 Coming up on DTNS, the Nvidia GeForce Now gaming streaming service has launched. And Patrick has a hands on report. Good news for YouTube and why some basic IT practices might have made the US Iowa caucus less of a fiasco. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 4th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and from the dark forests of Finland. I'm Patrick Beja live and direct from Des Moines. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We spent most of good day internet explaining what a caucus is and why it exists and how the primary system works. If you want to know a little more of the background of that stuff, become a subscriber to Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook's Messenger Kids app now lets parents see more details about who their children are messaging with if there are video calls being made and a history of anybody that their child has blocked. Parents will also see a log of recent images that their child has sent and received with the option to remove those images and report them if inappropriate. They can also log them out of all devices remotely. Parents can also download all of their child's information like the data download feature available in the main Facebook app. As it should be, the semiconductor industry suffered its worst annual slump since 2001 in 2019. The Semiconductor Industry Association said Monday in a statement. Revenue fell 12% to $412 billion in 2019. Sales grew slightly in the fourth quarter from the preceding three months period. Memory chip revenue dropped 33% from 2018. Led declines led by declines in computer memory. Sales in China fell 8.7% according to the SIA and sales in America. In the Americas dropped the most of any region at 24%. Boy, that that hope for bounce back better bounce back. Alphabet owned Jigsaw released details of a tool called Assembler that uses seven detectors and some machine learning and that kind of stuff to try to find signs of image manipulation. It can spot things as simple as the usage of Photoshop as well as more advanced deep fake manipulation in its early development. Jigsaw will make the tool available to journalists and fact checkers. All right, let's talk a little more about that GeForce Now service, Patrick. Indeed, users in North America and Europe can sign up for NVIDIA's GeForce Now game streaming service, one more of those which supports games from Steam, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net and you play running on a PC in a data center. Games must have been optimized for the service before they appear as available, even if you own them. The founders edition of the service is $5 a month for up to six hours at a time. But NVIDIA says the fee will go up at some point. You can try the service for free for an hour at a time without a credit card, though you may be put in a queue and you will get access to less powerful hardware. The GeForce Now app runs on macOS, Windows and Android and requires at least 1.5 megabits connection, 1.5 megabits per second connection, 30 megabits per second for 101 for 1080p. I'm sorry, I'm a little bit tired. 30 megabits per second for 1080p and 50 megabits per second for the best experience. There is no 4K option, however. Yeah, so 15 megabits per second base. But they're like, really, you need 50 if you want this to work well. Patrick, you tried this out. Did you do the free one or did you plunk down for it? I did the free one because for these kinds of services, you really want to make sure your connection is up to snuff before you dive too deeply. And I was already burned by Google Stadia, so I wasn't about to get burned again. However, it's an interesting approach that they have because when you launch a new service like this, the issue is which games are going to be available. And Stadia is a little bit at a disadvantage because games have to be developed for it or adapted to it specifically. Whereas GeForce now runs a PC in the background, so any game that runs on a PC can be optimized for it. But I suspect it's a relatively easy step for Nvidia to do. The thing is, when you try it, you kind of understand why Google went that way, the way they did with Stadia, because the experience is a little bit clunky. The PC running in the background, of course, you don't access the full UI like you do on a shadow PC, for example, which is a full PC in the cloud. The service itself launches the game in theory for you, and then you have the game full screen running. But you also need to log into the launcher that launches that game. So you launch the thing and it asks for your login and password. In my experience, it didn't remember them. It didn't remember my language settings, so I had to enter my password over and over again if I disconnected. The speed didn't seem to be as good as on Stadia, and even that, that's for my location. But I couldn't get anything reliable beyond 1280 for the resolution, and even that was limited to 30 frames per second, even though I tried different ones. So it's good that it's free. Stadia will be free down the line at some point. Well, when they get around to it, it's good that you can play a lot of games, but it does feel damn clunky. I don't know if it's going to please a lot of people because of that. You have also used the shadow service, where it's similar to this. You actually get a hold of a PC in a data center. But in that case, you have the PC. So I feel like in that situation, tell me if I'm wrong, things like saving your preferences and your passwords, that all happened fairly easily because you're accessing a dedicated machine. Exactly. So you run a PC just like you would your own PC at home, so everything works the same