 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Dr. X-17, Dustin Campbell, and Tim Deputy. Coming up on DTNS, Apple gets a 10-year contract for all Major League Soccer matches, Adobe makes Photoshop free on the web, and Meta now offers a setting to garble the voices of strangers in Horizon Worlds. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 14, 2022, Flag Day in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Happy Flag Day. It's Judy Whitman. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, technology contributor to ABC News author and host of The Tech, John Stephanie Upprey. Hey there. Is the day really Flag Day? It is, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, happy Flag Day. Whatever Flag you flag. Imagine if Tom was like, no, it's not. I just made that up. Now, Flag Day is when Mike Claiborne, a longtime St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster says, start paying attention to the standings. Don't pay attention to baseball standings before Flag Day. Wow, he uses Flag Day as a metric. Yeah, that's his metric. So be like Mike Claiborne, I guess. Quick fun fact. Yeah. I live in a community right outside of Philadelphia called Yaden, Pennsylvania. And the creator of Arbor Day is from here. Really? Yeah. I couldn't tell you his name, but we have a whole big citywide celebration every year for it. And yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm glad to see that Arbor Day gets some love out there. That's good to know. Yeah. All right, let's start off with a few tech things you should know. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company will lay off nearly 1,100 people, which is about 18% of its workforce. Coinbase quadrupled in size over the last 18 months. Lay it off employees will lose access to company services and email immediately, but get a minimum of 14 weeks of severance pay with an additional two weeks for every year of employment. This might sound familiar to you because Coinbase is not the only company laying off people. Redfin and Compass also announced today layoffs of about 920 people collectively today, citing surging mortgage interest rates. WhatsApp is adding a feature in beta that lets users move chat histories, contacts, and your other WhatsApp data from Android to iOS. No more losing your history if you switch phones. It'll be a part of Apple's move to iOS tool. Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer on June 15th for most remaining versions of Windows that supported it, i.e. on the desktop will be disabled and replaced with Microsoft Edge. However, Windows 7 extended support, Windows 8.1, and all versions of Windows 10 long-term service clients, IoT and server will continue to make Internet Explorer available for the time being, i.e. 11 will continue to get security patches for those platforms as well. So it's not dead yet. It's mostly dead, Tom. Exactly. Battery company called Our Next Energy, or Microsoft Edge, but it's mostly dead, Tom. It's mostly dead, exactly. Battery company called Our Next Energy, or ONE, O-N-E, announced a partnership with BMW to bring its Gemini Dual Chemistry Battery Pack to a prototype BMW I-X-E-V by the end of the year. One's battery will use two types of cells and is experimenting with different electrode chemistries to reduce the use of cobalt, nickel, graphite, and lithium. It may offer three different sizes, including the low-end version at the same cost as current nickel and cobalt-based batteries, but here's the clincher if it works. ONE thinks its battery can almost double the I-X's range from 324 miles to more than 600. Mozilla will make its total cookie protection feature on by default for desktop Firefox browser users. The feature keeps cookies isolated to the side on which they were created to prevent tracking, and the feature launched in 2021, but users had to turn it on at the time. Now, on by default. All right. Let's talk a little more about what's going on at Adobe. Yeah, cool stuff. Adobe made some announcements. Photoshop is getting a neural filter that can clean up old photos or photos that, I don't know, just need a little help, removing scratches, restoring color, that sort of thing. Adobe Lightroom, which can adjust images, will get the ability to handle video for the first time. You can color grade footage and trim down the beginning and end on Lightroom if you use it. Yeah, so the Lightroom thing is available in one version of Lightroom, but it's even more simplistic than this, so that's kind of nice. If you're a photographer who has a video clip, it's really not going to be useful for long versions of video, but that neural filter, that's cool for taking old photos that Roger was telling us before the show. You could do all of that stuff in Photoshop, but what's cool about this is it's one button. You can just click it. Yeah, I use Photoshop pretty regularly. I have certain things that I have to use it for, but I'm not great at it. I have my little tricks, but I probably use Photoshop like 15% of what it is capable of. Something like this is one of the things that I want to use it for at the absolute most, so I can see a lot of people being happy about this. Yeah, that's a super cool feature. The Lightroom thing, I thought that was like super niche. I was like, what? Anybody really need to do this? For real ever? I don't know why. With all the other tools available to do that kind of thing, why are we adding that feature to Lightroom? I don't know. I'm going to give it a go. You're a photographer who does a lot of TikTok. Could be. Yeah, which doesn't disprove the fact that that's very niche, even if that were it. We got another big one here. Adobe is testing a free web-based version of Photoshop in Canada with intentions to open it up to everybody, but right now Canadians get it. Adobe says the service is intended to be a freemium service at some point, but the core features will always