 Coming up on DTNS, a watch feature to help you avoid nightmares. Hey, remember Hyperloop? Well, Hyperloop just carried its first passengers and Tim Berners-Lee's company to put you in control of your own personal data. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 9th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And back to back to back. Well, just two backs. Chris Ashley, host of the SMR podcast is back here on Monday. How's it going, Chris? What's happening is going well, going well. Like the great AZ said in one of his best rap songs, I'm back. And we wouldn't have it any other way. We were just all talking about our favorite breakfast foods for most of good internet so far. If you want that wider conversation, become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Competition Commission of India has opened an antitrust investigation into whether Google abused its dominant market position to promote Google Pay in India. Google claims Android is not dominant in India because of competition from feature phones and says its Google Pay commission rate is, quote, market based, legitimate and pro competitive. The US Federal Trade Commission announced it reached a settlement with Zoom over a series of deceptive and unfair practices that undermine the security of its users, specifically claiming that it used end to end encryption before that was fully implemented. The settlement forbids Zoom from misrepresenting its security and privacy practices going forward with Zoom also launching a vulnerability management program. Strategy Analytics reports Samsung was the top selling phone maker in the US in Q3. Made up 33.7% of sales up 6.7% on the year. It knocked Apple back into second. Apple had a healthy 30.2% of the market. And LG number three in the US with 14.7% analysts pointed to Samsung strong position in the mid tier and budget phone segments and Apple's delay of the launch of the iPhone 12 into Q4 as reasons for the shift. Samsung last topped US sales in Q2 2017. Sony confirmed that PS5 games will be region free similar to the PS4. The company also confirmed its PlayStation Now service will be available on the new console and cross generation multiplayer will also work by default. Remote play on PS4 will also support streaming and controlling games on PS5. The company also announced that the PS5 won't support a 1440p resolution and will not include a web browser as well. All right, I think this is going to be our last vaccine update and I'll explain why in a second. But Pfizer and BioNTech announced that early analysis of their coronavirus vaccine trial showed it as more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in patients who had no evidence of prior infection. No safety concerns observed so far. Now keep in mind this is initial data that has only been reviewed by an outside panel of experts. It has not gone through peer review for publishing in a journal. It needs to do that. The trial is still ongoing. They haven't ended the trial yet. There's not yet conclusive evidence on safety, effectiveness and other things. But the initial data review looks good and Pfizer says they probably will be able to ask the US FDA for emergency authorization of the two dose vaccine later this month. That's the other part of this. You take one dose. A couple of weeks later, you take another dose. Takes pretty much a month from the first dose for it to be fully effective. Company expects to manufacture enough doses for 15 to 20 million people by the end of 2020, if all goes well. Now, earlier this year, we started occasionally updating the status of these phase three vaccine trials since either there were since there was kind of a gap in the coverage. People were like, what's going on with vaccines? I haven't heard anything about them. So we filled that gap, but medicine is not our focus here. I just thought it was important to kind of poke that along as it was going. Now that we have actual candidates arriving, you're going to get lots of coverage from this from lots of places. So DDNS is going to stop covering vaccine development and leave that to outlets like this week in science, who do such a great job with it. But hey, we got there. We finally have what looks like a viable candidate. All right. Let's talk a little bit more about Apple and Pegatron. Let's do it. Apple announced it suspended new business with Taiwan's Pegatron after being contacted by the Financial Times. Apple said it discovered several weeks ago that Pegatron misclassified student workers, letting them work nights and overtime in violation of the company's supplier code of conduct. Since this only applies to new business, current iPhone 12 production won't be impacted or should not be anyway. Pegatron is on probation with Apple until corrective action is complete. Pegatron says it's fired the manager responsible and compensated the compensated the affected workers and will fix the issue with current practices as well. Bloomberg notes that in the meantime, China's Lux Share may pick up new business from Apple that might otherwise have gone to Pegatron. It's not the first bit of trouble Apple's gotten into. It's interesting to note that the Financial Times had to go call Apple about this before Apple said, oh, right, we knew about that. They weren't making it public. Maybe they were trying to spare Pegatron's feelings. It also doesn't stop Pegatron from building Apple stuff. It stops new business. So any current contracts and that's understandable. They have contracts with Pegatron. It would take extraordinary circumstances for them to cancel those and it would be a pain in the supply chain for Apple. So so they're not stopping Pegatron from current practices. They're just trying to improve current practices and they're taking the extra step of saying we're not signing any new contracts with you until you're we're sure that this is fixed and it's not going to happen