 Coming up on DTNS, Zoom says it's end to end encrypted, but it's not. Scientists take the first step to turning your thoughts into text and why Niantic made a move that could make an augmented reality juggernaut out of them. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 31, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the dark forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Ah, Roger and Patrick just put on a parenting clinic in Good Day Internet. If you'd like to get that and more, we have a wider conversation available at patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Canada's D-Wave Quantum Computing Company is giving anyone working on COVID-19 free access to its Leap To Quantum Computing Cloud Service. This includes drug research, logistics, diagnostics, and modeling that spread, among other things. Existing Leap To customers will offer engineering expertise as well. Leap To is available in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and 32 countries in Europe. Project Loon Balloons, which deliver 4G Internet Service, launched in Puerto Rico January 25, 2020, have begun arriving over Kenya. President Uhuru Kenyatta gave approval last week for Loon to operate. Uhuru believes the balloon-delivered Internet will be vital to help the country as it attempts to stop the spread of COVID-19. Xiaomi beat expectations with a 27.1 percent year-over-year rise of revenue in Q4. It does, of course, believe the impact from the global pandemic will affect its bottom line, but they think it should be manageable. Xiaomi said its own production was already back up to 80 to 90 percent of capacity. India, however, is now Xiaomi's biggest overseas market, and that country just entered a 21-day lockdown. Xiaomi hopes for signs of recovery there in two to three months. A Shanghai startup called Zero Carbon System has developed a driverless street sweeper that can clean streets and sort collected trash like plastic and glass. The system has signed on the governments of Yangzhou and Jiangzhou as clients with a fleet of 200 vehicles under a pilot operation in Jiangzhou. Epic Games' owner of House Party is offering a $1 million reward for evidence the company was the victim of a commercial smear campaign. Starting Monday, posts on Twitter claim to show people locked out of apps like Netflix, Spotify or bank apps after downloading House Party. Epic says there is no evidence of any link between House Party and compromised accounts. Apple has acquired the weather app maker Dark Sky and has removed Dark Sky from the Android and Wear OS app stores and will shut down the Android app version of Dark Sky Services in July. No new signups for the Dark Sky API are being accepted and that API will shut down at the end of 2021. The Dark Sky website will stop showing forecasts and maps on July 1 as well. The US FCC announced all carriers and phone companies must adopt the surestaken protocol by June 30th of 2021. Wish it was 2020. The protocol authenticates caller IDs to reduce spoofing, identify bad actors and preemptively stop spam calls. Snapchat is launching a new feature called App Stories that lets users highlight their Snapchat content in other apps such as Dating Profile Hilly, alongside videos in Triller as part of screen sharing in Squad, and in augmented reality network Octi. Developers can now sign up to add stories to their apps as well. Instead of disappearing after 24 hours as they do on Snapchat itself, stories will default to a 7-day expiration in other app stories. Alright, let's talk a little bit about Zoom. Let's do it. Zoom claims that meetings that have no participants on the phone are secured with end-to-end encryption. Okay, that sounds fine. The Intercept, though, reports that Zoom uses what's known as transport encryption using TLS, which lets Zoom access unencrypted video and audio from meetings for ad targeting purposes. A Zoom spokesperson told the Intercept, quote, when we use the phrase end-to-end in our other literature, it is in reference to the connection being encrypted from Zoom end point to Zoom end point. And currently, it's not possible to enable E2E encryption for Zoom video meetings. A user is filed suit against Zoom and San Jose, California federal court over its use to the Facebook API to share data with Facebook without disclosing it to Zoom customers. Zoom has since removed the function from its iOS app. And finally, a malware researcher found that Zoom had used pre-installation scripts to unpack the app and place it in the apps folder on macOS and uses a misleading prompt to gain privileges. This is not malicious itself, but it is a method used by malware. Yeah, that last one's just a little shady. The lawsuit has to do with something that Zoom is walking back now. But saying your end-to-end encryption because it's encrypted between the Zoom end points is a very creative way of redefining end-to-end encryption and is not end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is what Signal does. It's what Apple does with FaceTime. And Apple does multi-person video chat that is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that Apple doesn't have the keys and cannot see what's happening. Saying it's end-to-end from Zoom endpoint to Zoom endpoint says, oh, we can see what is going on in your video chat if we need to. That means that they could possibly access recordings. That means that if a government came and said you have to hand this over that they would be compelled legally to handle it over because they have access to it. That is not end-to-end encryption. And I'm not saying you should stop using Zoom. Facebook Messenger is also not end-to-end encrypted at this point. And plenty of people use it. All I'm saying is you should know it's not end-to-end encrypted when you use it, that it is encrypted in transport. And that's fine as long as you don't need it to be end-to-end encrypted. And like Shannon said on