 Coming up on DTNS, the sad history of Skype. We come to morn it, not to bury it yet. Should Apple be allowed to buy dark sky and how we think ISPs will justify data caps after this is all over. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 1st, 2020 with an April Fool's Day news size hole in my heart. I'm Tom Merritt in Los Angeles. And I'm Sarah Lane at Studio Redwood and Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and the show's producer. My name's Roger. Hey, we were just talking about Sarah Lane's new Oculus Quest that she has obtained. We sure were. That's the new live with it. I'm VR for three months, people. Don't bug me. VR. Very excited for you, Sarah. I'm glad. Yeah. No, it doesn't work that way. Yeah. If you want to hear more about that and how to battle moths, well, you got to get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. An attacker used logging credentials of two employees to access information of more than 5.2 million Marriott hotel guests, including contact details, loyalty account information, partnerships, preferences, and some demographics. Marriott doesn't believe that the attackers access passwords or payment info or passport or ID numbers. The company learned of the breach at the end of February believes it dates back to mid January and has launched a site where users can check if their account was accessed. In other news, Xerox announced Tuesday it's abandoning its 30 billion hostel bid takeover of HP Incorporated, citing the current public health crisis and resulting market fluctuations. Xerox offer became public in early November after the company's failed to come to a merger agreement. Slack launched the Microsoft Teams Calls beta app, which lets a Slack user launch a Teams call from within Slack. Now the user does need to have both the Slack and Teams apps to make this work. The app lets Slack users set Teams as the default calling provider. Slack is also launching integration with Zoom, WebEx, Jabber, RingCentral and Dialpad, letting users call numbers from within the Slack interface using any of those systems. Reuters reports Uber Eats will offer delivery from Carrefour in Paris, and the Financial Times reports that Uber Eats delivery will be offered from convenience stores in Spain and local pharmacies, pet shops and convenience stores in Brazil. Delivery Hero is also using its warehouse capacity and riders to deliver groceries. It also works with Carrefour in France, ICA in Sweden, and Walmart in Argentina. Deliveroo is working with Marks & Spencer's, NBP in the UK, and FriendPri in Paris. DoorDash is partnering with more than 1,800 stores across the US, including 7-Eleven, Wawa, Casey's General and Circle K. All right, brace yourself for this one. Amazon now allows purchases of movies and TV shows in its iOS and Apple TV apps directly. Previously, users had to purchase or rent shows on the web to gain access to the app. Usually you could go through Safari or something and then just hop right back over. Apple takes 30% of all in-app purchases and does not allow companies to subvert that by linking to their own purchasing methods. Big change on that. You can buy Amazon Things from within the Prime Video app. Weird. These are indeed strange times. 9to5Mac reports that based on an early build of iOS 14 it obtained, Apple is working to improve the iCloud Keychain password manager on iOS with two-factor password integration that does not rely on email or SMS. Users will also reportedly be warned about using recycled passwords. An AI developed by DeepMind called Agent 57 has learned to play all 57 Atari classic video games in the arcade learning environment that researchers use to test the limits of their deep learning models. Agent 57 uses the same deep reinforcement learning algorithm to achieve superhuman levels of play, even in games that previous AIs have struggled with. However, there are still limitations. It can't learn to play more than one game at once. It can master a game, but it can't do two at once or 57 at once. It has to retrain for each new game. What did you remember Agent 57 was, Scott? It was a dog. What do you call it? Saint Bernard that carries the little jug of like brandy under its neck to save you. And it was part of the, it's either, was it the mighty mouse universe or something? Some old danger mouse. Danger mouse. That's what it was. And it was this dog named Agent 57. So I don't know if they got it from that or where that came from, but sure. Very cool. All right. Let's talk a little more about the big merger. It finally happened. T-Mobile USA and Sprint completed Wednesday. They're co-mingling the USA's third and fourth largest mobile carriers, T-Mobile CEO John Legere. Is it Legere? Legere, I think as I said. Step down and T-Mobile CEO or COO Mike Savent, Savert, is now the seedvert, is now the combined company's new CEO. Users will start seeing increased coverage as the networks now will interpolate and interoperate and not interpolate. Anyway, and Sprint will become, sorry, we'll begin to come under the T-Mobile brand this summer. Sprint's boosts and Virgin Brands also, or excuse me, are being sold to Dish, which will be allowed to use T-Mobile's network for seven years. I didn't stick to it. Sorry, bad, bad paragraph, everybody. I'll start today. It happens, man. Don't let it bring you down. It's okay. The