 Coming up on DTNS, what's going on with the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, China floats its version of the GDPR and how machine learning can help soccer. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 10th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. We were just reminiscing about faxing, and I was able to do some quick research and find out I last faxed in 2012. Kids, ask your parents. Get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The National Association of Attorneys General sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to abandon plans to launch a version of Instagram for kids under 13. The letter was signed by attorneys general from 44 U.S. states and territories, saying Facebook has historically failed to protect the welfare of children on its platforms. A Facebook spokesperson says that the company has just started exploring the product and is committed to not show ads in it. In an analyst briefing, Sony projected that the PlayStation 5 will remain in short supply throughout 2022. Sony says it has sold 7.8 million PS5 units as of March 31st, and estimates 14.8 million units will have been sold by the end of this current fiscal year. Monthly active PlayStation network users and game sales in the first three months of 2021 declined on the year. A new note by Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims that the earliest Apple plans to use its own internally developed 5G modems would be in its 2023 iPhone models. Apple, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies Johnny Sraoji, told an internal Apple town hall in December of 2020 that the company had begun developing a 5G modem following Apple's acquisition of most of Intel's smartphone modem business back in 2019. Just in time for its declining user base, Clubhouse released a beta of its Android app in the U.S. rolling out globally in the coming weeks. Android users outside the U.S. can pre-register for the beta in the Google Play Store. Clubhouse said the platform will remain invite only for now to keep growth manageable. A very interesting timing there, Clubhouse. The insurance company AXA or AXA said at the request of the French government, it will end cyber insurance policies in France that reimburse victims for ransomware payments, although policies will still cover the cost of recovery. Speaking at a recent Paris roundtable, French cybercrime prosecutor Johanna Brouse said that in 2020, only the USA experienced more ransom attacks than France. And one of the reasons you would do that is to discourage ransomware attacks, which have been consistently on the rise, and of course, one of the most high-profile ones yet took place over the weekend. Colonial Pipeline operates a 5,500-mile pipeline that carries gasoline and other fuels from refineries along the Gulf Coast near Houston, Texas to the east coast of the United States, terminating in London, New Jersey, near New York City. On the average, Colonial Pipeline moves more than 100 million gallons of fuel a day, about 45 percent of the fuel consumed on the U.S. east coast. This past Friday, the company suffered a ransomware attack and shut down the entire pipeline. Now, the attack does not seem to have affected the control systems that run the pipeline itself, but they did the shutdown to make sure that doesn't happen. They wanted to keep it from spreading from its information systems to its control systems. Networks control systems can include things like sensors for readings, valve controls, leak detection, and a whole lot more. Colonial has restored service to some of its smaller lines and is working with federal regulators on a plan for, quote, substantially restoring operational service by the end of the week. Fuel stores on the east coast have been stockpiled in advance of the summer driving season. They get replenished every five to six days. So if the outage lasts longer than that, consumers, like your drivers and airports and factories, may start to notice some shortages. In the meantime, the U.S. relaxed hours of service restrictions for truckers in 17 states. That will allow some flexibility in delivering some fuel by truck. And European traders have provisionally booked six tankers to ship gasoline from Europe to the U.S. east coast if they are needed. Energy companies have risen to be the third most frequent targets of cyber attacks from ninth a year ago. One of the reasons energy systems can be vulnerable is older, unpatched software. Many lag behind on applying security patches because of the cost of taking down the system in a 24-hour energy industry. You never have downtime in the energy industry. Also, the prevalence of working from home has increased the number of users with remote access. That increases the surface area for phishing attacks or an attacker can get into a system by getting a hold of legitimate credentials. So who did it? FireEye is assisting the U.S. FBI in the investigation to try to figure that out. The FBI said Monday it believes the group Darkside is behind the attack. Darkside was noticed about the middle of last year. It has a dark website that includes a mailing list, a victim hotline, and a code of ethics. This is a professional criminal organization. It also includes leaked data from victims that did not pay the ransom on its site and has even conducted a series of press interviews showing off that stolen data. They've been very press-friendly, which is why it's odd that the group had remained quiet about this attack all weekend and is still not responding directly to press increase, which it usually does. It even says on its dark website that it will do so within 24 hours. Darkside posted a statement Monday that said it is not tied to governments and that, quote, our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society. However, in that statement, it did not mention the colonial pipeline attack directly