 Coming up on DTNS, unencrypted biometric data exposed, a lot of it. The FAA says no exploding batteries on our planes. And we'll check on on the good, the bad and the ugly in AI. The Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 14th, 2019 in Studio Feline. I'm Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Tom Merritt is out of town this week, but we're going to keep the show rolling for you. In fact, before the show, Scott was telling us all about the salt flats of Utah. Pretty cool looking. We talked to Roger, gave me some some tech advice. Some of that I understood, some of that I did not. And we talked a little bit about what we all had for lunch. So everybody's doing pretty good and happy hump day to everybody. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. AT&T and T-Mobile began rolling out cross network call authentication services to notify customers if a call that they receive from the carrier is from the number listed or a robo call. Yay, I hope this works well. The call authentication is based on the shake and stir protocol. And AT&T also announced plans to integrate the protocol into its free AT&T call protect service. They started getting a call the other day and it said, this or I don't have any absence to all the ring fancy going on, but it says this is probably a junk call or some some of that effect. And I thought, I don't know what's happening, but keep that up. Yeah, the way it went, hey, co-working startup. We work submitted its S1 filing with the SEC with plans to go public. The company showed a $1.6 billion loss on $1.8 billion in revenue in 2018. The first half of 2019 showed a $904 million loss on $101.5 billion in revenue. The company has doubled both its desk and member numbers over the past year and now claims 604,000 desks and 527,000 members. It's a lot with 40% of members working in enterprise. The company offers space at 528 locations across 111 cities in 29 countries. Interesting, that enterprise number. I would not have thought of that, but I guess, you know, you're working remotely. It's a nice place to work. Yeah, Microsoft has patched four remote code execution flaws as part of the company's monthly patch Tuesday that could allow a malicious actor to remotely take over a Windows computer. So they're bad flaws. The four vulnerabilities affect all in support versions of Windows through the Windows Remote Desktop Services or RDS component. But that's disabled by default in Windows 10. However, all users are urged to run security updates pronto. Nice, notoriously accurate Apple Leaker CoinX claims that Apple's upcoming iPhone 11 will rename or sorry, rename its flagship iPhone Max to the iPhone Pro. It's interesting, calling it an iPhone Pro would better unify iPhones with the company's iPad Pro, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro ranges. Apple is reportedly keeping its current 6.1 inch XR, 5.8 inch XS and 6.5 inch Max form factors in the next iPhone release. Interesting. I wonder if calling it Pro makes it easier to make it more expensive. I think so. You're a pro now. You got the pro model. It is. It is synonymous in the company is that's you're going to pay more for it, even if you also might think, oh, it's more powerful, cool, but it also means higher price. So we'll see how people respond. Yeah, again, just a rumor at this point, but comes from a source that has been correct in the past. All right, let's talk a little bit more about biometric data and how it might be a lot more vulnerable than you think. One million people's fingerprints, facial recognition information, unencrypted usernames and passwords and personal information of employees was discovered on a publicly accessible database managed by Suprema in the UK. Now, Suprema's biostar to biometrics locks system is used by the UK Metropolitan Police. It's used by defense contractors, by banks to secure facilities like warehouses or office buildings that need high security through fingerprints and facial recognition when anybody tries to enter. Now, last month, biostar to an access control system, AOS that spelled A EOS is used by 5,700 organizations in 83 countries, big company. They announced an integration with each other. Now, Israeli security researchers, Noam Rotem and Ren Lukar, who work with VPN review service VPN mentor, have a side project where they scan ports that might have familiar IP blocks. And then they use those blocks to find potential holes in company systems that could allow a future data breach. Well, guess whose database was unprotected and mostly encrypted and searchable by manipulating URL search criteria. Biostar to the researchers were able to not only access the database, but they could also change the data in the database. They could also add new users to the system. The issue has now been fixed. So says Suprema and Suprema also tells the Guardian that the company will inform customers if it deems that there's an ongoing threat to security. That's bad. It's really bad. Can I invoke the Tom voice real quick because I please I miss him already. I hear him in my head right now saying this is a sign that we are getting better at catching open problems quickly and efficiently. And that this is another example of that. It's easy to look at this and go, oh, my gosh, an open database. Anybody can search and find them, whatever. And it's just simple vulnerability and all this. But in the end, at the end of the day, this is not malicious actors trying to dig around in there. No, they are now aware of it. They're going to fix it or have fixed it according to them. I think it's still bear scrutiny. I think they still need to sort of show their work and make sure that people are comfortable with