 Coming up on DTNS, a throat sensor to help you spot when you're sick, how the Apple Watch served as a backstop to a full ECG, and the Donkey Kong record leads to a libel suit. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 4th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Roger Chang from LA County. And I'm producing the show today. I'm Amos. Hey, Senator Landis off today. But thank you, Amos, for stepping in and helping out. We were just talking about the history of the word glom as well as Roger's secret trip into Disneyland as a child. Get that wider conversation. Join Good Day Internet by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. In a regulatory fire, Uber disclosed its Uber Eats service is pulling out of markets in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Honduras, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay and Ukraine by June 4th, as well as transferring service in the United Arab Emirates to its subsidiary Kareem that's spelled C-A-R-E-E-M in the coming weeks. An Uber spokesperson said this is part of Uber's previously announced strategy to only operate Uber Eats in markets where it can hold first or second place in market share. Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay announced Monday that Windows 10X will be for single screen devices. He said Microsoft and its device making partners will look for the right moment, quote unquote, to bring dual screen devices to market. Apple and Google announced that health agencies will need to sign some legal addendums if they want to get access to the company's exposure notification system. The agencies must agree to use the apps only for the COVID-19 pandemic, minimize data collection to that needed to make it work, collect user consent at multiple stages for the little information it does connect, and never ask to use location services. HP announced the Omen 27i monitor, the company's first gaming monitor to use an in-plane switching panel instead of a twisted pneumatic. It ships today from $500 at Best Buy. The Omen 27i has 1440p using LG's Nano IPS panel and has HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.0 ports plus two USB-A connections and a headphone jack all there in the monitor. HP also announced the Omen 25L and Omen 30L gaming desktops. They have some improved venting and airflow. You get the option of an Intel Core i9 10900K or an AMD Ryzen 93900 chip. There's also Wi-Fi 6, Nvidia GeForce GTX or RTX graphics up to 2080 Ti and maxes of 64 gigs of RAM, two terabytes of solid state drive. The 25L Omen starts at $900 and the 30L starts at $1,200, both of them shipping on May 5th. Intel confirmed it's acquiring Movit, spelled M-O-O-V-I-T in a deal valued at $900 million. Movit provides traffic data to third parties beyond Intel, such as Uber and 7500 different transit authorities. Intel confirms to TechCrunch that Movit's existing services will continue but that Intel plans to expand the services it offers via Mobile i, which Intel acquired back in 2017. And on April 30th, F-Secure disclosed two major vulnerabilities in the SALT open source framework used to manage servers. The two exploits combined could be used to bypass login procedures and let attackers run code on SALT master servers. Saturday night, attackers used those two exploits to access the core infrastructure of Lineage OS, an Android based operating system for mobile devices and set-top boxes. The Lineage OS teams said the source code and the builds of OS were not affected and that signing keys, the things that are used to authenticate the OS distribution is the right one, were stored separately from the Lineage OS main infrastructure and therefore also unaffected. The servers were taken down Saturday to be patched. All right, let's talk a little bit more about a high profile Amazon quit, I would say retirement, but I think he just quit. Amazon Web Services Vice President and distinguished engineer Tim Bray, fairly well-known out in engineering circles, announced that May 1st was his final day with Amazon, saying he quote, quit in dismay. Bray said that Amazon's firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19 was quote, evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. Amazon says the workers were fired for misconduct unrelated to their protests. Bray himself has signed a letter calling for climate action by Amazon in the past and was arrested for protesting the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Canada, but he said he began complaints about treatment of employees for being a whistleblower going through the internal system and did not get satisfaction and therefore he said he just couldn't do it anymore. My immediate takeaway from this is this whole controversy with Amazon, their warehouse workers, especially in the middle of the pandemic, is not going to go away. It's not something that is going to go away soon or go away quietly. Yeah, I mean whether you agree with Tim Bray or not is a separate question, but the fact that someone of his stature, he's been with Amazon for six years, he's well known as I said, is deciding to, in the middle of a pandemic, get rid of his job, I think is significant. It means that this is like you say, Roger, a problem that's not going to go away for Amazon. It's going to shine a little more light on it. It's still possible that Amazon did fire