Coming up on DTNS, LG might stop making phones. Apple scores well on repairability. Do you want a shuffle button on Netflix? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 20th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And he's the show's producer, Roger Chang. I think his internet may have gone out, but he's here in spirit.  If you want to get our wider conversations like that become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS, let's start with a few tech things you should know. US cybersecurity firm Malware Byte said on Wednesday it was breached by the same group that attacked solar winds late last year, but that its intrusion isn't directly related to that solar winds attack. Malware Byte says that the attackers breached its internal systems by exploding a dormant email protection product for Office 365. The company learned of the intrusion from the Microsoft Security Response Center on December 15th, while Microsoft was auditing its Office 365 and Azure infrastructures for signs of malicious apps created by the solar winds hackers. Malware Byte says it's determined that the attacker only gained access to a limited subset of internal company emails. Media Tech announced some new chips, the Dimensity 1100 and 1200 mobile chip sets both built on the new six nanometer process, including sub six gigahertz 5G modems integrated right in, four high performance Cortex A78 cores, four low power A55 cores, these are for mid range phones. The 1200 promises 12.5% better neural and AI performance than the 1100 and supports camera modules up to 200 megapixels compared to 108 for the 1100. Media Tech expects the new system on chips to be available to manufacturers by the beginning of Q2. Alibaba founder Jack Ma has kept out of public view since he criticized the Chinese regulatory system in a speech on October 24th. A lot of people were like, where is he? Soon after the Chinese government forced a suspension of his ant financial IPO and began an antitrust investigation into Alibaba in January. Ma's reappearance came in an online ceremony for rural teachers organized by Ma's own charitable foundation. The event also featured video from January 10th of Ma listing a school in Wangzhou city. Yeah, I wasn't too worried about him, but it's good to see that he's out and about. It's nice to know it wasn't worse. President Trump has pardoned Anthony Lewandowski Tuesday for theft of trade secrets. Lewandowski had been sentenced for 18 months in prison and ordered to pay Google $179 million. Peter Thiel and Palmer Lucky were among those recommending the pardon in a press release the White House Press Secretary said Mr. Lewandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good. Facebook announced improvements to its AI driven automatic image captioning system which generated alt text for images to let the image be understood for users who can't see the image. Facebook says that the system now recognizes over 1200 items and concepts 10 times the amount when the system launched back in 2016. So it's on the up and up. Descriptions are also more detailed, available to recognize landmarks and the AI able to note the relative positions of the people and objects themselves. The new detailed description will first come to Facebook for testing with the expanded vocabulary coming to both Facebook and Instagram. All right, let's talk a little more about Netflix. Yesterday we mentioned Netflix had passed 200 million worldwide users. They had made a dollar or more per earnings just missing the analyst expectations. But the bigger news that we didn't get to yesterday is that Netflix believes it will reach break even in 2021. And so therefore has no plans to raise further debt. It's a big moment where you go into paying for yourself instead of constantly having to issue debt. As part of its earnings call Tuesday, Netflix announced it will make its shuffle button test a feature for all users worldwide. Netflix has been testing that button. We told you about it before. I think it came out back in August or so. It shows up underneath your profile icon. And for some people, it says play something. Other people, it's a shuffle play. But the icon is always a shuffle icon, the intertwining arrows. When you press that button, it uses the content personalization algorithm to pick something for you to watch and then just starts playing it. Could be something you're partway through, something that's on your watch list or just something that thinks you'll like based on other things you've watched. Netflix says the response from less than 1% of the users it tested it on was positive. So they're gonna give it to everybody else. Netflix has not settled on a name for it yet, but they say it'll arrive sometime in the first half of this year. This is, it seems like, sure, this is a feature that some people are gonna be like, oh, I love this. I discovered a new show today. Thanks, Netflix. You know, it's a big library. Other people kind of like me are like, I don't know.  It's a series, it's a movie.  If I get halfway through a show, I don't like want that to shuffle back to me later because I probably was, you know, fell asleep halfway through it in the first place. You know, there's all sorts of reasons where all a cart viewing I like to be totally in control of and something that's a little bit more along the lines of AT&T TV now, which I'm testing for live with it. YouTube TV, very similar, old fashioned cable subscriptions the same where you're kind of like, I like this channel. I'm just gonna see what's on and it's just kind of sort of play. Yeah, sort of like a radio station. But I don't know, Scott, is this something that you would want from Netflix or, you know, you could discover things that way? Well, Tom and I spoke about it a little bit on his segment this morning on the morning stream and I had been thinking about it ever since because I was trying to figure out whether or not this is a thing I would even touch or beyond one use ever go back to.  