 coming up on D T N S David Spark talks about how the security industry can benefit from more diversity. Foxconn ramps production back up to normal and a Danish robot that kills everything like like infectious diseases. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 12th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. As I mentioned, David Spark, producer of the CISO series is back with us. Welcome back, David. Good to have you back, man. It is great to be back here. And I apologize. I usually am on for the annual, you know, RSA wrap up show. And I literally RSA passed and I was like, Oh, geez, I didn't contact you guys. No problem. No problem. We were just talking to David about some of the coverage that's happening in the world around security. We were also talking about pie and fear of trains. You can get all of that in the wider show at Good Day Internet. Become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. TikTok owner ByteDance says it set a goal to increase its headcount from 60,000 to 100,000 employees by the end of the year. The company also appointed monetization head Zhang Lidong as the chairman and short video app Du Yan head Kelly Zhang, Kelly Zhang Nan, chief executive of its China business. Both will report to the company's founder and global CEO, Zhang Yiming, who will shift focus to the company's global expansion plans. A new research note from Apple analyst Ming Qi Quo predicts that the new MacBook Air and Pro models with scissor switch keyboards will arrive in Q2 of this year. In the note, Quo predicted Apple will release a MacBook with a custom processor in Q4 of this year or possibly in Q1 2021 and introduce an update design on some MacBooks in Q2 or Q3 of next year, 2021. Twitter changed its COVID-19 response policy now requiring all employees to work from home after previously recommending it. The company will continue to pay contractors and hourly wage workers to cover standard working hours during the disruption. The release of Call of Duty Warzone and its 18 to 23 gigabyte download combined with an increasing number of people working from home and using video conferencing, leading to record traffic peaks at internet exchanges Tuesday, internet exchange points or IXPs exchange traffic between ISPs and content delivery networks. DECIX in Frankfurt, Germany reported an all time high traffic peak of more than 9.1 terabits per second on Tuesday. That is one of the busiest IXPs in the world. Community IX in Austin reported record traffic as did several other European IXPs. Let's talk a little bit about Magic Leap. Bloomberg sources say that the augmented reality startup Magic Leap is exploring strategic options, including a potential sale. Other options include selling a significant stake in the company or even a partnership. Magic Leap raised $2.6 billion in venture funding. And the sources say that a sale could be worth more than $10 billion with Magic Leap reportedly courting companies such as Facebook and Johnson and Johnson. I have been skeptical. Put it this way, I thought Magic Leap was a little overhyped from the beginning. Well, they had themselves some awesome publicity right out of the gate. Absolutely. So I'm not shocked that they would sell. There's some hints in this Bloomberg article, though, David, that it relates to supply chain problems because of the virus and possibly issues because of the tariffs in making affordable hardware. That very well could be the problem. But again, those are all God willing temporary problems. And by the way, tariffs did not affect a lot of other industries out here. It may affect the manufacturing out in China. But given that like our relationships with China might have soured like I know in the commercial real estate industry, especially in California, where there's a lot of Chinese purchasing, it did not affect that at all. So going for a quick sale because of something that is a known to be a temporary issue, I don't know if I buy that. No, if you can get $10 billion for it, maybe it seems like a very high valuation. Maybe they mentioned Magic Leap was interested in Johnson and Johnson augmented reality big in the health field. Maybe they can get Magic Johnson to invest. I see what you did there. Protocol sources say the license for Google's Android TV OS prevents companies from using forked versions of Android, like Fire TV OS on other devices they make breaking the agreement would result in an OEM losing access to the Play Store, Google services, apps, etc. on all devices. This is a known issue with phones, but protocol pointing out that it is also putting a break on people adopting Fire TV as an operating system on TVs. The terms apply to all devices made by an OEM. So an Android phone maker like Samsung, for instance, could not use Fire TV OS on non phone products like a Samsung television, for instance, Google previously announced it had a deal with about six of the 10 smart TV manufacturers and 140 cable TV operators to use Android TV. Samsung is not a great example because they have their own ties in OS that they use. But other manufacturers would like to use Android and might decide to have both if they were allowed to. Europe has gotten in trouble for this or Europe has fined Google for this sort of thing before 4.34 billion euros when it found the policy was anti competitive as it related to phone manufacturing. Now Google is appealing that decision. But in the meantime, let's European economic area companies make forked smartphones and tablets as a concession. But nothing in that concession says anything about televisions. So I would expect that we will see this issue surface probably that the folks tipping off protocol that this is happening are interested in getting some regulatory examination of this in Europe or some possibly somewhere else. Yeah, you're talking before