 Coming up on DTNS, Evernote's former CEO helps liven up your video conference, Thunderbolt 4 could double your 4K monitors, and as we work from home and become our own IT manager, Seth Rosenblatt helps us keep all that work and personal data separate and secure. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 8th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lean. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. As I mentioned, joining us from the parallax, Seth Rosenblatt back on the show. Welcome back, Seth. Hi, everyone. I'm here in sunny San Francisco. Ah, it's good to have you. It's sunny. It's sunny in San Francisco. It's a suspicious sign. Well, or a sign of the apocalypse. Yeah, one of the two. We were just talking about our favorite pizza and pizza chains on Good Day Internet. If you want to get that wider conversation, become a member, patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung announced its Galaxy Unpacked event will take place on August 5th at 10 a.m. eastern time. Samsung is expected to announce the new note phones and a follow-up to the Galaxy Fold and Galaxy Flip. ARM announced it plans to spin off its two LOT businesses to SoftBank, which bought ARM back in 2016. ARM will instead focus on its efforts on the semiconductor IP business, pending additional review from the company's board plus standard regulatory reviews. ARM says it expects the shift to be complete before the end of September, which is pretty quick. The company will keep its business on the compute IP aspect of the LOT. IOT. Internet of things. I say L, sorry, Internet of Things. I knew that. Korea's ET News reports Samsung may not include chargers with its smartphones starting in 2021. Many people already have compatible chargers and the move might reduce some costs. It would also reduce waste as some unused chargers get thrown away and put Samsung in the same boat as Apple, which may do the same thing. LinkedIn added a new feature to user profiles that lets you record a 10-second audio clip of how to pronounce your own name. Actually, it would come in handy. You're making connections. You want to be polite. Recordings can be added through the Android and iOS apps and played back on mobile and desktop. Popular game streamer Tyler Ninja Blevins, mostly known as Ninja, who notably left Twitch for Microsoft's Mixer service before Mixer abruptly shut things down, but still paid out his contract. To fold into Facebook gaming, he streamed a Fortnite session on YouTube Wednesday, kind of his first big return, along with fellow streamer Dr. Lupo, Tim the Tapman, and Courage, 100,000 people watched that stream. This is Ninja's next, sorry, first ever stream on YouTube, although no potentially exclusive contracts were announced at this time. A job listing from Twitter indicates the company's building some kind of subscription platform. The job listing says, quote, we are a new team codenamed Griffin. We are building a subscription platform, one that can be used by other teams in the future. This is a first for Twitter. Job listing does not suggest what kind of subscription service this might be. I really want to know. Oh boy, do I want to know. Reuters reports that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice are investigating allegations that TikTok had not fulfilled a February 2019 agreement to protect user privacy. Specifically in that agreement, TikTok promised to delete videos and personal information about users age 13 and younger, among other promises. TikTok says it accommodates users younger than 13 in a limited app experience with additional safety and privacy protections. And Microsoft announced several new features for its Teams product. Together Mode, for instance, puts participants on a shared background. The idea is to try to make you feel like you're in the same room. Dynamic View gives moderators more control over how shared content is displayed, like you can put Pat from accounting in their spreadsheet in front of everyone. And Teams is also getting reaction emojis, poll questions, photo and video filters, and more. All right, let's talk about a new way to video conference. Well, you're not going to believe me, but the name is Mm-hmm. It's a new virtual camera that can be used with Zoom, Google Meet, YouTube, and other video streaming services announced its private beta Tuesday. This is headed by Phil Lipin, or Lipin rather, co-founder and former CEO of Evernote. Remember Evernote, get your whole elephant there, remembers everything. Goes beyond similar services that lets participants change their backgrounds, but also manipulate deck slides and zoom in and zoom out of a participant's image itself to control the focus of the frame, not unlike a more traditional newscast, if you will. Mm-hmm, also allows interactive presentations. It says it includes recorded video slides that can be advanced by the audience and overall be played and paused. Mm-hmm, is invite only for right now. It's on macOS Catalina with mobile and Windows versions expected in the coming months. Now, the name may be ridiculous, but what I saw in that video looked really cool and very promising. No, it's it. And I don't want to laugh because that's the name of the company. And it is a palindrome, so I will give it that. Yeah, four M's, one on two on each side of the H. That's right. And, you know, and Phil Lipin, he, you know, kind of made fun of the fact that he's like, it's a silly name. We know it. You can say it when you're chewing food and without having to open your mouth. So it's like, you know, they're just having some fun with it. It's probably something about the fact that there aren't a lot of names for things anymore. But this aside, this is very cool. And it's not that, I mean, listen, we, we have experimented with a variety of meeting style software