important thing is, well, it's such a big merger. I mean, Scott can barely contain himself. I had to merge the words. Yeah, a lot of merging. Yeah. Goodbye, John Legere. I'll be very, very sad to see him go. I thought he was pretty crazy, cool and fun and did a lot of amazing things to bring T-Mobile from the brink of death when AT&T was not allowed to buy it. But, you know, this will potentially be a stronger company because of it. And we'll see if Dish can become a fourth carrier. That's the plan. We'll see. Yeah. I wasn't, I don't know. I wasn't really thinking that this deal would fall through, but a long time in the making. And yeah, I'm with you. John Legere. He was, well, I don't know him personally, but I really enjoyed any time he participated in his speaking engagements. So hopefully we haven't seen the last of his wit and humor. If we didn't have to keep our family-friendly tag, I would say something in tribute to John Legere right now. Our tactic is John Brodkin wrote up a story today about the effect of waving data caps. For instance, Comcast, along with a lot of ISPs, have waved them. Comcast previously charged many of its customers extra for an unlimited connection. Scott, what were you paying? 60 bucks extra? I'm paying about 60 bucks more for an unlimited uncapped gigabit service. Yeah, yeah. And if you had the capped connection, which is usually capped at a terabyte in the U.S., you had to pay $10 per 50 gigabytes of usage over your capped plan. Well, that's waved right now because of the current work from home orders, stay-at-home orders. Comcast has waved that. Comcast used to justify the need for caps by claiming data was a limited resource, which it's not. Or saying it needed caps to reduce congestion, which it does need to reduce congestion. Caps are an incredibly ineffective way of managing congestion. So Comcast has more recently justified its data caps as more vague need to promote fairness. That fairness apparently is not necessary in the northeast part of the United States, where they compete with Verizon Fiber because there are no data caps there, even before the recent waiver. It also isn't so much concerned with fairness that it'll give you money for not using a lot of data. It won't charge you less if you use a very tiny amount of data, although it does have tiers. And Comcast is not the only one lifting the caps. So what has happened since the caps have been lifted? Well, largely, the internet has done fairly well. Telia Carrier, which connects network operators with each other around the world, posted to its blog Wednesday, that all days of the week essentially look like Sunday, which used to be the peak usage. So in other words, the internet was built to handle the worst that you could throw at it. We're throwing the worst we can at it more days. But the overall peak isn't worse than usual. Overall traffic volumes have risen by more than 50%. And the worry is is not that they won't be able to handle the capacity but how it handles outages, which is a good worry to have. So they're they're working on how do we make sure we build in capacity faster than we would have before so that if something goes down, we have some redundancy to handle it. Whereas before you really all had to worry about that on Sunday, now you have to worry about it every day of the week. Comcast specifically said Monday that it measured a 32% increase in peak traffic since March 1, with increases of 60% in some areas of the US, VoIP and video conferencing, of course, up 212% VPN traffic up 40% gaming downloads up 50% streaming video up 38%. And Comcast says that even though it's waived this data cap the usage is and we quote, within the capability of our network and we continue to deliver the speeds and support the capacity our customers need, that jives with what Tilia Carrier is saying like overall, we're able to handle this. Comcast told ours technical, however, that it's too early to comment on what the company will do after the current data cap waiver ends on May 13. AT&T was a little more hedgy, saying that it has pledged unlimited access for customers for 60 days. But that end date is fluid. They're not saying at 60 days, it'll be the end, because they're waiting to see conditions on the ground. But both those statements, y'all imply that at some point after this has all passed, these ISPs would like to put those data caps back in place. Do you think they can get away with it? Now that people realize, well, wait a minute, there was no reason for the data cap, as we've been saying on DTS for years, other than charging people more for them. Yeah, especially because I love Comcast saying, listen, we're Comcast, we're strong, we're the number one in the US, we can handle this, you are safe with us. Oh, however, data is finite. And if you use more data, you should pay more. When this is all over, we're going to go back to the old way of doing things, even though we've assured you that we don't have to. Yeah, they make it sound like they've opened up a water spigot and said, okay, well, the water's free for now. But eventually, we're going to run out. So we need to go back to it. I mean, I don't know if they'll do that or not. I can't get an answer out of them, whether they'll waive my additional money I pay every month to avoid the $10 per 50 gigabyte usage thing. So if they're going