 Coming up on DTNS, the U.S. National Weather Service is running out of internet while the U.S. might be suing Facebook for the wrong thing and an iPhone with a game warren Steve Jobs turtleneck clipping. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 10th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. Oh, from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger. Yes, indeed. We are all here. And we were just talking about Netflix losing a board member to the Biden administration and Colin Kaepernick and getting some Ben and Jerry's flavors, all kinds of good stuff on good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS and get it. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Last call, everybody. Last call for Adobe Flash. Adobe released the last update to its Flash player app. The update adds notifications to encourage people to remove the app. Beginning January 12th, 2021, Adobe will block all Flash content from running in the app. We'll pause for the amount of time your browser would crash when you loaded Adobe Flash in its honor. The last Flash dance. So U.S. Department of Justice announced a guilty plea from an individual who took part in the Mariah Botnet attack back on October 21st, 2016. That was the one that was aimed at Sony's PlayStation Network, but hit domain service Dine and ended up taking down large parts of the Internet for most of the day. Remember that? The name of the individual was not made public because they were younger than 18 at the time the infraction took place. France's data protection regulator CNIL has fined both Google and Amazon for violating the country's data protection laws. Google was fined the lion's share of 100 million euros. Amazon was fined 35 million euros. CNIL says that in the past, if a user visited either company's French website, then cookies were taking data from their devices without prior user consent. Both companies have since updated their website to require a user's consent before placing cookies, but they still have a deadline of three months from now to fix outstanding banner issues that CNIL says are not clear enough. CentOS is no more. Tuesday, Red Hat announced that the Frias and Beer rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or RHEL has been replaced by CentOS Stream, which Red Hat itself says is not a replacement. It's just we got rid of CentOS and we're also doing CentOS Stream instead. CentOS Stream will be a rolling preview of what RHEL is intended to be in a year. CentOS is a widely used distro and its users are not pleased with the change. CentOS co-founder Greg Kurtzer has announced he intends to start a project called Rocky Linux to offer seamless continuity for business operations on CentOS. Samsung opened pre-orders for a 110 inch 4K micro LED TV in South Korea with plans for a global launch in Q1 of 2021. The set has virtually no bezels with a 99.99% screen to body ratio, with an included majestic sound system that Samsung claims offers 5.1 surround sound with no external speakers. The AVXL folks probably have something to say about that. The TV also offers multi-view features, letting users watch up to four sources of content from different HDMI connections all at once. No pricing details were announced, but Samsung said smaller micro LED TVs are on the company's roadmap. A 110 inches TV? How do you get that shipped? Anyway, all right, let's talk a little more about a home finally for the robot dogs. Indeed, the Korea Economic Daily reports that Hyundai bought Boston Dynamics from SoftBank in a deal worth $921 million. The maker of robots like the Quadruped Spot and the bipedal Atlas, Hyundai will likely use Boston Dynamics for designing industrial robotics specifically for use by Hyundai Wea Machine Tool Subsidy and Hyundai Glovis, which operates logistics. Yeah, so I mean, the joke, the obvious joke is like, ah, we're going to get walking cars because Hyundai, they make cars and Kia Hyundai, the parent company, makes a lot of cars. And who knows, probably if Boston Dynamics ends up in the car part of this business, it'll be in making the cars, and that's where Hyundai Wea comes in because they make the machine tools and the auto parts and all of that. So I could see that happening. But the logistics and the shipping and the cargo operations and, you know, industrial uses in general is probably what this is going to be used for. And that makes a lot of sense. Boston Dynamics for a long time made really impressive robots that nobody quite was sure how they would market. Military applications have often been floated out there, but an industrial and logistics home for Boston Dynamics seems like the right place for it. Although let's circle back to that point. You know, part of why Boston Dynamics had such a troubled path at Google, one of its former owners, was the idea that it was trending toward being a Department of Defense contractor and selling weapons. Effectively, Google didn't necessarily want to be in that business. And so they spun it out. I wonder whether or not their applications at the Pentagon, either A, were just not there. And