the show of well, if Google already has gotten in trouble in Europe for this and they're having to make concessions, even though it's still sort of an ongoing case as it's going to shake out eventually, you know, why, why would they try it again? And I think we were at the point Google, much like many other large companies just sort of see how long they can get away with it before enough people complain and they and they have to roll some some some strategies back. It's interesting that Amazon hasn't pushed the issue. Yeah, David. Well, I, you know, from that article, they they they talk at great length about the the how Amazon and Google have been each other's throats. And although it's being sold right now, or that looks like an old one, but that the Amazon stopped selling the Chromecast for a period of time. And there was a battle over YouTube being on the Amazon Echo show, which has finally been resolved as well. Anyway, it's it's been ongoing, but all this just screams anti competitive behavior per, you know, what you were saying in Europe. And I mean, this even harks back to what I was thinking, you know, when Internet Explorer was being distributed on PCs, and that was the default browser at the time. This is worse. This is this is if Microsoft said, if you sell a computer with Internet Explorer on it, you can't install any other browsers, which I don't know, maybe they did have that. I don't remember that you can't buy default. But then again, I guess anyone can, you know, purchase a fire stick or that or actually no, this is worse. This is you can't sell laptops with other operating systems on them, which honestly back then not a big deal. There weren't any other than Linux, you know, there weren't any tempting other operating systems. But this does put a break on fire TV and it does sort of take away the spirit of Android as an open operating system. If someone's out there bullying people into not using other operating systems based on it on the Android open source system. Completely agreed. And I'm sure this go on. But what was also described in that article is how unbelievably complicated this is. And in general, your average consumer is not going to be able to catch up with any of this. They're not going to notice. Yeah, because they just won't see the options on the shelf. Moving on to killer robots, although, you know, depends on what you're killing. Maybe not so dangerous. Denmark's UVD robots makes rolling autonomous robots with UV lights that have been operating in Chinese medical facilities for the past few weeks. This is how it works. UVD robots use ultraviolet sea light to shred the DNA and RNA of any micro organism. UVC light can be dangerous to humans and human operators of lights may miss spots where robots are less likely to. So they really come in handy in this case. The robots have light are among with the UV lamps. A human drives it around wants to create additional maps so the robot knows what the what the scene is, then annotates the spots on the map that the robot should clean. The robot can then automatically leave its charging station, go clean up a stuff, shut off lights if it detects a person. And once it's done cleaning, return to its charging station takes about 10 to 15 minutes to disinfect each room killing 99.99 percent of germs. The company is shipping robots by air freight to China every week and hundreds of them are in tests in more than 40 countries. Now, each robot costs 80 to $90,000. Yeah, we were kind of all impressed at, you know, for hospital equipment, how affordable this is. And a good thing to have because secondary infections in hospitalization are a big problem and the ability to keep things clean. And, you know, 99.99 is not all the germs, but it's an improvement in a lot of cases over what's there. You know, I interviewed years ago, the CEO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, and he was one of the first CEOs that I know of of a hospital to start just blogging regularly. And he publicly disclosed their central line infection rates without discussing this with his lawyers. And his lawyers got a little upset. But because of his brutal level of honesty on that subject, he kind of became a rock star in the industry as a result. Anyway, but then he it created a type of internal pressure as well of, oh, we need to fix this. And they did improve things. And then he published the better results. Foxconn founder Terry Gu Tai Ming said Thursday that resumption of production at factories in China has exceeded expectations, saying supplies to its plants in China and Vietnam have returned to normal. Foxconn's concern has now shifted from production to demand. Is there enough demand? Are we going to see weakening demand in the United States, Europe, etc. Based on on virus effects? That is the impact Foxconn is concerned with as well as some supply chain issues arising from Korea and Japan regarding getting enough RAM and display panels to assemble the devices. Meanwhile, Nikkei Asian Review notes that stocks of iPads are running low in China as families buy them for help with e-learning at home in response to school closures. Nikkei's source says Apple has ordered a 20% increase in iPad production as a result. And some Huawei tablets are limited to one purchase per person as supplies of those are also dwindling. Yeah, interesting to see, you know, as we continue to monitor the whole idea of people being home a lot more and how that's affecting the world really, the whole idea of, well, kids not in school need more tablets. That that makes a lot of sense, but the numbers are interesting. I'm glad to see Foxconn back up to speed. This is this is three months in, you know, from the from the outbreak in China and not that, you know, past performance is a guarantee of future, future performance. But this is this is