 Coming up on DTNS. Do we need augmented reality with our television shows phone form factors keep trying to impress us? But do they and why it actually makes sense for Microsoft to acquire tiktok? This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday, August 26th 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and triumphantly back at studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lee City. I'm Scott Johnson And I'm Roger Shane the show's pretty We just uncovered the secret history of Captain Crunch if you want that and more You got to become a member patreon.com DTNS and get the full show good day internet. Let's start with a few tech things you should know Xiaomi reported its profit more than doubled in q2 and overseas sales have returned to pre-pandemic levels Revenue rose 3.1 in the quarter ending june 30th while sales rose to 53.54 billion won Or 7.7 7 7 billion u.s. Dollars smartphone revenue fell 1.2 percent overall But sales of premium phones overseas rose 99.2 on the year Xiaomi has relied more on overseas sales as in india as it's uh As it fights Huawei for sales in china to find out who's number one Microsoft announced general availability of immersive reader from azure cognitive services Which lets developers embed text reading and comprehension capabilities into apps Immersive reader is designed to help users with dyslexia disc I can never say this right dysgraphia dysgraphia as I say it all right and ad hd It has features like reading text aloud while highlighting words Optimize font spacing and syllable breaks Google released chrome 85 with 10 faster page loads. Thanks to profile guided optimization or pgo PGO lets the most performance critical parts of code run faster Google says this should be especially helpful when you have many tabs open or multiple programs running You can also now collapse and expand tab groups to save some space in your tab strip And chrome 85 will block you from downloading ex season apks over http If the page itself is secured with https Progressive web apps can also now create app shortcuts on chrome in windows In apple's upcoming ios 14 apps will need to ask permission of users before they can collect the apple device identifier or idfa This is how many ad networks including the facebook audience network tracks users to target ads Facebook sent a warning to developers that use the facebook audience network for ad revenue saying Revenue could drop by 50 or more and may no longer make sense for facebook to offer the audience network for ios 14 We'll try to needle apple developers while they're mad at apple for other reasons. That's interesting Poking a poking the mad horse DJI announced the new om4 camera stabilization product om4 now features a magnetic attachment system an adhesive or side on excuse me slide on accessory Attaches to the phone to enable a magnetic attachment the gimbal has multiple upgraded shooting modes And a upgrade to the active track to better distinguish between subjects Including people and their pets gesture control comes from dji's drones as well The om4 is available now for $150 us And android authority published a video of lg's forthcoming phone the wing The wing is a dual screen phone with each screen on top of the other So the top one can rotate open into a t shape and yes lg Had a feature phone that did this like back in the early to mid 2000s in the video that android authority published the lower screen can show controls like a keyboard While the main phone in the horizontal mode shows your main thing like your browser or your map lg has yet to confirm the device Well speaking of phones that uh, I don't know we're getting creative here Is this is zen phone 7 and 7 pro feature a more durable version of its rotating rear camera That can flip over to take selfies But now also includes an extra zoom lens as well as an oled display and a 90 uh hertz refresh rate It still has the 5000 milliamp battery Which is very good the phone is on sale in taiwan with the zen phone 7 at 21 990 new taiwanese dollars Which is around 749 us dollars and the zen phone 7 pro at 27 990 new taiwanese dollars, which is around us 953 dollars the phones will come to select at european market september 1st with pricing yet to be announced I Okay, so the zen phone feature isn't new but they said they made it like twice as durable So instead of 100 000 flips of the camera It's 200 000 but that idea that I would get the same camera selfie or front facing Or rear facing I guess uh is is cool. I like that. Yeah more moving parts makes me nervous You know, but I do like the idea that oh, I don't have to have a notch I don't have to compromise on my selfie camera being any different than my other camera It didn't really like light the world on fire with the zen phone 6 So maybe I you know a little oled and 90 hertz refresh rate probably isn't going to change that But maybe the more durability. Well, I don't know. This is a good phone. It's well reviewed Yeah, I mean I think the folks who are sort of like well you want a rear and a front facing I mean what really ever took advantage of that besides a couple of apps that you know We're able to you know, take a photo, you know front and back at the same time or video kind of thing A fun novelty, but most people don't use the