 Dave Morley just started supporting independent tech news today. Want to be like Dave? Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 2nd, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Suday Fielin. I'm Sarah Lane. And somewhere from LA County, I am Roger Chang, the show's producer. Patrick Beja, out sick today, wish him a speedy recovery. He'll be back next week and we'll be talking about some gaming trends with him. But let's start today's show with a few tech things you should know. Samsung announced a new product launch on August 7th in New York, likely to be the Galaxy Note 10. A recent rumor about the Note 10 said that the S Pen might have a camera of its own. And another rumor said that the Note 10 could have four rear cameras. Sony announced it is raising the price of all the tiers of its PlayStation View streaming TV service by five dollars a month. They did the same thing last year. Current subscribers will start paying the higher price after July 31st. Apple CEO Tim Cook disputed a report about the departure of design chief Johnny I have saying that I've had grown frustrated with Cook's leadership and the report does not match reality and fails to understand how Apple's design team actually works. I was responsible for the design of many Apple products, including the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and the Apple Watch. You could tell he was angry because he lost his accent. Nvidia has refreshed its RTX line, the RTX 2060 Super and the RTX 2070 Super available on July 9th for the same price as the previous version, $399 and $499 respectively. On July 23rd, the $699 RTX 2080 Super will be available and Nvidia will continue selling the RTX 2080 Ti for $999 and the RTX 2060, which will be marked down to $349. The 2070 and 2080 graphics cards are being phased out by Nvidia. All right. We've got a couple of interesting announcements from Microsoft today. Sarah, tell us about them. Yeah, we do. Microsoft released a few details about the September update of Windows 10, aka 19H2. The update will include performance improvements, enterprise features and quality enhancements. It'll also be delivered in a monthly update, making it faster and less disruptive, you know, if it works that way. So a small service pack like update is coming in September. However, Microsoft also tweeted a video announcing Windows 1.0 with MS-DOS Executive Clock and more. Best guess, Microsoft will release 1.0, Windows 1.0, as an open source as it has for MS-DOS and calculator as well. Yeah. So the Windows 10 thing is fairly innocuous. It's going to be a small update. It's going to be delivered like monthly updates, which means it'll be a lot easier to handle. And likely that's because it's small. I imagine that the spring update next year will probably have a lot more features in it. This is an interesting aspect of the continuing update of Windows that you will get these occasional service pack like updates whenever they're necessary, whenever Microsoft says, you know what? We're holding off some features till we get them right. Those will be next time. I like this. The Windows 1.0 announcement is just odd. Well, and as we were, you know, preparing for this, it confused me. I was like 1.0 or 10. Like what are we talking about? Yeah, Roger and Sarah both like, you just spelled Windows 10. I was like, no, read, read, read whatever. Like I know I would do that. That is like me. But this time I didn't. I swear that they really meant Windows 1.0. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, what, you know, what are you most excited about? I'm more, I'm boring. I'm more excited about a very stable, small and fast Windows 10 update than I have about Windows 1.0 going open source. I have a working copy of Windows 286 sitting on a, you can't see it, on an IBM PS2 3286 over there in the closet. But it's, you know, it's for nostalgia purposes. I guess it's kind of cool if they make it available open source. I just, I, it's weird that they would put that out as a big tease. They had a video where it went from the Windows 10 logo backwards through all the Windows logos until they got to the Windows 1.0 logo. I guess the big takeaway for me is that Windows 1.0 logo was, was pretty good. Like that could be a modern logo. It wasn't as 80s as some of the things are. I think they're, you know what 80s nostalgia is huge right now. We got new season of stranger things coming. If they're going to release it open source, they're trying to play on that 80s nostalgia. That's hot right now. I think. No. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you're probably right. In an interview Friday, GameSpot asked Google VP, Phil Harrison, what impact ISP data caps would have on Google's Stadia game streaming product. Here's what Harrison said. The ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trends. And if you look at the history of data caps in those small number of markets and it's actually a relatively small number of markets that have data caps, the trend over time when music streaming and downloading become popular, especially in the early days when it was not necessarily legitimate, data caps moved up. Then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up and we expect that will continue to be the case. Now, Ars Technica points out Comcast raised its monthly data cap from 300 gigabytes to a terabyte in 2016 and now charges over each fees rather than just having a hard cap. Comcast imposes caps and charges in parts of 27 of the 39 States it offers its service. So Ars Technica is saying that doesn't sound like a rare, a