what they've done. But I feel like if Tom, the spirit of Tom is with us and he would say, this is a good thing. Yeah, it is definitely a good thing that two researchers who, again, they they they run as a project because they care about closing vulnerabilities in various corporate systems. You're right that this is a good thing. The fact that, you know, and the and the researchers also went on to say, this is, you know, it's not Suprema. It's it's well, it is in this case. But this this is going on in a lot of places and people need to be more aware and be able to to close vulnerabilities that that might be hanging around. What what struck me the most is, OK, so if I'm trying to get into a high security warehouse of some kind and I'm not supposed to be there and I've been able to add my fingerprints to an employee's name through the system in the back end using the technique that the researchers used. Sure. I mean, they're I don't know how to do this. So I'm actually not somebody who could who could exploit this. But if you could and if you could figure it out on a system that's similar to this, using very similar tactics, you could add yourself as an employee. I mean, it's it's the fact that it was publicly accessible, whether or not it ever was accessed, accessed publicly is that's that's that's mission impossible stuff. That's why they need to get follow up, you know, there needs to be a lot of follow up on this. They have to be able to do right by everybody. They have to be able to show that they've closed all these windows. They have to do that or else all this was for not. And it should scare anyone who has their data in those databases. Simple as that. Right. Twitter has an announcement and it's not that they're rolling back that terrible redesign. I wish it was. They have an upcoming feature to allow users to follow topics in addition to following users right now. I can follow Sarah. Maybe soon I'll be able to follow a topic that Sarah cares about or maybe I care about. The feature is testing on Android with sports topics like MMA, Formula One, that kind of stuff. Initially, the curation will be handled manually, but the company will eventually use machine learning to populate topics and keep them up to date. Your mileage may vary there. Other features being developed include temporarily muting a topic to keep tweets out of your timeline, searchable direct messages, the ability to reorder the photos in a tweet after you've attached them to a new post where that gets closer to edit feature. And the company also plans to add support for Apple's live photos. So push them down, hold them, and you get a little short video that was surrounding the shot. Of all of these, the two things I'm most interested in is the edit and the rearranging of photos because I screw that up all the time and the ability to mute a topic. I'm not so worried about finding the stuff because I feel like I kind of can do that now. The search feature is fairly robust on topics. If I'm looking for a certain keyword, I can find lots of stuff on it. The hashtags help, trending topics help, all that stuff helps. But I'm less worried about that and I'm more interested in usability stuff. I wish the service was just more usable and less likely to give me a bunch of threads I don't care about or say a friend of mine liked a tweet that I want nothing to do with. I hate that. And I don't want to unfollow my friend. I just don't want to follow the topic they're following. So I'm being able to mute entire topics rather than the people who may be retweeting them or liking them or whatever they may be doing with them sounds very appealing in the current noise machine that is Twitter. Yeah, following topics rather than just keywords is interesting to me. If it works well, this is this is actually something I'm pretty excited about. I never really got into making good, robust Twitter lists, even though that's been a feature since gosh, very early days of the company. What I always thought is, OK, I'll have like regular Twitter and then I'll have like DTNS Twitter where I can just really focus on tech news journalists and people who who provide information on Twitter that I find valuable. And I never really curated it well enough to use it regularly. So I kind of just sift through a bunch of noise in order to find news when I'm using Twitter for news to be able to follow a topic. For example, we're going to talk about AI a little bit later in the show in some depth just to kind of get a sense of all right, who's talking about it? And if those and if the, you know, probably follow our account would be a metric and retweets and in for whatever reason, if Twitter can surface kind of the way tech meme surfaces headlines and and and and gives credit to the story that has the most engagement and was also first, if Twitter could do that with a topic, wow, that would be such a great news gathering tool for me. I know not everybody uses Twitter for news, but hashtags, hashtags work great, but people only use them if they feel like it. I rarely use hashtags because I'm like, I don't know. It's too official. I'm too cool for that now. So I think that Twitter is understanding the the ways that people want to use the service. And if they could just let us edit our tweets, then I'd be really happy. Oh, that's all I really want, guys. And you can make it work. There's ways to do it. You can have a little bottom that says this tweet has been edited, whatever you got to do. That's what Facebook does. I'm not, I'm not ashamed. Sometimes I change my mind. I want to say something else where I misspelled something, get on it, Twitter doing. All right, moving on to airplane travel. We all love that. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a statement saying that it was aware of the recalled batteries that are used in some Apple MacBook Pro laptops and had alerted major U.S. airlines about the recall. Okay. The FAA reminded airlines to follow 2016 safety instructions for goods with recalled batteries, which include that they should not be on any flights, either as cargo or in carry-on baggage. Not at all. Do not bring them on flights. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued a similar warning earlier this month, although those rules allow devices with recalled lithium ion batteries on a plane. They just have to be switched off, never used during the flight. Airport staff and flight attendants back in the U.S. plan to start making announcements about the affected MacBook Pros at the gate and before takeoff, although you're sitting in your seat and you got one with you, that's going to be an issue, and company websites will also note the ban as well. So if all works well, you're apparently supposed to know well ahead of your flight to leave that scary laptop at home. In 2016, Samsung's Note 7 was banned from the U.S. flights, from U.S. flights due to a very real fire hazard. We all heard about that. Other recently recalled laptops may also be banned under the FAA's new rules. But Scott, I find it interesting that, and if I'm reading this correctly, it sounds like the FAA is saying, hey airlines, you can't do this. Remember, and the airlines are like, OK, we'll let people know at the very last minute. And hopefully they'll do their research before they leave the house with all their luggage packed. But it's on the passenger in the end, if anything goes wrong, because the passenger didn't pay enough attention. I guess so, something goes wrong. But the thing is, A, I think it's actually a bit of a freak out over nothing. A replacement battery shouldn't be scary. The original batteries may be. So there's that. But also, how do they know? How does even the the TSA scan thing? Are they going to look and look at my sealed MacBook Pro? These are famous for not. Well, it's not the replacement batteries that are the issue. They're the original recalled batteries that may not have been replaced yet. OK, in that case, same kind of thing, though, like if they, if I haven't gone to Apple yet to replace the battery, is Apple providing TSA and others with information that would help them during that scan to identify the battery and then make that determination at the point of scan, because that's where it's going to happen. And I don't know how they do that. That seemed crazy to me. It's a sealed laptop. And then what are you going to do? Hold these laptops? Like, I know I'm starting to feel like what it must have felt like for the the pain of those those Galaxy seven note owners. That must have been the nightmare. Because, you know, if you didn't know about this, you hadn't been keeping up on it. They just straight up wouldn't let you on your flight, or they had to take your phone away. This could get really bad. And I have a feeling that the the airlines are like not jumping through hoops. They're just like, well, we'll make sure everybody knows the last second. And hopefully that's enough. And they've all done their homework and we sort of put it on them. But at the end of the day, they don't really want to make too many waves about this, because it's a huge hassle. And there are way too many MacBooks and circulation that fly everywhere around this country every day for them to want to shut everything down because everyone has a notebook. It's just kind of a mess. I have a MacBook Pro that is within the parameters of the scary batteries. I'm lucky not to have an issue, although my display died about six months ago. But it's like, if I were to go through it, you know, just to get to, you know, I'm ready to board my flight. And for some reason, my laptop in there like, well, hold on a second, is this the record? It's like, I can't imagine this being anything that could be even potentially seamless. I see a lot of laptops just getting on board anyway, because nobody really knows how to check. In half the time, people in TSA don't take their shoes off and get all out of sorts, so you can't expect them to be, I don't know how this gets enforced. I do, I hope we're all very safe on flights and I don't want any batteries to explode. And I understand why these these these regulations should be in place, but I just don't know how they get enforced. Yeah, we'll see if they can figure it out. Sources tell Bloomberg that Facebook has been paying hundreds of outside contractors transcribed clips of user audio. Facebook confirmed that it had been transcribing users audio, but said it paused the practice last week and won't restart it. Users who were affected by the or by this can choose an option of Facebook's Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. Contractors are checking whether Facebook's artificial intelligence correctly interpreted the messages, which were anonymized so there nobody is not supposed to know who they are just text. The Irish Data Protection Commission says it's examining the activity for possible violations of the EU privacy laws. Once again, really what this is about is another thing Facebook did or is doing or once did that didn't they didn't tell anybody about now they're getting called on it and they're apologizing again and they just can't seem to get out in front of this stuff. You know, it's and the company isn't really apologizing. The company is like, oh, don't worry, we stopped that practice last week. Would we have heard about the practice otherwise? Probably not. Sounds like some independent contractors