 Coming up on DTNS, Robinhood, Reddit, and Retail Investors. Oh my. Apple earnings are in for that all important holiday quarter and Facebook's independent oversight board weighs in for the first time. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 28th. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rick Schroffolino. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Abangang. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Before the show started, we were talking about our fond memories of that sitcom night court, roommates from hell, and all sorts of other stuff. If you want to get a wider conversation in our expanded show, Good Day Internet, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. WhatsApp now supports adding a fingerprint, face, or iris scan to use as a second layer of authentication on the desktop or web. Android and iOS devices are used for the biometrics, which must be paired with the desktop client through a QR code. The latest version of the messaging app Telegram on iOS now allows users to import their chat history from WhatsApp, also Line and KakaoTalk, allowing participants to continue conversations in line. Group and individual chats are exported individually. US and Bulgarian authorities this week sees the dark website used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish stolen data from its victims. In connection with the seizure, a Canadian national suspected of extorting more than $27 million through the spreading of NetWalker was charged in a Florida court. YouTube is now testing a new clipping feature with a small group of creators letting them make short clips of live streams or videos between five and 60 seconds that will have their own unique URL. The feature is currently limited to desktop and Android devices, but eventually both creators and viewers will be able to create clips by clicking on the clip icon. And Samsung reported overall revenue grew 2.8% on the year in its Q4 to 62.55 trillion Korean won, about 56.4 billion US dollars, even as revenue from its mobile division fell 11% on the year. Quarterly profit was up 26.4% in the year, driven by the highest ever quarterly earnings from its display division and strong demand from its memory business, although Q4 profits did fall 26.7% compared to Q3. All right, let's talk a little bit more about the GameStop saga, which has really evolved quite a bit since we talked about it yesterday. We had Marketplace Tech's Molly Wood on to tell us a little bit more about short selling stocks and what was really going on with the GameStop situation, how a subreddit had driven a lot of retail investors to try to kind of take on the old hedge fund community. And it's messy, it's messy. So here's where we are, at least have recorded it at this point today. The stock trading app Robinhood confirmed that it placed trading restrictions on several stocks, that included GameStop, also AMC, that's for AMC theaters, Blackberry, Costs, and Nokia, letting users close or sell positions, but not by new shares. So it effectively kind of, I don't know, made the whole thing plateau, which it might not have organically otherwise. A pop-up on Robinhood's homepage said, 56% of its users own at least some GameStop stock, which gives you a sense of how many folks were actually participating in this. In other Robinhood news, a class action lawsuit, this is probably the first of many, has been filed against Robinhood in the Southern District of New York, and it reads, Robinhood purposely, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock GME from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock, thereby deprived retail investors of the ability to invest in the open market and manipulating the open market. Justin, I know you've been following the story, it's a wild one, what do you make of this? Well, there is no doubt that this is an absolute seismic change in terms of how retail investors are going to treat themselves, but the big change here is that we've seen punitive action come in, not only from Robinhood, but also from Webull, which was another trading platform that people left Robinhood to go to when they made this decision. And the larger question is exactly why they made this decision. A lot of questions on exactly whether or not Robinhood's parent company has some financial stake in this game, and whether or not they were protecting their own interests here. This is a meme that liquidated so much money from hedge funds that now we're seeing what happens when those folks who, by the way, are not only billionaires that run things like that, but that's billionaire money that goes into the hedge funds that people are trading for. We're gonna see exactly how loud they can rattle these chains. And what we've seen over the past couple of days is pretty loud. Yeah, what's interesting to me is seeing this go from being a Reddit story to kind of, because of the amount of money that's at stake, seeing this kind of reverberate, obviously there were numerous affected hedge funds, and Molly Wood talked about that yesterday on the show and kind of the financial impact side of this boat. Seeing the tech platforms react to this, I think has been really interesting and how Robinhood goes forward from this. We already saw, I even hesitate to call it losing a ton of goodwill, but they filed a settlement earlier this year, effectively deceiving, they filed a settlement with the SEC about deceiving customers about what they were charging for transactions and stuff like that. Obviously this is a several orders of magnitude bigger a problem for their imaging for an app called Robinhood to seemingly be be halting trading on something like on these meme stocks or whatever you wanna call