So here's a row of things we think you'll probably want to watch, which is a little bit like this, not quite the same. Not quite the same as hitting a button and saying just show me something. And then I thought about Google search engine, which is that whole surprise me thing. And I've used that maybe once since 1998. I just don't use that. I don't need that. It's not a thing I'm interested in. Wikipedia has something that will show you kind of random stuff. And I do use that occasionally because I want to be, I don't know, kind of surprised by something I could be educated about. But I feel like short form content is where this would be a beneficial thing by default, TikTok is doing this. That's the public feed. It's just giving you random things that you may or may not like and you may decide, oh, I'm going to follow this person. But for long form, half hour television show, 12 episodes season, or a two and a half hour movie. I don't think this is going to be for me. It doesn't strike me as a thing I'm going to use very often. And I don't know that it's going to be that smart anyway, because my queue and my usage of Netflix is a little bit jacked up because of things like film sack and other stuff. So I'm kind of with you, Sarah. I don't know where this would fit in my life. Yeah, maybe Netflix is sort of like, we're going to give you a for you button like TikTok. Everyone likes that. You can go to what you want to see specifically if you don't feel like, you know, just mindlessly scrolling. But if you do, then yeah, we might give you something that you like and you wouldn't find otherwise. Well, you'll never know until we get it, I guess. And then we'll try it. The European Commission find Valve and the game publishers Focus Home, Zenimax, Koch Media, Capcom and Bandai Namco it combined 7.8 million euros for geo blocking roughly 100 PC games, preventing them from being played outside certain EU countries and breaking the EU digital single market rules. Activision, the keys were blocked from being activated outside of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania from 2010 to 2015. Valve said it mostly ended the practice in 2015, but previously argued it didn't or shouldn't rather be liable for geo blocks requested by publishers. Valve was the only company, excuse me, was the only company deemed not to have cooperated with this. So while the other said fines reduced by 10 to 15%, Valve got the full fine of 1.6 million euros. Valve claims it did cooperate and will appeal to fine. Outside of that appeal system, this is the age old region locked argument that has been happening and gaming forever. And it's usually a console problem. Previous to the domination that Steam has over the PC games market, that's really where you saw it. So it'd be like people being upset that certain Nintendo games would only play in North America and not in Europe or other console games would be region locked or whatever. Most of that stuff is gone now.  It doesn't, and in my mind, shouldn't matter where you are in the world to play it. You should be able to just play it. Issues of like, where am I licensed to play certain kinds of music or things like that, not withstanding because those can be issues. I think Europe is right to enforce this. And I think Valve, if Valve didn't comply, Valve should definitely belly up the fine and also make this less of a problem because people don't like being region locked no matter where you are or what platform you're on. Well, the idea of the region locks for games back in 2010 to 2015 was, well, the economies are different in these different countries. So I can't price a game as expensive and expect to sell it well in the Czech Republic as I can in France. And so I don't want all my French customers to just go use the Czech Republic store because they can get it for cheaper. What Europe said is, we don't care. We're making it the rule in Europe that it's one price across Europe. And we're not gonna let you vary the price based on where you are. Man, Europe gets to decide that. So what Valve's arguing now is we were just following what the publishers said. It wasn't our job to enforce the rules. The publishers should have followed the rules and your right to find them but don't find us and that's what they'll appeal on is whether they can convince a judge that they shouldn't have been put in the role of enforcing the rules since they were just going by what the publishers told them to price their stuff at. Yeah, their argument is basically we're a store and if the publisher says put DRM on this, then we do that. Right, it's like consignment. It's like we're gonna use your store, we're gonna use your systems but we're gonna tell you what you should be charging or what you shouldn't be charging in certain areas and that's, I don't know, that's a sticky wicket dude. That'll be a weird thing. I'm actually kind of excited just to hear how this pans out legally because it has ramifications for lots of the industry, not just Valve or Steam. The Korea Herald reports that LG CEO Kwan Baksyak sent an internal memo to staff in which he wrote, quote, the company is considering all possible measures including sale, withdrawal and downsizing of the smartphone business. The memo indicated about 60% of employees would be reassigned to other parts of LG Electronics. LG Electronics, very successful in other places. A spokesperson told the Verge, quote, LG Electronics management is committed to making whatever decision is necessary to resolve its mobile business challenges in 2021. As of today, nothing has been finalized. LG's