good news and it means that a lot of this production that people are worried about is coming back. It's an indicator of that. So, you know, it's it's good to see some some positive news out of this. David, what do you make of all this? You know, people getting back to work. Of course, it's positive news, especially what the rest of us are all this and sort of not stopping work, but I have greatly altered our life plans. And actually, what am I saying? Many people's lives have stopped. I mean, it's it's a bizarre, weird time. So anytime we can see something positive coming from someone who had to halt production where it's it's a light at the end of our tunnel now. And like you say, Sarah, that tablet demand in China is shows sort of that the the unexpected, the unanticipated consequences of this, we're in uncharted territory. We don't know where the demand is going to ebb and flow because we've we've never been in anything quite like this before. So that's that's an interesting example of the kind of thing to be on the lookout for. It's interesting to the temporary spikes that certain industries are seeing and then the lack of demand that other industries are seeing, you know, depending on what you're talking about, right? It's like there are things that are sold out in grocery stores right now, iPads and other tablets that that make use of certainly classroom stuff, but all sorts of things that that that just make it more convenient because you're not out and about. You're not going to the office, that sort of thing. It's it's these temporary spikes where companies might say, oh, gosh, now we have to ramp up real quick. But but knowing that this might be pretty temporary. But again, temporary short term is a very subjective term right now because we don't we just don't know. Is this, you know, you say sort of like, OK, you got to plan for the next couple quarters next couple weeks next year. I mean, it just happened with me. I mean, I just landed another sponsor and they honestly said, oh, well, we're not doing many live events coming up. So I've got all this budget that we spend on live events. We're going to now advertise on your podcast. And I was like, well, that's fortuitous to me. It's unfortunate, but yeah, right? And it's the sort of thing that you don't want to get too used to, right? Because, you know, when things go back to normal, you know, we literally act how they describe why they all and you know, they just came out of nowhere. It's like, oh, we want to sponsor like out of the blue. Yeah, no, the resources are going to go in different areas. Not all resources will go away. Some will be down and delayed. Absolutely. There will be shortages, but it's interesting to think of that as we're recording this right now, the NCA just announced they're canceling the March tournament. Disneyland just finally announced that they're closing. More of these public events here in the United States are being temporarily delayed, shut down Major League Baseball, the NHL, the NBA. So there is going to be a demand for entertainment in other areas for people who are working from home or quarantined and can't spend the money that they would normally spend on these other events. It'll be interesting to see how that all affects technology. Well, speaking of maybe being stuck inside and wanting to be entertained, Blade announced its cloud gaming service Shadow will launch a VR exploration program, which is a closed beta for VR gaming on April 1st. Signups began March 13th with a second round on March 24th. The program is only compatible with the Oculus Quest, at least currently, and Shadow recommends a fiber connection with 100 megabits down and at least 20 megabits up, a ping under 15 milliseconds and 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi router. Shadow also introduced its new pricing tiers to the U.S., which start at $11.99 per month for a 12 month 4K gaming subscription, with more powerful plans coming later this year. LG also announced a partnership with Blade to offer Shadow on some of its products. This is a good move by Blade. Shadow, I think you could easily dismiss as, you know, the problem of the first mover advantage. Yes, they had a very compelling, very powerful cloud platform. Patrick Beja has been great about keeping us up to date on what it does. But instead of falling as Stadia, GeForce Now, Project XCloud come along, they're working hard to say, we want to stay ahead of the game. We're going to provide virtual reality because what we do is offer you a powerful computer in the cloud, and that powerful computer can run a VR headset. So if you've got a Quest, plug it in, and we can power it in the cloud. If you, you know, and if you want to do 4K gaming, we can do that. Partnering with LG to say, like, let's just build it into televisions. Let's just build it into other devices and phones. I think this is, this is smart and it shows that I'm not saying Shadow will win this war, but they are, they're definitely not going to, to just fade away. And nobody, nobody plays any video games, do they? You know, here's, well, let me, let me just back up a little bit because, you know, the first time we saw virtual reality was, you know, sticking the damn phone to our head, which was the most bizarre thing. But let me ask both of you, what is the longest you put a virtual reality headset on your head for? Like, what's the longest duration you've done? I mean, I'm the wrong person to ask. Well, throwing Roger, Roger, what was the longest you've done? You're more of a gamer than any of us, I think. Um, I have used it all of once, twice. And that was with the original Oculus back in the day when, when we had one in the, at the Revision 3 lab. So, but like, how long did it stay on your head? So you used it twice, so that's not really... Yeah, I mean, like 15, 20 