them. I also, I don't understand, I get all the other ones, but cost is a weird one to me just on a personal side of. All of these are shorted stocks. So this is where all of this began was on a list of the most shorted stocks on the market. GameStop was number one, and it was insane shorted. I'm sure there's a few people who would love GameStop to come back and like change their business model and be successful, but mostly it was, hey, this is a great way for us to make money. And also there was not enough stock for the hedge funds to buy back. And so if everybody bought the stock, it was going to rise and that was, there was no way for it to stop. All those other companies that you've seen, Blackberry, Nokia, KOS, Trutziroll, they are all there because they were also on that list of the most shorted stocks. That's the only connection between all these things. I thought it's just a coincidence that these are all nostalgic brands. They just happen to be un- Emphasis on nostalgic as in, yes. Maybe the heyday has been over for some time. It's interesting watching the spirited debate online about Robinhood, but really about any trading institutions that have halted trading of all this stuff, saying, hey, listen, things are too volatile. We don't know what's going on. This is a little too crazy. Nobody can participate for, at least in the way that they want to to make a quick buck until we figure out what's going on. You know, a lot of people are saying, well, who's leaning into Robinhood? What's going on here? Do the hedge fund people, and I'm using hedge fund just as the people who have a lot more money and have been doing this for a while, do they just win? Because that's the way that it's been thus far and they're just more powerful. And then other people saying, I mean, Robinhood is a startup. You're using it for free. I mean, what'd you expect? You didn't think it was just gonna be this easy, did you? So I think that, I mean, the story is just beginning because if the market can be manipulated so easily, and Reddit is a very powerful thing when it wants to be, but this is gonna happen all sorts of other places. And Reddit's argument is this was happening. This has been the process. The process is CNBC has a revolving door of hedge fund people that come on and tell retail investors, buy this stock, don't buy this stock. And they are doing it nakedly in their own self-interest because they want to better their own positions and they can move the markets by talking about it on the TV. They've decided, Wall Street Bets, Reddit has decided that they can, you know, ho, ho, ho, I have a machine gun now, they can play this game as well. That's the question. And so when we get into who's manipulating the market, it really depends on who you're talking about. Yeah. Well, in other things that happened since about 24 hours ago on January 27th, Discord confirmed it had banned the server used by the Wall Street Bets subreddit, saying that it continued to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings. However, today, Thursday, the 28th, the new server was set up with Discord staff actively working with the server's team to help with moderation, as well as scale infrastructure to keep up with its rapid growth. The Verge reported the new server had about 296,000 members by 2 p.m. Eastern time. It has more than that by now. Reddit also confirmed that the subreddit was taken private for about an hour on the evening of January 27th, that's the Wall Street Bets subreddit. Once public again, the moderator said that they were working on automated software to deal with the surge in traffic, but hadn't been granted special API access by Reddit. According to the Twitter account, WSBMOD for public communication. All right, Justin, what's going on with Apple? Did they make any money? Oh, you know these guys. They're always raking it in. Apple reported it earned $1.68 per share in Q1 on record revenue of $111.44 billion, up 21% on the year and beating analysts' expectations. iPhone revenue was up 17% to $65.5 billion, services up 24% to $15.76 billion, and other revenue, including Apple Watch, EarPods up 29.7% to $12.97 billion. Mac revenue was up 21% with $8.68 billion, while iPad revenue grew 41% to $8.44 billion. A lot of cash coming in for old Tim Cook and Co. Yeah, good quarter for Apple. Rich, I know you had some thoughts on how some of these numbers break down, and did anything surprise you? Was there any revenue area where you were like, huh, they either did better than I thought or not as good? Well, remember the heady days of last quarter when it was the first time they exceeded $100 billion in revenue? And that was a big deal. And it turns out, nah, 111, let's just make the little house and we're good. The categories that started to me actually were Max and iPads. I mean, seeing that iPad revenue jump 41%, if you look at Q1 last year, this is kind of a big reversal for iPad fortunes. That's kind of how iPads go. They're a little bit of a, people keep them I think for a little bit longer than something like an iPhone or at least that's been the trajectory historically. But last year, Q1 2020, iPad sales or revenue, excuse me, was actually down 11%. Same thing with Mac revenue down 3.5% at that point as well. There's a number of reasons for this. Obviously people, iPads are an economical way if you need something to do some Zoom calls or something like that, have really nice cameras on the front. Certainly usable for a lot of education purposes as well. So not surprising to see that still 41% for kind of an established category like that is surprising to see. Max, kind of the big question with that was where are we gonna be with the M1 based Macs? Obviously, the reviews