 Coming up on DTS choose your own adventure meets co-watching new features in the Android 11 beta and how Facebook paid for a vulnerability and then gave it to the FBI. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 10th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. We were talking a lot about falafel and sandwiches and good eating on good day. Internet become a member. Get that extra show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple told staff in a memo that phase one of a plan to return employees to the big mother board or mothership doughnut office, you know, the one will begin on June 15th rather. However, most employees actually won't go back for at least several more months. Apple says it will limit how many people are allowed in buildings and work areas at the same time. It will be taking temperatures requiring employees at the office to pass a daily health check with masks required at all times. COVID-19 tests provided by the company are also strongly encouraged. Apple also announced it's shutting down both iBooks Author and iTunes U. iBooks Author will no longer be updated and won't be available as of July 1st. So it's coming up pretty quick and projects will have to be used with an import tool to transition to pages. iTunes U will be discontinued at the end of 2021. Apple recommends using schoolwork or anyone publishing private content on iTunes U going forward from here. Tiktok competitor Zin spelled Z Y N N has been removed from the Google Play Store after accusations of plagiarism wired reports that a lot of high profile Tiktok users were saying their content or sometimes their entire account and profile were being copied to Zin without permission. Zin launched on Android and iOS at the end of May and hit the top 10 of both app stores really quickly. Zin pays users to watch videos and then refer users and get some payment that way too. Zin says it is working with Google to fix the problem. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian stepped down from the Reddit board last week and at the time said he wanted to be replaced by a black candidate. Reddit has now named Y Combinator CEO Michael Siebel to its board to replace Ohanian. Siebel was Y Combinator's first black partner and also co-founded Justin TV. Ooh, became Twitch eventually. Quibi added support for Chromecast to its Android and iOS apps. Quibi launched support for Apple's Airplay two weeks ago. In both cases, Quibi video cast to TVs will only be viewed in horizontal mode. Yep, no turn style when you're casting. And Twitter just started testing a feature for English language Android users that attempt to retweet links without clicking. A prompt will ask the user if they would like to open the linked article first before they retweet it. If it says, you can click on it, you can read that. It's just going to nudge you and say, hey, you sure you want to retweet that before you find out what it actually says? All right, let's talk a little more about what's going on with the Android 11 beta. Yeah, so like pretty much all the big companies who have annual events, Google canceled IO this year due to the global pandemic, but did release 12 talks originally scheduled for IO on YouTube Wednesday, including details on its Android 11 beta one, which is now available on Pixel phones. So there's quite a few new features here. So we'll try to get through what we can. Notifications will get a new conversation section for messages from chat apps. And from a conversation notification, you can now access bubbles. A bubble will let you pop out a conversation and get one tap access to open that conversation over other apps kind of while you're doing other things. It also shows up like a little floating circle with a face on top of it. Just kind of a kind of a trend I've seen in other apps lately. Google recommends that messaging app developers also adopt the bubbles API for Android 11. So everything works in conjunction. Voice access uses what Google describes as and quote, on device of visual cortex that understands screen content and context and generates labels and access points for accessibility commands. The point kind of being get to know the user better who is important to you, you know, who should have a certain label based on who you are. The power button menu, which you also get by holding down the power button is getting beefed up with access to payment cards and something called control, which will control all of your smart home devices and Bluetooth accessories. Media controls is moving up into quick settings at the top of the screen. Now that you toggle audio and video between your headphones or your speakers or your televisions. And there's now an option for one time permissions to limit an app's access to the device microphone or the camera or the location. Maybe you want it all the time, but you might not. The always allow button is now buried in settings never as a pop up and as well as a deny option that now exists to stop the app from ever asking you again. Yeah, these are these are some great features. The one I'm actually probably the most, I would say excited that might be a little over overstating it. But the one that sounds the most interesting to me is the power menu being expanded. Right now, there's just a couple of options there. I kind of forget that if you hold that power button, you get those options. This might bring me into using it more often, although it just works with Google home smart stuff. They speculate that maybe if a deeter bone over at the verge speculated that maybe if you get a Samsung phone, it might work with Samsung stuff. That's still a little bit of a wall of garden, but that's an interesting use of that that feature and the payments stuff being in there is interesting as well. Most of the stuff are just tidying up coming up with with nicer ways of doing stuff. I do like adding conversations as a separate breakout on the notification screen as well. I don't know if I'll use the bubbles much. I get what they're doing there. If you're having an ongoing conversation rather than having notifications pop up and get in your way, you