 Coming up on DTNS, a serious ransomware warning for hospitals, how voting tech works, and how not to get into arguments online. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 29, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chain. We do not have Sarah Lane on the show today. She got pulled away by a property management emergency, but she will be back with us tomorrow. If you're looking for earnings results, they're pretty good for Samsung and Spotify, but you can get all those on our shorter version, Daily Tech Headlines, dailytechheadlines.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Excel has had the ability to use data types for the last few years, able to pull in things like real-time stock information in geographical locations as well as integrating with Wolfram Alpha. Microsoft has now announced that Excel will let users create their own custom data types. These data types can be pulled in from Microsoft's Power BI Business Analytics service or with Excel's Power Query, which can pull them in from databases and third-party services like Teradata and Facebook. If you buy a 5G-equipped Motorola Razr on Amazon, Amazon workers will open the box and unfold it before shipping it to you. In the product listing, Amazon says, in order to better protect the display, we have folded your Razr. It's safer, but may not look as elegant as we hoped. We apologize if you see fingerprints on your new device, but we assure you your Razr is brand new, and we didn't run around the office using it. Oh, actually, I added that last one. Sorry. But I think that would be a good addition. The Financial Times reports that the United States can sell smartphone chip components to Huawei as long as they are not being used for the 5G business. Huawei has been under the U.S. trade ban since last year, with the most recent restrictions banning Huawei from sourcing any hardware made with U.S. technologies. I find this highly undercovered right now. It's a very curious development. Security researchers found a critical vulnerability in Intel code that let them access a service mode in the chip called Red Unlock inside the independent core and discover the secret key used to encrypt updates to the firmware. Now, the vulnerability can't be used for remote hacks, but physical hackers, not like Olivia Newton-John, but like somebody who has physical access to the machine, might be able to use it to root a CPU or even maliciously attack the chip in what's called the evil-made attack. Many exploits would disappear on a reboot, so this isn't persistent, but the vulnerability would let security researchers analyze microcode patches for vulnerabilities, which they can't do right now. It's been patched, but chip firmware can always be rolled back, so expect that to happen. ByteDance, member them, announced its first consumer hardware product, the Dahle Smart Lamb. This offers a display and camera designed to let school children get remote help and monitoring from parents and tutors. This comes as ByteDance is making a larger push into the Chinese education market with its Dahle education unit. The Dahle lamp costs $119 and will be available in China. I guess a Dahle Lump joke is just not. Time for a vaccine update. There are 49 vaccines in clinical trials and 88 in preclinical animal trials. There are a total of 11 vaccines in phase three. That's the final phase before you approve a vaccine for general use. There are six vaccines in early or limited use. Five of those are also still in phase three. One of them is actually only in phase two. No vaccines are approved for general use right now and no phase three trials are currently paused as of the recording of this episode right now. The phase three trials being conducted are by, one, U.S. Moderna and the U.S. NIH. Two, Germany's BioNTech, New York's Pfizer, and China's Fosun Pharma. All working together. Three, Johnson & Johnson, Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Four, U.K. Swedish company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. Five, Novavax. Six, India's Bharat Biotech, India's Bharat Biotech, Indian Council of Medical Research and the National Institute of Virology. And finally, the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia. Those are the ones just in phase three. The ones that are in phase three and also approved for limited use are the Kansana Bio and China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, approved for military use, Sinovac Biotech, approved for limited use in China, the Gamalaya Research Institute of Russia's Ministry of Health, limited use in Russia, China's Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, limited use in the United Arab Emirates, and China's Sinopharm, which is in limited use in the United Arab Emirates as well. All right, let's talk a little bit more about this hospital warning. Indeed, Tom. Security consultants tell Reuters that FBI and Homeland Security officials held a conference call with security experts and hospital administrators to discuss targeted ransomware attacks against health care facilities. Alon Liska, a threat intelligence analyst with Recorded Future, told Reuters six hospitals were targeted on the same day by the same actor. Officials warned hospitals to ensure backup systems work, to disconnect systems from the Internet when they can, and to avoid using personal email accounts. Attackers thought to have originated from Eastern Europe have used the Ryuk and TrickBot Trojans, Microsoft attempted to disrupt TrickBot earlier this month, but may not have succeeded. Yeah, this is a serious one. I tend to not want to exaggerate security threats. They happen all the time. They're usually not as bad as some of the headlines scream. This is a bad one. This is a