phone that way So to have a single camera that works in the array that you wanted to that is you know of high quality That does make a lot of sense as long as it doesn't you know, you know, pinch off in your pocket Yeah, I agree. I also I mean this is a side note But I don't like it when these guys tell me how many times I can do a thing or how many charges I can charge a thing even though it's astronomical numbers 200 000 times a lot of times I hate knowing there's a finite number or a close to finite number. Don't tell them the odds. I really don't I hate it. I would rather believe it. Just make me believe it will forever Yeah, I don't have to think about it anymore because then I'll just think of that number Did I do that five times today? Oh crap. I wonder what that does to my total. It's just my brain I'll admit it, but I don't like it No, no, I don't think he's alone either. Yeah Yeah, well I lost a little of the thread of my thought there because I meant to say I really like the Zenfone flip over camera thing is an idea the LG wing on the other hand Not so much. I got nothing. I don't know. Listen the 10 second video that I saw of it being In a car, I was like, well, that's kind of nice If you don't have a car that has kind of a you know in-screen display that would do a lot of that stuff already and a lot of cars don't yet so sure but Yeah, it is it is a rotating nightmare to me Just put your regular phone and landscape mode in your car. Like, I don't know Yeah, right Time time will tell if anyone wants that thing The web version of microsoft word for microsoft 365 subscribers is getting a recording transcription feature at no additional charge New features are always nice users can either record audio or upload an audio file and then have it transcribed Live audio will be transcribed within moments while uploads may take a little bit longer Depending on the length of that recording users can transcribe unlimited live audio and five hours a month of uploaded audio files Microsoft plans to expand the feature to phones and tablets But it's not mentioned plans to add it to any desktop version of word Yeah, it takes as long as the length of the recording. So if you'd upload a five minute recording It's basically gonna play it. So it's gonna take five minutes Whereas if you're talking it can it can transcribe on the fly And this is nifty I mean granted you're not really getting it for free because you had to pay for microsoft 365 But if you're already paying for microsoft 365, which most word users at this point probably are Then you've got a cool new feature That that you can add to your web version And and it's not as feature rich as say an auto ai or something dedicated at this But in the context of oh now it's built into word and I can you know take some quick notes or something I think it's handy It's also it's the kind of feature that I immediately picture business guy running through the airport sitting down having a little time between flights And saying stuff into his phone that he will transcribe and send off to his secretary While he's flying to you know, ohio for the next convention or something which isn't happening a lot right now But you know what it's like for some unfortunate reason that put the oj simpson hurts commercial in my Oh, no, what if oh well All right I probably shouldn't have even brought it up. I apologize Chromium is the code underlying most browsers Google's chrome microsoft edge opera and more and chromium has a feature called the intranet redirect detector It checks to see if an isp is using non-existent domain results to deliver pages with ads Now they're not just doing this because you don't like those pages with ads This is to prevent unnecessary drop-down choices in the address bar When your company internet has a site and your isp Is pretending like that's also a site on the web because the way the address bar works is like Oh, there's a legitimate site out there called marketing.com And you are also have an intranet site and your business called marketing. Which one do you want? Right? So there might be stuff like, you know human resources dev And if your isp is like we're any any domain name that doesn't exist We're going to deliver a page with ads for then everything you put for your intranet would give you that drop down Which would be an extra click. So that's what this feature is for to say like, oh, wait a minute if we realize that those are fake Websites and it's just a page of ads. We're not going to give you the drop-down. We'll just take you straight to your intranet site That's cool, right? To make that happen Chromium has to try three unregistered domains to see if it gets a page or not and then it'll know Okay, we have to we have to adapt to that. However for isps that are not hijacking unregistered domains it's trying those three domains and having to go all the way through the domain name system the dns Which we talked about on know a little more uh last week To the root server because there won't be a locally cached record of the domain because it doesn't exist Uh, that means that the top level root servers are getting crushed with chromium traffic From people using chromium that don't even know this feature exists that aren't on an intranet Ars Technica notes that verisign