 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Justin Zellers, Pepper Geesey, and Eric Holm. Coming up on DTNS, Stephanie Humphrey helps us make sense of a California bill to punish social media companies for addiction, specifically related to children. Why the tech media is going crazy over Apple's universal control and Fido has new hope for killing the need for passwords. Hi, you guys. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 18th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, technology contributor to ABC News, author and host of the Tech John podcast, Stephanie Humphrey, welcome back. Hey, good to be back. Happy to be here. Good to have you as well. We are going to get right into the tech news with some tech things you should know. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is suing META alleging in federal court that scam ads were being displayed on Facebook featuring public figures promoting cryptocurrency, even after some of those public figures complained that their names and images were being used without consent. Fortescue Metals filed litigation against META in Australian and American courts over similar fake IDs. META's response is that it cooperated with the regulator's investigation so far and will defend itself in court. Russia's central bank announced Thursday that it has given Major Lender Sphere Bank a license to issue and exchange digital financial assets. Last month, blockchain platform Atomize, Russia, became the first firm to get the green light to exchange digital assets legally in Russia after the Russian government advocated a complete ban on trading and mining previously. Automakers have been dealing with chip supply problems for quite some time now, but Toyota was dealt another blow by the 7.4 magnitude earthquake in northeastern Japan that occurred on Thursday. Toyota suspended operations at three factories, losing 20,000 units in the stoppage. The company also announced it will stop production on 18 assembly lines for a few days next week due to part shortages. That's because Japanese part suppliers like Morata, which makes ceramic capacitors, and RENOSIS, which makes microcontrollers, also had to pause production because of the quake. Grab is known to a lot of folks for its food delivery, but it is often referred to as a super app with lots of services. One of those services is loans. Grab is partnering with Sedania Asalam Capital to offer its Malaysian delivery workers sharia compliant financing. Grab Cash Financing I, as the product is called, does not require documents or collateral. To qualify, you just have to be earning a minimum of 800 ring it a month, which is the equivalent of about $190 US. Sedania provides financial products through its Gohalal financing program, which uses digital commodities to enable real-time money transactions. During its announcement of the Galaxy A53 5G and A33 5G, Samsung also unveiled, somewhat quietly, the Galaxy A73 5G, a new top tier phone in its mid-range A series with a 108 megapixel camera and a slightly bigger 6.7 inch display than the A53's 6.5 inch panel. Samsung says that the Galaxy A73 5G will be available in select markets starting April 22, but we do not have word on price yet. All right, let's talk a little bit about this thing that has got the internet ablaze. Oh, are they ever? So tech headlines, if you're in our line of work, rarely do they universally love anything. That's just the nature of tech news. However, we've gotten an anomaly today. Let's read a few from CNET. CNET says, universal control from Apple deepens the iOS Mac OS relationship. 9to5Mac says, universal control was worth the wait. Here's how it's changing the way I work. The Verge headline, universal control is Apple's most impressive new feature in years. Now that's saying something. So to recap, or in case you're saying, I don't even know what you're talking about, universal control is a beta feature that's now available in iPad OS 15.4 and Mac OS 12.3. It shares input controls between an iPad and a Mac without needing a keyboard, video and mouse or KVM switch. It's not screen sharing either. That is side guard, this is different. With universal control, your mouse can copy something on the Mac, then pop over to the iPad and then paste it in an iPad OS app. You can also drag files between the two, going back and forth, and an iPad keyboard or accessory can control a Mac as well. That is very, very helpful if you happen to have both of these hardware tools. Third-party software has accomplished this for years. You might say, well, hold on a second. Why is universal control that great? It's native. It's native to the operating system and by early accounts works really well. But it's on by default for upgraded users and it's not necessarily obvious how you control it. Multiple writers remarked that they had to turn it on and off again or maybe even a couple times to get it working, to get sync working. The devices that you wanna use have to have Bluetooth on. They all have to be on the same Wi-Fi network. That's pretty standard. On a Mac, you have to go to the display settings and check all three universal control boxes once you do that, you can add an iPad. Now, if you're on the iPad first and go in the other way, you have to have cursor and keyboard beta enabled in the airplane handoff settings. So this is something that you have to want to do. But if you want to do it, it sounds like it's working pretty well. Yeah, Stephanie, I saw you reacted to most impressive feature in years. I mean, I was blown away by the M1 Ultra. I really, you know, I thought universal control was, you know, a cool sort of feature to have. Yeah, why didn't it exist before? But that wasn't the most