to waive that for me, they haven't said or they, you know, they haven't gotten back to me with a definitive answer. So for all I know, I'm still paying for no data caps, even though right now they're lifting data caps, which is another issue. But at the end of all of this, I hope what happens is that we all have real data from multiple sources that can say, look, the internet was fine. In fact, this was a great test for it. And we learned that it could handle this and could handle that. And these other extemporaneous charges are no longer necessary for this industry to thrive. Who knows? I mean, to be fair, they already knew that this this has been a practice in marketing of like, we think people will put up with paying for data caps, because it kind of makes sense to them if they don't really know how this all works, right? Yeah, it's easy to be like, listen, you watch a lot of streaming movies. And that your neighbor here really only checks her email once or twice a day. Is that fair? Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not. I should pay more turns out the blinking lights don't cost more when they blink more, which is kind of one of the ways I've explained this over the years. So I hope that what they do is really lean into speed. And maybe like charge me a little extra for a synchronous connection, right? Because if I'm doing a lot of uploads, I need a synchronous connection. I'll pay a little extra for that charge me more for faster speeds that is long established, and something that everybody is okay with like, Yeah, you let me go faster. I'll pay more for that. But data caps are counterproductive. They're consumer abusive. They are not necessary at all. They are a choice that ISPs make in how they how they charge you. And it's a bad choice, in my opinion. And this kind of shows that hopefully enough people have learned that that it'll be difficult for them to go back to that in the future. Well, we're not done with zoom news this week, bleeping computer notes that security researcher at underscore God mode has discovered a method to expose Windows credentials in a zoom call. Zoom that makes URLs and network paths is clickable in chat messages. So an attacker could send a UNC path link, a network path usually beginning with two backslashes. And then when a zoom user clicks on the path, zoom uses the SMB file sharing protocol to open that link. By default, Windows sends the user's login name and password hash, which the hacker, the attacker rather can then attempt to D hash security researcher at Matthew Hickey verified the vulnerability and advise zoom not to turn network paths into hyperlinks. That would be a way to avoid this to mitigate the vulnerability users can set a group policy to prevent NTLM credentials from being sent to a remote server. Yeah, or don't click on path links, which is maybe a little harder to make people do. But this isn't a don't use zoom. This is a be careful. If someone's messaging you a link, make sure you know who's messaging it to you and where it's going. And you might want to do that, that group policy, or if you're a home user, do a registry change to prevent your credentials from being passed along until they fix it. Facebook's community helps feature is usually launched regionally to respond. Yeah, I guess is usually launched. That's weird to respond to offer help in the wake of crisis is like shootings or national disasters for the first time. Facebook has launched a community help hub globally for COVID-19 users will be able to request or offer help related to the pandemic. The hub is launching first in Canada, France, Australia, the UK and the US with more countries to follow over the next couple of weeks, starting with higher risk countries in Europe and Asia. Yeah, so this is this is something that we've never seen on this scale. It's there's two things going on here. One is Facebook showing that it really is a helpful thing in this particular case. And number two is we've never seen anything on this scale on this planet, because even Facebook hasn't had to make a community help feature available to the entire planet at once. Yeah, yeah, my first instinct was like, this is going to be messy because it's Facebook, but Facebook has the strength of numbers. So whereas the sort of thing was often available on Facebook in regional capacities after an event or were surrounding something that, you know, regional folks might be interested in, the fact that this is something of interest to the whole planet is I mean, what better platform to at least try this out than Facebook? Yeah, I've always felt like, you know, among the many things you can criticize Facebook about, I thought the Facebook community help feature was a pretty good one. If you're already on Facebook, then all the problems with Facebook are baked in. And so this allows you to communicate with people, make sure folks are okay and offer help and respond to requests for help and be able to request help. So this this is great. It's it's probably only a Facebook that could offer something on this scale. Yeah, it's good. It's also a little more accessible. There's one there's something like this in next door, but it's super buried in the menus. And I don't know people even know about it. So yeah, the bigger, the better, I guess in this case. Yeah, I've never seen that on next