just have the little face kind of floating there. I guess that's kind of nice. We'll see. But yeah, trying to be able to combat that notification malaise is a good thing to do and I like what they're doing here. I'm an Android user in a tablet form and in a set top box form only these days. What usually happens with updates like this is I just start to get jealous as a iOS phone user because these are all really cool. I especially like to fiddly stuff. This isn't going to matter to most people, but having media controls moved up to where that is and have that be more accessible for me to control things like what TV is showing, what headphones am I using right now? Some of these like quick access stuff are the things I long for the most. So what I hope happens and a lot of Android people always claim this is Apple all end up picking up some of these ideas and putting their stuff too later. So good luck. Yeah, I'm with you, Scott. The kind of smart home stuff is what jumped up to be the most because I think, okay, well, how do I have to do it right now? If I'm voice commanding to my smart speakers, that's one thing. But if I have to do anything that requires an app, there's nothing really in iOS settings that makes that easy for me. In fact, there's really no options at all. I have to go into my Lifex app or my Philips Hue app and move stuff around. The idea that Google Homes API will already support this. I mean, obviously, that's great for Google, but it is a unification that makes me jealous. Yeah, seems good. Yeah, it's a sign of the maturing of the Android operating system, I think. Yeah, and that's, I think, I mean, we talk about this all the time, so nothing new to say here, except that we are in that iterative part of phones. We're kind of where we were with PCs in the early 2000s. We kind of figured it out. So now it's time to tweak and add and refine. And these are all really solid refinements. I am jealous of much of this. So I'm pretty excited to see when this hits and see if my aging tablet can still handle the update, which is questionable at this point. All right, Motherboard has a very interesting story about Facebook paying a security firm. They founded the details from a Facebook employee, but Facebook has confirmed that it happened. Facebook paid a security firm and then worked with them to develop a zero-day vulnerability in the privacy-focused Debian Linux distro, Tails OS. They did not disclose that exploit to Tails. If you don't know Tails, Tails routes all traffic through Tor, among other privacy protections. The vulnerability that Facebook paid to be developed was then handed to a third party who delivered it to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. The FBI exploited that vulnerability to identify the IP address of a person who was doing a lot of really horrible things on Facebook, and it led to the arrest of Buster Hernandez, who has now pleaded guilty to 41 charges, including child pornography, coercion and enticement of a minor, threats to kill, kidnap and injure, among others. There's 41 charges here, and they're all awful, and he has pleaded guilty to all of them. Facebook told Motherboard, quote, this was a unique case because he was using such sophisticated methods to hide his identity that we took the extraordinary steps of working with security experts to help the FBI bring him to justice. Facebook says this should not be considered a precedent. It was a one-off. Tails OS never found out about this. They only found out about it when Motherboard asked them about it. Tails is used by more than 30,000 people. Some of them are activists. Some of them are journalists doing undercover investigations. Some are domestic violence survivors. Others are using it for less honorable or, in the case of Buster Hernandez, despicable uses. Facebook believes the code exploited by the vulnerability in Tails that they gave to the FBI was removed in an update made after the exploit was used on Hernandez. The idea was they found this exploit. They saw that the code they were exploiting was going to be gone in an update and said, well, we don't need to tell Tails because it won't be there. They decided no disclosure was necessary. This is something that you should realize. Facebook has several teams of security specialists who are always working to investigate suspected criminals on its platform. Hernandez is not the only one doing this. It's a game of cat and mouse. A lot of former law enforcement people work for Facebook. It was that kind of team that was after this guy who was notorious inside Facebook who they decided they just didn't want to allow to get away. He was taunting them saying, you'll never catch me. They went to the extent of paying someone to develop a vulnerability, helping them by giving them information and then having the third party give that vulnerability to the FBI. It led to the arrest and pleading guilty of the suspect, Buster Hernandez. There's a lot of debate going on on the one side. People are saying, look, Facebook says that this is unprecedented. They're not going to make a habit of it. It's not something they want to do. This was a particularly despicable person. They didn't disclose it to Tails because it wasn't going to be a problem anyway because the code they were exploiting was disappearing in a code update. So it's not even a problem now for anybody who use Tails OS. Other people are saying that that's beside the point. It's a bad precedent. Whether you say you'll never use it again. It was bad that they don't know what else the FBI might have done with it after they gave it to them before Tails OS was updated and that there might be other things that you could develop from this exploit based on the code that is in Tails. And if Tails doesn't know what the exploit was in the first place, they can't defend on any extra work that might be done about that. So where do you guys fall? Well, I don't know, Scott. You want to take this one? I know how I feel about it. I know. I feel like the second group, while also being happy that they caught this guy, I think transparency always wins out. And so I don't know