again. Chris, does that sound good enough to you? So I mean, from a going forward perspective, I don't know what else they could do except for to drop them all together. But it just seems like all these companies keep having this same issue come up over and over and over again. So you start to wonder, do you guys really care about this? Or is this another case of, well, I got caught. So now I got to do something about it because the fact that they said they fired the manager that was responsible for this. It's like there's no way that a manager had this going on and nobody else knew what was going on. So I that that sounds funny. Now, you know, I don't want to look at stuff like this and like, you know, just have everything is bad, right? At least they addressed it and good for them. But it just seems like they keep falling into this over and over and over again. Yeah, I mean, the whole kind of like to your point, Chris, Apple saying, we're announcing that we're doing this thing, but it's like, well, it's because the financial times contact you about it. You had to give a statement of some kind, and it would have been strange if you didn't speak on the record about something like this, that is clearly going to get people fired up because you're talking about student workers. It's yeah, it's it's a it is it's a familiar trope and I think, you know, Pegatron saying we fired this person, this manager, who had done this that the rest of us didn't realize whether or not that's true. I guess step in the right direction. And I'm sure this entire time over the last couple of weeks, Apple was just like, let's help no one talks about this so that we deal with this internally. But that's not really how the world works. Yeah, as there's more and more pressure for these kinds of manufacturing to happen in India, in Brazil, in other places in the world, Mexico, even in the United States, there's a lot more pressure to keep the cost down to keep your contract if you're a Chinese or Taiwanese or in this case, both, you know, a Taiwanese company operating in China. And that kind of pressure leads managers to cut corners and you want them to cut corners that are okay to cut, you don't want them to cut the corners that aren't. So, you know, putting putting this kind of pressure on them, having having the light shown on them and saying, hey, we really need you to take this seriously. I mean, it's the only way to get it fixed. I without some kind of other change in the pressure of the marketplace, I suppose. Yeah, that's why I'm glad they actually did something. But I'm going to say this, one of the best names for a company I've ever seen. Well, Foxconn ain't bad. Pegatron's pretty good though. Yeah, but only one of those names could be on the Transformers. How about Virgin Hyperloop? Virgin Hyperloop used to be Hyperloop One. It announced it conducted its first test with human passengers. Feel like we've been covering Hyperloop for the entire history of Daily Tech News Show, which I think we probably have. The test took place at Virgin's DevLoop test track north of Las Vegas. Sending a pod carrying two people 100 miles an hour down a 500 meter track. The XP2 pod used in testing is not full scale. It's about two and a half tons though between 15 and 18 feet long. But it's still a smaller version of the pod that the company hopes to eventually use to carry up to 23 passengers. The first two passengers in the Hyperloop were the company's chief technology officer and co-founder Josh Geigel and head of passenger experience, Sarah Luchian. Virgin Hyperloop says that with enough track, it thinks it can hit speeds up to 670 miles an hour. Remember, this test only went 100. But to date, the fastest any Hyperloop has gone and that was one without passengers was 240 miles an hour. If you're wondering, if you've been following Daily Tech News Show for a long time, Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies. It's the one in Los Angeles and changed its name to Hyperloop one in 2016 before being acquired by Virgin in 2017. So it's headquartered in Los Angeles, but its test track is north of Las Vegas. So this is super cool. But, you know, just the fact that you have another form of transportation, if you're going hundreds of miles per hour on the ground inside of this vacuum tube, it's really cool. But the only thing that I wonder is what are they going to do with this? Because I cannot for the life of seeing anything like this being implemented, especially here in the United States, we can barely get our current infrastructure fixed. How are they going to build an infrastructure to support this thing? Well, that's why Elon Musk started the the tunneling company to make tunnels for the Hyperloops. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's true, Tom, we have been talking about this for literally years, depending on the company you're talking about, it was like, oh, they're testing it in the Central Valley of California. And then it was, oh, it's going to go from, you know, Chicago hair to downtown. And then it was going to go under Dodger Stadium and, I don't know, to wherever in LA, it's going to be so great, you know, so great for traffic. And clearly, you know, this is the sort of thing that takes a while. My feeling is, and I've kind of not thought about this in some time, because we've had other things on our minds. But my feeling now is like, so you're in a pod with perhaps 23 other people in this day and age. How are we going to do this? I don't want to do that vaccine. Well, I still trust me, but I'm sorry, Roger, but by the time you actually will get in a Hyperloop, I am hoping we have a vaccine by that because I am as well. It's just it's a hard thing for me. Like I'm so now used to being like, no, no, no, no small spaces with other people. Sorry, Roger, go ahead. I have a real quick of this. I have a feeling that will be used for shipping first. So from the airport