 Coming up on DTNS, Apple's designing its own modems now is Twitter killing periscope and your groceries delivered in 10 minutes by gorilla. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, December 11th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Ah, we were just talking about storing cleaning products and stocking up on procedures and all kinds of good stuff on good day internet. You can get that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The NPD Group says that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X launches last month helped set a new November record of $1.4 billion spent on new video game hardware an increase of 58% when compared to a year ago. But as for the top console of the month, Nintendo and Sony split the win with the PS5 being the best selling hardware platform and consumer spending and the Nintendo Switch leading the market in units sold. Wow, that's crazy. U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to establish a list of equipment to be removed from U.S. networks that receive government subsidies as well as establishing a $1.6 billion fund to reimburse carriers for replacing gear deemed a security threat. That second was the big part of here. This will apply to broadband phone and wireless companies. The FCC also voted to revoke China Telecom's authorization to operate in the United States and affirmed its designation of Huawei as a national security threat. This comes after Huawei appealed the FCC's 2019 classification of the company as a national security threat. Microsoft announced that X64 app emulation was coming to Windows on ARM that was back in September. The company is now rolling out the feature to Windows Insiders in the dev channel. Microsoft hasn't said yet when emulation will come to stable Windows builds. The company also announced that Flight Simulator will come to the Xbox Series X and S consoles by next summer available with Game Pass at launch. Brave Software, makers of the Brave browser, announced a new news reader service called Brave Today designed to provide personalized news feeds without tracking what you read. The Brave Today CDN separates your IP address from the content you're requesting using TLS encrypted traffic from a load balancing service and the CDN also pads plain text with extra characters before encryption and strips out identifying headers. Personalization is handled locally in the browser. Cydia, the makers of an app store for jailbroken iPhones, has filed a lawsuit against Apple accusing Apple of what it calls, quote, anti-competitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution. Cydia has existed for just about a year longer than Apple's own app store been around a while. Yeah, first app I ever got on an iPhone was from Cydia, so there you go. Alright, let's talk a little more about Disney's investor day yesterday. Wow, they announced like 50 new things, mostly in the Marvel Star Wars and Pixar universes, but among those announcements were some non-content things as well, including a price increase. Starting March 26th, Disney Plus in the US will go from $6.99 a month to $7.99 a month or $80 a year. In Europe, Disney Plus goes up a little more from 6.99 euros to 8.99 euros. The bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus also goes up a dollar in the US to 13.99. And in January, Disney will start offering a bundle that includes the more expensive commercial free version of Hulu in the US for 18.99. Disney also announced Star, a free tier in some non-US versions of Disney Plus that will be made up of content from ABC, FX, Freeform, Searchlight, and 20th Century Studios. So essentially, a lot of the stuff that they would put on Hulu in the US will go on Star outside the US. Star will roll out to some European countries, Canada, New Zealand, February 23rd. It'll show up on a sixth brand tile on the app's home screen. A service similar to this called Star Plus will launch for Latin American subscribers in June. That one will offer Disney-owned brands alongside ESPN content, including some live linear sports. And Disney announced that Disney Plus has now reached 86.8 million paid subscribers worldwide as of December 2nd. That's close to the 90 million Disney had projected it would reach by the end of its fiscal 2024. So it's plenty ahead of schedule. Disney now projects 230 to 260 million subscribers by the end of fiscal 2024. Right now, about 30% of its 86.8 million are through Disney Plus Hot Star in India. So you've got a big number in the United States, big number in India, and then the rest of it's kind of spread around the rest of the world. I mean, the content announcements yesterday, I was like, wow, you've got some projects in the works. So the increase in costs for the consumer, again, in the US, it's just a dollar per month. It's a little bit more if you're in the EU. And there are quite a few other bundles that Disney's obviously putting together to try to give someone somewhere in the world the tier that they want at a price that they will pay for. But when you have all this content, you've got to pay for it. And it doesn't surprise me that Disney Plus, which has been a real hit right out of the gate. I mean, look at the numbers that they thought they were getting by 2024. They're going to hit that possibly by the end of the year this year. So yeah, it's a brave new world. Yeah, I'm not surprised by the price increase given the production quality that we have seen coming out of things like the Mandalorian. So they've got to make that money somewhere. And a dollar increase to me is minimal enough that I would say, OK, I'll be more than happy to pay that in order for me to see more of this amazing content that y'all have been