that's why you see it being bought and sold by SoftBank and now Hyundai. But if they are still interested in that, whether or not foreign ownership possibly clouds the possibility that that would be the case. Yeah, I'm very curious about that. I have no insight in any of these stories into what happens to any side of Boston Dynamics that does that. Obviously, Korea and the United States are allies. So there certainly is an easier way forward if that is going to happen. But I don't think it has to happen. I hesitate to say that because, man, military money, whoever turns down military money if they can get it, right? But there's a legitimate business for Boston Dynamics outside of that within Hyundai. Well, I mean, but I also wonder whether or not this is... All right, let me put it this way. When we first started talking about Boston Dynamics, oh, so many years ago, if you said, yes, and this, of course, will revolutionize how to put together a car, I think we would look at that as kind of undershooting what its promise was. That there are obviously a long, rich history of automation in car building. And maybe they're a part of that, but it's certainly not revolutionizing work or war in the way that when we first started seeing these quadruped robots, I think the ideas we're dancing in our heads about. Oh, keep in mind, though, Hyundai, we does more than just build cars. Hyundai Glovis is all about logistics and shipping and all that sort of thing. So there may be some military contracts within Hyundai that so many out there is like, Hyundai makes bombs, too. And I don't realize that, right? I don't know. So this is way more than just cars. I think that's the takeaway. The European Union announced a counterterrorism agenda, among which was a passage on encryption. Here we go again. The passage reads, the Commission will work with member states to identify possible legal, operational, and technical solutions to lawful access and promote an approach with both maintains the effectiveness of encryption and protecting privacy and security of communications while providing an effective response to crime and terrorism. Now, this really seems like the same old song and dance again, which is, hey, can we have a back door without any of the bad effects? And the answer is always no. But Natasha Lomas at TechCrunch points out that EU courts have regularly defined lawful access as targeted access and a back door for everyone is a bulk intervention. So this text seems to say like, we don't mean back doors. We mean, can we help them figure out some way to get access to these phones in another way? That's a good opportunity. Take a look at how law enforcement has been affected by the ever increasing encryption on personal devices for years now. Law enforcement agencies have warned of going dark if everyone uses encryption. And encryption has been getting stronger and more pervasive. So how are they doing? Is it going dark? No. A recent article by Susan Landau on Lawfare, which covers law and national security in partnership with the Brookings Institution, looked at a report by Upturn on mobile device forensic tools or MDFTs, mobile device forensic tool. 2000 of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States have purchased or have access to MDFTs from companies like Celebrite and Grayshift. 50 of the largest police departments law enforcement agencies have them. So the bigger you are, the more likely you are to have this. MDFTs not only crack into phones, but they also offer other features. So Celebrite's MDFT can compare facial images in the photos it finds on a cracked phone to a database. Other MDFTs use machine learning to classify text conversations by topic like family, money or drugs. So it's easier to dig in and find the evidence you're looking for. MDFTs cannot unlock all phones or get all the data every time, but they are very effective. What they also are is expensive. Las Vegas spent more than $640,000 on MDFTs since 2015. Miami spent $330,000. State law enforcement agencies in Michigan, more than a million dollars. Indiana State Police, $510,000. So it seems to me that the issue here isn't, in reality, we want back doors. We don't want to have to pay for the equipment we need to get access to the phones, because it is easier than ever to crack into an encrypted phone by a law enforcement agency. You just got to pony up and write that check. Yeah. So I mean, I guess my initial question would be, okay, if an MDFT is sort of the tool that we're looking at in a sense, like, okay, we don't want to have a total back door. That's a privacy issue. But in certain situations, we want to have the tools necessary to do this. How does the price come down? Does another company just come along and say, we'll do it for less? No, because much like all those contractors that we were talking about at the Department of Defense, this is kind of that little brother industry where you are selling to law enforcement. They are contractors for a business that will never go away, at least until they're, and even when their tech changes, these companies will continue