way. So that's a little bit easier. The connection quality was also tremendously is also tremendously better on shadow PC. I don't think that's because of the launch of GeForce Now because they have a Q system, if there are too many users. However, I just signed up and launched it and it actually worked. It might have been clunky, clunky, but it did work immediately without, you know, without any game breaking issues. Yeah. So the playing of the game was fine. Yeah, it was fine. Not great fluidity and yeah, but it worked. If you have a Mac, you can buy Overwatch and today start playing it on a Mac without installing windows on your bootcamp, etc, etc. Shadow PC is also, well, infinitely more expensive since they have a free option on GeForce Now. And even for the paid option, five bucks a month, even, you know, at some point it might become more expensive on GeForce Now. But Shadow PC, they have a new offer coming, which is 15 bucks a month. It should be coming in the next few days. But that's still three times as much. So I don't know if everyone will be happy to pay that. It's we're still figuring out essentially the takeaway is we're still figuring out how these gaming services, streaming services are best handled. And this is yet another attempt at getting it right. It has good sides, bad sides, but it's not perfect. That seems about right for an early days service like this that technically should work. But then when you put it in place, you run into things that don't work as well. And you keep fine tuning over the years and you make it better. GeForce Now has been fine tuning for years and years. That's true. It's been in beta for a long time. Yeah. So I would have hoped for it. This is more akin to what Shadow PC was at the beginning when it first launched like three years ago. Now Shadow PC is very polished or quite polished. This is it felt a little bit rough, but. Yeah. Thanks, Petra. My pleasure. Google told affected users of its backup photo service, Google Takeout, that between November 21st and 25th of last year, 2019, quote, some videos in Google photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users archives. Yay. Google also says that the backups made during that five day period may be incomplete and says it has resolved the issue that caused the problem and suggests deleting any export made in November and then re-importing. Google also told nine to five Google that if you're worried, does this affect me? Zero point zero one percent of photo users were affected, but doesn't mean you weren't. And when just a small number of folks when they say they're telling affected users, they're telling people that they know got videos in their backups that they shouldn't have had and might have incomplete backups. That's right. What we don't know is if they have any way of telling whether your video got put in someone else's archive and are they going to tell people about that? Because that's where this becomes concerning. It's weird enough to see someone else's video in your archive. And I guess it could be, you know, jarring or even disturbing. But it's really bad if you're like, wait, is one of my videos that was stored in Google photos and someone else's archive out there? Right. They haven't noticed it yet. And, you know, it's something just like family stuff. Like it doesn't even have to be, oh, it's it's, you know, some some racy video, but just just something that is clearly not meant to be shared with any stranger. You know, anytime one of these services is sort of like, oh, weird. There was some bug where like rando people got, you know, you know, everything that I said to my Amazon assistant within the last 30 days, you know, or, you know, some rando other Google user got maybe some videos that I had recorded at last November during the holidays. It is it is disconcerting even if even if there's nothing really there, it's it's it's bad news. Well, because because there's there's a trust issue, right. And this is unique in that a lot of the stories that we've seen like this would make people uncomfortable are chain of command things, who gets access to the voice snippets that get recorded off my phone or home assistant, who gets to see the Ring doorbell video, you know, throughout that that company. This is other users are getting your stuff that you've that you've uploaded. And that to me is just like that might be worse than all of them. That, you know, because it is a chain of command. Whether or not this is a technical problem that affects very, very few users, I still think that this is revealing. This is this is embarrassing. It certainly is, but I will take the counterpoint to this. I think by now we should know that sometimes stuff will happen and some services will have issues like those. And this as far as issues go, I don't think it's the worst one we've ever seen, but I think we should tell people that if you never want anything like that to happen ever, then you probably use cloud services online services, right? Yeah, because we've by experience, we now know these things might happen, just it does. All right, let's talk about some better news, maybe for Google. Alphabet, its parent company reported a revenue rise of 17%. However, that's its slowest rate of growth since 2017. Profit, however, beat expectations rising 19%. Costs also rose 19%. They still be profit. So that's pretty good. Most of the cost was due to data center investment and content acquisition for things like YouTube TV, YouTube music, etc. Google ad revenue rose 17%. That's not tearing it up for Google. I mean, it's a big rise, but it's not as fast as it used to rise. And for the first time, Alphabet reported numbers for YouTube and its