that came out were pretty enthusiastic, I would say for that. Still, it was interesting to see how consumers would react. It seems like in the first quarter that they've been up for sale, definitely it's a big quarter for Macs. That's the second, just for some context, that's the second most revenue that Macs have generated for Apple ever. And the last one was Q4 last year. So Apple kind of on a high tide for Macs for a number of reasons, they refreshed the professional line last year. They're updating all of their Macs now with this new processor kind of opening up the door for some performance gains and stuff like that. So those though to me were really all the other ones, we know iPhone revenue is gonna go up whether sales are actually going up. That's another question. We know services are a huge realm of emphasis. We know AirPods are extremely popular. Apple Watch owns the category essentially in a lot of ways. Those were the two that stood out to me. Yeah, the Mac revenue, not surprising. You know, you've got the M1 chips. They've been pretty universally well received. We've got new M2 perhaps, you know, the next gen M chips coming to a lot more in the Mac line this year, I wouldn't be surprised if Mac revenue had a pretty good year in general, depending on when we start seeing some of those new models. I also wonder, you know, in the other revenue category, you have Apple Watch, you've got the AirPods, you've got stuff like, I don't know. Homepads, yeah. Right, you have, you know, USB-C charging cables that aren't getting included anywhere that you have to buy now. But I wonder, and I don't actually have an Apple Watch, so I can't sign up for Apple Fitness Plus, but I wonder how many Apple Watches, because it's a popular item anyway, how much Apple's going to benefit from something like that where they say this is a really great service. However, you need this relatively expensive piece of hardware in order to use the service, there's no way around that. It might give them a nice bump into the next couple of quarters. I think services is the big thing to watch. And so far, you know, you had a big gain of, you know, with 24% here, it's at 15.72, that's already bigger than the Apple Watch and the AirPods altogether. That's a huge for the future of Apple, probably more than any one product, to be honest with you. I was a little surprised about that iPad, those iPad numbers rich. I know it's, you know, pandemic year, kind of makes sense, you know, you're stuck at home, maybe you're, you've got a kid in school, they wanted an iPad for a while. It's an education priority. Right, exactly. All right, if you want to give us some ideas of what you'd like to hear on the show, you've got a lot of options, but one of those is our subreddit. Yes, we have one too. You can submit stories and you can vote on them. Sometimes they even include financial news, but often they don't, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, so some other Apple related items here, Apple CEO Tim Cook, maybe throwing a little bit of shade at the keynote address for the EU's Computer Privacy and Data Protection Conference. He didn't mention Facebook by name, but he called on the need for international agreements around the principles of data minimization, user knowledge, user access and data security and reiterated the need for a comprehensive privacy law in the US, this is the computer's privacy and data protection conference after all. He also defended the addition of opt-in ad tracking transparency to iOS, framing it as about returning control to users while being critical of businesses built around misleading users and data exploitation, who could that be? In completely related news, the information sources say Facebook is preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and we'll get into that in a little bit here, but I wanted to kind of set up Tim Cook talking at this conference, really kind of drawing the battle lines in a lot of ways for what we can expect for this ongoing. We've seen Facebook taking out these front page ads on various newspapers trying to frame this as, hey, we're protecting developers and we want things to remain competitive and we don't wanna take away these ads from mom and pop shops that are depending on these to get their businesses out there, especially in during a global pandemic. Tim Cook kind of coming back hard with some very definitive language and really not mincing words, even though, maybe not mentioning Apple by name or Facebook by name, excuse me. Yeah. Well, yeah, Apple and Facebook are, they've been going at it for a while, go ahead Justin. Yeah, and really this was even before Facebook, before Facebook it was Google. It is the idea that Apple wants to impart both for branding and I do think because it matters to it. They don't rely on selling advertising. Facebook and Google do and selling advertising means harvesting data. And so they are going to differentiate themselves from the marketplace and they have for years on those lines. This becomes more interesting now that we're seeing antitrust questions being brought up with all of these companies. And so they're all trying to put pressure on each other with the understanding being that the government is going to come and the American government is going to come and do something. What they do, how severe it is, that's a larger question but this is front of mind because of those pressures. And kind of like I mentioned, like the information and services we're saying, Facebook going to be leading the charge on that preparing that antitrust lawsuit against Apple and they're claiming they're abusing their market position forcing third-party developers to follow app store rules even though they don't apply to their own Apple for instance can use their own first-party tracking for a lot of stuff as opposed to third-party stuff that they're making opt-in on Facebook's earning call. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Apple regularly interferes with how other apps work on its platforms. Oh yeah. This is a tough one, right? Cause it's like, well, it's true. Apple is holding itself to different standards but is that antitrust? Facebook says it is but there's some other news in Facebook. Isn't there Justin? Indeed, Sarah. Facebook's independent content oversight board issued its first five rulings Thursday and overturned four instances where it found Facebook unfairly infringed upon user speech and misapplied vague rules on content. One example found Facebook's algorithms were wrong to remove a post about breast cancer identification that featured a woman's nipple. Another found Facebook too strict in removing a French user's post praising hydroxychloroquine. The board felt Facebook shouldn't have taken down a post from a user in Myanmar with photos of a drowned Syrian Kurd child along with negative texts toward Muslims because the post didn't reach the level of hate speech that justified removal. Now, if I'm not mistaken, all the independent board can do, the oversight board can do at this point is say, hey, that thing shouldn't have been taken down. It should be reversed. Not this thing that is up should be taken down. Isn't that right? Yes, there has to be an action and then they will review the action and then they will make a ruling. I believe in instances where Facebook itself refers a decision to keep up content. The board does have oversight, but people like users cannot submit, keep up decisions to the Facebook oversight board. Only Facebook can do that at this point. This is really interesting though, and sure, these are early days, but the whole question up until now was, all right, well, there's just content oversight board. I mean, how effective is it really going to be? What kinds of things are they going to disagree with Facebook about? And is that going to be a problem in the future? Whether or not it's a problem in the future remains to be seen, right? We've got a few examples though of the board saying, yeah, Facebook did this and it thought it was doing the right thing, but here's why we have decided it shouldn't have happened. And people are looking at it as precedent. That's the big question. This wound up breaking through in political circles today because this board has a big decision that is going to be rendered within less than 90 days. And that is whether or not former President Donald John Trump will get his Facebook account back and whether or not he was removed. And there was one case in this particular batch where somebody had a quote that was probably misappropriated to Joseph Goebbels from the Nazi party in Germany that was critical of Donald Trump, but they said that that should not have been taken down because of unclear guidelines on dangerous individuals. Some folks have looked at that and said, well, if they're going to be going after Facebook, not necessarily for anything other than them just being too vague in why they are pulling these kinds of why some of these posts are going away, whether or not that is the argument for them to restore access to that account. So this is something where people are tracking precedent. This went from zero to Supreme Court like really fast. Yeah, well, and we've made that comparison before on the show is it's like Facebook's Supreme Court. Because Facebook can't then say, well, actually can it? Can Facebook appeal and say, no, we want that woman's post about breast cancer to come back down. It's inappropriate. They can, but they'll eat the criticism for it. Well, and it's also interesting to me, given the hydroxychloroquine one, I thought was an interesting example and kind of that Supreme Court kind of look at how to interpret, you know, how we should take down speech or stuff like that in that they were like, yes, this was misinformation. And yes, it was related to something. We actually have rules about misinformation about, but because like there wasn't, and there isn't an ability for people to go out and actually get this. Like it's not like you're saying like chug bleach or something like that. That because there was like a limited harm to it that they were like, no, you can put it back up. So I think that kind of focus on like, let's leave speech unless it meets these, you know, these very specific criterias will be an interesting precedent going forward. Well, I think in the case of the French user praising hydroxychloroquine, the board said, well, it was being praised by people. It is much less praised than it was at one point. But at one point, no one was saying, this is misinformation. This could be something that's helpful to people, but we're not totally sure yet. It has since changed, but the user wasn't necessarily trying to spread the misinformation at the time it was posted. Yeah. Meanwhile, on the earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that the Facebook platform will no longer recommend civic and political groups to its users. He further said that Facebook is considering steps to reduce the amount of political content seen in the newsfeed full stop. Interesting. You gotta wonder whether some of that is, you know, let's cut down on some of these oversight board cases that are shown. I don't know, I don't hang out on my newsfeed all that much. My Facebook newsfeed is, I don't know. I don't really know what's going on on my newsfeed. I check it like once or twice a week because I like to keep up with folks, but I do feel like the