 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon's Ring was sharing some locations with the police, sort of. TikTok was restricting videos from people it feared would get bullied, and what is your responsibility in reading and sharing news on the internet? You have one. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about trash collection on Good Day Internet and the travails and trials thereof. If you've got opinions on trash or many other things, we've got more coming up on Good Day Internet. You want to become a member and talk about it with us at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Mozilla's Firefox private network, or FPN, which encrypts Firefox connections, is now an extended beta to US users after limited testing in the Firefox test pilot program. The free service is restricted to 12 hours of encrypted surfing on Firefox's desktop version for now. And you'll also need a Firefox account to use the extension. Qualcomm announced details of new chips, including its Snapdragon 865 and 765 mobile chips. The 865 movie platform includes the discrete X55 5G modem RF system and the 765 includes the integrated 5G modem. Qualcomm also announced that the Sonic Max in-screen fingerprint reader, which Qualcomm says has a larger surface area, Xiaomi and Oppo announced that they will use the Snapdragon 865 in their new handsets to launch in Q1. Speaking of Xiaomi, India's top smartphone vendor is launching Mi Credit, a curated lending marketplace that lets users take credit between 5,000 rupees, about 70 bucks US and 100,000 rupees, which is about $1,400 US, at a low interest rate. Xiaomi partnered with Bangalore-based ZestMoney, Credit Vidya, MoneyView, Aditya Burla Finance Limited, and Early Salary. Users are required to let Mi Credit app access their texts and call logs for transactional information to determine if they are credit worthy. Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps you've heard of him, signed the legislation that bans selling smartphones or computers or smart TVs unless Russian apps are pre-installed. Enforcement of the law begins on July 1st of 2020, and Reuters reports that the Russian government will create a list of apps before then that must be pre-installed on various devices. And this just in, Bruce Schneier passing along the information that a team of six researchers, five of them from France and one from the US, have factored RSA 240, the next on the list of the RSA Challenge list. They also computed a discrete logarithm of the same size. First time both records were broken at the same time. Both of them are 795 bits. Both computations were performed with the number field algorithm using the open source CADO NFS software. If you're not familiar with the RSA challenges, formally ended in 2007. They used to give cash prizes, but the list is still used by researchers as a reference and target and a way to figure out things and pass along research. So a big advance in crypto research and something to be aware of if you're in the security world. Let's talk a little more about what's going on at Facebook. Oh, that little company. The New York Times reports Facebook has created a chat bot called Liam Bot to help its employees answer questions about the company that they might get from friends and family during the holidays. For example, when asked about hate speech, the bot says employees should mention that Facebook consults experts is hiring more moderators and is working on AI as well as mentioned that regulation is important to address the issue. Facebook's PR department collected the answers to common questions with links to relevant Facebook blog posts. So this is a very Facebook thing to do. Take your talking points for employees and put them in a chat bot. It's getting a lot more attention than I think it deserves today though because it's really just that taking what would have been an FAQ and put it in a chat bot. Well, yeah, it also is kind of an example of what happens when engineers meet the wider world who may or may not be upset that they are working on something that has meta implications that by and large, probably these people have no connection to. They are not, they are making the decisions that upset their friends and family and yet they are the ones that are going to have to answer for them. I don't have a problem with this. Look, a lot of these people are dealing with stuff that again is above their pay grade and they just want to say something that isn't going to make another news story that will eventually get them in trouble. So here's an easy way to access the official answers. Yeah, it's an FAQ or it's various managers not having to have to repeat the same things over and over if somebody says, yeah, I'm getting some questions about this. It's like create a chat bot. You're going to get all the same answers anyway. This doesn't really change anything. Yeah, this doesn't even take this. Somebody in the chat room said taking humans out of it. No, it's not even taking humans out. It's just making the FAQ accessible in a different way. It's just the same notes. Humans created the answer. Humans are delivering the answers to their friends and family. It's just a tool. It's actually not that not that bad. It's actually a decent way of doing