these employees because of misconduct. Just because you are also a whistleblower doesn't mean that you have carte blanche to do whatever you want. It's also quite possible and certainly has lots of precedent in corporate history that conduct that might have been forgiven or being a slap on the wrist in the past becomes a firing offense when you're also not liked and you might not be liked because of your stance on the way employees are being treated and no company likes to have the way they're treating employees criticized, certainly not when a bright spotlight is shining on you in the middle of one of the logistically most challenging times in world history. I have a feeling that one of the beneficiaries of this will probably be an increased adoption of warehouse automation where, just like, hey, you have fewer people working these jobs, less likely you're going to have something people are going to complain about. Yeah, I mean, I think that's going to happen anyway. I think you're right. Just because for social distancing purposes, any kind of automation will help. But that's going to worsen your labor problem. If you put in more automation, you're going to have more people upset that their jobs might be threatened by automation. So you're going to have to do something else to make workers feel safe and having one of your distinguished engineers quit is not going to help you with that. So I think we're going to have to see Amazon do even more to reach out to workers. And I think you're going to see the last of people getting fired for being a whistleblower because I don't know that Amazon, I mean, I shouldn't say that. Maybe they will. But I don't think they want to deal with that kind of look after this high profile resignation. An article in the European Heart Journal describes how a heart condition in an 80 year old woman was caught by looking at evidence collected by an Apple Watch. So the woman came to a hospital in Mainz, Germany, complaining of chest pain, irregular heart rhythm and lightheadedness. I don't know the particulars of this, but I can imagine she might come in and say, my chest hurts, my heart's pounding, I'm a little lightheaded. Doc, what's wrong? Am I okay? And they put her on a 12 channel multi-lead electrocardiogram, which would be a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and they find no evidence of a cause. So then, you know, your mind might leap to like, ah, the doctors are missing something, but probably what the doctors are thinking is, well, what is causing this? Let's try to figure this out. The woman decided to show them her Apple Watch, which the new Apple Watch, when you touch the crown and launch the ECG, can do a single lead ECG. This is not meant as a replacement for the multi-point ECG. The 12-point multi-point is much more accurate, but it doesn't make it perfect. And occasionally, those Venn diagrams overlap. And in this case, the readings from the ECG of the Apple Watch showed some evidence of a what is called a myocardial ischemia. So the woman was transferred to a lab for treatment. They were able to put a stent in and alleviate the problem that they otherwise might have found in another way, but found much quicker because they had more data to go on. I mean, that's one of the great spin-off benefits of fitness trackers, or not fitness trackers, but, you know, health tracking apps like that are, it's not just, you know, when you get hooked up to EKG, I mean, they have you or ECG, not EKG. They have that data from the time they hook you up until they unplug you. When you have your watch, you have it for days, if not weeks, at a time. I mean, there's a there's a mountain of data that is collected that you wouldn't necessarily get in, say, like a 30-minute doctor's visit. Yeah. And it's not like the ECG on your Apple Watch is running constantly, right? But the fact that they had it available as a double check also doesn't prove that the Apple Watch is better than a 12-point ECG. But it does say that, hey, this extra collection of health data means we have more data to go on. And yes, in almost all cases, the full ECG will be better than the Apple Watch. And the Apple Watch ECG may point out things that are mistaken that a 12-point ECG will say aren't right. But in this case, and this is a journal article. So the doctors looked at this and said, no, it wasn't a false positive on the Apple Watch. It was a false negative on the 12-point. And so, hey, when you're doing this, you have to look at more than one factor. And in fact, you know, the backstory to this is they didn't just look at the 12-point ECG or the Apple Watch. They were looking at other factors like what the person's heart rate was, what her medical history was, what her self-reported symptoms were. That's how they caught it. It wasn't a magic bullet, right? It's definitely more data points the better. Yeah. Scientists at Northwestern University and the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab have developed a small sensor that looks like a bandaid that can be placed on the throat. So right in that little depression where you would do a tracheotomy, that's where they put it. Because when you're there, it can monitor your breathing, your pulse, a lot of things. And in this case, they were monitoring for signs of COVID-19. The team modified the sensor, developed for monitoring