 Coming up on DTNS Science Week rolls along. Annalie Newitz is here to discuss how every day and not so every day tech is helping revolutionize archeology, plus whether you need to worry about using fingerprint ID on your phone, and Netflix launches a show on Instagram. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 8th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. In sunny, clear Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And under soggy skies, I'm the show's producer, Roger Che. We are very happy to have Annalie Newitz back on the show. She's the author of The Future of Another Timeline, also author of a book about archeology for lost cities coming out early next year. Annalie, great to have you back. Yeah, thanks for having me. We're gonna talk a little archeology and where it crosses with technology a little later in the show. We just fixed television on good day internet, so if you don't have that wider show, you gotta become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Netflix has added parental control options, including the ability to remove a title from showing up on a profile as well as filter out movies by rating. You can also review a child's viewing history and disable autoplay. Users can also add pins to profiles to keep others from using them. In 2016, Android 7.0 introduced a partition scheme that lets users, excuse me, install updates and on an, sorry, on an inactive partition while still using their phone on the other one. When the install is done, a quick reboot switches to the updated partition, making the update active, not all device makers support seamless updates but in Android 11, Google will require it as part of their vendor test suite. Ah, in our sub show, Daily Zoom news show, video conferencing company Zoom has created a council of chief information security officers, much of CISOs from other companies including Netflix, NTT data, HSBC and EA. In addition, Zoom hired Stanford professor and former Facebook security chief, Alex Stamos as an outside advisor to assist more directly with Zoom security review. Meanwhile, on the not so great news for Zoom, Zoom shareholder Michael Drew is suing the company over its prior lack of disclosure of security and privacy flaws and Google determined the Zoom app to be a security risk and will disable it on any Google administered machine used by Google employees. Mozilla Creative Commons and Intel are among companies who have joined the open COVID pledge to make intellectual property temporarily available without fees to anybody developing technologies for the diagnosis, the prevention or the treatment of COVID-19, we're all three. The pledge covers patents, copyrights and more with special licenses effective from December 1st, 2019 until a year after the WHO declares the pandemic over whenever that may be. Foxconn is working with Medtronic to make ventilators for use in treating COVID-19 patients. Medtronic's medical and technical personnel are working with Foxconn to get production up and running in the next four to six weeks. Foxconn's Wisconsin plant will be used to make the ventilators. Medtronic open source of the design for its PB560 ventilator, separately Ford Motor Company expects to produce 50,000 ventilators over the next 100 days in cooperation with GE Healthcare and General Motors. We'll build 30,000 ventilators in partnership with Ventec Life Systems. Mozilla announced chairwoman and interim CEO, Mitchell Baker will replace Chris Beard officially as CEO. Last August, Beard announced he was stepping down at the end of 2019. Baker's been with Mozilla Corp since 2003. Users outside Europe can no longer stop Twitter from sharing two types of data with advertisers. A list of the ads you saw or interacted with and a tracking identifier for a phone may no longer be excluded in privacy settings unless you're in Europe. In Europe, users may opt out to the sharing kind of data. Twitter will not share your name or email address or phone number or username. All right, let's talk a little bit more about a study from Cisco's Telos security group. Scott, what are they telling us? Well, Cisco's Telos security group, like you mentioned, published a study Wednesday showing how it could use or could subvert fingerprint authentication on devices from Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei and more on a budget of $2,000. Not 200, not 2 million, 2 grand. The researchers needed a clean reproduction of a target's fingerprint, had to touch it up in software and print a 25 to 50 micron precise mold. They had to try 50 fingerprint molds before they got one to work. Obviously not very easy. AIK's Padlock, Huawei's Honor 7X and Samsung's Note 9 Android phones were all bypassed 100% of the time with this method. The researchers could not bypass five laptops running Windows 10 or the verbatim fingerprint secure and Lexar jump drive F35 USB drives. The Samsung A70 also had a 0% success rate, but there was difficult getting it to work with legitimate fingerprints as well. The researchers concluded that fingerprint protection is adequate for 95% of users. Yeah, this is actually good news for most of us to say like, you have to do a lot of work if you want to subvert a fingerprint, which wasn't true when Touch ID first launched. It was a little bit easier to do it. It's gotten harder, but it's not perfect. So if you're a diplomat, if