it. I think I just want to know who Liam is. Yeah, he must have been the HR guy that used to answer all these questions. You know what we should do is you call it Liam bot. We miss him. German digital rights blog NetsPolitik says that according to a source inside of TikTok, the company limited the reach of postings from people with disabilities. The policy was supposedly meant to protect those users from bullying. TikTok postings are discovered through promotion run by an algorithm with human moderation as well. A category called AutoR, which stopped video from being put in the for you feed after it reached a certain amount of views, was applied to many users. The source says it was used for those with Down syndrome, those deemed to be fat, LGBT users, those with apparent autism, or those with facial disfigurement, among others. A TikTok spokesperson told NetsPolitik that the rules were an early flawed attempt to combat conflict and were never intended to be a long term solution. The spokesperson also said that TikTok now has more nuanced anti-bullying policies along with in-app protections. Man. Yeah. Platform wide solutions to nuanced human problems. Boy, do they never go wrong, huh, Tom? I look at this and I think, oh, this is the Facebook problem in a different location. Facebook's problem is, wow, we have a hard time throwing enough resources against this problem at our scale because they have so many users. TikTok said, wow, we have a hard time dealing with this problem at our growth rate because TikTok exploded in accelerated growth over the past couple of years. And I don't doubt that they really do have a bullying problem and we're trying to figure out how to deal with it. They said themselves this was a really bad way to deal with it. And I think we all agree they were right. On the other hand, it's probably better than not having done anything at all. I think that's debatable actually. Well, it goes against the whole idea of TikTok is you want to get your stuff seen. So if you're going to get bullied because your stuff gets seen and there are certain things that the company has deemed, oh, that person's overweight, they're going to get bullied, there is something very wrong with the platform. This is also a platform that is used predominantly by very young people, certainly younger than me. I don't even get TikTok, but people love it. But the human curation aspect of this is if there's an algorithm that, while was certainly a bad idea, probably meant to keep people from feeling bad about themselves or worse. But the human's going in and being like, well, that person looks like they might have a condition. We'll go ahead and make sure that they get buried in case they're starting to see some momentum is very odd. Well, it depends on how it's applied, right? If the only time they used it was a person saying, hi, I'm autistic, they're like, okay, definitely probably going to get bullied, right? Yeah. But here's the point. Also, it's over. They're not doing this anymore. But I mean, there is something very important here with TikTok specifically. TikTok is a big spotlight app. The way that they want you to interact with it is not to follow your favorite people. It's not to go wait for the new release from somebody. You're going there every day, multiple times a day. And TikTok is giving you the things that through its AI curation, you are supposed to see. That is generated by popularity and watch time. And a popularity and watch time is in this very adolescent app. Look, even the stuff now, I was looking at TikTok yesterday and there's some jokes on there that I could see myself making at 16, 17, that I'd be very horrified by making at 35. If part of that adolescence is understanding the differences amongst each other and possibly having a bad reaction to it, like laughing or making fun of people that are different from you, which is something that happens, they succeeded in avoiding the big magazine article about how TikTok is the place for the app where normies punish the autistic, right? But you're right. This is something that does need to be nuanced. And I'm actually more excited to know what they did because that is a very well curated feed whenever me, a random creepy 35-year-old interacts with the teen app. Yeah. I'm very curious about what they're doing now as well. I thought it's saying that they don't do it anymore. Great. I'm very glad to hear that. What are you doing? Because I'm very curious about that. Google has revamped its share option within Google Photos, including a private messaging feature that is now built into its iOS, Android, and web apps. Instead of having to create an album to share a photo with someone else, which was a little tedious if you just wanted to share one picture, you can now send a message to a friend who's also using Google Photos and create a thread on that one photo that can then expand into a conversation, creating a more social experience. Of course, you can still do an album if you have more than one. But this is a way to easily share photos within Google Photos, although I just share these photos through whatever messaging app I'm using. So I'm not sure how much use I'm going to make it of it, but maybe this is a big deal for people who have been sharing. Well, you'd