 Coming up on DTNS, Etsy wants some Gen Z business, Huawei's innovative play to stay relevant as a software maker, and what's new from Facebook's F8 Development Conference. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about vacation movies and melatonin. If you'd like that wider conversation and some jet lag dealing tips, join our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member and get it at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft announced it will hold an event to announce the next generation of Windows at 11 AM Eastern time on June 24th. Microsoft is rolling visual elements from the show, shelved Windows from the now shelved Windows 10X. So many folks expect significant UI changes, as well as a more developer friendly app store. Microsoft also announced that version 92 of the Edge browser will support automatic HTTPS capabilities, automatically switching URLs to use encrypted HTTPS connections. Security researcher, Gaby Kerleg reports that both Android and iOS versions of the Alibaba-owned UC browser send IP addresses and unique user ID numbers to Alibaba's US-hosted servers, even if you're using incognito mode. IP addresses, not so bad, unique user ID numbers, not so great. Since these findings were published, the English version of UC browser was removed from Apple's app store, although the Chinese language version and Google Play apps are still available. Ikea listed a $199 symphonic 22 inch by 16 inch picture frame with Wi-Fi speaker on its site, made in collaboration with Sonos. Although the product has not been formally announced and no release date is yet listed, the picture frame supports AirPlay 2, allows for stereo pairing, including using them as rear surround speakers and can be controlled through the Sonos app. LG announced it's gonna phase out LG Pay, its digital wallet over the remainder of 2021 with plans to fully shut it down on November 1st. Users will be able to use your existing cards linked to LG Pay until then, until November 1st. But functionality like adding new cards and purchasing gift cards will be shut down before then. According to a Pentagon report summary seen by the Hill, two DJI drones built for government use have been cleared for use by the Pentagon with an audit finding, no malicious code or intent. Back in January of 2020, the Interior Department grounded its fleet of over 500 DJI drones over cybersecurity concerns. Okay, so we're friends with Xiaomi and DJI again, but still not halfway. Let's talk instead about fashion, Scott. I think so. Let's get a little crafty as well. You'll see why that word came up. Etsy announced it's acquiring the fashion resale marketplace D-POP in a cash deal worth $1.6 billion US. This is expected to close by the end of quarter three of this year. D-POP was founded in 2011, has 30 million users across 150 countries with 90% of its users under the age of 26 and specializes in vintage clothes and streetwear. According to the Boston Consulting Group, the global market for pre-owned apparel is worth up to about $40 billion a year. That's a lot of money. That's about 2% of the total apparel market and expected to grow to 15 to 20% annually for the next five years. This is a big purchase for Etsy. D-POP, if you're not familiar, looks a lot like, I mean, there are many resale platforms these days. Poshmark is a big one, ThreadUp, I mean, the list goes on. D-POP is another, D-POP is a little bit different though because it skews so young and it also, if you haven't used it before, it mimics Instagram really specifically so that if you're scrolling through D-POP, it's as if you're scrolling through an Instagram feed of influencers, but it's all very focused on, well, Instagram is focused on sort of people looking their best, but this is about like, hey, look at me in this awesome shirt, wanna buy it kind of thing. So it has gained a lot of traction in, I'd say a short amount of time, but the company's been around since 2011, I think. And but it's definitely popular with the younger set. And it's interesting to me because Etsy, I mean, people of all ages use Etsy, but I think it's user-based, use a bit older. Yeah, it's a lot of DIY stuff, but so is the idea of recycling and repurposing clothes. It's a pretty good match. I also think it's interesting that we're seeing companies kind of eating around the edges of Amazon. We've talked in the past about Shopify becoming an Amazon competitor slowly by connecting you directly to independent sellers in a way that Amazon doesn't do in its friendly of a way. Independent sellers complain about Amazon. Shopify is like, you're gonna own your relationship. We're just gonna be the intermediary, but we will aggregate a bunch of things and be a huge marketplace for people to discover you. Etsy seems to be wanting to do a similar thing, which is we have a huge marketplace for a particular market, but we don't have recycled fashion targeted towards this demo, let's add that. And I think that's an interesting move and a smart move for Etsy to make. Yeah, so I have a 21 