still. So either it's not responsible or possibly the attack was a mistake. Ransomware can sometimes affect unintended targets and Sarah would be odd for Darkside to want to take down a target this big because that attracts unwanted attention. Usually these ransomware operators want to come in, get somebody over a barrel, get the money, and get out before any investigations are involved. And when you shut down a 5,500-mile pipeline that serves 45% of the East Coast, you're going to get noticed. Yeah, no kidding. When the story broke over the weekend, my first thought was like, gosh, my East Coast friends, is there gas panic? And it sounds like, sure, something could get worse pretty quickly. And there are some stopgap measures that some are already in place and trying to figure out how long this is going to go. But that aside, the whole idea of Darkside, the group, whoever the individual or group may be, being press-friendly, having a code of ethics of some kind and being generally known for a certain kind of ransomware attack, it doesn't really add up here. I mean, unless there is some reason that the group was like, you know what, this would be so crippling to so many people in the US that we're going to get this money and get on out of here. And it's turned into a little bit more of a PR fiasco type of a thing. But even then, I don't really buy that either. This is a tricky one. Yeah, because I mean, you can laugh at the code of ethics, but there are a lot of ransomware operators out there who say we are not going to attack medical targets, health targets, things like that. That is pretty common because even other criminals who do business with a ransomware company have lines and they're like, we don't want you to pay to attack our competitor if you're the kind of operation that kills people. This is not a situation where they're killing people, but I don't know, Sarah, something you said there made me think maybe this was not the reaction they expected. Maybe they did go after Colonial thinking like, yeah, we'll lock up some of their office software, they'll pay us to go away because they don't want it to get worse. And Colonial reacted by shutting down the entire pipeline just to be safe, which may not be what they expected. Well, I would like to pose a question to everyone out there. And you as well, Tom, since you're here, is the switch, the new UMPC? And you're saying, why would you ask me that question? Let me explain. The ultra mobile PC, aka the UMPC was an Intel Microsoft spec back in 2006. I know some of you remember. Now, if you don't remember it, that's because high price devices, underwhelming performance, emerging smartphones at the same time, and also cheat. Nope, netbooks that had become available made the whole thing a big flop. The UMPC did not stick around very long, but we're seeing a few devices coming to market today that have a pretty distinct, why do I need a keyboard? I could hold this PC with two hands, UMPC vibe to them. But these aren't top down vendor specifications like UMPC's had. It's crowdfunded startups trying to make a PC version of the Nintendo Switch more or less, both Intel and AMD based devices are claiming to offer triple A gaming performance in a switch like handheld form factor. One of them is the One X player, which is offering up to a core I7 1185G7 with Irish Iris Z graphics with an 8.4 inch 2K screen. Also two fans, two heat pipes, a 15,300 milliamp battery, a built in controller, and an attachable magnetic keyboard, if you so desire it. Meanwhile, the AI Neo offers a Ryzen 5 4500U integrated Radeon graphics with a seven inch multi-touch screen, Wi-Fi 6E support, built-in controllers, 12,300 milliamp battery, and they're both on Indiegogo. So prices changing over time as backing levels fill up, but the One X player that was the first one I mentioned starts around $899. The AI Neo is going for around $788. So you know, they're both sub $1,000 little devices, not just startups either though. Tencent recently patented a similar gaming PC device, and then there's Alienwares UFO concept from CES 2020. Is it still floating around? Might have some legs here. The switch has proven to be an enduring console form factor, but will this ever work as a real PC? Man, yeah, it does. I remember holding the first, one of the first ultra mobile PCs at CES back in 2006, and thinking, wow, this is really cool. It's got windows on it, and I can do a lot of PC things, but it's in a handheld form factor, and I can carry it around with me. And that was the problem. It was a really good demo. It looked cool. It was nifty, but it wasn't usable. And I wonder if that's the case here. The big pitch for these is you've got a handheld form factor, but it's way more powerful than the Switch because we've got these high-level processors. It runs Windows, so it can get any console game. You can get Steam or Epic or whatever game store you want. So you have a much wider selection. You're not locked into the Nintendo ecosystem. And it's got people excited, and that's why they're backing these on Indiegogo because they're like, oh yeah, that looks cool. But in the end, I wonder how many people really want to do that, really want to play a high-level game on a smallish screen. I mean, the Ionio, I think is only 800p screen. Yeah, I'm with you on this. Okay, so my first reaction was like, I mean, haven't tablets cornered enough of this market that there's just not a big enough demand for this form factor? But I asked a friend of mine this morning that plays a lot of games, and he was like, this is so great. The Switch is great. I love my Switch, but this will offer me access to all the other stores that I cannot access from my Switch. And now that people are starting to travel again or be a little bit more mobile in general, this is the best. And I said, okay, well, what about all the other PC stuff that you could potentially use this