our show on Friday, if you need a higher level of encryption, you might want to look at Signal or something else to use rather than Zoom. But I just think this is the problem with Zoom. It's just kind of shady how it does this sort of thing where it's like, yeah, we're end-to-end encrypted between Zoom endpoints. It's like, that's not what that means. Come on, stop it. Yeah, I don't know how shady Zoom is as a whole. It seems to me like it's a company that was doing things in its corner. It was still a big company, but now it's like the biggest conferencing company people are talking about. But definitely end-to-end means something very specific. Yes. And you can't just say, well, when we say this, it's like, I'm going to pay you $1,000. And when I said $1,000, I meant rupees. And you're like, no, that's not, you don't, when I say rupee, when I say dollars, what I mean is rupees. You're like, no, I'm sorry. It's almost like saying, I'm going to pay you $1,000. And by $1,000, I mean $900. No, that's a different thing. You can't just like, that's pretty close though. Like it's close to end-to-end encrypted, right? Well, not really. That's the whole thing. But yeah, so yeah, not great. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else to say about this because I don't want people to overact and stop using Zoom. I don't think there's any reason for that. It really reminds me of Ring and the Ring doorbells where they just, they keep skating so close to the edge that it makes people uncomfortable and a lot of people stop using it. And I don't think anything Ring has done has been, you know, spectacularly bad or even criminal. But they're always doing something that just crosses over the line and makes you uncomfortable with them. And a lot of times people are like, you know what? If that's what I know they're doing, what are they doing that I don't know about? And maybe I don't want to use them. I think that's what happens. It's very possible. And in this case, they could have said, you know, there are plenty of communications app. Maybe they were thinking that there are plenty of communications app that don't have end-to-end encryption. Maybe they were thinking, you know, we're used for business. So a lot of people will want end-to-end and we should say it is. And that is just not, you shouldn't do that. It's just, yeah. So two things is, one, Zoom, stop calling it end-to-end encrypted. And two, if you're using Zoom, know that it's only encrypted in transport. It is not end-to-end encrypted. This one's a little more fun. Scientists published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, so peer-reviewed journal, a method for turning cortical activity into text. In other words, not exactly you think it in, it turns into text, but getting closer, which is being able to take brain activity and interpret it. The scientists used epilepsy patients who had already had electrodes implanted for their epilepsy treatment. So they didn't have to do invasive surgery. That invasive surgery was already called for because of this other condition, but they got them to take part in this study. And then they tracked the neural activity of these patients while they read 50 sentences. So it's a limited data set. We don't, it's not very good at generalizing beyond this, but a machine learning system learned to recognize the brain activity and create sentences from it. So in other words, they could then just show the brain activity to the machine learning system and say, okay, we're going to go just based on the learning algorithms. We're not going to give you the data set anymore. Tell us what this brain activity was, and it could. That's a big advance. On less than 40 minutes of training per participant, accuracy came close to human translation. But again, only within that set of 50 sentences, the system now needs to be generalized, not only outside of the 50 sentence set, but for people who can't speak aloud to train it. Remember, these are people who could speak. If you want to use this for someone who doesn't have the ability to speak or write, you're going to need to do something else or be able to train it on someone who can speak and have it apply to someone who can't. That's a far more difficult problem. The scientists hope it can, however, be the basis of a speech prosthesis for people unable to speak or type. It's interesting to me because when I think of, oh, my mind wandering, it's like, what does, how would that translate into text? Thinking concepts can turn into words, but that's just based on the English language as I've known it. So it's like, what would that sort of brain dump look like if you just sort of tapped in? But I can see where, yes, when you're reading something, you're super focused on something that could be output from your brain because you're not saying it out loud necessarily. So yeah, even though this is a limited experiment, the implications are huge. And it's also, I think there are a number of different experiments in that field where they, there are ways of reading your mind quote unquote to manipulate a mouse or some pointing device or some UI element. This seems like the kind of thing, if it works for 50 sentences, I suppose it could work for 50 actions or a number of different actions. And if it does work well enough, it could also be used for these kinds of things as well. Although again, there might be simpler solutions for those. The invasive surgery, if it is necessary for this to get the data it needs to be trained, does make the prospect of that type of technology a little bit less appealing, I think, for a lot of people. Yeah, if you are someone who cannot speak and you will be able to speak again, you might be willing to do that kind of invasive surgery. But if they can't, but it's only going to be limited to people in those situations, if they can't get it out. I don't think people are going to be doing elective surgery. I don't