door. And I'm not next door all the time. Super buried like three menus deep. It's real dumb. That's another conversation. Also another conversation. Russia and Europe are both going to use apps to track people who have COVID-19, but they're going to go about it in a couple different ways. Russia's app launched Thursday will let officials monitor the movements of anyone determined to be infected. Anyone without a device to run the app will be lent a device to participate. The European effort called the Pan European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing, a lot of peas, will show who a person with COVID-19 had come in close contact with so that those people can then be contacted and take appropriate measures. The platform launches on April 17th with apps to roll out a week or so afterwards. The European app is voluntary and if 60% or more of a country's population ends up using it, this could allow for looser restrictions on movement because there's more information being gathered. In the US, Palantir is using anonymized hospital and healthcare data and lab results and equipment supplies to model data for the US CDC in a platform called Palantir Foundry. The UK is also using the service and Palantir is pitching it to other companies, sorry, other countries in Europe. So we have lots of different ways to address this problem. Yeah, there's two different examples of major efforts going on here. The Palantir effort and the Pan European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing Platform, those are those are platform efforts. There's another one going on in Belgium, too, that is very similar to the Palantir one, which is let's take data we have and use it to inform our decisions. Are people staying home? If they are, then maybe we don't have to put in extra restrictions. And that is, you're able to do that with anonymized data that stays anonymized. There's good ways to kind of keep that data anonymized so that you can see where people are concentrating and where they're moving. And that's what's going on with Palantir. It's going on in a lot of places. The other one is the tracing. And the tracking and tracing approaches are the key to the future, according to a lot of experts. It has been the key to South Korea being able to have a looser lockdown and clamp down on the infections very fast because what it does is say instead of us just saying everybody stay at home because we don't know who has it, you can say, all right, you can do a few things unless this app tells you you've been in contact with someone who was exposed. And then you know to self isolate yourself a little more. And then other places can use that to say like, oh, well, if you can show that you haven't been near somebody, maybe we can let you do a few more things. We can do temperature tracking. That is how we get out of this. Because even after the virus subsides, there are still going to be reinfections, possibility of recurrences until there's an actual vaccine out there. And this is this is the way forward to figure out how to restart society, according to a lot of folks out there. I like it because I like the voluntary part, because that's a good sales model for this to get people to do it without feeling like they're being forced into something. There's anything I've learned so far in this shutdown or in this in this, you know, this very weird couple of weeks we've been living in is that people don't like to be told what to do and it gets us in trouble. So when you say to them, hey, we got this great way to do it. And by the way, it's voluntary. And if it's over 60% of you do it, guess what, we're going to probably be able to lift restrictions because we'll have a better idea with the data of what's what and what's going on. Like this is a great and I'm all for this, like 100% would do this would sign up for this. Yeah, so keep an eye out. You're going to you're going to be seeing more of these tracing apps. There's going to be variations on it. Singapore has made theirs available, but not everybody's going to use that one. That one uses Bluetooth. It doesn't have the same privacy protections. This European effort is going to be very GDPR compliant and voluntary as well. We'll we'll keep an eye on that sort of thing. But I think those apps are going to end up being incredibly key to how countries are able to navigate forward in the months after May, right? We need to tell you that we have a science week coming next week, starting Monday, April 6th. We are featuring a science guest each episode of DTNS. We'll be talking about things like Mars colonization. Dr. Kiki will be here. We have tech and archaeology, the tech used in paleontology. All week next week, a different guest, a different topic that shows where science and technology intersect. So enjoy. Just all you got to do is stay listening the way you're listening now next week at daily. Show dot com. I'm excited for science week. Anytime we have a science story that's appropriate for DTNS, it's fun. So all week of it with all our favorite scientists. And yes, every day can be science week, but we're making an extra effort to pack in some extra science next week. The verge is Tom Warren has a write up on the sad history of Skype. Why it's not benefiting from the boom in video conferencing kind of lays out a timeline to remind us where