 coming up on DTNS an algorithm that may stop music copyright suits. You fear election manipulation, but should you and an exercise machine that helps improve your form, not just your reps? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 26th, 2020. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer back from Surrey Duty, Roger Shane. Big thanks to Joe and Amos, who also helped cover for Roger today, just back from Surrey Duty. Good to have you back, Roger. We were talking with Roger Scott and Sarah on Good Day Internet about the new Surface Peak feature. We were talking about Adobe Fresco. We were talking about all kinds of good stuff. Get that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Foxconn is getting advice on virus prevention from Zong Nan Shen, who is credited with finding the correct way to treat SARS 17 years ago. Zong was recently appointed head of China's National Health Commission investigation into the COVID-19 virus outbreak. Panasonic will end its four-year joint venture with Tesla to produce solar cells and modules at a factory in Buffalo, New York. Panasonic solar manufacturing operations at the plant will cease in May. Panasonic will be out of the factory entirely by September. Tesla plans to continue operations at the factory on its own. Panasonic still works with Tesla on a joint battery cell factory in Reno, Nevada. The Brave browser now automatically offers you a link to an archive.org web page where the current, if the current page is unavailable, clicking that link takes you to the Wayback Machine and you can scroll through different snapshots of the historical record of that page you can't get and choose to look at an old version of it. Maybe you still find the information you're looking for. The Internet Archive also offers that function in extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. And research firm Omnia estimates Apple shipped 46.3 million iPhone XRs in 2019, making it the most popular phone worldwide. The XR, folks. Rest of the top five in order was the iPhone 11, Samsung Galaxy A10, Galaxy A50, and Galaxy A20. Xiaomi's Red Note 7 was the highest shipping phone not from Apple or Samsung. It came in at number eight. All right, let's talk a little bit more about a report on the Tesla crash that happened March 2018. Sounds good. The National, excuse me, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board announced Tuesday that on March or a March 2018 fatal crash of a Tesla Model X SUV was caused by a combination of Tesla's autopilot operating in conditions it couldn't handle and the driver is being distracted by a game on his phone. Oh, I saw something like this yesterday on the road. Anyway, the SUV hit a concrete barrier at high speed, killing the driver. A cushion at the end of the barrier had been damaged in a previous crash, and if replaced might have saved another driver's life or this driver's life. The board made nine recommendations, including Tesla prevent autopilot from operating in conditions it was not designed for and create a more effective method of ensuring driver attention. The NTSB also recommends phone companies lockout distracting phone features when it detects someone is driving. Yeah, it'd be easier to get caught up on that cushion at the end of the barrier. That was something that happened a week previously. It's sort of just noted in the completeness of the report that, well, if the cushion had been in place, that might have helped. But they really are pointing the finger and there's more pressure on Tesla now to take more responsibility for autopilot, because its misuse is causing these kinds of accidents. Now, granted, this driver was not paying attention. And if they had been paying attention, presumably, they would have been able to take control of the car and slow it down. But what happened was autopilot did not detect the barrier, possibly because of the sun, because the lane markings were faded, that they were unsure of, but it definitely malfunctioned. And the pressure is now on Tesla to not have autopilot operating and somehow do more to keep drivers from being distracted. I'm not sure how much they could be expected to do. I mean, really, besides yanking autopilot as a feature altogether, and we've talked about the idea that some people are like, it's just too dangerous. People aren't going to take it seriously or there's going to be little things that happen here and there. When Scott, you mentioned there was a center divide thing that happened near you. These things do happen, especially if there's construction, that computer software in a particular car gets confused. It is dangerous. I mean, the person who is distracted by looking at their phone in autopilot mode, also to blame. That person is no longer with us. So it's kind of hard to know what happened in those moments. But I really do wonder, I mean, how much pressure gets put on this very cool technology that, in theory, people are like, wow, autopilot, very cool. How much does it end up rolling back because it's just not safe? Sure. And also, I actually have this question, Tom. Do you think that