 Coming up on DTNSA satellite rescue mission succeeds. Is TikTok dangerous? Reddit's founders think so. And the Smithsonian opens up millions of images for you to use for free. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 27th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Justin, Robert Young could not be with us. He is winging his way to South Carolina to cover the South Carolina U.S. presidential primary there for his show, Politics, Politics, Politics. We were just talking about flipping bags on eBay. Is that what we were talking about? eBay would be one of the options, yes. Places like that, yeah. If you want to get that wider conversation, get rich quick. Join the Internet. Become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Well, Facebook canceled the in-person part of its F8 developer conference which was set to take place May 5th and 6th. The company says it instead will conduct locally hosted events, videos, and live streamed content. So it probably won't make a difference for us because we'll still get the announcements because we weren't going to be there in person. Microsoft announced it's going to miss its quarterly revenue guidance for the more personal computing unit as a result of the COVID-19 virus. That's the unit that includes Windows licenses and Surface device sales. Microsoft also announced its Game Stack team will not attend the game developer conference in San Francisco due to the COVID-19 concerns. Several of its planned sessions will also take place online on Microsoft's website March 16th through the 18th. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple has lost one key supply chain executive and is about to lose another. Vice President of Manufacturing and Design, Nick Fortenza, retired. He led a team of supply chain and operations executive. And Ducco Paz Mouji, who led production operations for the iPhones and moved into AR reality efforts more than a year ago, is discussing an exit in the near future. German news outlet Deutsche Press Agentur reports that Google officially petitioned the U.S. government to let it supply its Play Store and apps on Huawei Android devices. Back in November, Microsoft got a similar license to supply Huawei with Windows 10 for use on the Chinese firm's computers. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company will open its first India store next year. Didn't realize they didn't have one, did you? Well, they don't, but they're going to have one soon. During the company's annual shareholder meeting, Cook also said that Apple will open an online store in India this year. All of our listeners in India were like, no, we were very aware. Yeah, we were well aware. Trust us. At RSA conference, which is happening, security researchers from ESET published details of a vulnerability in Wi-Fi chips made by Broadcom and Cypress Semiconductor called Crook with two zeros, of course, that affects chips in a lot of stuff. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Echo, Kindle, Android devices, Raspberry Pi 3, routers from Asus and Huawei. The exploit causes devices to put unsent data frames into a transmit buffer and then send them over the air using an encryption key of all zeros. And then you can keep repeating that until maybe you happen to catch something that's useful. Apple and Amazon said their vulnerability has been patched in their affected devices. All right, let's talk a little more about that satellite rescue. On Wednesday, Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle, also known as MEV1, successfully linked with the Intel Sat, rather, 901 satellite that only had a few months of fuel left, so it needed a little help. The Intel Sat satellite was raised to an orbit of 36,000 kilometers above Earth in preparation for the linkup to avoid impacting other satellites in the event that something went wrong. The linked satellites will now move back down to 901's operational orbit. The two satellites will remain linked for the next five years, after which point MEV1 will move to another satellite in need. A second rescue satellite from Northrop Grumman is planned and planned for launch later this year. Yeah, we've talked about satellites being in danger, and then what do you do? Do you deorbit them? Do you put them in a graveyard orbit? But if you put them in a graveyard orbit, that starts to get crowded, and then that can cause problems if there's collisions, etc. So this is an interesting way to keep satellites from either having to be deorbited or put in a graveyard. Give them some more fuel. The Intel Sat 901 wasn't built for this. They had to design the MEV1 to kind of work with what Intel Sat had, and they weren't sure it was going to work. That's why they took the precaution of using what little fuel it had left to raise it up out of orbit so that if it didn't work, it wouldn't cause any problems. But it worked. So Northrop Grumman is very pleased with themselves, and I think they have a right to be. They won't talk a lot about the cost. We're not sure how cost-effective this is, but in a lot of ways this was a proof of concept that they could do it, and obviously they're planning to do another one later this year. So they kind of want to prove the viability of this because they can help a lot of other satellite operators extend the life of their satellites. I really love the idea of like satellite as tugboat type thing. Like this satellite needs fuel to the rescue. Yeah, it is. Or it's like a little hug. Like MEV1 just comes up to like, I got your fuel. Yeah, you're okay. Intel Sat 901. For five years, we'll all be happy. If this doesn't work, you'll be safe, but I think it's going to work. I am curious why five years. Is that like recharging fuel enough? And if so, why does it take five years? There are a few more questions to dig down into, but so if anyone works at Northrop Grumman and can answer that, or works in this industry, like feedback at DailyTechnica.com. But pretty cool to think that you can take things that weren't built for refueling in any way and be able to figure out a way to do it. Absolutely. Facebook