year old son, just turned 21, and he uses this service all the time. I think news like this isn't gonna really affect his outlook on it or any more than his outlook on Facebook buying Instagram, still prefers Instagram over other social services. So this little crossover I think will be kind of a blip to the user base. As long as Depop continues to do what it does, it will continue to be kind of the thrift store of the now, like that's what it reminds me of. I just dig in through some of these, I'm like, yeah, this is what I used to meet my friends that go to the thrift store and look for this stuff. In fact, some of this stuff is from when I was a teenager and it's back again and who knows what people are wearing. But yeah, I think it seems like probably a good acquisition. It just seems like there's not a lot of crossover though between this and Etsy and maybe there is more than that. Well, Etsy does have an apparel section. Yeah, that's true. And again, a lot of it is sort of like, I made this shirt, do you want it? But there's so much of that going on. For example, over the last, let's say year, but maybe a couple of years, the idea of tie dye in your own clothes, while some of us remember doing that as kids, is very hot again. It's like you buy something that's a simple white t-shirt or something and you tie dye it and you can flip it for some money. And young people realize that if you can make a buck doing something, then it might be worth it. I think it's also interesting timing, not just for two companies like Etsy and Depop, but the idea that a lot of people were grounded from going to department stores or big retailers during the pandemic, and in many cases still are. So you've got that going on. So you turn to services like Depop a little bit more than you might have otherwise and then go, oh, this is pretty convenient. Also, you've been sitting around at home and you got a closet full of things and you no longer need that blazer. And maybe somebody else wants it. You might be able to hand it off type of thing. So this whole second hand market of apparel, I think the Boston Consulting Group is right that it is going to be a sector that grows quite a bit, at least in the near term. Yeah, and keep in mind, we think of Etsy as the craft marketplace and it still is that, but it has moved beyond just things you made. I bought some used plastic cups on there. Like it is moving into eBay territory quite a lot more. And in that respect, adding Depop makes perfect sense. All right, we're still mad at Huawei here in the United States. When I say we, I mean the United States government, I'm not part of the United States government. I should say they, the government is not letting up on Huawei, which means it can't get parts to make its own stuff, which means it has to turn to software, but it can't use Google's version of Android. So Huawei has now launched its Harmony OS for mobile phones, coming to the flagship Mate 40 on June 2nd and other Huawei phones over the coming months. Previously, Huawei had only run Harmony OS on its televisions and some of its IoT devices. The company denies that Harmony OS is in any way a derivative of Android, saying no single line of code is identical to Android, but Verges John Porter was able to side load the WhatsApp Android APK onto a Harmony OS powered MatePad Pro and it worked just fine. So you leave that as an exercise for the audience. Huawei is building the operating system as a platform for making it easier to connect devices to each other. And this is interesting positioning. If you're gonna get into the operating system market, you have to find a reason to switch operating systems. It says it's open to other phone makers using the Harmony OS on their phones, but it's really after IoT device makers to inter-operate with it. The hope seems to be to make Huawei phones stand out as the easiest phones to use to control your smart home. The president of Huawei's Consumer Business Group software department, Wang Cheng-Yu Lu, told reporters the problem with existing operating systems is that devices can't be connected easily with users often having to download separate apps to get things to connect. But Harmony OS can enable devices to be connected to form a super device. It will work as one file system, literally one device. Concept is you have a control panel on your Harmony OS device that you can use to do all the stuff. You compare Bluetooth headphones with your TV from the phone without having to add a bunch of apps. Your smart drink maker can be customized to make its recipes fit the health requirements it reads off your smartwatch. Huawei also released a Harmony OS plugin that lets it communicate with windows and other operating systems so you can do things like save photos from your phone directly to a laptop. So far, Mizu has hinted that its smart devices might adopt Harmony OS. We haven't heard any word on the bigger players like Oppo, Vivo or Xiaomi, which if you're inside China you're gonna need those big players on board. Huawei also announced