them making that recommendation that phone companies look for ways of maybe if they can detect that you're driving, turning off games, turning off features of a phone that would otherwise distract, do you think that gets any traction? They respond? No, because you can always, the carriers will always rightfully say like, if you're a passenger, you should be able to make use of these features. And there'll be a way to say I'm a passenger, and there's no way to detect if that's true or not. Clearview AI, maker of facial recognition software, we talked about on the show quite a bit, disclosed to its customers that an intruder gained unauthorized access to its list of customers, the number of user accounts that those customers had set up, and the number of searches that those customers had conducted. Now, Clearview said that the company's servers weren't breached, they weren't compromised, vulnerability has been patched. And the company also said, because of course, this is sort of the hot button issue, law enforcement agencies search histories were not accessed. Other information, but not exactly what the police were doing, except maybe the names of police organizations that previously weren't known to be working with Clearview. The company's customers are mostly North American law enforcement agencies in Canada and the US. Clearview scrapes images from the public web, and then uses associated data to train an algorithm to provide possible identity matches. Yeah, I mean, you got to take you got to take an honest view of this folks. This is not the worst data breach that has happened this week, but it's getting a lot more press because it's Clearview and a lot of people are trying to make the connection of I don't like Clearview AI using facial recognition. Therefore, I'm going to make the connection that they can't even protect their data. They should be banned. And even if you don't like Clearview AI's use of facial recognition, I'm not sure this follows. It wasn't a server access. They didn't lose the images. The images are all public anyway. At worst, this will embarrass law enforcement agencies or reveal law enforcement agencies tools to people who wanted to know about them. Yeah, it's not a lot of other sensitive information here. The number of searches isn't terribly useful. It's not that it's not useful at all. But I feel like the only reason this is getting the type of headlines it is, the type of coverage it is, is that people don't like Clearview's use of facial recognition. We've talked about that separately on DTNS about, you know, how to form your opinions about whether this is a good idea or not. But this kind of data breach, sad to say, is fairly mundane and limited in its damage. I mean, this is a bit like if my local grocery store lost my information because I use a frequent buyer card there versus some big national chain. They're just getting more attention because they're bigger and or it's closer to it's because of facial recognition. Facial recognition sends a lot of people into irrational paroxysms. It sends some other people into very rational objections. But as soon as it gets in there, it kind of clouds the issue and people like data breach, facial recognition. And it conjures up the image of my private facial data has been leaked and that's not what's happening in this at all. Yeah, they're already, right? The imagery is already a publicly accessible. I don't know. It isn't it's low hanging fruit if you're trying to freak people out with headlines. That's for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's not a great thing, but certainly not the worst. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in January shows that 74% of Americans have little or no confidence in technology companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google to prevent the misuse of their platforms to influence the 2020 US presidential election. When I when they say Americans, they mean people in the US. However, 78% of people surveyed say these companies have a responsibility to prevent such misuse. So three quarters of the people say they don't believe they will prevent misuse of the platform to influence the presidential election, but they think they should. Over the past decade, other surveys have found sharp declines in the shares from those associated with both Democrat and Republican parties. This is a bipartisan attitude here who say technology companies have a positive impact on the country. That has been in decline. As for the age breakdown, if you're like, oh, wait, what about the youngsters? Well, 31% of adults aged 18 to 29 say they are at least somewhat confident in these companies, but that's 69% not. So it's not that far under the 74% if you include all age groups. 20% of those aged 65 and older are at least somewhat confident. So that's 80% not. That's a little bit above but all within the range. So slightly more confident when you're young, slightly less confident when you're older, but mostly people are not confident. 