 Coming up on DTNS, a major breach in security from a surveillance camera provider, the U.S. floats its solution to big tech paying for news and a robot that thinks about its paintings. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 10th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Shane, the show's producer. We were just remembering all the technology that came out in 2007 on Good Day Internet. If you'd like to get that and more, get our wider expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung sent invites out for an event on March 17th called Galaxy Awesome Unpacked. Samsung didn't talk about foldables at its January event just a couple of months ago, but it was about this time last year that the company showed off the Galaxy Z Flip. There are also rumors of a Samsung ex-news powered Windows 10 PC with an AMD GPU as well. And the Galaxy A series has been getting a lot of buzz. Facebook launched something called Instagram Light in more than 170 countries. It's a two megabyte Android app with the ability to add and view photos, videos and stories content. Reels content can be seen, but not created in the app. There's also no advertising. Dark mode or end to end encryption. And there's no plans to create a similar app on iOS. This is just an Android thing. Nikkei Asia sources say Apple is cutting its planned production of the iPhone 12 mini for the first half of this year by up to 70 percent, as well as orders on all iPhones by around 20 percent. Apple is now reportedly planning production of 230 million iPhones for 2021, still an increase of more than 11 percent over last year. The revision reflects a more accurate sense of demand and a correction for estimates of which parts might experience shortages. Multiple data centers of Strasbourg, France based cloud computing company OVH, which is the largest hosting provider in Europe and third largest in the world, have been destroyed by fire. The company is advising customers to enact their disaster recovery plans. Those affected include Cyber Threat Intelligence company Bad Packets, provider of free chess server, LieChess.org, video game maker Rust, cryptocurrency exchange Deribits, blog and docs sites, telecom company AFRIX, encryption utility Veracrypt, news outlet EE News Europe, the art building complex center, Pompadour and more. Russia's communications regulator, Ros Komzenadzor announced that it has ordered ISPs to use deep packet inspection to slow down the speed of Twitter's service on all mobile devices and half of desktops. The agency claims that Twitter has been too slow in taking down illegal posts about such things as suicide, drug use and child pornography. It says that Twitter has been sent more than 28,000 requests since 2017, but 3168 still remain on the platform. Alright, that server fire is bad. This is also not good. A group was able to access admin tools inside a company called Vercata, V-E-R-K-A-D-A. Vercata supplies surveillance cameras, mostly to businesses and organizations. They have more than 5,200 customers, including cities, colleges, hotels and the like. Vercata also includes a beta facial recognition feature that can identify people across time and sort access by clothing color, gender, other attributes like that. Swiss developer Tilly Cottman shared with Reuters recordings from inside a Chinese supplier to Tesla. Also shared them with Bloomberg, which reported this first. A Chinese supplier to Tesla, also a jail in Alabama, hospital rooms, a police interview room, a community gym. Cameras were also accessed at Cloudflare and Okta. Cloudflare says no customer data was affected. Okta says its service was not affected either. Bloomberg reports Vercata manages service for more than 150,000 cameras and these folks had access to all of them. Cottman told Bloomberg the group found login information to Vercata's admin tools publicly online earlier this week and decided to access the videos because of, quote, lots of curiosity, fighting for freedom of information and against intellectual property, a huge dose of anti-capitalism, a hint of anarchism, and it's also just too much fun not to do it. Cottman also claimed they were able to gain root access to the cameras, which possibly could have allowed further network intrusions. It does not look like they took advantage of that. Vercata disabled all internal admin accounts after Bloomberg contacted them about the story and is working with law enforcement on an investigation. A little background here too, Vercata told Reuters in 2018 that it made it easy for users to access and share videos in order to be able to share them with emergency responders. Vercata also fired three employees last year for using their in-house cameras and facial recognition software to take and share photos of women at the company without their permission, obviously. So a little question about Vercata's company culture. Definitely a huge question in my mind about the policy of having, A, an admin account that can access your customers' video feeds. Did the customers all know this? Were they okay with it? Is it worth it? Should that even be allowed? And how were they able to get credentials online? Is there not two-factor authentication on this super admin account to 150,000 cameras? I find that unconscionable. Yeah, especially when you think of things like hotels. Sure, we're pretty used to cameras being here and there at certain places where you go, well, of course, they're going to see who's coming and going. A prison system, a jail in Alabama, as you mentioned, Tom, or a hospital, there are certain places where you say, well, we've gotten used to this because we care about the security of that place's operation. Sure. But yeah, who's supplying the cameras and how secure is that company? And when you've got instances such as this where people are saying, it's just too much fun not to do it because they weren't secure. That's a bad thing. Well, in this case, I'm really glad that they, even though, you know, clearly they did it mostly for the lulls, they didn't do it to hold anyone hostage and it could have gotten worse. Tom and I talked about this a little bit this morning and you, what do you call it, a gray hat hacking attempt where it's a little bit. It's certainly not a white hat attempt, but I don't know if it's entirely a black hat because they could have done more and they didn't. And they went to the press with it, which is a, this isn't responsible disclosure, but it's the kind of thing you do when it's a responsible disclosure. So it's, yeah, it's in that gray area. Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is like, I suppose it could have been a lot worse. And I'm really glad that it wasn't. And also what I hope happened is a bunch of companies got together in their weekly or daily meetings and said, you all seen this? Where are we at with these sort of things? Like that's why these things usually are good overall. And instead of being alarmist, I've learned over the years to see these as opportunities for other companies to do better, including them. And to address things like your company culture all the way over to your company security, especially in a world where we've all got cameras and there's no slowdown in which cameras are going to show up in everything we own. And we're going to have to get better at this and it's going to need to start with stuff like this. So they did it for the lulls, but I'm glad they did it weirdly so that it can be exposed and fixed. I'm seeing a lot of the rhetoric around this focus on the surveillance and the facial recognition aspect. To me, that's just a consequence of the bad management, right? So surveillance, like Sarah was saying, it's fine in certain places. If it's restricted, if it's under control, you need to have surveillance cameras. A lot of people have cameras in their house as part of their security system. And your security system, your ADTs and stuff can access that camera. You want them to be able to, if you're not home, be able to look at that video feed and say, oh, yes, no, we see the person. We can access that video. We're giving it to the police now. It just needs to be under control. And so having super admin access that is easily available like that, I know it needs to be restricted to a very few number of people. And all of those accounts need to have two-factor authentication on them. This is just sloppy. Yeah, literally not even a story without that mess up. So be better, everybody. The U.S. has made its move in regards to helping news publishers get paid by big tech companies. Sounds a little familiar. It's because this has been a big topic in Australia, which we talked about the last couple of weeks. Republicans and Democrats have teamed up to introduce the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act in both the House and the Senate. The bill first introduced in 2019 creates an exemption from antitrust laws so that news organizations could collectively negotiate with online content distributors for four years from the passage of the bill as law. A news organization must have a dedicated original news staff publishing at least 25% current news at least weekly marketed through subscriptions for ads. An online content distributor must distribute third-party news to 1 million monthly active users worldwide. Okay, so we were wondering who's going to go next after Australia? Looks like maybe the U.S. They tried to float this in 2019. It didn't get traction, but I think they feel like they have a better chance now. It is bipartisan. And I kind of like this approach if you're going to have one, which is not to say we're going to force, like Australia did, everybody to come to a conclusion and there's no getting out of it. This is a little more hands-off and says the problem is leverage. So let's give leverage to the side that doesn't have the leverage, the news publishers. Let's give them an exemption to antitrust to say, all right, you can collectively negotiate. That evens the scales a little bit. We'll give you four years. You all try to work it out. This is not bad. And the qualifications, you have to be a million monthly active users. So, you know, that's pretty much Facebook and Google, right? I guess, you know, I don't have a whole lot of problems with this. Well, and also the news organization having to fall under certain parameters like you have to be big enough and have a certain reach and be able to say, listen, this is something like Facebook and Google. Or whoever emerges in the future that could be one of those two is taking away enough of our bread and butter and here's how we would reach our audience. Otherwise, I'm with you. I actually don't totally remember this from 2019. Obviously, Australia has gotten a lot of attention, but the fact that this has been brewing in a variety of markets and the subject is back on the table. And countries are not just saying, OK, well, if that's how Australia do it, that's how we have to do it here. It is different depending on who is making the laws. And there are laws that sound better than others and probably make more sense to all parties involved. Yeah, and I don't know about you guys, but I always feel pretty good when I hear that there's a bipartisan attempt to get a bill through. I always just feel like that stuff needs to be jumped on and cared for and supported, especially, you know, we need to be as aware as we can as citizens about what it's about. But that just seems like it happens so rarely that I'm happy to see that finally happen. And like Tom says, it's not as far reaching as what Australia is attempting to do or doing. But it feels like I don't know about the word compromise, but it feels like a decent attempt