to like a warehouse facility where you just send it as fast as you can. And if something happens, it's just packages. There's no person in it. But that gives you enough runway. Haha, joke to to generate some use and revenue from it because now you have the ability to skip traffic. You don't need to hire drivers. You don't need to have, you know, go there from the airport to the warehouse and then from there you can do the hub spoke model and send it wherever it needs to go. Yeah, a lot of people think that that might be the case. If they pull it off, I'm all for it. I would definitely check it out. I would have to know what their safety features are, though. Yeah, you know, there's a whole thing filled up with foam. It's got they have a plan for slow acceleration and deceleration for sure. But yeah, that's why you want to see these tests and, you know, how fast to the Shikansans go and in Japan because I'm like, like, like, like, because it's 150 miles per hour. The fastest. So this would be 100 significantly faster than that. Yeah, I mean, it's a hundred eight hundred. It depends on which version of the Shinkansen you use. Like the original ones are only like a hundred twenty hundred fifty. And the ones you can use for free with your Japan rail pass are the slower ones, too. And props to them for eating their own dog food. Yeah, right. The CTO is like, sure. I'll go back first. I'll get in. Yeah. Props for that. Well, let's talk about sleep, shall we? And how to make it better? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of the Nightwear app on WatchOS and iOS. That's Nightwear W.A.R.E., which uses the watch's heart and motion monitors to detect when users are having a traumatic nightmare caused by a disorder. So not just, you know, how to bad dream. Something that is goes a little bit beyond that. The app uses a 10 day baseline to get to know a user's sleeping habits. And then once learned, the watch will vibrate if a nightmare is detected, interrupting the dream without, hopefully, immediately waking up the user as well. The app is by prescription only and Nightwear stressed that the app is not a standalone treatment. So something that would be, you know, in conjunction with other treatment. An FDA study found that users showed better sleep quality with the app than the control route. So I'll say this, if anybody that's listened to this show doesn't recognize how important sleep is to you, you really need to investigate and because even when I started exercising and training so much harder and I was just still, you know, up gaming all night and I was miserable for months, it really wasn't until I started going to bed early and getting more sleep that I actually started to recover and feel so much better. So don't sleep on your sleep. I tell you sleep is important. And I started using a sleep app. This is interesting. I don't suffer from nightmares, but I'm sure as you can see, a lot of people do. You know, I'm even interested in getting a sleep apnea test, which is I don't think I have it, but my brother did. And and you know, we had to get him the machine and all of that stuff. So I would love to see an app for that. But if certainly if you can create an app that can help people suffer from these crazy night terrors, then yeah, I'm all for it. Oh, yeah, because there are several different disorders where where nightmares happen. They're not just scary because they might wake you up and you know, you're afraid. They also interfere with your sleep. You don't get as good of a sleep because of that. And it's it's harder to treat those disorders when people are all when you're also having to treat them for sleep deprivation. So again, it's, you know, fair to repeat that warning that this isn't a stand alone treatment. But you know, with proper treatment, this could be an excellent thing to add in if you've already got an Android watch or you've got an iOS, you know, what an Apple watch to say, hey, Doc, you know, could can you prescribe me night wear so so that I can I can have this thing, you know, kind of nudge me. I think it's interesting. Like I usually with these apps, they're like, well, there's no harm in using it, even if you don't have the problem. I think so. I think it's interesting that they're like, really, no, this is only by prescription. We don't want people messing around with this unless they really need it. Yeah, I thought that was interesting as well, because yeah, you'd think that, you know, the company would be like more data, the better. But this is for specific situations. It's not just me being like, ah, I had like a kind of a crazy dream just now. Yeah, right. Let's, you know, let's send the data back. I mean, I don't think I'm a candidate for this. But like you said, Chris, if you are sleep deprived over a long period of time and you just don't really realize it because that's just the way you've lived your life and all of a sudden things change and you kind of go, oh, wow, I feel a lot better. You know, I'm sleeping better. I'm I'm thinking about less kind of crazy things, you know, while while my brain is is trying to rest up, then, you know, that that means something. Yeah, I took the TV out of my and I've been a TV sleeper my whole life and I took the TV out of my out of the room. I put background sleep music. I love using like aroma therapy. Like, you know, once I realized like, wow, getting a good night's sleep really does improve my workouts and improve my overall lifestyle. I started ramping it all the way up to get the best sleep that I could. The only reason I stopped using like a sleep app just to kind of test how long I was half now I was waking up and stuff like that is just because it throws off the charging of my watch throughout the day. And I like to get up early and hit it. And normally when you exercise, you're going to burn up the battery. So it's just I stopped doing that for the most part. But but