has paused its election reminder function in the European Union while it addresses concerns from the Irish Data Protection Commission. The election day reminder is supposed to display a notification to users on the day of a local election to remind them to go out and vote. Facebook does not explain the criteria it uses to determine if a user sees the reminder. That's where some of the concerns come in. Though the concerns from Ireland's DPC revolve around transparency over what personal data is collected when users engage with the feature. That would be a GDPR-like concern. I am suspicious. It may be that the Ireland DPC is using the personal data collection as a way to stop this because they have other reasons that they wouldn't have legal basis to stop them for otherwise. But you shouldn't need, if you're Facebook, to collect any information to show me a reminder. At least, no additional information, right? If I've gone onto Facebook and I've told you where I am, which millions of people do, then you would know, like, oh, you're in Slovakia. Slovakia is having its election show you the reminder. The worry that some people have, and it's not the worry that Ireland is expressing here, but the worry that some people have is that Facebook, with its targeting, could affect turnout by reminding people who are likely to vote for a particular candidate or people of an ethnicity that would be likely to vote for them. Yeah, exactly. Something like that. That has been proven that when you have these reminders from Facebook, it does increase turnout. There have been some studies that looked at areas where Facebook has done this and said, yeah, we can pretty much say that it increased turnout by this much. So that is a real concern, although there's no reason Facebook should do that, and it should be pretty easy to catch them if they did. So I go back to wondering, like, what is Ireland really doing here? Are they trying to dig down into that kind of transparency and make sure they put pressure on Facebook not to do that? Or was this thing somehow collecting data when you interacted with it, which I can't imagine a good excuse why you'd want to do that? Absolutely not. I know what these banners look like. I've seen them. I think, I don't know. I don't think I've updated Facebook, so it probably still thinks I live in Los Angeles, although they're smart enough. But that's the sort of thing where adding your location can be really helpful. Maybe I just want to blast out a notice to all my other friends who live in LA if I'm trying to sell my couch or whatever. There are lots of reasons that the company knowing your location actually makes your experience better, at least for me. And you might say, yeah, but if it knows where I live and it's reminding me to vote, and maybe there's a button where you can see where your precinct is or some sort of information, that's about it. There shouldn't be any more data collection, and it definitely shouldn't be selective when it's supposed to be based on an area in general. I mean, I guess the other way they could go about this is to look at the IP address and say, oh, Sarah's not listed as being in LA, but her IP address shows that she's up in Northern California. So let's show her the Northern California result because of that. I don't know. I have also, to be fair, I have found these sorts of notices very helpful, not only from Facebook. This is not the only company that's sort of like, hey, don't forget to vote, have your voice heard kind of thing. But again, Ireland is onto something where there is data collection that is inappropriate or some sort of manipulation that is not of public knowledge, then they need to know. Nine to Five Max says that it found evidence in the latest iOS beta release of an Internet recovery feature. The way it works right now is if you need to restore an iOS devices firmware from scratch, you need to connect it to a computer for devices like an Apple Watch or a HomePod. That means most people aren't going to bother. They're going to take it to a service provider since the devices don't have an easy way to connect to a computer. The feature Nine to Five Mac found is called OS Recovery and seems to work the way that the Mac OS Recovery feature does by downloading the firmware image over the Internet and then installing it. The feature is not working in the beta, but it looks to Nine to Five Mac as if it could also work by connecting an iPhone to another iPhone by USB as well. Yeah. We had a lot of talk before the show about who would need this, right? Because yeah, one of the reasons Apple Watch doesn't have a way to connect it to a computer is that most of the people who use an Apple Watch aren't going to tinker with it. If it doesn't work, they're just going to take it into the store. And I think that's been the idea with iOS too, whereas more people who own laptops and desktops are willing to install their own operating systems. So I like the idea that Apple might be saying, look, let's make it easy for you too. Like if you want to restore your phone from scratch, right? Like you're giving it to your son or your daughter, and you just want to wipe out everything that was on there and start from scratch. Well, you want to plug it into a computer now. You can just do it on the phone. There's lots of reasons people might want to do this. And not that hooking it up to a computer is super hard, but it is that thing of like, well, I got to find the cord now because I never really charge it and I never sync it anymore. Whereas if you can do it without hooking it up, you'll just do it. You'll do it right then. And that's really nice. I've done that a million times on macOS. So it would be nice to have that option on iOS. Yeah, I think you're correct that the feature is super helpful for a certain subset of users. It's not going to be something that the lion's share of iOS users will ever need, or when presented, the option necessarily want to do. But it's nice to have the option. Yeah, because you can do it by, okay, I was pointing out. You can do a secure wipe. That's not the same