 Coming up on DTNS, Apple annoys customers who don't have Apple fixed iPhone batteries. Twitter just, oh, Twitter. And Facebook jumps on a cord cutting bandway. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 8th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From Viva Las Vegas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And from the LA County area on the show's producer, Roger J. We're just having a wide-ranging conversation about eating habits and the Iowa State Fair and more. So if you'd like to get that, become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS and look for Good Day Internet. Let's start now with a few tech things you should know. Google will now surface individual podcast episodes in its search results surfacing content on specific topics or maybe an interview with a specific person and plans to bring the same feature to Google Assistant soon. For now, the search requires the word podcast, such as podcasts about boxer dogs or boxer dog podcasts. And if you choose an episode, it'll then play in the Google podcast web app. Google says it plans to support third-party playback for podcasts that are exclusive to certain platforms and will eventually drop the podcast search term requirements. Postmates has been granted the first-ever permit for sidewalk robots in San Francisco by the city's public works department. The city formally banned testing of street robotics without permits. Permits are active for 180 days and allow testing of up to three autonomous delivery devices. Postmates unveiled its semi-autonomous sidewalk rover serve back in December. Serve uses cameras and LiDAR to carry 50 pounds for up to 25 miles on a charge. Samsung has released a 5G version of the smaller 6.3-inch Galaxy Note 10 that it announced yesterday, but only in South Korea. Other countries the U.S. included will only get 5G in the Note 10+. Samsung also announced the Galaxy Book S, an arm-based fanless 13.3-inch laptop inside is an Adreno 680 Xtreme graphics card capable of driving two 4K HDR displays with a claimed battery life of 23 hours. The Galaxy Book S also comes with a 1920x1080 10-point touch screen, two USB-C ports, a fingerprint reader and a micro SD card slot. The laptop will be available in December starting at $999 in earthy gold or mercury gray. Paytm is India's largest mobile payments firm and now has 10 million customers of its Paypay app in Japan. A joint venture with Yahoo Japan and Softbank. Paypay is supported at one million stores in Japan and has processed more than a hundred million transactions. Stores in India and Japan tend to prefer cash and sometimes don't accept credit cards. So this is an interesting way of jumping from cash right to phone payments. Paypay's biggest competitor in Japan next to cash is Messaging Platform Line and if you keep in track Paytm also has a presence in Canada. Let's talk a little more about what Google's doing to make it easier for you to walk around. Yeah, who doesn't love a good walk? Google Maps Live View, augmented reality, walking navigation is launching in beta for all Android and iPhone devices that support ARCore and ARCore and ARKit. Live View helps figure out what direction you're going in with the virtual positioning system that matches your camera view with data from things like Google Street View combined with GPS to give your position and heading. Google then overlays your camera view on top of a map and draws directional arrows. Yeah, visual positioning system just means they're combining a bunch of stuff. It's really not new technology. But what is new is that ability to do image recognition. We talk a lot about, you know, bad uses of image recognition. This seems to be a good one, which is, hey, we think we can match what you're looking at to Google Street View, which once we can do that, we can tell which direction you're pointed at. And I'll be honest, this is a big deal for me. When I come out of train stations in a new place, I often take, it seems like 10 minutes, it's probably like less than 20 seconds, but it seems like it takes forever to figure out now which direction is that street I need to go to. This would be super handy for that. If I didn't have to hold the phone up in front of my face and make it really obvious how lost I was, I don't love that part of it. We've all done that dance, right? We've done the dot dance where you come out of the subway, you come out of the train station, and then it's like, all right, I'm going to start walking. Did the dot move up? Was it going up where I need to go, or was it going the other way? And then you got the GPS fluctuations that are moving your dot all over the place randomly. It's a pain. I like this. I don't know how often this is something that I would use more than just a novelty, like, hey, look what I can do to whatever walking partner friend I might have with me, but I don't know. Let's say I'm in Japan, and I know a street is named something, and I think I'm going in the right direction and there's a street sign, and I can get some recognition that way. I can see this being helpful in occasional scenarios for me. Yeah. That's