minutes? I mean, there was no real games at the time. There was just a lot of demos. So I mean, there wasn't too much meandering about it for me. Anyways, VR is going to need it to kill our app, like everything, like everything. Well, yeah, that's still, that's still true. But I'm not trying to say VR will save shadow, but they are, they are definitely distinguishing themselves by offering things that are out there. People like the quest. People use the quest. And so this is, this is not the killer app for shadow, but it's another thing that they will be doing that other services aren't yet. In fact, a lot of those other services way slower. Right now, there's no restrictions on shadow as far as what you can play, unlike GeForce Now. It's a, it's a much more powerful system than Stadia, at least at the moment because it's offering you control over an actual computer. I mean, you can run office on this thing. You can run video editing absolutely on this thing if you want. So I think it's interesting to keep an eye on for sure. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. On Thursday, Australia's CyberCX, which is a recent merger of 12 top security brands there announced it's going to fund 12 scholarships to support women who enroll in university or what they call TAFE, Technical and Further Education for cybersecurity programs. CyberCX also partnering with the Australian Women's Security Network, the Australian Women and Security Awards. We see the Lowy Institute calling for more review about diversity in the security industry, noting the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence releases an annual demographic report here in the U.S. that examines the hiring and retention of minorities, women, and persons with disabilities across the entire 17 agency intelligence community in the U.S. These are just examples from today of how the security industry is paying attention to diversity, but I know, David, there's been some folks who say that diversity can be an impediment. What do you get if you pursue diversity and security? Why is it needed? So there's diversity in people and there's diversity in thought, and I'm quoting my co-host from our show Defense in Depth, Alan Alford, who said that the key thing is diversity in thought and you usually get diversity in thought when you go diversity in people because people who are from diverse backgrounds have diverse experiences and the whole thing with cybersecurity is to be able to look at problems and issues from different angles. If everyone comes from the same place, the same background, the same experiences, you do not get that and therefore you don't become quote secure. You're not looking at the gamut of possibilities that can happen. You're only looking at a sector and that's, that I would say is at the most basic level, the main argument for the need for diversity in cybersecurity. So how do you build a diverse team then? How do you get how do you get the right team that's actually really good at this but also bringing in those benefits? So one of the the major arguments I heard is you have to start building your diverse team from day one because non-diversity sort of feeds on itself and we kind of know this whenever we do hiring like you hire that one person and to then hire the second person you ask that one person who do you know who would be good? Well, the majority of us kind of hang out with people that are from kind of our same backgrounds in general. I know this is I'm highly generalizing don't but that often is the case because we we usually connect with people who are like-minded with us. So what happens if you do that then there's that kind of like a snowball effect you just start hiring the same kind of person over time. So the big the best argument I've heard is if you want to hire diverse talent you start now when you building I guess your network your connections your relations when you're not hiring. This is just kind of like a general good networking advice you know like you know how do you find your next job network well do it when you don't need your next job same exact concept when you're in hiring so on the flip side of that you know I think that oh go ahead no no go ahead sir okay as the token woman on the show today I I feel lucky enough to yeah when I when I think about women in security it's like oh wow I can rattle off lots of really awesome women who are security experts that we work with regularly I know that that is a novelty for a lot of other people so when I see something like this I go great more the Marrior you know anything that is more inclusive not only for my gender but minorities anybody with a disability anybody who feels you know on the fringes of what is historically yeah I gotta have a white male type of a thing and and and very much you know kind of at times a real secret club type of a thing and and honestly and we've all seen this in in certain cases there is some animosity towards you sort of like that that kind of idea of like the newcomer and this sort of oh we gotta be politically correct and you know have everybody right you know everybody's gotta be representative from something at the very beginning but David I agree with you I I agree that when you when you're building a team of any kind the sooner that you get on board with diversity the better because it's much harder to add people in later yes and but more importantly than that and and and this is where you you kind of get the beginning when you reference oh I'm the token woman on the show kind of a thing if you let's say you you build this awesome team that's not diverse and like oh crap I need to hire diversity how do you think the those each additional people are going to feel about joining your team you know they're going to be not so quote comfortable about that because all of a sudden they're