coordinated attack on hospitals. Not, we talked about an attack in Germany that accidentally hit a hospital because an email was opened in the hospital environment that was meant to be opened in an academic environment. This is not that. This is malicious attackers going for hospitals because they know that's urgent right now and they think they have a better chance of getting them to pay the ransom if they do. You don't get the FBI and the DHS to sit down with independent security experts and hospital administrators unless there's something very serious going on. These are targets, like you mentioned, that are ripe for this kind of attack. And so what I would love, and I know we're preaching to the choir here, but sometimes you still got to hear the sermon so you can know how to tell your friends and family the exact same way to find the light. But this is reality now. The reality is that phishing attacks and clicking on malicious links are going to be the way that crime is defined going forward. And this is so advanced that anybody is able to do it. It's so cheap to do and you can do it largely anonymously, which means you are only going to see more and more of it. Yes, you can try and catch the bad guys, but there is no reason why everybody should not be brushing up on exactly the best tips to not infect your system no matter what. Yeah, absolutely. Officials weren't hospitals to ensure backup systems works. That's that's so they can recover if they get attacked. Disconnecting systems from the internet, that's to limit the surface area attack. If something's not connected to the internet, it doesn't get locked up by the ransomware. But the where you prevent the attack is don't use personal email accounts. Don't open attachments that you don't know for sure are safe. Don't be the person that spreads it. And that that is incredibly important. That's what Justin's talking about. Brush up on that hygiene. And in fact, all of us can help, especially if we have someone in our contact list that works at a health care facility. Yes, because if you accidentally open something, it may without your knowledge, send an email to your entire contact list that then gets them to open it, which then attacks their system. So all of us can contribute a little bit. And certainly if you work in a health care facility, you need to take this seriously. All right, I'm going to say this half jokingly. But the more I think about it, the more I think we should have it. We need a smoky the bear for malware links. Like we need an only you can prevent forest fires, right? Level thing because again, this isn't going away. And the only way that you can combat it is personal responsibility. I'm snubsy the hacker. All right, here's a fun one in April. Amanda Cadel sued Amazon on behalf of California residents for unfair competition and false advertising. This is about digital video. She claimed the company secretly reserves the right to end your access to digital movies and TV shows that you buy from Amazon Prime Video. So we're not talking about Prime Video, the streaming service. We're talking about when you buy a movie, you buy a TV show and you download it and you want to watch it. It's also available in the cloud, right? You do this on iTunes. You do this on Google. But with Amazon, she says they secretly can pull the rug out from you at any time. Well, Amazon filed in the court case Monday to dismiss the complaint arguing she has not been injured. Amazon wrote the complaint points vaguely to online commentary about this alleged potential harm, but does not identify any Prime Video purchase unavailable to plaintiff herself. In fact, all of the Prime Video content that the plaintiff has ever purchased remains available. And apparently she's perfect, just like a dozen or so things since she filed the case. And they don't go on to be specific about this has never happened. But they're basically saying this never happens. And you have to show harm to bring a case. She hasn't been harmed. She's not pointing to anybody else that's been harmed. So let's throw the case out. But they're not saying it isn't true. Amazon also contends this isn't a secret thing since the terms of service expressly state that purchasers obtain only a limited license to view video content and that purchased content may become unavailable due to provider license restriction or other reasons. So Amazon's other argument in the case is she knew it or she should have it was in the terms of service. Now, it'd be interesting if this the judge said, yeah, but the terms of service weren't clear to her or whatever. It could totally change terms of service law. But if it goes the way most of these go, it'll be like it was there for her to know the fact she didn't read. It's not our fault. So it's not a secret. Anyway, if you ever wondered if you own your content from Amazon. No, you do not. Amazon has said so in a court filing. You just have a limited license to it. So is this I mean, the number one, this is a great example of our shift from we buy physical media to now we stream or have digital distribution. And much of that initially was like, OK, I'm going to download a two gigabyte file and play it. And now it's so much easier to not deal with that storage and have it all streaming somewhere. Is this about a physical like what you have a physical download? It's not like they can stop you from playing it, right? Well, if it's got digital rights management on it, they can it can it can be set up to expire after a certain amount of time and say, like, I need to check in with the internet to be able to be to be played. So theoretically, yeah, there's ways around that. Some of those ways violate the DMCA. You know, I railed against DRM for more than a decade. I still think