Google cloud services. YouTube reported $15.15 billion in revenue for the year. That was below what people had expected. But it's the first time we've ever got a solid number. YouTube ad sales rose 31% year over year to $4.7 billion. YouTube says it now has 22 million paid subscribers for YouTube premium and YouTube TV counts 2 million subscribers. Alphabet also reported cloud revenue grew 53% on the year to $2.61 billion. By comparison, Amazon reported almost $10 billion and Microsoft $12.5 billion in their most recent quarters. So it's still a smaller cloud business by comparison, but it's on the rise, 53% growth. Alphabet wants to be in that same class as Amazon and Microsoft and looks like the trajectory is on its way. It is kind of crazy in the meta that Google, which was theoretically thought to have such an advantage in terms of their server space that they are playing catch up like this to Amazon. Yeah, no, it is kind of surprising if you haven't really been following this to think like, wait, but they data centers, that's what they do. That was the thing, like that was their natural advantage. Yeah. And to play catch up to Amazon, but also to Microsoft, which before Satya Nadella, remember, that was the Windows company. And now they're making more money or at least have more revenue than even Amazon. I guess they're arguably the biggest player in that in that field. And Alphabet is so far behind. I mean, third place in a three man race might seem low, but they're still, you know, one of the big players. That's why I tongue in cheek, call it cloud services company, Microsoft. I guess I call it advertising company, Alphabet. And of course, we have news now about image sensor company, Sony. Exactly. Sony reported a smaller than expected decline of 20 percent in quarterly profits on the strength of a 62 percent rise in profit from smartphone image sensor sales. Sales have been so strong that Sony cannot meet its inventory goals even at full production. Sony's gaming business fell 27 percent. Sony shipped 6.1 million PS4s. It's lowest holiday quarters since launch. So these PS plus subscriber service arose to 38.8 million subscribers from 36.3 million. I saw a few headlines saying that this was even slower than people had expected on the PS4 sales. Everybody expects it to be winding down as the PS5 is coming out later this year. But Patrick, do these numbers look disappointing or sort of what you would expect? It's not too disappointing for me because they didn't have a lot of big games and all of the games that they had have been pushed to this year. Most of the big ones, well, the two big ones. And we also have PlayStation 5 coming this year. I tend not to put too much trust in the estimations and predictions on that business because it's a little bit volatile. And Sony is honestly doing really well. They are still very strong in this generation. But it's no question that they have shifted their focus to the next generation, which is starting in a few months. So it's not too surprising. Microsoft have the similar down. Numbers were down in the gaming department. That's not too surprising. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines in about five minutes, subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Monday in the United States was the Iowa Caucus, the first of 50 contests where the two major parties, Republican and Democrat, hold different events, usually primaries to select the delegates that will go to a convention later this summer to select their presidential nominee for the general election for president of the United States. That will happen in November. Now, the Iowa Caucus is significant because it's historically the first one. It has often been very good at predicting who the Democratic nominee would be. This year, President Trump, of course, won the Iowa Caucus on the Republican side. No problem as expected. But the Democratic Caucus was open. And there were questions about who might win it. As we talked previously on the show, they were going to use an app to help speed up the reporting of the results of the caucus to catch you up on that part. Remember that we talked about how the Democratic Party in Iowa had declined to tell anybody anything about the app, anything about the testing of the app. They were not making anything public. Today, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf acting Secretary Chad Wolf said that he had offered the DHS to help test the security of the app and that was declined. They claimed the Iowa party claimed they had used independent security experts. And all of this reason for having an app was because the results this year are going to be more complex. The Iowa Caucus works with people gathering in a room and declaring their support and being able to switch their support in the middle. And then a number of delegates being assigned proportionally based on the population for that area. And this happens in 1600 plus places around Iowa. This year, the Democratic Party required Iowa to report the results of the first ballot, the reports of the first declaration of support, the reports of the second number. So how many people switch sides and what was the count after the second side as well as the delegate count, which is always reported. So the app was meant to speed that process up because there's three numbers to report this time. Here's what happened. They didn't get any results reported as of this recording. We still don't have the results reported. Probably by the time you hear this, you may know what the result is. But the Iowa Democratic Party said it was inconsistencies in reporting. Everyone agrees there was no security breach. It's not a problem with