 Coming up on DTNS, China's bid for tech self-sufficiency, a Swiss replacement for the Apple TV remote, and how an Appalachian town probably has a lot better internet than you do. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, December 9th, 2019, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about global nominations, how streaming is dominating them, what we think of the morning show from Apple TV Plus, you get that and a whole lot more by becoming a member and subscribing to Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Chinese phone maker Vivo is doubling down on the growing demand for mid-range devices. Vivo is world's sixth largest mobile phone company and is well-positioned to take on the African market, competing with transient holdings and Huawei, among others. Back in October, Verizon announced it intended to permanently remove all content from Yahoo groups as of December 14th. They gave the members the ability to download the content before that time. Members of the archive.org team were using semi-automated scripts to join more than 5.6 million Yahoo groups to back up the content to the internet archive. So it wasn't for spam, they were just trying to preserve it. However, the archive team announced that Verizon has now banned all the email addresses of its volunteers from joining Yahoo groups and required that users rejoin groups one by one. In a statement, Verizon said 128 people were affected and were banned for violating terms of service. The archive group estimates this could lead to 80% data loss from Yahoo groups. The trial to stop T-Mobile from buying Sprint began Monday led by New York and California state attorneys general. The attorneys said a plan to combine the number three and number four wireless carriers in the U.S. would raise prices, especially for users of prepaid plans. The companies argue that a stronger combined company would result from the proposed $26.5 billion takeover and will push down prices for consumers. More things winding up as we get it towards the end of the year, Microsoft announced that support for the Office apps on Windows 10 Mobile will end January 12th, 2021. Not too many are using Windows 10 Mobile but if you are, you should know that. The apps will continue to work but will not receive bug fixes, security updates and general technical support. Microsoft also announced it's shutting down support for its to-do app, WonderList on May 6th. So you got a little time. Microsoft has been encouraging people to switch over to its own to-do app. I love WonderList. Intel has created a cryogenic control chip codenamed Horse Ridge for quantum computing. Intel Labs, Q-Tech and TU Delft. Intel Labs, Q-Tech and TU Delft can use the chip to control multiple qubits. Horse Ridge is an integrated system on a chip with simplified control electronics built with Intel's 22-nanometer FinFET tech. It minimizes distance and cables and operates at warmer temperatures, reducing the cooling challenge. Rather than chasing quantum supremacy, the chip is designed to achieve quantum practicality, something that IBM calls quantum advantage, meaning it can handle problems conventional computers can't at a faster pace. And Apple announced that the new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR will be available for order December 10th. Mac Pro starts at $5,999 for an 8-core Intel Xeon processor, 256 gigabytes of SSD and 32 gigs of RAM. No details about made-to-order upgrade pricing were announced. The 32 inch 6016 by 3384 Pro Display XDR starts at $4,999. No ship dates for either of the products were announced, but December 10th is when you could start order them. All right, let's talk a little more about new features coming to the Pixel 4 in Google's first feature drop for its Pixel line of phones. This is a plan Google has to add new features to the Pixel every month. US Pixel 4 users are getting an update to call screening. It will filter out robo calls and answer unknown numbers automatically while giving you a transcript of that. It's a little bit of an update to what you have to do manually before that. Photos will now be able to add portrait mode to photos you've already taken by doing a little machine learning magic. And Duo, the video calling app, gets auto framing so you can center around the one or two people that are in the video frame, along with the background blur and smooth display which can take a bad connection and make it look a little better. Nifty features here, I particularly enjoy the call screening one. I've done the manual thing where I say, yes, answer this with call screening and then just kept hitting the, I'm sorry, I can't understand you until they hung up. I love, I know that the cool features will eventually, will run out of them but I love the idea of like, what's the feature drop this month kind of thing? That's sort of a fun way for people to look forward to updates for features that they didn't have previously. Yeah, and it allows you, I think it's smart in another way because it allows you to promise features without people feeling like they got ripped off. Like I