why they couldn't have told, I know why they're saying they didn't, but I don't know why they couldn't have told Tails about it. And those involved in the development of that, of that fork of Linux, like just certainly after the exploit had been used and they busted the guy. Why not tell them that? Yeah. Yeah. Tell them then, like that's a, that's the weird bit to me because what that tells me is they think they're going to use it again. And maybe they will. I guess what I'm saying is somebody who hasn't updated my, yeah, maybe it's useful for that. Right. And maybe it is. I, I, that part is the part I don't like because yes, the idea was to stop this horrible person from doing it was doing and they did it. And then it's great, but there are going to be other bad actors who are now going to exploit this exploitation in other ways because people weren't told about it. I don't know. I just think transparency always wins. And this is a case where you could have done more to be more transparent about it, work with Tails. Just make, you know, you don't have to tell us yet. Wait until they had rest and then tell us. That's fine. We're talking about it now. Now the world can know, but I don't know. That's just that to me, that part's funky. And I don't know if they should, I don't know if we should feel like they're going to be that much more transparent about the sort of stuff in the future. Yeah. I think this, you know, before we move on this, the story that this particular person got busted for what he was doing, no one's going to stay here and be like, well, he should have gone free. Of course, we're, you know, we're all happy that it ended the way that it did. And it sounds like it was, you know, it was real issue for Facebook for some time. But if the company has the capacity to do this, to go after anybody, you know, and can figure out a way to, you know, be clandestine about finding a person who doesn't want to be found, no matter what that person's doing, that's kind of where I take issue with the whole thing. Well, there's that messaging app signal. We all know them. We love them. Do we? I don't know. I kind of like them. Anyway, they can now securely transfer data from one iOS device to another. So normally, the way I worked in the past, if you got a new phone, that meant all your previous texting data from other apps to are gone. That's just the end of it. You start over, you get a fresh look. And if you're trying to search all that stuff, you're kind of, kind of hosed. But in the first, for the first time, signal is enabled, the ability to move to a new device without losing any data, like your conversation history. The new device creates a QR code read by the old device, data is then transferred over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth directly and encrypted without ever reaching the internet. Android users still need to manually move an encrypted local backup. There is no transfer feature available between the two OSes, Android and iOS, at least not currently. This reminded me of kind of a general push in general. We can talk about the specifics of it being messaging in this case, but we're getting so much better at platform agnostic moves to get your data from one platform, or at least an existing version of your device to a newer version. Gaming's been doing this for a while lately, and it's been great. You can have a, the weirdest thing happened. You can have your save files from your PC version of the Witcher 3, and you can move those over to your Switch without hardly any work at all. It just uses the cloud saves that you already have on Steam. Things like that keep happening. I feel like this is a, that kind of thing that happening in messaging and also keeping things secure for those who use signal for those reasons. I think this is very cool. Yeah, I was trying to think of a, do I, do I want, is this something that I need and want? No, I mean, if I had a new device, I suppose would be really the only reason why I might want to transfer, you know, Tom and Scott and my very private signal conversation history from one device to another. There really isn't any, but you know, let's just say, you know, but, but that's, you know, that's why signal is used in a lot of cases. This is really, you know, it's, it's stuff that privacy is of utmost importance. And the idea that it never goes to the internet. It's not going to be sniffed by anybody. It's going to, it's going to be really cool for a lot of folks. Yeah. If you're a journalist cultivating sources on signal, which a lot of journalists use it for to protect identities and protect sources, you don't want to have to lose all of the conversations you've been having just because you got a new phone. So this is great. Well, on the subject of security, PIM eyes, you may have heard of it. You may have not. It's a facial recognition website from Poland that lets you upload a photo of a person's face, anybody's face, and then find more images of that person or at least what the software thinks is that person on public websites like blogs or news sites and the like. Now this is unlike clear view AI, which is a similar service used by law enforcement, but clear, clear view AI scrapes social media services. PIM eyes doesn't. The service is free to use, but charges for a premium tier that lets you set up to 25 alerts for when faces appear on new websites. PIM eyes also charges developers to access its database and offers contracts for law enforcement. Yeah. And PIM eyes has taken a little bit of heat for positioning this as, you know, we're just trying to help you keep track of yourself to find out where your image is being used because they give you 25 accounts. It's like, why do you need 25 alerts for yourself, for your own image? If you work at all good, you might need to not 25, but that said, that's one of the reasons they're not doing social media is you can find yourself pretty easily on social media. It's a lot harder to go out there on a general search engine and say, find images of me. Google has a reverse image search lookup, but it doesn't use facial recognition. So for the purpose PIM