 Coming up on DTNS, the United Nations wants an investigation into who cracked into Jeff Bezos' phone. A U.S. county decides to just go ahead and hold an election on the Internet and why Microsoft is forcing Bing on some Chrome users. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 22, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In rainy Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just getting Scott Johnson's lowdown on living with the edge browser, also starting a very divisive conversation about Chile. That's all on Good Day Internet. Get the wider show, become a member, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Motorola's foldable Razer phone has a new release date after being delayed due to unexpected demands. The new Razer will be available for pre-orders January 26 for $1,499, arriving on February 6. The Razer has a flexible 6.2 inch display and runs Android on the mid-range Snapdragon 710. 90s are back, baby. EA is pushing messages to its Tetris and Tetris Blitz app users on Android and iOS, saying the apps will be discontinued on April 21. They're already gone from the App Store. And after the 21st, neither Tetris game will be playable on devices. The mobile Tetris game called Tetris Royale from N3 network or network with an E instead of an E or three instead of an E is offering a battle Royale version a lot like Tetris 99. This, this insta correction, the Motorola Razer first arrived in 2004. Management regrets the error. Did I say 90s crap? Vodafone has announced it is withdrawing from the Libra Association that cryptocurrency project originated by Facebook. Vodafone says it's now going to concentrate its efforts on financial inclusion through its involvement with mobile money service and PESA in Africa. Vodafone does say it hasn't ruled out working with the Libra Association in the future, which what it didn't say was, so if you get your stuff together, I don't know, maybe we'll come back in. Libra Association is now down to 20 members. They originally had 28. Amazon announced on Wednesday that its music streaming service now has more than 55 million customers. This includes paid and ad supported free users. This puts it close to the 60 million total listeners that Apple Music announced in June, which includes paid and free trial users as well. Spotify announced 113 million paid subscribers in September. All right, let's talk a little bit more about this UN Bezos story. Scott Johnson to United Nations special rapporteurs for extra judicial killings and for free expression of requested an immediate investigation into allegations that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince was somehow involved in cracking into the phone of Jeff Bezos. Saudi Foreign Minister or excuse me, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud called the allegations absurd and silly. A forensic analysis commissioned by Bezos himself showed his phone security was breached by a malicious video file sent from a WhatsApp account that happened on May 1 of 2018. It's been a little while. Analysts did not find malware, but the video had an encrypted downloader and the phone transmitted large amounts of data within hours of the video being received by Bezos. The Bezos phone may have been compromised by software called Pegasus. This is offered by Israel's NSO group and WhatsApp has sued NSO group in October of last year for attacking its users through undisclosed vulnerabilities. Yeah, so a little bit of recap here. If you remember back last year, Jeff Bezos wrote a Medium post accusing the National Enquirer of threatening to release personal photos of Bezos if he didn't stop an investigation into how the Enquirer acquired text messages they had published a month before. We actually took a small amount of heat from a couple of people for covering this because they said this was just a personality story, but there are there is a technology angle here and we're seeing it today. A month and a half after that Medium post, Gavin DeBecker, an investigator hired by Bezos, accused Saudi Arabia of being involved in obtaining Bezos personal data. However, at the time, the brother of a woman accused of having an affair with Bezos, part of the Enquirer story, claimed he gave the data to the Enquirer. So now, coincidentally at the same time the Davos World Economic Forum is going on, we have two UN officials calling on the United States and others to investigate whether these messages came from Saudi Arabia. And the reason that it's thought that this video came from Saudi Arabia is that it came from a WhatsApp account associated with a number given to Jeff Bezos by Saudi Arabia's crown prince. It doesn't, I mean, anybody can operate an account so it's not clear evidence that he was sending them. And if you look at Vice showing some of the UN report, it appears that it's questionable that this would come from the Saudi crown prince because it seems a little odd the messages that were being sent. It might have been being operated by someone else. It might not have been. We don't know. But the video certainly seems to coincide with a large amount of data being exfiltrated from Bezos phone. They don't have a clear connection there, but that seems a little more solid. Wow. So