you're an investigative journalist working in a sensitive area, anything like that where someone might go to all of this trouble, then this is important stuff to know about. You were telling me this morning on TMS, we talked about this in a segment. You said that it had to be, basically you had to figure out a way to get somebody's thumb print in a chunk of clay and it had to be a really good print, couldn't be jostled around or jerked in any way. So you'd have to be a perfect transfer of a person's print to even get this thing started. And all I could think about this morning after you left was, how are you gonna trick somebody into that? How are you gonna do it? The more common way is to get it off of like, say a glass, the typical spy movie wine glass thumb print. But even then you have to do a lot of manipulation to turn that into a 3D model. You might need multiples of these. That's why probably the better vector is the thumb print scans at customs. You can somehow lift those that people do. That might be a way to get multiple versions of it. Annalie, looking at this story, does it change your opinion about whether you would use fingerprint till go into your device or not? I mean, not really because of all the reasons that you've described. I mean, for me I think, and for a lot of people, one of the issues with fingerprint readers is that as you get older, your fingerprints change and they start to wear down. And so I find that sometimes if I'm using my phone, it just won't recognize my fingerprint and I have to kind of do it a couple of times. And so I do a lot of work with my hands and so my fingerprints are, I guess they're kind of getting screwed up over time. And if my hands are really cold, it's really hard. So I just think, I guess it's security that's robust even against the appropriate user, which might not be a great thing. Yeah, that's on that Samsung A70 side of things is like, we also just need it to work when it should work as well. Exactly. And I mean, it is good, but I think, yeah, now that we're going to facial recognition more on phones, then there'll be a whole other question around that, especially if you're wearing a mask. Yeah, right. Yeah, I thought it was interesting. I mean, yes, you got to get a clean, a really good clean fingerprint of somebody. Then you have to have access to that person's phone, assuming that you didn't get them to sign up for like a clay making glass or something with your fingerprints or going to be all over something. It's like, there are a lot of things that go into play here. That said, the fact that it was, the researchers were able to replicate this off a variety of devices and platforms is somewhat impressive, even though most of the time, somebody having the knowledge to be able to execute something like this is probably for the wrong reasons. Yeah, this will make great father for a plot for CSI NCIS SVU Chicago Jag, when it finally comes. And we finally put that show together. Yeah. New York Times report covers some of the changes in internet usage happening since the lockdowns began here in the United States based on data from similar web and Aptopia. Trend lines for the increased usage of video chat services, of course, are there. They're what you would expect. They're still pretty impressive. Those lines go, you know, very far up. But the Verge's Monica Chin noted an interesting tidbit. Average daily traffic from January 21st to March 24th for websites have skyrocketed while mobile apps have not. For example, Facebook.com rose 27% in that period, while the Facebook app rose but only 1.1%. Netflix.com rose 16% while the Netflix app on mobile rose 0.3%. And YouTube.com rose 15.3% while the YouTube app itself declined 4.5%. So this is something I hadn't thought about the fact that people are not going out means they're not using their phone for things as much because they're sitting down, they're doing work from home, and they're more likely to use that desktop or that laptop to engage in social networks or watch video. Yeah, one of the things that I, yeah, one of the things I thought was super interesting about that study was that they also showed that people are now flocking to local news sites and also traditional media. So we've seen this huge uptick in people reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, but also reading the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and it's because they're really focused on what's happening in their immediate communities. And we've also seen a decline in people seeking out news from places like Fox and Breitbart and the left-wing equivalents of those sites to get kind of opinion news because people don't want opinions right now, they just want facts. And so it's been a huge reversal. Even a left-wing science like Truth Dig is seeing that flattening out as well. So yeah, people, the Akron Beacon Journal is one that went way up a more than 50% rise across this because people want to know what's going on in their community. It's more important now than ever. Yeah, I've been downloading the California report every day for my podcast, my morning podcast breakfast and it's like, it's invaluable. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one thing about the YouTube thing, I've noticed this too. It seems like if you're using YouTube on mobile and you're using it more, it's because you're out and about and you don't have time to sit down to a desktop and watch a thing or you just want to see it right now. But if given the choice and you're trapped there anyway and you've got a big screen to see something on, I think it's just a choice to choose that over a phone. I'm not surprised by that change at all, but it is such a weird little shift. The other thing I've noticed is, yeah, a lot of Netflix going on but everybody in the room where I'm sitting are all also on their phones while it's happening and they're checking local news sites and they're pausing the movie and saying, hey, did you hear this latest thing or whatever? It's like just a whole new usage pattern we're not used to. Yeah, so it may not be they're using mobile less, they're using mobile differently. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I always thought that my mobile usage was like, oh, it's so convenient, I have all these choices. You know, desktop and mobile versions of depending on what system you're using, they're not exactly the same, but I liked having the freedom to choose but I realized that if I'm not out and about, I often just choose my laptop and it's the mobile version of something, I'm like, I just smaller screen, I want the bigger screen for the most part. I'm not in anybody's way, I'm not trying to juggle it while driving or anything like that. So these numbers make sense but you think of also the younger set, it's like, are kids still on their phones? Well, yeah, but they were anyway. So a lot of these numbers, number spikes are people who were working, who were not doing this sort of thing from their desktops at home and now they are. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if it'll stick, we'll see. Netflix is launching a series on Instagram live with stars from Netflix's young adult shows talking with health experts. Topics will include things like sleeping trouble, staying connected, managing anxiety, sort of common themes during these times. The first episode streams on Netflix's Instagram account Thursday, April 9th, that's tomorrow at 10 p.m. Eastern time with Noah Centineo from To All The Boys I've Loved Before, which I've been told was a big hit a couple of years ago. He'll be talking with Dr. Ken Duckworth, who's the chief medical advisor at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I mean, this is interesting. I don't know that, I don't know that there's a one-to-one that the young people are really into Netflix shows that have young people in them. I think Netflix has an appeal. Netflix has that data to say these are the shows the young people are into. They do cast the people from those shows to go to do this thing that we want to do. I don't want to pretend that they don't, but it's a little bit like them going, hey, what if we took some of these young ones and took them over to this platform that is very skews, very much younger than say our overall data suggests on Netflix and maybe we can, I don't know, bring some people over from there? Like I don't actually know what the point of it is other than it seems like a maybe a COVID only response and a cool thing to do. And I like that they're doing it. I'm having a hard time seeing the bigger picture of it though, like what advantage do they have doing this that they wouldn't have by having those stars just be on Instagram anyway? And having- Well, I think it's exactly that, right? Like we've all seen or heard at least about stars going nuts on Instagram and doing live streams on Instagram where they're like being like Jack Black and dancing around in their backyards. And so this is a way to kind of turn that into a PSA kind of moment, you know, and teach the kids about, you know, health while watching the cute boyfriend from to all the boys I've loved before. Although I think that this is the boyfriend that she winds up jumping in the sequel. So whatever. Sorry, I'm kind of lame. I mean, we all saw the first one. I mean, he was cute, but whatever. He was a starter boyfriend. Let's face it. Well, I don't know. You guys should watch it. It's cute. It's really good. The sequel is terrible, but the first one is great. So my wife raved about it. She loved it and told me to watch it and I just couldn't get through about 10 minutes of it. So it's, and I'm totally cool admitting that. I don't expect them to take the ass of life. Why don't you try watching Noah on Instagram Live tomorrow? Me? Yeah, that'll suck you in. Finally. You're saying there's a way. All right. Google announced its video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone in its 14 supported countries with a Gmail address. So just to have a Gmail address, you can get in. Users still have to buy games to own them. So that's still part of the core service, but can't play them on a PC. But can't play them on a PC now. Chrome OS tablet, Google Pixel phone, or supported Android devices, still no iOS, but that's probably coming down the pipe somewhere. Google's also giving new users two months of Stadia Pro for free, which includes access to nice games, nine games rather, and existing pro subscribers get two months free as well. That wasn't clear right up front. A lot of people were really upset, but they clarified and it's all good now. After the trial, Stadia Pro will cost $9.99 a month until now Stadia required buying the $129 Google Stadia Premiere edition