kind of the thing. I don't know if you'd use this every day, right? Because usually you know where you're coming. You kind of know what's up. You're aware of your surroundings. This is going to be helpful when you're traveling and you're in a new city, new location. But again, am I just being silly, though, or is sometimes if you're in an unknown location, the last thing you want to do is advertise that you've got a phone. I don't know. I think you might be over. Am I being too Dickensian about the pickpockets? I think it depends on where you are. If you're in a deserted alley in Barcelona at midnight, maybe you got to have your wits about you, but in general, it's pretty normal now. Everybody's got their phone out pointed at something. Just make sure you have your phone in one hand and your fight knife in the other. No one will come and mess with you. I am way too paranoid about looking lost. I don't want to stand out when I'm traveling, so that's probably all this is. I agree with you. I'm very excited that Google is finally delivering on tech that they put in the initial Google Glass video. Honestly, this is going to be way cooler once whatever augmented reality wearable comes along that we want to use. We're still waiting on that, of course, but if you don't have to pull out a device, that's when my paranoia or not, this becomes much easier to use if you're like, oh, it's just going to overlay it on the world around me. That's great. I fix it reports that if anyone besides Apple replaces a battery in the iPhone XR, XS, or XS Max, a service message will display saying that the phone is unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine Apple battery. The customer would probably already know that, but it also will no longer display battery health readings, so it's going to annoy some people. Chips on the battery now include an authentication feature for pairing with a specific phone. I fix it found that the issue arises even when using a genuine Apple battery as well. Now I fix it calls this hostile to the consumer, whereas I see it as hostile to the consumer. Look, I have no problem with Apple saying trying to do extra stuff on the analytics of your battery so you can know more about, you know, where it's life cycle is and at what point you should replace it. And if you take a off market battery and put it in there, then you're not going to get that. I understand that. What I do think is, and I agree, hostile to the consumer is continually throwing a pop-up in your face over and over and over and over again. That's excessive to me. Like one, just to let you know that it's not, like, I think that's helpful. Beyond that, it does seem a little overkill. I can count on one finger the last time I checked my battery health reading, and it was right after I wrote this story up for the show because I'm like, where is that again? Like you have to go into settings, into battery, into health reading, so them saying like, look, we can't guarantee the health reading of a replacement battery seems fair, right? But annoying you constantly that, hey, that battery you put in there wasn't put in by us, that's where I think it's hostile to the consumer because Apple has a bad enough time right now with appearing to be against your right to repair something. This isn't helping. Yeah. I mean, if the service message will be there for the rest of the time that you have this phone and use it regularly, that's insane. That's Chinese water torture. Yeah. I mean, I would be so mad if I had some third-party battery, and this was happening to me. I also think, and yes, Tom, I don't go into my deep battery health settings all that often either. But all Apple has to do is add a little something at the top of that page saying, Apple cannot verify this information. It didn't come from us. That's all they have to do. Well, they might not be able to measure it, right? If this battery doesn't have the proper chip, right? And I think that would be fair too if you're like, look, we can't even give you an estimate because this thing isn't giving us the data we need. That would make sense to me. I could see like the first time you turn the battery or the phone on with the new battery telling me like, hey, did you know that battery wasn't put in by us? Okay, fine. But yeah, I mean, you should be able to have someone else pop a phone open and change your battery. I get that Apple might not want to warrant you in that case since they didn't do it, but they shouldn't degrade your ability to use the phone. That's ridiculous. Well, here's something else that I think is ridiculous. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's campaign posted a video on Twitter of protesters threatening the senator outside his house on Monday. So it's important for this story to be clear. The senator's staff with the senator's permission posted the video of people threatening the senator to the senator's account as a way of showing that the senator was being threatened to the senator's campaign account. Twitter has a policy against posting content containing violent threats and Twitter hid the tweet with the video and locked the team underscore Mitch account. Twitter told the Washington Post, the user was temporarily locked out of their account for a tweet that violated our violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety. Twitter says the post with the video must be removed for the account to be unlocked. Republicans have reacted by announcing an advertising boycott of Twitter and the Hill estimates the National Republican Congressional Committee spent in the five figures on Twitter this year. So that's probably not going to hurt Twitter all that much. But the publicity backlash I think is a more interesting aspect of the story, Justin. Certainly so. Look, there is a brewing sentiment amongst conservatives that social media platforms are hostile or biased to them. This is an example, something that will be held up as an example, because by and large, Mitch McConnell, for whatever you might think about him and his politics, his staff runs a fairly, you know, a risk taking Twitter friendly kind of presence. Just go ahead and Google cocaine, Mitch, if you want an idea of the kind of fun that they like to have on their Twitter account. So the fact that they were taking advantage of the platform and the audience that they had gathered to demonstrate something that everybody can agree is at the very least unpleasant, even if you do have your reasons why you would think that Mitch McConnell should be criticized. This is going to be yet another element of that case being built against Silicon Valley companies. And there's rumors that President Trump is looking to do an executive order that would address some of this. So something like this, although it is all too familiar that Twitter knee jerk pulls something or does something maybe to make things worse for them, this could have a repercussion. Taking just the fact that this is a political figure out of the equation, Twitter has a real issue with its policies across the board and has for some time, especially with, yes, posting a video with threats of violence is you say, well, that yeah, that makes sense that Twitter wouldn't want that on the platform. This has not happened to me, probably never will, because I'm not that kind of a public figure. But let's say I did exactly what Mitch McConnell's team did, and my account was suspended. And I was told that I had to take the video down in order to play in the sandbox again. That would be really upsetting to me. And I would feel that it's very unfair. Yeah, it's an example where I think we can all agree that if you're trying to expose a threat to you no matter who you are, and you think like, hey, I want to show people this is happening. That's different than I'm posting a video to encourage threats against somebody. And it's all about the context. And that's where Twitter is failing. A lot of times they do take into account context and say, well, yeah, people are saying X on Twitter, but we need to allow that kind of freedom of expression. In this particular case, they're being very literal. And I think that's where all of these social networks fall down on this. And where this becomes an issue that is not easy to solve, which is you you have too many accounts to police, you have you have too rigid of rules in place. And it's difficult to try to get people or algorithms to apply these rules in a sensible manner. Yeah, I'll say this. I've known quite a few friends that really wish that Twitter would have been so snappy when they have had violent threats made against them on Twitter platform. Like that's the one thing is like, man, they really sure did leap into action quick on that. Yeah. And and some of the, you know, other facts aside, some of it could be attributed to this being a public figure. And so there's there's more eyes on it. And it gets brought to people's attention faster. But but also that could be one of the reasons they're deciding to be more literal about it too. You can make you can make all kinds of accusations. And it's it's not the sensible thing to do. No, at least not in my estimation. At black hat right here in Las Vegas researchers from security for a firm checkpoint demonstrated an exploit of WhatsApp that would let an attacker alter text in a quoted message to change what a person appeared to write. It also lets the attacker change the name of the sender in the quote, a third flaw that tricks sender users sending a private message into sending it to a public group has been fixed. Facebook told checkpoints, Oded venue that the that the other issues could not be resolved due to infrastructure limitations. And the statement to the BBC Facebook said the scenario described here is merely the mobile equivalent of altering of altering replies in an email thread to make it look like something something a person didn't write. We need to be mindful that addressing concerns raised by these researchers could make WhatsApp less private such as strong information about the origin of messages and quote. We couldn't just change the color of the text if it gets altered or something. Well, they would have to be there would anything that allows you to prevent this would