as restoring everything from scratch. If there's been something that's a little wonky, sometimes you just want to go right, like let's just wipe out the firmware and start again. And that's what we're talking. So it is a very small slice of people that would take advantage of this. But I know a few of you out there are very excited about it. Yeah, I mean, going iPhone to iPhone, to me, I'm like, more of a hassle than my computer for sure. But I also have several Macs laying around. So it depends on your situation. During a roundtable discussion at an investor's conference called Social 2030, Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman was asked if Silicon Valley startups had something to learn from TikTok, you know, TikToks, taking the world by storm. Everybody's loving TikTok. Freaking, this is us cast doing TikToks like everybody's doing TikTok. Huffman responded, I don't watch this. No, that's not what he said. Huffman responded, maybe I'm going to regret this, but I can't even get to that level of thinking with them because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, his word, that it's always listening. The fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying. And I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone. Now, you know, that's pretty measured language. Right. Yeah, it's almost like, what are you saying? Fingerprinting, most of you probably know this, but fingerprinting is combining things like what fonts are installed? What's the graphic card type? What's the processor type together to track you? So that even if you don't give any personal information, they can take a profile. It's like, this particular combination is unique to this phone. So we know that phone is using TikTok. TikTok's parent company ByteDance claims it collects this kind of data to identify malicious behavior, which could be a reason that you would collect this information. It's usually not what companies that are solely concerned with protecting malicious behavior do, but it's not impossible that that could be the reason. I'm doubting it's the only reason. TikTok told TechCrunch, these are baseless accusations made without a shred of evidence regarding the fact that they're fundamentally parasitic. It's not really an accusation. He's just like, I don't like the idea of TikTok. It's not even really, ByteDance doesn't even really, or TikTok, I guess in this sense, doesn't really need to defend itself because the department doesn't want to use it. It's an opinion, not an accusation. It's always listening as an accusation. And that kind of implies they're listening through the microphone, which I don't think that's what he means. He means tracking. So if he means fingerprinting, they are. The fingerprinting technology is terrifying. That's an opinion. So, so yeah, the only accusation is that they're always listening. So maybe that's what they're responding to. But I do think that yes, TikTok fingerprinting is not any better than any other fingerprinting. And lots of companies are doing fingerprinting out there. And there's a constant battle to try to reduce that through legal and public pressure and other means. I'm not sure that TikTok is worse than others or not. Maybe I'm wrong. There also is the somewhat complicated notion that, well, a Chinese company, we never really know what they're doing. So no matter what they say, be cautious. And that is unfair. But at points in time, and we've talked about some of these situations on the show before, that has come into play. So I think the fact that the CEO and co-founder of Reddit was like, this is a really bad app is going to get some attention. Again, like you said, a lot of this is just his opinion. He isn't up to use it. I don't even use TikTok. So, you know, I kind of read stuff like this and I'm like, sounds like it could be problematic. We'll see. But, but yeah, it's not the company doesn't need to like do a lot of damage control from this. I don't think unless there it really is something substantial that's found later down the road. Yeah. I mean, my first reaction was like, oh, company that is tangentially in competition with other companies says other companies parasitic, but I guess Reddit and TikTok aren't head to head. Sheryl Sandberg said some things about TikTok. I'm like, oh, well, you were definitely worried about TikTok under my name. So, but yeah, I, I try to hold myself to a higher standard than just saying, but China and still Huffman's credit. He didn't say that. He didn't use that as one of his things. He focused merely on the fingerprinting, but there is that undercurrent. Well, in kind of fun news, if you like the languages of love, I don't know, Uber began really not an ad app in app translation tool for messages between writers and drivers. They don't need to be in love with each other. Just, you know, it's fun to be able to speak the same language even if you don't. This uses Google Translate integration and comes as part of a larger app redesign that further clarifies our ride's arrival status. Now, speaking of Google Translate, the feature itself added support for five new languages. We've got Kimya Mwanda, that's a language primarily spoken in Rwanda. Odia, that's the Indian state of Odisha where a lot of people speak Odia. Tatar, Tatar stand in Russia and Tom, I believe a few other places too. Turkmen from Turkmenistan and Uyghur from Xinjiang, China, the province anyway, bringing the total languages supported up to 108. The languages will start rolling out to users today and come to iOS and Android users in the coming days. Part of the reason that these languages took so long was finding enough text to train the machine learning algorithm on and enough human speakers to refine the models. Yeah, the first thing that brought to my mind when I looked at the Uber thing was in Seoul, Korea, when we would hail rides. If we had had to message them, like, oh, we're on the other side, or can you call me? And they didn't speak English, we would have been stuck. So having these kind of messages translated just for those little interactions, they