big target Jeff Bezos, I guess, one of the biggest money. Yeah. I mean, you know, he's real rich, influential, runs a successful company also runs influential publications. So there's a lot going on here and the story, you know, the whole political slant aside because we could go on about that forever, but we're not going to on this show is, you know, I'm sort of like, okay, somebody had his WhatsApp number, his WhatsApp app credentials. It appears that that was something that he had shared with the crown prince and they were both at a function in Los Angeles. Okay. Well, maybe they were talking about stuff. The fact that there was some sort of fairly not bizarre video, but a video that wouldn't really mean one thing or another that had to do with, you know, there's a Saudi flag and a Swedish flag and that sort of thing where the malware was attached to getting into Bezos's phone and then a bunch of information be extracted. You think, well, that's so unfortunate. Oh my gosh, it's Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, that kind of thing. But this is just to me, it's like this is the sort of thing that we all need to be careful of because this is what happens. Well, yeah, except we're small potatoes and hopefully we don't get targeted like this. But yeah, like these, this, this vulnerability existed in WhatsApp regardless of who you were, right? Like they did say the analysts said they didn't find actual malware, but the video had encrypted downloader and who the heck knows how that works. And presumably WhatsApp's taking care of that and fixed it. And we talked about the lawsuit and everything else. So I don't feel like I'm immediately being targeted or anything, but it's just a good reminder that none of this stuff, no matter what they tell you about ending encryption or anything else, all of it's going to have some vulnerability at one point or another. And hopefully good actors are out there finding those reporting them and they're getting patched. But then something like this happens. It's just a good reminder. Just know, you know, if you're going to put stuff on your phone for good or for ill, where, you know, somebody can get to you. Yeah. The, the video in question was kind of benign. It's, it's a video purporting to be, and I haven't seen it play, but apparently is about Telco cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Sweden. So it is the kind of video file that I could see Jeff Bezos not worrying about clicking on. If you're in WhatsApp, it's end to end encrypted. You assume that that vulnerabilities are patched. In this case, they may not have been. So it goes to show that anybody could fall for a properly targeted exploit. On the other side of this, if you're not Jeff Bezos, you may not have people willing to go to the lengths it takes to find an, you know, an NSO group of vulnerability and pay for it to make a video to send them to hack into the phone. Yeah. Let's talk about the future of autonomous vehicles, shall we? Yeah, that's better. Yeah. Lots of companies are in the mix and GM subsidiary Cruz is as well. Cruz showed off its autonomous electric shuttle on Tuesday. The Cruz origin, as it's known, is designed to be part of a fleet of ride hailing vehicles available through an app. The origin has two rows of seats. They face each other and they can seat up to six passengers. Doesn't have a steering wheel, doesn't have pedals. So it's car like, but not really a car. Origin has been tested on private roads at highway speeds, but is not yet approved for public roads. So we're not doing this on public roads. This is, we're a ways out still. Cruz is testing its autonomous technology on public roads, but in cars with steering wheels and other controls and a human safety driver. So what they're doing on public roads is kind of, you know, the norm these days. Well, Waymo has approval to test cars without human safety drivers in California. We covered that previously. So this really, I mean, GM did a great job getting people to cover this. This is GM does things that many other companies are already doing, which is have a prototype of a car without a steering wheel and pedals. We've seen that before from Waymo back when it was part of Google and Neutonomy and other companies. And Neutonomy is even testing some of their shuttles out there delivering groceries in restricted areas in neighborhoods. So they're not the farthest along, but I guess the story here is that GM's cruise division is in the game. They do have working prototypes. They do have tests out there. And I think they're trying to wow people with the design of this thing. It looks a little like a crossover SUV and not having a steering wheel in a GM subsidiary car, sort of, you know, blows people's minds. It's one thing to see it in a company like Waymo. It's another C associated with the name GM. I get that. But honestly, I'm not, this is sort of an also the GM is also doing it and making progress, which is good. Yeah, it is good. And what I like also is to see companies of their size and of their, I don't know, their influence doing something in the, the autonomous sort of ride hailing vehicle space. Like we always think of, Oh, self-driving cars are coming. We're all thinking of the