bundle. That included a Chromecast Ultra, a wireless Stadia controller. They made just for this thing. And three months of Stadia Pro, Google is temporarily dropping the default resolution for pro users from 4K resolution to 1080p. This is to manage bandwidth, they say, but users can bump back up to that in their settings. It's a weird move from Google, not a weird move. It's a move that I kind of expected by now to happen during this lockdown where a lot of people are at home and they want this service to be in more hands. They've had a little bit of a rough launch in this thing. It's felt like more like an Alpha or a Beta and not really a full product launch. So we'll see if people jump on board and dive in. It feels a little late to the game, honestly, no pun intended really, honestly. This should have been something, because this was already the plan, that Google flipped the switch on right away. As soon as they knew, like, okay, we're gonna have a lot of people staying at home, let's get that free tier out there. I could be wrong, but it doesn't feel like there was a lot of engineering work that had to be done to make it free. So I'm not sure why they didn't just open this up to begin with, maybe there was something on the backend as far as user management that had to be changed, I don't know. But in any case, it is a good move now to say, look, we wanna make it open for more people to try it now that people have more need to try it. Whether this will cause a huge uptick in state of usage, I am a little more skeptical about. Well, do you think Google may have just, at the beginning, overestimated consumer interest? You know, a lot of what I hear from the consumers that would be interested in something like this is, okay, there's a little confusing, I've got a lot of other options, why do I need to do this, and why is Google packaging it to me in this way? Whereas if it was something that's like, need to have it, have to have it absolutely, then you get a lot fewer complaints from people like that. So at this point, Google's kind of like, well, we need more users, and now is the time to offer free things because that's kind of the wave. Well, yeah, I'm wondering why they didn't notice it was the time to offer free things two, three weeks ago. That's all I'm saying. I agree with that, but also you make a really good point about who this service is aimed at. They're trying to be a platform, platforms need exclusives, or like you said, Sarah, reasons to get it. And right now they don't really have any. They have the same games as everybody else, but you have to buy them separately. If you already own them, you have to use them on their service. They don't have transferable saves. Like there's a bunch of reasons why it's not a good deal for existing gamers, but kind of interesting to people who barely game at all and want a decent experience. They just haven't done a good job selling it or explaining it. So better late than never. And also I'm glad to see these things are rolling out, but I still have huge doubts about the longevity of this service until they start to see some other changes in it. Hey folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. As we mentioned, Annalie is coming out with a book and I'm gonna try to get the name exactly right. Four Lost Cities early next year, a book about archeology. And you've done several stories over the year for different outlets about how tech and archeology are crossing. Tell us some of the ways technology is changing how archeologists work and how they view things. There are a lot of ways. Let's start with big and go down to small. So one of the really exciting developments over the past about 10, 15 years has been using LIDAR surveys, as well as satellite photography from space to locate new places to excavate. So everything from finding lost cities in the jungle, which is made possible by LIDAR, to finding intriguing new locations in the desert for checking out the possible locations of ancient Egyptian tombs. There's a great story about scientists who found hundreds of new cities, hundreds of new areas of habitation in the area where the Maya had their civilization just because suddenly they could kind of strip away the tree cover using LIDAR. The other thing that people are doing a lot of is DNA analysis of ancient bones. So we're going from the big to the small here. And that allows us to understand sort of the genetic makeup of people, how they're related to contemporary people. And the other thing that I think is super intriguing is there's a way to do isotopic analysis of bone and teeth in these ancient skeletons to figure out things like where people grew up versus where they died. So that allows us to look at things like migrations in the ancient world. So we're not just digging up a skeleton saying, like, oh, here's a skeleton. The skeletons related to modern Europeans were able to say, actually, this is a person who came from Rome and got buried in England. That's a really interesting story in itself. In your story about Pompeii, I noticed there were a lot of technologies that we're familiar with, 4K, often criticized as, why do I need that much resolution? Or VR, what's it good for besides games? And it struck me in reading the story that Pompeii provided a couple of good examples of why these technologies are good for things you wouldn't necessarily