for this show. I've definitely done group zoom calls and some others for, you know, maybe family and friends related stuff, but nothing that really, you know, struck me as, oh, I could do like a fun YouTube creative show using these tools based on what I've seen that seem pretty easy. Not that you can't do this in other ways, but it either requires post-production or more kind of clunky measures. So it's invite only. I asked for an invite. I'm on the list. Who knows when I'll ever get it. But, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. Dear Phil Lipin, we will all use it on an episode of Daily Tech News Show. Yeah, Phil. Come on. Get us to the front of the back. Well, not only that, I was thinking about this from the creative perspective of like somebody who's trying to do live streams on Twitch all the time. I control all of those aspects. If this tool is simple enough to use, it changes the game for how I can do that stuff in real time. But I have questions about platform. Will this be a virtual camera? I can use in any software like OBS, like Streamlabs, something like that. Like there are a few, few little dangly things that I want to hear more about. Yeah, they, I mean, they made a point of this isn't video conference software itself. It's stuff you use to put your image into zoom and Google Meet and YouTube, which does sound like a virtual camera, but also I've used those kinds of things before and they are buggy as all get out. So I'm very curious. Snap camera. I'd be using snap camera right now. Oh yeah. If it didn't, you know, poop the bed every time I tried to do it on top of some other service. I'd be a rabbit. You know, I'd have rainbow eyes or something. I don't know. So are they, are they just looking for free beta user? Yeah, you know, for free beta feedback right now. And even when it comes out in the autumn, it's going to be a freemium model, I think. Yeah. Well, mm-mm. Mm-mm. That's not yet ready. We have some more people saying civil rights experts Laura Murphy and Megan Casase released an 89 page report on their independent audit of Facebook's practices and policies. Facebook asked them to do it, but Facebook didn't have anything in the making of the report. The audit notes quote, this report outlines a number of positive and consequential steps that the company has taken. But at this point in history, the auditors are concerned that those gains could be obscured by the vexing and heartbreaking decisions Facebook has made that represent significant setbacks for civil rights. So they're saying Facebook did a lot of good stuff. And then the decisions they've made most recently regarding particularly certain posts, including posts from the president, that disappoint the auditors. Also, at the same time as this report came out, leaders of the groups that are promoting an ad boycott of Facebook met with Mark Zuckerberg and called the meeting a disappointment. Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of Free Press said the group's quote, didn't hear anything today to convince us that Zuckerberg and his colleagues are taking action. And this group very particularly has said, we want Facebook to do more. So again, kind of echoing what's in the report. Maybe what they've done up until earlier this year was fine, but we need them to do more. And Facebook doesn't seem to want to do that. One hope people might have is that the independent oversight board that Facebook is setting up might help with this because that oversight board can take appeals from users about moderation decisions. But that oversight board announced today that it will not be ready until late fall, likely putting it after the US presidential election. So it's not going to be around to affect this for a while. So really what's going on here is Facebook's digging in, it sounds like to me, and saying, we have done what we're going to do and we're not willing to take this any farther at the moment. Yeah, the takeaway for me was not whether or not they should or shouldn't or whatever the political stance of any of the parties are. But the statement here seems to be, hey, we're cool for now. We're not going to move in too many directions. We're going to kind of be Facebook. The way we want to be Facebook is this for right now, and you're not going to come in here and tell us any different. And I guess I'm not totally surprised by that. They probably don't want to swing too far in any direction at this point. Well, every company is going to reach a line where they say, well, now we would be interfering. Now we think we would be doing more harm than good. And this is where Facebook thinks its line is. Well, I mean, what we've seen over the years is that whether we're talking about Facebook or Twitter or any other social media service, that they don't make changes unless there is like a howitzer pointed at their head. And I'm not particularly hopeful that the changes that Facebook does feel compelled to make at the end of whatever gun is being pointed at them are compelling because what we've seen is they take these after-the-fact actions, right? They only started doing the most gentle of reviews of posts after the 2016 election. They were doing a little bit before, but it really wasn't until after, and everyone was very upset with them for how they dealt with things that were posted on Facebook or ads that were bought on Facebook. We're still fighting with Facebook over ads. Even when Twitter has said, actually, you guys are right, we're going to make some changes. So I'm wondering if one of the things that may be more impactful is some kind of regulation that says that social media companies must make user data portable. So instead of saying people are locked in and we're going to regulate how you deal with people and consumers internally on your networks, you just