70% plus no matter what age group you're looking at are not confident. Here's my problem with this. I don't have a problem with Pew Research doing this study. I think this is important to find out, okay, what are people's attitudes? But there's also no evidence that there was an effect on an election because of misuse of a platform. Plenty of evidence of attempts to misuse, plenty of evidence that things were done, but we haven't yet found out what effect those attempts have. And I keep hammering on this, but I think this shows that people are not worried about the evidence. They're like, I just believe that it is being misused. And that's dangerous. The reason I think that's dangerous is if you're believing without evidence, then it's very difficult to convince you that it's been fixed. Yeah, well then you can get into the meta of this, which is a huge part of the reason they don't trust these services or don't trust social media as a particular point is because they're doing the very thing that we're now applying to the overall social network. In other words, we may get some article on Facebook that seems slanted and you just feel like, well, that has no evidence. That's nothing to back it up. That's just a headline to get people all fired up. And so now it's easy for us to blanket statement and say, well, all of Facebook, I just don't trust them to be able to do this, to be able to keep this stuff at bay and not have it affect the election. We're doing it on top of the problem that we see with the same problem because we're not willing to look at the bigger picture and look at all the evidence as well. It's a super complicated mess. I'm not surprised by any of this, like any institution that has some trust up front and you start to see that erode through actual experience, whether it be throughout the last election cycle or even current election cycles, it's easier for people to be jaded. Like I don't trust it either, but I also just, I'm more like Tom these days, I look at a thing and go, okay, what are they talking about? What do they mean? And I look deeper before I talk about it. And maybe that's just on us, but at the end of the day, I'm not shocked by these numbers. And the reason I harp on this is because people want Facebook, Twitter and Google to stop the election from being influenced. And it comes from all sides, right? You either want them to stop favoring a candidate or you want them to stop being manipulated by outside forces for the favor of a candidate you don't like. And if everybody's right, then there really isn't any influence because it's happening on both of the major US parties. So that's useless. What's more useful to me is to focus on what can you do to make sure that you are not unduly influenced, to be able to check your biases, to be able to make a better decision. I think we should be focusing on what can these companies do to improve our news diet, to make sure that we are encouraged to eat right when it comes to news. There are lots of things these tech companies could do to help us improve, but if we're just battering at them to defend themselves against being misused, they're going to spend a lot of time trying to defend against something we don't properly understand and may have no effect if they've done it. Here, here to that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, before we move on, I mean, my thoughts on this is doesn't surprise me that overall younger people have a little bit more confidence in social networks, well, and other technology companies, but we're kind of talking about social networks right now. But still not very high, but at least a little bit more like, well, we understand how this works, we'll get there kind of thing. What I find interesting is, you know, the vast majority of people are like, yeah, we have no confidence in these companies being any help at all and can be very manipulative, but we're still using them to spread a lot of information. So that's on a lot of us. Yeah, I kind of agree. Well, let's talk about LG. The LG's V 60 think that's with a Q 5G is its third dual screen phone with a second screen in a case that could be separated from the main phone. The V 60 has the Snapdragon 865 processor and improved camera that can handle 8k video and a headphone jack. Both screens are 6.8 inch FHD plus OLED with a small notch. LG and Google Maps, excuse me, apps can span both screens. The 5G is optimized for sub six networks. But there will also be a model optimized for MM wave on the rear is a one and one point seven inch sensor 64 megapixel f point one eight camera, which uses pixel brining or binning rather for 16 megapixel images. The V 60 has 128 gigabyte storage, eight gigabytes of RAM, Wi Fi six and a 5000 milliamp battery. Prices will be announced by carriers, but will be less than a thousand dollars when the V 60 arrives in the spring. That's a pretty good deal for a premium phone. Yeah, this is not the best phone. Certainly that 6.8 inch FHD plus OLED feels a little dated. But it's a very good phone. It's got a great camera. Got a little bit of a bump on it. It's not flush like it was in the last model, but it's still a great camera. It takes good pictures by all accounts of