eyes is saying it's for, it makes sense that they would just be going out there on the web and saying, Hey, you want to find things that, that are you and how people are using your image. Here's a way to do that. And that's a valid concern for some people. The fact that they're also, you know, charging developers to access the database means they hope people build apps on the platform to find other uses for this. They obviously want to make some money off law enforcement and say, Hey, you guys could use this too. So that may be a cause for concern for some users, but it's another example of how you can't put the facial recognition genie back in the bottle. You're going to have to figure out how to deal with it. Oh, that's a great way of putting that. That genie is out, isn't it? And not everybody's happy about that, but it's there. So what are we doing with it? And I guess we just have to kind of, I don't know, support companies who do cool stuff with that thing. I mean, I remember being so excited about facial recognition when it was first talked about it was like, Oh man, this is so cool. We can tell who everybody is all the time. Now I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't know if I want my face put on some deep fake naked guy or whatever. I don't want it. Yeah, I don't either. I think that's fair. Yeah. Just for the benefit of everybody. No, it's, it's funny because at first, my first reaction to this was like, well, if it's not on a social media site, I mean, where would my picture even be? If I was, if I was doing a search for myself, but that's exactly why PMIs is like, well, but what if it is somewhere? Yeah, what if it's on, yeah, someone's blog and you're never going to just like stumble upon it on your own. That would be something that, you know, might be of interest to you or it might be an issue to you. And so in that sense, it's a little bit of like, well, you know, you don't know what you don't know, pass. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day, keep up on this stuff in about five minutes at a shot, go subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. An iOS app called What If I launched on Tuesday, it's W-H-A-T-I-F-I, all one word. What if I lets up to nine people view interactive stories together and then vote on what should happen at certain points in the story? It's choose your own adventure. It's bandersnatch, but you're doing it with more than just the people in the room. You're doing it with people online. And here's the twist. Each decision must be unanimous. No matter how many people you've got in your group, everybody has to agree before you can move on and make the decision. There's a chat room in the app where you can come to your consensus with each other. There's two movies on the app at launch. One is a drama called Anatomy of a Decision. It tells the story of a person from conception in a fertility clinic all the way through their life. And then there's a supernatural thriller called As Dead as It Gets. More releases are planned for later this summer. They've also opened up a pitch-taking mechanism where people can give them ideas and maybe get funding to create new movies for this. And a lot of people are comparing this to Quibi. I think what if I was trying to push that? Like, you know, Quibi may have the big names and the celebrities, but we've got a better idea. I'm not so certain that this even compares to Quibi. Quibi's meant for, I only have a few minutes of spare time. This is, I want to co-watch, but I want to do more than just co-watch, or I want to choose your own adventure, but I don't want it to just be me choosing my adventure. That's why I described it as co-watching meets choose your own adventure. Because I don't think either one of those are that captivating on their own, but this sounds like something that might capture people's imagination. Boy, when you've got up to nine people, you really want to choose your interactive group wisely, don't you? You know, it's like, it's like a hung jury. I mean, there would be times where someone's just like, no, I don't agree with you. I won't budge. And everyone else is like, oh, okay. Now we just kind of wait for you to change your mind. Yeah, I haven't found out if there's a way to kick anyone out of your group so you can move on. That's a good question. This is not designed for a do it with strangers, right? This is like, you've got to have a tight group that wants to come to a consent. To me, it feels a bit like tapping into escape rooms, which are all the rage or were all the rage before COVID sort of stopped people from being in tiny rooms to try to get out of them. But before that, though, that was a rising concern. People are really into it. And I wouldn't be surprised to see this takeoff in that way. And because that is always about a select group of people or at the very least like minded people that meet up and you're like, okay, well, our little group's going to combine with this group. And now 10 of us are going to try to get out of this room in a way 10 of you are going to try to get out of this story. And you're going to try to find the best way out and the best possible choices. And it has to be unanimous, which is part of the system. All of that leads me to think that there's some real potential here. I've downloaded it. I'm going to give it a shot. I want to see what this is about. But have you guys tried to wrangle 90 your best friends lately? That's also tricky. So well, you don't have to have nine. I think you can just have two. That's all we can get. Yeah. Right. So if it's two or three of you, I could see that working pretty well. You know, as, as I was telling Tom on the morning show this morning, when he was telling us about this, one of the things I really like it, that's currently in beta or sort of closed usage is these watch party things they're doing on Twitch. And I forgot the name they gave it, but basically your favorite Twitch streamers can fire up something on Amazon Prime Amazon owns Twitch so they can do this. And then anybody else with prime who can also legally watch the TV show or movie you're watching