the token something else as opposed to an all white male team so one of the huge benefits if you start early then you don't deal with that problem later on but also something you said earlier too Sarah is sometimes the security industry is not welcoming and that really pushes people away so and we talk about this endlessly about the desire to be more welcoming to help people in and I will just say this and people who are in cybersecurity who are listening right now the cybersecurity world is filled with a lot of great people and a lot of jerks at the same time like in anything but there's there seems to be an enormous proportion of those as well well we don't think anybody who contributes subreddit is a jerk in fact we want you to contribute to our DNS subreddit you can submit stories you can also vote on other stories that are in there that you think are important that we should know about dailytechnewshow.reddit.com all right let's check in with Nate Langston to see why a pig a pedometer and a barn fire y'all feature prominently on the next text message episode guys one of the things we talked a lot about on this week's show involved a pig a pedometer and what happens when the aforementioned pig swallows the aforementioned pedometer it turns out the answer is it mixes with the animals excrement and causes a barn to burn down so we talked about that the house the wise and also what other kinds of technology are used on British farms so that's all out now at uktechshow.com it's a barn burner of an episode there all right let's dive into the mailbag let's do it Todd wrote in response to our conversation yesterday about Amazon powering the back end of these cashier stores especially in airports Todd says decades ago I was a cashier at an airport gift shop during peak transit times it wasn't uncommon for me to have a line of 15 or more people waiting to check out and I was working as fast as possible to crank through at a rate of two to three people per minute if their transactions were simple enough being able to walk in grab something and just leave would be a huge benefit to those on a tight connection and yes that would also alleviate the embarrassment of buying certain items I can't really think of anything I was embarrassed to buy at an airport but it does just it just makes it more of a a seamless situation do they still sell pornography at airports I don't even know I don't know that's not something for a friend David yeah I've never thought to look David pornographic magazines at airports being sold the question is who needs to take care of themselves on a flight I don't know I well and also you know it really depends on who's sitting next to you you know even if you have it like you can like just open it up and you know just be like well if you want to sit next to me I'll be reading flavor other examples of embarrassing items that we could think of too if someone was buying some kind of medicine you know right and they just felt self-conscious about the fact that's like yeah yeah I've got diarrhea sorry I gotta buy this though totally that sort of thing too but yeah I I I'm very very curious once this is in place in Newark if anybody's flying through Newark or once it gets into La Guardia or elsewhere if you get a chance to try this out let us know how it works what you see people buying I'm very curious about them bringing this Amazon cashier list just walk out technology to airport convenience stores me too I mentioned yesterday that some of my best friends are cashiers and Todd you are now my best friend that's great shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Tim deputy Kevin S. Morgan and Dan Dorado Hankins also thanks to David spark David it's been too long where can people keep up with what you've been doing since we saw you last well the big thing is CISOseries.com that I do two podcasts like you guys do podcast mine are not video but these CISO security vendor relationship podcast which is our most popular one and then we do defense in depth and we've been doing a lot of live shows it just got back from shows in Tel Aviv New York and Boston and well it doesn't look like they're going to be doing a lot of live shows coming up in fact we just had to postpone a bunch of them but there will be more coming up but I would also throw out to the audience given all our concern around coronavirus COVID-19 on Friday we're doing a live video chat that means it's a it's an open discussion anyone who wants to participate we do that on Crowdcast you can find the link to that on CISOseries.com that's going to be tomorrow Friday 10 a.m. Pacific time Excellent folks there's one way to directly support the show it's the best way to support the show and that's to become a member of our Patreon our Patreon allows us to cut out the middleman and make sure that we are responding only to the people who want the show to succeed the people who listen to the show who get value out of the show so we're very thankful to everybody who supports us on Patreon and if you have thought about it before and thought I don't know if I want to or if I have time two bucks a month is the first entry in that's barely even a cup of coffee The last set of price of coffee The only two of price of coffee it's less than a price of coffee You'll still have money for coffee and support the show so go check it out Patreon.com slash DTNS Man what I wouldn't do to get a two dollar coffee these days I know it's getting right Yeah that's been a while our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we are also live Monday through Friday that's 4 30 p.m. Eastern time 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Rob Dunwood and Len Peralta talk to you then this show is part of the Frog Pants Network get more at frogpants.com Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program