the reviews that came out today has the millimeter wave, like you said capability. And so therefore, you know, it's going to work at 5G in lots of markets and it's going to be less than a thousand dollars. And it has a headphone jack. I know it has a notch, so it's not the perfect phone for the discerning phone. I feel like you want a headphone jack more than they don't want a notch. I don't know that they really want either because they keep buying phones in large amounts that have neither. But people say they want these things. Yeah, they keep buying. That's true. They buy the phones, but they have neither. But they're also very busy upping the wearable market and buying, you know, portable headphones and earbuds and things at a rate that I kind of think the predictions that that stuff was going to phase out anyway is kind of true. I think that days are limited. It's going to be soon where hardly any phone has a headphone jack, but the temple will have it. So you mean the V6. Sorry, the V6. Thank you. Thank you very much, LG, for your headphone jack. We appreciate it. Remember when we were all like, is it think or think you? Oh, was it? Is it think you? I think it's think. Yeah, because there was a there was a LG had an announcement and somebody said, thank you at the end. And we were like, Oh, all right, that was very clever. Speaking of tempo, Scott, tempo is a 42 inch HD touchscreen with Microsoft's Azure connect camera inside to track your exercise form while you take live streaming classes. So as you follow the on-screen instructions in strength training, cardio exercises, yoga, stuff like that, dots on the screen plot your movements and then instructions appear to help you perfect that form classes grade you on your form, not your number of reps. So it's not like, Oh, you bailed out early. It's how well are you doing this overall? The classes cost $39 per month for a subscription and the tempo cabinet screen and standard barbell and weights up to 100 pounds costs $1995. Deposits of $250 are needed to reserve one now shipping in the summer. Who wants one? So the the Peloton craze has as we saw at CES this year sparked numerous imitators. This is a interesting one because it's not a machine. It's not a treadmill. It's not a bike. It's just a screen so that you can see 42 inches is pretty big and it's vertical. So you can see your instructor and try to mimic them. They do the exercises that you were doing all through all the reps. They don't just do it once and stand there and watch you like my trainer did. So you actually get that ability to kind of watch the form. You see the dots that kind of give you instant feedback. You get instruction straight in your back. Keep your legs straight, bend your knees, all that kind of stuff as you're going. I never do these kinds of exercises anymore. But if I did, this sounds pretty great. I know 2,000 bucks is a lot. But you're also getting the barbell and the weights. You can use your own weights on that barbell as well. So maybe you don't want all these weights. I don't know. $39 a month is cheaper than Peloton. Peloton is cheaper than an actual Soulcycle class. But you're doing something different here. I don't know. This seems like a good one. Now also look at the connect living on as a technology in some way over there, Microsoft. And I'd forgotten that they were doing anything with it. Honestly, I kind of thought also Google Glass is not dead. Right? You dude, your predictions are really true. Most of them are not. These aren't predictions. These are me paying attention. Your your ability to read things and retain them. Unbelievable. You predicted them so long ago. They're just coming true now because you're a genius. Right. As somebody who I don't currently have a gym membership, this is going to be a problem if I don't address it soon enough. But I do work in where I am Studio Redwood has a plenty of space to kind of put together a home gym. And I actually have some weights that I that I got already. Kind of wish I would have known about Temple beforehand, but whatever. I've got a bunch of weights. I've got some yoga mats. I could, you know, mount a television. I love this idea because I'm kind of in a place now where it there are gyms around, but I'm going to have to get in the car. And that wasn't always the case before. And so just having something where I could like, I just got a really good workout and I have to leave the house makes a lot of sense. And 40 bucks a month for something that is a subscription is going to be, I mean, leaps and bounds better than anything. I'm going to get it 24 hour fitness. Yeah, you won't get all the machines you got there, but you do this. Yeah, if you want to be disciplined, I think I think this is cool. You don't mount this. It sits in a corner and it you store your, your weights in it. So it's really space efficient too. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. All right, this is a, this is a story after my own heart. I've been following the, the DRM controversy since the mid 2000s. And, and of course the music industry, there was a story today that music industry makes 80% of its money off streaming. So the DRM wars have simmered down as Spotify, Apple music, etc. have become more popular. But what we have seen are a lot more court cases about the use of melodies. We had the Blurred Lions case. There was a case between Tom Petty and Sam Smith over a few notes. And those cases are big cases that can cost a lot of money and shift money from one artist to another. So Damien Reel, who is a musician, a programmer and an attorney and Noah Rubin, who's a programmer and a musician, got together and wrote an algorithm to basically brute force, create every possible eight note, 12 beat melody contained within an octave using modern programming and hardware to just write every eight note, 12 beat melody at once. They stored all of that on a hard drive and copyrighted the hard drive. So now they theoretically own the copyright on every single eight note, 12 beat melody. They released the algorithm under an open source license on GitHub, in case you want to play around with it yourself. And here's the clincher, released the melodies, all of the melodies, under a Creative Commons no rights reserved license on archive.org. No rights reserved basically is the same as public domain. Something can't in the United States anyway, legally be public domain until it meets certain criteria, including length of time. But you can waive all of your rights under a Creative Commons no rights reserved license, and it has the same effect. Anybody can use these. The idea is to reduce the number of copyright lawsuits based on simple melodies rather than whole songs. So by doing this, there is now prior art for every single eight note, 12 beat melody. And if someone writes a song and says, well, wait a minute, you took that from my song, this could be used as a defense to say, well, no, we actually took it from this hard drive from Damien Real and Noah Rubin, and they gave us a license for it, because they gave everyone a license for it. I'm not sure how this is going to affect preexisting melodies, because that's prior art to this. So it's obviously not going to hold up for that. I'm actually not sure how this is going to hold up in court at all, because at least in the United States again, fair use is a defense that you can use to convince a judge you aren't guilty of infringement. In fact, that's not even technically right, because you're still guilty of infringement, but fair use is a defense to say the infringement was justified. I'm allowed to do it, because I was commenting on something or using it for education or was using such a small amount of it that it wouldn't affect the marketplace for the original, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So whether this would hold up in court, I don't know. But Damien Real is an attorney. He thinks that he has a shot. And the way this stuff often works anyway is not even going to court, but having people work it out amongst themselves because they don't want to spend the money to go to court. And having this out there may dissuade people or reduce the leverage of people who want to take this stuff to court. I think it's a very clever use of technology to clear up a point and say, look, a computer can make all the melodies at that level. We shouldn't be arguing about that. Whole songs? Sure. My sweet lord, he's so fine level stuff where you're talking about the entire record. That's up to a court to decide. Why not? But these little snippets, these little melodies, they've just tried to basically take that out of the equation. Well, when you brought this up on TMS and your segment today, I immediately put my brain in this place of like, all right, well, does that mean everything is math? And you quickly corrected me and said, not really the point. This isn't about reducing everything to the argument that, well, everything's made of matter, man. It's all just light and sound. And you know, at the end of the day, nobody owns anything, man. It's all free. I realize after talking to you this morning, it's a little wrong headed to go that route. But what is the, what is the edge of this? What is the edge case? Like, sure, these, these arrangements of notes in this small group makes sense to me. And now everybody can just go use it and go for it. And we're not worried about whole songs. But when does it get close to being a whole song? Is it four bars? Is it two bars? Is it everything up to the stanza? Is it just the stanzas? Like, to me, there are legal questions to ask. And I don't know where that will get asked and what court will decide them. But it's fascinating to me. And I got, it made me get all philosophical today. Probably, you know, I probably didn't need to, but I felt like being that way. Well, and I think that what real and Ruben's intentions are here are good. That said, I can see an artist being like, no, this is just a place for someone to hide once they rip me off. You know, my song, sure, there's, you know, sure, top, you know, number one on the billboard 40 for, you know, 10 weeks. And now they can just say, well, it's just part of some open source thing. So