just got the new version of Android and it doesn't have all those features they promised. Like, oh, well, they're probably coming in the monthly feature updates. So then it goes from being a, someday we'll do this to here's our roadmap and you know, you'll start to get them, particularly this call screening feature I remember them talking about and being a little disappointed that it wasn't there right at the beginning but like you say, it's like a little present dropped onto my Pixel 4 this morning. Yeah, you can make it kind of fun if you roll it out the right way. Also, for anybody who is working for themselves and buys their own health insurance, it is an open enrollment right now in the US. So, Robocalls are at an all-time high. I mean, I probably dismissed 10 calls before the show today this morning while I was prepping for the show. So, anything that can filter out Robocalls in any way better than what I'm already doing. I don't have a Pixel phone. So, some of these features are lost on me but if it works, I hope that it rolls out to the phones as a whole. I'm probably going to let it do the answer unknown numbers automatically while providing me a transcript so I can decide whether I want to pick up or not but I kind of like being in control of that. Yeah. It's kind of fun. So, I don't know. It probably doesn't make sense for me to just troll Robocallers by leaving it off. I'll probably take advantage of the auto screening. And you know, portrait mode to photos that have already been snapped, it kind of sounds like a little thing but portrait, if it works as advertised that is a very cool feature because you don't always think about that in the moment. You might just kind of snap something and then realize, oh, I wish I would have done something a little bit more telephoto. So, if the metadata is there and can be zoomed in on a picture appropriately, that's really cool. Yeah, I like that too. The Financial Times reports that China's central office has ordered the removal of all foreign computer equipment and software from government offices and public institutions within three years. Analysts at China Securities estimate this would affect between 20 to 30 million pieces of hardware. The order is likely not going to allow the use of version of Windows 10 developed with the Chinese government. It is also unclear if domestic Chinese companies like Lenovo would be allowed to poor purchase since their products often source chips from the US and also Korea. Yeah, this is a broader move than what the US did. If you recall, the US has prohibited its agencies and funding to be used for the purchase of Huawei products, but that's a specific company. This is broadly saying, not only can you not purchase US products, you can't purchase anything outside of China. So, it's all the way the other way. Whether this is something that is being used for leverage or whether it's something that is a serious attempt to try to stimulate the local companies which are already doing well to build even more for China, I feel like it's something that three years is very aggressive on, especially when Microsoft went to a lot of effort to work with the Chinese government to make an acceptable version of Windows 10 for within China. Now, that won't be lost entirely. Non-governmental institutions will still want to take advantage of that version of Windows 10 because it's approved by the government, but this is going to be harder to implement. It reminds me of when China decided to do their own version of Linux and we're not going to use Windows for anything anymore and we ended up having to go back on that. Hard to implement and also hard to enforce. How does enforcement happen in this case? Well, it's easier to enforce when you're the government saying, our agencies and institutions can't buy this stuff, right? Because the government is doing it to itself, right? They're not trying to police everyone in China from doing this. The other thing that's important here is how are you going to make it happen? How are you going to find enough stuff that is acceptably made in your country to do this? And a couple of items shed light on how China might rely on its own products more. Huawei announced Monday that it will release more products running its Harmony OS next year. That includes smartwatches, smart speakers and virtual reality devices. Huawei, however, has no plans to roll out the OS to phones, tablets or computers. They prefer to use Android on mobile and just modify that themselves. Whether a Chinese company taking the Android open source project and turning it into a domestic OS qualifies will be important under those new rules. Also, and this one I think is more interesting, Nikkei Asian Review has a profile of ArmChina. ArmChina is a subsidiary of SoftBank-owned Arm Holdings. That's the UK company known for making the arm designs that are used in Qualcomm processors and Samsung processors, et cetera. ArmChina was created in April when SoftBank sold 51% of its stake in the Chinese subsidiary of Arm, still holds 49%, but it sold 51% to a consortium of investors. So Arm