yeah, sleep is super important. So and the interesting thing about this, too, is that it doesn't try to wake you, right? It just says it's going to nudge you to kind of almost like redirect your dream. Over here real quick, give you a little nudge and I'll move you out of that. So I thought that that was pretty pretty interesting about the story as well. Just another example of the wide variety of medical uses that wereables are enabling. Hey, folks, if you want to join in the conversation in our discord, you can talk about all kinds of things in there like sleep deprivation, watch apps and more linked to a Patreon account and get in there. Patreon dot com slash DTNS. You may have heard me talk over the years about the open source project solid, solid developed at MIT headed by Tim Berners-Lee is designed to give users ownership of their data. So you have all your data on a server, you either authorize or control in a personal online data store or pod pods. It's a single pods, a personal online data. Anyway, personal online data stores pods. Pods let users control access to data. Developers can access all or part of a pod only with your approval. And you can change that approval or even fully revoke it at any time. Back in 2017, Tim Berners-Lee launched a company called Inrupt to market products that use the solid system. And on Monday, Inrupt announced what I think has the best chance to get this to catch on an enterprise product that lets developers build apps that use solids pods. Inrupt's enterprise platform uses a solid server to manage the pods while providing an SDK to let developers access the data in the pods for specific uses. So Inrupt is providing the SDK for the enterprise to work with their apps and hosting the pods for any people who want to provide them or make them available to that app. And they have clients. This isn't just theoretical. Inrupt is working with the BBC, with the UK's National Health Service and the government of Flanders, Belgium to develop its enterprise platform as an example. The National Health Service is going to store patient health data in a pod and then you as a patient can authorize doctors, family, caregivers to access parts of the health data in your pod. For instance, a caregiver may be able to just get your your vitals out of there. Maybe your medicine that they need to help give and also add to it. Add caregiver notes to your pod and then your doctor would be able to access those notes, what medicines were administered when and vitals and your entire general medical history, which the caregiver maybe doesn't need to have access to. That's just one example. Inrupt manages storage and serving of pods, but only users can see them and grant approval for access. So this is similar to any kind of cloud banking or any kind of sensitive service. You have to trust the provider or you have to provide it yourself. There's a way to provide your own pod. But then it's very useful in controlling your data if you get other companies to use the solid system. And here we have finally some big enterprises that are using it. Yeah, so the concept of this sounds very interesting and I'll because I'm always for anything that allows end users or users to control their data. Couple of the challenges that I saw in the architecture first off is that it runs on a separate server. So you're you're now telling companies that they're going to have to either spin up another virtual server or if it's hosted on a premise, they're going to have to spend up another server or can it work in conjunction, which then it's like a cloud server. Yeah, resource uses. But either way, it's another server to not only spin up, but to manage, right? Because it's not just put a new server out there. Actually, actually, the way it works is interrupt does the server. But I think you just have you just have SDK access to it. OK, all right. So that's what I was worried about when I said they had a server. I was like, I think they're going to have to manage it. Right. But. That's that this is pretty cool. I'm wondering how they're going to get. Get this to take off. I'm glad they got some pretty huge customer base. Pretty huge users with large customer base to test it. But you basically for this to be fully effective is you got to get everybody to adopt it, right? So I always prefer to see a client side piece where maybe it's just restricting the data and then you can tell it which one to provide. But in this particular case, it doesn't necessarily make sense in the architecture. But anyway, what that said, I do like what they're doing here. And I do like the fact that I can say, OK, this doctor can see this while this doctor can see that you know, information and it kind of helps prevent, you know, the one repository where everybody can see your all data and be able to build profiles around you. So this is pretty interesting. And you you can withdraw a consent. So the same pod, if you if you've got a pod, you could say, Facebook gets to see my email address and that's it. Nothing else. My doctor gets to see all my health data. You're you're the one in control of that. And there I know there's lots of questions about like, is this really secure? And this is an open source project. It's well vetted, a lot of eyes on it. So the the system itself seems like it's it's very well vetted. The question is adoption at this point. Adoption and trust in the platform, you know, are you going to trust in rupt to be able to operate this securely in a way you want to, right? But the system of solid itself is, if I may say so, pretty solid. So then it's just a matter of adoption. And I've been wondering how they were going to get adoption. Today seems like the key. If you can get the National Health Service in the UK to use this and suddenly everybody's creating pods because they want they participate. Everybody participates in the National Health Service. Then more companies