 Coming up on DTNS Uber wants to be your app for everything, an alternate app store for iOS, no jailbreak needed, and drones that keep you safe from crocodiles. This is The Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 26, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From San Diego, California at TwitchCon. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. If you don't know, we do stream this show on Twitch. And we start before the show where you can hear us talk about Justin's upcoming radio appearance and our thoughts on music cues on radio. That's all available on Good Day Internet, which you can also get by becoming a patron at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start now with a few things you should know about technology. Indonesia Riot Hailing Company Gojek launched a video streaming service called GoPlay, featuring exclusive access to hundreds of movies and TV shows and some shorter clips in a library of its own. Gojek began testing GoPlay with select users back in June, focusing on local content in the country. Gojek has partnered with major local production houses such as Bass Entertainment, Kalyana Shira Films, and Warhana Creator for production of original titles. Cloudflare, Chrome, and Firefox are all adding support for HTTP 3 today. Cloudflare enabled the option on its dashboard and you can enable it in Chrome, Canary, and Firefox. They will get a nightly version of this or sorry, this autumn and HTTP 3 is a complete rewrite that uses Q U I C instead of TCP and builds in TLS encryption. Tech cards as Brian here reports his new and improved Samsung Galaxy Fold has an unintended brightly colored amorphous blob on the screen. After 27 hours of use, he guesses it happened from pressing the display to close the device. Samsung has since got the device back and will be taking it apart to find out what went wrong. Heater did not have a broken Galaxy Fold the first time around, so maybe they just didn't want him to feel left out. Microsoft General Counsel Dev Stalcop said in a blog post that Microsoft is challenging a federal judge's order that forbids them from telling a corporate customer about a warrant requesting its data, something referred to as a sneak and peek search. Microsoft believes that the practice is too widespread and is appealing a loss of its challenge to the secrecy order in September of 2018, arguing that the warrant for emails, text messages, and voicemails associated with two email addresses was overly broad. The account owners are accused of wire fraud and money laundering and conspiring to contravene U.S. sanctions. Huawei founder and CEO Run Zhengfei said Thursday that it will produce 5G base stations free of U.S. part of a thousand 5G stations per month, starting in October and plans to produce 1.5 million base stations next year. Huawei president of corporate strategy Will Zhang said performance of the new base stations is, quote, no worse than those made with U.S. parts. And Microsoft denounced the beta for Xbox Action for the Google Assistant, now available with a general release expected this autumn. This lets gamers turn on or off their Xbox launch games or apps and player pause content from a Google Home device or through the Google Assistant app. You can customize the name of connected Xboxes as well as assign them rooms designated in the Google Home app. Microsoft previously released Xbox skills for Amazon voice services and Cortana, so there you go. All right, OnePlus had their big announcements. Let's start by talking about one of those, Justin. You're gosh dang right, Tom. OnePlus announced that the OnePlus 7T phone, a slightly smaller and less expensive version of the OnePlus 7 Pro, the 7T has a 6.55 inch 1080p OLED panel with a 20.9 aspect ratio and 90 Hertz refresh rate. It has an optical fingerprint sensor in the display and a small notch in the front facing camera on the back. It has three cameras, standard, ultra wide and telephoto. It's wired charging is 23% faster with the 7T Pro, although it does not have wireless charging. It uses USB-C but does not have a headphone jack and they aren't going to give you a dongle neither. The OnePlus 7T with Android 10 will be available in gray or blue October 18th for $599. Yeah, man. Good price. Good price for the specs. We know a lot of folks in the audience love OnePlus phones. Great price for these specs. Pretty solid, well-beloved. Everyone talking about that 90 Hertz refresh rate. Most of the reviews I read just kind of gushed about how smooth the phone worked and how good it looked for $599. I think that price point just puts rose-colored glasses on people's faces. Yeah. Look, the feature to me about the new iPhone is the fact that those three cameras really do functionally change the way that you take photos. If you can get that for a fraction of the price, well, Renz, you got us still going. Yeah. OnePlus fans particularly were very proud of having headphone jacks for a while. I don't know how they're going to take this. It's not the first time they've sold a phone without a headphone jack, but this is the big entry into the US market. The OnePlus 7 Pro was sort of the international version of this. OnePlus is a Chinese company. I want to point out that Huawei, under the gun, ZTE has had its troubles, but OnePlus has seemed to carry on just fine without running into a lot of the controversies. It also doesn't make a networking gear, which I think attracts the attention of your governments for ZTE and Huawei. So that may be all the explanation you need right there. But well-reviewed and well-priced phones from OnePlus. Yeah. And without the wireless charging for the most part, this is any flagship phone. It checks all the boxes of the kind of phone that over the last six months, we've all been like, okay, well, everybody has to, you got three cameras on the back, lots of bells and whistles, in-screen fingerprint sensor, the whole thing. So