speech and swallowing in stroke patients. But they said, okay, let's take the same data I can collect for that. And let's look for signs of somebody having coronavirus. A high band with tri-access accelerometer measures movement on the surface of the skin. So it measures your breathing. It measures any coughing. It measures your heart rate. It measures your temperature. And once a day, it's not broadcasting, you place it on a wireless charger where it also syncs its stored data with a tablet. So that makes it easy to keep sanitized. You don't have to be broadcasting from your throat. It doesn't have any ports or anything. It's just wireless transmission. And the data is then uploaded to a HIPAA compliant cloud server, or an algorithm looks for particular patterns. Now, there's a little bit of machine learning going on here in that algorithm, but that's not the key. The key is it narrows down to say, okay, we think we might have found something. And then a human who is trained to do this, a trained medical professional, looks over what the sensor reports and decides, hey, yeah, no, that really is probably COVID-19 or not. And if it finds a match, the data is then forwarded to medical providers. 25 test subjects have been wearing the device for about two weeks. I think it's super cool because it's one of those things that is developed. I mean, it's often at times of great need that a lot of these innovations come around, right, because people, there's an overwhelming necessity. What's interesting is like, before they tried the Xolorama, they were thinking about putting a microphone on it to do the measuring. It's like, well, no, you're going to get all sorts of ambient noise, people talking stuff. Let's just figure out where the tissue is moving. In this case, your skin with an accelerometer, and we'll measure it that way. And it's pretty brilliant because oftentimes when you think of this, how do you listen to it? Well, you don't necessarily need to quote, unquote, listen. You just need to verify what's happening, and you can measure that through a tissue movement. Well, and this is great preventative maintenance, preventative measures for high-risk populations, people in healthcare. I could see them putting this on nurses and doctors, people in nursing homes, people who are just elderly, people working in grocery stores, with high exposure to the public, as a way to say, okay, yes, we still need comprehensive tracing or testing, but what if we also had a way to indicate like you might want to do a test right now because it kind of looks like you have this before you're particularly symptomatic. Now, I guess you have to be symptomatic for this to work, but a lot of times asymptomatic can mean you don't show symptoms, and that's not going to help with that. But asymptomatic can sometimes mean like, well, I didn't have a strong cough, I didn't have a high fever, and this may be able to catch some of those earlier cases, just as they're making that transition from being asymptomatic to symptomatic. And the earlier you catch this, the better, right, the fewer people you're exposed to. And like with the previous story, the more data points that you have to present a picture, the better. All right, the big news today, Apple dropped a 13-inch MacBook Pro, which now includes the Magic Keyboard. The pricing starts at $1,299. That'll get you a quad-core 8th Gen Intel i5, 256 gigabytes of storage, 8 gigs of RAM, the touch bar, a physical escape key, 500 nits displays, that's nice and bright, supports the P3 color gamut, and two Thunderbolt 3 ports that are also USB-C. You can also upgrade that, get the 10th Gen Intel processors from some faster RAM models with four of the Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports. But the big significant part is that now, with the MacBook Air and the 16-inch MacBook Pro, also having the butterfly keyboards, or I'm sorry, the scissor switch keyboards, Apple no longer sells devices with butterfly keyboard switches. So that five-six-year experiment is now finally over. It's not an experiment, Tom. They've just slowly moved from one product development to another. From one great product to development to an even better one. Yeah, exactly, that there was nothing wrong with the previous design or engineering. It just outlived its usefulness and they've developed something better. It is unusual, and of course Apple's not going to come out and say like, no, no, we were wrong, but it is unusual to see Apple do an about face like this. They generally ride the technology they believe in until, like you say, something significantly better has come along. They're trying to make it sound like the scissor switch version is the best of both worlds. My theory, though, about this is occasionally Apple's design impulses override its usability impulses. And this is an example of that. They wanted to get those keys to be as flush with the surface as possible. They wanted to eliminate that problem where keys were imprinting on the monitor. They just wanted to make this look as if it were one simple surface without a break, but still feel like a real keyboard. And I think in their mind, they achieved that with the butterfly keyboard because it did have more depth than a flat touchscreen, but most people didn't like it. This is the history of Macintosh's. The first Mac they came out was