don't happen all the time, but when they do and you're in a place where there's non-English speaking drivers, that would be great. Yeah, when I'm local, there are plenty of drivers in the US that there's been some sort of a language barrier. And most of the time, the app is supposed to work so that that's not too much of a hindrance. But it has definitely been an issue when traveling, especially when you get out in an unfamiliar airport and you're kind of like, where do I get the Uber? And it's like the person on the other side can't necessarily speak English, nor should they if you're outside the country. And it just hopes the process be a little bit smoother. Now, this idea that they're finally getting to languages, like the total of these five languages that they just added is only 75 million people, which sounds like a lot in absentia, but when you compare it to the 9 billion people on the planet, it's a very small percentage. And they're like, we needed to find better language sets to train Google Translate on it. We needed humans to check it who actually spoke the language and could say, oh yeah, that makes sense what it's putting out. So really interesting to see us getting to that point, getting stretched out that far with translation. I was translating a German article earlier today and I was marveling at the progress we've made just in the past five, 10 years where instead of getting kind of a broken version, I was getting a very understandable English version of that German language article. So this stuff is finally really coming to the fore. It's one of the things where we get the story when it's new and there is like, this is amazing, but it doesn't work very well. And then by the time it works very well, we've all accepted it and it's not interesting anymore. So I like to pay attention where at this point we're like, we're actually starting to reach the inflection point where translation, machine translation is really useful. Yeah. This is probably just a really nerdy thing that hopefully some of you won't think is super weird of me, but for fun sometimes I try to fool Google translate and then give it feedback as to like, here's what you did wrong just now. I'm trying to help you, little machine. This is for certain languages that I actually have like a vested interest in knowing more about. So I'm kind of going back and forth, but it is really important. And so if you have fewer folks overall who like doing those sorts of things or are willing to do it, it's going to take a little bit longer, but progress being made. The Smithsonian published 2.8 million images and 3D models in its collection under an open access program. Not the first to do it, but this is one of the biggest ever to be done. All the images are also licensed under a Creative Commons zero license. Remember we were talking with Scott Johnson about the guys who made the melodies and put them out under a Creative Commons zero license. That means there's no restriction on what you can do with these. It's essentially the same as public domain. The secretary of the Smithsonian institution Lonnie G. Bunch III said, we are empowering our audiences, empowering them to remix, to repurpose, to reimagine all the richness we offer. We're inviting our viewers to become collaborators. The collection is also accessible by a public API with collection data hosted on GitHub. Because a lot of this isn't just images. It's data that they hope people can mine and find out new things about history, new things about science by using it. The Smithsonian plans to add more to the collection over time. There are things it doesn't own the copyright to, and it's a $155 million item collection. They would have to get permission. There's also just other things that it takes time to scan and put in. There's all kinds of reasons for that, but $2.8 million, even though it's a subset of their collection, is huge. I love that they said, look, we could have said you can't profit off this. We could have said you can't do derivative works. We could have limited it, but we're not. This is the heritage. The Smithsonian institution is run by the U.S. government. It's funded by the U.S. government for the most part. And so they're saying, look, we are going to make what we can available for you to remix and reuse, which is in the United States where we have this incredibly long copyright period, a huge boon to people who want to make creative endeavors out of older works. Yeah. I know that there are a lot of uses of this that I'm not even thinking of, but I'm thinking of some sort of an art installation at the Smithsonian or wherever it might be that makes use of this and is branded as such would be super fascinating. Yeah. Charlie Parker's Alto Sacks. Whether it's image or, yeah, right, yeah, or some sort of 3D printed something or some, yeah, some sort of video or all the things that is really fun about going to particular exhibits at lots of museums. But yes, as you mentioned, the Smithsonian, huge. The fact that they've got a very small, this is going to apply to what's really a very small portion of the entire collection is still a really big collection. Yeah. The p-squared in our Twitch chat makes the joke. Tomorrow's news, Getty Images Inventory increased by 2.8 million images. Yeah, it should. Getty Images should add all of these. But that doesn't mean that Getty would then own the copyright on them. These are under a Creative Commons Zero license. The best part of that is Getty can use them. Getty can sell them or not. But you will then also be able to go get them without having to go through Getty or anybody else. But that's one of the beauties of this is like, yeah, stock art people can now add this stuff to their collection and resell it. That's fine. And if you want to pay for the ease of getting it through a subscription you already have, that's great. You don't have to. If you want to do the work to go and get this stuff on your own and wade through it, you can do that too. That's the beauty of a Creative Commons Zero license is it frees this stuff up to say anybody can use it any way they want. We're not going to police that. And that keeps those unexpected uses from not happening. There's no restriction on what someone might or might not do with it because they're like, well, that might run afoul for the license, which is something we don't see anymore at all, really. Do you feel like besides just saying, well, good on you, Smithsonian, that's really cool. Art for all. Is there any other reason that this would be happening that we're just not getting? And that's just me being like asking a very pessimistic question. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I don't. I don't. That's a great question. I don't think there is a downside to this. I don't know. You know, I mean, at worst, somebody could be fooled into paying for something they could have got for free. But again, that could just be because it's more convenient to get it from the person they're paying for. At worst, they didn't know they could get it for free. So, you know, that's our job to spread the word and let people know. But it's mostly upset. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. Also, a big all thank you to everybody who contributes to our subreddit. You could submit stories. You can also vote on other stories. Make sure that they float to the top if you care about them. Daily tech news show dot Reddit dot com. Also join in the conversation in our Discord and you can do that by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon dot com slash D T N S. Oh, we got something good in the mailbag. Yeah, Charlie wrote in about our conversation yesterday and specifically said, you know, when Tom sites study whether the disinformation affected results of something in this case, it was political elections. I says, Tom says, said this for many years. Charlie says, I'm reminded of the advertising problem. I know I'm wasting half my advertising budget. I just can't figure out which half. No study can identify what would have happened in the absence of the meddling. There was meddling just as no economic forecast can identify what would have happened if conditions were different. Those who claim otherwise are at best only giving statistical statistical inference, and that can't apply in elections where each event is unique with different issues, candidates and surrounding culture. My personal assessment Charlie says is that the goal of election interference is not to hurt the prospects of either Democrats or Republicans, obviously in the US, but to further any divisive forces. The responses could be rank preference voting that happens in Australia or nonpartisan primaries like in California to undercut our current political system simply requires manipulating the electorate to make compromise unpopular based on current events. It seems to be successful. I disagree with Charlie when he says no study can identify what would have happened in the absence of meddling from a certain point of view. I'm going to owe we want him here. He is literally correct in the narrowest point of no study can identify what would have happened in the absence of meddling, right? Because it is an election and it is unique. But I don't think he's implying and therefore no study should be done because we can't find out. And that's where I disagree with him. I think you can make useful statistical inferences. You can find out in laboratory conditions if certain kinds of meddling tend to have an effect. Same way you can say no one can find out what would have happened in Mrs. Smith's fourth grade class in 1977. But we can study what elementary stool students tend to do in reaction to certain kinds of educational attempts. So I think it's still worth studying. I think it's still worth finding out what kinds of meddling should be worried about, what kinds of effects could happen. I think that's very important and I think it's useful knowledge. That said, I totally agree with Charlie that the undercutting of the political system requires manipulating the electorate to make compromise unpopular and that seems to be working. That seems to be the problem. And that's why I'm always like, let's try to figure out how we counter that. And he has some pretty good responses here, rank choice voting, nonpartisan primaries as ways that might help it. And those are worth studying to see how much effect they have had as well. But I don't like this idea of like, well, you can just never know. So we might as well guess. I know that it's not exactly what Charlie's saying, but I've seen people say that and it's like, no, but we could know a lot more. We could make a lot more educated guesses. Well, thank you for the email, Charlie. And thanks to everybody who emails us. Your feedback is very important. Also, extra thank you to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. I'm so excited. I'm tripping over myself. Jeff Wilkes, Sonya Vining and Tony Glass. Yeah, if you're at the grandmaster level, pop into that discord. I know there's only a few of you in there, but we're doing some new album art. And I popped some album art ideas in there for you to look at. So do that. And there's all kinds of good things that you get if you're a patron. Listen, if you're listening on the free feed, first of all, the easiest thing is go to patreon.com.dts. Give $2 a month. If you can afford $2 a month, you won't get any more ads. And if you can afford $5 a month, you'll get extra bonus shows. You'll get things like today, I did an editor's desk where I just looked at the headlines in tech today and I evaluated like, which ones were useful to look at? Which ones you should be wary of because they might make you think something is true that isn't. That's the kind of stuff we try to give you at patreon.com slash DTNS. Uh, you're never linked bait to us. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you've got feedback, send her over. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Oh, I bet we're going to talk some e-sports tomorrow because we got Jen Cutter on the show and Len Peralta will be here too. Talk to you then. 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