that. Here's the quote from the IDP chair, Troy Price. While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. Now, he says that problem was identified and fixed. Again, no security breach and they're verifying everything through paper. The precinct workers are reporting to multiple journalistic outlets that they just didn't want to use it and decided to call in anyway that the app was crashing. They couldn't log in. Some people claim that their phone said it was malware. That's all colloquial. But there were problems sending in the results that's acknowledged by the Iowa Democratic Party. And even if they did try to call in, the phones were swamped because more people were calling than they expected. We also have a little more information about who developed this app. The New York Times, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, all reporting that it was developed in two months by a company called Shadow Incorporated that they were paid $63,000 for making an iOS and Android app and the integrated data management system. That's not a lot of time. That's not a lot of money. Shadow is related to a digital profit named Acronym that previously described itself as launching Shadow and quickly has changed its website to say it is an investor in Shadow and is distancing itself. The LA Times notes that Shadow was formerly called Ground Base and was founded in 2016 by Gerard Namira and Krista Davis, who worked on the digital side of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. Finally, the Nevada caucus was reportedly planning to use the app on February 22. But now the Nevada Democratic Party chair, William McCurdy, the second says Nevada Dems can confidently say that what has happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22. We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus. We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems and are currently evaluating the best path forward. So it sounds like Nevada is backing out of using the Shadow app. Justin, you were on the ground in Iowa. Was this expected? I mean, we talked about this app before it launched. What was it? What was the feeling as it became clear that the system was definitely not working? In short, no, they're they're leading up to the actual caucus. I don't think that there was much of a discussion around at least through the campaigns and their supporters about there being any technical problem here. Obviously, this was going to be a hard fought caucus. You have a lot of different campaigns that have put a lot of different money. And if we are to believe some of the reports of what the vote count is, which we're now only able to piece together by way of the campaigns, self publishing, what they believe internally those counts were. Then you had a couple of really, really, really big stories coming out of it. But I don't believe anybody had what a gigantic, unmitigated disaster this is. And I am not saying that lightly. This is a historic disaster in, you know, of a vendor trying to, you know, put an app into this process. I want to quote Dan McFall, chief executive at App Testing Company, Mobile Labs, talking to Daniel Whitaker over at TechCrunch, saying in an email, it's a tale that we have seen with our enterprise customers for years. A new application was pushed hard to a specific high profile deadline. Mobility is much harder than people realize. So initial release was likely delayed. And to make the deadline, they cut the process of comprehensive testing and then chaos ensues. Now, as important as having that press conference on Monday evening was for any candidate that can claim victory, as important as this election is to the Democrats. How is it? Do you think? I know you don't have the answer, but how is it that you don't have a more bulletproof solution to this and that you try out an app from a fairly untested company on accelerated deadlines? I mean, that is the million dollar question, Tom. And it's what literally millions of dollars have gone into ad buys and campaigning throughout Iowa. Just to give folks a sense of this, there is no bigger primary contest than Iowa. Iowa has the biggest footprint in terms of media. Just to give you a sense, Nate Silver of 538, who does a big election model, they build in to the model, the fact that the person who wins Iowa tends to get a statistical bounce. There is a chance that the app has ruined that, that we're not going to see the big hands held aloft as confetti falls moment for one of the candidates that might have won. Or conversely, you have candidates that by all reports have underperformed their expectations that now we're going to wait another week to face the guillotine. This is again, there are times where I love Tom. You're and you've always been there to bust fun, right? I can say without hesitation, this is a story that is as terrible as it looks from the outside. There is no excuse here. And that's because of the moment, right? We'll in some ways, the Iowa Democratic Party is doing what they should do, which is they look at these three results as what it sounds like and they didn't match. They're like, these numbers don't match up. Let's not announce anything. Let's take our time. Go to the paper ballots and count it, right? They're making sure to get the right result, but everybody's moving on to New Hampshire for the next one of these. And so you just don't get the punch even when the results come out. Is that is my looking at it, right? I mean, there are a lot of steps. I think the Iowa Democratic Party could have taken between delaying and there was the release of any results at all. I mean, that that is the fascinating part is that we haven't seen anything. They don't trust