 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, and Brad. Coming up on DTNS, one man's quest to make an unhackable voting machine and our tips to help him along the way. Plus, why teens think their social media use is just fine, and another company tries to improve on the browser. Good luck. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 17th, 2022 in Los Angeles. The Capital of Entertainment. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, the capital of absolutely nothing. I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, the capital of live music. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. I almost said live music right along with you. It's like, yeah, that's what it is. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Blizzard's partnership with NetEase has expired, so it will have to suspend parts of its catalog in China. That means that after January 23rd, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch 2, Starcraft, Heroes of the Storm, Diablo 3, and Warcraft 3 Reforged will no longer be available in China. Blizzard said it will offer guidance to Chinese gamers in the coming days. Diablo Immortal is part of a separate agreement, so that one will continue. But China frequently requires foreign companies to partner with domestic companies to meet requirements on data storage and content policy. I bet they'll come up with another partner, but yeah, it's tricky. We'll see. France's data protection agency CNIL announced that it had fined Discord. Yeah, Discord, the place that we're streaming in right now. 800,000 euros on November 10th, quote, for failing to comply with several obligations of the GDPR. In particular, with regard to the data retention periods and security of personal data. Now, it's good news and bad news. The five breaches included not having a written data retention policy, incomplete information on data retention, failure to protect data by default, that was related to when you close the application and you're connected to voice, insufficient secure password requirements, they originally only required six characters, and failure to do data protection assessments. The good news is Discord has now addressed all of those breaches to CNIL's satisfaction. Qualcomm announced its new Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 chip meant for augmented reality glasses. The chip is designed to work with one co-processor in each arm on a pair of glasses and a third above the bridge. The chip is optimized to be faster at things like object recognition, hand tracking, also uses half the power of the XR2 meant for VR headsets. It also supports eye tracking and iris recognition and compare with a phone's chip for graphics processing. More than a dozen companies were listed as partners developing devices using this chip. Microsoft and Adobe among them are working to make compatible software. Qualcomm also announced a sub-brand of Snapdragon to identify its CPU as Qualcomm Orion, Orion with a Y. Well, I guess that part wasn't unexpected. Yeah. But yeah, Orion. Orion? No, no, it's Orion, but it looks like Orion. NVIDIA is still investigating why some NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU users reported overheating and melting plastic in some cases. While we wait for NVIDIA's official word though, the good folks over at Gamers Nexus think they might have figured out what's going on. They were able to reliably replicate smoke and melting plastic when the power cable was not fully inserted, and especially if it was bent to one side. So not all the way seated and also bent kind of jacking it open a little bit. This could affect any cable or adapter using the 12 VHPWR connector. A better design could certainly make it easier to be sure the cable is fully seated. So there might be something NVIDIA could do, but until there's a fix, you should make sure, if you have one of these, that you can pull on the cable firmly without it coming out. Once you've put it in there, just give it a little tug, make sure it won't come out, and then avoid trying to bend it too far to one side, which I know as big as that thing is. It's easier said than done. Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has opened up its app tracking protection for Android for beta testers, not unlike Apple's app tracking transparency for iOS devices. So if an Android user enables the service in the DuckDuckGo app, the app installs a local VPN service on their phone, then they can start automatically blocking trackers on DuckDuckGo's public block list. The company says this happens without sending app data to DuckDuckGo or other remote servers. It's an ad tracking transparency for Android, voluntarily. I like it. And that is a look at the quick hits. Well, earlier this year, the White House in the U.S. announced plans to combat potential harm that teenagers may face when using social media. So, you know, under 18, type thing. On that front, here are some new details around how teens are actually using social platforms. This is according to a Pew Research Center study survey of 1,316 U.S. teens in the U.S. aged 13 to 17. It was conducted between April 14th and May 4th of this year with a cooperation of their parents. And there's some interesting findings here. 80% of those polled teens said that they felt at least a little bit more connected to what's going on in their friends' lives using social media. 71%, they felt at least a little like they have a place to show their creative side. And 67% said they felt at least a little like they have support in tough times. That all sounds good, right, Justin? Oh, indeed. 32% said that they thought sites had mostly a positive impact on them. 59% said it was neither negative or positive. And only 9% said it was mostly negative. But when it comes to peers, we get a different story. 