is still the majority owner of ArmChina, but it doesn't hold 51% if that makes any sense. They own the most of anybody of ArmChina, but they still don't own the majority of it. ArmChina has been building domestic supply chains, developing its own intellectual property independent of the parent company that is good for use just in China. And Monday, Nikkei reported that ArmChina has developed code that lets Chinese semiconductors run state-approved cryptographic algorithms, something that would make it very favorable to being purchased for use by Chinese government institutions. It also has infrastructure to make an AI processor called Xiaoyi and a CPU for mobile as well as IoT devices. ArmChina's most prominent client is Huawei. So now we know where Huawei is gonna get its chips. Nikkei quotes Chris Hung, a consultant at Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute estimating it would take ArmChina about three to five years to have concrete achievements in core chip intellectual property if they wanted to go for full self-sufficiency. So longer than the three years China Central Office wants for government institutions to stop buying non-Chinese tech. Interesting that the Harmony OS is going into IoT devices, smart watches, smart speakers, VR devices. But Huawei says, Android is still the right operating system for phones and tablets and computers. Well, yeah, and I think that's because Harmony OS was meant as a wearable IoT auto operating system. And you can't just make one operating system that works great everywhere. I mean, that's pretty obvious from watching Android stumbles is it like, well, Android TV is gonna be a little different than Android Auto, it's gonna be a little different from the main Android. So I think that's actually just really smart of Huawei and probably means they think they can get away with it with using the Android open source project to build their own version. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the whole thing really feels at least to me like a hedge against any kind of future, not maybe not follow up, but let's just point it for the worst. By implementing basically key core technologies that they would be able to use in the event that they would no longer be able to access foreign supplied chips and technology. And also kind of to build a large domestic base that could conceivably support homegrown industries in the same way that Intel initially was supported mostly by domestic companies that needed to use their CPUs, whether for banking or telecommunications or even home computers. I mean, you have a great example of scale in China. So it's hard to say that if you just walled off the market you couldn't create the demand but we're not saying no one in China can buy these devices. They're saying government can't buy these devices. I think it's just gonna end up not really stimulating the demand as much as they want and bite them in the hand. I mean, I'm not prognosticating how successful they are but I can definitely see what their view is. Also, I mean, in some ways this is just kind of their version of the buy America or this case buy China campaign where they do kind of, I mean, they still need to play to a domestic audience. Yeah, is it though? That feels like an entirely different thing to me. A buy campaign is trying to get people in general and they're doing that. But this is more what the US did where they're like, yes, don't buy Huawei. It's trying to cut off the purse strings. It's trying to fight back against what's being done to you. That's why I think this is less about being targeted towards stimulating domestic demand in China and more about the trade disputes with the United States. I'm not saying that the trade has no facet on this. I'm just saying they are definitely looking I think for more one for more angle. Say if the trade thing doesn't pan out the way they want it to. They, I mean, you know what I mean? It's not just a single-ended campaign. It's only for trade. It's for trade. Hey, maybe we can might, may be able to stimulate local development of. As a side of the fact. Sure, certainly. I also don't think it's a long-term plan. I think they'll back off of this eventually if they start to resolve the disputes. Possibly. I mean, hindsight is 2020 and we'll have to. Run over that hump to see what it looks like. Cliché, cliché, cliché. Let's talk about television remote, shall we? A Swiss broadband provider called Salt, may have heard of them, maybe you haven't, uses the Apple TV to deliver television to its home fiber customers. Okay, Mac rumors reports that Salt is now offering alternative remote for the Apple TV to its customers. Has a physical four-way D-pad, a menu button, volume and playback controls and does not include a microphone. So it kind of lacks the Apple TV remote itself in that sense. But otherwise, I welcome anything that is better than the Apple TV remote. Now, we're on record as disagreeing on this. I have no problem with the Apple TV remote. I've gotten used to that little touch, it's not a touchscreen touch pad that you use to flip around and I'm