 Coming up on DTNS, Solar Power greens the desert for one crop. The most popular Twitch streams are not games. An augmented reality and Unreal Engine fill stadium seats, but do we like it? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, July 27th, 2020 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, tech contributor to WGBH Boston Public Radio, Andy Inato. Welcome, Andy. Hi, I feel very welcome. Thank you. Oh, it's so good to have you. We were just talking with Andy about ordering pizzas and toggle switches, but not from the same place. If you want to get that wider conversation, you got to get our Good Day Internet show. Become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Garmin confirmed reports that its five-day outage was caused by a ransomware attack that encrypted some of its systems. The company also began restoring limited functionality to Garmin Connect. Can now display activity details and uploads, registered devices, show the dashboard, produce reports, and segments. Now, on Garmin Strava service, Strava Beacon integration is working, but segments and routes and uploaded activities can only be queued to sync. Garmin said there is no indication that customer data was accessed, lost, or stolen. Axios sources say Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apples Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg will now testify before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee in a rescheduled session. It was going to happen today, but they have moved it now to July 29th officially. Last month, India banned 59 Chinese smartphone apps, including TikTok. India today's sources now say an additional 47 apps have been banned, mostly clones of the already banned apps that would let Indian users still access the services such as TikTok Lite. The Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is also reportedly reviewing over 250 Chinese apps for any user privacy or national security violations, including the popular game P-U-B-G. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google will extend its work from home policy until at least July 2021. This extends Google's roughly 200,000 full-time and contract employees in its major office in Mountain View as well as other offices across the world, US, UK, India, and Brazil. Google has partially reopened some smaller offices in countries relatively unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic, including in Australia, Greece, and Thailand. Samsung published a trailer for its virtual unpacked event, which is scheduled for August 5th. The video featured the silhouettes of five devices which appear to be the Galaxy Tab S7, Galaxy Buds Live, Galaxy Watch 3, a new Galaxy Fold, and the Galaxy Note 20. Qualcomm announced Quick Charge 5, which it claims is 70% faster than Quick Charge 4 and supports 100W smartphone charging. The new charging tech uses 12 separate voltage current and temperature protections and runs 10 degrees Celsius cooler than Quick Charge 4. Quick Charge 5 cables will be backward compatible with the earlier versions, and it supports USB power delivery and, of course, USB Type-C. The Consumer Technology Association launched the Public Health Tech Initiative. This working group includes Microsoft, Facebook, PhilipsVS Health, and Northwell Health, and will look at how technology has been deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group plans to introduce a white paper with initial findings with an ultimate goal of creating recommendations for policymakers to prepare for future public health emergencies. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about election security, shall we, Sarah? Oh, let's. The research firm Area One Security published a new report looking at how vulnerable email systems used by county and local elections officials were to phishing. Surveying more than 10,000 officials, the report found that 53% only implemented rudimentary or non-standard anti-phishing technologies, with 28% implementing basic measures like those from a cloud provider's email controls. And 6% using advanced controls like an independent email security service. Additionally, 5.4% of those surveyed officials used personal email addresses to conduct election-related business. Six jurisdictions across New Hampshire, Maine, Missouri, and Michigan were also using unpatched versions of the open-source ExSim email service. The National Security Agency, rather warned in May that unpatched ExSim installs were being exploited by foreign intelligence agencies. The researchers note that email systems aren't connected to systems that count votes, however. That's good. Also, you know, that there are some anti-phishing technologies being implemented. That's also good, I guess. I don't think we should take this to mean, you know, that the catastrophe is coming necessarily, but Andy, it does seem like you might want to check in with your local elected officials and find out where they are. Yeah, treat them like they're that one relative that is always asking you what the Wi-Fi password is, because it's always a good idea to read back the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the Russian interference. There were five volumes, and one of them was all about election interference, and they really