to make money like that. And just to give you a sense of our previous conversation, like these numbers, a million dollars, a half million dollars, while gigantic to us, and I'm sure for Celebrate, they're making a very tidy business, those are amounts of monies that Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin at the Department of Defense level like step over. Like that's the kind of cash we're talking about here. Well, let's talk about space, shall we? Everybody loves space. The SpaceX Starship is a reusable, super heavy lift launch vehicle designed for long range space travel, including to the moon and possibly Mars. On Wednesday, Starship conducted an atmospheric test, which among other things showed that the ship can return properly from orbit. It passed that test and all the others, but it also blew up on landing and that got a lot of attention. And we got a call from somebody who knows a lot about this explaining why this is not a bad thing. Anthony Colangelo here from the podcast, Main Engine Cutoff. I wanted to provide a little bit of extra context for that Starship test that we saw from SpaceX this week. Starship is a next generation vehicle that SpaceX is working on to replace its Falcon family of vehicles. It is intended to be fully reusable. That means reusing the booster portion like we see them doing with the Falcon vehicles, but also reusing the upper stage that goes to orbit, which is Starship. To do that, you need to solve three huge technical problems. You need to be able to survive the heating that you experience when you come back into Earth's atmosphere from orbit. That is something that we've seen with not only the dragon vehicles, but the space shuttle. You might remember the heat shielding that that used. You need to be able to solve that big problem. The second problem is the aerodynamic capabilities to be able to guide yourself back to your landing pad. That is what Starship uses its little fins for. It guides itself back over the landing pad and uses those aerodynamics to flip itself to orient properly for number three, which is propulsively land on your landing pad using these high performance rocket engines. SpaceX is the best in the world at number three. They do it all the time with their Falcon vehicles. But this test this past week was the first time that Starship has shown off its aerodynamic capabilities and that part was a huge success. They were able to guide itself back over that landing pad. And as Elon Musk said, put the crater in the right spot. That was a huge success. It made it way further into the test than nerds like myself and a lot of you out there ever expected them to. So I'm excited to see this. And I'll be tracking it all over at mainenginecutoff.com. Yeah. They expected it to blow up basically. That part was not a surprise. I think Elon going into it said that it was a two out of three chance that it blows up. And this certainly came a lot closer to that one out of three chance than I think a lot of people, including Anthony, was expecting. But talk about just a visual that if you were to go back, let's go back to the time we were first talking about Boston Dynamics and say like, this is where we're going to be in rocket technology. You would be blown away. It just looks like a Douglas Adams novel come to life. This gigantic whale falling out of the sky sideways and then writing itself. The fact that it even gave us the big Jerry Brackheimer explosion at the end was almost just a further delight. Yeah. As the great philosopher, Nicki Minaj once said, starships were meant to fly. Let's do this one more time. Oh. Folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit, submit stories of vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Not a good week for Facebook. After two antitrust lawsuits launched against Facebook in the U.S. Wednesday, Germany's federal cartel office, the FCO, announced it's investigating Facebook's requirement that users have to have a Facebook account to log in on Oculus VR devices. The office believes the practice, quote, could constitute a prohibited abuse of dominance by Facebook. So it'll investigate the effect of the requirement on competition in VR and social network markets. And that's not the first case that the German FCO has against Facebook. But of course, the biggest case is the U.S. one, which are the U.S. two, depending on how you look at it, which advocates spinning out Instagram and WhatsApp into separate companies. And now that we've had a day to look at that case, here are some further things to consider. The U.S. FTC argues that Facebook acquired WhatsApp and Instagram to eliminate competition for advertising. It also allegedly restricted access to its developer platform to harm competitors. But it's mostly about did they eliminate competitors? The FTC claims WhatsApp could have grown to be a competitor of Facebook. That's always hard to convince a court is that, hey, this could have happened. They also think that Facebook cabined WhatsApp and didn't develop it, that it could have turned into WeChat if it had been on its own. Instagram also