have to make it so that consumers can take their data elsewhere. You don't like Facebook, you can go to... I can't remember, Webby or whatever the... one of these new social media startups are, just so that they have a little bit of a leg up, right? So that you can say, hey, I took my data, my friends are all going to take their data too, and we're all going to be here with things that we've posted in the past. Yeah, I don't know if it even would take regulation. We're seeing Facebook move toward transparency, so continued pressure might get them there. What I would really like to see, regulation or not, however we get there, is the ability for something like MIT's Solid to catch on and say, your data will always be yours, no matter where you are, and you can decide who has access to it and who doesn't, and change those permissions as you go along. Well, something that might be good news a little bit more across the board is that Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 865 plus chips. Plus versions of Snapdragon are usually higher clocked versions often targeted at gaming. The 65 plus is 10% faster with a 3.1 gigahertz CPU and a GPU around 660 megahertz. The plus also adds Fast Connect 6900, which brings peak speeds of up to 3.6 gigabyte, gigabits per second, and Wi-Fi 6E's expanded spectrum, making it work better in crowded areas. And that's actually a really big deal depending on where you are. Lenovo and Asus will release products using the Snapdragon 865 plus and Asus will unveil the Asus ROG Phone 3 using this new chip on July 22nd. Yeah, so I mean, this is, if you're into gaming on mobile and having more powerful gaming as gaming gets better and better, these plus releases of Snapdragon are always good news. The previous plus round brought a lot of game focused stuff and this one's no exception. That Wi-Fi 6E stuff though, we'll have an episode explaining Wi-Fi 6 and 6E coming up next week on Know a Little More, and that really will do a lot in areas where, like a stadium where they provide free Wi-Fi and you got a lot of people using a lot of data at once in a small area. 6E's gonna be great for that. Yeah, well, especially the VR and advancements we're making in portability and size and speed and graphics capability. VR is gonna benefit a lot from... Yeah, that's true too. Yeah. Nine to five Mac reports, references in the code for iOS 11 beta 2 in a function... 14. What did I say? 14. iOS 14, yeah. Oh, that's weird. iOS 14 beta 2. A lot of numbers. Two, a function to let iPhone users scan a QR code to make payments with Apple Pay. The feature doesn't work with an image. Doesn't work, but an image gave instructions on how to use it. QR codes could be used to generate, or could be generated by the wallet app itself. The feature is in the public system API implying it will work with third-party apps. So get ready to do it like the rest of the world been doing it for a while. Yeah, right. Oh, man. It's funny. We were talking before the show. There were a lot of breathless like, look what this hidden new functionality. And iOS 14 is gonna offer people just because it wasn't part of the stage keynote from WWTC. But it's not, well, first of all, I think it's a great idea. It's not super surprising because I am an enthusiastic user of Apple Pay at a select few places that take it. It, you know, there's sort of a point of sale thing to deal with. I notably, where I used to live, had a grocery store that was just like the best in every way possible, but they only took Samsung Pay and it was just like the bane of my existence. And, you know, there is, there's a little bit of like, especially not wanting to touch things as much as possible. And I've really thought about this in not just grocery stores, but just anywhere lately is like just, you know, being able to scan something with your own device, you know, you're there, you're wearing your mask, you're not punching in a pin number or otherwise touching something just adds a little bit more security that I think is the timing is very right and it's crazy that this hasn't happened. Like, I know friends of mine who run small businesses in San Francisco and they have storefronts and whatever, where they have to interact with people on a regular basis are very, very anxious about dealing with cash. Even though there is a problem where, you know, you can't ban cash because there are certain people who only have cash, the vast majority of people who do have smartphones should be able to use them and why Apple and Google and Samsung aren't pushing as hard as they can to get, you know, device compatibility and cross compatibility into stores. ASAP is just utterly mind boggling. This is such an incredible moment for them and it feels like you're watching the ball just sort of like roll down the gutter. And the QR codes would be a way to expand accessibility for Apple Pay, right, because a merchant wouldn't have to get new equipment that works with NFC without all the equipment. It's a lot easier to set up a QR code, which is why it's the predominant way to pay for things in large parts of Asia. WeChat in China uses the QR code system. In fact, there are places and I think it was on the Philius Club where they were saying not using QR codes to pay for things seems insecure to a lot of people at a lot of parts of the world. Or just a very clunky way to do something when there's already a solution. So what we've seen if I can hang on this for one more second is that it's often credit card companies that have been the blockers to tech adoption in the U.S. or at least in North America where they're reluctant to go for chip and pin cards, they're reluctant to go for to have to pay with those cards, even though Europe and Asia by and large have had these services for ages. I haven't done any reporting into this