be saving a step. You're a Google Photos user. If you could just share something from the app itself, aren't you? To me, it's easier to be like, oh, I took the photo on my phone, open up WhatsApp, connect, you know, put photo in message send than it is to like, oh, take a photo. Okay, now go to Google Photos. Now think, oh, wait, does this person have Google Photos or not? Well, now I want, you know what I mean? Like, I'm just not in Google Photos all the time. Yeah, if you're using it as mostly a backup, then maybe this is a step that that you don't need. But Google Photos is, by and large, it's a well-liked app. The social aspects of it seem pretty obvious. And we could go like, well, why didn't they do this earlier? You know, you know, with the Instagram on the rise and Google could have made something that's a little bit more social. That's true. I think that this is a great little feature though. It makes perfect sense for anybody who's like, and I know that there are lots of you out there going like, I love this idea. It's going to make so much easier because, yes, making an album for a picture or two was a little clunky before. It certainly kept me from sharing things in Google Photos. And I'm not a huge Google Photos user, but I do use it as backup. So there you go. We have so rarely get news that breaks in the middle of the show in the technology world that are very excited right now. Coming across the wires, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are relinquishing control of Alphabet. Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take over as CEO of Alphabet while maintaining his position as CEO of Google. With Alphabet now well-established and Google and the other bets operating effectively as independent companies, it's the natural time to simplify our management structure, wrote the duo of Brin and Page. We've never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a president. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google and managing Alphabet's investment in our portfolio of other bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term and will remain actively involved in the board. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we're passionate about. I would assume that's like travel and drinking. Burning Man. Yeah, burning man. But this is a big move and it's too quick to really say what this means, but it is a change from Alphabet as the parent company. We're the CEO of that and each company underneath has its own CEO to saying Google is the most important thing in Alphabet and we're just going to give up the fiction that these other companies are going to be as big as Google ever. Finkel is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkel. This is what that is. This is the solid. There is no Alphabet. There is Google. And that's what this move means to me. CNET reports that for over a year, police departments had access to a heat map of Amazon Ring customers showing where their video doorbells were installed. Down to the street, but not actual addresses. The feature was removed in July. Public documents from the Rolling Meadows Police Department in Illinois were obtained by privacy researcher Chendres Candler. Sorry, sorry. In a statement, Ring stressed that its heat map tool didn't offer exact locations of users. It's meant to help police determine if there were enough Ring cameras active in the area to request video recordings from users. So the concern here is police intimidation, right? So if you're like, wait, what's the big deal? You have to agree to give the video. So what if they know that you have a doorbell? Can't they just walk by and see that? That's fine if you trust the police. If you live in an area where you have good relationships with the police, you probably don't get this. But if you live in an area that's adversarial and you look at a heat map and you see like, oh, it's really easy to tell that I'm the only Ring doorbell user on my street and the police come knocking and say, hey, we know you have a Ring doorbell. We're trying to catch some perps in your area. Please hand over the video. You'll feel pressure to hand it over that you wouldn't otherwise. And again, you may say like, well, why wouldn't you want to help the police find someone? There are situations where you may think that the police aren't on the up and up and aren't are trying to build a case against someone that maybe you don't support, in which case you wouldn't want to cooperate and you don't have to cooperate, but they could put pressure on you and make you maybe feel like, uh-oh, they're going to start looking at to enforce things on me. Maybe they're going to put some traffic tickets on me. Most police are not like this. I'm not trying to tag the police with Tar and Feathers, but there are areas where people have these legitimate concerns and that's why they're worried about this sort of thing. It would be the kind of the same concern as if I was at a, I don't know, a town parade and something happened and somebody, you know, somebody in law enforcement tracked me down. They said, we know you were, you were recording some video at that parade and we'd like you to give us your video. You know, it's, it's, there are times where you'd be like, yes, I'm