mobile phone business has posted losses of 5 trillion won over the last five years posting consecutive operating losses every quarter since Q2 of 2015, a lot of losses. In December, the company announced it would outsource its low-end phones to third-party manufacturers. Sounds like that trend may continue with some of its more premium phones. Yeah, this is a little sad to see in some ways. LG has a long history of this. It's not like the LG brand would likely disappear if they do shut it all down. They'll license it. They already, like you said, already licensed the low end, so they'll license the rest of it. But it does feel like LG has been the only one really innovating in form factors. Samsung and Huawei did foldable, but LG has done the velvet and they've done the swivel and now they've got the rollable that's supposed to come out this year. Rollable, I guess, ends up being their Hail Mary pass if this is what their attitude is, but nothing they've done. None of that innovation has really been able to steal any market share back from Samsung, Huawei, Apple, Apple, Vivo, et cetera. A weird bit is these guys just had me all excited last Wednesday about their cool rollable phone. And I was on the show that day and I thought, I'm looking at a magic device, man. This is going to be the future. Look at that thing. It's like rolling in and rolling out. You don't even know what's happening now.  Oh, no, it's coming out. LG has said it's coming out. So don't. Well, it feels last gaspy, right? Cause you're not going to want to support. Well, I shouldn't say this. Someone will, but you're not going to want to go, oh, you know where I'm going to buy my next phone? That company that's not going to make phones anymore after this. That's like the company's going away. There's still be there. Just saying. I'm glad they're doing well with TVs and dryers and washers and stuff. That's kind of how I feel too, Scott. It's like, sure, part of a little liquor for LG, you know, potentially, but yeah, they also make that OLED TV that's slightly above my price point, but I'm looking at it. I have an LG TV. I have an LG clothes, clothing, washer, I do not have an LG phone. So there you go. Yeah, yeah. Folks joining the conversation in our Discord, what LG products do you not own? You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTMS. I fix its final tear down of the AirPods Max revealed that the headband is designed in a way that could make it user removable. And in fact, it is user removable, But it could be used for customizable headbands. So if you remove the magnetic ear cups, the ear cups are meant to be removed so that you can replace them if they get worn out. Underneath the ear cups, there is one of those tiny holes like you have on your phone to remove the SIM card, except in this case, when you stick the SIM card removal tool or just a paper clip in that little tiny hole, it detaches the headband. And when you pull it out, it reveals a tiny lightning-like connector. It's got the little, you know, the flat pins like you have on the Apple's lightning connector. 9to5Mac also discovered that iOS devices can see a headband type identifier even in the current iOS 14.4 Beta 2. So they haven't taken that out, indicating that this is certainly something Apple at least at some point planned and maybe they still plan for. iFixit gave the AirPod Max a six out of 10 for serviceability, which may not sound that great, but compared to other Apple products like the Air Pods, which have a zero. Zero. Six out of 10s, doing pretty well for Apple because they usually don't care about this stuff. Oh yeah, I mean, this is perfect for iFixit, right? It's like, look what you found. You can change your headband on your really expensive, you know, $500 plus. $550 headphone. Right? So when I first saw this, I was like, okay, let me wrap my head around what Apple might be doing here. Would Apple really be wanting people to kind of like get into that SIM card territory? I mean, I've been buying my phone unlocked for years, but in the past I've definitely swapped out SIM cards. I mean, I know how to do it.  And now I'm going to break this really expensive device that I'm trying to fix here. I don't know that Apple would want anyone to be doing this, but I guess it's not really for the average consumer because the average consumer is just going to be like, I like my headphones. These are the ones that I wear, but I don't know if you're exercising versus hanging out watching a movie, you know, in a nice warm room, chilling, that kind of thing or colors matter to you. I mean, the fact that it's a SIM card thing, like you say, which takes a little effort means it's not meant to be swapped out a lot. This is like, I've decided I don't want the gray headband anymore. I want one that's colored like the Horde in World of Warcraft. Yeah, it's a little less of a, like I was trying to figure the watch as a comparison. They want to push all these bands, everything from, you know, cheap little rubber ones to the really expensive crazy ones. And that seems like an Apple thing to do, you know, from a fashion standpoint to say, look, these headphones have got all this extendability, but they haven't touted that or even talked about it. So what it sounds like to me is, I mean, to me, the math works out. They didn't announce anything. They may or may not intend to do anything with it. And it's kind of tricky to take care of. The six out of 10 kind of tells us that. So it seems like- Well, the six out of 10 is about like actually opening the thing up and servicing it. It's not necessarily related to the headband issue. Sure, sure, but in general, my feeling coming away from it was not quite ready for prime time in terms of this interchangeability of headbands. This is definitely created for