32% said that they thought the sites had a mostly negative impact on other people their age. And only 32% said the effect was mostly positive on other people their age. So, yeah, me, I'm fine. It's that person. They're so affected by the ground. They must not be having a good time. They also looked at the political landscape as we move post-U.S. midterms and into Justin's favorite time of the quadrennial, the 2024 presidential election. Teens, apparently, don't care. They're not using social media for politics. 90% of those polled in this Pew study said they had not encouraged others to take action on political or social issues. 93% said they had not used a hashtag related to a political or social cause. Even if this is off by a few percentage, that's a pretty big percentage of the folks in the survey. Justin, what's going on with the young people? Where do they go to talk about this, or if not social media? Is it a bar? Yeah, sure. In certain neighborhoods, I'm positive. But I hope that these teens have watched the adults in their lives embarrassed themselves so thoroughly on social media when it comes to politics, that it is something that is discouraged amongst that cohort. The world and certainly our country will be better if that is the case. But ultimately, I think there are a few things at play, and I don't think that any of them really affect technology or social media here. We believe, we being the collective, we internally that we have the ability and the tools to take advantage of these technological gifts that we are given. We look at our neighbor and say, well, they might not, though, they are falling apart. They are sad, and I don't like the way that they look. Ultimately, I think this is just society. The best and the worst thing about social media is that it's filled with people. Yeah. I had kind of the same sentiment. When I was looking at these numbers, I was like, all right, well, it's been a while since I was a teenager. But none of this seems unfamiliar to me as an adult in her 40s. It's like, yeah, I don't think social media is good for some things. I don't want to spend too much time on it. But boy, are some of my friends just really off the rails on social media. It sounds like exactly what teenagers say. And I'll point out that when it comes to political stuff, teenagers can't vote. Doesn't mean that they can't rally and affect change. And I certainly wouldn't want any young person to think otherwise. But there's a little bit of that going on, too. Yeah. This study uncomfortably aligns with a lot of things I suspected already. That we overestimate how many people are involved in politics because we hear about it all the time. That teens are probably not nearly as worried about their social media use as their parents are. And so whenever I see something aligned with my viewpoints that closely, I dig in and go, okay, what kind of confirmation bias am I dealing with here? And you have to remember that when you look at the survey, it's self-reported. So people are generally going to be less likely to say they are a victim of something or that something is bad. And the parents were involved. And so when the parents are involved, the teens are even less likely to be like, well, maybe they're not looking over my shoulder, but they're involved. So I don't want them to find out that I said I was bullied or that I think- I'm doing fine. It's my friends. Exactly. So you have to take that into account. That said, the 90%, it's such a big number. I think that might be significant. But all of this is pointing towards further study. The Verge has an article up about the ARC browser from a company called the Browser Company of New York. ARC is the latest in a long tradition of browsers that thinks it can take over many of the functions of the operating system, going all the way back to Netscape Constellation in the 90s. Similar to Sigma OS for a more modern example, Sigma OS takes a productivity approach to browsing. Yeah, so ARC puts tabs and bookmarks in a sidebar. So as a user, you can pin tabs or folders of tabs. You can rename tabs. ARC will also automatically close all your unpinned tabs every 12 hours. But you can also set that to maybe every 24 hours or every 30 days or just turn that off completely if you don't care. Close tabs are always available in a searchable page as well. You can also have multiple spaces. I think this will appeal to some of you, each with a different set of pin tabs, and each space can be logged into as a different user. So if you're sharing a computer with somebody, this might be nice. For example, you could have two Gmail accounts persistently logged into as different accounts in each space. Oh man, I would use that for Patreon. I have to have like a different browser for every Patreon I run because they're all different accounts. It also does something cool with media control. So if you're listening to a Spotify playlist, for instance, and you move to another tab, play, pause, and skip controls show up in the sidebar. So you don't have to search around for them or say you're in a Google meeting. It'll put your mic controls in the sidebar so you can mute yourself. A few other things of interest here. It gives you access to downloads and screenshots in the sidebar. So you don't have to go looking around other places. It has a notes function and an easel function. So you can take some notes or do some whiteboard drawings without having to leave ARC. And a feature called Boosts lets you apply cascading style sheets to a site you're looking at. So, you know, you have to be into doing a little bit of coding, but you could temporarily change how it looks or works. David Pierce changed Twitter to not show the trending topics on his version of ARC. ARC is available for Mac OS to focus on a waitlist with Windows and a mobile version due next year. But here's the question. We have Vivaldi, we have Opera, we have Edge, we have Brave. Most people are still using Chrome though. Justin, do we need a new browser? To quote the great philosopher stone called Steve Austin. Oh, hell yeah, we do. Absolutely. If there's one thing that we spend the most time in, it is browsers. And we've spent so much time trying to think about websites and apps specifically as the mobile revolution happened that we really are probably about a decade out from the last time there was a big push in competition to reformat what the browser is, what the experience is and should be. So, I don't know if this is for me. There's a lot of stuff that seems really cool. I'm very excited to test driving it because some of the features there I think are just dead, simple improvements. But without a doubt, keep doing this. This is the innovation I want. And if it's good, to be totally honest, I'd be willing to pay which is why I suspect we haven't seen a lot of innovations that there's been a lot of other elements of our technology world that are a quicker payday. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because on my computer upstairs, not the one that I'm using now because I'm on Chrome on this machine, but I use Firefox as my dominant browser and I've got some backups if something's kind of wonky, depending on if I'm trying to access some sort of strange site. But Firefox has been really weird with me on my M1 MacBook Air. Don't know why. Uninstalled, reinstalled, it's still wonky. Activity monitor shows that it's just hogging way too much data. Very annoying. But I've got Chrome as my backup. There's also Safari and there's also lots of other options. I just feel like for the most part, all I really care about is what browser is not hogging all the data on my machine so that I can do the things I need to do on a day-to-day basis because as we've discussed on a recent show, I've got a lot of tabs open, doing a lot of things at once. Even if I close other programs, it's like most of my stuff is browser-based. So something that the Arc is doing, they sound like cool features and maybe if your workflow, depending on what you do for work, maybe it's like, you know what, this is exactly what I've always been waiting for that I didn't have before and I am excited to try the browser. I'm down to try a new browser all the time. I usually end up going back to the ones I know though. That's what everybody does. That's why we haven't had a new browser eat in a Chrome. And Willie Scott was asking in the chat, is this chromium-based? Yep, it's another chromium-based one. I think the tab management might help with the reliability because it can keep down the number of tabs, the way it manages them for you. So there's some interesting things there. I sort of like it in its productivity orientation there and kind of treating tabs and apps equally in a metaphor. I'd like to try that. I haven't been led into the debate yet, but I hope to get there. But yeah, if this is the one that proves that, you know, hey, we finally cracked it. This is the thing people were looking at for a browser. Then in the words of the great Ric Flair, I will say, woo! Yeah, you know, let's reimagine the browser. There's no reason not to. We're all used to things the way that they have been, but it doesn't mean they can't be reimagined. Yeah, yeah. Well, folks, if you're a patron, you do not want to miss our column from Roger this week. You got to go over there and read it. It's written. You use your eyes in your browser to do it. He explores the downside of being an individual seller online, including his own real-life experience. You can read that. You don't want to miss it. Patreon.com slash DTMS. Earlier this month, Technology Review republished a story from Undark called, This Scientist is Trying to Create an Accessible Unhackable Voting Machine. Here's some deets. It's about University of Florida Computer Science Professor Juan Gilbert. Gilbert has been developing a voting system called Prime 3 for 19 years. He believes it's the most secure voting technology ever created. But first, let's give you a little bit more background. Why do we need machines at all? Why not just do paper ballots marked by humans? Justin, wouldn't that be the easiest way to make sure that things don't get strange in software land? Well, Sarah, I'm glad you asked. The reason is not every person with the right to vote can mark a paper ballot. Maybe they can't see. Maybe they don't have enough motor control to fill a small circle. And there are plenty of other possibilities that make these machines necessary. In the 2002 Help America Vote Act, it required U.S. polling sites to have at least one voting machine for voters with disabilities. This often takes the form of a ballot marking device or a BMD. While BMD designs vary, they generally have a touchscreen that prints out a paper ballot that can be fed into a scanner. This makes voting more accessible for those with physical disabilities and has the added side advantage of making it easy to do things like offering instructions in multiple languages, larger fonts, etc. The danger, of course, is that this software on the ballot marking devices can be manipulated. And since ballots are anonymous, it's difficult, if not impossible, to protect anonymity and also let somebody prove that their ballot and only their ballot was improperly marked. So, back to Professor Gilbert's system. The Prime 3 prototype that he's been showing off in videos, it's not the only implementation of the Prime 3 system, but the Prime 3 prototype uses a transparent touchscreen on the face of a translucent glass box. Translucent is redundant there. It's a glass box. You can see inside. You can see what's going on. A voter selects a candidate and the candidate name is printed on the paper inside the box right in front of the voter where they can see it. The voter is then asked to verify that the printed name is correct by touching the screen above where the name is. So they're forced to look at it as they press the confirmation button. The voting cannot continue until the voter has touched the