happy to help. And other times you're like, no, I don't want to do that. I was part of the protest. I don't want you to capture my fellow protesters and bring them in. Right? Yeah. Maybe there's something in my video that has nothing to do with what they're talking about, but I'm not comfortable sharing it. Sure. So, so I can see where, and it sounds like the practice shut down in July and Ring has been, you know, forthcoming about it. And there's some public documents. So it wasn't, it wasn't totally under wraps, but I wonder, I don't know how many people were affected by this before the company decided to reverse course because they knew it was going to be really bad PR. There is a huge market for security, right? Be it an old fashioned ADT, you've seen a lot of startups like Simply Safe and Ring is very much in this mode, except it has that one killer idea that you can watch what's on your doorbell. You can always have your, for your personal safety, this connection to your home, but a connection to the police for many users are a part of that. For some who don't have the same idea of whether or not the police in your town is indeed somebody that is on your side, then they will have reservations. The key to all of this is we've always said on this show, opt in. If you want to be, have your device have a closer connection to the police, maybe even further than this, that they're able to pull video in, in certain cases, maybe with, with the touch of a button on your app, then you should be allowed to do it. In the meanwhile, if you don't, then you shouldn't have to be, be put in the situation where somebody who has the ability to arrest you for something other than what they came to your door for is now asking you for something that you don't want to give them. All right. Let's finish our top stories on a lighter note. Oh, let's because tis the season for Apple and Google to announce their choices for the best apps and games of the year. AI powered specter camera, one best iPhone app of the year. Sky, the children of the light, one best iPhone game. Google named teen oriented messaging app abloh as best Android app and call of duty mobile as best Android game, which also won the people's choice. People's choice for best Android app was video editor, glitch video effects. Best iPad app went to digital notebook flow by Moleskine. The best Mac app went to affinity publisher by designed by for designing printed materials like books and brochures. The iPad game of the year was hyper light drifter and Mac game of the year was grease. The Apple TV app of the year was the explorers, but shows off natural photography and video. I'm actually kind of into that. I wasn't familiar with it before. And the Apple arcade game of the year was Sayonara Wild Hearts. And that's what all these awards are good for as consumers is is exposing us to some stuff that we didn't know was out there that that might be pretty good. Might be pretty cool. I thought the explorers look pretty interesting myself. So there you go, folks. Go check out the lists. Spotify also put out their their top music downloads or streams of the decade. Congratulations Drake on being the most streamed Spotify artist of the decade to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes. Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. Let's talk your responsibility in sharing news. Adi Robertson over at the Verge has a very thoughtful and well written article called how to fight lies, tricks and chaos online, basically trying to share her experiences as a journalist in ferreting out viral stories to give people some insights into best practices so they can trust what they're reading online. I'll break down what what 80s approach is. And then I think we all kind of have our own approaches here that we'll share with you. Adi Robertson says number one, you should know when to be worried if you have a strong emotional reaction, if it makes you want to spend money, if you immediately want need to share it. Those are warning signs that like hold on, am I being manipulated? Number two is once you feel that you should check the story. How old is it? A lot of times I've run into stories where I'm like, that's interesting. And then realize, oh, it's also five years old. Are the photos from the story actual photos of the story or are they using illustrative photos? Sometimes people will manipulate you that way. He shouldn't trust outlets that don't link to primary sources or don't quote actual sources. Dig back to the source of the story. If those links are there, whether it's the original reporting, the press release, the legal filing, any direct quotes and he leaked documents that are maybe up on scribb, something like that. If you can't find anything like that, it's a good warning sign. You shouldn't believe it. Also look at the context. Look for gaps in the story, mismatches between what is claimed in the story and what's in the source. Beware, is it satire? Everybody's been fooled at one time or another by the onion or someone to like it. Does it describe actual conditions? Are people actually outraged or are they just saying they're outraged and everyone's getting outraged because the story said they were outraged but nobody was outraged before the story? What's the