for? And he was like, eh, I don't know. Maybe that would be convenient, but it's really more of a gaming thing that I like. I will add it's very much a niche product, but I think Sarah hit the nail on the head with her friend's comments. What the PC has is in a huge library. You go on Steam, you have literally thousands of games that fit that form factor, whether they're old arcade hits, or newer 2D fighters or 3D fighters, or games that are designed for a D-pad and standard control button setup. It's perfect for that. And it's not a broad appeal product, but it's enough to get people on Indiegogo to stump up some money for. And even if you're not going to make millions of dollars, you can make enough money to make the whole exercise worthwhile. Yeah, for each individual company, I think you're absolutely right. I don't think this becomes a common form factor, because I think what happens is as excited as people are to do that, and as novel as it is, and as fun as it is, these games weren't designed for that. Whereas the benefit of the Switch ecosystem is the games are designed to be played on the Switch. And so I think you run into people realizing, yeah, this is kind of fun, but it's way more fun on my big screen with my more powerful PC than it is as fun as it is. But Roger, I think you're absolutely right that this has an audience and you're going to sell a bunch of these. I think the Indiegogo's are already showing that. Protocols. Shen Liu has a review of a new privacy law being proposed in China. A second draft was released in April for public comment, and a final version is expected to pass by the end of the year. It's similar to Europe's GDPR in that it grants consumers the right to know what data is being collected about them and how it is being used. You may not realize that data privacy is as big of an issue in China as it is anywhere else in the world. One of the provisions in the policy would require tech platforms. So Du Yan, which is the TikTok, the company ByteDance operates in China. WeChat, which is the messaging system in China. iQiyi, one of the one of the top video platforms, they would all have to form a committee to review any of the data that they are collecting and how it's handled, as well as publish periodic reports about info protection and they'd have to stop offering any service that misuses personal info. Another provision of this privacy policy in China gives families the right to handle a deceased family member's personal info, including the right to be able to delete accounts. That is interesting because this is a thing that we don't have a lot of policy examples around the world for. So China kind of blazing a trail there. The proposed law also requires opt-in for personalized ads and other things. In fact, without consent personal info can only be collected when necessary to provide services. There's also a chapter on limits for what the state can collect. Personal info cannot be collected by the state beyond what is needed to fulfill statutory duties and state organs must also inform citizens what is being collected and get their consent for that collection. Now, that probably is going to apply in practice to smaller, more local or regional state bodies. There is a broad exemption for the state when informing or consenting would undermine the purpose of the collection, such as a criminal investigation. So party business, surveillance, intelligence, that probably is going to be able to use this exemption. But it is interesting to see that you are having a state applied personal info policy even mentioned in this at all. The family is given the right to handle deceased family members personal info, which would include deleting the count altogether. I feel like for the most part, this is a great idea for everybody. I'm not just talking about China specifically, but there is nothing in here where I go, well, that's a little crazy. That'll never get passed. I mean, this seems well thought out in most cases, putting control into the user's hands where perhaps there isn't enough now. And not that different from, well, when I say like at home, I obviously mean where I live in the US. But yeah, there's nothing too well here. But like you mentioned, Tom, when you were letting us know what's going on, it's like a lot of people think, oh, well, it's different in China. And nobody has, the rights are different. And privacy is totally different because the government's tracking everything that you do. And sure, regionally, lots of places in the world act differently. But the idea that a individual's privacy is of utmost concern and certain companies need to do better to ensure that privacy for a citizen is it's it's pretty fascinating. Yeah, I look at these sort of things as as sort of checks on what is a reaction that's caused by unique circumstances in a particular region and what is our human reaction to technology. And we've talked before on the show about the crackdowns on the technology companies in China getting too large, which is an antitrust issue, which we're also seeing in Europe in the United States and elsewhere in Australia, etc. And now, and now like devoting a lot of time and energy to a privacy policy means that there are a lot of people in China who are worried about the amount of data that big tech has on them. And so the Chinese government is trying to address that, just like there are people worried about that in Europe, hence GDPR in the United States and elsewhere as well. So I think there's some just common things that you can say when we get technology to this point, these are concerns that everybody's going to have no matter which companies are are running the platforms and what what the people in the region, what their traditions are. Hey, folks, would you like a DTNS hat, a hoodie, a mask, a mousepad? No, that's all right. But if you do, we have all that and more at the DTNS store. Go check it