screen above the candidate's name. Now, if it's the wrong name, you call a poll worker, you have a bigger problem. But most of the time you just proceed on to the next vote. The voter can also write in a candidate. There's an on-screen keyboard. You can choose not to vote for a candidate just and then that'll print out and you confirm it. The system can also be used with a headset and a microphone or a paddle system. So that takes care of making sure the voter can anonymously verify their votes are recorded on the paper ballot correctly because they're in the voting booth alone doing it. But what if they want to change the software to take away the verification part, right? They're malicious. They want to get in there. They're going to hack it so that verification goes away. Or maybe they want to change the list of the candidates. So it looks like you're voting for somebody, but you're really voting for somebody else. Yeah. If you're having the same question at home, the software is open source. So it's easy to review for security vulnerabilities. The machine is also, as Tom mentioned, encased in glass. So it makes it difficult to access the computer or the printer's ports. Each machine's OS and ballot information are burned on a read-only Blu-ray disk. So even if you get into the box, even if you plug in a USB stick, you can't alter the OS or candidate list, at least not easily. And just to be safe, the machine reboots after each voter's done casting their ballot. Going back to zero. Any software that might have been added to memory would then essentially be wiped out. Or that's the idea. Yeah. So if you've got a Blu-ray in there, you'd have to replace the Blu-ray. You can't alter the Blu-ray. And if you're rebooting, everything in RAM gets kicked out. So those are pretty solid. Now, of course, there's also a version of Prime 3 for blind voters that's been tried out in New Hampshire. It uses a QR code to verify identity and walks the voter through voting options with voice prompts, and then reviews their selections before printing them. It doesn't have the security of the visual confirmation. Butler County, Ohio, where Professor Gilbert grew up, uses the Prime 3 software for overseas and military voters. And it is certified for use in California. It has not, however, been taken up for wide use. And so, to grease those wheels, Professor Gilbert appealed to the hackers. To the hackers! Last spring, Professor Gilbert issued an open invitation for folks to hack that translucent box. He specifically emailed Princeton computer scientist Andrew Apple, who has argued publicly that machines are fundamentally insecure for voting and their use should be strictly limited. Professor Apple famously installed malicious software on a voting machine in seven minutes using just a lockpick and a screwdriver. This was in a court appearance in 2009. Apple says that the machine for Professor Gilbert's a pretty good attempt. It's well designed. It looks pretty secure. He's been fairly complimentary. He's come up with a couple scenarios that he think might be weaknesses, but he says it needs more vetting. Gilbert also invited Harry Herstie, who co-organizes the voting machine hacking village at DEF CON. Herstie says that Gilbert's machine is welcome at next year's DEF CON as long as he follows the policies, you know, like requiring hackers not sign NDAs and stuff like that. Bring it on over. Yeah, but the biggest hurdle might be the voting machine industry itself. Three major vendors dominate the U.S. voting market. Election systems and software. Dominion voting systems and heart inter-civic. There are a fixed number of jurisdictions that need machines who have contracts with one or more of these companies already. So you're just saying, oh, here's a better solution, not that easy. Once machines are in, governments aren't likely to want to replace them for, let's say, 10 years, maybe more. Yeah, so I am unclear on the security procedures for the blind voting where you're not using the glass box in the paper ballot. There's a QR code that's used in order to certify you are who you say you are, which is, you know, sort of an ID situation. But I didn't find good descriptions of the cryptography. I'm not saying that those descriptions don't exist. I just didn't see that part of it. So I'm a little more skeptical of that. The glass box for in-person voting, when you can see, looks pretty good. So I'm hoping Professor Gilbert takes it to DEF CON. I don't see why he shouldn't. I'm very excited for that to happen. I do believe that there should be a more open and honest competition with this kind of software, because if we have spent a lot of time in this country talking about the value and belief that people put into the American democratic system that in our modern age, if we're going to be this concerned about teens using TikTok, we should also be talking about the hardware that we use to process our democracy. And there is a healthy skepticism that we should be putting into this. That being said, blanket statement. People have been subverting elections and cheating them since democracy was invented in ancient Greece. We were subverting elections before we had technology. All that being said, I think this is a good attempt. I'm excited to see it go forward. And I will be thrilled to go see it in action at DEF CON should the professor bring it there. Well, let's go to the far west region of England called New K, where spaceport Cornwall has been granted a license by the Civil Aviation Authority or CAA to launch satellites into space. This includes a repurposed Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 aircraft named Cosmic Girl. Okay, cute. Equipped with the Launcher One rocket designed to propel 19, sorry, not 19, nine satellites into orbit. 