impressive thing that I took away from that Apple event, so. I feel like this is one of those situations where it looked cool in the demo, but once you actually use it, people are getting that first love blush of a new feature where they're like, oh my gosh, it actually works. Like I don't have to think about it because that is one of the nice things. It turns on by default and then you just set your iPad next to it and you don't have to go in and futz with settings. Yeah. Because what struck me about this is all these articles said, I did have to go turn it off and on again later. You know, it works the first time but then later I had to miss with it. I'm like, that sounds just as buggy as sidecar to me. But I think the impressiveness of not having to turn it on in the first place and having it work has probably got a lot of people excited and it probably works really smooth because it's at the OS level instead of having to do a third party thing. Right. I don't use an iPad regularly anymore and having for some time, but I certainly am on Mac OS all day, every day and I have other Apple products. The idea, you know, from what I can glean from these reviews is it just works. And I know, you know, there's a lot of iRolling that comes with that, but if it does just work with the absolute least amount of, you know, trying to figure out, I mean, even to this day, it's like, I will be on my phone. I need to send something to my computer and I'm like, do I text it to myself? Yeah, maybe I do that. That would be the easiest thing. Anything that is truly, we're all in, you know, one OS, just, you know, dragging and dropping is a game changer, it is. All right, this next story is gonna be really bad for people who love passwords. So everyone's gonna love this story. The FIDO Alliance is an industry-wide authentication project with the stated aim of getting rid of passwords while improving security, not just maintaining it, but making it even better. We have a whole episode of Know a Little More about it, we'll link to that in the show notes. FIDO technology is pretty solid. They've got it working. It can perform multi-factor authentication using secure keys without you having to have something that you could get fished, you know, trying to put in. It's more secure than passwords in that respect and it's supported Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and Opera all supported. It also works with Apple's Face ID and Touch ID on Safari. All Android devices version seven and higher are FIDO two certified. So why don't we see it everywhere is because websites need to implement it. Websites are waiting for the pressure from their users before they go to the trouble of changing everything up and moving people onto FIDO instead of passwords. Thursday, FIDO published a paper they think has cracked the problem of user resistance and it took all their firepower to make this paper. FIDO members collaborating on this paper included folks from Intel, Qualcomm, Amazon, Meta, American Express, Bank of America, Google, Microsoft and Apple. That's a lot of brains. Some consensus. Yeah, FIDO works by authorizing a device to help you log in. Now that might be a Yuba key that you use. In most use cases, it's something like your phone or maybe even a smartwatch. And they argue that you need a simple way to switch or add new devices to this scheme because if you have to fall back to passwords every time you get a new phone, then people are gonna be like, why am I doing this thing? I have to remember all these passwords anyway. So FIDO suggests operating systems that implement something called the FIDO Credential Manager. It's basically a password manager but instead of for passwords, it's for the cryptographic tokens that FIDO uses. Android or iOS or Windows could all migrate them when you move to a new system so you don't have to log in again. It would do that thing that FIDO is good at of saying not only did we make it the same, we made it better because you're not gonna have to do anything. As long as you authorize the move securely then all your tokens move locally. Doesn't have to be in the cloud, it can be but it doesn't have to be. Apple's already implemented an end-to-end encrypted version of this called Passkeys in iCloud Keychain. Now that one does use the cloud but it's end-to-end encrypted so it's under your control. Passkeys is just their name for a web-authent credential and a web-authent credential is what FIDO uses. So that can be the Credential Manager for Apple. FIDO also suggests a procedure to let a device act like a big token over Bluetooth. So just like a Bluetooth security dongle like Google's Titan security key, your entire laptop or your entire phone could act like the dongle and make it easy to switch between operating systems like going iOS to Android, for instance. If you all have questions about this, I'm not like a super expert, I can try to answer them but this does seem like if they can get people to implement it, they would make life a lot easier in a lot of ways. Well, I think a lot of, and myself included when this kind of like, if you wanna be as secure as possible to have some sort of a hardware key that you use to log into various devices is the vibe. And people go, oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, can I just use passwords? But the idea that you already have a device that can be used as that dongle to unlock another device, that's I think where sort of the sweet spot where people like me are like, I mean, I care about privacy, I care about security very much, but I also care about ease of use. That's where this seems to be going for. And my thing, I mean, I might just be getting caught up on semantics here, but the