenced them so that or at least it it's difficult to believe it didn't that being said That being said, I think the current state of the punishment feels more Appropriate and if they had done that to begin with I think people would have had a lot less of a problem with it But of course, it's a Second try. I think the the way if you want to look at it with a little bit of genuine positivity Blitzchang will be able to compete in the next round of Grand Masters next year He might choose not to but if he does it will mean that with all of this focus and his pro Hong Kong stance He will still be competing in the competition next year and the visibility will be quite strong So I think in that sense I'm understanding it as a way to Split the difference and still giving him the opportunity to be visible, which is I'm guessing if they were to if they wanted to please China a hundred percent They might not have wanted this to happen, but well, there's so much going on here I mean Brack wrote I want to be clear our relationship in China had no influence on our decision BS, I'm sorry. I agree 100% just if he had said I want to be clear China does not get to decide what happens with with Blitzchang. I'd probably be okay. All right Yeah, I mean you have to take into account what's going on in China and your market and everything But you're the diss you're the one who makes the final decision Okay, fair but to try to get me to believe our relationships had no influence. This didn't happen this fast Without influence being felt may maybe Xi Jinping didn't pick up the phone and call Blizzard immediately and say, you know fire that guy But they didn't have to no one from the Chinese government had to reach out That's not how this works You know that that is going to get you in trouble and you do something to head off any repercussions Which is why Blizzard acted too fast in my opinion and this is Brack saying we acted too fast He doesn't say because we were scared Yeah, which is what I think and and that's why they overreacted and punished him too harshly and now they're trying to dial it back But I you know, yeah, you can we had one of the DTNs listeners point out that you know There's things like Colin Kaepernick in the US where speaking out has has gotten him sort of shadow banned from the NFL but even that was not as quick and as very much related to exactly what was happening as this and And I think that has everything to do with the fact that it was about China and because It's such a hot button issue Everyone knows China is intolerant of any kind of expression of support of Hong Kong the NBA thing had already happened at that point and so They they were extra sensitive to it and of course they reacted because of it it might be that the Asian team was the one that made the decision and that global team is the one Then even then you can't claim It had nothing to do with it. That's no, I'm sorry All right last week privacy advocates warned that a note in iOS 13 mentioned that the safari browser uses Chinese company 10 cents Safe browsing system along with Google's safe browsing program in order to warn about malicious web pages Now both these systems may log IP addresses in the process Apple says that the safe browsing providers send a list to the safari browser which never shares the actual URL you visit with the safe browsing provider whether it's 10 cent or Google the list is only received from 10 cent on a phone If that phone's region code is set to mainland China Otherwise, it's from Google now Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green says that while Google uses hashes for you are all matching Sometimes safari may ask Google for more matching hashes Which could reveal the IP address to Google and Apple didn't say anything about the IP address So that part is true. It's unknown how 10 cent handles requests But it may do the same but it comes down to whether you believe Apple if Apple saying the thing I want to hear which is no we only use 10 cent in mainland China where we can't use Google and we only an outside of mainland China We use Google and if there's a problem with how the Google thing works great Let's talk about it But I think a lot of people were worried that oh, I guess safari is sending my browsing information to 10 cent and that's far from What's happening here? And that's been reported on I think rather poorly because of the frenzy probably around China and Apple When there are things that are genuinely concerning we should call them out It seems unlikely this is actually one of them and they've been using 10 cent as safe browsing in China for a while This just sort of came to light with the iOS 13 mention of it And I think it was taken out of context So on the one hand I have my opinions about the you know the Blizzard China relationship as you heard this I think is a red herring I don't think there's much going on here outside of the fact that you can't use a Google product in China And you may think that you know 10 cent could be doing something a farious with Chinese user stuff that that that's a Perfectly legitimate topic area for conversation But I that's not what a lot of the stories that I saw were trying to imply and I don't think there's any chance Again less apples flat out lying and somebody can catch them in the lie I it sounds like Apple is not using this outside of mainland China Right. I mean there are many things we can discuss about the relationship between Apple and China many of them problematic But let's yeah, let's let's keep things a little bit factual and in this case. Yeah, what you're about to say next sounds like It's not factual, but it is Roku announced That Apple is launching an Apple TV app for most Roku's starting Tuesday The Apple let users access purchased or rented TV shows and movies as well as programs from Apple TV channels like HBO and