new MatePad tablets running the Snapdragon processors, not Huawei's own Kirin processors implying that they aren't able to build those fast enough anymore. They announced their first Harmony OS powered smartwatches. They were using a light OS before that. They announced a new stylist and teased an announcement of an upcoming flagship P50 phone. I can't help but think of Harmony remotes and I can't get it out of my head. It's really unstructured with it. I know, I can't help it because you're just like, hey, Harmony OS. I'm like, is that the OS in a Harmony remote? No, it's not. It's not at all. It's not even close. But interesting, when we were talking about this prior to the show, it hit me that this just feels like the era of Windows and Mac competing in the 90s and other OSes popping up and saying, hey, we're gonna be the amazing third alternative. And what ended up happening instead is the two leaders sort of just stayed. Windows, of course, in their very dominant position and little things would pop up like, you know, Linux happened and different forks of Linux and Unix and different things like that. But the stuff that tried to come to consumers homes never really happened. And I wonder if we're not gonna see this particular one Harmony OS kind of near that. It's not like the first time somebody said, hey, what about our mobile operating system? And then nobody paid much attention to it. But that's a big market. And maybe in China, it could really make inroads with what they're promising. I don't know, feels like maybe more there than here. Yeah, there's definitely, you know, the market to take into consideration. To me, this sounds a little bit like what Huawei is saying is you've got all these devices. How are they ever gonna talk to each other? We're going to be, you know, the ground zero, the mainframe for everything. But isn't that what Matter is supposed to help achieve, formally chip, as far as the internet of things, devices being able to talk to each other and you've got big device makers on board for that as well? Well, and yes and no, Matter is supposed to make it easy for interoperability so that if you're using HomeKit, you can connect to all the Google and Amazon stuff. If you're using Alexa, you can connect to all the Google and Apple stuff, right? Matter makes that easy, which works against HarmonyOS. I think what HarmonyOS is trying to be though is like, hey, but you still need to add device apps in a lot of cases. You still have to often have a vacuum cleaner app and a rice cooker app and a washing machine app. Wouldn't it be nice if that stuff all worked from one dashboard? But you're right, Sarah, that's kind of what Matter allows HomeKit and Google's home and everything to become also. In which case, if you can't get the device makers on board with Harmony because they're like, oh, we're doing Matter, then you're kind of dead in the water. Yeah. Well, not dead in the water is F8 Refresh. If you're not familiar with Refresh, it's Facebook's currently virtual. They went virtual back in 2020 for the first time, but also Pairedown Annual Developer Conference. So the company announced all businesses can now use the Messenger API to interact with users on Instagram. Kind of a big story out of the conference. The feature was first announced as a closed beta back in October of 2020 for 30 developers and 700 brands. So it was a small test. It will publicly roll out in phases over this year, depending on how many follower accounts a business has. The more follower account you have, the more soon you're gonna get it. Facebook also announced deeper support for shared AR effects and games and video calls in Facebook's mobile apps, think Instagram Messenger, much like its video chat service portal already has for AR effects, AR enhanced games, storytelling modes, effects for chats, that sort of thing. Messenger and Instagram already had AR effects on some level, but support for multiplayer will allow for people in one chat per game to share common effects or experiences. And Facebook launched the Pi Torch Enterprise Support Program. It's one of the founding members of the Pi Torch Enterprise Support Program. Microsoft is launching Pi Torch Enterprise on Microsoft Azure to support each release. Facebook is also close to finishing a move of all of its AI models to Pi Torch. Facebook hopes that the move to the open source platform will improve its research and engineering work. Finally, Facebook also said it will launch a new API designed specifically for access by the research community. A lot of academic access was eliminated after the Cambridge Analytica issues. So Facebook says we wanna do it better and smarter this time. Yeah, this is a developer conference with a lot of developer oriented announcements. Not a developer conference where they sneaked in a big press release grabbing thing, which may have surprised some people, but yeah, that's what's going on. There's some nifty stuff here that developers will be able to enable for you. And that Pi Torch thing, I think is one