idea that it's fish proof that was what I got hung up on cause fishing sort of implies human error and I think there will always be human error. So maybe instead of someone being able to get your password, now there's a bunch of different websites that get spoofed so that you put your key in a website that you thought was the one you wanted, but is now something different where they can still collect that information. So I would be very careful about using the term fish proof cause I feel like people always find a way. I feel pretty good that they can say fish proof. It doesn't mean it's without any security flaws and I think you're right to be suspicious, but fishing usually says put in your token here, you put it in and they steal it. The way Fido works, both the website and the token have to be an agreement for it to work. So there's no way to steal it. There's no way for you, even if you put it in, even if you're at the wrong website and you put your token in, the website can't get anything out of it because it's using PGP. And so it's, whereas if you type in your plain text, that code from text message, that can get fished, your Fido token can't get fished. Doesn't mean there aren't other flaws, you're absolutely right. And people will figure those out but at least it cuts down on them, right? And that's the idea. Nothing's ever gonna be entirely foolproof but you've gotten rid of one main avenue and so that's super helpful. But it's a good question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good question to have. Well, recently on a podcast called It's a Thing, co-host Tom Merritt and Molly Wood talked about the air wrap from Dyson. If you are not familiar, I don't blame you but it is a part curling iron part hairdryer and has been quite the social media rage. TikTok alone, lots of videos about this particular device. I happen to have a knockoff that I use sporadically from Revlon which is way cheaper but let me tell you a little bit more about the Dyson and why people like it so much. Dyson announced Thursday a new version is coming later this summer and here is how it's getting better. The air wrap takes advantage of something called the Kowanda effect which is the tendency of jet fluid or air to fall at a convex surface. So if you're thinking about hair, a high pressure motor pulls hair onto the barrel device to style hair without heat and then theoretically without heat damage which is one of the things that is kind of an issue with heating your hair every day with a really hot hairdryer. In the current air wrap, the attachment determines what direction you're curling. The new air wrap will have a switch that changes flow of the air so you don't have to switch out attachments just to curl in different directions. You will still need to switch the barrels depending on how big of a curl you're looking for. No judgment, it's all about you. The barrels come in 30 millimeter, 40 millimeter or 40 millimeter long and 20 millimeter long lots of options there. There are also new attachments like a smoothing dryer that promises to take your hair from wet to damp without flyaways. We'll see. Something Dyson supersonic hairdryer also promises. There's also firm and soft brushes for a straight finish and Dyson says that the whole thing is gonna work a lot faster and if you have the current airdrop Dyson will sell you the new attachment separately. Sounds great, right? Well, depends on what your wallet has inside because the new air wrap with all attachments will cost 600 US dollars. We don't have an exact date yet. Sometime this summer is coming but man, you gotta like this thing in order to buy it. Stephanie, you and I are gonna be using this. Yeah, this is one of those times where I'm glad I have no hair, I have no dog in this fight. I will say however though that Dyson is like the apple of its products. So I'm very familiar with the quality and the design and all of the science and thinking behind Dyson products. So I can appreciate what they're doing here. Would I spend 600 dollars if I had hair to get the perfect beach wave? I doubt it, but if that's something that you're into and your hair is your thing and it's important for you for it to look a certain way and get a certain result every single time then I think this could be worth it but we'd need to look at that cost per use. Yeah, what Molly was telling me about this on It's a Thing. I was fascinated with the Qwanda effect. I think that alone, the science behind it is interesting how it's able to use that. That's the other thing Dyson's really good about is finding interesting science and then turning it into a product. But she also, Sarah, was like, yeah, but the Revlon one does the same thing. It's way cheaper. So I think it's- It's like $30. Yeah, so I think it's super smart for Dyson to be like, oh, but that Revlon hasn't caught up with this. Now you can curl both directions. And you don't have like 12 different attachments on the Revlon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It also, you know, it kind of gets into the sort of like, well, I mean, do you like bathe in La Mer lotion or do you just use, I don't know, you know, lubricant or- I re-chrope and Vaseline. Yeah. There you go. I mean, there is not one size that fits all here but it is true that the Dyson hairdryer hybrid, the Airwrap is, it is well-beloved by people who blow out their hair a lot. It's the investment bag of hair styling products. It really is. Yeah. The Hermes of hair products. Totally. Hey folks, if you're feeling social and you want to get in touch with us on your social media of choice, you can do so on Twitter, DTNSShow and Instagram, DTNSPIX, D-T-N-S-P-I-X. Go find us. California State Assembly