it's a horrible thing, but the world has moved on. Yeah, everybody streams now and nobody cares as much about ownership as they used to. Only we'd listen, Tom, if only. Time management coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders wrote an article for Wired called How to Stop Getting Into Pointless Arguments Online. Q Angel Music. She identifies several problems with online discussions, one of which are that there's no natural boundaries. Anyone in the world can argue with anyone else and you're not limited by space or time. This can make commenting into a habit because you feel a flood of adrenaline and dopamine when you win with a particularly staving retort. It doesn't matter whether you've convinced anybody and you can get that flood anytime you want. You should read the full article, but here are a few of the tips when you feel the urge to wade into an online argument. Number one, don't instead talk about it with people that you know, one-on-one or write your thoughts down yourself. Oh, I've argued that one a lot, which is like just write down your response, don't send it. And you already feel a little better getting it out of there. I would say for me, especially since largely the stuff that I would argue about are things that I do podcasts about, I yell at myself for being like, why am I giving this away for free? This is literally content that I can get fired up and talk about this for money. Number two, if you can't resist, post your thoughts and move on, turn off notifications, do not get drawn into the back and forth. Say your piece and leave it. It's much more persuasive that way anyway. Yeah, there's a lot of psychological studies about the fact that the back and forth actually drives the person away from your position. Just stating a thing and leaving it, not necessarily going to influence it, but it's more likely than continuing. It's also how winning arguments normally go in general. Like you just say your piece and leave. Number three, if you have to respond, make yourself wait. Don't respond in the heat of the moment when you see the first response, give yourself a cool down period. Yeah, like Warcraft. You should have a 30 second cool down. I actually believe this is also an advice that I give or gave to myself when I was dating or to friends who are in breakups that like, here's the rule, from here on out, every response time on a text message doubles. So if it took you two minutes last time, it's four minutes for the next one, eight minutes for the next one, and so on and so on until you're waiting a day before you send a thing. I think that's a great idea for an online argument as well. It's actually part of the retweet system from Twitter too, is like to make you stop and think a little longer, rather than just like angrily hitting the retweet. Number four, when you do respond, only respond to productive comments. No one's trying to get you angry or cause, or not the ones trying to get you angry or cause drama. Yeah, this one's harder cause you wanna, I mean, if you're into the responding part of your brain, you wanna respond to the ones getting you going, not the calm, rational ones, but... I will also say this, only retweet compliments. That's just a lifestyle choice and everybody should follow it. That's a good one. Number five, respond the way that you would want to be responded to with empathy and not attacks. You can even just write something neutral, like I hear you. The practitioner I see doing this the most is our mutual friend, Brian Brushwood, the sort of like, yeah, I understand you're angry, but that's cool. Like... Yeah, yeah, I would only, I would deviate away from I hear you because that has a bit of a loaded political kind of context to it. It can mean agreements too, yeah. A thing that I've also found is if something is baffling or you don't really get it, just I sometimes I just respond with a question mark just to see like, hey, can you make this clearer? Keep going? Yeah. Also, another thing, always respond with less words. No matter what, I don't care if they have two words, use one. Six, when you want to resist, but are finding it difficult, substitute another activity to responding, like going for a run, gardening or dueling or whatever hobby makes you feel like you're happy and not enraged. I think that is just a good unplug. Everybody could stand to unplug. If you find yourself getting angry on the internet, might be time to put down the internet for a little bit. Yeah. And I think the biggest thing is being aware that this is just a dopamine hit. This isn't real. Like once you're aware of that, you can resist it easier. Like, oh, this isn't important. It just feels important right now. I mean, I'm so glad that I grew up with message boards when I was a kid because I feel like these are all lessons that I learned watching people flame out on message boards. Oh, yeah, yeah. I ran my own message board in 1999. I learned almost all of this back then. Oh, my God. I'm so glad that I got off of a cap to the admin. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. CNET's Marguerite Reardon has an excellent ride up over at CNET.com on the technology used to count votes in U.S. elections. There are a few main types of vote counting across the United States. I, you know, I think this is interesting all year round, but it seems to be particularly interesting to people right now. So here are the few of the things that Marguerite talks about. The old lever-activated machine is still in use. More commonly, you'll see a paper ballot, which is fed into an optical scanner. And the other option is a touchscreen that will record the votes digitally. In most cases, a paper record is also printed for auditing the count. The totals from the precinct's machines are tabulated and reported to county officials. And this can happen in a few ways. The printed record and either a smart card or a thumb drive can be driven to the county officials. You just hop in the truck and take it over there. If it's a larger area, the totals might be phoned in and then you bring the records later. So you make sure they get the total and then you hop on over with the actual physical records. Or the totals could be entered over a secure internet connection and the records brought later. Large rural counties might do this. Sometimes this is the way state records are reported. And then mail-in ballots are usually confirmed separately because you have to go through a few more steps. You have to make sure it's valid. Look at the signature, make sure that that's an actual registered voter. Once you've confirmed that it's a valid mail-in ballot, then you feed it into the optical scanner. Provisional ballots are another one that she talks about where you come in in a place where you need ID, you forgot your ID or your eligibility was undetermined. They're like, well, we say mail-in ballots. So we have to make sure you didn't vote with that too. Those are later confirmed and if they're confirmed as valid, then they're counted. The county will send a preliminary vote count to the state in most cases. And sometimes they'll send that preliminary vote count to the media. And they may also post it on a public website. In fact, most counties do these days. The results are considered preliminary until the actual records are tallied again by election officials. These preliminary results are the ones that the media jumps on and calls elections before all the precincts are in, right? Then there's the idea of the preliminary account the next day, which is still not the official count. There are triple checks, a process called canvassing. Make sure that every ballot cast is accounted for. Make sure the number of ballots received matches the number of votes counted, basically checking for any possible errors. Now, in smaller cases, this may happen very quickly, could happen the same night, but if a process usually extends into late November, and depending on the situation can happen in December, not in like Al Gore type cases, just in a normal election year, it can extend into December to get the confirmed, like preliminary count seems right, but we went through and triple checked everything. You don't hear about it because it rarely changes those preliminary results. After that, a county board of elections certifies the election and generates an official vote count. That all has to be done by December 8th for presidential elections because December 14th is when the actual election takes place. The electors that are certified by the governor of a state go and cast their electoral college ballots. So that is all very, very good information and that is all important information for what will obviously be a very closely watched election for which things like this have kind of come up in the discourse. What I would like to do at this point is tell all of the DTNS listeners that have now heard that, here's how if you want to watch this election come in like a geek, right? If let's say you are disgusted by television discourse, you don't even like radio commentary on this, you literally just, you and whatever a beverage of choice just wanna sit, listen to music and follow this election the way that a reporter would, here's what you do. What you do is find and you can Google these, but swing counties throughout America. I'm just gonna read a few. One of them that I butchered the name on the Politics Politics Politics show, McComb County, Michigan. These are the suburbs of Detroit, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, LaZern Pennsylvania, LaCrosse County, Wisconsin. You can keep going with these, but what you wanna do is go there and find their county election boards. They all have websites. They were all last redesigned in 2003. They look like GeoCity sites. So you'll love it. It'll be like a trip back in time. And then you can watch as they surely edit the page itself to update the vote totals as they come in. This is what the engine of the networks are watching. They just have their own versions that are doing it that then process the information and feed it into the pretty talking heads. That is the best way to watch an election. If you can get that list of, these are the counties that are important in the states that are important in the electoral college vote. You can be looking at it like, I don't know, what do you think? Less than a dozen websites maybe. And know which way the election is going just as fast as they would on TV. Bookmark them now. They'll be easy to do. The websites sometimes go down. So you wanna make sure that you know exactly where they are before you start. Here's the other side. It helps to kind of know. So here's for example, Florida, as you alluded to with the 2000 election, very pivotal. It was one last in 2016 by point and change. You will know how well this is going for Joe Biden, for example, depending on the votes that come in through Miami-Dade County, Broward County and Palm Beach County. In fact, you could make the argument that in 2016, it was an underperformance by Hillary Clinton in Palm Beach County that might have turned the tide for her. That is where the bulk of the Democratic votes come in Florida. They're the Southeastern counties there. So if you know a little bit more about how states are won, which you really can't go wrong with cities need to turn out for Democrats and the suburbs need to turn out for Republicans in general, right? There are some examples where that's not the case. Then you will also be following this just as well and