could have been an alternative social network outside of Facebook's control. These are hard arguments to convince a court. The acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram were approved by the federal government itself in 2014 and 2012, respectively. And Facebook is using that in their arguments to say, look, you all approved this before. Why are you changing your mind now? They argue that the two apps are dominant now because of Facebook's investment in the intervening time. And that's something they can show a court, like, look what we invested, and that's why they're big now. They wouldn't have been big without us. Casey Newton at The Verge, however, predicts there will be no breakup, but that this case will have the effect of preventing future mergers with Facebook and to limit their acquisitions. That may be true. I liked with the economist Hal Hodson was saying on the Economist Podcast today, arguing that a better antitrust case against Facebook would have focused more on the fact that Facebook has made it more expensive to market products in social media. Because you pretty much have to go through Facebook to reach certain consumers. And that seems like a better target if you wanted to try to bring an anti-competitive case than Instagram and WhatsApp. Yeah. The idea that Facebook would be the mob bell and that they would split up WhatsApp and Instagram into their own baby bells, maybe baby faces in this case, would have you asking what if? What if they indeed went for this richer target? Which I do think you can show, and again, these cases are famously hard to prove. Like, America does not like to break up companies unless you can demonstrably show that there's actual harm to the consumer. And to me, the idea that there's not a larger social media threat to Facebook's dominance is immaterial compared to the online advertising thing. Because that is something that is genuinely affecting industries far beyond social media. Online advertising became the juggernaut. And the fact that they are keeping one gigantic marketplace and not having little sub-marketplaces like a Instagram or something like that, that might offer a little bit of a cheaper way to get your message out there, it not only affects social media stuff, it affects television, newspapers, display ads. The entire world of trying to let you know about a product is affected by Google and Facebook, which right now are the unquestionable dominant players in this space. You know, the whole idea of Facebook making WhatsApp and Instagram the successes that they are, don't really buy that. They were both bought because they were on the up and up of success. And I don't know what Facebook has really done besides, well, okay, Facebook has definitely offered a lot of features, take the whole Snapchat thing and bundle it into Instagram, say that yes, has had some success. Could Instagram as an independent company or a company that was bought by a company other than Facebook been able to do the same? Yes, probably. So I think that that's sort of a silly argument on Facebook's part. But yeah, to be able to prove that the companies were bought in order to kill them and be absorbed into Facebook, I don't know. I mean, call me crazy, but they are three different companies to me. Yes, Facebook owns them. Yes, you see a little bit more Facebook marketing on Instagram and WhatsApp as well. And even the Oculus VR stuff, it never really bothered me. But that was also when I first got my Oculus headset, it was sort of like, hey, do you want to sign up new account? You can also use your Facebook account. I was like, oh, that's fine. I'll use this one rather than my two other burner accounts. It didn't really bother me. I get why people don't want to be forced into doing that, though. And that's the whole thing is, you know, Facebook forcing itself on users. Man, I think they would have had a really interesting case if they had gone after the fact that, look, if you post something on Facebook and you want it to be seen, you have to pay Facebook extra for it to be seen through advertising. That is the big complaint that every business in the world has. And I'm not saying it's an abuse of their dominant market position, but I feel like you have a chance of convincing a court that it is versus like, hey, they're a conglomerate and they bought other companies. Yeah, okay, just ignore TikTok and Signal and WeChat and Telegram. Let's redefine their competitive space as Instagram and WhatsApp. It doesn't make sense to me. To me, the actual harm is you could have a parade of people that said, I migrated my community to Facebook because they told me this was the best place where I could connect with my fans and users. And then they, like a mafioso, waddling up in a big trench coat, said, nice audience, it'd be a shame if you weren't able to talk to them and made everybody pay the troll toll. Well, on the other side of it, maybe this is going to foster a little more cooperation amongst these companies so they avoid these sorts of lawsuits. Twitter is adding Snapchat and Instagram to its share menu. So