 Coming up on DTNS, the portal opens for Facebook and Twitter, stopping deepfakes right at the processor level and animatronic dolphins. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 15, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Usher Chang. We were just talking about the idea that you can't use getting hacked as an excuse anymore, folks. It's all over. The gig is up. Get that wider conversation. A good day, internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Barnes and Noble confirmed it experienced unauthorized and unlawful access to certain Barnes and Noble corporate systems on October 10, causing outages in nook service and cash registers. Outages continued through Wednesday when Barnes and Noble acknowledged a system failure and added Thursday it has no evidence that customer data was exposed but can't rule out the possibility just yet. No financial data was exposed. Snap introduced Snapchat Sounds on iOS, letting users add song clips to snaps and stories. Snap has deals in place with BMG, Universal Warner and Merlin for tracks. Notably, it does not have music from Sony. Swiping up on a snap, though, will give you music which will show the album art song title and name of the artist with links to listen to the whole song on various streaming services. DJI announced two new gimbals, the Ronin S2 and the smaller Ronin SC2. The S2 has a small 1.4 inch touchscreen display that supports active track without a need to put your smartphone on top of the camera, which is nice. DJI also introduced the Titan stabilization algorithm to optimize speed, dead band and acceleration settings. Both gimbals have built-in batteries for up to 12 hours of use and both feature a new quick charge function. Both are now available, $849 for the S2, $499 for the SC2. We need a gong. Yahoo! announced to users it will shut down Yahoo! groups on December 15, 2020. Yahoo! suggests Facebook groups, Nextdoor, Google groups, or groups.io as alternatives. In fact, groups.io supports importing members from Yahoo! groups. Yeah, end of an era. While Apple announced that it will not include headphones with the new iPhone 12, for most customers, those in France will receive a free pair of wired earpods. French regulations require phone makers to include a hands-free kit at a customer's request as a precautionary move to protect children under 14 from any potential risks of electromagnetic waves from the device. Promoting the use of a mobile device without a hands-free accessory is also a finable offense in the country. Let's talk a little bit more about Stop and Deepfake. Sarah, how do we do it? Well, CNET reports on a San Diego startup called TruePick developing a system to verify the authenticity of videos and images. TruePick foresight runs on Snapdragon processors and creates a digital signature that can be then used to prove an image has not been manipulated or defaked. The effort goes alongside similar systems to being developed by Canon for its devices. Adobe has one for its software, but TruePick hopes to embed its technology in Qualcomm processors so it would be available on the majority of phones. Qualcomm processors are kind of everywhere. TruePick foresight works by moving images taking in secure mode to the secure enclave where it then authenticates pixels, date and time, geolocation, a 3D depth map creates a cryptographic signature also. So it's doing a lot. Public key infrastructure is used for validation as well. So if you want to try it out, TruePick offers an app for an Android called Vision Camera that uses TruePick foresight to embed the signatures in phones taken within the app. In the photos. In the photos taken within the app. Yes, photos. Not the phone. Well, I point that out because it's not at the phone level yet. The app just lets you try at the signature. But the point being, of course, as you mentioned, that eventually they want to put this into the chip so that it's just happening anytime an app takes advantage of it. Now, granted, every photo app wouldn't have to take advantage of it. That would be up to the manufacturers of the phone, the makers of camera apps, etc. But with, as you said, 90% of the phones out there, at least particularly Android phones running on Qualcomm chips, if they strike this deal, pretty much every phone would have that capability. This has kind of been a worry that we have had in technology for the last 30 years. The idea that our eyes indeed can lie to us. And we saw a lot of the cultural fears around Photoshop along these lines that software can change it. What we found culturally is that people who were practitioners in the software were able to tell elements of its use. So, of course, this building is not actually smoking. You can tell that this is the stamp tool that was used to make it look as such. That's indistinguishable from somebody's random eye, but not for somebody who knows what it is. The question now is with deepfakes, are we getting beyond even somebody who knows how to use deepfakes to tell whether or not this is something that has been altered? So, I think this is the next level, figuring out a way for us to tag these things earlier. And if this isn't the solution, my hope is that we continue to find different places in the chain to authenticate photos. So, there's just one more piece of evidence to show that we can trust what we're looking at. Yeah, I think this is going to be... I've got three questions about it, put it that way. Does this work well? Will it, in fact, in practice, and I