are going to say, well, wait, why are we building our own identity and personal data management system when everybody's got a pod? We'll just tap into that. And they go and they get the SDK from in rupt and they handle it that way. Or maybe they implement it themselves because it's open source, but it's still cheaper than spinning up data storage for yourself. It solves a lot of problems, especially for smaller companies getting started where they don't have to handle all of the responsibility and liability of managing a copy of everyone's personal data. It's just more efficient because all your personal data is just in one place and you get to decide who sees it. Yeah, I was actually wondering what is the major use case for these two agencies that are testing it? Is it like you said, the storage and maintenance of people's data or is it something else? Now that what you said does make sense, which is why we don't want to get into this identity management is to become the storage of this data is becoming more and more expensive, because you're always gonna have to keep adding drives or we're gonna have to outsource to a company to host the information, which then we're relying on them to keep that data secure. So yeah, so definitely if you could have a single system that everybody uses, that does make a lot of sense, but I'd be interested in confirmation that that's what you're looking at or what exactly, what problem for these customers is solid platform solving. Man, easy GDPR compliance alone, I think is pretty attractive there. Which will be an interesting portion of it, right? Because now solid has to say, well, if your data comes from the UK, it stays in the UK, if it's in Germany, it stays in Germany, how are they gonna facilitate that? But what if I have a doctor that's in both? You know what I mean? So yeah, GDPR brings its own challenges to this, but definitely at least if they keep the, if they can follow the GDPR rules and give people access to, which is what they're saying, is give people access to control their data, then yeah, they're already a step ahead of the game. A British software engineer, this is a new one, thought it would be funny to name his company after a cross site scripting attack. So he named it script, SRC, hyphen, HTTPS, Quillen, slash, slash, M-J-T, X-S-S, .ht, .ht, L-T-D, that's the name of the company with all the appropriate quotation marks and brackets. Most important, the name of the company began with a quotation mark and an N tag. So that meant any site handling the name of the company needed to handle HTML properly or it would end up executing the script. This would just end up executing a script from X-S-S Hunter, which helps developers find cross site scripting errors. But still, you could see where this would become problematic. The name was registered with Companies House, which registers business names in Britain. The director of the company found out that it was actually causing some minor issues. So he contacted Companies House and the UK's National Cyber Security Center and didn't disclose the issue to anyone else. The company's name has now been changed to, quote, that company whose name used to contain HTML scripts tags L-T-D. Yeah, folks, it sounds funny to name your company out after a cross site scripting attack until the name of your company starts executing cross site scripting attacks. Yeah, I guess it's good in one sense, right? That you let people know, it's like, hey, you guys need to update your servers and your web pages because it's vulnerable to this. But come on, man, what are you doing? Right, I know. It's clever and problematic. And problematic, yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag real quick. Let's do it. Kyle wrote in about our conversation we had last week about some of these Amazon boxes might having some Mario folks on the outside of them and who's gonna get them. And Kyle says, I wanna let you know I was the proud recipient of a Mario Amazon box at work today. Probably wouldn't have thought of anything of it. Had it not been for last week's show of yours, I'll be sure to let you know how much I get for it on eBay. Very good. Thanks for sending the picture, Kyle. There was someone on Twitter sent us a picture as well. Thank you for sharing that on Twitter. The person on Twitter said that they actually had to dig it out of the trash or the recycling, I guess, because their spouse had just opened the package and thrown it away and they're like, wait, it's the Mario box. Right, which is eBay. Well, thanks everybody who gives us feedback every day. You got questions, you got comments, you got something on your mind, you got photos to send in. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those. We'd also like to shout out our patrons at our master and grand master levels today, including Chris Benito, John and Becky Johnston and Gadget Virtuoso. Also thanks to Chris Ashley. You were with us on Friday, you're with us on Monday. It's been a lovely sandwich of sorts. What are you been up to? So this week we'll be getting ready to record another episode of the SMR podcast. I definitely have three racks of beef ribs that I'll be posting pictures of when I get those on the Smoker folkshow. Excellent, excellent. Hey, thanks, babe, for doing back to back. So I really appreciate it, it was super fun. I was happy to, no problem. Hey patrons, did you know your ad free RSS feed can have just a DTNS or just good day internet or maybe both? Check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS, GDI or all in the tier name. And if you want to change, change your tier to one that has the name of the thing you want to get at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We are live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson and Snob OS's Nika and Terrence. See you then. Big Apple announcement. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Hehehehe.