Skype was back in 2011 is when Microsoft acquired Skype. Coincidentally, that's the same year zoom was founded. So you know, start your engines, Microsoft and zoom Skype at the time had 100 million active users, 8 million of them paid for various features in 2012 is when Microsoft started to treat Skype as a messenger app, if they ditched Windows Live Messenger, which is sort of the the error of MSN Messenger and said Skype was going to become their messaging app. 2013 Skype transition from being peer to peer to cloud servers to make it easier to use across platforms. Skype was promoted as the default messenger for Windows 8.1. It was part of connect for Xbox one outlook.com integrated Skype on the web. And that transition was not smooth. It caused unreliability. It caused lack of syncing between all these different platforms. But Skype kept growing by 2015 Skype had 300 million active users and decided a redesign is what it needed so it can compete with snapchat added emojis launched and then closed the quick video messaging feature. And in 2016 Microsoft teams launched to compete with Slack and between zoom and teams kind of spelled the doom of Skype. Now I have been saying here that Microsoft was trying to turn Skype into their messenger. When you may have also noticed that I said the doom of Skype was spelled by things that aren't messengers Microsoft's own teams product, which is a messaging platform in a way but it's not a messenger like WhatsApp. And of course zoom. So 2017 what did they do another new design with more snapchat like features that everyone hated and they eventually rolled back. And then of course we're in this year 2020 teams has just this week added consumer friendly features. Skype will only report that they had 200 million active users over a six month period. They won't give you monthly active users but still less than the 300 million in 2015. The lockdown is causing a huge rise in video conferencing 70% rise to 40 million daily for Skype. Compare that to telegrams 200 million monthly active users though. Apotopia estimates that zoom had nearly three times the mobile users of teams in March and teams has more users than Skype. So it's bears repeating what we talked about earlier when we talked about Microsoft launching the consumer friendly app features for teams. Microsoft told venture beat for now Skype will remain a great option for customers who love it and want to connect with basic chat and video calling capabilities for now for people who love it. Is that I hear that part right because yes man I haven't loved it for a long time that here's the thing is we have a very specific relationship with Skype as creators and podcasters. It's been for the longest time this love a relationship of this is how we communicate with people and it's as good as we've got and not a lot of other people were doing much else but that is changing clearly and this whole experience lately has just made you know zoom become a proper player. A lot of people I even heard of it before this all happened and now I think they're kind of here to stay and it really bums me out because back in the day Skype had some really great ideas it may have been before they were bought I don't know but feels like it may have been prior to 2011 and I was using it then and it let me do all sorts of things it won't let me do now so it's kind of my last resort these days I try not to use it unless I have to kind of thing and it bums me out Skype used to be you know there was a reason they bought Skype it was huge it was big it was like the upcoming thing and nobody was doing anything like it and now I don't know maybe they they missed the target and they're doing their own thing anyway with teams so. Yeah Skype was Skype changed video messaging absolutely at one point Skype was sort of the thing and then the competitors came along and the mobile came along there was it's better now I mean we're using Skype on this show and have been for some time but you know there was that issue for years where it was like you'd silent after an hour of using it and it was to mess and the whole messaging and kind of cutesy snapchat emoji stuff never made any sense to me in fact I've worked at corporations where you had more than a few people on a team who had to talk to each other remotely this is sort of pre slack or at least in the infancy of the slack era and I'd be like Skype we're going to mess each other on Skype I can't we do anything else can we go back to email and that's really telling you something at this point I it's it's it's not that Skype doesn't work fine for a lot of uses but I think really kind of missing the boat on those early days of mobile and reliability issues and just a you know a general lack of direction you know rolling back designs because everybody hates it is just not a good look yeah to me it felt like they were trying to get in on what was kind of a gold rush at the time which was you know what's happened everything else taking over chatting was taking over and that was the thing everybody had to have it I remember everybody in mad at Facebook because they were not only owning half of them but then they did stuff with Facebook Messenger that was bad but it was to keep up with this new demand for private messaging services that weren't just SMS or you know regular phone texting and I feel like