think of otherwise. Right, so this is the middle range between very big and very small that I didn't mention before, which is that a lot of people are using things like off-the-shelf drones and 4K imaging technology to capture both the layout of ancient cities. This is being done a lot in Pompeii. But also, if you wanna examine, let's say an ancient gladiator stable at Pompeii. So this would be an area where gladiators hung out and shot the breeze in between bouts. And you don't wanna have to go there all the time. You wanna be able to go there, capture in detail every aspect of the room, and then be able to turn it into a 3D image and really examine it carefully. And using this technology, people are archeologists are actively creating super, super detailed images of the entire city of Pompeii so that you from your office can go visit and actually say, oh, there's actually like a tiny crack in the wall here, and that's connected to this other piece of masonry, which can reveal things about how many times a building was rebuilt, what kinds of uses that gladiators made of that building, were they like practicing throwing each other against the wall, were they like peeing in there? Like these are things that we can actually learn from archeology, don't even get me started on like how we do chemical analysis on like toilets, because that's a thing, it's very important. So it's really a great way for people to collaborate with each other and do research and sort of data analysis after they've left a site, because the biggest problem in archeology is getting to these places and getting that data and bringing it home. We've talked about satellite, which can let us see where things might be that we couldn't see otherwise. LIDAR, which can actually do the same thing by seeing things that are underground in a lot of cases, 4K VR. What are some of the things we can learn about that we couldn't have before? So my favorite example with LIDAR, which is a laser imaging technology where you kind of fly over top of the ground and you bounce laser off of the surface of the earth and it's really great for penetrating tree cover, particularly when it's dry, like when it's a season where there's not a lot of leaves. And so it at Angkor, where the famous temple of Angkor Wat is located in Cambodia, doing a very intensive LIDAR survey of the area allowed researchers to figure out how big the city of Angkor actually had been because all of their laser imaging revealed a city plan that no one had seen for about a thousand years because you could see these little elevations in the ground that revealed things like the foundations of houses, ponds where people kept rainwater in their backyard for use later in the year, and old streets. And all of that stuff had been covered over by jungle. If you've ever played Tomb Raider or seen pictures of Angkor Wat, you know it's just like covered in trees. So suddenly they were like, holy crap, this city was huge. Like Angkor Wat was this little tiny temple at the center of a city that held probably a million people at its height. And now we can actually see the streets and the houses where they lived. It's so cool. Yeah, a million people over 40 to 50 square kilometers they estimate in something where prior to this ability to see what was going on, they thought, well, there's some other stuff out there. I guess maybe they used it temporarily or something. Yeah. This is a huge discovery. They had no idea. And one of the things that was really cool about that was that there was writing from the period during the Angkorian Empire where kings and their scribes would say like, we have a million people. And European archeologists came along in the 19th century and were like, well, that's obviously a lie. Like how could Southeast Asia have had the biggest city in the world at that time? That's ridiculous. And it turns out the Europeans were wrong. So history proved them wrong. Imagine if like the only thing left of New York City was Penn Station. And everybody thought, oh, there's this little station in the middle of nowhere. And then suddenly discovered that the entire metropolis of New York City had once existed around it, it's crazy. Do these technologies mean that archeologists have to get good at the tech? Do they have to acquire new skill sets? Or is there cross-collaboration with researchers who specialize in that sort of thing? Like DNA sequencing, for example. That's a really great question. And the answer is both. A lot of the folks who are doing things like the 3D imaging at Pompeii, for example, they've had to train themselves to do that. And so they're having to teach themselves on the job and they love it. Things with like DNA sequencing which require a lot more specialized knowledge and equipment, they're absolutely collaborating. And it's great. Like you'll see these terrific collaborations where there's an archeologist, there'll be an environmental scientist who's analyzing soil. There'll be somebody who has a background in forensic analysis, looking at skeletons. And then there'll be somebody who's got an expertise in microbiology, who's looking at isotopes and DNA. So the lists of authors on these papers are always just this sort of delightful mix of like, you know that they just like called all their buddies like in all the different science buildings on campus and were like, hey man, you