great from a very stylistic user friendly design, but it also overheated like the Dickens and it was impossible to expand where they came out with the Mac SE. What did they include? A fan. So it's one of those things where everything is just a necessary improvement, but you're never going to say, hey, we really just made an odd engineering or design decision there, and we're just going to correct that. It's like, no, no, it was always meant to be that way. And this is just the next iteration. I mean, the fact that they put in a program to fix the butterfly keyboards and the fact that they now sell no MacBooks with the butterfly keyboards speaks more volumes than Apple could ever say about how they feel about this. Definitely. All right, TheraBody is a company that has introduced a new line of four new TheraGun massage tools. One problem with these percussive therapy guns, you may have seen them all over Instagram, is that they're loud, which kind of acts the relaxing effect. Now, they're mostly meant for sore muscles. If you've been working out, you've been playing sports or exercising or lifting weights, it's to help kind of ease the pain of sore muscles. So they don't have to be quiet, but it doesn't help when they're loud. The new TheraGuns have a feature they call Quiet Force, all one word, which is kind of quiet, but it's also supposedly, though, it reduces the noise to more along the lines of an electric toothbrush than a power drill. So that's good. I think people who like these sorts of things will appreciate that. There's a new very affordable, as far as these things go, TheraGun Mini for $200, and it's the company's first single-handed device. It delivers 20 pounds of force on three different speeds and gets 150 minutes on a charge. The $300 TheraGun Prime delivers 30 pounds of force with five speeds along with Bluetooth. So you can sync with your health software. All the other models past this also have Bluetooth. The $399 Elite has 40 pounds of force, customizable speed ranges, so you can just set it precisely within the range along with five attachments, one of which is thumb-shaped. So if you want to feel like somebody's really digging into your shoulder, you can do that with the thumb attachment. And then there's the $599 Pro. That's really meant for professional massage therapists. It has a rotating arm, swappable batteries, a super soft attachment for sensitive areas, and up to 60 pounds of force. Bluetooth-connected massage thingies that help relieve your sore muscles, Roger. Whole product category that a lot of people may not have realized existed unless they had Instagram. So my question with this was, you need someone to do it for you, especially if it's on your back, unless you're incredibly dexterous and you can reach to your back. But I've always thought stuff like this paired with an ergonomic chair that's just mounted and you could lean back into it would be great. I think that's the idea with the Theragun Mini is that you'd be able to do that one on your own because it's one-handed. So yeah, maybe you could hook that up. Or just bolt it to a chair because those old chair-style massages with the little massages for your lower back, one of those devices, it sounds like a perfect way to update. This is the thing. A lot of what people do today in the office requires a body positioning that's actually highly stressful. Your head's tilted down, you add a lot of weight. And I only know this from my chiropractor because when I was going to them, you're saying like, yeah, a lot of these desk jobs, when you're looking at a screen, you're putting a lot of pressure points on your body that isn't natural. And I think having 60 pounds of something ramming into my shoulder blades would be awesome. So you're saying Theragun is great for people who work out, but they should also be targeting their products that people don't work out and just sit in a chair all day. Yes. It might not seem like it, but there's a lot of people need some good massusing. Yeah. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, let's talk Donkey Kong and libel law. In April 2018, Twin Galaxies announced that Billy Mitchell did not achieve his Donkey Kong high score on unmodified arcade hardware and therefore stripped him of all accumulated records. If you're like, wait a minute, what does that mean? The true Donkey Kong record is supposed to be set on a Donkey Kong cabinet that would be pretty much the same as if you played it in an arcade when Donkey Kong was new. What you could do, I'm not saying this is what Billy Mitchell did. In fact, I don't even think Twin Galaxies is saying this is what he did. But one could take an emulator, put it inside a cabinet and pretend like you're playing Donkey Kong, but not actually play it on the original. The reason you don't want to count that as the record is at that point it's a slippery slope to putting in cheats or things that might help you win, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, Twin Galaxies never said that Billy Mitchell somehow modified the software to his advantage. They said that they found evidence that this was not an unmodified cabinet and that their rules required them to only recognize a record that was done on a unmodified cabinet. Well, Billy Mitchell's suing over that. Ars Technica uncovered that Mitchell filed a defamation lawsuit in