did demonstrate categorically that for the 2016 election, Russians were not necessarily tampering with elections, but they were very, very carefully mapping and monitoring exactly what the network of interdependencies was. It's not beyond the pale to imagine that if they really did want to interfere directly with the election, they would know if we just screw up these eight email accounts and make sure that these four people in this region can't talk to each other, that's going to help. And if nothing else, the other thing that the committee was quite insistent upon is that the way that that government was going to describe a win is not necessarily to swing the election one way or another, but to simply disrupt it, simply throw sand inside the gears. If all they do is make sure that two weeks after either A, a somewhat close election, or B, an election that does not go the way that a certain person who is used to getting his way gets enough evidence to be put into place to make everybody question whether or not everything happened above board, whether there needs to be a recount, whether there needs to be appeals. So this is basically, we don't have the sort of wiggle room here to have open email accounts. We don't have the sort of wiggle room where people don't know, hey, if there's a failure to communicate with the person A, is there a backup system? Is there a communication for someone to go to system B? It's a warning, not a scare moment, but it's something that we're just going to have to be aware of until three months after the election. Yeah, I forget whether any particular organization is backed by the Russian government, the Chinese government or anything. You don't want or any organization, domestic or foreign, to be able to mess with elections. So I agree with you, Andy. This should be taken as a public service message, not a scare tactic. This is saying, hey, this is how good we are now. We could definitely be better. So put some pressure on your local officials to make sure they tighten things up. Bloomberg sources claim and Twitter has confirmed that more than 1500 people have access to admin tools that can reset Twitter accounts, review security breaches and respond to content violations. Those tools are the ones that were used in the recent attack. They can access phone numbers, email addresses, even IP addresses. And of course you can use an IP address to maybe estimate location. The 1500 people include Twitter employees, but also employees of companies, Twitter contracts to provide customer service. Bloomberg sources, which are made up of four former Twitter employees and several contractors claim that in 2017 and 2018, some contractors made a game of creating bogus help desk inquiries to justify accessing celebrity accounts, including Beyonce. Some contractors were caught and fired, but not all. In a statement, Twitter said, we have no indication that the partners we work with on these accounts played a part in the recent attack. Twitter told Bloomberg that personnel only have access to tools they require for the job. 1500 employees would average to about 124,000 Twitter accounts per customer service person. Oh man. You kind of chuckle and say, you know, you're going to try to access Beyonce's personal information. Of course you're going to get caught and fired. That's so silly. But if you have enough people who have access to things that feel very special, that a lot of other people would want to have access to, you're going to get some bad actors. And a lot of the, you know, Twitter isn't going to have all these people under its wing. It's going to use contractors. So the idea that you've got all these people and people go, well, that's too many people who have access to this stuff. Most of this stuff is all tools to do the right thing to, again, cut down on content violations and review security breaches and reset Twitter accounts if and when that is necessary. I mean, a lot of this stuff is, you do need a lot of people to be able to do this. You can't all do it with algorithms and robots. But yeah, they seem like two different situations. You know, breaching and a bunch of people having access to certain information does not mean that the people who have access to the information are, you know, led to the breach. It's almost more scary to me, though, because we all have seen incidents in which a company took their security very, very seriously. It just wasn't good enough to stand up to whatever assault was being laid against it. When you have a situation that seems so fixable and so obvious, such as someone who has access to the ability to deactivate, reactivate, change the email address, look at the DMs of any account on Twitter. It seems as though that when you give this person that magic sword, there is a countdown clock on the magic sword and it burns out after time. And you have the ability to say that this person has absolutely no business having access to this tool. And you have ways to monitor that and make sure that their access is terminated as soon as they are no longer have a responsible way reason to be part of that. You'd be using that tool. So it's amazing to me that we're saying that 1500 people have access to that kind of power and they can't yet tell us how many of those people