just as accurately as any news network. And all you need to do is look at old websites. This is made for the DTNS listenership. Is there an easy way to find out what those swing counties are? You can Google them. I mean, the other way that you can find them out is just Google Obama to Trump counties. So those were counties that did vote for Obama, then voted for Trump. Or if you want to go back even further, Obama to Romney or blah, blah, blah, you can, that's kind of the handy work for it. I just typed in swing counties and there's nine battleground states that Trump and Biden need to win. The 54 counties that could tip the election, the 10 counties that will decide the 2020 election. So yeah. It's easy to find. The harder thing to do is then just going county by county and saying like Kenosha County Board of Elections or County Election Supervisor, because they all have different names sometimes. Yeah. So maybe folks, if you want to get in our Discord and share some of those swing county websites that could help each other out in there as well. Yeah. And of course, if you don't want to do that, you can always watch me, twitch.tv slash Justin, our young on election night while I'll be doing that and providing whatever commentary I can on time. Honestly, it's probably the best way to do it, to be honest. Levi Stadium, where the San Francisco 49ers American football team plays is introducing the world's first 8K replay system. Before you go, roll my eyes, there might be some reality to wanting to do it this way. The stadium is using Astro Design 8K cameras. This is not about the display, this is about the cameras. They're capturing video, digitally mapping the field in order to be able to zoom in close on action without losing any detail. So the broadcasting, a 1080p feed to the stadium's 200 by 48 foot video boards and also to any television broadcasters that want to take advantage of it. But the cameras are able to capture video at 120 frames per second, 8K allowing slow motion video and freeze frame stills with literal or no motion blur. And because it's 8K, you can zoom in up to 400% without losing any detail at 1080. So if you want to see whether that foot was on the line, whether that ball was in his hands as he touches the end zone, you can do that in a much clearer way. And anybody who's watched sports knows, those millimeters sometimes is where these reviewed calls turn. And if we're gonna get even a little bit more sportsy on this, this could actually have a material impact on the game because it's often these video boards that coaches watch because they go quicker than whatever replay system they have on iPads or whatever Microsoft tablets they're using to see whether or not they should challenge to play or whether or not somebody was in and they should badger the ref on it. This could affect the way that games at least are coached. Right, and the referees that are reviewing calls will get the 8K feet as well. So they'll have more resolution to deal with as well. So yeah, if you've been wondering like 8K, what is it good for? Probably still not much in your home, to be honest, just for the average person sitting on their couch. But here's an example where it actually is useful for purposes that you may or may not think is useful, but it's certainly useful for those who do. Unless your home is the size of an open air stadium in Santa Clara. All right, folks. Or you want detailed replays of your flag football game. Exactly. Let's check out the mailbag. Jason wrote in and said, "'Hello, I listened to your show and love it' was listening to the segment on Loon Balloons. That's Alphabet's from a balloon internet service and wanted to share this photo that I took through my telescope. I live in Fenton, Michigan near Flint and saw a great object in the sky like a bright star. So I got my telescope out and realized it was a Loon balloon. Keep up the good work and thanks for the great content. A Loon balloon was going over Michigan and he caught it and it really does look like a UFO, doesn't it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it is very eerie looking. That's the new weather balloon is. Oh, no, it was just a Loon balloon. Just a Loon balloon. Just 99 Loon balloons. Well, keep those emails coming. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Big shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Johnny Hernandez, Tim Ashman and Tim Deputy. And of course, thank you, Justin, Robert Young. We're in bat country and you're keeping us all sane on politics, politics, politics. Thank you for that. Oh, we are doing our best and there are only a few days left. In fact, we're, I think, two episodes away. We're gonna do our regular episode that we do on Fridays and then we'll have another episode on Election Day. But of course, you can get not only a bonus episode today and a bonus episode Monday if you become a part of our Patreon. Take politicsseriously.com. I do have to say this. I know that there's a ton of DTNS listeners that have come over and given PX3 a try. Thank you guys so much as we get closer to this final climactic moment. I am just filled with gratitude that you guys have supported yet another independent operation like DTNS this time for something like politics. Hey, patrons, speaking of patrons, heads up, you get a special interview with my sister, the county clerk of Bond County, Illinois about the tech Bond County uses for counting the votes. If you wanna hear an actual county clerk talk about these touchscreens and the printed ballots and the scanners and the USB sticks, you can get that interview by becoming a patron right now at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back tomorrow with more DTNS. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.