the LA County Court in April 2019 and is building a case that will finally come to a hearing on July 6th. But that hearing isn't over the libel accusations. That is an anti-slap motion. Slap stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. Anti-slap laws let a defendant, in this case Twin Galaxies, strike down a lawsuit that can be shown to censor, intimidate, or silence a critic by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense. So if you can show the court, hey, the only reason they're taking me into court is they're trying to shut me up. They don't really have much of a case, but they just want to draw this out. You can get it dismissed faster than you would otherwise. Mitchell says that Twin Galaxies' decision to strip him of his record is libelous on its face, he prima facia, because it implies that Mitchell did not achieve his record score legitimately. He's like, the fact that they rescinded my record means they're accusing me of cheating. He argues that a reasonable reader would believe Twin Galaxies was calling Mitchell a cheater. However, Twin Galaxies has never used the word cheat or cheater. Mitchell isn't saying he did. He's just saying what they've done is town to mount two calling me a cheater, so they might as well. Twin Galaxies said the decision was based on a specific board transition image that would be impossible on an original unmodified Donkey Kong machine and agrees this is its opinion and harbors no animosity or ill will against Mitchell. That last is very important because in libel law in the United States, you have to prove something called actual malice. It's not enough to say something about someone that's not true. Mitchell can't just prove that Twin Galaxies is saying he used modified hardware when he didn't. Even if he's able to prove in court that he used unmodified hardware, that wouldn't win the libel case. He has to also prove that Twin Galaxies was conducting this change or this behavior because they actually had malice against him. In 1964, Supreme Court ruling of New York Times versus Sullivan defines actual malice as knowledge that something was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. You not only have to know it was false, you have to not care. Twin Galaxies is saying, hey, man, we don't have any malice against Mitchell. We think we're right. It's an opinion. I guess, they're not saying this, but the attitude is, I guess we could be wrong, but we don't think we are. That really is tailored out of this actual malice. It's an opportunity to talk a little bit about communications law, I guess, but it's also interesting because it's Donkey Kong and Billy Mitchell, right, Roger? To be honest, I never thought the King of Kong would have this much of a legacy behind it, the documentary that featured Billy Mitchell. What's really interesting is that this is something that is taken in a higher regard because score counting is such a big deal, especially because I'm not sure if Twin Galaxies still is, but at the time it was vetted by Guinness Book of World Records, so any record that you did and it was verified by Twin Galaxies could conceivably make it into the Guinness Book of World Records, making it like a very big deal. Having your score removed because of allegations as well as suspicion that the rules weren't followed and the game wasn't played the right way, I think is a big deal. A lot of this is, I think, an attempt, at least on Billy Mitchell's part, to reclaim some of the pressed limelight. I just need to be in it just for a little while, just a little while, but longer. It's hard to say. Billy Mitchell, I don't know, and I'm not going to try to ascribe motives to, but I can imagine is someone who really thinks he deserves this record. No matter what actually happened. He is saying publicly, like, no, I used an unmodified cabinet, and I guess if you're Mitchell, the scenario is they're using a video to show a transition that is just an artifact of the video, and I had witnesses there watching me play this game on an unmodified cabinet, and he's going to pull all of that witness testimony and everything into court, an expert testimony saying he's a good guy, but none of that matters, because what he's suing on is libel law, and I don't think what Twin Galaxies did here constitutes libel. In fact, they've covered their tracks pretty well to defend themselves against it being libel. It's not libelous to say, I don't think a person deserves a record. Just on the look of it, he really doesn't have too much of a case, because there's nothing that has been recorded from Twin Galaxies that would indicate anything that would be considered libelous. Now, what's implied, I mean, that's up to how people perceive what was stated, but nothing directly stated by them said that he cheated, rather that the video that he gave to record us to say, this is my score from playing this game doesn't pass, Muster, and that particular piece isn't good enough. Well, folks, if you've got an opinion about this Donkey Kong decision, or any other opinion, as long as you have no actual malice in your heart, go and express it in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. All right, let's check out the mailbag. First of all, George C is a property manager and DJ, and both jobs are on hold right now. 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