 Coming up on DTNS, autonomous trucking set to become widespread in 2024, how Europe busted hundreds of criminals by spying on encrypted phones without a backdoor, and what effect that ad boycott's going to have on Facebook. Spoiler alert. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer, Roger Cheng. We were talking a lot about beans and the current gig Chronicles Kickstarter on Good Day Internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook sent out notifications to users of its video sharing app, Lasso, that the app will be shutting down on July 10th. The app originally launched in 2018 in select markets and offered a similar experience to TikTok. Users can download videos from the service prior to the shutdown. Google is discontinuing the Pixel 3a telling Android Police that it has, quote, completed sales of the phone. Google is rumored to be in development of a Pixel 4a. Like we're like finishing a game. We were done. We sold them all. And yeah, we got to the end of the Internet. We don't have any more. It's over. Weather app Dark Sky said in an update on its website that it will keep the Android version of its app running until August 1st. It was supposed to shut down July 1st. On August 1st, still currently existing subscribers to Dark Sky's Android version will receive a refund. Dark Sky usually cost you $2.99 a year for Android users. The iOS version is a one-time $3.99 purchase, so you don't get anything back for that. Dark Sky will remove weather forecast maps and embeds from its website on August 1st as well. Remember, Apple bought Dark Sky. Oh, Dark Sky rules. I love Dark Sky. Kind of interesting that there were two very different business models depending on the app store you were using. The latest Windows Insider build in the dev channel features a redesigned start menu. This removes a solid color backplate behind apps and uses a semi-turned parent design that can be customized with accent colors and set to dark or light mode. Some users in the dev channel also received an update to Microsoft Edge, which will open all browser tabs in one panel with a combination of Alt-Tab while using the app. Instagram confirmed it's testing new ways to display stories. This test shows two rows of story bubbles on the Instagram home screen with a See All Stories button that will show a full page of story bubbles to select and scroll through. Oh, Voltron's gonna assemble in Washington, D.C. U.S. House Antitrust Panel Chair David Siciline confirmed that Apple CEO Tim Cook has agreed to testify as part of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's antitrust probe this July. This month, Ricode's Car Swisher tweeted that in an interview with Siciline, Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and the feet of the Voltron. Amazon's Jeff Bezos will all appear at the hearings to be held in late July. I'm also hoping that trading cards will be made for this year. We need a Netflix so we can get full fang! We're so close to full fang! 2K Games announced it will sell the next gen at Pillay Station 5 and Xbox Series X versions of its upcoming NBA 2K 21 for $69.99, which is a $10 increase on the current Xbox One and PS4 versions of the same game. And Apple and Google have removed access to those 59 Chinese developed apps in the Indian versions of the app stores that the Indian government had ordered shut down. Other sources say that customs officials in India are also holding back shipments from China of parts used by Indian-based plants of electronics companies like Taiwan's Foxconn. Alright, let's talk a little more about a different thing than the ad stuff with Facebook. What did Facebook discover, Justin? Many times at one hacker way, Facebook announced Wednesday that it found 5,000 developers that used Facebook login on their apps accidentally had access to data from some inactive users. Facebook has a policy that after 90 days of inactivity on an app that users Facebook login, the developers can't access the user data anymore until the user logs back in. Some of the friend functions like inviting a friend to a workout in a fitness app, for instance, didn't have that restriction implemented. Facebook says the issue has been fixed. Facebook's also strengthened its terms to require developers to delete data no longer required or received an error, get explicit consent from users to share data with third parties, and strengthen data security requirements. Facebook may also request user data be deleted. The new terms go into effect August 31st. Actually, those new developer terms are all good moves by Facebook to say like, hey, at any time we can come in and tell you to delete data. If we find something, you should delete data automatically if you got it in error, like this, for instance. And while this shows that Facebook's quality control may not be as good as it should be where they're like, okay, we've shut off access. Oh, crap, we forgot about friend requests. That uses a different part of the system. We need to go do that. I don't think this shows any maliciousness. Do you? No. Well, I mean, you could say of the 5,000 developers that had access that they knew they shouldn't have. So the fact that it took Facebook this long to, you know, make some corrections leads me to believe that some developers were like, let's just keep getting this access. That's if the developers knew they had it. The developers may not have realized that data was there. In fact, probably didn't. Also 5,000 in the grand scheme of people that are using login with Facebook is probably