statistics indicate this adds half the total load on root servers An open bug in the chromium project request making the intranet redirect detector be off By default that way if your isp doesn't deliver these fake Pages with ads or if you're not somebody using an intranet you don't send a bunch of traffic to the root domain name servers Now i don't have a ton of questions other than I think you did a really good job of explaining that and that's a boring topic. I don't mean It's a great topic for the show. I've said this before the show and i'll say it now Great topic perfect for tech news But tom has a way of taking the mundane of the daily tech news and making it interesting So I just want to say and also the takeaway is like this should be off by default to Yes Cut down on everyone being like what is happening right now, you know with this browser that's supposed to be really great So there you go. Yep Bloomberg sources say apple plans to add augmented reality content to a To its or sorry as a companion to its apple tv plus tv shows So some of that programming over there characters or objects From the shows would be overlaid on the real world as seen through your phone As an example of you or for all mankind could see a lunar rover on their coffee table that sort of thing When they're looking through their phone or their ipad we were talking about for the show This is very likely precursor stuff to maybe a future headset that's been rumored forever anyway And that's maybe the more interesting implementation that your phone in the room somewhere Yeah, and honestly, I mean, I hate to be you know be like, uh, this sounds stupid and and I love vr Like i'm a vr enthusiast ar almost like I need more I don't know. I I need it to be proven a little bit more to me. I'm sort of like Okay. Well, I watch a lot of content on my apple tv You know, I'm in the apple ecosystem in many ways I sometimes airplay things from my phone to my Apple tv again, you know that kind of thing so ar like what am I getting exactly like Information about the actors who might be in a particular show that I'm watching It could be delivered nicely, but it could be just Like one of these things where it's like we did it because we could and everyone's like no one asked for this I don't know. I I'm not sure Well, and that's the thing this is bloomberg and mark ermann who has good sources Saying this it's not there yet. So we don't know what they have apple's usually pretty good about not launching a feature Unless there's a at least a story they can tell about why you would want it Uh, so launching this before there's a headset I'm very curious to see what they're gonna say like oh, you could you could see the director's commentary and through your phone You'll see the director standing there talking to you or or maybe there is additional Content to the plot that happens off your television screen and in your room That might be fun all of those things feel like going back to what you said Scott feel better If you actually had a headset on rather than having to hold up your phone or your iphone There is one case where I was thinking about this before the show and I've it's formulated a little better in my mind How I could envision it, but let's say you're watching something that's very special effects oriented And on screen is some sort of huge monstrous creature That's clearly been built out of CGI or something To be able to pause the movie because you'd want to do that That's the other thing is you don't want to miss the movie or the tv show you're watching right right And then look at my table and see a fully formed model of that object And then I can kind of look around it and and and then if I go around the back I see the back's missing and there's text there that says since the back of the monster was never shown It was never Then it gets interesting then I'm like ooh info I never would have heard otherwise that yeah, I could get in some extra features documentary style or something But I don't know that some of that stuff appeals to me The ar is good enough on phones that you'd get the kind of fidelity and quality quality that you're looking for But ultimately it still feels like a precursor to I want this on my head And I want it to be small and I want it to be unobtrusive and just kind of a natural flow while I'm watching things And maybe that's what I think I figured it out. I think I cracked it Clothing and furniture when you're watching for all mankind set in the the 60s and you're like man, that's a cool retro coffee table What do I look like in my house? Well, you just told how to monetize it. That's not that way. We just give them more reason to make money Yeah, and now Hubble will know why do they ever come out with any technology? But also, you know for anybody who's sort of like, but why would they come out with a technology A year plus ahead of you know an ar headset. Let's say that's happening, right? I mean, it's a little bit like Uh before the apple watch there were a lot of things that a phone could do And people kind of got used to that but it was maybe a little bit cumbersome And then it was like now we have this new gadget that makes all the things that you want to do better better So I think there's you know, there's build up the appetite for