yeah, the price is, it kind of makes you wonder why you'd pay more than $600 for such a thing. Well, but also this is getting to know you prices, right? Like, this is their big step out into the United States market. And so they want to make sure that there's a lot of people out there that are using OnePlus phones that are happy with not only the purchase, but the experience. It's not their first phone in the United States market. It's the first of the seven lines. So yeah, I mean, they're always pretty affordable though, I have to say. No, that is part of their brand. But I think that this is in line with how they want to work here in the States. OnePlus also announced its first TV, the 55Q1 Pro running Android TV, has a 4K HDR capable OLED VA panel, also has an eight speaker module that slides from behind the screen that contains two tweeters, two woofers and four full range speakers. A cheaper model called the 55Q1 has just the four full range speakers. The remote includes a prime video button and also a mic for using Google Assistant. You can also use an Android app from OnePlus called Connect Control the TV that way. At launch, it won't support Netflix, although OnePlus does say it hopes to fix that by October or November of this year. The 55Q1 four speaker model will sell for 69,900 rupees. That's about 985 US dollars. And the eight speaker pro for 99,900 rupees are about 1400 US dollars in India. Yeah. So this is a quantum dot. So technically a QLED panel and by all QLED, sorry. Yeah. By all accounts, a nice looking panel. Now, they're only marketing this to India. This is OnePlus's first venture into televisions. I think it's interesting that they're trying to split their loyalties by saying, yes, we'll use Android TV, so Google Assistant. But don't worry, Amazon will put a prime video button on our remote for you. That always kind of bothers me because those remotes age and eventually, I'm not saying prime video is going to go out of business, but at some point you're like, why do I have an M-Go button on my Roku remote? Yeah, I know. Big shout out to everybody with RDO buttons on their Roku controllers. Yeah, exactly. But it looks like a decent TV. So, you know, Godspeed OnePlus on entering the television market. I think I was expecting these to be at a little lower price point. This doesn't seem to really compete with the TCL price points as much to me, but it's close. I mean, but it's kind of like they go from one rapidly commoditizing market in smartphones to by far the most commoditized market in televisions, which has been, you know, at pretty much rock bottom margins for a decade and a half now. Well, and OnePlus can also say there's an included sound bar, essentially, within this television, which can drive the price up a little bit. That's a good point. That 8-channel or that 8-speaker sound bar is pretty sweet. That makes a big difference. All right. We have some research on moderation effects. In January, WhatsApp limited how often messages could be forwarded to five groups instead of the previous 256 groups. The idea by reducing the amount of groups you could forward to was to slow the spread of disinformation. MIT researchers have studied what effect, if any, that change had. Co-author of the preprint of the study, Kiran Jaramela, is from India and said the general consensus of people she talked to during the Indian election was that it didn't affect things much. So the perception was, I don't know that it did anything. WhatsApp says that when they put the limit in place, it reduced the total number of forwarded messages on the service by 25%. So what did the study do and what did they find? Researchers joined thousands of public groups across Brazil, Indonesia and India in order to be able to collect 6 million public messages. Remember, WhatsApp is end to end encrypted. So they had to find public groups to be able to do this. They used those public messages to rebuild the network and run simulations using different forwarding limits. So they knew what the messages were, where they'd been forwarded from, and they could model that network and say, okay, what if we had limited it more? What if we had limited it less? Under the five group limit, they found that 80% of messages died within two days, leaving 20% to reach the full network. So it definitely had an effect. However, the researchers say the data indicates that directly limiting specific messages or people could add to the effectiveness of this. So they're saying, yes, definitely had an effect, probably more than people perceived. But if you really want to shut stuff down, you're going to have to target it more specifically. You know, this is a fascinating case because to refresh folks as to why these rules, these moderation rules were put into place, there were rapidly spreading mobs that, you know, at times could even like end people's lives. Like it was literal mob justice that was being round up because information spread as fast as it did. I think this was a very inspired thing, and I'm glad to see that it shows that obviously there is some net effect to these things kind of dying out a little bit quicker than they would with, you know, effectively unlimited gasoline to be poured on the fire. Yeah, I think this is a good study, and I encourage these kinds of studies to happen because I think we learn more about what's effective. And in this particular case, what they're saying is definitely reducing forwarding helped, but it didn't solve it, right? And that's the kind of thing you want to know, because if you just jump to one conclusion or another, you may spend your time doing a bunch of things that don't help at all, or you may think you've solved it and you have it. In this case, the perception was, I don't think this solved it. And it turns out, well, it solved it more than you thought. It just didn't solve it all the way. So that's good information to have. Good example of an