easy changing of headbands, though. This is created for a consumer level changing of headbands. This isn't a like, you have to take it in. But don't you think they'd say Apple might market that way and say, well, we're making it easy for our staff, but they made it so that anybody could do it at home without having any special tools, right? All you need is a paperclip. But without announcing it, which you could just do with like, they don't have any to show yet or they don't have third parties making them yet or something like that. But having them not say anything is a little weird. It could just be pandemic where they're like, you know what, factories right now, we're having a hard enough time getting the parts out of them that we need. Let's not make the alternate headbands quite yet. Let's hold off on that. Well, bunny ears are no deal. All right, moving on to Nvidia. Nvidia Shield TV, in fact. Roger and I both have one of these. I have one of the original ones. And the Shield TV Pro users can now pair PS5 DualSense or Xbox Series X controllers to Shield TV version 8.22 or 0.2. That means that you can pair them with your Bluetooth settings and then use them for Android or GeForce Now games. Nvidia also added control for home automation support so you can use your control for remote or app to navigate the Shield TV UI. I haven't done this yet. I do have an Xbox Series X controller. I'm gonna try it. I don't have a PS5 controller. But this makes sense to me that they would not only support these but that we'd see this start happening not just with them but others. I know Steam's working on native support for PS5 controllers in Steam as part of that suite. Already you can do this with a Series X controller. So this is kind of normal for new consoles to have their controllers start making it to other devices especially those that just straight up support Bluetooth. In the case of the Series X that thing's got both a proprietary Microsoft connectivity protocol that's supposed to be lower latency and some other stuff beyond Bluetooth but also Bluetooth so you can use it on a Bluetooth device like a PC or whatever. So none of this is hugely surprising but nice to see Nvidia continuing to support these devices. Did Roger make it back with this? I was gonna ask if he tried it. No, no, he's not here but when I was talking to him earlier one of the things he was pointing out with his Shield is that they've done really good backwards compatibility. They support these machines for a long time. I think he got his back in, I don't know, 2015. And he's still getting updates. It's still supported. And that's cool. The idea that you could be playing a PC game through GeForce Now on your five, six year old Android device and use the latest Xbox Series X or PS5 DualSense controller to do it. I think that's one of the reasons this has got a little extra buzz around it than just kind of a mind, otherwise you would think of it just as a minor software update. It's also, it's a strong argument for an alternative to you running out and getting Stadia or anything else, especially with this something you've already got because a lot of people are grabbing these controllers for various reasons. Their phones can use them now for heaven's sake. So there's a lot of reason to have an extra controller around pair that with something like GeForce Now which is doing quite well for a lot of gamers. A lot of people really like that service. And you've got a pretty good competitor in the streaming games ecosystem that just kind of came together for them, especially if they've got an install base so people already have shields.  These are not the cheapest devices on the market. But they're also multi-use in lots of other ways. It's still the best looking Netflix playback I get outside of actually the new Series X is the only thing that's beaten it so far. But for a long time, the best looking Netflix output I could get was out of that shield. And I got mine in 2015, like incredibly resilient devices, these things. And I think it's cool that they continue to support them. So good on them. Roger, we already, I already mentioned what you were saying previously about backwards compatibility and how long they support this. And I'm glad to have you back with the internet connection. Yes, the internet gods have smiled upon me. I just wanted to make a quick note that for a device that was released at the spring of 2015, beginning of summer around there. And DVD has done a really good job of making sure that even the initial runs of the product are not orphans. They've updated the firmware, the software and they've increased the capability of the device. And it's just really impressive. You don't really see that a lot these days. And frankly, it's a shame, but I think Kudos to Nvidia for really keeping that product going. Yeah, it's a heck of a thing. I recommend it to anybody who's like, hey, I'm thinking about doing something a little bit different with my setup down there and getting a different kind of set top box. And I'm usually very quick to say, look at that thing when you're comparing it to your Apple TVs and your Roku solutions and the sort of other stuff you may pay a little bit more, but not much. And in the case of current pairing to Apple, you may pay less. And you're gonna get some really great playback options, really good support. And now this, like I don't know how you can go wrong. It's a really nice device. Well, in the EV charging world Israeli company StoreDot has made a battery for electric vehicles that can be charged in five minutes. Depends on the vehicle, of course, the lithium ion sample batteries were produced by StoreDot's strategic partner in China, Eve Energy, and used with success and a two-wheeled scooter. Might be a little different for a larger car, but also some other things to consider. Existing plug-in infrastructure will work against rapid charging rollout because they don't just have your rapid rollout even if it's possible. Battery degradation from fast charging, also an issue. Still, StoreDot is feeling good about this, aiming for a 2025 rollout if it can find strategic partners for mass production. So, I mean, the fact that they've only done it in a scooter might raise an eyebrow. Like, wow, could they really do this for a car battery? But it's more of a big deal to me that the infrastructure would need to adapt. If they've proven that this can work, I imagine making it work in a car probably is not going to be the big hurdle.  