at tackling this problem. Yeah, Lon makes in our Twitch chat said it giving news outlets any trust exemptions makes makes them nervous. This is very limited. It's limited only to this purpose, only with these tech companies and for four years. It's got an end. The bill lasts for four years at the end of the four years. They could try to pass another one, but they would have to do that if they want to extend it or have it keep going. So I think it's tailored narrow enough that it won't let news organizations abuse the exception. Of course, anything's possible. There's always unintended consequences. Insider sources say that Amazon has reached the late prototype stage for a home robot code named Vesta named after the Roman goddess of the hearth. Vesta is about the size of two small cats. So that's not all that big. I guess it depends on small cats and about 10 to 13 inches wide. It includes a screen, a microphone, several cameras and sensors for monitoring temperature humidity, air quality and a small compartment for carrying things and also a waist high retractable pole with a camera. So it's kind of doing a lot of the stuff that would you would do indoors. Otherwise it's described by the Verge as an echo on wheels. It's able to respond to spoken commands and interact with other smart home devices that you already might have. Insider quoted a source directly involved with the project as saying, people are very skeptical. We're worried it can turn into another fire phone. We know how that turned out. So what do we think about Vesta? Is it more Amazon echo or more fire phone? Oh man. The name sounds like knock off windows, but anyway, forget about that. Windows Vesta. Here's my here's my dream application here. I'm a pretty hearty user of my echoes. And I say that plural because there are three of them in the house in different places. And if I had any real complaint, it would be they're not omnipresent. I do kind of have to be in the room or I have the opposite problem. If there's one sort of in between or there's two of them that can hear me, they're both trying to do the same thing at the same time. That's kind of a problem, especially as music or something. So my idea, my application here would be, can this thing just kind of follow me around all the time until we get little floating droning type things like bits and tron or whatever. This might be a way to deal with this. So this thing just sort of knows where I'm going or it or let's say I'm remotely somewhere. I'm on vacation finally after the pandemic and I can at home say, I need to check something in the garage or I need to check something in the office. And I can tell that thing remotely to drive in there and just fill around and film, you know, just kind of do a video run through the office to make sure I'm not being paranoid about something. I thought lit up that shouldn't or if there's a fire hazard or whatever thing I want to have this thing do you want that ring drone then it could just fly in there. Kind of. Yeah. Like I that is the ultimate place we're going to be for this sort of stuff. Probably whether or not this thing's mobile enough. How does it get through doors that are shut? Like probably can't just like, you know, or you're not going to get most little robots. There are any doors, including cleaning one. So a little of this is pie in the sky, but being able to take it with me. And I know I've got a phone with me. So someone say, well, Scott, you've already got your personal data assistant. I realize that, but I like an autonomous almost creature that I can just say, go do this, go do that. Like I want more, more that in my life. And I would, I would, you know, I would be interested in that, but that is not this version. We're probably five, 10 years away before I start to see what I want. I have the same feelings as you, though, Scott. I have an echo. It's in a particular area of my house where I feel like I can kind of look at the screen most often. But there are many times and when I first got it, I went through this like aha moment where I was like, oh wait, it has to be plugged in and left on a shelf. I can't just, you know, undock it and move it around like a laptop type thing. I would love it if I could do that because I actually really like the device to have something that's more sort of, yeah, like just kind of my little right hand man or lady, whatever you want to call it, right hand robot, Vesta. Yeah. That's, that's, that's hovering. And we talked about just on the show yesterday, the idea of smart assistance being able to gather more information like regular heartbeats. And the fact that you can't be like too far away from devices at this point to be able for that to work effectively, having something that could kind of sense you and help you out or you call it over type thing would be great. That said, I already have lots of thoughts on the limitations of my Roomba, which Amazon does not make. It's an iRobot product. But yeah, the idea of a small little device being able to navigate a home and what might change in the home and who might be standing in the home and there's pets involved and are there stairs? Yeah. Are there, you know, little steps between rooms? All of that totally remains to be seen how effective this would be. It doesn't have robot arms. Hey, but that's the only bad thing I could think about it. It was November 2014 when the Echo was first announced. And I remember thinking, I don't know why, but I think I'm going to really like this. And everybody had all kinds of reasons why the Echo was dumb. Look at it now. I'm getting the same vibe out of the Vesta, which is like, there's all kinds of reasons why this shouldn't work. I feel a weird optimism about it. So I'm in. Let's do it. All right. Folks, what do you think of the Vesta? Join in the conversation in our discord and let us selves