be available for free to try out. More sophisticated features will eventually go behind the paywall. Adobe launched the web version of Photoshop back in October, but it's only been for subscribers up till now. It offers basic edit tools. It offers layers. They've been adding more features to it as they go, but Adobe is pitching it as being more than just a collaboration tool. When they first launched it, they said, this is for making small tweaks and annotations if you're sharing photos with each other, but it looks like they're now saying we want it to be an entryway. We want people to try Photoshop for free on the web. You could use it on a Chromebook, for instance, and then want to use it more and maybe eventually become a paying customer. Yeah. I mean, as somebody here, I paid $10 a month for Photoshop on Creative Cloud, and I feel that it's worth it because it's a very robust tool, even though I'm not that creative Photoshop. My first reaction was like, why does Canada get everything first? My second was like, okay, well, what exactly does Photoshop offer that I'm not using right now that is free, fully free, where I would say, okay, let me pay for this because I like it so much and I'm using certain tools that they're going to keep me back from on the free version. I just have such disdain for the entire freemium model. I mean, I know this is capitalism, but it always feels like bait and switch to me where you're getting people invested in using this particular tool under the auspices of it being free and then flipping that switch when they need it the most. And I think people that can pay for software kind of already do for the most part and you would just be, I think, hamstringing some people that actually could benefit from a truly free version of the software. Yeah, it depends on how they do it, right? And I guess that's part of the Canadian test is for us as consumers to be able to see that too. So Canadians, let us know. I think if it works like a free trial where it's like, this is how it works, if you like it and you suddenly are like, oh, I want to get more advanced than paying for it, that seems fair to me. It's free to use basically, but if you're becoming an advanced user, then go ahead and kick us a few bucks. If it's more like you're talking about Stephanie where it's like, oh, you could use it for a couple of things, but you won't be able to finish them because you're missing an essential thing, then yeah, that's not cool. I don't like that either. And as much as that whole sweet cost as is, it's just like, dude, what are you doing here? How much is this even going to cost? Why even bother? Let this be the one altruistic thing you do, Adobe. Seriously. Well, in entertainment news, if you like soccer, Apple and Major League Soccer or MLS announced a 10-year broadcasting deal that makes the Apple TV app the home of all MLS matches. MLS Commissioner Don Garber said Tuesday that the league has the youngest, the most diverse, the most digitally native fans anywhere in the world. Some matches will be freely available to anybody with the Apple TV app, while the rest, including the MLS and Leagues Cup will be part of Apple TV Plus, which is $4.99 per month. Yeah, there's some interesting things about this. It's a global deal, so they're getting the rights worldwide, which is different than how sports leagues typically sell broadcast or streaming rights. They usually go country by country, region by region. MLS will also be allowed, and in fact, Apple isn't being encouraged according to ADQ. Apple has encouraged this. MLS will strike deals to simulcast matches on linear TV. My guess is they'll probably do this in local markets to say, oh, your local regional sports network or maybe your local broadcast channel will be able to show a match even if it is on Apple TV. So there won't be blackouts on this for, again, for select matches. Apple's ADQ also said the deal is a huge opportunity for both of us because it's a partnership. It's not a rights deal. Sounds like a rights deal to me. Sounds exactly like a rights deal. What's the definition of a rights deal? This is interesting. When I read this, the first thing I thought about was that that whole thing that Saudi Arabia is doing with some of the professional golfers here in the United States that had to leave the PGA to play in that live tournament. I don't know if it's live or LIV or those are Roman numerals. But it kind of reminded me of that and the idea that these major sports organizations are kind of up to the highest bidder basically at this point and I guess there's nothing wrong with that but it just, I don't know, it just made me question a little bit the motivations from the MLS. I know why Apple would want this to happen but it's like now people won't be able to see some of the matches and it kind of ruins that experience for those folks. But why won't they be able to see the matches? Well, the ones that get behind the Apple TV Plus. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, like they'll be limited in some way. There would be a lot of free ones but not all of them will be free. Some of them will be $5 a month. Unlike how sports viewing has gone up until this day. I was going to say, I don't think that's that much I don't know that that's that much different than what we get now where you have to pay a cable subscription that sometimes is a lot more in order to get just a limited number. This is you're paying $5 a month for Apple TV Plus which gives you all of Apple TV Plus and gives you access to the MLS stuff and they're not blacking out local broadcasts so it's possible you might get some local broadcasts available without even having to have Apple TV. I mean, I get what you're saying, Stephanie but I feel like compared to where we are now it's still probably an improvement. I wonder about how this plays out everywhere else around the world where soccer is way more