shouldn't say work, will it be effective in combating deepfakes? Will we get trained to look for, whether it's from Canon or Adobe or TruePick, will we be trained to look for that check mark to go like, oh, I can trust this image, it's verified, and look a scant at any photo that doesn't have it. That's what makes this effective. If we're all trained to say like, I saw this crazy picture, but it didn't have the little check, you know, so I probably is faked. I'm not going to believe it. And that takes us a bit of social learning. We all have to get used to that, has to be out there in the wild a lot. We have to get used to seeing it. The other part is, can it be faked? Can somebody hack these digital signatures? Now, TruePick is doing all the right things, putting it in the secure enclave, making it a cryptographically sealed signature, but pretty much everything can be hacked. It's a matter of how and when. There's also just, you know, there's a lot of... Well, I don't want to say lazy, it's just convenient ways that people share images on the internet these days, whether it's on mobile devices or otherwise, you know, take a screen grab in a variety of ways. So a original image that has a check mark, you know, saying it's authentic or doesn't, you know, that's not always going to be the end, the image that you end up seeing that might be shared virally. Well, and that's why the training is required, right? In other words, it's not the check mark is on the image. It's that the check mark is generated when it's displayed, because the cryptographic signature is there. And if you're taking a screenshot and spreading it, then we all have to get trained to go, yeah, but it's not generating the little check mark. And I'm using check mark. I don't know if it'll always be a check mark, so whatever, whatever that symbol is. Yeah, but and we're going to get into this a little bit later in the show. You just want points of data. You just want as many fail safes as possible, because the world isn't black and white. We're always piecing together little pieces of it to make a better understanding for ourselves. And to markup's point in the chat room, I wonder if there will be tags like altered by the artist. Yes, both Adobe and TruePick have systems that they want to put in place to allow you to see how an image was edited. So that if an artist is like, Yeah, no, I did edit this. You can see like, Oh, yes, it was edited, but it was edited by whom by the original artist intentionally, etc. And I've talked to some photojournalists who are like, Yeah, I don't really love that. I don't I don't want to reveal how I, you know, touched up my photo. I don't want that to be something that people always see. And in the Adobe situation, that's optional. But if it's optional, then it doesn't become as effective. The lament of the artist. German mobile measurement company adjust released a report on subscription services in the United States. Adjust worked with census wide to survey one thousand and three TV and streaming customers age 16 to 60 in the US between September 23 and 29th. Streaming video apps made up 30.7% of subscription based app downloads followed by gaming and news. Consumers who use streaming entertainment services spent an average of $33.58 a month on them. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus and YouTube TV made up the top five favorite streaming services. This is lower than I thought it would be, honestly. I mean, I subscribed to YouTube TV. The prices went up a little bit recently. It's 65 bucks per month now. It used to be 50. But it's still exponentially cheaper than any traditional cable service that I used to pay for, which was always over $100. I wonder, I wonder how many folks are like, All right, well, now that we have all a card options, we just have to choose the stuff that we care about in the way that we never were able to with cable subscriptions before. I mean, I don't know anybody who's like, I have 150 channels and I watch them all. Now you watch five. But you like the fact that they're 150. But if you don't have to do it that way, then you end up paying less. Well, sorry, Tom, go ahead. No, no, no. I was just going to say the perception to is that people are spending even more now than they used to. And I too, like you, Sarah, was taken by the idea that this was only $33.58. When everyone thinks the average cable bill is lower than it is, the average cable bill is somewhere north of $150 if you go and look it up. It's because they always advertise $40 a month, but it doesn't stick there. And too many people aren't, you know, good enough on keeping up on calling in and making sure they get the low promotional rate. So we pay a lot for cable TV. And if this is the replacement, even if it goes up, there's a lot of room to go up. There is. And really the biggest difference here is that we are not looking at a world where everybody is competing in the same business model, which is what you had with the satellite and cable situation. Channels were only going to, they set their prices at this amount, you know, $3, for example, at the high end per subscriber. And that is a one-way street. Nobody was ever going to negotiate that number down. It was only ever going to go up. We might see that creep again in some of the slings and Hulu lives and YouTube TVs going forward, although they're bundles, they're starting at a smaller bundles, smaller bundles that you're able to mix and match a little bit more. But what really changes the game