not all that much. It seems like a very specific use case. And more than that, the issue that I think you can ding Facebook for is, yes, they're making the right decision. Now, fate login with Facebook has been around for a while and some of these things don't specifically tag into this issue. They probably could have put these things in a little bit ago, but whatever. The time to do the right thing at best is many years ago and the second best time is right now. Yeah, I mean, you could say like they should have known before, but Facebook also didn't have to tell you about this. I mean, maybe they did under GDPR. It's a good point. But Facebook did make a point of looking for this. They have ongoing audits to find stuff like this because they know it's a big complex system. I don't think this is your best argument against Facebook if you're looking for one. The UK Competition and Markets Authority issued a report Wednesday, including the assessment that Google paying to be the default search engine on Apple Safari browser creates quotes, a significant barrier to entry and expansion and quotes for Google's rivals. Google paid £1.2 billion to device makers in the UK in 2019 to be the default search engine. The majority of that went to Apple. The regulator said enforcement authorities could choose to remedy the situation by requiring choice screens or restricting the ability to monetize default positions. Now, there was a big thing. I don't know if folks were aware of it. Apple Euroheads kept tabs called Brexit, the UK Union. But if you were wondering whether or not the new UK using their own independent authorities would differ significantly from the way that the EU regulates tech companies. Well, rest easy. They are doing very EU similar things because this is a very EU similar move. So what they're saying here is that Apple has a predominant market position. Google has a predominant market position. And so Apple charging Google a lot more money than any competitor to Google would be willing to pay is keeping competitors out. That seems to be the position there. I may not be saying it perfectly, but that's the idea. Google paying this much money keeps anybody else from being able to outbid them because they're so big. To me, this is a symptom. This isn't an antitrust violation. It's like, oh, well, if you let them get that big, then this is an effect, not an abuse of their market position because Apple has to charge this and Google has to be able to pay it. Also, Bing is the default on Siri. Google is only the default in Safari. So how does that work up into this calculation? I'm interested. And really, who's piping up for that scrappy underdog Microsoft to finally have a bidding option in terms of being able to be the default engine? And aside from that, what's the remedy? Is the remedy saying, OK, would you like to choose your browser and then would Apple have the option if you say no to sell the no option? I think that there's a few things that go into this, but in general, it seems like something that they care about in Europe. Here in PN police and crime agencies hacked phones from a company called Encro Chat starting April 1 and used information obtained on those hacked phones to arrest 746 suspects sees 54 million pounds and confiscate 77 firearms and two tons of class A and class B drugs. That's just in the UK. There were also arrests and seizures made in France, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. It's a huge, huge bust. Encro Chat may be well known in certain circles as selling a modified Android phone that is locked down so that it's almost impossible to track. All it does is communicate through Encro Chat's own end to end encryption service using offshore data centers. They send an encryption, right? Nobody else can get into it because you have the key on your phone. And even the data centers are offshore so that if anybody tried to go to Encro Chat and say we want to subpoena stuff, they'd be like, man, those data centers aren't in your territory. So it's considered to be one of the most secure ways to communicate and is marketed to people who often are probably up to no good. French authorities installed malware on the Encro Chat phones written specifically for the BQ Aquaris X2 Android phone that Encro Chat uses. That malware was able to clone application data, disrupt a data wipe feature and record the screen lock password. When Encro Chat caught on and pushed a patch to stop it, the malware came back with the added ability to now change the lock screen password. So Encro Chat went to its Dutch SIM provider, KPN, and asked them to block connections to the malicious servers that were powering the malware. But when Encro Chat then restored service, KPN removed the block. KPN may have been involved in this. We don't know. Encro Chat then decided to shut down and said, look, we can't operate this network securely. We advise our users to power off their devices and dispose of them. Encro Chat had a public-facing enterprise. They were trying to at least appear legitimate. But Vice reports, other companies providing similar services like MPC, Phantom Secure, do not have public-facing executive sites or stores. So we're a little harder to see what's going on. And in fact, there is a company called Omerta that has been advertising to former Encro Chat users. You survived the extinction event. Now get 10% off a new Omerta phone. Goodness gracious. Of course, anybody who's seen a mob movie is aware that Omerta is the code of silence that the mafia takes to each