political content and I felt like I was seeing a lot of it, you know, mid 2020 for a good reason, right? You know, we're coming up on a U.S. election, but I've seen quite a bit less and maybe that's just, I don't know, the algorithm knowing what to filter out for me, but reducing amount of political content seen in the newsfeed. Some people are gonna be upset about it. I don't think recommending civic and political groups to its users was probably the best idea. Seems like a great way for Facebook to say, hey, we didn't do it. You know, if you joined something, it wasn't us. Yeah, well, let's see how long they keep up. Well, I've got some good news for anybody who has something in common with me and that is that I have to have 50 to 60 browsers open and my browser tabs rather open in my browser at any time. I also use different desktop views. So really, I probably have like 150 tabs open depending on what I'm looking at at my computer. I don't know why I just can't close a tab. It means I'll lose it forever and I'll never get it back. So if you're a tab hoarder like me, you might wanna rejoice. Vivaldi browser version 3.6 has a new two level tab stacking feature. That's right. You can go horizontal or you can go vertical. So you can max out the number of tabs you have open at once without them becoming those tiny little icons horizontally where you actually don't even know what tabs are open anymore. So users can now choose between compact, that's the normal, what we're all used to stacking, or two level organization. Vivaldi also offers the ability to display tabs off to either side or even at the bottom of the browser window. So if two level tab stacks is enabled and you have side orientation, you can see two tab columns rather than just one. Get it? Yeah, columns, you know? Getting spreadsheety here. The Vivaldi browser supports tab hotkeys, tab searching, pinned websites, recovered tabs, tab tiling. They're tab crazy. They are. Is it just me? Am I the only person who's- I try to keep my tabs as low as possible. I'm trying to minimize the tabs in my life. So I have used Vivaldi specifically. They had a feature before this. It was just like single tab stacking where you could just kind of like group stuff together, but it didn't have this multi-tier kind of level to it. And I never liked it because it just meant I was, I still had to click through like twice basically to kind of see what I, to kind of get where I wanted to. You know, for someone that has to have a lot of tabs open, you know, maybe putting together like a daily tech headline show or something like that, I could actually see like it looks ridiculous. It truly does. And you're starting to get to the point where like your headspace in your browser starts infringing on the content of maybe a little bit in the kind of more expanded mode. But Sarah, I'm kind of with you. I want to try this out. Yeah. Listen, I just started using Firefox full time from Chrome a couple of months ago. It was when I got my new MacBook Air. So I'm not totally ready to just switch browsers again. What I would like though is for this to catch on in other browsers. Cause you know, as we all know, once a browser does something that people love, then all the other browsers say, oh well, if you want that, we'll do it too. Yeah. All right, moving on to the mail bag. Brian wrote in with some feedback about my latest Live With It segment, which is up for patrons. We'll open it up to other folks in about a week or so on patreon.com slash DTNS. But I had reviewed AT&T TV now, which is now defunct, it's AT&T TV, but that's a longer story. Hopefully you can listen to it and enjoy it. But Brian said, I was listening to the Live With It segment and wanted to point out something about the alphabetical channel sorting. That was something that I had pointed out I really liked. He says YouTube TV does allow custom channel sorting. And after I was a subscriber of Direct TV Now, which preceded AT&T TV Now, I was so used to the alphabetical sorting that I had to change YouTube TV's sorting to alphabetical as well. It's a manual process. You gotta drag and drop the channels into the order you want, bit of a pain. But if they, and if they add channels, you have to update the sorting. But a benefit of the custom sorting is you can also hide channels that you know you'll never watch. That's a good tip, Brian. When I used YouTube TV in the past, I never thought to do that. And I guess it would be kind of cumbersome, but if you like the alphabetical, which I do, it's like, why hasn't it always been this way? It's good little, good little life hack tip. If you have email that you'd like to send us, whether it is a life hack tip, or a question, or a comment, or anything in between, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. And we want to give a shout out to our patrons at the master and grandmaster levels, including Linnell Lane, Carmine Bailey, and Eric Holm. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Politics never dies. So what's been going on in your world? We're gonna be talking about some of the political fallout of this GameStop situation on Friday's episode. And we will also be joined by Jodie Avergan, formerly of 538 and 30 for 30 podcasts on ESPN and his own new show this day in esoteric political history. Excellent. If you want DTNS as a video podcast, because that is an option, you can get the video RSS feed at dailytechnewshow.com slash subscribe. Also thanks to all of our patrons that support us at dailytechnewshow.com slash support. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back tomorrow with Lamar Wilson and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Diamond Club, I hope you have enjoyed this program.