CBS all-access Apple TV plus original shows will be available through the Roku app starting November 1st For $4 and 99 cents a month Now this answers a big question for me Which was if they're using Apple TV plus as a loss leader on Phones by giving you a year free How are they expecting to make the money back if they're switching from being a devices revenue generating company to a services revenue Generating company. This is one of the things I would expect to see you're going to put Apple TV plus out there as something to bring in People from other platforms the way Apple music went to Android Apple TV plus apparently gonna go to Roku, which makes sense Roku is the set-top box maker that is most popular It is well fire TV is pretty popular too, but I'm guessing they couldn't get Amazon on board for that So so Roku seems like a logical choice here Yeah, and the granddaddy of these hell freezing over moments, which was literally the way it was described on stage was iTunes coming to Windows Yeah, right and that was also a move to get people hooked and to push the iPods and that Ecosystem and it worked out for Apple. So it's not that surprising. They're doing it again. No I was surprised. I didn't hear about it earlier I guess but it probably took some time to code test and get get the platform to agree and all that although With Roku, they're pretty open. So the platform agreeing was probably not a big deal there And also over the weekend visa Mastercard PayPal Stripe eBay booking holdings and Mercado Pago all Decided not to join the Libra Association citing various regulatory compliance concerns if you listen to Good Day internet on Friday You heard us reacting to the beginnings of the story breaking especially visa and Mastercard leaving the association Acknowledged that its plan for a June 2020 launch may be delayed because of regulatory hurdles, but 21 companies still remain. What's that? 21 Keep going don't pay attention to 21 companies still remain including one payment processor The Netherlands pay you those 21 members met Monday to ratify governing documents in Geneva, Switzerland and elect the Libra Association board we've talked about the Libra Association is existing But it's really only existed as a concept until now now they have Bylaws and they have a board of directors. So now they are in fact a legal association The five-member board includes Facebook's David Marcus as you might expect as well as representatives from Andreessen Horowitz Cryptocurrency company Zapo pay you the Netherlands payment company and micro lending nonprofit Kiva Former PayPal senior director of payments and engineering Bertrand Perez is a Libra Association member and was officially named COO and Interim managing director of the Association the Libra Association also claimed that 1500 organizations have expressed interest in joining and a hundred eighty of those meet criteria for membership But Patrick if you don't have visa Mastercard and PayPal on board I'm not saying Libra Association can't navigate the regulatory issues and can't launch But you need those companies back on board if you want to make this thing viable if you want to make them viable as a Having a bridge with the real world Yeah, it could still be viable for internet payments for lack of a better term And I'm pretty sure Facebook is gonna keep soldering on but yes, those are I mean it's incredible that all of those left at the same time and It chops off an entire part of Libra's use case use cases They might come back But certainly this is expressing lot of Cold fitness at the idea of Libra when a few months ago there was seemingly more enthusiasm Yeah, and this takes me from thinking Libra Association is a very well designed system with the right support And it should work if it's allowed to to thinking Libra Association has a very good chance of never becoming anything And one thing to note Andreessen Horowitz's representative has been suggesting instead of the basket of currencies Maybe they peg Libra to the dollar because that would make it more acceptable to regulatory systems But that takes away a lot of the viability of the model If they can get regulatory approval of this it is of course possible to visa Mastercard PayPal stripe Etc join back up later, which case this could could get restarted But having the regulatory resistance they have and now not having the bank type places the payment processors on board I think it looks unlikely to me Yeah, I wouldn't go that far, but it's certainly more of an uphill challenge and The I mean, yeah, we'll see we'll see Well folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines in about five minutes each day subscribe to daily tech headlines calm Let's get into those Google announcements Their announcement was very interesting very laid back a lot of talk about concepts Baratunde Thurston did some video snippets that they use to quite effect and then they just kind of like sprinkle in Details it wasn't the the typical like here's our product. Here's what it looks like. Here's the specs Here's the price and release state. It was very interesting talked a lot about ambient computing and being helpful For instance at the very beginning of the the keynote They just kind of threw out the Google stadia launches November 19th and the pixel will be the first phone to support it And yeah, you can get the founders edition for 130 dollars in pre-order or on launch November 19th I This is such a low-key way to announce the launch of a major product it confirms again to me that this is a beta and They don't want everyone rushing in and this is you know when you launch a service like this You want everyone to be talking about it? Doing it like that is not going to be conducive to a lot of press. They also had a couple of hardware announcements that are coming Down the line for instance pixel buds The