you can add a tweet as a sticker in Snapchat or even Instagram stories. Features rolling out to Snapchat right now and will be available for Instagram in the coming days. Isn't it nice to see people playing along? The U.S. National Weather Service is proposing limiting users to 60 connections per minute on sites that provide weather observations, forecasts, warnings, computer model data, air quality information, something that a lot of us have been paying a lot of attention to in California as of late, aviation weather support, and ocean conditions. The NWS says it doesn't have enough bandwidth and we all have to stop. The data is accessed by companies that provide weather forecasting to customers from the apps you might use on your phone, tailored weather forecasting for markets like energy and agriculture. There are a lot of uses for this that the National Weather Service provides. StormVistaWXModels.com is a popular site for big companies, also for weather hobbyists. It believes it might have to cut its model runs by half. So why does the NWS have a bandwidth problem, you might say? Don't they just figure it out and fix everything? Well, the Weather Service says it has to plan to move certain components of a system into the cloud. In other words, it's not using CDNs or any other kind of cloud service right now. At a public forum... Yeah, I know, it's local storage. At a public forum, weather officials estimated it would cost $1.5 million to avert these rate limits that it's proposing. The Weather Service is accepting public comments. And I bet some of our DTNS users would have some on its proposal through December 18th. $1.5 million sounds big to me as a person who doesn't have $1.5 million, but it's nothing to an agency that has $5.4 billion in its budget. Correct. Spend the money, get the bandwidth, move into 2005, for goodness sakes, National Weather Service. Of course, you're running out of bandwidth. You're running all the servers yourself locally. That's just crazy. Tom, come on. I'm not totally sure how many apps use this data, but I have a weather app that does. Works great. Would like it to continue working. Almost all weather apps use some part of the data, right? Even if they don't get the correct pipeline. I think it's fascinating that it's taken to this moment for the show to take an unabashed political position. That this public resource needs to upgrade so we can all know whether or not it's going to rain. Just call the US government to spend money on the Weather Service. You're right. Darn it. They got me, finally. It's only $1.5 million. Come on. Come on. Seriously, you're not in the cloud. As soon as I read one of the things they're planning is to move the system to the cloud. Oh, gee. Okay. All right. Yeah. Or maybe we just don't need them at all. How about that? There. I gave another side. Well, then it's going to rain. You're not going to be prepared. It's going to be a whole thing. Well, we're not talking in the millions of dollars, but we are talking about something kind of expensive in this next story. Caviar. It's not that food caviar. It's a different caviar. This caviar is known for those sort of expensive fancy replacement casings for iPhones has announced the iPhone 12 pro jobs for collection in black and titanium, white and luxury gold versions dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the iPhone four, which you might remember was the last iPhone model that Steve Jobs presented himself. The cases feature an authentic fragment of jobs. His original famous journal act embedded in the Apple logo on the back of the phone. Also jobs signature. Think different. It's a whole thing. It's very lovely, but it's not cheap caviar says that the white model is made of composite G 10 covered with jewelry enamel and it's Apple logo is made of 925 sterling silver. The gold model is made of genuine 18 karat gold and it's Apple logo is crafted from 750 gold prices start at $6,499 for a 128 gigabyte black titanium iPhone 12 model and go all the way up to $10,140 for a black and gold phone 12 pro max with 512 gigs of storage. And that is your secret Santa everybody. Oh, I'm going to go into my porch right now. Thank you, sir. I'm definitely swapping this one out for the white elephant. It's been such a tough year for us all. Here's my question. Yeah. Who got the turtleneck? How? I think it's authentic. Okay. I'm curious how they got the turtleneck. Are you willing to spend anywhere between $6 and $10,000 for an icon to an icon, right? You obviously need to have a deep admiration. If not a hero worship for Steve Jobs to do it. And yet. And yet I can't help but imagine that he would hate this. Oh, yes. Absolutely. Like, are you willing to be haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs? Like for the fact that I only had to spend a couple bucks for my Shohei Otani card with a game worn jersey fragment in the corner. Like why do I have to spend thousands of dollars for an iPhone? Oh man, especially when you're just going to cycle this one out. If you've got 10,000 to drop on this, you're just going to cycle this one out