one car we're going to have that will self-drive us. We don't think that much about what transit will look like. And I think in Vegas that's running now, although it has a steering wheel and pedals, but it's an autonomous vehicle that does ride hailing and that sort of thing. I think that somebody needs to do their best shot to dominate that space where else they're going to get run over. And I think that's what this is. Is their play to say, it's all, it's all well and good that we're all going to have our own personal, you know, supposedly personal cars that one day will drive us everywhere. But what about inner city stuff? What about getting from place to place in a more sort of community? The conventional wisdom is the way companies win at this is with fleets for ride hailing, not, not selling the personal cars. And I would agree. And it's important to know where your rights got. The GM is showing that they are, they are in this game. They're not going to get left behind. And also real quick, don't, I hate the whole facing passengers thing. I hated it when I had to fly on Southwest Airlines like that. I hate it. It's like moving cattle around. It's awful. Don't do it. All right. Here's another thing that I imagine there's several security professionals are saying don't do voters in King County, Washington. That's the county that includes greater Seattle will be able to vote on their smartphones in February for the board of supervisors election in King County. This makes it the first election in U S history that lets roughly 1.2 million eligible voters vote using their personal devices. Previously, the Tusk led company that's doing this also led a West Virginia election that used a mobile app for voters living overseas and military voters back in 2018. There's a county in Utah that allows mobile voting for some disabled voters. It's also very limited. But this is like a count big county, county wide. Everybody can do it if they want to you enter your name and birthday on a mobile website. Then you make your election choices. Then you verify your submission that these are the choices you want to make. You provide a signature using the touchscreen like your manual signature and you submit it. Now Washington State, not just King County entirely votes by mail. So the signatures are on file and that is what King County is going to use for verification. They will match signatures to the signature on file and then print hard copies of each ballot where the signature matches. Voters will also have the option to fill out their ballot on the web and print it out themselves, not submitted over the internet. All the ballots will be accepted between now, Wednesday, January 22nd through election day, February 11th. The worry I would have is, have you seen your finger phone signature lately? Right. Yeah. Mine is sort of like it's a series of what look like mountains. Yeah, that is a fair thought, but I'm going to give Tusk and King County credit that they have already like tried that out and made sure that the matching is close enough that that'll work. Are there any other objections? I mean, no, I want to vote this way. I'm like, I don't have no other objections because man, I do. I'm sure there are a ton of them and I'm not thinking of them, but I do look forward to the day when this happens, because I think there will be a day when it does. And I'm hoping smarter brains and me have thought of all the contingencies, but yes, I want this. I agree with Scott. I understand that there are a lot of technical things that could go wrong. We're in an era now where the voting process in general is under deep scrutiny for a variety of reasons. So this whole kind of like, oh, I can vote through an app. Cool. That's super convenient. Yay. But maybe it'll get hacked where maybe my signature won't be, you know, it'll be like some, you know, false negative, right? Where they're like, well, that isn't you. And I'm like, but it is. So there's a lot of stuff that could go wrong. But yes, in the essence of this is the future and I want it to. Don't do this. That would be my recommendation because I have not seen anything that says they are protecting against a man in the middle attack. The big weakness here would be you do it all online. It looks right to you. You've signed it. You send it through someone intercepts it, changes the votes, sends it along. You have no way of telling that that happened. King County has no way of telling that happened. Even if they print it out, it's already wrong. So until I've seen much more, and maybe they haven't, and I just haven't seen it, but much more security that says there is no way someone can intercept your ballot while it's being transmitted. I might use this to print my ballot. That might be fun to just do it locally on a disconnected computer where I print the ballot and I can see the printed ballot and know yes, that's who I want to vote for. And then I mail that in. Sure. But I'm not so certain that most of the security professionals I trust on this are comfortable that we're ready for this to be safe enough and secure enough. I agree. And I just hope we get there one day as impossible as it sounds because it changes democracy forever if they can figure it out. All