scale of it? Is it actually national or is it just happening in a neighborhood? Is it just a few people? And most importantly to me, are other outlets presenting the same story? Or is it just this one place? Watch out for what Dana Boyd calls context collapse, where all the information seems equally important because it's next to each other in your feed. You should think about where the story is coming from. Then weigh the evidence. You can't believe or disbelieve everything. Some experts are worth trusting. Some news outlets are usually accurate. And even so, both sometimes get things wrong. It's how they react that's important to note. And then think about what happens if you're wrong. Why do you need to share this story? What would be the good outcome of sharing this story? And I'll finish up with a quote from Adi Robinson. She says, I want to argue for treating investigation like a shovel, not a knife. Critical thinking shouldn't just be a synonym for doubting or debunking something. The point of research isn't simply to poke holes in a story. It's to understand the story better. And I think that's a good jumping off point for our own perspectives on this, which is I'm not worried about disproving a source. I'm worried about making sure I really understand what the story is. I totally agree. I think that there is a tremendous amount of critical thinking that I think now is more important than ever because you do, and I mean you, the dear listener listening to my voice right now, need to act like a journalist more than you ever have before because the role of journalism has changed rapidly over the past 10 years. Think of how many stories, big stories, major stories have literally begun because somebody posted something on Facebook, because someone posted something on Twitter. These are now considered primary sources and you are interacting with them almost universally before a journalist that's then going to synthesize this information will. So you are facing a lot of these same problems. And the only thing I would ask for everybody to think of is not to believe that journalism is either this holy right that you have been sent from heaven to discern truth from fiction. That's a lot of mythology that kind of goes into this that I've always found a little repugnant. But do understand that the real role of a journalist and more specifically a publisher is that your reputation is on the line for what you push out for newspapers and television stations and stuff like that. It can be a lawsuit. It can put you out of business. Just ask Gawker, right? But on the other side, you have your personal reputation there. And this is where when I read all these things, these were all lessons that I experienced coming up through journalism and through new media that I had to learn the hard way. I had a story once where a police report when I was the editor-in-chief of a paper, they had it looked like on the police report that there was $3,000 found in the car of a quarterback for the Syracuse football team. That would almost certainly be a violation of if you got it from somebody else be a violation of NCAA rules. That's a massive story. We ran a very, very basic version of it and then turned it over for people to investigate. And within 24 hours, we found out, oh, wait, no, it was just a wrong scribble on the police report. And we had to walk it back. We had to issue retractions. We had to make sure that this thing was handled in the right way so we could not be found malicious, which is the way that you are proven liable. So just your reputation, you are your own publisher. Everything that you put is your own reputation. Yeah. And that I think it's important to note that, yes, even the most respected publications will get things wrong sometimes. And how you handle that after the fact is how you build your reputation going forward along with good reporting. I somewhat recently had a friend who was like, oh, this is a great Twitter account. It's just like really easy snippets of news. And you can kind of just almost keep up on news when you're so busy that you can't read all this stuff. And I look at it and I'm like, well, where are the sources? They're not linking to anything. It's a tweet that says something like North Korea resuming nuclear tests. Where you're like, what? Where did that come from? And he said, well, the source is the Twitter account. And I was like, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way. And it's like, this is not an ignorant person at all. This is somebody who was like, oh, this is saving me time. But I'm like, no, you can't. If you get your news that way, you're going to get in a lot of trouble. Like, who's running this Twitter account? So I think sources and knowing, again, that some stuff is going to stories develop, they change over time, but at least being able to track something back to an original source. And then you can say for yourself, I trust this or I don't. Or, well, three publications that I trust did all say the same thing. This is starting to feel like it has more legs and make more sense is a huge part of what we'll do every day. Now, here's the final word that I think is important to put on this. You don't need to be a journalist. That's ridiculous. If you're sitting