popular and what type of access do Europeans and everybody else have to the games in general and will they be impacted? I don't know. Supposedly it's $5 a month wherever you live in the world if you can get Apple TV you can get it. No, I mean, what's their status now? How much access do they have to the games now? This is our league the US league, they probably have to pay a lot. They probably have to pay some specialty providers so I would think this would bring it down if they're even interested because they have better soccer over there anyway. Yeah, a friend of mine who is much more into soccer than me I asked him about this this morning and he was like this is amazing but this is also something that he doesn't have to discover because he already has an Apple TV he's familiar with Apple TV Plus you know, if you care about a sport enough to figure it out you're going to figure it out. You're going to figure it out. This is kind of similar to what the NFL did with Prime. Yeah, where they did the Thursday night games on Amazon Prime Video and now that's the only way you can get them is Amazon Prime Video. Yeah, I think one of the objections I'll expect to hear people say is like well I don't have an Apple device and it's worth pointing out if you don't already know this that the Apple TV app is available on the web it's on Roku, Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung, LG, Sony, Visio, Panasonic, Hisense, PlayStation, Xbox it's even available on cable boxes from Xfinity and Sky and Free and BTV so it's available if you want to install it and you've got one of those devices. Alright, US Food and Drug Administration has cleared a company called Rune Labs to offer software called Strive PD. This tracks the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. So it uses Apple's Movement Disorder API and an Apple Watch with the Apple Watch sensors to track things like Tremors which is one of the main symptoms of Parkinson's and it also lets patients add symptom reports and medication usage on their own. Strive PD is meant to let clinicians track a patient's progress and monitor changes. So this is through your doctor. This is not like an app you download and pay a subscription for. It provides a better look than patient recall and can be used to fine tune medications. It will also help enroll patients in clinical trials to develop new treatments and bring those to the market more quickly. Rune Labs is not the only company working on this sort of thing with the Apple Watch. The Verge notes a company called Cerebellia is also developing an app related to Parkinson's as well. But what Perk my ears about this it's a service going to the doctors that treat this to help them rather than a service trying to get you to pay $5 a month to maybe come up with useful data but then they'll leak out on the internet anyway. So they're not doing that last thing is what is what I'm pointing out. I think this is I think this is this is good. I think this is significant and it's interesting. Now this is super cool. I was just thinking that you know I hope there is a way or someone could figure out a way to get Apple Watches into the hands of folks in low income communities that have Parkinson's because I mean you know this is this is wonderful and there's already an app I believe there's already an app that does this for on the smartphone but if there was some way to do some sort of partnership to get more Apple Watches into more hands so that they could take advantage of the software that be great. Especially as these kinds of devices get used for more of these kinds of things and not even just the Apple Watch you can work for Fitbits and other devices from Samsung and others too to be able to say hey this is going to be able to help health in general let's make it available let's figure out how to get it into people's hands like you're saying I think that's great. Yeah sometimes it kind of becomes a conversation of like well yeah everybody with Parkinson's disease would love to have an Apple Watch but you know how many actually have them so yeah I I've got I have another friend story a friend of mine's mother has Parkinson's and I sent her this article this morning and I said just you know about this and she goes oh yeah yeah she's on the list so I think it's a I think this is somewhat slow going because the the Food and Drug Administration saying okay we're good with Strive but Strive then say okay we're good with you patient because you have all you have all the the symptoms that are necessary for this to work is is you know there's there's some moving parts here that's a really good point the news here is the FDA approval that doesn't mean magically it appears on everybody yeah right yeah well folks if you're feeling social get in touch with us the DTS audience is available or we are available to the DTS audience I should say on DTS show on twitter and DTS pics PIX on instagram well meta is introducing some new features for it's VR products VR enthusiasts listen up VR safety tools announced in March are now rolling out to the Oculus app at dashboard let's parents and guardians see a teens list of friends list of apps blocked apps on the on the account parents can also be headset time and get alerts when apps are purchased so more or less just making sure that they know what the teens are doing on VR teens can also request permission to buy age restricted apps so before we get to the other the other aspect here which is that horizon worlds thing I teased at the top of the show this this feels unremarkable is there anything of note here Stephanie I know you follow this space pretty closely like it it just feels like kind of minimum expected stuff for it is the bare minimum unfortunately but but when you hadn't done the bare minimum you know stepping up to that I guess feels like progress to folks it's funny the the part about the the parental controls have