right. Moving on. The UK's Information Commissioner's office published a new code of conduct called the age appropriate design code. It's a terrible film. Don't go see it. Anyway, to protect children's privacy on Wednesday. This happened on Wednesday among not just not going to protect it just on Wednesday. The standards are a requirement that location settings be off by default. General privacy settings be set to high by default and techniques to encourage children to lower privacy settings should not be used. If Parliament approves this, companies that don't comply with 15 standards of data protection involving toys, apps, social media platforms, online games, educational websites and streaming services would face quote unquote large fines, although specific fine amounts were not detailed. Yeah. So this is kind of GDPR extended. In fact, the ICO even says GDPR already protects our children. These additional standards will make sure that we're extra compliant. Those weren't its exact words, but I want to see more details on what the compliance is, but the details that I have seem seem reasonable, I guess. I mean, yeah. Before the show, we were kind of kicking around. Okay. Well, you know, how much is this going to hurt a company like Facebook monetarily? If they sort of go like, eh, we're just not in compliance and we get fined. Well, Facebook's got all the money in the world. Google would be another company. There are a lot of companies, though, that would have to say, well, we're going to have to change a lot of our default settings. And like you said, Tom, what I'm seeing now is all very, it seems, it's obvious. You're not supposed to encourage children to lower privacy settings. Location settings should be off. The nudging happens. So you need that rule. That's what I'm saying. But when you lay it out and say, think of the children, we should not be doing this. No one's going to be like, well, no, their privacy settings should be lowered by default. This is all stuff that it makes sense to me. It seems very, again, very obvious. And it seems like overall, a good thing. I would like to know what kind of fines we're talking about. Does it depend on user base? Is it a blanket fine, no matter the company? Because that could ruin an entire company. Rather than just kind of be like a small dent. And the bigger company, fines are never really the thing that caused the enforcement. Fines are just a way of putting a little bit of teeth in it. Enforcing principle. What really brings the enforcement is the public shame. The public backlash. If you have been determined by a court to have violated these rules, that's a bigger deal for the big companies like Facebook. And yeah, for the smaller companies, it could be an existential threat. That's true. Moving on to some Netflix earnings. Netflix beat expectations overall in Q4, but fell short in the US due to increased competition. Worldwide, Netflix added 8.76 million subscribers for a total of 167.1 million subscribers. Its fastest growing region was Asia Pacific, where it added 1.75 million users. Netflix added 520,000 subscribers in the US. That was short, though, of its expected 600,000. Financially, it reported stronger than expected revenue of 5.47 billion dollars and earnings per share of $1.30. Analysts had expected earnings of 53 cents per share. So they did do good on revenue. Netflix expects to add 7 million subscribers worldwide below the 8.82 million projection from analysts. So it's a little bit of a mixed bag here when you look at these numbers. The company, and this is very interesting, also has started citing viewer statistics based on a shorter amount of viewing time. So if I watched a show, and I was counted as watching a show previously, that would be me completing 70% or more of an episode of a TV show or a movie. Now, Netflix is reporting 76 million households chose to watch The Witcher, and 83 million chose to watch Michael Bay's Six Underground. But choosing to watch is now defined as starting a film or episode and watching at least two minutes. So this last is most interesting to me. Netflix grew a little slower than possible. Everybody's making a hay of like, oh, it's Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus. Okay, maybe it is. Maybe it is. It probably is. But the fact that they are moving from we never report subscriber numbers or never report viewership numbers to, we're going to report some big viewership numbers that are 70% watch to, we want to report big numbers, but they only need two minutes watch to make those big numbers. That tells me that they're feeling a little pressure to put out some even bigger numbers. This is like autoplay ad numbers, you know, where you're like, oh, so many plays. But I mean, two minutes, two minutes is better than the autoplay where it gets shut off really fast. I want to be fair, but if I bounce out after two minutes of a feature length film, I did not like that film. Yeah, that is not a watch. That is me saying, I don't like it. It's not an accidental start, but it's not. And I liked it. If you have only seen two minutes of Michael Bay six underground, they should rename it Michael Bay. You did not watch it. Yeah. If you only watch two minutes of six underground, watch