any bit of it. And at the point that we are recording this now, they will release something. But some reports say that it's only going to be 50% of the data with the other 50% possibly coming later tonight, if not tomorrow. It is it is just flabbergasted. I want to I want to suggest something I saw. I can't remember whether it was in TechCrunch or somewhere else. I wish I could give proper credit. But it might have been in the TechCrunch article where someone suggested they could have just used Google Sheets. There is a way to keep it secure so that only the right people have access to it. And you just put in your number in the proper sheet and that would add it up and everything would have been fast. It's a well tested piece of software. Like, like, is it is is it a situation where someone sold people who aren't sufficiently up to speed on technology? A bill of goods, do you think? Yes, this is an issue. The vendor, we don't know the actual process of how that vendor got selected and why it was on such a short timetable. One would think that you have four years to figure out exactly what your solution is going to be to have a choke point of two months out is is is extraordinarily reckless. But to me, it is one part. There was pressure from the campaign, specifically the Bernie Sanders campaign that they wanted this other numbers to come out because they believe that they would have beaten. They had more people vote for them than Hillary Clinton in 2016, for example. So there was pressure from the campaigns externally. And the solution that came up obviously has not only become an absolute unmitigated disaster. But if you are to read some of the most dire doomsayers, it could spell the end of the Iowa caucus as we know it. Well, not not the end of it as a caucus, but the end of it as having that premier spot, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, well, we'll we'll see, you know, we'll see. There's never been a disaster like this on on that stage. Disaster is always welcome. A story is in our subreddit stories and vote on others at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. You can join in the conversation in our discord as well. It is alive and kicking where you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Of course, right before the show, SNAP released its earnings, missed its quarterly revenue estimates. Disney posted twenty six point five million. Subscribers beat its estimates. We'll have more details on what that all means on tomorrow's show. For now, let's check out the mail bag. And we got our voice one this time from Big Jim, who has some insights on the coronavirus and how it affects shipments in and out of China. Bonjour, D T N S crew. It is I Big Jim coming at you live from I 75 Southbound on my way into work. And I want to talk about yesterday's episode specifically when it comes to the coronavirus in China, while some factories may be working through the manufacturing production cycle or will restart on February 9th or 10th due to the Chinese Lunar New Year extension. The important thing to know here is just because the production is up and running, that doesn't mean the goods are going to be able to be shipped out of China. Most of your major airlines, including US flag air carriers, have canceled operations, including cargo operations in and out of China. And you need to be worried about what's going on with the steamship lines. Some of the vessels are being canceled and some others are just being dry docked at this point, being waiting for their orders. So check with your freight forwarder if you have goods coming out of China. It might be a good time to make sure you have a backup plan. But that's just my two cents for taking trade. I'm Big Jim. Hey, that that's a really good point. Even if the factories, which look like the factories, are mostly going to go back into operation February 10th, if those planes and ships don't go back into operation, then those products can't get anywhere. Exactly. Thanks, Big Jim. Always good to get your perspective. Also, shout out to our patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Chris Allen, DeGrasche A Daniels and Ken Hayes. Also, thanks to, well, we've got two people to thank today. We'll start with Patrick Beja. Patrick, what's been going on in your world in the last week? You know, if you speak French or want to learn French, just go check out the Rendez-vous Tech. It's a fun tech show in French. And you can do two wonderful things at the same time. So all the details can be found on my Twitter account, not Patrick. That's where you'll find everything. Absolument. Also, thanks to Justin, Robert Young, coming at us on a Tuesday. It's been it's been quite a week for you and let folks know where they can keep up with what you've been experiencing as of late. Yeah, if you want more on the ground reporting from not only Iowa, but also New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, that only place to go is politics, politics, politics, get the podcast. And we do actually have some breaking news on this story. The Iowa Democratic Party chair, Tony Price, calling the reporting fiasco, quote, unacceptable. And as the chair of the party, I apologize deeply for this. Sixty two percent of the data across all ninety nine counties will be released at the top of the hour. Oh, boy, we have new Patreon reward merchandise, folks. If you want to support all of this that we do, the fact that we come together and try to boil this all down for you to understand it every day for 30 minutes, become a patron. Patreon dot com slash DTNS. If you stick at a level for three months, you get some stuff. 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