out, dailytechnewshow.com slash store, just another way to help out the show. Let's talk about football. Yes, the football that the rest of the world calls football, defending Premier League champions Liverpool and Alphabet's DeepMind published a paper in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Liverpool gave DeepMind access to data on every Premier League game that the club played between 2017 and 2019. A lot of data there. The scientists also analyzed more than 12,000 penalty kicks taken across Europe in the last few seasons. The scientists were drawn to football because it offers lots of agents present. There's competition and collaborative aspects, but with inherent uncertainty. One of the main use cases outlined is ghosting, training a model on a specific team and lineup to predict how players will react under specific conditions and then overlaying alternative trajectories of predictions on top of actual footage. So this is what happened, but these three other things were likely to happen. The paper also trained a model on how different categories of players approach penalty kicks and predict where they would kick. Apparently, strikers aim for the bottom left, midfielders balance things out more. The data shows that yes, it's best to kick to your strongest side. Other models in the paper estimated what actions contributed to a goal and recommend alternate actions like passing would have been a better option. Another model estimated fatigue and could recommend when to rest players, when to avoid injury, when's the right time for all of that. The idea not to replace human coaches, but to provide assistance, supplementary help to improve pre and post match or even halftime analysis. Deep mind predicting tools should be ready for use on the pitch in the next five years. Yeah, so this is just going over the video enhanced, right? Every sport and every coach and every player is addicted to looking at the video. How are my mechanics? What did I do there? Imagine now, like with the ghosting, you can say like, okay, you took the shot here, but look at what the machine says would have happened if you had a past there or you passed there. Look what would have happened if you took the shot. You can get those kinds of insights into here. Like you said, I don't think this is going to replace the human element. I know that's going to be a reaction to some purist sports fans out there. This is just another tool in the toolbox to say, okay, after the game, before the game, even in halftime, let's look at how we're doing and see if we can pick up any insights and the algorithms can parse through a lot more data than we can. Yeah, and not unlike if you've got, you know, if any team, it doesn't matter which team, but hypothetically, you know, you hire some hotshot statistician and, you know, that person is watching every play and starting to understand patterns. And that is a person who is helping the coaches and the players better understand how to work against this, you know, the opposite team. I mean, that's all sports, right? We're all very used to something like that. So being able to say, all right, all those smart people, still really important. And yeah, teams that have more money might be able to afford better, you know, the best of the best of that particular knowledge base, right? So the AI aspect of it doesn't really change any of that much. I wonder though, just because so much more data is able to be parsed more quickly, you know, on just larger scale, how much that changes the approach that teams have in general, because it's like, all right, now how do we fake them out this much more? Right? Because you're still doing that on some level. It's like, okay, we can't be too predictable, or the other team is just going to get hip to, you know, hip to the hustle, and they're, you know, they're going to stop us every time. Yeah, they know that we know that they know that they're out of the nose. Right. And so it's, you know, if AI starts to get like, okay, now we're really starting to understand the patterns and that this player, you know, he's, he's always doing it this way, you know, it's, it's, it's always that right foot, or it's always, you know, as a quick sprint to a certain area every time, how you're, there's a little bit more of like smoke and mirrors of what will they do next? Well, and that's one of the cool challenges from, from the computational aspect of this is you're not dealing with is this a cat, which is a vague enough situation, you're dealing with much more collaborative vague situations that can change. And, can you create a system that then takes in the adaptations and incorporates that and says, ah, as we stopped kicking always to the lower left, now the goalie is, you know, moving more to the balanced part, et cetera. So, so there's, there's some, this is a really interesting advance in being able to handle these more human like situations. But in the end, Liverpool, you'll never walk alone. You'll, you'll have the AI ghosts with you as well. That's right. The US FDA has approved a smart cap for insulin pens. The cap from Bigfoot Unity works with an integrated glucose monitoring system to offer recommendations on doses. It's designed for either type one or type two diabetes patients who need multiple daily injections. The cap shows glucose value, a trend arrow, and the recommended dose. This saves having to enter blood sugar data on a separate device to get your dosage. Bigfoot Unity's cap can also upload data and make it available to healthcare providers. At launch, the Bigfoot Unity cap supports the freestyle Libra 2 glucose monitoring system from Abbott. They hope to be able to support the other big one and maybe others. It's compatible with all major rapid and long acting disposable insulin pens in the US as well. I love this. I mean, I, I do not need this personally. Maybe I will someday, but I know people who do. And I, you know, this is a perfect example of emerging technology in the medical fields that will help a lot of folks. Yeah. And just, just making it that much easier to get the right dose, first of all, and to get it faster. So it makes your life more convenient. It's a huge deal. Makes my smart light that I can turn blue on a whim. Kind of silly. This is a smart device. It's actually really helpful. Yeah. The impact might be a little better. We're not saying that your light is a bad thing or anything. They can both exist in this world. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Speaking of existing space exists and we keep trying to go there. Here's the latest Canadian engineering firm Geometric Energy Corporation has partnered with SpaceX on SpaceX's launch of its doge one U-class spacecraft also known as a Cube set, which will be aboard a Falcon 9 rocket and go to the moon in the first quarter of 2022. Yes, I said doge one. And yes, it's that doge. The mission is the first commercial lunar payload funded by cryptocurrency doge coin, which SpaceX's commercial sales VP, Tom Ochinero, said was vital in demonstrating how crypto can establish a foundation for interplanetary commerce. There's there's so much puffery in this announcement, but it is also hilarious because dogecoin, you know, such launch, you know, but much funding. I look at this and I think, okay, the analog would be a story. I don't know in the 1400s about a boat that was funded with paper money, this new paper money situation. And now we wouldn't care how it was funded. Instead of like funded with, you know, bricks of, yeah, instead of bricks of gold from the from the king, the finest tea, the queen allowed. Right. And these days, we're like, man, it's really not that interesting how they paid for it. We're more interested where the boat went. And, you know, the same will be true, I think, in the future. Like if cryptocurrency becomes common, we'll look back on it and go like, well, okay, so that was the first one. But, you know, why is that such a big deal? It's like, yeah. I mean, there's monetary value here. You can't, you know, these sorts of things cost money. Okay. You paid for it with crypto. That's, I think that's becoming more and more normal. Yeah. And it is just, and it is a little bit of a dodge because it's like, they just took the money, turned it into dogecoin, and then said they were using that to pay for it. Right. It doesn't help you get to the moon any better. Yeah. It does not affect the mission. Yeah. Well, dogecoin, I look forward to that not being the story of the weekend. I'm still entertained by dogecoin. I have to. I know, I am too. It's just, it's weird enough. It's just weird enough. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Kevin. Kevin is from Milwaukee. It will be spring any day now, Wisconsin. Kevin, we're, we're, we're hoping that for you. Kevin says, finally, something in my wheelhouse. And he's referring to our discussion that we had with Nikki last week about the medical field and MRIs and CT scans and all that stuff that, that medical professionals need to be able to help humans, living creatures, be, you know, best versions of themselves. Kevin says, I rate software for CTs, and we had the Milwaukee Public Museum come to our facilities to scan some mummies. They've done this a few times now, and it lets us use our latest and greatest on something other than a water phantom, and they get some good archaeological images. There are other costs to a CT scan, but the x-ray tubes are the expensive component that degrade with each use. Hospitals will have to replace those eventually. Newer machines are designed to give more coverage on the detector side and more input data and also provide better image quality with less radiation. I could go on, says Kevin, but I won't. Happy to answer any questions that you may have. Yeah. You got some CT scan questions. We'll pass them along to Kevin. Send them to us. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Thank you, Kevin. I love getting this from people who actually do the work, you know, who are like, yeah, I've got some insight, like from my actual experience. We were, we were scanning mummies. How cool is that that they brought in mummies? Yeah, no kidding. And by the way, if you really are interested, Kevin passed along a couple of links. We have them in our show notes, kind of video and a little bit more information on the mummies scanning, because who doesn't like a scanned mummy? Exactly. Especially the day after mummy's day. Oh man, if you have jokes as good as Tom's, perhaps even better, although I don't think that's possible. You can send them in to feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Questions, comments, we will take it all. Love to hear from you. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Steve via Darola, Jeffrey Zilx and Tony Glass. Also, thanks to our brand new bosses, Ryan Radiski, Nick Whitworth and Peter. They all started back in us on Patreon. And we thank all of them for it. We have three new bosses today. They are, they are probably one of the better looking people are in their circles because of it, I think. You just get that glow, you know. Yeah. You just, you're just kind of like, look at me, patron, looking good. People say, oh, did you just get back from Hawaii? You're looking so glowy. Or I don't know, wherever. Yeah. And then I say, no, I'm just pay. I'm just a boss of DailyTechNewShow. Yeah. And they go, oh, that's what it is. Oh, maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's patron. All right, I'm done. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC right here on this show. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Robert here and talking about OLED calibration, the new high sense value 4k panels and Apple TV's new self calibration tool. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.