wireless earbuds hands-free access long-range Bluetooth They wouldn't give us an actual range, but it sounds like it's just typical range of other Bluetooth three rooms or a football field Come with a hook that stabilize them in the ear and keep them almost flush So they don't hang out like a lot of them do especially the AirPods Volume dynamically adjust to ambient noise beam forming mics Help pick up your voice better They claim five hours of listening time on a charge 24 hours with the charging case not come until spring of 2020 for 179 bucks the Pixelbook go laptop however is available soon Has a magnesium case in black and pink also has a grippable wavy bottom 13 millimeters thick Ways two pounds with the claim 12-hour battery life and a quiet keyboard Intel Core m3 i5 or i7 processors 8 or 16 gigs ram 6428 and 256 solid-state drives you can get the black version for pre-order now with the pink coming soon and Each cost 649 dollars really affordable chromo s laptop here Yeah, I'm I'll go back to the pixel buds for just a second. It's kind of incredible how much The AirPods have influenced that well They have created this category and everyone including myself We're laughing at them when they first announced them But once we got our hands on the product We realized how well-designed they are and they've all danced around the design But in the end it seems every big company has a version of this which is very similar to that product So that's that's something that continues to impress me. It's rare nowadays that Apple's defined Apple defines a product category But they did there Yeah pixel book. I'm personally not a big chromo s user. So Okay. Yeah anyone Google also stressing that the nest is their home brand with a lot of nest announcements the nest mini Used to be a Google home mini now. It's called the nest mini This new one has a third mic so it picks up your voice better comes with a wall mount They've really improved the sound with software They have they say two times stronger bass, but everybody listened to it said yeah, it's got better bass It's got better sound Uses ultrasound to light up the controls when your hand is near which is kind of nifty because there's not physical buttons And also use that ultrasound to tune your audio to adapt to noise the nest mini available for pre-order for 49 bucks shipping October 22nd Google also announced a program to migrate works with nest devices to Google devices will need to pass a security review to migrate But that's good news if you were worried works with nest was just gonna get cut off Looks like there's a path forward for some devices anyway This will allow things like non-nest security systems to view and control your nest camera Or do things like have your lights flash red if the smoke alarm goes off That's part of home routines which launches early next year Nests can also hear breaking glass or barking dogs. Why you'd want it to hear barking dogs in my house I would they would just be going off all the time, but it can send you alert if you want It'll call the appropriate emergency dispatcher if you ask it to and the Google home app will now have a feed of what's happening with your home devices in it New nest aware whole home pricing you won't pay by device anymore one monthly rate for all your nest devices $6 per month with a 30-day event history and $12 a month for the 60-day event history and 10-day video history That's rolling out in early 2020 and the nest Wi-Fi router and Wi-Fi point Are the new mesh Wi-Fi products two times the speed and 25% better coverage than the previous Google Wi-Fi? One router and one point supposedly will cover about 85% of the homes in the US Settings are now in the Google home app They're kind of motion everything into Google home the router contains Bluetooth low energy and thread support So it can act as a smart home hub and the nest point the extender has Google assistant speaker and mic in it So it can act like a nest mini available for pre-order now shipping November 4th a two-pack Which is just the router and the and one point 269 bucks and a three-pack for 349 bucks at least clarity or some measure of it It's good that they are Kind of explaining to us what nest is and what Google is and All of those categories that have become very confusing I don't know how long that would last but for now I think that's a good thing Yeah This is the most focused that nest and Google home have felt in a while all all of these announcements felt like they were Bringing it together rather than causing more confusion for once So that's that's good. And then of course the star of the show the pixel 4 With the project solely radar motion sensing chip in it called motion sense Claims that that makes it the fastest face unlock because motion sense knows when you're moving towards Your phone to pick it up. You can also wave over it to change tracks Silence a call interact with games motion sense is processed on the phone And it's not shared with other services Google made a lot of effort to talk about privacy today The Titan M security chip and pixel phones will let you delete your Google assistant data by asking Google assistant Also Google assistant has an on-device language model So it doesn't have to go to the cloud for all your Google assistant requests Some can be done right there so it never gets shared with the cloud. No one else ever sees it Six gigabytes of RAM you can get 64 or 128 gigabytes of solid-state drive storage There's the 5.7 inch screen on the pixel 4 with a 2800 milliamp hour battery and a 6.3 inch screen on the pixel 4 XL with a 3700 milliamp hour battery couple of the other features they mentioned the recorder app can now Transcribe voice recordings in real time on the pixel 4 that let you search for things later and find parts of your recording That's all done on the device The OLED