and others know you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Apple is replacing the word subscribe with follow for podcast audiences and iOS 14.5 now in beta and do for release later this month to everybody. This was reported by pod news first according to a research from Edison Research about 47% of users associate subscribe with paid content and don't always realize that some content is free. 95 Mac points out that previous rumors suggest Apple might be working on a new paid podcast platform which make the distinction all the more important paid subscription versus follow. So let's immediately jump to the people who will not realize that follow means that you actually get the episodes delivered to you. They just think it's like following someone on Twitter. Yeah, that's a problem. A big problem as far as I'm concerned, but is it as big as the eternal problem we've had since 2006 when they implemented podcasting as a feature in iTunes was subscribed ever any good. It was always kind of hard to explain, but now we're kind of there. It's like podcasting as a term in general. Everyone's just accepted it. We've stopped trying to call it different things. And we've just accepted it for what it was. So now whether you're Apple or a billion other platforms that support podcasts, they just call them podcasts because that's the name. It's the Kleenex of the business. So I feel like the subscribe part. I feel like we're probably over it. And I think this is a little weird. I think maybe earlier on we could have used a switch in the nomenclature. But now, all these years later, remember, oh, six long time ago, now we're in a place where subscription means paying for a bunch of things and follow means social media stuff. And so it's just more confusing. I think I think they're kind of in a rock and hard place, though. I don't know how else you do it. I don't know. For a long time, and I gave up the whole idea of is podcast the right word for what we're all doing? You know, it's new media, right? So it's podcast, right? That term has stuck. And I understand that subscriptions come from, you know, the concept of RSS feeds. And there's just the word subscribe means something that doesn't always mean I subscribe to it like a magazine, which I have to pay for annually kind of thing. Not everybody gets that for years. I've had to explain to people who I think might like one of the podcasts that I'm doing a subscribe and they go, huh, how much? And I say, well, it's not not for you don't pay for it. I mean, might be ad supported, right? But the idea of subscribe means something very different. But now we're getting into a point where it's not just for podcasts, but, you know, certain articles that are paywalls where there's a subscription to maybe access a particular newsletter. I mean, that's more prevalent than ever. And I think, you know, the YouTubes, the twitches on Twitch, it's still like slightly confused. Well, it's not confusing to me anymore, but it was a little bit at first where I'm like, am I subscribed or I'm just following because I have two choices. What's the one that I pay for? It's like, we all got to get on the same page about this sooner than later. I subscribed to that opinion. Yeah, that's a good subscription, Tom. Keep it. Keep it active. Twitter says it's testing a new way to give accurate image previews with a small set of Android and iOS users. Well, assume if this works out, they'll expand further. Twitter uses an algorithm currently to crop images, which has led to a lot of mistakes and outright bias with the system that they've copped to. Twitter's chief design officer, Dantley Davis said the new method shows the entire image most of the time, unless it is a very wide or tall image. Twitter is also testing support for 4k images. All of this, I have so many questions about their compression about 4k images. But anyway, we'll get to that in a minute. Twitter product chief, Kvon Beckapour also confirmed that the company is working on a big overhaul of its tweet deck client. This caused a little consternation in my circles. He said that it would be a share, or sorry, it would be shared publicly later in the year, although it is unclear what this means as an overhaul tweet deck, or what it would look like, or whether it would even happen in this year in 2021. And here's the other thing, all users of Twitter can now join and talk in Twitter spaces. So limited beta done. Twitter's clubhouse like conversation rooms and the company hopes to let everybody create spaces starting this April. Yeah, so Twitter on the move, man, trying to do a lot of things. The one that catches my eye is tweet deck. I use tweet deck every day. I want them to improve it. I wanted them to keep it. I don't want them to ruin it. So go Kvon Beckpour. Make it better. Don't screw it up. Yeah, I listen, I'm actually not a tweet deck user regularly, but I would be if people didn't complain about it all the time. But like you said, Tom, it's something that you use every day. You probably have, you know, some feature requests if they're taken them. But companies often say here's the new design overhaul of this service that is actually really indispensable to you. And now it's less useful. I think Twitter wants tweet deck to be something that people willingly pay for. So I mean, that's what I think. I think you're not wrong about that. And I also think that tweet deck. I mean, I'd love to see a mobile tweet deck app again. So it's not just web reliant or having to use it with janky browsers on mobile. So there's a lot of reasons why I think that tweet deck could use some help, but what it doesn't need is a complete overhaul. Like it just needs some, you know, a little paint because it's a little old and long in the tooth. It doesn't support certain formats. It doesn't let you do gift, you know, inline gift stuff