they just got caught up in that and I don't know if I blame them like from a corporate standpoint looking down on this I probably don't blame them but what they did in the process is sort of destroyed the soul of what Skype was I think you're absolutely right they saw billions of users using Snapchat and said we need billions of users using Skype at this point they've given up on that that's very clear whether they just kill Skype like they killed Wunderlist remains to be seen what I hope they do is say hey wait a minute why do we still have a few hundred million users what's that about maybe we can capitalize on that because if they finally realize that the people who've stuck around using Skype and they said this to venture beat are broadcasters and people who want a really robust way to call people and video chat the messaging part is just something you use when your call isn't going through it's not the main feature for the most for people to use it I think they have a chance to make a specialty product out of Skype and finally give a lot of us what we've been wanting to be which is a higher quality video audio broadcasting and connection tool like a replacement for a satellite connection a replacement for a phone connection even a video conferencing app in a certain way but not a messenger no and a lot of us would pay good money for that like the actual buy your services if you could provide the thing I'll pay any kind of money bad good otherwise yeah let's do it I mean even something like I don't know recording this call and then outputting it as a video which is extremely limited on Skype you can do it other ways using third parties or you can use another service altogether but stuff like that hey you can join in the conversation in our discord which is a great place to chat turns out which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns let's check out the mailbag mohan wrote in and said in light of apple buying dark sky this was a very strategic acquisition for apple thanks mohan their stock weather forecast app uses a third party I think weather.com you are right mohan and must have become expensive for them given the number of ios devices out in the wild with dark sky they can integrate it into their stock app their maps carplay etc they have access to all the back end servers and the sensors as an android phone user and paid dark sky customer I am not happy but since then started looking for an alternative and found it with simple weather which uses openweathermap.org as the back ends for those who want to use openweathermap.org but don't want to deal with an API key they can use forecastee f o r c no e yeah back in ios 8 apple switched from using yahoo to weather.com for its information and weather.com was supplying the info to yahoo so they were already cutting out one middleman now they are cutting out even more middlemen the dark sky API is backed by a wide range of weather data sources which are aggregated together to provide the most accurate forecast possible according to dark sky so it's not like dark sky creates the data it's just their special sauce for interpreting it but I've seen some people say that because dark sky is so popular it's antitrust for apple to buy this and take it away from android shout out to do you guys agree real quickly before we shout out I mean possibly it feels litigious but I'm so bad at knowing what you should sue for in this business anymore that I hate to say but it seems like a thing that I mean there's so much competition for weather apps and they're all using the same data sets that come from meteorological agencies it's just their own spins on it I'm not sure if it qualifies as antitrust I will say and I've only used the ios version dark sky is far and away the best weather app I've ever used I am an iOS user so apple buying them doesn't hurt me probably helps me but I can see why this was the app to purchase I think that's why people want to call it antitrust they're like but it but I liked it it was so good yeah and you're taking it away from a half of its users now it's time to shout out the patrons at our master and grand master levels including Tony Glass, Ruchan Brantley and Adam Carr also thanks to Scott Johnson our Wednesday wizard woo Scott what's been going on with you well other than the wizard re I did on that paragraph earlier today was a real piece of work however do you want to see other pieces of work that I'm into you can check me out at frogpants.com I do comics I do artwork I do podcasts a whole string of them there's a ton of it over there that we'll look at and listen to especially in these trying times so go check them out that's at frogpants.com I'm also on Twitter at Scott Johnson we're trying to share the love it's spread information about resources that you can take advantage of as well as other creators that you can support there there are ways if you if you are able to continue to support people to make sure that everybody's able to to get a little more during this time Anthony Carbonia Jeff just brought back we have concerns their podcast about items of concern to you and the world they were very early on the concern about washing your hands in the first run of their episodes and now that concerns become so important we're very glad that they're 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