I, it's, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this. I think I think it's very clever. I don't know how much it's going to, to help artists who are battling against other artists in the future. But I hope we hear more about it. Yeah. And there are some limits. It's only one octave. It's not every melody possible. It's every combination. There's, there's, there's a few nuances to it. But essentially, they're just trying to take this level out of the conversation. And I'm curious to see if it will work, or if it will just stand as a instructive stunt that, that helps us understand better how this all works. It could go either way. It probably is going to be a little both. What was it 600 gigabytes of, or so? Yeah, when I looked at the, when I looked at the archive data or give us something like that. I love that. That's amazing. Well, another thing we can't predict yet is what will be at the top of our subreddit tomorrow. You can submit stories and vote on them at daily technewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord happening right now. Happens 24-7. Great group of folks in there. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Mike in Dusty Riyadh, his words, says he was struggling with the laptop or tablet debate that we had on last Friday's show. Mike says my laptop 2017 HP Spectre X2 had a battery that was starting to explode, so I needed something to replace it ASAP. I like Windows 10. I want my full keyboard. I want my touchpad. I agree that multitasking is easier in Windows. However, the contrast in price between a Surface 7 and an iPad Pro with 512 gigs of onboard storage had me seriously considering going for the iPad. One key reason, my workplace Office 365 account only lets me access my work files or apps through a web browser, meaning I need an internet connection to work on the go between public Wi-Fi paranoia, not wanting to burn through data tethering. This is a huge inconvenience for me. In contrast, I can access all my apps with biometric authentication on an iPad. It's great being able to take notes in one note, just go home, have it sync up over my home network, or work on a document on a plane and save it to the cloud later. Mike does say I ultimately went for the Surface, but I don't know if I'll do a Surface 9 or 10 when it comes time to replace this guy. I so identified with this where you're like, man, this could work. It might be better. But I am going to do what I want to do. You know what? That's funny because of the exact opposite experience when I was in the market for moving up to the next whatever version of a drawing device I was going to get. And I was like, well, how's the surface these days? Let's give this a shot. And I ended up going with the iPad again because in that particular use case, same deal. You're just going to be in a better position. And he just happened to be in a place where that's not a great solution. I think this makes perfect sense. And he went the right way. Yeah, I do appreciate you, Mike, for being like, you know what, though, there are some limitations with the choice I made. I know what I did. And I did it willfully. So we hope you enjoy your service. Let's also thank our patrons at our master and grand master levels including Dan Dorado Hankins, John Johnston and Chris Smith. Last but not least, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today, Mr. Frogpants. Where can people keep up with what you're up to? Well, all of it is at frogpants.com. And there's a lot of stuff, cool stuff going on. In particular, I have been harping on this for a few weeks, but it's because I'm proud of it. And I'm really happy about how it's going. So if you want to see the latest comic strips that I launched and I'm running right now, you can check it out. It's called Fred and Can. It's available linked right there at the top of frogpants.com as well as on its own page at frog, excuse me, Fred can comic.com. And let me know what you think of it. Some of your feedback and tell me what you like, what you don't like, that sort of stuff. I'm very, very proud of it right now. And you can follow me on Twitter. I'm over at Scott Johnson as usual. Hey, folks, we're getting near the end of the month. And that is a time when we're especially thankful to all the patrons who stick with us because we know sometimes it gets a little tight and you realize that next charge is coming and you might want to cut back. So we always hope that we get some new folks in for the new month. Two dollars is the base subscription to get ad free, get special bonus episodes, get all the inside information on the show. If you're looking at two dollars and thinking like, yeah, you know, I could waste that on a candy bar or something, or I could give it to Daily Tech News Show and help the show get better. We'd love to have it. Patreon.com slash DTNS. And you help keep us strong. If you have feedback for us, well, have I got an email address for you? Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Write us early and often. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Justin and Robert Young. Talk to you then.