app saying, all right, well, we took away features, basically, but those features were being abused more than they were being used for good. Yeah, definitely. At an event in San Francisco, Uber announced its overhauling, its ride-hailing, and food delivery services into one unified app with new safety features, new options for bikes and scooters and public transportation, and virtual restaurants. Uber CEO, Dara Cosversahi, is calling it the operating system for your everyday life. Now, when the app launches, users will see two boxes, either get a ride or order food. A new opt-in for digit pin verification system is going to help riders make sure they're getting into the right vehicle. A second safety method, which is rolling out in the next few months, uses ultrasound waves to automatically verify that you are indeed in the right car. A new on-trip reporting feature will let you as a rider report safety incidents that are happening during a ride. Maybe they're going the long way or they're not acting right. And then Uber says it'll follow up on after that ride is over. As for bikes, Uber is building a network of jump-charging kiosks in certain cities, which lets riders swap out a depleted battery for a fresh one on the go. The company's also rolling out a new rewards program for frequent food delivery customers. And also, this one's interesting, partnering with celebrity chef Rachel Ray to launch a new virtual restaurant that will only be available via Uber Eats, available in 10 cities for 10 weeks. It's Uber Eats pop-up store. Yeah. Well, it's something that a lot of these food delivery places have been taking advantage of. And a lot of people have been building them for things like Postmates and Uber Eats, where they're like, we're not going to have a place for people to sit. We've talked about that on DTS before. So this is Uber partnering with a big name to do that, to kind of make a splash. I think that's super important. The other thing that's really interesting here is that safety thing. Well, let me get to that in a second. The other thing that's really interesting here is that really Uber is trying to become a super app. We've talked about this multiple times on the show. WeChat is kind of emblematic of this, but there are other examples around the world where they are the app for everything that you do in your life. You don't leave home without your WeChat app in China because you can do so much with it, order food, pay for things, et cetera. Uber is trying to be the company that can be that app in the US. Facebook has tried it. Others have tried it. It just hasn't taken off here the way it has in China, but I think maybe this is a better way to do it, which is, okay, you don't want to pay for everything or do everything like that in this app yet, but you do like food delivery. What if we try combining the app? Now, if you don't see this combination, apparently Uber isn't rolling it out to everyone. It's kind of an A-B test, but I'm very curious how many people they can get inside the app because the other thing they're doing here is adding transit directions and adding a competing scooter service. Lime scooter is also part of this. So the idea being is when you say, okay, I want to take a ride. I want to go somewhere, you put in your address and it will not just help you get an Uber to that place. It'll tell you, oh, it's faster if you get an Uber to this train station and then take the train, maybe even get an Uber on the other way or grab a lime scooter on the other end. And that starts to sound like a pretty compelling reason to use the Uber app suddenly. It's also a diversification of Uber's business model, which is something that they made a very big point about when California passed that law that would reclassify their independent contractors that they work with as employees. So cynical rant over. I do believe that this is where they should be going. I mean, look, the idea that they were going to always make the ride-sharing part of this business, the core was dependent on a lot of things up to and including autonomous vehicles. Obviously, that has not shot up at the trajectory that they might have hoped five years ago. And so now they look at, all right, well, what works for us? And here's the reason why this feels like more of a good step than, let's say, Facebook stapling on a bunch of other services is that people like Uber, people like Uber eats. Now they might have moral questions about it, or they might have a different idea about whether it's good for them, but there's no doubt that a food delivery is something that people like. And reintegrating that along with the scooters is just a good idea. This is also something that Lyft has done. Although Lyft deployed their own fleet of scooters, at least in the Bay Area that you can get through their app. And now Uber's taking advantage of not only the scooters that they themselves own, but also Lyme, which has a tremendous footprint. Well, and it's advantageous for Uber who, yes, has had a PR issue for the last several years for a variety of reasons to get people to say more and more, oh, how should I get there? Uber will tell me. Is it a subway bus? Is it a competitor scooter? Is it an Uber car itself? It becomes sort of like the Q-tip or Kleenex of transportation. And then while you're in there, you might get some food and spend more time in the app in general. And so it's a big shift into we want you to think of us as a place where you do lots of things, whether or not an Uber driver is actually picking you up. Yeah, I mean, they're not really adding a whole lot of new features, honestly. They're repackaging them. And I think that's significant. I'm curious what other services they come with. Remember, Uber under the previous CEO was often trying stuff like, what if we do this? What if we do that? Let's roll out a test service. I wonder if some of that stuff has still been incubating. I'll tell