creating. And honestly, like, I am not surprised that they have already hit 86.8 million paid subscribers because literally just in my own life, so many of my friends that have kids, every single one of them has purchased Disney Plus. So it is not surprising at all. Yeah, they kept that price really low to drive adoption that obviously worked. And so it's not a shock to see him raise the price raising it a single dollar. I think really does help people swallow it and not feel like, oh crap, now it's getting really expensive. I might have to rethink this. And they buried the announcement of the price release under an avalanche of Star Wars Marvel and Pixar announcements, right? Because they know they already have families and kids and nothing that they announced is going to drive families and kids away. Don't get me wrong. But a lot of that Star Wars content, a lot of that Marvel content is really going to make people think, oh wait. So after the Mandalorian is done, maybe I should keep it because I want to see WandaVision or I want to see that Andor thing or I want to see the Ahsoka spin off. Like there's and the list goes on and on and on, right? I mean, I'll probably spend the majority of court killers on Monday just going through all the things they announced here. I'm glad you mentioned that because I kind of fall into that category of like it's just me and my husband in our household. And we considered maybe we should cancel it after we watch Mandalorian because I've already seen all the Disney movies when I was a kid. But now that they've introduced all this new Marvel content coming out next year, I'm like, maybe we should pay for it because it's still a good price. Yeah, I think when Disney Plus was first, you know, announced and the launch was imminent, I was kind of like Disney. I mean, yeah, like I don't, I'm not a babysitter really very much these days. I don't have little kids. I've kind of seen the Disney movies I think I'm going to see. And I it to me, I was like, maybe not the target audience, but the Mandalorian did come out. I've become hooked as many people have been. And I think that, you know, Disney was hoping that that would be the case, but it has been a runaway success. And there are all these spin offs that now can happen, even with people who weren't super aware of of the whole, you know, universe before, where they have now become really into this one show. And now care about these spin offs that would have been really hard to sell them otherwise. You know, maybe I didn't read the comics or, you know, watch, you know, certain animated series or just kind of know the the lore and the background so much. And it's it's interesting where the company goes because sure, they still have that catalog of, you know, that, you know, Cinderella's kind of stuff. But it is, it is greatly ballooned into something totally different. That's going to make them a lot of money. Yeah, the catalog only works a little bit in keeping people around. It really doesn't even attract people. Honestly, you need new content to attract people. And honestly, you need new content to keep them around too. Well, moving on, we have some news coming out of Apple, who is also making some changes to probably bring them some more money. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman's sources say Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, Johnny Sruji, told Staff Thursday that Apple is designing its own cellular modem to replace chips it buys from Qualcomm. Apple bought Intel's modem business in July of 2019. Apple also signed a six year patent licensing agreement with Qualcomm in 2019. And that means Qualcomm gets paid whether Apple uses Qualcomm modems or not. Yeah, so everybody's happy. I'm sure Qualcomm would rather sell them the modem too, but they're going to cash a check from Apple on the patents they agreed to. And now that explains why Apple signed to those agreements. Some people were taken off their stride when Apple signed those agreements at the time. They were using Intel modems for a while, then they bought Intel's modem service and switched to Qualcomm. But it all sort of makes sense now, which is they needed to go with the proven 5G modems from Qualcomm until they could get their own designs out there. And they wanted to make sure they didn't have future problems with Qualcomm, so they signed all those patent licensing agreements. And it just continues the trend of Apple designing their own hardware chips. So the A-chips that are in the iPhone and iPad, the M-chips that are now in the laptops, the U-chip for Wideband, the chip that's in the Apple Watch now, the modem, it's going to keep going, I think. Yeah, I mean Qualcomm having a little bit of a six year patty is nice as well. Yeah, like you said, the company is probably like, okay, well, let's think of where we go going forward. But they've got a few years. Yeah, and I'm sure it's got a pile of cash too. I bet Qualcomm has kind of seen this coming too. Like given the trend that we've seen with Apple and given how the public has really seen all the changes that Apple has been making as far as their hardware goes, they've had very positive results from the public as far as like benchmarking and stuff. So I'm sure Qualcomm was like, I feel like this is happening. So we probably need to change our business plans as well. And in a certain way, Apple showing what you can do with the ARM system for the M1 in a laptop is good for Qualcomm. Because Qualcomm can now say, look, we can design those kinds of chips for you, smaller company that doesn't have the resources Apple does. Oh yeah. Well, some things happening over in the Twitter verse within Twitter itself app researcher Jane Manchin-Wong found