But, man, forget all that rational stuff that I just said. The idea of being able to pull in with my electric car and spend as much time or less as I would filling a tank with gas to charge all the way up, that very attractive. And think of what a gas station would look like if it was a charging station. You could fit a lot more cars in there. No, plus it's a game changer. Like, that changes a lot about what it's like to have an electric car right now. As a, you know, again, we're making a bit of a leap to how this would scale and everything. But if you could really promise that consistently, that means a lot of existing gas stations and those who own big conglomerate gas station chains all over the country would consider refitting their gas stations to include some charging stations because they don't have cars parked for a half an hour to an hour to charge their cars. They've got people coming in for a quick fill-up and get out. That's advantageous to them. Like, this could change the whole thing and everybody, you know, accelerate the acceptance of these cars in general. I'm all for it. I mean, I like the idea of a gas station in a world where they don't need to provide gas anymore. Let's pretend we've gone that far and that you can fill up in five minutes. It'll just be a parking lot. And each space in the parking lot would have a five-minute charger.  Cool ranch. Yeah, cool ranch Doritos and you're on your way. I mean, gas stations would love that. If the profit margins they could get from the charging were such that they were making the same as they would with gas, but then they didn't have to deal with all the inspections and the environmental concerns and the safety concerns and the insurance and they'd have more space in their parking lot because they don't have to have lanes for people to pull up and fill up. They just, every space is a parking space that someone can use to run in and buy something from their convenience store. Now stores that aren't even gas stations could suddenly do this and be like, oh yeah, come on over to Target. Best buy, whatever. That's a really good point. Here I was thinking, oh, gas stations may convert. A lot of places could become this. Yeah, yeah. You know? I'm in. All right, let's check out, if I may, ask Sarah to check out the mail bag. Yes, let's all check it out together. It'll be fun. Rob wrote in to me, this is from last week, but he said, the other day you were talking about the different earbud apps and mentioned that you used the app for your job or Elite 65T. Rob says, I have the same ones. It took me accidentally reading the manual one day for me to learn that double clicking on the right earbud toggles ambient mode on and off. I had been talking about how that mode of kind of do, if you're walking around by yourself late at night or in an unfamiliar place, like I don't actually want it to be super noise canceling when it's just me. So he says, in addition to doing that when it's dark outside, I leave the left earbud in its case and then I listen in mono, only the right ear, but it'll do mono. Once I learned those two tricks, I uninstalled the app from my phone. That's interesting that only the right earbud does mono, that you have to pick the left earbud to put in the case. Yeah, the right earbud is sort of, it's the Bluetooth connector and then the left earbud connects to the right. So you kind of, there's a bit of an order involved. Rob, I have not tried your method. I'm really glad that you told me about it though. That's extremely helpful. I do think that's a setting in the app itself. The Jabra app is, I don't know, there's a lot of stuff going on in there. So not having the app installed on your phone, maybe you have your reasons for that, I don't know. I actually like the app. I like playing around in the settings occasionally, but yeah, it's always good to have a tip or two, a little life hack from the... Tap, that's pretty convenient. From the other, yeah, wireless earbud community. So thank you. Also thanks to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Bjorn Andre, Scott Hepburn and Dale McCallhee. Mulkayhee. Mulkayhee. Like father Mulkayhee from Mesh, right? One day I'll get it, see, and Thomas said this to me before, like, didn't you ever watch Mesh? I'm like, no, I was too young. Also- Thanks for all the KitKats, Dale. Mulkayhee. Shoot. Dale, you know I love you. Everybody who sends us feedback, questions, comments, anything, cat photos, always appreciated. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also thanks to Mulkayhee. Mulkayhee, it's a great name. Thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, what's been going on in your world? Well, aside from my boring, easy to pronounce name, lots of stuff actually.  Do you wanna wake up to something fun and goofy in the morning? I do a morning show. It's mostly comedy and fun.  It's called The Morning Stream. You can find it at frogpants.com slash TMS or wherever you get your podcasts, just go search for it. And find me on Twitter. I'm at Scott Johnson. 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