you what's been incubating, Tom. Crocodiles in Australia. The Australian state of Queensland has been started a project to detect an alert tourist about crocodiles. The Ripper Group makes the West Pack little Ripper drones, which work with Amazon Web Services to reduce delays in transmitting footage. An algorithm developed with the University of Technology in Sydney identified 16 different marine life with 93% accuracy. It previously was used in a test to identify sharks in New South Wales and has been tuned to tell crocodiles from mangroves in Queensland. The Queensland Government data shows 11 crocodile attacks since 2011, four of which were fatal, Tom. I mean, no jokes, right? With a fatal crocodile attack. On the other hand, this is a lot of effort going to prevent a very small data set of risk. Most people in Queensland don't get attacked by crocodiles. No, I think let's keep it that way. Let's make it zero. I'm with this. 150%. I'm from Florida. I know what wildlife that can hurt you looks like. I understand that that is a low grade panic for some people. This just gives you a little bit of peace of mind. Tip of the cap to you, Ripper Group of Queensland, Australia. Yeah, this is, I can't find fault with this. I mean, yeah, there aren't a lot of people truly in danger from crocodile attacks, but nothing helps tourism more than peace of mind. And if Queensland wants to get people to visit and they're like, look, we have drones in the skies preventing you from being attacked by crocodiles. Most tourists will say, wait, I was at risk of being attacked by crocodiles. Why am I coming here? No way. They'll say, oh, I feel safer. I will vacation in Queensland now. I'm just saying if Amityville had this technology, Jaws would have been a short film. Yeah. I mean, it worked in New South Wales. It'll work in Queensland. This is, I believe Australians in the audience, please, please let us know if we're right about this. This may be the most Australian story we've ever covered. I want to add real quick too, I just made a note about like Uber incubating ideas and it struck me that we did not announce that Uber announced Uber incubator to encourage its employees and others to develop products and services on top of the Uber platform. So it would be interesting to see what comes out of that to show up on that new home screen that Uber wants you to use. All right, to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Lastly today, I want to talk about something that reminded me the old days, the buzz out loud days of tech reporting. Just in a developer hacking away at the system to figure out how to deliver you a little choice. Developer Riley Test-It has released a project called Alt Store, which lets you run an alternative app store on iOS. That app store will include Test-It's own Nintendo emulator called Delta. And the clever bit is you don't have to jailbreak to do this. Apple lets you sign your own apps with your own Apple ID, usually only developers or schools do this for testing apps that they want to use in development or for schools. So Test-It created a Mac and a Windows app called Alt Server. You install and run Alt Server on your PC, plug in your iOS device, get an app specific password from the Apple ID management portal, so you're not sharing your main password, you're getting an app specific one that is only used for Alt Server. And then Alt Server will sign the Alt Store iOS app and add it to your device. Now that's perfectly normal. And like I said, it's used by developers and schools, but self signed apps like this expire after seven days. So here's the extra clever bit. The reason you want to keep Alt Server running on your PC is it will every seven days refresh the app for you so that it's good for another seven days as long as your iOS device is on the same Wi-Fi network as the PC running Alt Server. So if you're home, you're connected to your Wi-Fi, your PC is connected to your Wi-Fi, done. It'll just keep running, you'll never even have to know about it. Now Apple could shut this down, but it would be hard to do so without affecting the schools and developers that use it. Test-It thinks the thing they could probably do is block the refreshing of the apps over Wi-Fi. So that would mean you'd have to plug it in every seven days to refresh the app. But if you're worried about the security of it, the code is open source. It's on GitHub. Anybody's free to investigate it. And once it's ready for full launch on September 28th, the Delta emulator that Test-It has made will support SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 64 platforms. And because of the developments in iOS 13, it'll work with Sony DualShock 4 and Xbox One controllers or any M5 supported gamepad. So I just had to say I thought this was a very clever and elegant piece of working around. I don't know how many people are really going to do it, but Roger Chang, our producer, I know is a big fan of emulators. And I thought this might appeal to you too, Roger. It is a very clever way of kind of getting around Apple's sort of walled garden. I'm curious to know what Apple's response now. Like if it were me, I would just kind of shrug and make sure and kind of keep it on the down low. But there could be some sort of something they could implement to help defeat this. But I mean, that would be a lot of work just for this one guy. It has always been my theory. And I think it will be tested here that Apple doesn't care if you do stuff like this. It also doesn't care if something they do breaks it. There's nothing obvious that they would do that would break this. So I think this will continue to be available. I think it's more likely that Nintendo gets been out of shape over an emulator getting this much attention. But I don't think there's anything that Nintendo can do about that because he's not including the ROMs, right? Well, he's not including the ROMs. I mean, it depends on how you wrote