a line of code in the Twitter app itself indicating that the service may shut down its Periscope live broadcasting service. The code points to a PS app shutdown learn more URL string with a link to a FAQ about Periscope. Although the link isn't live. It's there. Wong noted that she hadn't seen any shutdown notices in the separate Periscope apps code, but much of Periscope's core functionality has already been integrated into Twitter live. So you might say, yeah, maybe don't need both. Twitter required Periscope back in 2015 before the service actually launched. Yeah, that was the Meerkat scan, right? Twitter was going to get taken down by Meerkat if it didn't, if it didn't act soon. This doesn't surprise me much. A lot of folks in our chat room earlier were like Periscope's still around and it's got, I don't know, 10 million users or something like that. But the idea of using the Periscope app to stream is to use the Periscope app to more efficiently stream to Twitter. Right. And so it makes sense that Twitter would just take that team, take that technology, incorporate it into Twitter live until such point where the user base on Periscope was low enough that they could say, do everything you do on Periscope on Twitter live and Periscope feeds Twitter live anyway. So we really don't need two different apps. I guess one of my big questions about doing more live video on Twitter, which I only had one friend that I know that was using Periscope in a very consistent format is how are they going to market this towards creators as opposed to doing live video on another platform that they can monetize. If creators can't monetize it, I don't see how it would be beneficial or how it would really grow for somebody who, you know, needs to put content out there, of course, but maybe doesn't have a sponsorship integrated into their live video and needs to have some way to monetize that. Yeah, I think that's, that's a really good point, Shannon, and it's also the whole Periscope thing back in 2015. And Miracad or any sort of live video was kind of event based. Were you at some sort of a protest rally, you know, or were you getting somebody on camera that, you know, it was important for a lot of people to see in real time, or natural disaster, that kind of stuff. It was, it was very much that sort of thing. And sure, there was crop up, unfortunately, all the time where there's situations where you want that kind of live capability, but so many other apps have that now. And the social aspect of apps like, you know, Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat, they've, they've figured this out in a way where it makes more sense. And I don't know that many people on my side either who are like, Ah, Periscope, that's the way to share with the world, even though you can do that. I don't, I don't think Twitter is thinking going forward. That's what they need to do with this. I think it's going to be much more of a, Oh yeah, all that fun social stuff that you do when you're talking live for a while, making dinner or, you know, singing or chatting with your friends type of thing. You can do that on Twitter now and maybe Periscope needed to be unbundled. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And Twitter Live is not meant to be a monetization platform. It's meant to be an adjunct to keep you using, watching, creating on Twitter. It's like, Hey, if you want to go live on Twitter, here you go. You can do it. During the summer, I saw a lot of people using Twitter Live to do all kinds of streams and they've got partnerships with sports to provide live streams through Twitter that way. So, so it's a different situation. The TechCrunch article did kind of ask, like, is that smart though? Shouldn't they be trying to do with Periscope what TikTok did with something that had been around in Snapchat or the app 12 seconds? If you go back even farther and figured out how to make an explosion out of something that wasn't new, but they figured out a new twist to it, couldn't Periscope have been that? So I fully expect that someone's going to come along and do a live streaming app that is kind of the TikTok of live streaming. That's a thing that feels like there's a niche for. Well, more Twitter news today. Meanwhile, the company announced that it is acquiring the team behind Squad. If you're not familiar with Squad, it's a social screen sharing and video chat app. It's very popular with the younger set. The Apple shut down on Saturday and Twitter shut it down. And the Squad team will lead a product in Twitter's design, engineering and product department. Squad previously partnered with Snap and used many of the SnapKid developer tools. So interesting that they're coming to Twitter. Squad CEO Esther Crawford told TechCrunch last year, when the pandemic first struck, Squad usage had spiked 1,100%. Wow. That's a lot. It's a big spike. Twitter achieved its squad goals, you might say. Yes, indeed it has. Folks, if you want to make puns like that, you can join our conversation in the Discord or you could actually have a substantive conversation. That happens quite a lot in there, quite a lot more often. Join by linking to a Patreon account, patreon.com, slash D T N S. All right, Shannon, there is a big vulnerability getting lots of headlines. Can you explain it to us today? Yes, I can. So Microsoft has identified a malware campaign, which it is calling Adrozec, which began as late as May last this year, 2020, peaked in August, and it's still ongoing to this day. So Adrozec works against Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Yandex browsers on Windows to inject ads into the search results in order to collect affiliate fees. So they're just making money off of ads that