other. So just in case this product was. If that was lost on you, it's, it's, you know, there's certain. Justin, I kind of heard you chuckling through this entire story. I mean, I don't know. Like how could, how could this have played out differently? Well, I mean, it could have played out in a way that I think we here on this show have talked a lot about. And that is having a back door on to either the hardware or the baseline software that would be used on these phones. And I think that that's something that we have all as, as privacy advocates are along with privacy advocates have said is a bad idea. This is the European police doing police work. They wanted to find people that were breaking the law. They identified a way that they were communicating with each other and not unlike a phone tap or any of the other ways that they got information in the wire. Now they did something that, that is, is relevant to our modern age and the way that criminals communicate with each other with these kinds of phones. It's a signal to criminals that just because somebody sells you a phone saying it's very secure doesn't necessarily mean it's particularly secure. And I don't know, to me, it is a sign that you can do this without a back door. Yeah, well, it is an example of doing this without a back door. They didn't need a back door, a couple of other things there. One, one of the messages that was decode that was accessed was criminals telling each other, don't use an iPhone. The police can get into your iPhone because there are all these stories about the police wanting to get into iPhones. So some criminals apparently are like, oh yeah, I wouldn't even use an iPhone anyway. Second of all, a back door would have put a weakness into iPhone encryption. And I'm going to guess Omerta is not going to go along and put that back door into their system. I'm pretty sure EncroChat wouldn't have either. So you put a back door in, it's not going to go into these companies most likely, Omerta or MPC or Phantom Secure. They're not going to cooperate. And so you're not going to have the back door in the phones most likely to be used by criminals. But what you can do is, apparently, France had a law that allowed them to do this. I don't know what that law is, but in the Vice Story, they said they had a law. And so you can legally put malware on a criminal's phone in order, like Justin said, to wiretap them. Which means you don't have to wait around for some lobbyist to figure out how to convince somebody to put a back door that probably won't be put on the phone you need access to anyway. You just get the access by doing what Justin, I think, rightfully called police work. Yeah. And I would encourage criminals, the worse you are, the more you should heed this advice, continue to please use walled gardens that are very easily hackable. Twitter, changing topics, removed a picture from a tweet by the President of the United States Tuesday after receiving a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA by the New York Times, which owns the right to the photo. Two weeks ago, Twitter and Facebook both removed videos posted by the President's account after DMCA claims by the parents of a toddler featured in the video. Important to note that this is different than the labeling or hiding of posts that have been done by Twitter and other platforms. The DMCA is an exception to Section 230 Safe Harbor protections. If you make a properly worded and specific claim, you can have anything removed from any site. If the person who posted the alleged infringing materials believes that they have the rights and are willing to go to court to defend it, they can file a counter notice. Then the entity that originally filed the DMCA claim has 10 to 14 days to file a lawsuit. If they do not, then the content is republished. The note here is the DMCA is not Safe Harbor. It is its own flawed piece of legislation that we could spend a whole nother episode talking about the complexities of. I think that is well put. If you want to criticize Twitter for taking down this one, you need to be criticizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The reason Facebook and Twitter both took down the video is they don't have under the DMCA a choice. If someone tells them, I own the copyright on that, take it down, they have to take it down. And as you heard Justin say, it stays down for 10 to 14 days even if that person was mistaken. There are virtually no consequences. This is an exception to Section 230. By the way, if you want a full explainer on Section 230 and Safe Harbor, what it is and isn't, it's in Know A Little More today at KnowALittleMore.com. Also available for patrons. Autonomous Truck Company 2 Simple, that's T-U Simple, announced plans to create a mapped network of shipping routes and terminals across the U.S. by 2024. USPS, UPS rather, US Express, Penske, Truck Leasing and Food Supply Chain, McLean are all partners in the Autonomous Freight Network, or AFN for short. The system includes the self-driving trucks, the mapped routes, the freight terminals, and also a monitoring system to track shipments. 2 Simple will operate the trucks for its 22 customers, but will eventually sell the trucks so customers can operate their own fleets. 2 Simple currently operates on seven routes with human safety operators between Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso and Dallas. 