recently, but I'd be very curious to see if we are seeing blocks from MasterCard and Visa and other major payment companies. Yeah, that's a fair question. I'm curious as well. And last, as the USB 4 standard is about to launch with most of the advantages of Thunderbolt 3 inside, Intel released specs for Thunderbolt 4 which adds things that USB 4 won't have. It is the same speed as both Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4 at 40 Gbps but it can run Thunderbolt 4 can. 2 4K displays supports PCIe data speeds up to 32 Gbps that's twice Thunderbolt 3 and you can have a cable that's up to 2 meters long and docks and monitors with up to 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports. That's up from 2 that you could do with Thunderbolt 3 on your docks. Thunderbolt 4 will use the USB-C connector still and support USB 4 at least one port on a computer support charging and wake from sleep by keyboard and mouse when a computer is connected to a Thunderbolt dock. Thunderbolt 4 also requires a protection against direct memory attacks something that was optional in Thunderbolt 3 and now it's required if you want to call it Thunderbolt 4 and the controllers, which is where Intel makes its money will ship to manufacturers later this year along with 11th gen Tiger Lake processors. Yay! Yay, right? That's kind of it. I can afford to get a machine that can have a pricey Thunderbolt 4 controller at it. I want it! The funny thing is the only advantage for me and I'm using Thunderbolt 3 a lot for a lot more stuff than I thought I was going to would be the extra display but right now I don't think I need an extra 4K display so obviously somebody needs this but weirdly I'm kind of happy to hear that the 40 Gbps speed is still the same and I'm still okay. I'm not completely obsolete for the next two years. I think a lot of people are going to look at this and Apple, moving to ARM will also just move to USB 4 because even though Thunderbolt 4 has some advantages they're not huge advantages and it's certainly cheaper to just use open standard of USB 4 than it is to pay Intel to license Thunderbolt 4. Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about 5 minutes be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com Alright, more people working from home more people have a mix of work and personal data sloshing around on their devices and their networks because of that and that's something you need to keep an eye on. Seth, how can we keep our work and our home data separate and secure? Well, if you've got enough scratch and you don't mind the effort create an entirely separate network get entirely new devices and you know don't mix your your home milk with your work meat. Keep it kosher but that's not really feasible for just about anybody so barring that you know this is something that I've encountered a lot of different takes on from cybersecurity experts as with most things involving COVID people are figuring out what the new paradigm is in real time so things that people were advising early in March probably have shifted a little bit as we've settled into this constant work from home situation I think one thing that a lot of people working from home really need to think about is how old their home Wi-Fi router is Wi-Fi routers are terrible I wrote a story back in 2019 on new research then showing that Wi-Fi router security had actually decreased from the early aughts to the late teens that's not good and yet we do now have Wi-Fi routers that will have patches updated automatically a lot like your phone or your computer does and that's really important but get a new Wi-Fi router absolutely make sure you're using two factor authentication on all of your services make sure that when you're using it that unless there's no other option than the SMS texted code for your two factor use an authenticator app or ideally a UB key or Titan key something like that use a password manager I use one password I use UB key and Authy as my authenticator app these are all things that we've been hearing for years and good IT departments from employers will be mandating but it's really more critical now than ever you know especially as people are working from home and are looking at data that they're generating for their employer you know as you know potentially mission critical data for their careers so you need to be really careful about how you deal with things a VPN is good but not the only thing that you need yeah I think a lot of times the argument with VPN is a little bit like the argument with masks it does protect you but it could also give you a false sense of security you need to do other things along with it right you need to wash your hands and use a password manager and socially distance yeah definitely distance your data what about you mentioned the router like if I just bought a new router yesterday I'm probably in good shape right whether I need a new router or not yeah I mean for one thing if your router one of the challenges with routers is that they're pretty simple boxes they're not terribly expensive to make their commodity items and they last forever right most wifi routers will last a very very long time and just because you bought it even yesterday doesn't mean it was made this year it could have been sitting on shelves three years for five years and so there's extra due diligence that people need to do consumers need to do before buying a new router there's no question there so making sure that the router has been made recently that it has that it supports automatic updates that you will get patches that the patches are made in the first place and there's talk in the cybersecurity cybersecurity community about making something like an energy star rating some sort of like basic minimum standard of security that can be you know stuck onto things that