you might find in your search results. So the malware arrives whenever users are tricked into visiting and downloading software from malicious domains. It appears as legitimate audio related software like audio lava.exe, some kind of executables, quick audio.exe or converter.exe. It also registers as a Windows server service for persistence so that it can come back on reboot. It then modifies or installs browser extensions, modifies browser DLLs, and it also changes security preferences. So the malware is used to inject ads on Firefox. It attempts to steal credentials and on Edge. It turns off security controls that detect unauthorized changes to secure preferences and the modifications to security settings expose devices to additional risks as well. So currently Adrozec is using 159 unique domains with each hosting an average of 17,300 URLs and each URL hosts an average of 15,300 unique malware examples. So that does make it hard to detect by signature based antivirus software, but something like Windows Defender that could be able to detect it because that works a little bit differently. So users infected by Adrozec are advised to reinstall their browsers. My personal opinion on this is this is not a critical, critical campaign. It is something that we have seen many, many times in the past with ad injections and trying to get people to download things. So using good security hygiene whenever you are doing searches online and using general consensus of what you would expect to find if you're doing specific searches can definitely help with protecting you from this kind of attack. It doesn't seem like a unique attack. When I first saw this this morning in my feed, I was like, oh, here we go again. But it seems to be getting a lot more attention than these kinds of attacks usually do. Is it just because of the fact that it's hitting four browsers? Yeah, I think that in that way it is unique that it's persistent and it's hitting those four browsers, which in essence Yandex does run on Chrome source code as well. So keep that in mind too. But it's smart enough to be able to do that to kind of change how it is going to inject malware onto a machine based on what kind of browser you're currently using. But in the sense that ad injections are extremely common. These have been happening for years and years and years. So that is not necessarily new. It's just the way that they are implementing this attack is new. Yeah, it's pretty pervasive. I guess that's the other thing is it's a very successful version of this. Well, we don't usually cover funding rounds, you know, companies that get money on DTNS unless it really affects the end user. But a recent round went to a German company in the food delivery business called Gorillas. That's right, Gorillas. Gorillas is an interesting company because it promises 10 minute grocery delivery on average using bicycle delivery people. It was founded back in May and operates in Berlin and Cologne, Germany. Google employs its writers directly. They're not gig workers. So it's a little different in that regard. It also uses what some call dark convenience stores. Those are small centrally located stores that it stocks products in carries all the things that convenience store would have. But the convenience store itself is not open to foot traffic. It's just a place to the Gorilla folks get their stuff out of the store and send it off to whoever has ordered them. So the key to procuring its own supply of food so it has healthy margins at normal retail prices. Gorilla charges a delivery fee of 180 euros and it plans to expand in Germany in hopes to open its first location outside Germany in Amsterdam. Similar services like DJA and Weezy in Europe and GoPuff in the U.S. also use the dark convenience store model. Yeah, doesn't mean evil convenience store. It just means you can't walk in. What's the word for the kitchens that operate? Ghost kitchens. Ghost kitchens. Yeah. They only do delivery through like DoorDash or Uber Eats. Sure. And I mean, I know that also sounds ominous like ghost. Ghost to cooking my food. Well, if you don't have to have a storefront and, you know, a place to, you know, seed people and you can make good food. And a lot of people want that delivered anyway. I mean, it makes perfect sense. So I get what Gorillas is doing here. I had not heard of this company before, but I think more and more this type of thing will make a lot of sense because you can supply and then deliver and you're taking care of the entire process yourself rather than having to partner with a 7-11 or something. Yeah. And it's expensive to do that because you have to run the whole thing. But the folks at Gorillas seem to feel like they have the magic sauce to be able to like, no, no, we procured the deals. We've got the good supply chain management going on. We've got the logistics because remember Cosmo back in 1999 tried to do the exact same thing Gorillas is doing and couldn't afford it. It was just too expensive. I just really want to know if everybody is required to dress up like a gorilla to deliver your food when they get hired by Gorillas. That's very important. All the pictures we're seeing show the riders on the bikes in gorilla costume. So if anyone in Berlin and Cologne has used Gorillas to get a 10-minute grocery delivery, let us know if a gorilla brought it to you or not. Right. And have you witnessed anyone be like, it's a gorilla on a bike. Is that effective? That's such great marketing. And it brought me the milk that I needed for my recipe. Okay, let's talk about drones, shall we? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA, is busy developing its Gremlin's project that can grab drones out of the sky. Three X-61A gremlins air vehicles, GAV, flew for more than two hours in the third series of test flights. They were unsuccessful, but barely that. DARPA tried unsuccessfully to capture the GAVs using a docking bullet extended from a C-130. The agency says it was inches away from success. They feel pretty confident that they're getting there. The gremlins project has been in the works for several years, and DARPA believes that being able to carry out such operations will, quote, dramatically expand the potential uses of unmanned air vehicles in conflict situations. Grabbing drones. Anybody? It's a pretty cool product that the Air Force or the Department of Defense has been working on for decades. They have done similar tests back in the 60s, but the chief advantage of this system that they're developing is that they ideally would like to pick up the drone and then still be able to redeploy it. Previous attempts have picked up the drone midair, but then you have to land and, you know, essentially pull it out of the net and then get it ready for flight again. The idea is that you can deploy and redeploy while it's flying, which is huge because then you don't need to land and then you can still carry out operations. It's all part of a push to develop basically swarm-based devices that allow you to overwhelm an enemy's defenses by giving you them a lot of small targets to hit instead of just one giant one. Yeah, and this is why I often will try to say quadcopter or UAV when we're talking about, like, DJI drones, because these are drones. Like, these are the ones that have been called drones for a long time. They're not the quadcopter you use to take pictures when you're out in the park. Yeah, no, these are essentially, they look like little airplanes and their wings swing out once they, they look like a little missile. They get shoved down. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, good stuff. Let's check out what's in the mailbag. Kevin wrote in about a conversation that we had on good day internet. If you don't catch the wider conversation, boy, are you missing out because we love to talk about all sorts of stuff. And Kevin says, I really enjoyed the conversation on the old timey sayings. We were all coming up with, with, with our own sometimes stuff that we understood and sometimes stuff that we didn't. Kevin says, I really enjoyed that segment. And one of my favorite sayings is the whole nine yards. I never knew what that meant. Then I looked it up and it has quite the history. He links us to an npr.org article, which we'll have in our show notes that indeed it is an interesting story. And Kevin says, personally, I like the ammunition belt origin theory. Yeah. So back in World War Two, the length of an ammunition belt was around nine yards. Nine yards. So you could say he shot off the whole nine yards in a pie in a plane, like when you're shooting ammunition out of the plane. But some people think it refers to sales or cement truck capacity. There's no one really knows. That's why that's why we love talking about this stuff on GDI because sometimes these these old sayings are sort of shrouded in mystery. You don't know really where they came from. Yeah. And you'd learn a little something indeed. If you've got feedback, it could be something like Kevin's where you've got a story to share with us. Question, comment about anything that we talk about on the show. Please send them over to us. We love getting your feedback. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We'd also like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Steve Ayadarola, Chris Allen, and Mike Aikens. And of course, on Fridays, we love having Len Peralta here to draw something for us related to today's show. What do you got for us, Len? Well, you know, the announcements from Disney Plus were a big deal yesterday and or Disney just in general. And this is sort of how I felt reading everything. And I think that a lot of people felt the same way while they were hearing all those great announcements of Fantastic Four, of Ashoka, of Loki, of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It was like Christmas three weeks earlier, two weeks early, right? So this is called Disney's Future. And you can check it out right now if you go to my Patreon, patreon.com. Or at my online store, you can get it at lunperaltastore.com. The perfect Hanukkah announcement. Thank you, Disney. Thank you. Thank you. It's just like they knew. Also, thanks to Shannon Morse for being with us today. Shannon, where can people keep up with all your work? Because you got a lot of work. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse. Just like my name is spelled, I've been posting so many gift guides for the holidays. It's insane. So if you're looking for tech gifts for anybody, pretty much in your family, just go there and check the links. I'll make it easy for you. Nice. Yeah, we had some folks in our chat talking about your channel before the show. It's good stuff. People are enjoying it. Oh, thank you. Hey, we love our patrons, especially the patrons that stick with us. So we want to keep you happy. That's why we're happy to offer Patreon loyalty rewards. You can get a unique sticker or a mug or a t-shirt or a hoodie. And every three months, you'll get a different one which has unique art from Len. It features the first one, the DTS7 year anniversary logo. But then after that, you'll get one with the logo and Roger. One with Sarah. One with myself. Get all the details at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you'd like to join us live, we'd love to have you Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back on Monday with Peter Wells. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.