know. I don't know. We say that now. Maybe I'll be considered the old man like, oh, you don't want to do the elective surgery for the special speech implant in the future? Who knows? But the big thing is the machine learning needs to get trained on a wider variety of sentences. And then once that happened, it may be able to recognize phonemes, et cetera, and then be applicable to someone else. Also, someone who can't speak needs to be able to imagine themselves speaking. And that's something that hasn't been tested either. Is it the same? Will you be able to see the same brain activity in someone who doesn't speak normally? Because what they're modeling it on is the actual brain activity that causes you to speak. So that's another hurdle there. Indeed. Fitbit announced the Charge 4, including built-in GPS, NFC payments, and Spotify compatibility. Fitbit is adding seven GPS-specific modes for activities like outdoor hiking, running, and walking, plus heat maps to see where a route got your heart rate up most. Active zones minutes will track time spent in specific heart rate zones, and the Charge 4 will also get Fitbit's smart wake alarm feature when it rolls out. Pre-orders start today for the $150 base model in black, rosewood, or storm blue and black, and a $170 special edition with an extra granite reflective or black woven band. Well, I'm a Fitbit tried and true customer. I not only have the Versa 2. In fact, I've done a live with it segment on it, so you know very well that I have one. But I'm also really into the whole Fitbit ecosystem, and I'm tracking how much water I drink every day and the whole thing, so I love Fitbit. So I can see where the Charge 4 would fit into all of this well. It's interesting because fitness trackers that aren't specifically smart watches, but they're also cheaper are exactly what certain people need. The Charge 3 did not sell that well. Fitbit just has a lot more competition, and now it's getting bought by Google, so who really knows how Fitbit's going to change in the next year plus. But this is a great little gadget. Some of the stuff like a heat map so that when I was huffing and puffing up a hill, it'll tell me later that I was doing that. I mean, probably kind of obvious, but still it's fun stats and data that I think when you really want to go ham on these devices, it's helpful and it keeps you motivated. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a big Fitbit user myself, but I think that this definitely fits in nicely into their family of devices, and I think that's one of the reasons people are excited about it. The other is that people have forgotten that Google hasn't completed the acquisition yet, and a lot of people are like, oh, this is the first Fitbit device after Google bought them, and it's like, well, it's the first Fitbit device since Google announced they were buying them, but it may be, in fact, the last Fitbit device released before the acquisition is closed. Yeah, I mean, Fitbit may have been so close to, well, let's just roll out the charge for, and then things will get interesting when Google's involved. But yeah, I mean, I don't know, the 150 base model, not that cheap. You can get Fitbit activity trackers for cheaper than that, for sure, under $100 at this point, but it is nice, it's fully featured, but again, not a smartwatch. It depends on what you want. If you've never had a smartwatch, I think that in many ways, and I'm kind of in that category because the Versa2 isn't technically a smartwatch. If you compare it to something like an Apple Watch that really works with iOS better than this particular watch, but if you're looking for something specific that really focuses on activity and the GPS is nice, and NFC payments also very nice, then these are these kind of middle-of-the-road products that there are a lot of them, and I wonder where they're going to go in the future. Spotify launched standalone app Spotify Kids in the US, Canada, and France for those already on a $14.99 month Spotify Premium family tier, which supports up to six accounts. It's made for families or groups. Spotify Kids has over 8,000 curated songs and 125 playlists for children aged three and up and available on both Android and iOS. Spotify Kids launched in beta in Ireland back last October and then expanded to Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. So it sounds like they got enough good feedback that they expanded it to some large markets. So here's my only issue with this, and I don't have kids, so this is not really something that I can use and say with authority whether it's curated well or not, but in times like these where many families are experiencing sheltering at home and staying with their kids and there's not a lot of childcare and there are lots of reasons why this can be problematic and having kids being able to enjoy a playlist or a variety of playlists would be a great thing. If Spotify gave this to all of their users, let's say, maybe in select markets or whatever, for free for three months without needing to be on a $15 per month family plan, that seems like a much better way to get more Spotify customers overall because it's a goodwill gesture, but it's also a way in because once a kid likes a playlist, you're probably going to pay for it because sometimes you just need things like that. I don't know, Patrick, what do you think? I have two problems with this app. My kid is too, so too young, and also his favorite song is Bad Guy by Billie Eilish, which I suppose is nothing on that. He likes Bad Guy. Wow, he got good taste, though. He loves it. He wants to sing it. He wants to listen to it all the time, and he looks at it and he goes like, Bad Guy. But yeah, it seems like a cool thing, but I wonder if they're not going to offer something like access to the app. Unless it's launched safely and they know that it works and they know that they can handle the load, maybe they can offer access