display has a 90 Hertz refresh rate that will adjust automatically by activity to try to preserve battery life You're also no longer getting Google photos as part of a pixel 4 purchase instead You get three months of Google 100 gigabyte storage a lot of people upset about that Let's talk about the camera It's a square on the back that uses computational photography 2x telephoto lens that's hybrid optical digital live HDR plus with some machine learning to approximate HDR plus in the viewfinder so that what you see is what you get Dual exposure controls while you're composing a shot brightness and shadow are the two controls some learning based white balancing in all photo modes now New portrait mode with computing depth from dual pixels and dual cameras So you can do farther back portraits and large objects They're working on fur and the night side brought an astrophotography mode so you can capture the moon or a moonlit landscape You can't do both at once yet But they said a software update is coming that might increase the dynamic range close enough to do it You can get the pixel 4 in black white or orange although they have you know funny Google names for those Pre-order starting at 799 dollars for the 4 899 dollars for the XL shipping October 24th on all major US carriers Now a few more things to notice before I let you give your impression Patrick no headphones included in the box You can't get the pixel buds yet, but there's no headphones in this box no adapter in the box You do get a hundred dollar Google store credit when you buy one so presumably you could buy some wired headphones But that seems annoying the motion sense chip uses a 60 gigahertz ISM band which is not allowed for commercial use in India So pixel 4 not coming to India and Google confirmed to the Verge that the pixel 4 will not support the daydream VR Platform and Google will no longer be selling the daydream view mobile headset A spokesperson told the Verge that usage has been declining and added asking people to put their phone in a headset and lose Access to the apps they use throughout the day causes immense friction So my read there is that Google is pivoting to create a standalone virtual reality headset All of the Oculus go and we may see that in the next year or two There's a lot in there, but I think the most interesting one is Solely or now they're motion. It's marketing one motion sense. There you go. I'm not sure What to think about it? It seems gimmicky and and this kind of thing has been tried before and hasn't really caught on but of course it might not have been as Polished as this could be. I think in the end, of course, we'll have hands-on and people will tell us and we will try Ourselves to see if it's good. I think it might still be gimmicky. I feel like it. It's two context specific and The uses the use cases will be Relatively limited. What do you agree with you? It feels like a thing that is gonna look cool when you show it off But is not yet to the point that you'll use it a lot And and I'm not saying it won't get there But this is this is the first gen Introducing the concept whether they'll start to find uses get more apps on board with it that that will be seen over the next year I think I mean just the the fact that Essentially the phone has to be not lying. It doesn't have to be lying flat But the only times when you're not having it in your hand is Going to be when it's lying flat and if you have it in one hand, I suspect you touch the screen You don't stop waving your hand around. I mean, I guess you could but it's not as a So that alone makes it a little bit if he on my on my for me Everything else seems great great updates to the pixel phone the photography Aspects are interesting but not incredible the you know, 90 Hertz all the display is pretty cool But again, not amazing Yeah, it's it's cool. It's a solid phone and it's priced appropriately. I think it's seven hundred forty nine dollars It's cheaper than most major flagship phones And it's a good solid phones. This is not going to win the war for the further for Google By any stretch, but it's going to keep them in the fight Indeed I Bought one. So I'll be letting you know how it goes once I get it how much project solid you use Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit You can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit.com and Join in our Facebook group Facebook comm slash groups slash daily tech news show Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including Mike McLaughlin Philip less Frederick Hoobner Thank you for your support and thank you Patrick Beja for being on the show Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure Do you have anything going on to let folks know about? New launches anything? Um, I guess if you're French you can always check out the rendezvous tech or If you like tech or gaming and if you speak English, go check out the Phileus club, which is the last episode we had English an Englishman a Scott and an Irish person and they talked about Brexit one of them was a pro Brexit Voter and we had would you imagine it a civil conversation? Yeah, and it's possible So I like that you had an Irish European because the high Irish border is huge for that I like that you had a non-Irish European yourself and then you had a remainder and a lever and it seemed to seem very well Ballots. I really enjoyed that conversation Yeah, it was fun You can get the name of the show at frenchspin.com if you don't find it easily on your podcast app the Phileus club Real quickly Len Peralta's year-end DTNS art poster is revealed Including a very large looming Emperor like Roger Chang. Well, Sarah and I fight It's it's a very Star Wars inspired and you could have your name on it in the credits area Order now and it will happen only 30 spots available. 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