of the more significant things. Especially if that leads Facebook to have better automated moderation, which everybody's got their eyes on right now. I thought there'd be some VR talk. I don't know why I feel like that. I thought the Quest 2 did pretty well and there's certainly room at a developer's conference to talk about development for headsets and whatever, maybe show what's coming up. When they first showed prototype Quest back in the day, I thought that was really rad and it was part of one of these kinds of conferences. So I guess I'm a little disappointed in that, but I think they're saving that stuff. Oculus has its own developer conference and they're like, yeah, we'll have an Oculus announcement on its own. And there's this whole idea of the Oculus Pro and pretty much everybody working at Oculus has said, do not expect that in 2021. So I didn't really expect any Oculus news at F8 Refresh, but Scott, I'm with you. I was hoping that there'd just be at least something. Yeah, especially because Facebook is, even though Facebook is very long game on AR, the company says repeatedly, anytime anybody gets too excited, we think that the real killer ops for AR are years away, but don't worry, Spark AR, that's our AR arm. We're working on it, but it's not happening anytime soon. Yeah. Well, folks, we've had a lot of patrons with us since 2014. The January 26th club. And we love the folks that stick with us as long as they can. Even if you're just getting into supporting us on Patreon, we want to thank you for sticking around for just three months. We've got Patreon loyalty rewards. You can get a unique sticker, mug, t-shirt, or hoodie every three months, as long as you stay a patron at one of our highest levels. Each one has a unique piece of art from Len Peralta on it, featuring the DTNS seven year anniversary logo, along with different takes that some include Roger, some me, some Sarah, you can get all the details at patreon.com slash DTNS. We mentioned government digital coins as one of the trends to watch. It's still probably a few years off. The Bahamas, however, already launched one called the Sand Dollar, and China has been making strides with its DCEP program administered by the People's Bank of China, PBOC. The latest advance for China will be to give out a total of 40 million yawns worth of digital yawn split among 200,000 people in Beijing. These digital red envelopes will each have 200 yawn a person, which is about the equivalent of $31 US. You can sign up for the lottery June 6th, and disbursements will begin June 11th. All your currency must be used by June 20th. This is a temporary program just to test it out. The DCEP currency will be given out in a lottery and spent just like regular yawn, excepted at about 2,000 retail locations. So you will be able to find places to spend it. The PBOC has conducted experiments in several major cities, including Shanghai, Shenzhen, and more. PBOC Deputy Governor Li Bo said last April that they are considering letting visitors use digital currency during the Winter Olympics, which has come into Beijing in 2022. Central banks from Thailand and the United Arab Emirates are also signed up with the PBOC to test cross-border use cases for digital currency. This is where the rubber meets the road for me. I know I come on the show all the time looking like a starry-eyed dummy about crypto, but there's something about governments who issue their own currencies now, right? Like we have the dollar and the one and everything else, like they're already doing that, and they have been for, in some cases, centuries. Why wouldn't it happen there? In other words, it's not just gonna be a bunch of crypto companies and people that run blockchain stuff and in-betweeners and all that. If it's going to really take off, there'll be nationalized currencies. And so when this starts to happen, I go, ah, now that's when I can start to make sense of this. Like this is when, not make sense, but make like practical daily sense of it. A usable, not just a weird speculative market that's confusing to a lot of people, but hard currency in a bank showing you what it's worth, spending it on things, getting things in return, exchanging it and so on. Now we're talking. Well, and this seems like the rollout is relatively small. If you converted to, you had mentioned Tom, 201 is equivalent to 31 US dollars. Okay, give me 31 US digital dollars and I'll spend it on something. And so that goes to either one merchant or a variety of merchants, depending on what I'm getting. And all of a sudden that money, it's a small finite number, but you pretty quickly can see, oh, okay, this is where it's spread to, just like any money. And I, yeah, I'd come, a company, a country like China is probably, is maybe the most fascinating country to watch this unfold in because it's big, because digital is already so widely adopted and to see how the spread rolls out and how seamless or unseamless the rollout is. And we're working on this too. We have to be, right? Now, I don't hear a lot about it. Maybe