wanna check out a 5,000 year old skeleton? And they're like, yeah. I'm right, I do. Yeah, that's great. How much of this kind of thing is gonna go into your book? Cause this is fascinating stuff. This is, so my book is done and a lot of this stuff is in there. So the book focuses on four cities that were abandoned including Pompeii and Angkor and why they were abandoned and all of the new technologies that archeologists are using to try to figure out what happened there. Why did people leave these cities even though they were these incredible gems at the center of their civilizations? So it's a mystery story, it's a tech story. And also you get to journey back in time which is kind of my favorite thing to do. I love abandoned stuff. Like it's just fascinating, right? Like combine that with a little Indiana Jones and some technology, like I'm in, this is good stuff. That's the goal. If you'd like to talk archeology and technology and where they intersect you could join the conversation in our Discord all sorts of conversations happening there right now. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Also check out our new Twitch emotes. Yes, Tom, Sarah, Roger, we've all got them. Theater Monkey made some new emotes featuring our faces. They're really good. I mean, you know, it's us, but they're done very well. So Theater Monkey gets all the credit for that. They'll be really not tomorrow. Do all subscribers. So have some fun. Yeah, can't wait to see our disembodied heads floating through chat. Yes, exactly. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including our superstars today, Frederick Huebner, James B. Callison and Juan D. Hernandez. Also thanks to Annalie Newitz for being with us, halfway through our Science Week. This was awesome. Annalie, we just wrote a book and doing a lot of work so let folks know where they can keep up with everything. You can follow me on Twitter, I'm at AnnalieN or you can listen to my Fortnightly podcast that I do with Charlie Jane Andrews, which is called Our Opinions Are Correct. Congratulations on the Hugo Naum as well. Thank you, yeah, we're very excited. Also thanks to Scott Johnson. Scott, what's been going on since we saw you half a fortnight ago? Well, you know, I started that new comic strip because I thought I would have this fun story with this guy in this disembodied can of expired cream corny lives with called Fred and Ken. And I thought it would just be stories about Fred and Ken and it wouldn't really bust too much into real life, but it turns out this pandemic has definitely had its effect. So if you're following that comic, you already know what's going on. If you haven't, you may want to check it out. It is a kind of a weekly telling of where my head's at in this whole mess and it's in comic form and you might get a little smile and a little chuckle out of it. Check it out at fredandcan.com. For everything else, the podcast, the art, all the other stuff you can find at frogpants.com and you can find me on Twitter as well at Scott Johnson. I hadn't really considered just how precious you were in creating a comic about a person living alone with canned food. Yeah. I honestly was never in the, it was never even a consideration. And it just all worked out, I guess, in a weird way. Sure. Yeah, wait, wait, wait aheads us up there, Scott. Spirits are there. It's all your fault. And as we've been doing, we take the time at the end of this show now to highlight some other creators out there that you might benefit from. They would love to have you seeing their work. And this time, Sarah, you've got a recommendation called Over the Road. Yeah, it's a podcast, audio podcast that is all about the life of somebody working in the trucking industry. And it's hosted by a guy, goes by Long Hall Paul. First time podcast host and you'd be surprised because he's got a really nice radio voice. He's been in the trucking industry for over 40 years, kind of knows everybody, knows all these roots, talks to people who stop off on a particular side of the road and on a certain highway in Kentucky and they know everybody who works on the left side or the right side and they know where's the best place to maybe stop off for a sandwich or banana pudding and where the national conventions are for the trucking folks and the fact that as people say, it's a lifestyle and not just a job and the whole thing is so fascinating to me, particularly because I don't know a lot about it. So I'm just like eating up all this information of, wow, this sounds really cool. But it's just a well done podcast and it's pretty long form. So if you've got a good 45 hour minute at a time, it's a weekly show, eight part series so hopefully they'll be doing more but that's at Over the Road.fm and I'm enjoying it a lot. Excellent, you can always support our show at any level thanks to everybody who's been covering for the folks who can't and if you can't, we totally understand. DailyTechNewShow.com slash Patreon. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com and if you'd like to join us live, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC and you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. The Science Week train continues forward tomorrow. Justin Robert Young joins Ariel Waldman and maybe some tardigrades, talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you've enjoyed this brover.