the emulator. And in some of the cases, they've nailed creators for basically lifting code verbatim. But I don't think that would be the case. And there's literally an arm length's worth of emulators floating around on the Internet. And the ROMs are super easy to get. Not that I would know, but they're super easy to get. You've heard. I've heard. I've heard on the forums. I've heard on the forums they're super easy to get. And tested isn't new to making these emulators. So I'm guessing he knows how to write his code to avoid any kind of risk of Nintendo coming after him because he's been doing this for a while. Well, all right. So here are the two reasons why this would get stepped on. Number one, you guys already identified, which is that people who believe that their IP is being infringed through this app now start complaining and ask for Apple to do something. Many of them, considering we just had a gigantic launch of a Mario Kart app, are partners with Apple that that want to see things continue to flourish on the mobile side. The other is Apple just not liking the precedent and just not saying like just not liking the fact that, OK, you want to know what this certainly takes a bunch of a lot of effort. It takes continual renewal and maintenance to make sure that it keeps going. But we're not in love with where this could lead down the road if it becomes popular. So we're going to squat on it. And, you know, I don't know, I would tend to believe that we're probably going to see at least what Ted said thinks their their next move will be to eliminate Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi blocking. Yeah, just just make you plug in. Apple usually worries if it's something that they think their audience is going to do and hurt themselves, right? They're like, ah, they're very parental that way. That's why they they sometimes would fight jailbreaking. I always felt like they fought jailbreaking by just not bothering to adapt to it. Like pretty much any code change can hurt a jailbreak by accident. So I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. Well, I will say, at least in the case of Nintendo, sometimes they've gone after the creators, but most times they just go after the websites that host it. Host the ROMs. Or just the ROMs or even the applications. So maybe they might lean on GitHub. I don't know. I mean, it seems a bit much for one guy. I don't think so. Again, Test, it's been doing this for a while and has has avoided that sort of scrutiny. So I think I think I doubt that becomes the way it goes. But yeah, anyway, good. I don't know. It feels like 2008 again, doing this story just made me feel good. Hey, thanks, everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit.com. We are also on Facebook. We have a group facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News show. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Connor wrote in about our discussion we had on Tuesday with Patrick Beja about reselling software. Connor says, I'm a software engineer and this subject reminds me of the transition happening with a lot of enterprise and B2B software companies. Before business software started moving to the cloud, the software was mostly considered on-prem, meaning it was installed in customer data centers on servers or mainframes. A disk was typically shipped to the customer for them to install or a field technician would visit the site and install it for the customer. This is still pretty common, but is trending out with software as a service in the cloud. It wasn't the software that was sold to the consumer, but a perpetual license which gave rights to the consumer, allowing them to use the software, and that agreement typically came with somewhere between one to three years of updates and support. After the one to three years, a new agreement would have to be made. Patrick touched on this when mentioning selling a license to access a game for 50 years. By no means was the customer allowed to resell the software though because they didn't own it. As Tom expressed, reselling software just doesn't make sense. With the current trends in consumer software and gaming, including software as a service, game streaming, and other subscription models, I think this problem will quickly fade away. Man, no, that is a great analogy and bringing in that B2B perspective on it is very valuable. Thank you, Connor. I think Connor wins Best Written Email of the Week here. That's really well done. Three cheers for Connor. Yeah, keep those emails coming. We love your feedback. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young, always good feedback on the show. Justin, where can folks keep up with the rest of your work? Oh, well, I don't know if you guys have noticed, but in the world of politics, there's been quite a lot of news. So here's what I would suggest you do. Number one, go to your closest podcast player or store and find the Politics Politics Podcast, and sign up for my free political newsletter at freepoliticalnewsletter.com. And if you are at TwitchCon, you might see me. But more than likely, I'll be at the lobby bar playing Hearthstone. So just come on and tap me on the shoulder. I swear I won't bite. Excellent. Folks, we are just in the waning days of the old Patreon rewards. October 1st will be the last time we deliver the old slate. And starting on October 1st, there's a whole new slate that people will sign up and get. If you want to know what that new slate looks like, you go to dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. I mentioned we love feedback, and our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Keep those emails coming. We're also live Monday through Friday. That's 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC. And find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Lamar Wilson and Len Peralta illustrating the show. 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.