these two minutes. I mean, I also think they have to kind of change these numbers, not just because I think those are good reasons you guys state, but I think that there may be another thing of play here, which is there is now so much new content happening on Netflix every day, or every week new content being added that you're starting to have a kind of crowded content problem. And a lot of that content I refer to is not leaving. It's there permanently. And so a shorter view of a thing might actually be a valuable statistic because a lot of us are doing shorter checks on the thing, whether I want to see it or not, where it used to be, well, I've got this choice between movies I already know and love and this new thing they made. Now it's, I've got 20 new things they made plus eight movies that were added. I don't even know if I'm going to like this. I'm going to give it a couple of minutes. Oh, it held me. I'll stay or open. I'm out of here. Like I can kind of see why that that would be a strategy that that goes along with just content overage in there. If you know what I'm saying, if that makes me call it now, Netflix is long-term thinking. And what they want is a few years down the road when Disney plus is still reeling for people like, wait, you had all the Marvel movies, but now you lost them because of these deals that were done before Disney plus. Why can't I count on the fact that Harry Potter was on Peacock? Now it left and it's at HBO Max. Netflix will start pointing to their library and say, we own ours. All of our stuff is still there. Stranger things still there. You can still rewatch it. It'll flip. It'll try to flip it. But yeah, the international story is the one to watch with Netflix. The fact that they're international members, Latin America, Asia Pacific or skyrocketing, they're doing great international content. That is the future of Netflix. And the slowing down in the U.S. Maybe it's because of Disney plus or maybe it's just, you know, the U.S. has been kind of lagging behind for a while for Netflix. I don't know that it necessarily is. I mean, number one market for some time. The numbers have been, you know, it's, this is, this is a, this is a familiar, familiar quarterly earnings report for Netflix where it's like, Hey, international numbers are skyrocketing in particular markets specifically, but not so much in the U.S. It's like, well, you know, you reach saturation. What I wonder is, especially with original content and how that's working so well for streaming services, if you got a hit, you know, that's, that, that, that makes more sense at least to a subscriber like me than a back catalog, because how many times I'm really going to watch even my favorite movie type thing. I want to see new stuff. How is that going to change the kind of original content that people see knowing what the strong markets are? All right. Microsoft's going to force some users to use Bing on Chrome. At least that's the headline you're going to see, or maybe you've already seen. Here's the real scoop. Some businesses use something called Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus. I see some of you sys admins out there nodding your head. It's basically Office 365 with super awesome business features for doing business. I'm Bob Business and I use Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus. One of those features is Microsoft Search in Bing. That combines enterprise wide company search with web search. So in version 2002 of Office 365 Pro Plus, Microsoft is making it easy on folks by including a Chrome extension to install Microsoft Search in Bing on Chrome. That way, you can't have an employee claim they didn't find form WB slash five or didn't know about the new employee dress code rule because they had Google as their default search in Chrome, not Microsoft Search with Bing that had the company intranet. Now, some admins are less than appreciative of this generous move by Microsoft thinking maybe that extension should be their option, not Microsoft's. However, Microsoft does provide instructions in its support documents for excluding the Bing extension if you want, and instructions on how to remove it after it's been installed. But there's still chafing that it's the default option that it forces it in on everyone in your company. Yeah. I mean, if there was no option to reverse it, I could see people rioting. Sounds like an annoyance more than anything, but an annoyance nonetheless, especially things like this are, they never go over well. No, like forcing them, they shouldn't do that. If anything, I would rather them come up with another way for people to see that Bing is pretty good these days. Like I was surprised using Edge all week, how much Bing got me where I wanted to be. I did end up going with DuckDuckGo in the end because I just kind of really like what that is for many reasons that aren't just about the search engine, but things are all right. So do it in ways that make people want to switch to Bing. Don't force them to do it. Well, and it's combined with the intranet here. It's a total office workplace thing, which makes it a slightly different flavor to begin with. Hey, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. And thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. Some of you are in IT. Some of you are consumers. Some of you are both. Submit stories and vote on the ones that you care about at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Also join in our conversation in Discord. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Lots of good stuff in the mailbag. Yeah. Ian, aka the geeky Brits, wrote in about the advantages of new portable dialysis technology that we talked about on the show yesterday. Ian says before my son passed away when he was 17 years old, he had perionial dialysis that was done at home and the machine itself took up half his bedroom. It was a whole overnight process, about 10 hours every night while he was sleeping. He had one option that allowed him to stay away from the machine for a night. We never pushed it more than one night. So travel, obviously very difficult. A portable solution that didn't need to make sure that he was home every night would definitely have been an advantage and would even allow a short vacation to happen. We now live in Canada, but in March we're going back to England for a week so that we can be close to him on what would have been his 40th birthday. I'm so sorry, Ian. Me too. Thank you for sharing that with us. And we did get some other feedback about this particular story and thanks to everybody who did. Folks who have passed, who are still living with the future of dialysis need for care. Yeah, and what might help quality of life in the future. So it's good to know that that means so much to a lot of folks. Yeah, and we appreciate everyone sharing their personal insights, their direct experience. Jeff Parker did that regarding the Clearview app that we mentioned. That's the one that matches scraped photos using facial recognition. Jeff says, I want to let you know more about it as I have access and use the app. I'm a felony prosecutor in Texas and at least as far as Texas law is concerned, nothing found in the app is by itself admissible in court. In fact, if you look at the attached screenshot, he sent us a screenshot, you'll see the app explicitly states that the results are not to be used in court. The app's usefulness is only in getting leads on unknown individuals. For example, someone is captured on ATM photos or seen on a security camera. Who is this person? Clearview might give you a lead to that person's publicly available photos and that in turn can lead to identifying the person, and that's how I use it. So it's important to remember it only uses photos which are publicly posted and the app merely tries to show people with similar facial features. That's somewhat reassuring, Jeff. It's good to know that there's a warning saying like this isn't admissible evidence, this is just lead generation. Lead generation can still lead to a lot of the concerns that people have with harassment or improper use, but that is a it's good to know that there's at least in Texas, that speed bump in its usage as well. Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, thanks everybody who wrote in on a variety of topics we talked about yesterday. Always good to have a full mail bag. You are so smart and you add so much context to our stories. Keep it coming. Also, shout out to our patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Andrew Bradley, Tim Deputy, and Kevin S. Morgan. And last but not least, thanks to Scott Johnson. Good enough job to get thanked. That's right. You know, we never know. We're sort of like, it's a little touch and go at the top of the show. Did a good job, Scott. What do you, what's been, what's been going on in your world besides DTNS? Well, lots of cool stuff in particular. We are a few inches more down the road to seeing a release of my new card game called Rock Runners. If you guys want to see that, you can see some of the artwork and some other stuff at frogpants.com slash Rock Runners. And watch for a Kickstarter coming soon. We're only going to finally get that thing off the ground and get that going. Rules are done and they've been edited and everyone likes them and we're good. So I don't have to worry about it anymore. We can actually make a product. So check that out. If you're into podcasts, other art, other cool stuff happening frog pants.com is the place you can always follow me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. If you were watching the video version of this, either on Twitch or YouTube, you might have noticed that Sarah and I both have these lovely knit caps that say DTNS on them. If you're listening on audio, maybe you heard it in the warmth of our voice because they're very comfy. We want you to have one of these on your head and there's only 20 left. So Dave, who runs our store said, let's give people a discount 20% off the knit cap. Keep your head warm and show your love of DTNS all at the same time. Just go to dailytechnewshow.com slash store, buy the knit hat and use the code nice hat at checkout because it is a nice hat. Oh man, this is my favorite hat. I love it. And sure it's winter, but you can rock a knit cap year round. You really can. Use that code nice hat. Good through Friday. After Friday, it doesn't work anymore. 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