mean you would have to be seeing what the message is saying. Right. And I think it has on its side, which is like, look, if you want and encryption, it means we don't get to involve ourselves in the messages. And if somebody figured out how to hack the editor, which previously made it hard to edit a quote so that you can edit a quote, we don't they're saying we don't think that's a vulnerability. We think that's a workaround that someone is employed. And it's no different than right now, when you reply to an email, you can edit the quote reply. And so maybe people need to get used to that on what's happened. We should make that clear to everyone that that could happen. But whether that's a vulnerability or not is up for debate. I think this is a better hack than it is a story. You know, these I'm here in Vegas for the DEF CON convention. There will be plenty of people demonstrating various exploits on all things great and small. This is an interesting way that they did it. But I don't know exactly how much this affects the world. Obviously, if you're trying to post post to a private thing and it becomes public, that is something that definitely needs to be fixed and it has. But other than that, kudos to the folks who figured it out. But I don't know how much this materially affects the flat. Well, the worry is what's up in many parts of the world and most particularly, or most famously anyway, in India has been used to spread false information and rile people up. And so if you can manufacture a quote and say, look what Lenorendra Modi said, and everybody gets crazy because they're like, well, it's right there in the quote. He definitely said it. That causes problems. There's no doubt about it. Sure. So making it making people aware like, hey, just because it looks like it's quoted text doesn't mean that it's actually quoted text is important. And I think that's good to have that kind of awareness here. It is. And look, I'm glad it was pointed out. And again, it's a good hack. But I don't think anybody in India that was wreaking havoc with these like mass false information stories needed a tool like this. Could it be an arrow in their quiver? Sure. Yeah. But I don't think that they had no, they didn't need it. They didn't need the help. But if you're battling that, knowing that that is an arrow they could use is important. I guess that's what I'm saying. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You should know that this is more like email than it is like text message. Totally. At the same time, in the world we live in now, there was probably a lot less information being disseminated in the country of India via email and more on WhatsApp in the way that to quickly spread information a lot faster. So yeah, it kind of works the way email does. And everybody should be aware that text can be doctored up and you should trust the source and all that stuff. But this is a new era where social media and mobile devices are the ones that are bringing the information to a lot of folks. All right. Like the ghosts of Christmas future, we've just been showing you negative things. Can you show us a tenderness somehow, Sarah? Tom, you read my mind. My very sharp mind. In fact, early results from a study by Apple, Eli Lilly and Evidation Health found that data from an iPhone and Apple Watch and a bed at sleep monitor could differentiate patients with mild Alzheimer's disease dementia from those without symptoms. The test looked at 113 patients over the age of 60 for 12 weeks. The data then showed those with cognitive alt ailments typed slower and more irregularly on devices, used text input less overall, started regular activity later in the day, then the control group and then answered a daily one question survey later and less often. Further research and validations obviously needed to see if this can be reliably detecting mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's disease. But hey, that is something we all need to know about sooner than later. And this is a very encouraging step. Yeah. And this is a good use of data, gathering data about yourself. This could be done with other devices, other sleep monitors, other watches. But it's a great evidence that if we take data, we can do some things for good with it sometimes too. And that's what's most important about this. Obviously, they need to replicate this more. They need to see if they can figure out if what they found in this data could be used predictively. So can they identify these sorts of behaviors in people who have not been diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia and then help prevent that or help at least mitigate the symptoms of that? That's kind of the hope here. That's the next step. That has yet to be developed. But this is really a positive development in that direction. Look, we've long been keeping a lot of data on ourselves since the age of smart watches and our phones and health kit and stuff like that. And I've kind of always thought that the next step beyond us gathering the data in this quantifiable self universe is doing something with it. And I'm glad that this seems to be