it. That's exactly Okay Well, um, did anyone remember fortnight? In this show to date Yeah, I know the new season of fortnight still exists everybody arrives on august 27th highly anticipated but because apple is blocking fortnight from the app store The new season can't be added to existing ios versions of the game and epic seems to have decided not to update macOS versions Either as a result epic will no longer let folks Pardon me playing on ios or macOS cross play with other versions of fortnight. They'll be able to Continue to play against each other But again cross-platform gets weird. Yeah, so fracturing of the world's you if you're in the apple ecosystem You can play with each other on the old season if you're not you can play with each other across all the other platforms windows Xbox etc android I I'm sure there might be a reason where epic said look We could put this in the mac os version because technically we don't go through the app store but That legally might be fraught with peril because it would you know Put us in danger of a developer agreement and it's already dangerous enough I do think it it feels like they're they're just saying like well, you know If apple's going to be like this about the way we're being Then we're just not going to let anybody get the new season on on anything Um, but that said given that I mean epic could change this anytime they want They could take away the alternate payment system from fortnight and apple will unblock it So you can decide who you want to blame but given that fortnight isn't Uh available to be updated for the new season through the apple app store Cutting it off from the rest of the platform seems like the only choice You don't want to have people wandering into each other in two different seasons The messed up thing about this in my mind is that on the pc side Well, actually in the in the cross-platform Ability of the of the game since its inception. That was one of their big spearheaded ideas They were like good. Look, we're gonna we're gonna get away from this idea of these walled separate gardens Everybody in ps4 is playing ps4 people everybody on pc's playing pc We're gonna make it work with everybody and a lot of people didn't believe it would work But it did you had foam people playing with pc people and and everything else in between This feels like going back on their own You know big idea that everything should be in one big pile one server to serve them all sort of idea and instead They've had to I mean this means they've literally had to set up Virtual servers or actual servers to run older versions of the of the build In in the meantime and that's just it's weird compared to what their plans were Yeah, which means they are at least trying to support the players on apple Who who still have the app on their phones and and not they could have just said well You're you're out of luck complain to apple, right? So they they did go that far Folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe the daily tech headlines.com Andrew ross sorkin and mike isaac from the new york times published an in-depth look How microsoft got pulled into possibly buying part or all of tiktok It's been going on longer than you think according to their sources and they have like a dozen more sources The us committee on foreign investment began an investigation into bite dance in november We talked about this last november on dts What we didn't know is that bite dance investors sequoia and general lannick began acting then as go-betweens With bite dance the company they're investing in and the us administration What they determined was the us said it wanted bite dance to reduce its ownership in tiktok Restructure corporate governance. That's something the us successfully got zte to do And move all the us data to us based servers remember tiktok says that all the data is on us servers But it's also backed up in singapore. They're like no no more singapore all of it on in us So bite dance turned to microsoft as a us partner not under antitrust scrutiny That could help them meet those conditions plus bite dance ceo zhang yiming is a former microsoft engineer talks with microsoft began in july so before all this stuff broke and in part began And in part because of us china tensions microsoft and bite dance We're talking about microsoft taking a minority investment. They're like an acquisition would probably Not fly it would be it bring too much attention microsoft really just hope to get tiktok off google cloud and on to azure as i've been saying This would fulfill the us conditions. They bite dance would be reducing their investment They could probably do the government restructure without microsoft But then they microsoft would help them move all the data into the us Reduced ownership by bite dance and us data on us azure servers would be the thing that would be a win-win for bite dance and microsoft So it looked like everything was just a matter of dot nines and cross and t's but as talks went on microsoft realized they advantage of owning tiktok and especially tiktok data That tiktok data would be especially beneficial for microsoft's data science arm in training machine learning As well as a benefit to microsoft's advertising business Don't forget they sell ads on msn and bing and