are trustworthy people inside Twitter and how many people just simply forgot to click on the magic sword. They can't click a certain button during their outboarding process when they lift the company. It was my understanding that these are 1500 people who do need access to this tool, that they are all customer service employees. Is that not the case? There's 1500 people include Twitter employees as well as employees of companies, Twitter contracts. It's named in the Bloomberg article that there's a customer service contractor that is part of that. It's not just employees because that's how it works. If you contract somebody to do your customer service, you've got to get access to the tools. Didn't Motherboards say that one of the hackers that they were talking to said that they had paid off somebody inside of Twitter? That has yet to be confirmed. Twitter has not said anything about it. I'll be honest, I'm a little doubtful because that was an attacker claiming it, which is a great way to get some attention. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. We just don't know. Well, game streaming on the rise. A new report on game streaming from Stream Elements and the streaming analytics firm Arsenal show that Twitch streaming in Q2 grew 56% from Q1, peaking at 1.8 billion hours watched in April and surpassing 5 billion hours in the entire quarter. In June streaming hours watched on Twitch increased 60%. Now Facebook gaming saw streaming in June up 200% on the year to 334 million hours. So well behind Twitch, but obviously a huge increase for the gaming part of Facebook. In Q2 Facebook streaming was up 75% over Q1. The report also found that the top four Twitch streamers and top 10 on Facebook gaming come from outside the US. The most popular content on Twitch for the quarter wasn't actually a game, but people in the just chatting category up 94% from Q1. The top three actual games in Q2 were League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Fortnite. Twitch's travel and outdoors category also rose 183% from January to June as people yearned to see some nature. If I were Twitch, I would be championing that fact that just chatting is up so much because they're trying to expand beyond just having games watched. Obviously that's super important for them and still really popular, but we're just chatting on Twitch as we record the show, right? They want to have more of that because that's more diversity to hedge against any one thing getting less popular. I was reading the report now, but when they say just chatting, were they talking about chatting between the community of fans of a certain Twitch streamer and the streamer himself, or is it being able to create groups amongst themselves? Because that would be super significant. It would also because not only would it mean that it's significant that this is a good social, good safe place that people feel as though our communities are there. This is where I'm going to meet our people and talk to each other. But it would also mean that Twitch would not be dependent on Twitch superstars to maintain those kind of communities. You can't moderate content if you're not fearless about saying, OK, don't care if you were responsible for 5.8% of our revenue last quarter, you're gone. Yeah, I think it is mostly a streamer on video just chatting with the audience. But there's a lot of those. So, you know, your point still holds that as you get more and more people on the platform, smaller communities can form. So I think that that could be a positive. Also, not surprised to see that people want to watch nature, right? Yeah. I wouldn't think of Twitch for that content, but I don't really know. I guess YouTube would be the first place that I would look. So I mean, it's fair enough opponent, competitor. But yeah, I mean, Twitch is clearly trying to branch out of gaming, even though that is the bread and butter still. And that's where the lion's share of viewership is coming from. But making deals with musicians. You know, the just chatting category, which is a lot of, you know, more and more kind of the podcasting folks like us who are using Twitch because it's a great platform to do stuff like this. And then both Facebook and Twitch are both sensing the huge vulnerability that YouTube is suffering as creators are the mid-tier creators are more and more fit up with policies that seem to be arbitrarily focused. Draconian takedowns, Draconian de-platforming and demonetizations where it feels as though I'm going to spend, why am I going to spend two or three years trying to build up a community in an audience only to have this random monster corporation have the ability to simply cut my purse strings immediately and give me no recourse after that. So the fact that if all they can do is say that we will promise to be a poke in the eye with a much blunter stick. In terms of controlling our platform for you and Twitch and Facebook and basically steal a whole bunch of people away from YouTube. And that's good for viewers and good for streamers, right? Because there's more choices. And hopefully good for YouTube if they learn their lesson and say, you know what, this is not working for us. And also to say nothing of the fact that when you have the highest volume, the highest most popular