you know that you're going to be getting patches on a regular basis that you're going to be getting security updates for X period of time and that will sort of help consumers I think if and when this thing actually happens figure out what the lifetime of these devices really should be but right now you've got to really be cautious when you're buying stuff check when it was made check reviews and it's a lot of burden on the consumer which is unfortunate and I feel like this is a place where Enterprise IT can step in and start making recommendations as somebody who I don't know I had a Lynxus router that worked until finally I had a Comcast you know connection that the Lynx router simply couldn't deal with so I was like okay I'm going to get a new router because I want you know my throughput to be as good as possible but you know I didn't really think about any of that stuff because I was like I used to have it it's fine it works you plug it in and you're good to go I wasn't really at the time doing work from home so it mattered less but the security issue was still the same I mean I actually think that more and more people should be asking their employer's IT department for advice on these things see what they recommend and if they don't have a recommendation you know get some of your buddies that work together and have people you know in on a group email saying you know we're not coming back to the office anytime soon we need guidance on this you know and depending on whom you work for maybe you know if they're providing you with a phone or a laptop they should also be providing you with a wifi router certainly they should be providing you with enterprise level password manager support two factor authentication keys these are not expensive things for businesses and they will go such a long way to protecting corporate data yeah and even if they don't have the budget to replace all the routers helping you assess whether that router is safe to use or not is important yeah absolutely well one thing we'll provide you with is some pretty great discussion in our discord which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns let's check out the mailbag oh let's do it we got so many good mailbags and thanks in advance to everybody who sent in cat photos and also a lot of dog photos because I asked you and you're great gary rodin said your conversation with kirsten brazier yesterday reminded me of some frustrations of my old job until about three years ago I did technical support for an unspecified company that manufactured secure console servers I work with folks from utilities military organizations city state and national governments financial institutions pharmaceutical companies etc they'd all call us about how some new cve had just been issued had to be fixed right now unfortunately given the highly customized firmware in our products upgrading to a new version of ssh usually took around six months of engineering work luckily for us at the time none of our competitors were any better at dealing with security issues most were worse then there were the folks running ancient vms systems or something from the same era that we're trying to meet modern security requirements so we no longer have products that communicate via x.25 lat token ring nor do we know of anybody who does I begged and pleaded with upper management and engineering to make our current and future to patch until the day I retired and it was frustrating Gary thank you for sharing your pain we totally get it it's good stuff yeah and unfortunately his experience is stuff that I hear all the time all the time from people who are either security experts or working in security engineering it's a real real challenge you know well yeah you know especially when someone's broken we're you know we have to work and you're like well that it can't happen tomorrow it's already hard like I was just thinking about how hard this already is to get done before in the before times in the before pandemic times imagine trying to have this stuff get done now like there's no it feels like the urgency gets pulled out of the sale a little bit that's also a bummer but yeah I feel for him this reminds me the old offices I used to working in giving me flashbacks well if we're in the aftertimes we still have patrons at our master and grand master levels and they're great including at Dandorado Hankins John Johnston and Chris Smith hey thanks so much to Seth Rosenblatt for being with us today Seth it's so great to have you back let folks know where they can keep up with your work thank you yes you can follow me on twitter at SethR and the parallax which is the cyber security and privacy news site which I founded four and a half years ago now yeah it's crazy we struggle it's independent journalism but you can follow us at the parallax that's P-A-R-A-L-L-A-X it's a great word learn it love it and thank you for having me on absolutely also thanks to Scott Johnston you've been a pretty busy man so let folks know where they can find out what the latest is well there's a lot going on and there's always stuff to be seen at frogpants.com but I would recommend right now to check out support.currentgeek.com Tom Merritt and I are putting together some of the best work we've ever done in a really cool kind of long form curated audio format that we're really really excited about I can't wait for people to hear this thing we tackle really cool subjects have you ever wondered where the word manna came from or mana we learned we have to call it from now on and why it's so prominent in today's video games and board games and things but back in the day not so much it came from a very weird place we discuss all of that we talk about theremins we talk about wrestling we talk about all sorts of 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