can all watch at the same time. That's a cool audience interaction thing, but you're missing the interactivity with the content itself that this is providing. So somewhere in all of this between Quibi and live streams and this, there's got to be some really magic killer app. I don't know what that is yet. This might be it, but we're going to have to fiddle with it. See my, just as a person who are where I'm like interactive, I don't know, I work enough, but like I love the idea of consuming the interactive stories that were built by other people. Now, of course, I should never have access to anybody's chats, but I love the idea of what if I saying, okay, anatomy of a decision has 1100 different outcomes based on, you know, the people who contributed and maybe someone like me kind of votes on like, well, this is the one I like the best, good on you. So there's kind of some fun community stuff, even if you were more of a voyeur, that I think that they could build into this if they wanted to. Well, and part of the fun of this is going back and doing it again to find out what different choices lead to different outcomes, right? I think one of these has at least a dozen endings that then there's different paths to get to those endings. So, you know, there are lots of ways through the story. And I think that's one of the things that might make these consensus moments less burdensome is you can always say like, look, we'll do it this way this time. And then we'll go back and try it again and see what happens if we do it the other way. And then people that might get people more on board. But but yeah, I think I don't know, there's something that feels a little magical about that twist of saying everybody thinks co-watching is going to catch on. But all I see are people trying co-watching once and then leaving it alone, right? Unless it's like you're talking about, unless it's watching us, somebody they admire perform while they watch. And this twist kind of makes that co-watching worth it, right? Because there's something to do while you're co-watching, you're not just having to chat because when you chat with people while co-watching, it takes you away from watching. And I think that's also one of the fundamental problems there. Well, you know, it isn't a problem. Everybody chatting and discord because they're in a cord. You can join the conversation or discord where she can join you by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Nick and Nick says, the store that I work at sells the types of gift cards that are for digital services. Roblox, which we've talked about over the last couple of days, makes up roughly 35% of sales for these types of gift cards. Steam makes up about another 40%. PSN, probably about 10%. And the rest is mostly iTunes, Google, Xbox, occasionally Minecraft. My theory as to why Apple, Google and Microsoft make up so little of our sales of gift cards is because they have billing based on Australia and people are willing to give their debit card details to those companies as banks can't charge international transaction fees on them. And in Australia, where Nick is, almost everyone has a debit card or a credit card. PSN and Steam, however, don't have Australian based billing. So if you buy a game or other content from them, the bank will slug you an international transaction fee on most cards. So people tend to buy those gift cards to avoid fees. Canadian friends who do this for similar reasons. It's not quite as restrictive, but same thing. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. And Nick did explain that he guesses, and it seems reasonable that Roblox gets a lot of gift cards because you don't want to hand over your credit card information to your kid, right? Puts a limit on what they can spend. So that makes sense too. Interesting, interesting on the ground, anecdotal, but interesting information from Nick with a K. Thank you, Nick. Yeah. Thanks, Nick. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Chris Allen, Jeffrey Zilx, and Ken Hayes. Also thanks to the one, the only, Scott Johnson. Wow. It's like a, I feel like I'm walking out on a stage and I should be wearing a funny hat. Yeah. Yeah. What you got for us, Scott? I appreciate it. Thank you all very much. I'll stop. Anyway, so yeah, I've got a few things going on, but the main thing I'd like to point people to is this weird turn I took in a comic that I created, where we called Fred and Ken. It's about a guy named Fred who lives in an apartment with a can of sentient cream corn and they have adventures together, but also can is having a bit of an adventure of his own. If you'd like to catch up on that storyline and see what's going on, let's just say it involves canned tomatoes. You'll find that over at Fred and can.com or linked at my website, which has all the comics and the, and the podcasts and everything else. That's at frogpants.com. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to take this moment to say thank you to our patrons. When we went into lockdown in March, I think all of us who rely on Patreon to, you know, and this showed 90% of our funding comes from Patreon. We're a little nervous about what this was going to do to our subscription levels as people, you know, weren't able to go to work and all of that. And I know lockdown is easing. The employment numbers looked a lot better. And I know we're not out of it, but you have really stepped up. And I can't tell you how much that means to all of us who make our living, you know, feed our kids and our pets because of you. So thank you to everybody who has helped us out. And I'm glad that we could provide a little bit of distraction and maybe some helpful information during all of this. So thank you to everybody who supports us at daily tech news show.com slash Patreon. If you have feedback for us, our email address is feedback at daily tech news show.com. We're live. Did you know Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern? That's 2030 UTC. You can find out more and join us next time at daily tech news show.com slash live. Talk to you tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.