in a year anyway, when they come out with a new phone. I still want to know where they got the turtleneck. Yeah. And this is clearly a limited run because not that many people are going to buy it. But yeah. Is there like, are there 10 turtlenecks? Was there a closet that got auctioned off? Like what house? You don't make a turtleneck. Your fragment came because I'm not paying that top dollar if it's in like the small of the back. I really make a 30 of these. They may not even own the turtleneck. They may be a company that's slicing up the turtleneck and selling it off in different ways. If there's anyone out there who's like, I'm the person that finds this worth the money, please let us know. Because first of all, I applaud your bank account. But I also, I'm just very curious. Who is the target audience here? Much cheaper to get a game used, Joe Hayo, Donnie. Yeah. Black turtlenecks, buy one at the gap. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. We got some feedback from folks who live in Denmark because yesterday we were talking about Google search terms over 2020 and what ended up popping up in different markets. Soren who lives in Denmark says, just a quick note on the Denmark top searches on Google. You mentioned Rob Kugler as being the top search overall. Actually, it's just the top search result when the searches start with bedsteh, which means best. What's the best blah, blah, blah? Soren says, so we do like Rob Kugler, but we're not crazy. It didn't totally top our overall list. The actual top overall term in Denmark was also coronavirus. But the sorting of the list differs depending on the country selected. Little confusing, but love the show. Thank you, Soren, for gently correcting that. I was just going through Google trends and changing the country and didn't notice that the top left, which had been the top overall search on all the countries I looked at to that point, had moved to the second row. I went back and looked at it today and I'm like, if I'd been paying attention, I don't speak Danish, but I probably could have figured that out. So thank you, Soren, for that. But we got another email that says Rob Kugler are delicious. Frank wrote in and said, I can understand that you kind of wondered about the Danish people just staying at home making rumbles. Just want to say that if you've ever tried one, you would try to make it as well, even though I always just buy them from the bakery. Imagine a ball of leftovers from other cakes and Danishes mixed with rum essence and rolled in sprinkles. I mean, what's not to like with a cup of coffee or cocoa? It's perfect for the dark Nordic weather. And in Denmark, we've only had one hour of sun in the first 10 days. Oh, Frank, I hear that. Well, you eat those rumbles. Yeah. No kidding. Shout out to the sixth largest country in DTNS lists or in a ship. Denmark. Thank you for showing up in our emails. I appreciate that. Also, thanks to everybody who sends us feedback. Sometimes you have information we never would have had otherwise. So thank you in advance. Keep it coming. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. We also want to shout out a few of our patrons and our master and grand master levels today. They include Ken Hayes, Tony Glass and Jeffrey Zulks. Also, big thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Santa hat looks good on you, brother. What else is going on? Oh, well, thank you so much. I want to let everybody know that especially if you've got a big holiday drive coming up, you need an audio book. Either if you listen to my history podcast, raise the dead or not. Both seasons are now available as an unbroken, fully mastered audio book. Both contain exclusive season one focusing on the 1960 election is a bonus episode, a full episode that was not heard on the podcast and season two features an hour long conversation with Tom Merritt. What? All about how we researched the both seasons and what is in store coming up next. They're available on Audible and I know this audience, just like so many podcast audiences, there's a bunch of loose Audible credits floating around that you might have even forgotten about. Go peel off a few and get them at raise the dead podcast.com slash complete. Don't forget folks, holiday cards are on their way. If your address is in and correct, you should definitely get them by December 25th in the U.S. Maybe even in some parts of the world, worldwide it might be a little longer. If you missed it, don't be sad. We have digital versions already messaged to your Patreon email address and we have another offer for you. We're offering Patreon loyalty rewards. You can get a unique sticker, mug, t-shirt or hoodie every three months as long as you stay a patron. Each one has unique art from Lynn Peralta featuring the DTNS anniversary logo. One with Roger, one with Sarah, one with me. Get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you can join us live, we'd love to have you Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. We'll be back tomorrow with Shannon Morse and Lynn Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.