to it for a week or two, at least to help out parents because you're right. I think it would make for a better conversion thing if they offered it a taste for free for a little while. I would definitely say at this point, I mean, I have Pandora on Spotify. I only have the personal, the $5 a month account. And one reason I haven't expanded to a family size one is I don't have enough people in my family to actually take advantage of it. I'm pretty much the only one that uses Pandora. Although my eldest daughter really is into that specific mode with kids like listening to the same song over and over and over and over again, and now she's stuck in a SIA mode, so everything has to be SIA. Watch your chandeliers. Yes, chandeliers. Even the LSD collaboration that she does is part of it. I can see it being advantage, but at this stage, if people don't have it, I don't know if this will necessarily make them sign up to a family plan. All right, let's talk about Huawei, which reported a net profit rise of 5.6%. It's its smallest rise in three years. It's still 5%. That's not nothing. Sales were driven by 36.2% rise in China. Revenue in Europe and the Middle East rose 0.7% and fell 13.9% in Asia Pacific outside of China. Huawei chairman Liang Hua said the company would need to further adapt to the long-standing restrictions imposed by the entity list while also addressing the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Deputy Chairman Eric Xu told reporters, the Chinese government will not just stand by and watch Huawei be slaughtered on the chopping board and, quote, suggesting China could ban US 5G and smartphone equipment. Xu also suggested that Huawei would like Google to make apps for the Huawei gallery app store similar to how Google makes apps for iOS. Huawei still became the world's second largest smartphone maker by market share in 2019, overtaking Apple mainly through sales in China. Yeah, for, you know, you could point your fingers, which certainly Deputy Chairman Eric Xu is doing here and the United States is also doing from its government. But whatever the reason, whoever is at fault in your mind, this is a mess for Huawei. They are starting to be stymied outside of China. Huawei will not fail. They will not go away because they are strong in China and I believe they will continue to be strong in China. But this is showing that even before the effects of COVID-19 were felt in the rest of the world, they were seeing serious headwinds. And that's with models that still could have the Google Play Store. They are now starting to push out models that can't have the Google Play Store. So you see, I think that's why you see this sort of stiff resistance and fiery rhetoric from the Deputy Chairman, but also the idea of like, but hey, we could also just, you know, get Google Apps in our store. You do that for Apple. Why, when you do that for us, please? Because it's their only hope, I think. And obviously that's not going to happen because Google can't do business with Huawei because of the entity list, right? I could not find clarification on that because there are American apps that are showing up in the gallery. Not a lot, but some. So there is a way for apps to show up in this app store without violating the entity list. I think because it's not a part, right? The entity list says you can't give us Android because that is considered a thing that we make the phone with. But the only reason Google Play Store can't be given to them is because Google ties it to Android. And so what they're saying is like, there's no reason you couldn't just show up in our app store because that wouldn't necessarily violate the entity list because we're not using it to build the phone. I still need to do some more looking to find out exactly what the details are, but it seems to be that that might be what they're thinking. I wonder what American authorities would think about that happening. They probably ban apps from going into app stores and showing you, right? I mean, it's a cat and mouse game. Niantic, the makers of Ingress and Pokemon Go have acquired augmented reality firm 6D.ai. This is a company that came out of Oxford University's active vision lab and uses computer vision to solve augmented reality issues, meaning they can do some really cool AR stuff that Pokemon Go couldn't do, but now might be able to. In fact, Niantic says the acquisition should let people, quote, experience Pokemon habitats in the real world or watch dragons fly through the sky and land on buildings in real time. They also talked about having characters from their games take you on tours of cities, the ability to leave notes for each other in the augmented world. If you want to get to that sort of Neil Stevenson, William Gibson-like world where you put on the glasses and see more than what's in the real world around you, this is how you do it. And Patrick, I'm curious what you think of this. I feel like this position's Niantic to be the winners of the killer app, to say, look, we know people love Ingress. We know people adore Pokemon Go. We know people were calling it AR when it really wasn't AR, but now we have the talent to actually make the platform that turns the world around you into something augmented. They just need somebody to make the hardware that they can run this on. There's some of that. I'm not a huge Pokemon Go user, so I can't speak with a definite authority on this, but my feeling is that the real draw of Pokemon Go is not really AR, it's geolocation. And it's actually kind of similar with Ingress. The AR is a nice bonus, so I wonder if that will enable them to create products where AR will be the main draw, or if it's kind of irrelevant to their already successful product. Not irrelevant, but less relevant than people might think. I would argue that you're right about the geolocation because that's what they built Ingress on, was making that geolocation. But geolocation is the thing that can make the technology from 60 AI sing, because you know where to put it. The marriage of those two is what has me looking at this with a raised eyebrow and saying, that is combining the peanut butter and the chocolate together. Yes, no, absolutely. It's still unproven, and we're in an area where the ideas are very seducing, they're very seductive, but the applications are sometimes different from what we imagine them to be in all of those things. Oh yeah, you're absolutely right. I just played a lot of Half-Life Alex, which is a VR thing, so it's a little bit different, but I wasn't super impressed. Yes, I know, a lot of people were, and maybe I'm weird, but it's kind of the same cautiousness, I guess. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, there's an easy way to do it. Go to DailyTechHeadlines.com, keep yourself informed in a short amount of time. And if you come across a news story, something, maybe somebody tweets it, maybe it comes through one of your feeds, and you think, this would be a great story for Daily Tech News Show, you know what you should do? Go to DailyTechHeadlines.com, and check out the subreddit. There are stories in there that you think are interesting. You can vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.reddit.com as well. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's! Mark wrote in on yesterday's discussion regarding privacy and COVID-19 contact tracing. Mark says, Tom said that Germany is a long history of making privacy paramount, unlike the U.S. That's true when you're talking about private or commercial companies having access to our data, but it's certainly not true when it comes and must be made available to the government on demand to protect companies from copyright infringement, et cetera. The copyright protection stuff comes after blanket laws requiring data retention were determined illegal under EU law, despite that member states continue. The privacy laws are mostly just to attack Google, Facebook, the big companies, and make it look like they are good laws for the common good, but it doesn't really apply to government surveillance. My point is not to be contentious, but rather to encourage a deeper examination of EU and member state actual data practices before holding them up as examples censored of the full context. Okay, that's an interesting perspective. Thank you, Mark, for that. The little boots on the ground perspective there on the differences between that privacy culture in Germany and what we have in other countries. And then Norm from the beautifully sunny and moderate temperatures of Vesalia, Joe Oaks says, wanted to thank Matt for the Da Vinci Tree Academy tip on the March 30th DTNS episode. I have two children at home, and the problem isn't finding resources, it's finding reliable and vetted resources, and this is definitely one of them. My kindergarten age daughter's school provided some at-home material, but it lacks the personal touch that the Da Vinci material does, and will provide a great supplement. Plus, additional teaching aids will be greatly appreciated as I have a feeling I'll be having my children home through the rest of the school year, if not through the summer. Yes, thank you, Norm. And thank you, Matt, once again. Also, congratulations, Matt and his wife had a baby girl this morning. Oh, congratulations, Matt. I know. And family. Yeah, so it's pretty great. And if you're like, wait, what was that resource again? It was Da Vinci Tree, davincitree.academy.com slash online learning. We're going to head out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Chris Smith, Jeff Wilkes, and Sonya Vining. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja. He's our Tuesday star. I was trying to think of something that started with a T. I couldn't mess that one up, but Patrick, what's been going on since we saw you last? I guess I would say that we had a really fun, interesting conversation with dedicated neutral centrist Tom Merritt on the Phileus Club as to what is happening in the U.S. And it was really interesting. I encourage you to go check it out, along with everything else we've been talking about on that show. It's the Phileus Club. You can access it through Frenchspin.com and if you want to spell it in your podcast app, it's P-H-I-L-E-A-S. Search for that and you'll find it. Yeah, I thought the episode had some good points and some bad points. Let's leave it at that and we'll let you make your own. I was just trying to pretend to be neutral about it. It was a great show. It was the best show you've ever done. All seriousness, it was really fun. I had a great conversation with Patrick about just sort of the differences in perceptions on what's going on here in the United States and its response to COVID-19. And thank you for having me on, Patrick. It was really fun to do. It was a pleasure. I'm going to end the show at the end of the show lately, not just to plug our own Patreon but to kind of expose you to mother creators out there that are doing some great stuff like the Da Vinci tree that we mentioned yesterday. If you like music, there are so many great musicians out there and you can support and get a pipeline of awesome tunes delivered direct to you. You can't go see them in the bars in the arenas anymore, but they can play for you on the Internet. Stella Voice performs live regularly on Twitch. You can see more of what she's up to and support her at patreon.com slash Christy Cates. And of course you can always support our show at any level at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. I can feel that you have feedback right now and you're just dying to tell us. And you know what, got good news because we got an email address. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to tell us all your burning secrets or just questions or comments. From Eastern, that's 20-30 UTC and 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