relatively small number of markets, but of course, they're just talking about Comcast there. AT&T also has data caps. So that's a large number of markets as well. They range from 150 gigabytes to a terabyte. Charter doesn't have any data caps, but Charter is prohibited from using data caps until 2023 as a condition of its merger with Time Warner. So Ars Technica is trying to say, look, this isn't as simple as Harrison makes it sound, but having been through this a couple of times where people were saying like I particularly remember folks saying Netflix will never catch on as a streaming product because of data caps and what happened was either data caps didn't exist or they were raised so that Netflix streaming did work. Now, if you're in a place with 150 gigabyte data cap, you're still saying Netflix streaming doesn't work for me and I understand that, but it hasn't killed Netflix, obviously. I as much as you can pick at what Harrison said as being maybe over optimistic, I kind of feel like in general, he's not wrong that if Stadia doesn't work, it won't be because of data caps. I also wonder, okay, so Charter being prohibited based on, you know, something that they had gone into agreement with another company prohibited from having data caps. Why isn't there more outrage from you and me to say no one should ever have data caps? Oh, there's plenty of outrage from you and me and other people about data caps. Well, but outrage that changes the landscape? Not really. You know what? Ars Technica is a really good point here. You know, I keep saying Ars Technica. I should really give credit to the actual author of this study because John Brodkin does the Lord's work when he's covering this stuff and he does a really good job of pointing out that where there aren't data caps, you can generally find competition either Verizon Fios or Frontier or maybe AT&T has its fiber service where there are data caps. Usually it's because the company doing data caps actually just doesn't have any competition. So they can they can get away with it. But even then those data caps do tend to get raised based on usage where the data caps are low. A lot of times it's because usage is not very high. And if you're the one person who wants to do a lot of usage in your area that runs into that, that doesn't help you. But I think there's less outrage because you and I don't have data caps, right? We don't run into it that often. You know, though, I mean I always sing the praises of Plex media server that I use my my I it's a time Warner cable that I spectrum now. Yes. And every so often, you know, there's some sort of a blip where I realize like there's a data cap going on. I know what's going on. There's a difference between that and a data cap. The data cap is you hit your limit and we're going to charge you more. All right. That's that's that's specific. What you're talking about. Well, it's modeling. What you're talking about is the service outage, which probably isn't throttling. It's probably just because the way cable works. If a lot of people use a note at once, it gives bad service to everybody. Perhaps. We'll agree to disagree on this. All right. The U.S. State of Virginia has amended an existing law that defines distribution of nudes or sexual imagery without consent as a class one misdemeanor to specifically include quote falsely created videographic or still images. The bill was signed into law in March and took effect on July 1st. New York has a similar bill that received opposition from Disney and others for being too broad. U.S. Representative Yvette Clark introduced a bill into the U.S. House to make deep fakes made with the intent to humiliate or harass a federal crime. Yeah. So we're getting more laws on this. Virginia's is being tatted as the first time that deep fakes have been specifically targeted. It's not named. It's videographic or still image. But but it is technologically focused. And I think you could say, well, they already had distribution illegal. Wouldn't that cover it? But then you have to go to court and prove that your example is what the law intended and there could be room for the defense to argue that it wasn't for this or that reason. Adding the specificity with that by amending the law not passing a whole new law is a good way to say this. Let's let's remove the doubt. These kinds of distribution of images are included. You know, so no, let's not have any worry about that. Yeah, I mean, tough, tough subject. And I would say the the more that we can create what does this mean? You know, why is this bad and how is this bad? I don't always feel that way about laws in general. But in this case, I feel like we're on the right track. Yeah, I don't think there's a lot of debate about whether distributing a picture of someone else naked that they did not agree to is wrong. Yeah, I'm not seeing a lot of other side to that. Sure. Yeah, it's unfortunate that we were in the situation where we're like, Hey, we got to make some laws about the stuff. But here we are. Well, the deep fakes is interesting because that's not. Oh, I took a picture or someone shared a picture and now I'm distributing it without their permission. It's it's they they never had a naked picture of them, right? If you're just taking someone's head and convincingly putting it on someone else's body. That's now specifically illegal with this, which is good. Yeah, I agree. Australia's NBN company, which runs the National Fiber Network there has a proposal out before the top 50 retail ISPs or RSPs because they're retail service providers not providing the infrastructure asking