3 Simple plans to expand to Europe and Asia afterwards. Yeah, so I mean, I have been of the opinion for a while now that probably trucking would be the first real use of autonomous vehicles because you can map out the routes very carefully from point to point, especially if you're building your terminals like 2 Simple is, and they've been doing it on long-term halls already with the safety operators. So it's interesting to see 2 Simple as the first out of the gate with this. They may or may not be the one that makes it popular, but this seems like a good plan. What do y'all think? Yeah, obviously this is something that was coming down the pike, and now we can go from the tech story of, isn't this cool that this happened to the consequences of tech story of, are we going to see a very fast erosion of the career of the long haul trucker? Something that is a fairly significant earner for a lot of Americans. You can make a very good living as a long haul trucker, and that's a business that may or may not be going away within the next presidential term. Yeah, the question will be, this is when the rubber meets the road on automation of jobs, right? The question will be, what happens to those long haul truckers that would have been driving the routes that 2 Simple now has that? Are they going to get jobs as safety operators? Are those going to continue to be available? In which case, man, if they get paid close to the same amount and they don't have to do as much paying attention, that's cool. Are they going to get jobs in the terminals, get jobs as somebody who knows this to be able to provide expertise, or are they just going to get out of work? It's probably going to be some combination of all three, probably more of them getting out of work than getting those other two jobs. And then are there jobs that they can then take? I listened to a podcast called Over the Road. I've talked about it on this show before. It's all about the trucking industry. It's fascinating and really good show. And it's funny because the folks who produced the podcast, they all sort of say, yeah, we're kind of wondering what Uber and the other companies are going to do when everything starts becoming autonomous. And what are we all going to do? Because we have a job right now that might go away later. And it's not that people are upset about it. They're curious about it. What is this going to look like, you know, in the not too distant future? All I know is that I will very selfishly always stand up for long haul trackers because long haul trackers are voracious podcast listeners. So I am on yours. And I will encourage too simple to keep the human operators as long as possible because they can pay attention to podcasts even better. Yep. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day at about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. The information sources reported that Mark Zuckerberg told a staff meeting last Friday, quote, my guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough. It's the kind of thing you say to calm down the staff when you're facing more than 600 brands pulling their advertising, including big name advertisers like Unilever. It's also possibly true that they will be back on soon enough as many of the companies are pausing their ad campaigns for a month. And in fact, Facebook didn't mind confirming to the BBC and CNN and probably other outlets I didn't see that. Yeah, that's what Zuckerberg said. He absolutely said those words that the information reported were not going to deny it. And he will meet with Stop Hate for Profit, which is the group that is organizing the boycott. He wants to sit down. He's taken up their offer to sit down and talk about this and talk about their demands. However, also in that report from the information, Zuckerberg said he saw this as a reputational and partner issue, not a financial one. According to analysis from Pathmatics, of the 25 largest spenders on Facebook ads last year, only three, Microsoft, Starbucks and Pfizer are pausing ads for this month. Also, according to Pathmatics, of the top 100 advertisers on Facebook last year, they only accounted for 6% of Facebook's revenue, because Facebook derives the majority of its revenue from direct response ads. If you talk about a long tail, there's a long tail. Small brands that rely on the advertising for their revenue, something they cannot afford to pause, especially now. So let's look at reputational and partner effects. What could those be? Reputational effects generally would mean that people might not want to work at Facebook. They might have problems with recruitment and retention. That's what a lot of people call the tobacco company effect. You don't want to admit you worked for RJ Reynolds at some points in history. People may be embarrassed to admit they worked at Facebook. Whether that will happen or not, we don't know, but that could be one. Partner effects could take the form of Facebook having to satisfy partners that if they come back on the platform, they wouldn't suffer reputational harm themselves to their brand. Facebook also doesn't want them experimenting with other platforms and then finding out, hey, TikTok's a great place to do ads. Snapchat is amazing. We didn't know we hadn't spent enough time on it. So they want to bring partners back on as soon as possible to avoid that. And so far, Facebook's response to all of this has been to talk about what they already do and how much things have already improved, not to promise to do anything new. So in summary, it does seem like Facebook isn't going to feel a bottom line pinch very hard. They're not worried about feeling a bottom line pinch very hard. Everything