personalities, they can actually be hired away. So even though they're not, they don't belong to YouTube corporate structure, they can just really say, hey, Twitch, what do you offer me to take my entire audience away from YouTube and towards you? Something Twitch has also learned can happen to them recently as well. The BBC's Justin Rowlett has a story about an industry that has adopted widespread use of solar power to reduce costs and increase productivity. This is an agricultural industry that has been seeing increasing crop yields from small entrepreneurs as solar power allows it to place groundwater pumps in more areas. That allows irrigation and planting in places that previously couldn't use that. Essentially, if you drill 100 meters down to groundwater, you can then pump it into a reservoir by attaching solar panels to an electric pump. And the whole setup costs around $5,000, which, you know, not nothing, especially if you're a very small entrepreneur, but will pay for itself over time. Cultivation in one area has grown from 157,000 hectares in 2012 to an estimated 344,000 hectares in 2019. The industry I'm talking about is opium growing and the entrepreneurs are in Afghanistan's Helmand province. The panels first began appearing in Afghanistan in 2013. By 2019, 67,000 solar arrays have been counted in Helmand province alone. The evidence comes from satellite images analyzed by a company called ALSIS. They have increasingly found areas that were just desert before, now show green fields, water reservoirs, and arrays of solar panels. I don't want to make light out of this, but if we're focusing simply on this one report, this one article, they're basically greening deserts and also creating good models for solar power. Absolutely. Also, given the international drug trade, that means that more panels are going to be manufactured, which means that yields are going to go up for panels, prices are going to come down. Again, that's strictly from a very, very specific point of view. That's these are good things. It's also good that, guess who actually pointed this out to everybody. A satellite company that can simply say, oh, look. So the next time that your community... Would you like us to find the next great region for you? Yeah. That's what we do. One of the people they talked about in this story started growing opium and now grows tomatoes. That's what flipped the switch in my head was, okay, yes, this is Afghanistan, this is opium, this is a troubled area and not a positive crop that we don't want growing. But if you get past that, Andy, like you said, this is great. This is a template that people could use for legitimate crops that can help people in so many areas, in rural areas, in drying areas. I was thinking of all kinds of places in sub-Saharan Africa that could use this. It could be a huge boon to take the model and apply it to things that aren't opium. Yeah, particularly when it comes to irrigation. Yeah, yeah, because you can take an area that just has no way to get the water other than digging and say, oh, but if we dig, we can pump it with the self-sustaining solar. I mean, deserts usually have lots of sun, so that's... Well, and I'm not totally up on how much opium is going for these days and how that crop might be more lucrative than, let's say, a tomato crop. But I would imagine that at least some fraction of people who would be growing crops that have to do with the international drug trade, if presented with the solar capability to grow something else, would. Yeah, and the people who are growing this in Helmand are driving out the people who have the dirty diesel generators that are really expensive to keep running, too. Yeah, and part of the crop here is simple information and simple experience, so that there are going to be always people that maybe don't want to be part of the international drug trade. But now there is general knowledge of here is how you turn land that is not farmable and turn it into farmable land, and here is how you take, if you have no source of water, here is how you create water for your community, and here's how you create energy for your community. And so where it's hopefully not focusing on the negative side of it's helping more opium being put onto the market. But again, I think the drug trade comes and goes from communities, hopefully. But the knowledge that they leave behind about here's how to take a resource that's not working out for community and turn it into a working resource is a good source of optimism. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. So as we mentioned last week, a lot of sports, including baseball, have been piping in crowd noise, much of it from video games. But this weekend, Fox went the extra mile and added fans to the stands, sort of. Four cameras, your high home field, your center field, your high first base, and your high third base cameras. So big wide shots showed virtual fans in the stands rather than a big empty stadium. Crowds themselves are built in Unreal Engine by a company called Silver Spoon Animation. Augmented reality software from a company called Pixotope is used to then add those crowds that were created in Unreal to the stands. And a company called Sports Media Technology, or SMT, who you may not realize are also the people who put the virtual yellow line in on U.S. football broadcasts, handles the camera tracking because they're good at that kind of thing so that the people stay in the seats during a live broadcast where the camera's panning around and moving. Producers of the broadcast can adjust how full the stands are, thinning it out in the eighth during a Dodger game, for instance. A tire can be adjusted to be weather appropriate, home and away colors can be adjusted to kind of mix it up. I did watch, I think all three of us, watch some games that were using it this weekend. Andy, we'll start with you. How did you feel about the virtual fans? It was nothing but a distraction, frankly, because my opinion on a lot of these sort of things is that show me what's really happening, show me what's really going on. I will adapt just fine if it's absolutely real. If you're going to fake it, you have to fake it perfectly or else I'll be thinking about nothing of, gee, how come nobody chose to sit in the first 20 rows of the stands? Because of the way the shots are set up, they really can't composite fake people behind the actual picture in the battery so they had to leave those empty. And you have a crowd that looks okay if they were in the crowd of NBA 2K or something like that. When you're used to, there's subtle dynamics about how crowds work that just makes it not work. So there's already, I don't like it for that reason, but the other reason is that, you know what, this is a test for that. At some point, hopefully they'll be able to actually have regular people coming back into the stadiums. And don't you want to, once you have an owner who says it really looks bad that we're the San Diego Padres and we're barely selling half of these seats, we need to fill more of these things. Or you have people who already have teams that are trying to deal with complaints that, oh, the games are too long or too boring. Well, you'll have a person in the truck whose whole job it is to make sure the crowd noise is like, oh my God, I can't believe this big pitcher's duel that's going on right now. I'm so excited, I can't even hold in my pee. It's nothing to do with the cheap pee or anything like that. It's just problematic. I feel as though it's completely unnecessary. And for the next year, for the next two years, for the next three years, every time you see a big crowd at a baseball game, you're going to have cause to wonder how much of this is real people, how much of this are just animatronics. Yeah, I'm with you mostly, Andy. I get why the crowd and the energy of a crowd not only hypes up the team members, but it hypes up the people watching from home. Yeah, me as a San Francisco Giants fan, if I really like the Giants and they're playing, I don't know, some team that's like, I don't know. There's a big difference between the two teams as far as stand-ins go. You might get a mostly empty stadium here and there. And if I like the game, I don't really care about that. I might note, not a lot of people are out at the stadium today, but it doesn't affect my love of the game. But when you get a packed stadium and everybody's going crazy and the crowd noise is bleeding into it, the announcers and all that stuff, you're kind of like, oh, this is exciting because everybody's there and they're like pumped. And I kind of wish I was there too. And so that's sort of the fun of watching the game in a televised way for me. So yeah, knowing that it's all just phony is like, I get it. And maybe psychologically it is helping some people, but it is distracting at the same time. Yeah, the crowd noise stuff, and I'm with you on the slippery slope aspect of all of this, Andy, the crowd noise I liked because I watched some of those summer camp games without it. And it just felt really different. I also watched some of the Korean baseball games without any crowd noise piped in before they started allowing the crowds back, which they have now. And I noticed it. So having the crowd noise pumped in just gives it one less thing for me to think about. I'm like, oh, how different this is. And I'm sure I would have got used to it eventually, right? So the crowd noise, I know it bothers some people, it didn't bother me, but those shots when there were suddenly people in the stands and there hadn't been moments ago in another shot, I found that to be just that didn't help me feel like it was a normal game. Jump cut or something. They're there. I mean, there are a couple of things. I remember they had actually had to look it up to get the date, but the game in 2015 between the White Sox and the Orioles had been canceled because I think there was some sort of a bomb threat. And then so they replayed they replayed the game, but they didn't have a crowd in there just in case the threat was real. And so it's still like one of the most wonderful baseball games I've ever watched because it's like there is no I wouldn't want to hear no crowd for the for the rest of my life. But it was interesting to see a professional baseball game played where one of the one of the one of the announcers still one of the funniest things I've probably heard on TV in 2015 was again, he went into like a golfer tone because he didn't want to scare the guy. And Walton settles in for that catch