there's official stuff or not, I don't know. But you know it's being worked on. It's at the very least. When you say we, you mean the United States. The United States of America, the country I live in, I wanna know that we're not gonna be freaking Johnny come last on this deal. And the rest of the world sort of just, cutters on with this amazing new way of. We're not in first place in lots of things, but. Well, true, but I would love it. I would love it if we had a plan. I don't know what it is. And I've not, this isn't me complaining that we need new leadership for planning. I just mean, you know, what are we doing? We got to do something. I will add that there is conscientious foot, not I wouldn't say foot dragging, but making sure that other people go first because the digital currency they currently have in mind for the US, they want to make sure that they understand all the pitfalls of rolling out a digital currency and all the things they haven't thought of yet. And so when they roll it out, they do try to make will be as seamless as possible and less disruptive to the market. So it might be a case of let everyone dive in first, see how it works out. And then we'll pick up all the good things and maybe be able to leave out the bad things. That might be what they're doing. That might even be intentional. It might be a great way to spin the fact that you're behind. But it might end up being smart anyway, right? To let somebody else make the mistakes. Yes, the United States is developing this. Every country is developing this. They're all in various states of launch and nobody's behind. China likes to put the stuff out here so they look like they're on the cutting edge, but they are still far from making this an accepted widely used type of currency. Europe, we had a story earlier this week about Europe testing a digital wallet. Not digital coins in it yet, but Europe has its own ideas for digital euro. Everybody's in the early stages. What China's doing is testing out some systems, which is, it's a smart way to get some feedback, but yeah, you're giving people 30 bucks. They're gonna go out and buy some Hawthorne Berry candy and a bow and a milk tea, and then they're done for the day. This is just to see how the system works. This is far from being let's spread it. They're not even sure if they want to let other people from outside the country use it at the Winter Olympics, which would be a huge way to drive adoption of it, right? Especially among merchants. Oh, look at this. I'm gonna talk about Bloomberg and Mark Gurman now. How about that? Tell me. My eyeballs went down to the kicker, but that's not where my eyes should have been. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman notes that three members of Apple's self-driving car management team have left the company this year. Don't quite see a pattern yet, but maybe Benjamin Lyon, who helped create Apple's original car team left in February to become chief engineer at a satellite company. Autonomous car safety team lead Jamie Wadeu left to be CTO at an autonomous car safety startup. And most recently, the robotics team lead Dave Scott became CEO of a company developing next generation MRI systems. Interesting crossover. Former Tesla engineer Doug Field still runs the division under Apple SVP and ML and AI. John Gea Grande. I'm sure that's right. Thank you. John Andrea. Thank you very much. Also with about 12 executives and hundreds of engineers, some former Tesla execs in charge of drive systems and manufacturing engineering car interiors and exteriors and self-driving software are all still at Apple. Apple has gone from possibly designing a car to just systems to be used by other car makers to maybe designing a whole car again. Hyundai was rumored to be partnering with Apple and then denied it. But high profile exits make people think something's up. Yeah, read these tea leaves. What do you see when you see three departures happening and ask consequence like that? Well, and that's a thing, right? It's, there's so many factors here. First of all, it's Apple. So it's like Apple's building a car. Well, maybe they're building technology for somebody else who's building a car. All of those things have been floated. All of those things may be true. All of those things may not be true. And they may be true when they were reported and then they changed. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, but when you do have three higher profile executive roles left in a short period of time, you think, well, something's going on over there. It doesn't mean that Apple has abandoned plans to figure out some sort of self-driving car, but it does seem somewhat volatile or maybe plans have gone onto the back burner in some capacity, which wouldn't surprise me at quite a few large companies at this point because we're just, we've been in a weird year. But yeah, it sounds like you've got people in charge who were like, you know, I'm going to go do this other thing instead. Is it possible that they're, I mean, Apple is kind of, we were talking earlier about maybe you shouldn't be first to market. Sometimes that's Apple, you know, let someone else be the diamond Rio and we'll come in and be the iPod. Maybe they're thinking that way about cars. So it's, they've got the money, they got the backing and they can just kind of hover this R&D and have it sort of be there and change lanes when it needs to, no pun intended. And maybe these guys are just in a position where like, okay, this is great, but I'd really like to get wheels on the road. Like literally I'd like to have a car going and I'm tired of scrapping all this stuff. So I'm just going to go do something else. And that's fine. I like to me that doesn't spell trouble necessarily at any kind of basic company level. Just says maybe they need to get out of there and do something else and leave these hundreds, if not thousands of other individuals are all still working on it. They're still there. New people will come in like, to me that strikes me as likely what's going on. Yeah, Apple keeps developing stuff until they're ready to ship it. That's all this means. And that may take 10 years. Occasionally it's meant never because it just never met their standards. Look at the air power. And sometimes it just takes a long time. Somebody leaving to become CEO of a health system sounds like, yeah, I just wanted to move up and that wasn't going to happen at Apple, right? Maybe CTO of an autonomous car safety startup is the same situation. Satellite company is a whole different company. All three of these may just be coincidence where their career paths were like, yeah, okay, I've put in the time here. We're not launching anytime soon. So it's time for me to make a move and they made a move. I don't think you can read. I don't think you need to read any more into it than that. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Well, Nick wrote in and he had a good reminder for all folks that are following the GPU news as of late, you know, whether there's a shortage or something you want to buy, there's a lot of news. Nick says, remember that NVIDIA GPUs and laptops are called the 3080 laptop, for example, the 3070 laptop, et cetera. That's an important designation over standard 30 series carts. Nick uses the example that with Amper, the desktop 3080 is a 68SM, that's streaming multi-processor 32 watt part with a boost clock of 1710 megahertz, the 3080 laptop, however, is a mere 48SM part with up to a 115 watt TDP and a boost clock of up to 1545 megahertz. Laptop versions also have reduced RT cores, tensor cores, and memory bandwidth. Yeah, that's a good reminder, especially because yesterday we had desktop cards from NVIDIA and mobile cards from AMD. We do try to make a point of saying these are mobile cards if they're meant for laptops and other mobile devices like that. But yeah, NVIDIA doesn't make it easy by naming them essentially the same thing and just tacking on laptop at the end. Thanks for the reminder, Nick, good stuff. Thank you. If you have reminders for us or any feedback at all questions, comments, the whole nine yards, send them to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and thank you in advance. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today they include Brian Schott, Martin James, and Mike Aikens. Also, we have a brand new boss and a brand new boss is Mattia Schultz, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Mattia. Sarah, I think people are catching on. They're catching on that if they become a new patron, we will thank them on the show. Well, I certainly hope so. We certainly love thanking them. So thank you, Mattia, and everybody who may be on the fence about becoming a patron. Name and lights, name and lights. Also thanks to Scott Johnson, whose name is always in lights. Scott, what's been going on since we saw you last? Well, I started wearing these glasses because the lights were, there's too bright. No, that's not true. There's a lot of stuff going on. I would like to mention a very small little side thing I started. It's a podcast. It's just me, single Mike, but basically for a half an hour, however long it takes, I listened to something old that we all thought was cool to see if it holds up. So if you used to think, let's say the show MASH, I'm wearing our T-shirt today. If you think the show MASH was any good, well, what if I pick an episode that's supposed to be the best one and I watch it, listen to it and record that in audio form, then you'll find out if it was any good. And I'll tell you my own opinion. That sounds weird. It's cause it is. Go check it out. It's over at frogpants.com slash any good. And I would love more listeners and some feedback. Excellent. We are alive on this here program, Monday through Friday, four at 30 PM Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tom is starting to go on vacation tomorrow. Well, he's going on vacation tomorrow. That's when it starts. But I'll be here, Rich will be here and Justin Robert Young will be joining us. 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