there like, man, I'm not going to go through all that work every time I want to share a link. That's fine. Just listen to what Justin was saying and what Sarah was saying about what needs to be done for protecting your reputation and for making sure that what you're passing along is true. And then maybe don't pass it along unless you've got a good shortcut to say, well, I always trust TechCrunch or I always trust the Verge. That doesn't mean they'll always be right. They will make mistakes too. But don't just pass it along again because of that context where you're like, well, but it was passed along to me. It was on a Twitter feed. Being on Facebook, being on Twitter doesn't make something legitimate. We have to relearn the shortcuts. The shortcuts used to be like, well, I heard it on a major broadcast network news. I read it in a major newspaper. I heard it on a legitimate radio news source. You can't do that on the internet where everything looks legitimate. Everything looks the same. So instead of saying, well, I can't be a journalist, say, you know what, maybe I won't pass things along unless I'm feeling pretty sure about it. It's better to just not pass it along and not believe it and not let yourself get swept up than to abandon your responsibility in my opinion. So find some trusted sources that you can say, I'll let them do the curating for me because I've never been burned or I've been burned very rarely by them rather than treating the entire internet like it's all equally credible because we all know it's not. Just qualify. The way that you prove libel is actual malice. When you're putting something out that you know is inflammatory, think about that. Am I perpetrating? This is untrue. Am I perpetrating actual malice? Well, speaking of curation, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. Your peers will judge you if you add a bad link. Now I'm just kidding. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. But really, the good stuff rises to the top. Our subreddit is great and we really appreciate and thank everybody who points us to stories that we might not see otherwise or stories that we had seen, but we realize that they mean something to you. You can also join the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mailbag. Real quick. We got a fun heartfelt Giving Tuesday type email from David, who said, I just want to take a quick moment and thank you guys for doing DTNS and making a fun, enjoyable and informative show that I can listen to every day. Pass along my thanks to Amos, Patrick, Scott, Justin, and Len and all the others that worked to make the show a genuine joy to listen to. That's David from Cool and Snowy Minnesota. Oh, thank you, David. I hope you stay warm up there in Cool and Snowy Minnesota. I like how he's like, it's snowy, but cool. Also shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Steve Ayadarola. Hope I said your name right. It's a very cool name. Mark Gibson and Dr. Carmine M. Bailey. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Looking very dapper, I might add. Justin, what's going on with you? Well, I'm glad you asked, Sarah, because I've got a brand new podcast and it is debuting today. Raise the Dead. The first episode is out now. The feed is live on all the stores, but friends, it would really, really, really make me happy if you gave it a listen. It is the story of the 1960 election and a lot of the lessons that could really be applied to what we just saw in 2016. Tom, do we have the trailer? We do indeed. Here you go. As a candidate, who is Trump more like Kennedy or Nixon? 2016 is an election no one saw coming, but what if we were looking in the wrong direction? What if the only way to understand the biggest upset in presidential history is to find the time it happened before? That's what we're going to do here. But unlike 2016, as we are in the 60th anniversary of the 1960 election, we know all the dirty details. For everyone else, it's just old news. And old news dies and becomes history. But on this podcast, oh, yeah, we raise the dead. So again, that is available everywhere that you get podcasts. I want to thank Tom, who was very personally involved in the development of this project and listened to many, many hours of far worse versions of the episode you're going to listen to. And thank you to everybody at GTNS, you guys, and everybody listening, you were always so supportive of stuff that I've been asked, and it means a lot. So give it a listen. Go subscribe right now. Just try it out. It's super important for Justin's success with this project to get a lot of subscriptions right now. So even if you just want to help Justin out, go subscribe and then listen. And I think you'll be hooked. Go check it out, raisethedeadpodcast.com. Also, don't forget we have new Patreon reward merchandise to celebrate six years of GTNS. Len Peralta created the art. You can find out more details at Patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. You can always support our show at DailyTechNewShow.com slash Patreon. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Write us early and often. I'm begging you for live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. You can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this brover.