and he catches it, bringing him one step closer to that green jacket. But Microsoft has a different plan for the NBA that they talked about a few days ago, which I think is kind of a nice sort of happy medium between the two where they're not going to fill the seats with fake people. What they're going to do is they're going to direct really tall 17 foot tall LED screens around three three sides of the court and using Microsoft teams. Shack technology basically actual fans can be like in these screens and part of the they've added a new feature just for regular chat so that you don't have to be like you know like me sitting behind sitting in front of a screen. They'll basically cut people out. And so to make them look like they're sitting at the same table. That's and also they mentioned things like well we'll also do things like the more like certain fans tweet a certain hashtag. The louder we'll make their crowd noise at this moment, which is interesting. I mean it's I think it's a better solution. I tried the MLB app with that during one of the games and I just felt disconnected because what I was doing didn't really match up with what was happening. So at least I mean it's a good time for experimentation. Yeah, it's impressive that they could do this stuff right using a real engine augmented reality able to put that like the technology behind it is great. Well, you may have some thoughts about sports you may not anybody whether you want to talk about sports or not can join our discord and you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check the mailbag real quick. Well we've mentioned that we were talking to Andy on GDI before the show about pizza and on Friday we were talking about animals and Tom you had mentioned that your dog Ray had tree to a possum meaning chase to possum up the tree. And Barry from Jeffrey New Hampshire wrote it and said well my Alaskan Malamute Jack two weeks ago, treat our neighborhood black bear Bruno Bruno tried to come down three times Jack kept chasing him back up the tree. On the fourth try Bruno made it down and Jack jumped on top of him. They wrestled for a couple of minutes then stopped Bruno got up and walked off in one direction. Jack calmly walked over to me in the other direction and we headed for home. I was standing about five feet away from the action trying to get Jack to stop what was I thinking. Barry also says PS Bruno the bear is on all fours at about four to five feet tall. Jack is a big dog he weighs 130 pounds but still only quarter the size of Bruno. Wow that that story could have ended up very differently and I'm glad it didn't but good boy. Well I mean and I think that I also my my congratulations and admiration to Barry for asking that question like what was he thinking because this is this is something we see way too often from now. If he is putatively the referee of this match he should have considered that once that bear is treat and definitively treat that's like a three second pin he should have called the match at that point. Rather than let this thing go on and on and let one of these two fighters be hurt. Now I don't know if they're going to be sanctions if he's going to be allowed to do another title bout like that. But I really do think that this is the sort of thing that's ruining the sport for me now it leads a longer more bloodier matches but I'm really there for the sportsmanship you know for the for the for the silent art so to speak. And so Barry I hope you learn from this I hope you again go back to referee school do some thinking about and I hope you do come back wiser for the experience. I do commend them for not putting any fake bears in the audience. That's right that's right just just just good old New Hampshire bear and dog. I shout out to patrons that are master and grandmaster levels including Justin Zellers Tim deputy and Kevin S Morgan. Also thanks to Andy and not go for being with us and I don't even think you've been on the show since I've been part of the show so it has been a while. What have you been up to. Well I used to I think the last time I was on I was still the tech columnist for the Chicago Sun Times that I'm now they had they didn't give me the title emeritus when I left but I decided to seize it and let them take it away from me. Right now though I'm I'm working for a WGBH public radio in Boston I talk about technology on Boston public radio every Friday usually at 1pm. Although the times we live in sometimes I get bumped for a governor or a mayor who wants to tell us things related to a global pandemic but usually Friday's at 1. The bar barring virus news for Andy on Fridays and don't forget folks not just good day Internet there's also columns from Roger Chang and specials for myself at our Patreon as well go check it out daily tech news show dot com slash Patreon. If you'd like to send us an email with thoughts or maybe your own black bear story you can send them to feedback at daily tech news show dot com. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30pm Eastern that's 2030 UTC find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. Tomorrow we're talking to AI with Andrew Maine. See you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants dot com. I'm in club hopes you have enjoyed this program.