the following would your organization support the development of a price response whereby charging of streaming video could be differentiated from the charging of other traffic slash services. Would your organization be likely to product ties such a mechanism if developed by NBN? Ooh, I love a good jargon sentence. What they're asking is, Hey, if we did some deep packet inspection and could tell what traffic was video streaming and what wasn't and then we charged you extra for the video stream, would you be cool with that by passing along the cost to your customers? Just wondering asking for a friend because we'd like to make that money. This would likely take the form of some kind of deep packet inspection and could possibly be a virtual connection or CVC separating the video traffic from the other traffic. But most of the RSPs are responding at least the ones who are talking on the record with IT news by saying, No, that's a horrible idea. Do not do this. We understand you want to make more money. But our job is not to deep packet inspect our customers data. It's to deliver the data they asked and the NBN certainly shouldn't be looking at what the packets of data are because they are simply supposed to be operating the pipe. Okay. Do you think that the outrage from the ISPs is more about the fact that they're like, This is going to cost us more? No, because if it was that they just pass it along, right? They just say like, Yeah, well, we can just charge people more. I think there are probably some RSPs out there who would say like, Oh, yeah, no chance to make more money. Good. We'll do it. But because you have 50 retail RSPs or retail ISPs in Australia, you have enough competition that they know that if everybody doesn't do it, then their customers will leave for the ISPs that don't do it. So there are some out there that are like the Sonic Net here in the United States that say, No, we we want to be customer friendly. That's how we keep our customers and this is not a customer friendly situation. So hopefully they tell the NBN with a fairly convincing voice. No, don't do this. It's a bad idea. Moving on the Guardian. The New York Times, Motherboard and other publications have all had stories out claiming Chinese border guards in the Xinjiang region have been installing spyware on tourist phones. Where's the Xinjiang region? Well, borders India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan and Mongolia border agents asked for phones and passcodes and plug them into a machine that then scans contents. If it's an Android phone and installs an app called BZAQ or Feng K that collects and transmits contacts, text messages, call history, calendar entries, installed apps and usernames used in some apps. The app is meant to be deleted after inspection, but isn't always. Yeah. And it was somebody who had a phone where the app was left on it. That contacted several of these news outlets to show them the app and talk to them about it. That source crossed the border at Kyrgyzstan, which would make sense. There's a lot of surveillance, particularly of the Uighur population and Muslim populations in that area of China, and it would be most likely they would be crossing from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, possibly parts of India, but the Muslim parts of India, Kashmir are around there too. So, but, but yeah, this is a, I don't know what you do about this, though, right? Yeah, China. So I think public pressure not to install these doesn't do anything. It doesn't change the Chinese government's take on this. It's in an area of the country where public pressure is seen as a threat anyway. So it's, you know, it's not even going to be allowed to get started. I think probably what happens is a bunch of these border agents get chastised for forgetting to take the app off. Yeah. And, you know, based on what we know of what's being collected, most of us would be like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's nothing, you don't want anything that's in my, you know, my, my call history, my calendar entries, that sort of thing. But the fact that it's possible is frightening. And certainly, you know, if you're, if you're moving in, I don't know, across the border of any of these regions, it's something, you know, you have to know about. Yeah, because we have the same issue in the United States where Customs Border Patrol has taken people's phones into another room. There's no evidence that they actually installed an app to copy things, but there's no evidence that they didn't. It's just one way or the other. We don't know. At least I don't know of any situations where there is clear evidence that that happened, but people have been objecting to that practice, at least for US citizens and saying, no, you shouldn't be able to do that. And there are now changing laws being developed for Customs and Border Patrol here in those situations for technology and such. I doubt that anything changes in China though. Yeah, at least as far as this goes. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Muse with us now, ladies and gentlemen, on the words of Samsung executives about where we will be in five years. You see this cell phone in my hand? Won't be using that apparently. Samsung CEO, DJ Ko, told the media in a briefing, the previous 10 years was an era of the smartphone. From this year, maybe a new era is opening because of the emergence of the Internet of Things, 5G, AI and all these technologies mingling together. The new era is in front of us. We must think rather than smartphones. We must think smart devices. So he's saying everything centered on the smartphone right now, and that's where we've been for 10 years, but it's about to change. It's about to diversify into lots of different devices. And I think that's something we could all wrap our heads around and say, yeah, it's about time for Internet of Things to grow up 5G because of its capacity, not necessarily because of the speed, but because of the amount of capacity 5G can handle. And Wi-Fi 6 as well. We're going to see a lot more capability in our Internet of Things devices, hopefully increased security along with that. But Samsung design head, Kanyan Ji, said the reason for building a foldable phone at Samsung, remember the Galaxy Fold that still hasn't come out yet, was that smartphone design has hit a limit and he added this last, which I think is the most interesting, in five years or so, people will not even realize they are wearing screens. You know, I don't disagree with this. I think that that is true. I think it's very hard for you and I to, you know, kind of like get to the point where we're like, okay, this thing, this object where I access the Internet and I access my apps and all of my information comes from that is just going to like be part of my, you know, my person. Yes, it is. And it's the same way that 20 years ago, none of us could ever consider smartphones. We couldn't make them up. They did not exist. You just couldn't put that much processing power in something that you could stick in your pocket, right? We just went there yet. And then what was the interface going to be like? Because remember the old compact Windows Mobile devices? They weren't even phones, right? But they had full keyboards on them and some people still say I work for a physical keyboard, but it was the touch screen that made it so that you could do more with these because the screen could be bigger. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it's easy for a CEO of a very popular company who makes a lot of popular products to be like, hey, you know, don't worry. We're going to, you know, we're going to get to that next phase of life and, you know, everything's going to be embedded under our skin or whatever. But not that that's exactly what he said, but, you know, it's sort of the implication, right? But yeah, like, how does that happen? One thing I will say is it needs to be convenient, right? The switch over to a touch screen interface was huge because, you know, your options were either had a foldout keyboard or you had a stylus, which in both cases are kind of inconvenient. Even the first Android phone had pop out keyboards and they were pretty popular. But at some point people were like, well, you know, isn't there a easier, less complicated way to interact with the phone and whatever comes after the smartphone needs to have just as, you know, I should not maybe not I guess easy, but a very straightforward method of interfacing with it because if it's complicated, if it's, if it's a wearable technology and you need to have your CPU jacket in order for your, you know, display glasses to work, you're always going to be wearing the same jacket and that might not always be convenient depending on how thick the jacket is, you know, if it's a hotter or cold climate or, you know, for a multitude of reasons. It just needs to be effortless. Like you wake up in the morning and not have to think right. Well, and okay, so think about the conversation we had yesterday about hybrid cars needing to have more sound so they didn't like hurt people, right? Like we, there are lots of situations where, where the technology is ahead of us, like the humans haven't caught up to the technology yet. So we have to kind of dial back to make it work for us because that's the only thing we know. And I think that this is a good example of that. When you say it has to be convenient. That's just in some ways. That's just saying for the next thing to be the next thing, it has to be the next thing, right? Like it was the same. There was the same inconceivable situation with phones, right? How could we ever have a computer actually even in a laptop form? It could never be a powerful enough because you need bigger components to make it powerful. But we figured that out, right? Oh, yeah, the phone was going to be a computer. Well, it would have to have a better to interface, right? Because you've got such a small form factor can never give me the interface that a laptop can. But we figured that out. So you're, I think what you're saying, Roger is not wrong, but you're just saying they'll going to have to figure that out. And what DJ co seems to be saying and also what the designer, uh, can Young G is saying is we think we're going to figure it out. Uh, and, and that's, that's the key when you're looking at the future is you don't know how they're going to figure it out. But I rarely say they won't because I'm definitely not saying they won't, but I, you know, these are all very broad strokes. And, you know, it took a lot of tries to get to the, to get the smartphone where we at, right? You know, before and look, so where are we trying? Right? We're trying on the wrist with Fitbits and Apple watches. We're trying on the head, uh, with augmented reality glasses and Snapchat lenses and all kinds of, uh, of takes on Google Glass and that sort of thing. So we're just waiting for that one company to say we did it. We got the one that everybody's going to, going to like, uh, and, and everybody does it. And it actually doesn't work that way where they say we got it. It, what happens is they put out the product and everybody likes