to be initiated through the teens account I think is still lagging behind what most of the other platforms do with the exception of Instagram they were mentioned in this article as well they just flipped it so that the parents can actually send a teen a request and say hey you have to you know you gotta let me get access to your phone to get these parental controls in place so we'll see if they do something similar to that for the Oculus but yeah I don't know why Meta wants to take these baby steps as it relates to how parents can parent their kids and their devices alright let's talk about the other go ahead Sarah sorry I was just gonna say it's probably because Oculus has become so popular especially with young people that the company was like huh we didn't really think about that we should probably make sure that teens are a little bit safer than they have been in the past they never do alright Meta's Horizon Worlds VR chat app is launching in the UK adding that Canada and the US and getting new options for voice chat right now voice chat is on by default that's not changing you might be like oh yeah they need to turn that off no it's still on by default when you enter Horizon Worlds but you're getting a new setting called voice mode over the next few weeks that will let you disable that so you can say I don't want to hear anybody talking to me unless they're my friend that I've approved I don't want to hear them or even I think more interesting you'll have an option called garble voices from strangers garble voices lets you know a person is talking by playing what Meta describes as unintelligible friendly sounds we can all do our version of that later and then if you want to hear what that person is saying you can raise a hand to your avatar's ear to temporarily hear them without having to add them as a friend and decide if you want to have a conversation I get when garble mode is on an icon will appear above your avatar of an ear crossed out to indicate that you're unable to hear people I assume that happens if you've disabled it altogether as well but I don't know well here's what and Stephanie I don't know how much VR you know you're doing on a daily basis I play a lot of VR exercise games not in horizon worlds but I know what it is and I know it's a way for people to meet friends all over the world just like any other place on the internet right it's just a VR version of that the unintelligible friendly sounds from somebody who might not actually be friendly towards me it's kind of it's an interesting choice it is I'm like what is that even you know the idea of it and even the idea that you would raise your hand to speak I feel like the realist in me I'm already thinking through ways to abuse this picture because you know you could have two people sort of tag teaming someone you know you raise the hand to listen to one thinking that they're going to say something you know normal when this other person now you know starts shouting and yelling and screaming at you that that was the thing I was like you know you should be able to do that individually if you're going to be able to do it at all you should be able to do it individually with the people that you're not friends with like it seems like if you have the garble on everybody you're not friends with as garbled so I think you should be able to kind of toggle that on without having to raise the hand just because there may be someone you want to speak to but there may be somebody you don't want to speak to in the same room at the same time and you're going to you know I could just see that going left very very quickly. Yeah I agree with you there should be an unmute setting for individuals in a particular chat room that you're like I don't want to go so far as to put them on my friends list permanently and every time I run into them but I've raised my hand I found out that you know they're not they're not crazy and they're saying interesting things but I don't have to keep my hand up to listen to them either so yeah it would be nice if there was a middle ground it's a it's a it's an interesting way to solve a problem of of because I assume if you turn it off entirely it's like you just don't know they're talking right you you wouldn't have any indication so this is a way to let you know like hey people are saying something to you you can decide if you want to take the risk of listening or not and that seems a lot of distracting to go ahead you're just hearing garbled but it's friendly there you go I mean a lot of this when I you know at first I was like what are they doing and then I was like you know this isn't unlike what social networks have been trying to solve for many many years is okay you know is somebody my friend great you know we talk back and forth maybe I don't want to add them as a friend but they can DM me maybe they can't do either of those things and that is just the VR world we're in now yeah I'm imagining it like simlish some kind of you know but very friendly yeah but very friendly I'm gonna have to try this out friendly garbling yeah you're gonna make my VR headset on later on just friendly garbling you know same now I have to see have to see how it works everybody send me we're gonna start unfriending each other just so we can hear garbling unintelligible stuff send it to me well something that you also might be interested in is a company called motos based out of Boston developing something called the paper laptop which has a black and white electronic paper display you might say what is that well it's like like a kindle the team says that great battery life less eye fatigue and better visibility and bright sunlight is it's cool because the majority of laptop users really are using their devices for things like emails spreadsheets word processing and other text-focused tasks not really you know rich stuff where a e-paper obviously excels and the battery life is really good