and why this number is so low is that our culture is centered around a lot of the originals on streaming. And that's why that number gets as low, not because they have stuff like Sarah and I and Tom, I'm assuming you have some live distributor. It's because they just have Netflix and Amazon Prime. And guess what? They're able to watch Stranger Things and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel like everybody else. And Thursday Night Football on Amazon. And Thursday Night Football. So that's why that number is as low. If we continue to get into the over the top streaming live channel battle, that number will creep up higher. But the good news is we got what we wanted. More stuff, cheaper prices. And I don't think it ever gets as high because you have control. This is the other thing this points out is you can cancel Amazon Prime. You can cancel Netflix. You could whittle away at that amount. And you can switch from sling to YouTube to AT&T TV. There are more competitors to choose from. But I cannot tell you how many friends and family I have because I'm always the person that people come to like, how do I get this? And what's the coolest new thing? And who say, well, but I just canceled Netflix. And that's the only place I can watch that show. Everyone's talking about that show. Man, this is all too much. I think that the fact that people are paying less is not because they don't want to pay for all the services. Well, it's because they don't want to pay for all the services. It's not that they don't want the services. And you just kind of got to choose your battles. We've always loved the content. We've always hated the bill. Well, folks, we are going to talk about Facebook and Twitter and hashtag portal the hell in a second. But first, I want to thanks all those who participate in our subreddit. We get some great story ideas over there. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Now, yesterday, we did mention that Facebook was limiting the reach of posts with a link to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, Vice President Joe Biden's son. Twitter subsequently blocked the ability of its users to link to the story at all or repost images from that story because Twitter said it violated its hacked materials policy. More on that in a second. This is the first time that either has gone after an established news organization in this way. The New York Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. You may have heard of his musical. It is currently owned by News Corp. You may have heard of succession. That doesn't make it infallible, of course, but it's not an upstart. It's not run by unknowns. This is an established media company. Now, the post story sources information from a MacBook Pro dropped off at a Delaware repair shop and never picked up. The shop owner says that they made a copy of a hard drive before handing it over to the FBI. They handed it to the FBI because of the nature of the content on it. The Post's story shows multiple emails, but those emails do not show metadata or other headers. The sources who brought the information to the Post are from the opposite party to the Democrat candidate for president, and the Democrat campaign says they were not contacted about the critical elements of the story. So there are a few questions about whether all standard journalistic practices were followed in this reporting. But the story is not unique in that. There was an Atlantic story about the president's remarks on military members recently that was also based on unverifiable sources. In both cases, it's up to you to trust the editorial organization or play detective and try to uncover evidence in the stories themselves, which ends up throwing it in the laps of social networks when Democrats and some journalists claim the story is not reliable and could do damage if it goes viral and therefore should be blocked. And of course, the Streisand effect means that we've made this the most well-known story of the day, but we're a tech show, so let's get to the tech part. How do social networks determine if they should take action on this? Both these companies have policies. Facebook invoked a policy from October 21st, 2019 that reads, in many countries, including the U.S., if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker, which is exactly what they did. They had a policy that says, hey, man, if we think this is really going viral and it could do damage and it might be false, we're going to go ahead and pre-reduce it while we fact-check it. So they followed their policy. We don't know what the signals were that made them think this, ostensibly it's all the journalists who do not work at the post claiming it's a weak story, and it's also unclear how you go about fact-checking a story based on private documents and sources you don't have access to, but that's what they're doing. To Twitter, it introduced rules against hacked materials in 2018 to stop doxing, and it updated that policy in March 2019. That policy says, posting hacked content on Twitter, e.g. in the text of a tweet or in an image and linking to hacked content hosted on other websites is prohibited, and it has implemented that policy before. It shut down the DDoS secrets account, which posted newsworthy leaked documents, but this is the biggest test of that policy, and it fits the letter of the policy. These were hacked documents from a laptop unauthorized by the owner of the laptop, and therefore you can't link to them or repost the images under