19 would be nice, but let's start with nine. When clearance and weather permit, the plane will take off from the spaceport and hit 35,000 feet, that's 10,700 meters, over the Atlantic Ocean. Virgin orbit, which is behind the launch, can now carry out mission-ready tasks. But if you're excited, there is some stuff yet to happen. More licenses are needed before the specific mission can go forward. Spaceport Cornwall's Melissa Thorpe said in a statement, the CAA continues to work on several license applications, including being in very advanced stages with Virgin orbit on its applications for launch and range licenses, as well as the satellite operators ahead of a proposed first UK launch. Well, first of all, I have two things to say. First of all, this is great. I want more spaceports in various parts of the world. So I love the idea that we could go out to St. Ives and on the way stop at the spaceport and watch a launch. So I hope this ends up. I hope we get one in New Mexico and I hope we get one in all kinds of places around the world. My second thing I wanted to say is, man, I can't decide if I want to make a joke about pole dark or the fact that Prince William owns most of Cornwall because he's the Duke of Cornwall. I'm undecided. Well, decide. Yeah. I mean, Tom, now's the time. I don't feel encouraged. We're not here for our health. Let's check out the mailbag instead. All right. This one comes in from Eric, who says, I recently listened to a podcast, not ours, a different podcast, about how to make friends as adults. Eric says, it totally changed how I view social interactions, emphasizing the importance of doing an activity together to make social connections. They told a story of a retiree in Australia creating a program called the men's shed. Every week they got a group of guys together to help fix up a motorcycle or go bowling or have a cookout. The activity gave them a reason to be there and the conversation would flow naturally. Eric says, there are many other examples of social groups that have a core activity, the online game World of Warcraft, another example. As you progress through the game, you come across challenges that are too difficult to complete by yourself, forcing you to team up with other players to complete them. I'm trying to find this to the metaverse, says Eric. I've not yet tried it, but it seems like there's a lot of sitting around talking, but not a lot of activities to do while talking. I believe having common activities to do together could be the missing ingredient. Mini golf. Mini golf. Mini golf. Mini golf. Supernatural. It's the best. Like, I mean, this is, I wouldn't do it if I wasn't on a leaderboard with a bunch of other people being like, hmm, I do like get 500 more people on like just slightly ahead of her. Honestly, the first so-called metaverse provider that gives you a compelling reason, maybe it's bringing Supernatural in, maybe it's a great mini golf course. I don't know something like that. That's the one that takes off. The thing that's like, oh, people meet me here in this virtual world to do this thing together. Yeah, absolutely. Good, real good point, Eric. Honestly, especially our recent conversations about Gastadon and me trying to figure out who my community is there and engage with the right people and follow the right people, it's like, there is a lot to say about that underlying, well, we all care about this thing, you know, in Eric's description, like, maybe bowling. You know, maybe I like love bowling. Well, I love bowling, but I'm terrible at it. Let's say bowling was really important to me. That might be a really fun way for me to meet people and then learn a lot more about them. Well, the reason Justin's yelling mini golf is because he and Brian Brushwood and Heaton and myself during the lockdowns were meeting in mini golf and VR, you know? You guys aren't doing that anymore? Well, no, we're not. Well, now a lot of us live in the same town. So three of the four of us moved. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not because we loved mini golf so much. It was that it was a fun enough thing and it gave us something to do. He gets you in and then, yeah, you're hanging with your friends. Well, thank you, Eric. And thanks to everybody who sends us feedback like this. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Keep them going. It always makes us smarter. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young always making us smarter when he's with us. Justin, what is new with you? Well, I am doing the politics, politics, politics program as we exit through the midterms. We begin with the 2024 race, which already has one declared entrant. I don't know if you've heard of them, but you can get all the breakdown on his announcement on Friday's episode. You can hear our numbers guy, Evan Scrimshaw, go over some of the results, things that surprised them, things that didn't. But by the way, he was more correct. The guy that we had on week after week after week on PX3, especially in the final few weeks, more accurate than 538, more accurate than the crystal ball outlets. So there's a reason. There's a reason you want to stick with us on PX3. And you can begin the journey to 2024 right now if you are a sicko like me. Well, thanks for being a sicko. You're our sicko. Our favorite. Yeah, you really are. We also want to thank our brand new boss, Jeff. Jeff just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Jeff. It's really nice to have you. Indeed, Jeff. You're saving our bacon there. Be more like Jeff. That's what I've always said, at patreon.com. Speaking of patrons, do stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet, which we roll right into after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, we do the show live. You can catch it live Monday through Friday. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with an interview about accessibility and video gaming and talking home theater gift guides with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta with us as well. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.