fine with it. I do think that I'm in the minority and I don't know why. I don't know if it's just that I have more patience to learn it than other people or if I'm just crazy, probably the latter. The issue is not that kind of touch pad. That all works fine. If I am holding the remote as it should be, with menu up at the top left, everything's fine. The problem is that it is sort of weighted the exact same. So unless you're really looking at it, you pick it up and it feels the same when it's upside down or red set up. And most of the time, just because I'm an unlucky person, it's upside down. So I end up hitting a button and then I go out into the whole Apple TV setting. You have to feel for the circle. That tells you which side is up. You don't feel for the weight. I don't have the circle, Tom. I have an old enough Apple TV remote that I don't have the circle. Yeah, it's harder with the older one, that's true. Yeah, it's all just flush. The fact of the matter is, whatever I or Apple think about how superior this remote is, we're wrong. I mean, no, seriously, we are wrong because the majority of people don't like it to the point that a Swiss broadband provider is providing its own infrared remote in real place. And I'm reading the story like this and I'm like, yes. You can't argue results. Yeah, and the thing is, this isn't new. You can buy other remotes of the Apple TV right now if you want to. It's not like this is the first time anyone's ever done that. In fact, Apple still sells its older version of the Apple remote from the previous Apple TV that works in infrared. It's just interesting to see a provider say, look, we know you could go out and get your remote, but we're just gonna make it easy because we know enough of you don't like this remote. TechRange reports on near space labs which provides imaging data on a daily cadence from stratospheric balloon-based devices. The devices launch for a couple of hours. They gather data and then they return to Earth for immediate access. Near space labs provides frequent updates at high resolution for use by insurance, real estate and logistics companies as well as municipalities. For instance, you could check progress on a large construction project or monitor traffic congestion or analyze efficiency at a port. Higher flying satellites are expensive and sometimes can't provide the resolution or frequency needed for these kinds of operations which is where the balloon-based devices come in. I mean, this is pretty genius, I think. It's easier to get in the stratosphere than it is to get to low Earth orbit. It's less costly. You can get up there and back faster. What's not to love about this as far as the ability to have some, not quite real time, right? That would be the next step up, but very within a day imaging of things that you need to look at. I mean, I could see a municipality just saying like, hey, we need to know what's going on with our traffic. Can we order pictures to be taken of the city and its traffic between three o'clock and seven o'clock for the next five days? And near space labs would be like, yeah, no problem, we can do that. Yeah, and that's a really great example of someone who's like insurance company and what would they want with this kind of data? That's what they would want. Well, I was thinking that for a municipality that's trying to figure out the congestion, but you're right, insurance company might want that too. I think an insurance company would want to look at devastation conditions, especially in flood zones. This would be very good just for disaster relief come to think of it and being able to launch these balloons when needed, if there's a flood or during wildfires and things like that. I think there's so many good applications of this, you know? Yeah, I'm kind of racking my brain to figure out like, okay, what kind of other insurance could take advantage of this? But I mean, the implications are far and wide. Insurance, again, real estate, certainly municipalities in a variety of sectors. The real silver blade thinks insurance companies want to find hidden structures you're not paying for. Or that, right? This is good and bad, balloon-based devices. Good and bad. If you're in the insurance industry, let us know what you think this would be used for because I'm sure there is a good use of it that we're not thinking of. I could think of the logistics one because we talked to Big Jim enough about logistics and ports and just being able to see what the traffic is in and out, what the flow is like, whether peak traffic is coming, all kinds of things like that. I'm sure there's other things Big Jim could think about that we're not thinking about either. But I thought this was an interesting not fang, it's not one of the big companies, but filling a niche that had yet to be filled using the stratosphere for space imaging at a higher resolution with more frequent updates. Love it. I would say homeowner's insurance is the big one because if you can fly over a property that just got nailed by a storm, you can say, well, we can sess the damage from here. Oh yeah, probably not