too web browsing will obviously be different without a full color screen but motos has done work on an e-paper monitor that can achieve 60 frames per second refresh rates making scrolling web pages and full speed video playback very smooth this is still in the development phase but that video they showed of the prototype was pretty impressive to me if you're like they played video it they're like well we're working on dithering in grayscale right now so it doesn't look great but it worked like the refresh rate was enough that it actually worked and the other thing I thought was fancy about it is it could just scroll and do forms and pretty much all the things I used my chrome book for it could do and it's going to have like a month-long battery life because it's an e-ink screen I signed up for the survey I was like alright I want to find out more about this I'm into it I'd be curious what the specs of the laptop are going to be did they say that anywhere in there now because they're still just developing the display technology that's going to make a difference and it's like you know is this different than a reader with the keyboard addiction like could you just could you fashion this out of a Kindle like currently no because the refresh rate is abysmal on a Kindle that that's their secret sauce right okay well it could be a thing I was I was pleasant I was pleased to hear them talk about the idea of this being a way to distract you because grayscale in your phone is largely agreed as a way to not use your phone so much so I like that they put that in there because I think that's probably going to be an actual significant selling feature for this for this thing yeah yeah if you don't need to play video games you know this could be the thing well I think a lot of us myself included you know what I first read the story this morning I was like what no a laptop that doesn't have color but how many how many things do I really need that for sure rich video definitely so even though video is working on the modest laptop the paper laptop but most things most of my day-to-day things are you know task oriented work stuff yeah and I think that yeah especially if you're well I don't know who's doing a lot of traveling in these days but as as the world sort of comes back to life I think that you know this starts to be really attractive to folks who are you know on the go and yeah the battery life in particular is a big selling point all right let's check out the mail bag let's do it this one comes from josh josh says thought it was interesting he's talking about yesterday's show that rich mentioned that authors could put notation on each word so that an audiobook AI could read the words and then place emphasis where the author desired reminded me of any kid who's had to learn to chant from the Torah and the notations on each word that teach you the appropriate musical notes it's called trope a four thousand year old solution to a modern problem hey so sometimes the old ways are best right yeah nothing new under the sun that's great and then Bode host of the kilowatt podcast wrote in and said hey if you're interested in an affordable electric vehicle with solar panels we were talking about the big expensive one yesterday that's coming from who was it oh man I'm blanking on the name suddenly but yeah we were talking about the big expensive one that's coming that's like two hundred thousand euros Bode says how about the APTERA it's a two-seater three-wheeled vehicle with solar panels it's not quite an apples to apples comparison in some states it's classified as a motorcycle motorcycle the light year thank you Bode the light year zero is got a big price difference the base model of the APTERA starts at twenty five thousand nine hundred dollars for two hundred fifty miles the max out APTERA claims a range of a thousand miles and with all the options it would cost you fifty thousand seven hundred dollars which is still a quarter of the price of the light year zero production of the APTERA should begin soon if it hasn't already is there a top speed on that thing because that thing looks pretty cool yeah I mean it's a two-seater right so you're this is not high capacity but yeah it looks like like that you know it's least can get zero to sixty miles per hour in three and a half seconds so yeah that's decent well thank you to Bode thank you to Josh and thank you to everybody who writes in with questions comments feedback all the things feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to direct your email our way thank you in advance we love your feedback also thanks to Stephanie Humphrey for being with us today Stephanie where can people keep up with what you've been up to they can follow me all around the web at techlifestef you can check out my website at todethyoutweet.com and of course please listen and download the tech john at the tech johnjawn.com yeah if for no other reason to get Rob Dunwood's secret basketball name that's right he has a secret basketball name oh yeah yeah oh gosh I'm clearly behind on my episode no the tech john's awesome and so are you Stephanie thank you for being with us also thanks to our brand new boss whose name is Jason Jason has started backing us on Patreon thank you Jason Jason you're the best you could be the next Jason just back us at patreon.com slash dtns fanfare is yours tomorrow if you want it there's a longer version of the show called good day internet we roll right into it as we wrap up dtns available at patreon.com slash dtns just a reminder we do the show live Monday through Friday four p.m. eastern twenty hundred UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live join us live if you can we'd love to have you and we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow it's got Johnson joining us talk to you then this show is part of the broadband network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program