like the other clients do that sort of stuff that could definitely improve. I just hope that they don't make it go away or don't let me do all my accounts at once or start charging me per account or something weird like that. Because I'm like Tom, I rely on tweet deck as a business tool and I'd be happy to pay for that tool. But you got to tell me what you want me to pay first, I guess, before I do it. Lastly, Twitter Spaces and listen, if you are conducting great audio conversation on Twitter Spaces, please let me know. I don't see a lot of buzz around Twitter Spaces and maybe that's because it hasn't been open to more users and that might change. I see a lot of folks saying, hey, you know, I'm going to be on Clubhouse talking about X, Y, Z, this 6pm Pacific time type thing. Clubhouse is still, well, there are other ways to get in now, but has been restricted to iOS users and you need an invite and that sort of thing. But it's become very, very popular. So historically companies like Twitter doing stuff like this will take some market share from the clubhouses, but I wonder how much that will be the case. Scientists at IBM Japan, the University of Tokyo and Yamaha Motors created the AI painting project, a robot that uses a brush, paint and canvas to create paintings. The algorithms were programmed to make the art most like a presented concept rather than just random designs that were made by a robot. It's also programmed with artistic values to guide it so you can set parameters for the art like limiting brushstrokes. The majority brushstrokes would produce something a little bit more abstract. 300 would have resulted in a more realistic painting. The robot works with acrylics, also watercolors, and can mix paint with water. The scientists are working on a visual system that will let the robot see its paintings as it makes them. And if this sounds interesting to you, you can see the AI painting project as part of its work, as part of South by Southwest 2021, which launches virtually on March 16th. Tom, the Wednesday listeners, the regular Wednesday folks, you're probably your everyday folks, but you're all thinking, oh, Scott's going to complain that robots are going to take over the art world. I'm not going to do that today. I think this is really cool, and I want a robot that will paint for me. That's all I have to say about it. I love the way in the video that it pauses, like it's thinking about what the next stroke should be. I love that you can say, like, you know, give me a landscape or, you know, give me something impressionistic that you can present the concept. It's not just machine learning. Like, I decided to put out, it's really interesting. Such a painter robot of you to say. Yeah, I love this too. I think it's, I don't know, there are so many opportunities to have something that's truly unique. And, you know, maybe it's something you hang on your wall, maybe it's something different, but something that feels like your own, that was created in a way that you dictated, but was made by a robot. Love it. This is not making AI creative, but it's a little tiny step towards that. And just imagine that you love, I don't know, landscapes or abstract art, and you could say to this thing, make me a big canvas of abstract art, and then you put that up on your frame, and maybe you've got a digital frame so it can change real easily. And now you're happy with that. And then a week later, I'm sick of that one. Make me another one. It makes another one. You put it up there. Like, you can always change. I mean, there are some actually practical, like, home reasons. You might want something like this, not just that you can't afford a particular artist or whatever. This would have those ramifications. So I'm actually kind of pro this thing. It'll be cool. Well, earlier in the show, Tom reminded y'all to join in the conversation at our Discord and just a reminder that we have a lot of great channels to talk with your community friends. In fact, we just added an entertainment channel, which is popping. There's also some great talk about coffee, beer and the food channel. Follow versus subscribe. People have opinions over in the Apple channel and there are more. Just to name a few. So jump into our Discord and join in the conversation. Also, if you have heard anything on the show and you say, I just want to email you guys about it, please do so. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Dale McKayhee, Ollie Sanjabi, and Paul Thiessen. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Richard. We see you. Just started backing us on Patreon. So thanks so much, new boss. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, what's been going on in the frog pants world? Plenty of stuff. If you are interested in what's going on, we're having a weird year in video games. For example, I do a lot of video games coverage on various shows on my network. And we're seeing the pandemic start to show in release dates when that impact slowed things down, created delays, and then what it actually seemed to do in the positive way for Indies. Indies are popping. So if you want to learn more about that and why we think that's a trend that'll probably last for the next three, four years, check out the show Core, which is over at frogpants.com. We talk about core gaming each and every week. Hey, folks, if you want just the headlines, sometimes you don't have time even for just 30 minutes. Check out our related show, Daily Tech Headlines. Jen Cutter has joined Rich Strafilino. Jen just did her first solo effort. She's been doing the Week in Review as well. Rich Strafilino brings it to you the rest of the days. All the essential tech news in about five minutes at DailyTechHeadlines.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern here on this show. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.