something that is like, oh, cool. Look, these are just undeniable patterns that now we can identify because so much of this is recorded. Or, oh, no, I seem to have dementia. Well, there's that. Yeah, knowledge is power for sure. Yeah. That, you know, I mean, that's a side conversation for another day, probably, but there is going to be continued conversations about the right not to know. If there's evidence that you have a disease that there is no treatment for, there's no way to mitigate it. Like, maybe you're better off not knowing. Huntington's disease, in particular, there have been a couple of court cases around that where a doctor was sued for telling a patient that they were at risk for something or at risk for Huntington's disease genetically when there was nothing they could do about it. So, you know, that that is that is at the other side of this question. In this case, though, because there are things you can do for Alzheimer's, and especially if they're more effective, the earlier you catch it, this is really hopeful. Absolutely. All right. One disadvantage of cutting the court is having to handle bills from multiple services. That seems to be one of the big complaints. Like, I don't have to pay all these different places. One solution to this has been aggregators. Amazon's Prime Video, Roku, Hulu, even Apple TV channels all let you combine your services into one bill. So, on Prime Video, you could say, oh, I'm going to have stars and I'm going to have a crunchy roll. I'm going to have it all here. But it's all part of my Prime bill. No big deal. That's why Apple TV created channels. And it looks like Facebook wants to get into that, too. Facebook is launching a small scale test in the US to sell subscriptions to Britbox, College Humors Dropout, Motor Trend App, and Tastemade Plus. Those are four different video services. And the prices of all four are exactly the same as if you subscribe directly from the service itself. And they range from $3 to $7 a month. Subscribers will be able to join discussion groups on Facebook to talk about recent episodes and participate in Facebook Watch parties, which led multiple users watch videos concurrently and chat in real time. So, if you do this through Facebook, you not only get the one bill, you also get a couple little Facebook special sauce thrown on your subscription. Facebook plans to launch a connected TV app for the services this autumn. They do have a Facebook Watch app out there. But I imagine they're just going to overhaul that and make it better, because right now it's pretty simplistic. And I don't think they've done much with it for the past couple of years. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, Justin, it's nice to see Facebook jump on another bandwagon, isn't it? Oh, I don't think Facebook's meant a bandwagon that they haven't wanted to hop right on. This is the most Facebook move of all time. You know, wait for there to be a trend. Figure out how Facebook can either replicate the product or jump on it. You know, they try to pay their way into the process. This seems a little bit more organic. They didn't make anybody go exclusive at the very least. But they've wanted to have more people watching video. This is a bit of a departure, though, because previously, obviously Facebook is an ad company. They sell video ads. It's part of the reason why they pushed so hard into live. It's part of the reason why they pushed so hard into original content. But this is not going to show you ads, presumably, if you are paying a subscription fee for it. So it is a little bit more of a one for one bargain, which Facebook kind of rarely is, although it is still more time spent on their platform. But yeah, I think this will fail and Facebook will forget about it within five to seven days. Although we are maybe not the right, you know, sample group for who might like this. There are a lot of folks who use Facebook more than they they don't have Roku's. They don't have Hulu subscription and Amazon Prime videos. Like they don't know where that is. But they're on Facebook a lot. The concurrent watching is something that I always wish had been done. And many companies have tried to do it. Using Twitter's API. And it's just it's it's been something where it's like, yeah, if you could do that correctly, that would be really fun. Because I'm often chatting online with friends who are not with me and it would be fun if we could be on video when we're all watching the same thing at the same time. So that it's an interesting idea to say, all right, well, not only are we everything to everyone as you know, a social network, but we're also a place that you know, you can gather on the old TV and have some fun and all your subscriptions are here and it's easy. I'm not going to use this Facebook is the last company that I'm going to have hooked up to various media apps. It's just not going to happen for me. But I know some people who might hear this and go, that sounds really cool. Yeah, I mean, I will disagree with you in a tiny way, Justin. I because because I think people are testing this. And yeah, somebody like you say Sarah