members have introduced a bipartisan bill called, and really like Republican and a Democrat, both got together. It's called the Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act. The bill would require social media companies to design their features and data collection practices in order to prevent child users from becoming addicted. Now, there's gonna be a lot of questions. You're gonna be like, okay, how do you figure this out? The bill relies in its justifications on something called the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. That's a well-accepted scale for measuring this stuff. That scale estimates about 5% of the general population exhibits signs of social media addiction. Now, there's a debate in the psychological community over whether this is actually an addiction or some other kinds of disorder. And neither the WHO or the DSM-5 have recognized problematic social media use yet because of that debate. They're waiting for some consensus to build. The bill also relies on leaked internal studies from META and of course the testimony of former Facebook product manager, Francis Haugen. What do they mean by addiction though? Okay, we've got their justifications. The bill defines addiction as quote, preoccupation or obsession with or withdrawal or difficulty to cease or reduce use of a social media platform despite the user's desire to cease or reduce that use. In other words, you get caught up in it and you can't stop. Also causing or contributing to physical, mental, emotional development or material harms to the user. This is a pretty standard definition of addiction. So you're gonna have to show a court that you met the standard of an addiction. What does it require companies to do? Well, if you make less than $100 million a year, nothing, you're exempt. However, the bigger social media companies if they are founded violation of the act must show that they didn't know or shouldn't have known that their service encouraged addictive behavior or another way of putting that, if they knew or should have known that what their algorithm that they had would produce addictive behavior, then they're in violation. To avoid these penalties, companies can engage in quarterly audits to detect potentially addictive practices. In other words, we put in a new algorithm, we did an audit every quarter to make sure it wasn't encouraging addiction. And then if they find evidence that it does, they have to correct it within 30 days. If they violate the act though, the government is not punishing them. It's the new FAD in US bills to authorize lawsuits. So if they're founded violation, parents and guardians can sue for damages that can range up to $25,000 per child per year in a civil suit. Class action suits can also be brought at around $1,000 per child and other penalties are delineated in there as well. To defend themselves then companies would have to show with a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant's injuries were not caused by the actions of the company. So it shifts the burden of proof pretty far onto the social media companies. Stephanie, I know you've followed this story pretty closely. What do you think of this attempt to remedy? I don't think it's gonna work. I think we're gonna see a lot of, I don't wanna call them frivolous because obviously parents have concerns around this and their concerns are legitimate, but we're gonna see a lot of lawsuits, but I don't think we're gonna see a lot of the result that people expect from those lawsuits. I don't even think that the social media platforms are gonna just throw money at the problem just to get those folks to go away. This is not the best way to go about this issue. I do a workshop called, Till Death Do You Tweet, I've been doing it for over 10 years now and I talked to students and parents about social media and how to kind of manage and maneuver that whole thing. And while I am not blaming parents, let me go on record, I will say that sort of anecdotically when I speak to parents at these seminars, they do tend to, for whatever reason, whether it be technology intimidation or whatever the case, they do tend to have more of a hands-off approach with respect to the amount of time their kids spend on their devices, when they can use them, if they're putting them away for dinner, putting them away for bedtime, that kind of thing. And I think we just need to do a better job of empowering parents to sort of take back some of that authority with their children on how and when they can use their phone, how much they can use their devices. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way of looking at this because the problem I have with this bill is that there's not enough knowledge of what actually causes the problems. It's very clear there is a problem. We've gotten that far. And it thankfully is not super pervasive. Well, and that's a thing too. It's a problem, but how big a problem it is. Yeah, but you know, I get there, like even if it's a few thousand children, we wanna do something to protect them. I feel like until we know more about what the actual causes are, we got a lot of correlations, but not a lot of causes that the best thing that a parent can do is what you're suggesting, which is take an active role, observe, see what's going on, right? Yeah, it's a thing. It's a huge problem. I mean, I've had parents tell me, well, they just get so angry when we try to take their phone. But, and then I always push back. I'm like, but don't you pay for that phone? Like, isn't it in your name and the bill's coming to you and you're doing all like, like it just, like I feel, I don't know where that disconnect happens where parents don't feel empowered to put some limits on