they're doing is to stave off those reputational effects, which also helps stave off those partner effects. I have a few friends who work at Facebook and are in various departments and do various things. And just based on a lot of the stuff that we've talked about recently on this show, I check in with people every once in a while and they're like, how are you doing? How is it over there? What is it like actually working for this company? Because I think from the outside, it's easy for a lot of us to be like, oh, things are getting really bad. Facebook's situation with people who are having a baby and off time and the general benefits that you get from working at the company, at least as far as people that have talked to me are concerned, greatly outweigh the idea of walking off in a huff because you don't appreciate what the company is doing. So I think part of what would be good in this conversation is just to understand what Tom said in terms of where the money comes in. Because part of this is if there is a fundamental misunderstanding of why Google and Facebook are the ad powerhouses that they are, it helps to understand why they were special. Back in the day, when Yahoo was gigantic, if you wanted to advertise on Yahoo, you would go in and you would talk to a sales rep. And if you're like, I have $5, the sales rep would say, call me when you multiply that by 1000. And then maybe we can think about doing something. Google and Facebook both say, we'll take that, we'll sell you $5 worth of advertising. We will sell you any increment worth of advertising as long as you are willing to pay for that small, small, small version of it. That's why a bunch of companies pulling out, which, by the way, is advertising. They're advertising the fact that they are pulling off Facebook because they believe me. Hi, I'm Starbucks and I'm standing up. Don't forget, I'm Starbucks. Yes, you can get your favorite coffee here, but this time with 5% less hate if you believe that Facebook is a merchant of such wares. Zuckerberg is exactly right to say that. And part of the reason why is because they built a business model that cannot be sunk by a Unilever boycott. Yeah, and if you're thinking like, well, these companies probably don't have as much to spend on advertising right now anyway because of the downturn. That may be true in some of these cases, but I know for sure that Unilever has said our advertising budget will remain the same. We're spending going to spend the same amount of money. We're just going to shift it from Facebook somewhere else. So it's not as simple as that for at least all the companies. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit stories that make sense to you and you want to rise to the top. You can submit and also vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Tara wrote in a real nice email and said having DTNS to listen to every weekday definitely has a bit of a grounding effect. Making things seem okay even when they're not normal. Thank you. Oh, thanks, Tara. I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah, absolutely. Having you having people like Tara to do the show for also has a grounding effect for us to be honest. So it works for you. You can say that again. Hey, shout out to my patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Dustin Campbell, Andrew Bradley and Paulo Jacob. Also thanks to the one, the only Justin Robert Young. Mm hmm. Yes, it's me folks. As life. Oh, you know, live in the dream out here in Oakland, California. We got a new PX three coming out tomorrow talking with our money man Dave Leventhal all about the comings and goings in terms of the green backs of the presidential election and much, much more. And apparently I've been arguing with Tom about something on text that I'm going to have to drag him onto the show so he can talk about it there. Oh yeah, that's good. That's going to be fun. We may bring up primary reform from the 1970s. Who knows? Hey, all the hot, sexy topics that everyone's into these days. Yeah. Next week is security week starting Monday, July 6. We're featuring special security guests each day of the week, including info staff, Seth Rosenblatt, Alyssa Miller. We'll be covering topics like improving your security while telecommuting, how to avoid being socially engineered, understanding deep fakes. That's all next week. Don't miss it right here on Daily Tech News Show. French criminals, tune in. French criminals, tune in. 10% off of something. I don't know what. Also, thanks to everybody who is supporting the Current Geek Chronicles Kickstarter that Scott and I mentioned yesterday. We are a third of the way there. Thanks to you. So keep it coming. We really wanted this show to happen. It's one of the best things I've ever done. Deep dives into geeky topics. Go check it out. Support.currentgeek.com. Of course, continue to support Daily Tech News Show, Daily Tech News Show dot Patreon. And the masks are shipping. If you ordered a DTNS mask, David Michael sent me a picture of him wearing one today. They're going out in the mail. And so you can still order one as well, Daily Tech News Show dot com slash store. Our email address is feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. Please write us. We'd love to hear your thoughts. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. We are off this Friday for the start of the Independence Holiday in the United States, but we'll see you on Monday. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I'm in club. I hope you have enjoyed this program.