other things they make about seven million dollars off of advertising So the two companies started to see an acquisition as maybe a cleaner option after all And that scenario microsoft would let tiktok run as a standalone unit similar to how linkedin and moyang moyang Which makes micro minecraft run right now under microsoft. They would just buy tiktok and let it do its thing on july 31st The committee on foreign investment analysis was done And the recommendation at that time was that bite dance be ordered to sell tiktok to a us owner and they had one ready microsoft Chinese shareholders would only be allowed to keep a minority investment And that's what bite dance wanted they're like we'll sell it to tiktok We'll just keep a small cut of it And this seemed to fit into the microsoft bite dance plans perfectly However, the president and many of his advisors wanted to go farther and instead Decided to ban tiktok entirely The president called sachin adela gave him 45 days to complete a deal which has now been extended But at the time that's what happened adding that bite dance should retain no ownership now And the deal should benefit the government some way such as job creation or other economic benefits if not a payment into the treasury somehow Now this article also says oracle is now interested That many bankers and investors have tried to get twitter and netflix involved So if you've heard twitter's name that might be why it may not be the twitter's interested It's that people are trying to get them interested But microsoft microsoft is still the furthest along in these acquisitions Are these talks i read this times article and the part that um That really was educational for me was um, i've been trying to figure out since the lawsuit was filed against the administration What the motivation was is that standard is that tiktok's way of going Ah, we got to fight it somehow or you know, I just didn't know don't follow the stuff I know to know for sure But in that article it made it pretty clear that 45 days is not a lot of time to do anything Uh in in regards to the transference of ownership of gigantic and it's since been extended to 90 days Which still isn't a lot still not a lot of time like even in the tiny companies i've worked for before Timeframes are either needed to be fluid or if there was a deadline sometimes It meant we were going to kill ourselves to get there and and I and I can't imagine even in 90 days How this is going to go at all smoothly So my biggest takeaway from all of this is I think there's a solution Someone's gonna this is going to end up happening and microsoft's probably going to be where it ends up All of that stuff that everybody's predicting is probably true I just don't think they've given it enough time to do it and maybe they can still extend that Maybe this lawsuit is a way of well the article argues that that may be a stull tactic And it may be the only they have so if it is then then great But I just think they need time and I don't mean just tiktok. I mean microsoft needs time and They've had more time than I thought they had since this started into live That's still not a lot extra though And yeah, if they can get a temporary restraining order on the executive order while they litigate it That's all they need they just need to say hey You can't enforce that executive order until we've finished our court case even if they lose the court case And the executive order goes into effect I mean Clearly the situation is fluid and Who knows at this point? I mean it changes by the day But it does kind of bring me back to when microsoft was first floated as May by tiktok. I mean a lot of us were like, what? Why When did this happen and it turns out, you know, there's more to the story Which often happens with acquisitions that seem a little, you know out of the blue So, you know, there's there's more to it and it gets deeper into How microsoft's got a lot of stuff into there in their arsenal Including the money to do it and also the lack of scrutiny in terms of, you know Anti-competitiveness and all that stuff right now, but they also lack severely in the social data department and So I think that's an important key thing here is that microsoft one of their things microsoft really wants out of the deal If they get the deal or what they would want is all this social data That they can then use to build stuff and that's what everybody wants right now And honestly what they want most is somebody paying for azure or being able to show off azure running a service as big as tiktok, right? That's number one whether they keep it or not then the fact that they have a model with linkedin and minecraft Okay, so we know how they might run it. Just let it go, you know, they they wouldn't mess with it That seems to have worked very well for both of those units And then they could spin it off if they want keep it as an azure client But I hadn't thought about the data science stuff and I I definitely hadn't thought about the advertising aspect of it That could be a huge boon for microsoft's advertising service, which isn't small But it's not on the level of google and facebook Yeah, and in 90 days if they can pull it off that suddenly becomes very big yeah Well, if you have thoughts on this or anything else you can join a