what their kids are doing with their devices, but there is definitely a disconnect, at least parents that I've spoken to over how much they can sort of tell their kids what to do basically. And it doesn't even need to be, you know, that dictator-ish type of thing. Like you do what I say, you know, you can come up with a digital contract and work with your child to talk about how long we can do it, how much time on the weekends, you know, when do phones need to go off? Where will phones be stored every night when they get turned off? So, you know, I think if we could get more families having that conversation, this type of legislation would not be necessary. I think a lot of what you're talking about, you know, if you swap out smartphone and put in Walkman, TV, video game console, like go back decades, a lot of the same things still work. I'm not saying it's entirely the same and there probably are differences, but man, this sounds like it rhymes, you know, history rhymes. This sounds like it rhymes to me, yeah. Definitely, definitely. Well, if you're thinking about taking a trip and you're worried about inflation, put in a bit of a squeeze on your wallet in a variety of ways, the amateur traveler has a tip for those who want to maximize spending power before going on that trip. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another tech in travel minute. This particular tip will help you even if you're not a traveler and it's a way to save some money or to earn some miles for your trips using credit cards or cashback websites and it's a site called cashbackmonitor.com. This is an ugly site. This is a site that looks like it comes from a dystopian future where all web designers were turned into zombies, but it's a useful site because you can find whatever store you're shopping at, what's the best deal or what's the best credit card to use, including which coupon sites can get you more cashback on your purchase. And so if you're a travel hacker, you can look for what credit card to use to get the most miles and otherwise you can just look to how to save money. The site again is cashbackmonitor.com and this is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. As they say, it ain't pretty, but it's usable. That's right. That's a great tip though. Yeah, thanks, Chris. It's like my Revlon hairdryer. All right, let's check out some mail bag. Let's do it. So Mike and Dubai wanted to pass along a few thoughts about fact-checking because we were talking about various ways that we fact-check with Justin Marbury Young who was on the show yesterday. Mike says, a friend posted a tweet that made claims about companies' recent profits and price hikes and their role in inflation. The post was flagged with a fact-check and I thought maybe the numbers or claims were incorrect. They weren't. The fact-check linked to an AP article asking a handful of economists whether record corporate profits played a role in fueling inflation. The economists interviewed by the AP all said, probably not. However, not a single economist interviewed had studied the issue. I can continue to support fact-checking on social media but it needs to meet a higher threshold than linking to an article that just asked some smart people for some hot tanks. Yeah, there's all kinds of weaknesses, right? And it has to be done right for it to work. And the story we were talking about yesterday was that people who read fact-checking of an article were more likely to then no longer trust the source of the article even if the fact they checked was a quote. And so they were saying, well, the fact-checking needs to make clear who you're fact-checking. And this is another example of like, well, is this a fact that you're checking or is it an assumption that you're checking? Those can be different things. Well, thanks, Mike and Dubai. And thanks to everybody who writes in with questions, comments, feedback for us, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. You make our show better. Thank you in advance for all of your hive-mindedness. Also thanks to Stephanie Humphrey for being with us today. What's going on with you, Stephanie? Where should people keep up with your work? Well, I'm rocking all around the web at TechLife staff, but of course, thetechjohn.com, J-A-W-N, and shameless plug for the merch now that we have in our store. So check out the website, go get some merch, join our Patreon, all that good stuff. Well, we're so happy to have you and thanks for being here as always, good stuff. Also a special thanks to James Graham. James Graham is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Couldn't do without you, James. Thank you for all your years of support. Yeah. You want to get that? Thanks, folks. Become a new supporter at patreon.com slash DTNS. We might be thanking you tomorrow. Getting all that applause. We will thank you all day. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. If you know the show, you already know what time it is. But if you want to know more, patreon.com slash DTNS, it'll be rolling for all you live folks in just a few. Just a reminder, DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Have a great weekend, everybody. We'll be back Monday. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coons, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus1, Biocow, Captain Kipper, Steve Godorama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A., A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Pete Petitrion support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show include Allison Sheridan, Scott Johnson and Justin Robert Young. Our guest on this week's show was Stephanie Humphrey and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.