Twitter policy. But one wonders, would they make an exception for a story in the public interest like leaks by Chelsea Manning or Edward Stoden, which theoretically would violate this policy if those things were coming out today? Hold that thought. A couple more quick points. Twitter and Facebook have not broken any laws. Notwithstanding, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai plans to move forward on a rulemaking to clarify Section 230 because Pai said social media companies, quote, do not have a First Amendment right to his special immunity denied to other media outlets such as newspapers and broadcasters. He's right. The First Amendment doesn't give you the immunity. Section 230 does, and Section 230 doesn't have anything to do with this, no matter how much you might want it to. Section 230 means if outlets decide to control what's on their platform, they won't be penalized for allowing illegal content posted by someone else on their platform to slip through. It is meant to say you can decide what goes on your platform without being liable for what a third party puts on your platform. It protects your right to editorialize exactly the way that Twitter and Facebook are accused of doing. It doesn't apply. This is a First Amendment situation, and the First Amendment has been interpreted to protect a platform from deciding what it can and cannot carry. You don't have to think it's fair. They have a First Amendment right to do it. Section 230 just doesn't make it liable for what other people say on its platform, specifically giving it the right to make editorial decisions of what they allow on the platform. That was the whole point of Section 230 was before it was either all or nothing. You either had to let everything on the platform or nothing on the platform, or you were liable for what anybody else says. So, bringing Section 230 into this is weird to me. Anyway, being legal doesn't mean you have to do it. So, Justin, Sarah, what effect do you think this is all going to have? Tom, this is all proceeding as I have foreseen, and everybody who has listened to Daily Tech News Show understands that I have been calling for for the last several years. It is, again, say it with me, friends, hashtag Hell Portal, hashtag Portal to Hell. This is the biggest example that I can remember seeing of it, largely due to the loud nature of our American political system and the current phase we are at in our electoral season. I don't agree with Twitter's ruling specifically. I'll hold that for a second and just get to the Facebook thing. One thing I would like to add to your description of it, signals that there might be content that could do damage to the election could also, and I'm drawing a line here, be Facebook being informed by intelligence agencies or other security firms that there are certain pieces of information that they believe will be fed through new sources. If that is the case, then I believe there is a reasonable expectation that Facebook should be up front about that, and furthermore, should be transparent about even if they're not revealing it immediately, they should be up front about things that they have been told once they make these kinds of editorial decisions that shape their news content. As for Twitter, I think this was overbroad. I think this was terrible precedent, and I don't believe that at least the spirit of their hacked materials clause, which to me is more along the lines of raw dumps in Pacebin and stuff like that, should be stretching out to organizations that already have a lot on the line and are vetting these stories at least to their own detriment, should they get sued for libel or in the case of a television network slander. The New York Post story is something that I think there are a lot of journalistic questions about. I have very legitimate journalistic questions that we could go through here if this were a different kind of show. However, I don't believe that these are unique. I think that there's a tremendous amount of journalistic questions that you can ask specifically in terms of political reporting. So you're a living Twitter policyist, not an originalist. Yes. Again, as they get into this game and they start making the rules as they're going, they're going to get into trouble. And ultimately, I think both of these companies need to have just big hard lines in the sand of exactly what they are going to do, and then they need to take the heat when they are making controversial interpretations of that specifically in our current political time, where look, you're going to get yelled at. You're going to get yelled at if people believe that this is Russian propaganda. But guess what? If it's not violating anything else that you allow on your platform, then I don't see how you can censor it. It's so interesting and not always in a good way to watch an evolving company try to evolve and figure out these kinds of issues. It's not like you're selling Coca-Cola and it's like, that's what we sell. Just drink it or you like it or you don't like it. That's what we do. It's constantly changing. Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, wrote in response today about this whole debacle quote, our communication around our actions on the New York Post article was not great and blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero contacts as to why we're blocking was unacceptable. Now, I don't think that that was wrong. I think that communication, especially from the top, is important, especially when a company is like, huh, we should have approached this differently. And we've learned something in the process. But depending on who you are and what you want to believe, you read something like that and you go, they don't know what they're doing. Now they have to apologize. They've really screwed up here. And there's so many mixed messages that people can get from things like this. And it happens all the time, particularly with Twitter, but Facebook as well. I think in the end where I come at this is is more and more to just what Justin said years ago, which is as soon as you start even hinting towards deciding what is okay on your platform, what's true and what's not, and adjudicating that you're going to end up in these issues where someone doesn't agree with you and there's going to be controversy over that. And we have seen other examples, but this is the biggest one so far. All right, folks, we need an amuse-bouche. So let's move on from this and talk about some dolphins. Oh, Tom, your timing is so good because Reuters reports on edge innovations. It's a company which has developed a remote control animatronic dolphin that it thinks could be used in movies or even in theme parks. The dolphin weighs 250 kilograms and is two and a half meters long, looks like a dolphin. Its skin is made from medical grade silicon. It costs three to five million dollars to make, so these are not cheap dolphins, but they are supposed to be realistic after all. Edge is using the animatronic dolphin in a partnership with TeachKind from PETA, that's people for the ethical treatment of animals. Edge creative director, Roger Holsberg, describes it as a kind of a Sesame Street underwater situation. The company says it could possibly make sharks or even Jurassic era reptiles as well. Oh man, can you imagine if Megalodon came jumping out of the marine world pool and did some tricks? Or just, I don't know, I mean, I went to a lot of zoos and marine theme parks as a kid and over time it has become, not that they don't exist anymore, but the treatment of animals has become much more at the forefront of what we should all be doing and some of those theme parks has suffered. But really, as a kid, you're on a school trip, you're trying to learn things. A lot of this stuff could really still be fun and teachable and we'd all come away learning something and have a good time and you wouldn't have to have real animals there. This is also a classic PETA story. They love getting any time that they can get their name out that isn't necessarily about something gruesome and awful and brutal and part of the solution and not the problem, they love to do it, so it doesn't surprise me that their name's on this. Well, we're glad to take advantage of that behavior today to kind of lighten things up here at the end of the show. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Bruce and his guide dog Stu, for those of you on our video feed, we've got a picture. Always love the animal pictures. Bruce wanted to comment on Microsoft's Seeing AI story from Wednesday. Bruce, who is vision impaired, says, I use the Seeing AI app to help read my mail among other small print. I'm curious to see how it will integrate into Office. I'll also use Zoom text for screen enlargement as well and I noticed when using voiceover on Facebook, it sometimes describes the picture and also any caption texted and I really appreciate that. So I think it's a good reminder that a lot of that data is helping somebody out there to be on the same page and that's really cool. Always good to see Stu, too. It's now a series of Stu pictures. Also, we got an email from Drew who wanted to thank us for our balanced coverage on the 1-0 article about Clear Yesterday. Drew transparently says, I'm a clear employee and I usually brace for impact whenever we're in the news and I really appreciate that your coverage was an even keeled assessment of the pros and cons of our service instead of the what kind of idiot gives this much data to a private corporation that a lot of outlets default to. Thanks for what you all do every day. Thank you, Drew. Thank you so much, Drew. And if you have feedback for our show, please send it. We love your feedback. The email address is feedback at DailyTechnoShow.com. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Kevin, Paul Boyer and Philip Shane. Also, extra special thanks to Justin Robert Young, PX3 man himself. What's been going on with you? Well, of course, Politics, Politics, Politics is where you can get the more political side of the story that you just heard about. You also can get my political history podcast, Raise the Dead, Johnson vs. Goldwater, all about the 1964 election. I'm very, very excited for people to hear the episode that we just aired, mostly because it is the result of really a year's worth of research looking into the comparisons between the upstart campaign of Barry Goldwater and Bernie Sanders in 2020. Two guys that could not be further apart in terms of their ideological perspective of how the government should be involved in our lives, but in terms of dealing within a massive party power structure are almost identical. Check that out right now. Raisethedeadpodcast.com. Hey, folks, if you'd like a DTNS hat, hoodie, mask or mouse pad, we have all that and more at our DTNS store, DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. We are also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Shannon Morse with us. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com.