is going to be like, oh, Britcox on Facebook. That's cool. That's what Facebook wants. They want a few people to use this, see how it works, gather some data, because they're never going to get Netflix on this. They're Disney's not going to put Hulu on this. And obviously Amazon's not going to add Prime Video. But the way they make it work is that they get HBO, Showtime, Star, CBS, All Access. Those are the ones that are doing this on Prime Video or on channels, etc. And they're not doing that yet. So this is in the exploratory phase. And if they decide to do it, they'll come big with those bigger names after they've made more of a case for why folks should join them for that. And then I think Sarah is right. Then I think some people who are not into this in other places might become into it on Facebook. And that that's that's when I'll start to want to judge it to see if they can get all of those big names to join them on this. I have no doubt that you're correct. But also by the time that they figured out whether or not they want to do it, they'll have found another bandwagon they want to jump on. There's never a shortage of bandwagons. And if you want to find out what the next one is, listen to Daily Tech Headlines, DailyTechHeadlines.com. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You're a great bandwagon. Keep it rolling. Submit stories and vote on others at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. Hey, if you hang out on Facebook, you might have liked our previous story and you also might like our Facebook group, Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. What's in the mailbag, Sarah? Tom, I'm glad you asked. Don wrote in on yesterday's discussion that we had about worshipping the idea that you would ship something to be able to sniff a network and possibly get some data from it. Don says, I receive creative marketing items from vendors like digital picture frames with presentations and the like. If you hit a 3G modem and surveillance devices in a working item like something like a picture frame or a cool toy, nobody would even be suspicious. A toy might sit on my desk for years. It's genius, Don. You just got around, the people will open the package issue. You don't have to send it to somebody who doesn't work there anymore. You just send one of those really crappy backup batteries. Yeah. When you plug it in and it doesn't really charge well, people are like, yeah, yeah, these things never work. They put it in a drawer. Yeah, they'll throw it in a drawer and it'll just sit there working away. It's brilliant. Well, all right. We also just figured out a way that Funko could get into this InfoSec game. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks, Don. Yes, very troubling observation. Everyone watch out for your future packages. Thanks to Justin Robert Young joining us today from the old Sin City. Justin, what's new? Well, I'll be a DEF CON. So if you are a DEF CON this weekend, come find me. I'll be at the Hack 5 booth, although I probably won't be able to talk much because I'll be working helping out the Hack 5 people. But you'll be able to see me live in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, August 27th at the Out of Bounds Comedy Festival. You can go to oobfest.com to go get your tickets. 10 bucks for not only night attack, but also two great comics, Clara Blackstone and Kai Krebs. And if that wasn't enough for you folks, if $10 for two standups and a live night attack episode on a Tuesday night in Austin, Texas doesn't do it for you. Well, friends, let me sweeten the pot, a special guest appearance from the host of Daily Tech News show, Tom Merritt himself. I'll be there. I'm looking forward to it actually. This is going to be super fun. When is that again? That is Tuesday, August 27th. You can get your tickets, $10 for all of it. It's a two and a half hour extravaganza. So head on over there, oobfest.com to get your tickets. Now, I know there's a guy in Dublin right now who's like, why can't make it to Austin for that? Fine. I'm coming to Dublin, August 17th. And there's a meetup, August 17th at 6 p.m. at Laguna. Laguna is right in front of the Mayor's Square stop on the Lewis Red Line. Laguna.ie, if you want to know where it is. So Irelanders, come and meet me. If you're in town for WorldCon, which is why I'll be there, come right on over, August 17th, 6 p.m. at Laguna. And you will find out about this stuff earlier if you join our Patreon, patreon.com.dts, all kinds of good stuff coming in there. Yesterday, we had an interview with Tanya Evans from the UNH Law School about Libra, and its legal implications today. Interview with Big Chris Ashley from SMR Podcast about this new Amazon Ring surveillance story that's been going around. Now, both those episodes will come into the main feed this weekend, but you can get them early at patreon.com.dts. Our email address to send feedback to questions, comments, or anything as feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday, 3 or 30 p.m. Eastern, 2230 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Raj Deyut and Len Peralta's back. Talk to you then.