just from there. You probably still want your ground-based assessment, but that can help in the assessment. That's a good, that's a great one, yeah. Well, folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. A New Yorker piece by Sue Halpern called The One Traffic Light Town with some of the fastest internet in the US, that's actually two whole counties, it's not just one town, tells a story about the People's Rural Telephone Cooperative or PRTC, which has wired up Jackson and Owsley Counties in Kentucky with high-speed fiber, gigabit fiber. PRTC obtained grant money and loans through the Connect America Fund. Now called the Digital Opportunity Fund. They also got some money from their sister company, Appalachian Wireless, and some money from the US Department of Agriculture to build a thousand miles of cable fiber at $50,000 per mile to 7,000 structures. Project took six years. High-Price Tag was in part due to the commitment to serve every person in the region, no matter how remote. We're talking about mountainous country here. In fact, it meant they had to use a mule called old bub to haul fiber through mountain passes and into particularly remote locations because they just couldn't get machines in there. Like a mule, like a donkey. Like a mule, yeah, because a lot of farmers still use mules in this area. They're like, well, I guess we'll use old bub to haul the fiber through. After the build out, the PRTC worked with Teleworks USA to train residents for remote work. Local unemployment fell as a result from 12 to 16%, depending on which county you're talking about, to 5.5%. Residents now work for customer support and tech support for companies like Hilton Hotels, Cabela's, U-Haul, Harry and David, and Apple, among others. Some are, in fact, one particularly was quoted as tutoring children of wealthy Chinese parents in conversational English, joking that there's gonna be a bunch of kids all over China with speaking English with a Southern accent. And the cooperative has plans to upgrade to 10 gigabit. So they're not stopping there. This is, I think, a really fantastic and very interesting case study of what happens when you have local support for something, local will to do something, a little bit of financial help to get it done, how it can change a county from being what has been called by some to be one of the poorest, if not the poorest counties in the United States, to one with a reasonable level of unemployment and people starting to get back up in their feet. They're not getting rich, but at least they're able to have jobs that allow them to pay their own way. Yeah, I mean, unemployment falling from upwards of 16% to 5.5% is, that is somewhat staggering. I'm not saying that the customers support jobs that are afforded a lot of people because they have great internet are the, that great jobs can't say that, but the fact that there is more opportunity and more people have an opportunity to have jobs and use the internet to their advantage just goes to show you, when you hear stories of underserved areas and wouldn't it be nice if there was better internet in this area, but it's hard, it's mountainous or it's rural or the carriers just, they can't make it work. Well, when you do, good things happen. Well, I mean, Oh, I was just gonna say, the story really underscores how important broadband is in contemporary society, especially as it is to job creation. It isn't just a nice to have the kids get to do their homework and a couple of other fun stuff things, but really just kind of a driver of economic growth. Yeah, the other thing is we're starting to see some more side effects of this. So there's a factory that located here because they were able to do training with people and had the internet to provide some of the services that they wanted to do in a factory, a factory that never would have opened. This is a place where factories have been closing. When the weather is bad or there's a flu outbreak, teachers can still stream their classes to students at home that allows them to have what's called a non-traditional instruction day, which means the school district can still collect its funding because it's not closed. They don't get to collect funds to operate the school on a day that it's closed. So there's all kinds of side effects that we'll see happen here. If they still are able to get the money to do their expansions, or it'll be a question of whether we see other areas be able to do this as well, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is the one we talked about a couple of days ago where coverage maps are so important. If an area can't get funding because AT&T or Comcast are providing service for one household in that area, that's not optimal. Because you don't need to spend a ton of money on this. You need to target it at the places that need it most, but you need accurate carriage maps and coverage maps to be able to target those places. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. We talk about a lot of these stories and others as well. If you haven't been there lately, come on over to dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Submit stories, vote on others, join the community. Also, speaking of communities, join our conversation in our Discord, which you can join by looking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's check in with Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler, who has a tip for those of us on the go who also love to write. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. If you like to keep a travel journal, and I think you should, you like to write in pen, but you don't wanna carry around a thick book while you're traveling, I'm gonna suggest the Rocket Book because it was a little tech twist to it. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Rocket Book, but I ran into it with a friend who's using it for his college courses. It's a thin notebook, it's about 36 pages, and it's reusable. You write with pen on this paper and then you scan it to the cloud and then you erase it and start again. And so you can keep as many pages as you want. It is basically an infinitely length notebook that you're writing with pen and paper. So it's an interesting idea for travel or for other things. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. That is nifty, I'll have to keep that in mind. Thank you, Chris. And Sarah, do we have anything in our mailbag today? Oh, you know what's funny that you asked Tom, we do. In fact, over the weekend, we got a lot of responses for our upcoming Live With It segment. As you may recall, I'm in the last couple of weeks of my Live With It segment on the Fitbit Versa 2, my fitness tracker watch that I've been wearing for the last three months and I've got lots of thoughts about it and can't wait to share them all with you. But we decided as a group here, huh, what are we gonna do next? And we decided to go with smart ovens. The smart home, I'm super into it, as smart as everything can get. There are certain smart home items that maybe aren't quite right for me. The smart oven, whatever it may be, is right for me because I wanna stay alive and feed myself well. So we put up a poll over the weekend. If you haven't voted, it's over on our Patreon and we would love your feedback because you're going to decide what we end up buying and what I end up using and using for my food. But just one of the notes of feedback we got was from Howard who said, two reasons that I'd like to see the Amazon oven, which is one of the choices, get the long-term review or the price point and the flexibility to use the different types of cooking. I could also see something like the Amazon oven be a good option for college students where space is a serious premium. Yeah, the other two in the poll, which again, you don't have to be a supporter of Patreon, you just have to go to the Patreon to vote, is the June oven and the Tovala. And they both can be used for multiple types of cooking too. In fact, the way I break it down is Amazon's the cheaper one, but it's a little less fully featured. Tovala is a steam oven that also operates a food subscription service if you want it so that you can order their meals that are easily cooked in the oven. I do that and I love the Tovala service, it's amazing. And then the June is the one that recognizes the food. It's probably the coolest of the bunch because it also has multiple ways of cooking, but you just put the food in there and it goes, oh, you wanna make salmon, gotcha. Here's how you just press the button and I'll cook it for you. So those are the three options, the three different ways of approaching it. And we have a lot of different opinions on which one of these should be the top, don't we? Yeah, we do. And in fact, even the Amazon oven, it being the lowest price plane, people have already been ready and saying, I mean, don't you see that it has a lot of like one and two star reviews? Yes, we do. And that's sort of the whole point of this experiment is okay, what are the gadgets in any category that might be worth me looking at and really taking it to consideration and trying to use and what is maybe unfairly hyped or fairly hyped? So yeah, it's all good stuff. I want the Tovala to win because I want you to get all their food, but you know. Me too, me too. Feed Sarah. But no, in any case, what we'll do is we will go ahead and go with whatever the consensus is. So please vote. You got eight days. Get over that Patreon.com slash DTNS. Absolutely. Hey, shout out to our patrons at our master and grand master levels including Ken Hayes, Brad Schick and Paul Boyer. We also have a new Patreon reward merchandise to celebrate six years of DTNS. Len Peralta created a fancy new six year anniversary logo. I just got the mock ups. They look great. If you back certain levels at patreon.com slash DTNS for three months, you can get either a sticker, poster, mug or t-shirt. Get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Send us feedback. We want it. We're also live Monday through Friday. If you can join us, please do. 430 PM Eastern, that's 2130 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. 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