conversation in our discord going on right now 24 seven in fact and you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com Slash ttns. Let's check out the mail bag. Oh Let's chris wrote in and said I want to thank ttns for not calling services apps This is something that you know Gets chris's goat. He says I occasionally hear a slip up But other prominent publications call the many services we use apps the zoom app the tiktok app It greatly confuses users into thinking that the square on their phone contains the totality of what is encompassed In an extensive complex services available in many sovereign territories The app economy died with the three dollar flashlight app remember that one It is reminiscent of the late 1990s when people would refer to services like ebay as web pages chris says I think it would be a great Know a little more segment to help people understand a little bit more about the app on their phone Being just a view like logging into a website into a service that has many complexities Yeah, I mean I try to only talk about it as an app when we're talking about it as an app Like when we're talking about oh, they would put the app on the store that sort of thing So chris i'm with you there It is more than a service and it reminded me of explaining The web to sherry tornatory at half price books in 1997 and she was like so where is this website? And i'm like it's out there like she was so used to installed software It was it had to it was a change in perception to be like what do you mean out there out where So, yeah, this is a fun one to apply to the to the whole fortnight mess because if you think about it applies Not just this is not a not a game or an app on your phone It's a service that that that game is a window to Yeah, it's the same thing so the app is blocked, but the service still exists out there You just can't get to it. Yeah, right And also big jim writes regarding companies moving their electronics factories to mexico Jim says It's actually nothing new that companies are looking to do what we call short shipping But honestly it has little to do with the free trade agreement and more to do with lead times Accountability and inventory reduction China and asia are still much cheaper to produce in and even with the section 301 tariffs Many suppliers to companies are simply eating the difference with the long-term goal of stabilizing the market and writing things out What most u.s. Companies are having issues with are the delays in the logistics area and the increased costs that affect their While just in time models I expect to actually see more development in south america because of this unless us development in africa in the medium term So so jim is saying look it's it's more about logistics It's more about getting that stuff here fast and when when you're you know in short shipping That means you get stuff here faster. Thank you jim He also pointed us to a story from freight waves that shows us imports from china are booming even During the trade war and the lockdown because people are spending less money on services like travel and eating out And more money on stuff like furniture for your home office or home improvement interesting Well, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including rick hubner martin dames And de grassier a daniels also thanks to the one the only scone johnson Scott you're a busy man. What do you been up to? Well, there's a lot of stuff going on There's brand new comics up and podcasts and all sorts of things But I want to mention The tom and I have been working very diligently with a couple of producers on current geek chronicles Which successfully funded last month Which means we are about to launch our second episode first one was put out to sort of get people excited during the kick starter Second episode all about I don't know beginners guide to why wrestling is such a freak out sport for so many people And why some of us don't understand If that sounds at all interesting to you and I promise you it is Go check it out. It'll be up there on the first and every week thereafter until the season is done So check it out current geek.com is where to go subscribe to the feed It's already on your phone for a lot of you don't even have to worry about it But if you haven't subscribed get it wherever you get your podcasts That's a current geek.com frog pants.com for everything else you're looking for There's also a history of zoom and enhance coming and an episode called from scuzzy to usb So I don't know you you want to get in now and get these episodes current geek.com You can also support this show at any level and get a bunch of perks Scott's going to be doing a live with it on the magic keyboard And if you want to get his thoughts on living three months with the magic keyboard become a patreon You'll get it before everybody else patreon.com Slash dts If you have feedback for us, we would love to hear it our email addresses feedback at daily tech news show dot com And if you can join us live, we'd love that too We're live money through friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc and find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live Justin robber young's in tomorrow. I'll talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this brover