it and then everybody looks back and goes, Oh, they figured it out, but you don't know until it gets that up. I, it's going to be a smart cat. It's going to be a device that looks like a hat and then like, if it's, if it's a baseball cap, you just flip, there's a thing that flips on for the visor for, for video. Uh, now everybody wants to wear a cap though. I think it's going to be smart. I think it's going to have to be small and unobtrusive, like maybe like sits behind the ear and can then project into your eye, uh, frame of view or something like that. But even glasses, people don't want to always wear glasses either. I wear glasses all the time. Look at 3D. 3D glasses because you have to 3D TV didn't take off because people are like, I don't want to put on those glasses. Well, yeah, exactly. It's not convenient. It's right. I mean, I think that's part of, uh, the reason that the wearables, um, market has been so interesting and it's exploded. Right. I mean, there didn't used to be a wearables market. Now there's lots of watches and, and, and, and variety of devices that you can wear that will work with your human body to give you data that you want. But at the same time, it's all, you know, I feel like everybody who's making all of the stuff, all of the, all of these wearables, they're kind of sitting back being like, is it a hit? You were, we're still kind of trying to figure out like, is this a thing that people will want because some people want it. Not everybody wants it though. Smartphones, everybody's got one of those wearables, not so much. Yeah. And, you know, and it's very interesting because the smartphone came about because of parallel track of technology, right? It wasn't just the technology on the phone. It was a technology and data transmission over cellular networks and having the infrastructure. So you need these, it's almost, you know, you need a parallel path of all these things to work in order for you to have a phone. Like you could have a smartphone, you could have had the iPhone back at the late 90s, but you wouldn't have a, a mobile network to take advantage of it. And so people would just say, well, what's the point? Right? If, if you, you needed that's where the 5G comes into the situation because of the capacity. You can actually, I think what we're forgetting here is you can farm things out. We're used to, this is where you get stuck in like the what is, we're used to, oh, the phone has everything on it, but with the Internet of Things, a lot of the functions can be pushed out into the network, can be pushed out into sensors and other devices and suddenly that little implantable doesn't have to do as much and becomes more viable. Look for implantables in the five to 10 years. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit implantable stories. Definitely show up there as well as other submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook. Join our Facebook group. If you haven't already, facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News show. Let's take a look at the mail bag. Let's do it. Mike wrote in about the jump in Lyme scooters on Uber. We talked about this yesterday being part of the Uber app. The main app Mike said he's been out of the country for about a year and said after linking his Lyme and Uber accounts, he recently got a Lyme scooter in front of this hotel. Mike says, I'm guessing it was a secret beta and I just had no idea that I had access to it using the scooters three or four times. I was struck by how dangerous they are as somebody who bikes in traffic in DC, Washington DC. I found myself carefully watching the ground constantly worried the scooter wheel would get stuck in a sewer crate wouldn't make it over a pothole or get stuck between cobblestones. I think I'm going to stick with bikes for the time being. I think I remember hearing something about that beta. So I don't think it was super secret, but yeah, it probably was a surprise when you did it. Yeah. Man, I'm with you, Mike. I watch people on these scooters and I think I don't know. I don't know if I want to be on that like they're there, but for the grace of God to go. I and you those people look like they have a lot more balance. Well, yeah. Right. Good. Yeah. Ryan wrote in said on the discussion of safe driving. One of the things that I dislike are the lack of knobs for controlling the audio and air conditioner and heater. I can easily reach down without looking and adjust knobs without taking my eyes off the road. I occasionally drive my mother's car with sync that manages everything by touchscreen requiring multiple screens for each activity. You need a co-pilot to turn on the air conditioning. If you could do everything by voice, that would be fine, which a lot of new cars are having, but those controls are still very rudimentary compared to say an Amazon Echo. Yeah. I mean, yes. It's I feel your pain, Ryan. Yes, we do. I'm with you on that. That's why I drive a 2002 car because it's full of knobs. I just just just stay just stay old school. Why not set clear? Yeah. Hey, folks, our goal each month is to get one more patron than last month. You could be that person that puts us over the top become a DTS member, get an ad free RSS feed special episodes from myself on how we do the show. Special episodes looking back on the tech news of the past and more. Sign up at patreon.com slash D T N S. We've got an email address as well. Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Email us early and often. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I'm in clubhouse. You have enjoyed this problem.