came forward and said, there's some really sensitive personal information in these transcriptions, you know, from the audio messages that I as a human am listening to. No, I don't know who they are. I don't really know what this is for. But it was happening and it was something that was was was affecting, you know, some portion of those hundreds of folks who are being paid to do it. And yeah, I, you know, I kind of go, all right, well Facebook's making its AI stronger. They want to make sure that they're they're they're checking it against how a human would interpret a transcribed audio message versus a robot. I get that. So that on the surface is not that big a deal to me. But again, it's it's Facebook is just really has a knack for people saying, whoa, this is crazy. And Facebook saying, oh, yeah, we were doing that. Well, I think I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. But the problem isn't maybe not so much what they did or what they're doing is that the company essentially appears tone deaf to complaints. Because as each of these crop up, they they will knowledge it, but it's never it never seems very contrite. It just seems more of a, oh, yeah, we did that as more of an afterthought. I think I think what you're looking at is is a very long time where Facebook saw incredible amounts of data as experimental. And I don't mean like in nefarious ways. I think they just see it as, hey, we should test for this. And maybe we could learn some from from that. I think there was a lot of that thinking going on. And I just don't think they can do that anymore. I think they have to ask and look and talk and and transparent everything these days. They're just too big. They affect too many lives or too many governments watching them like you just can't. You just can't look at that pile of data like they used to and just say, hey, time for an experiment. Let's go. We got to really flesh it out, talk about the ethics, look and see where where it may apply to certain, you know, rules that you have to adhere to in certain countries like all that stuff's going to have to happen. Yeah, I mean, on the user front, I don't really see that many people stop stopping using Facebook because of something like this. Because if that were the case, people would have headed for headed for the hills a long time ago when it comes to government regulation and clamping down on practices on on that level. Then yeah, it's something that Facebook should can approach a lot of the stuff differently. Yeah. A senior unnamed surveillance officer reports that Huawei helped the governments of Uganda and Zambia spy on political opponents, including intercepting communications and tracking opponents movements using cellular data. This is according to the Wall Street Journal, a representative for Zambia's ruling party confirmed that Huawei technicians did play a part in the fight against certain news sites stating, well, whenever we want to track down perpetrators of fake news, we ask Zikta, which is the lead agency, they work with Huawei to ensure that people don't use our telecommunication space to spread fake news. Huawei has denied involvement and that its own internal investigation show that the company that didn't, nor did its employees engage in alleged activities. I mean, maybe not. But again, I feel like we're once again, because Huawei's name is on this. It's yeah. I mean, well, Huawei's name is on it. And Huawei is also saying, no, that didn't happen. Yeah. So, huh. Who knew Zambia had such a big need for this sort of stuff to be controlled? Well, I mean, I will stress and to be kind of the merit voice in this, Huawei didn't do this, or at least the technicians, the alleged employees that did this. They did this at the behest of those governments, right? This was in Huawei secretly. Sure. Yes. Listening in the parliament. Bringing information back into China or something. Or the Chinese government. This was the governments of Uganda and Zambia saying, like, hey, these people are spreading misinformation and we need, you know, according to them, misinformation and we need to find out who and who their contacts are and the rest of it. And so, I mean, you could definitely fault those particular employees on this. But I wouldn't paint it in the there's no connection here, direct connection between Huawei executives or the Chinese government saying, aha, we're just going to use all this technology and spy on these governments in Africa because we can. It would be good, though, if they had again, if they had, I don't know what the method would be, but maybe these employees just any time any sort of government. Anybody comes to you, just have to call the home office and guys, we're supposed to do this. And hopefully they say no. And then they document it. And then when this stuff comes out or it's a problem, you have your line of defense. Huawei's name gets drugged through this stuff so hard lately. I just feel like they missed an opportunity to be ahead of it on this one. And, you know, again, the employees goofed probably or I don't know who you blame. But yeah, I mean, I guess you could be a technician who technically works for Huawei, but it wasn't under, you know, any sort of orders from your boss. Right. Yeah, that's a strange story. And it's also because it's Huawei, people go, oh, here we go again. But yeah, this seems an unrelated issue to a lot of the other reasons that Huawei is in the news as of late. Hey, everybody, to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. So let's talk about fear, everybody. Who's into it? I'm into it. Good. AWS has added fear to the range of emotions identified by its Amazon recognition facial analysis service, which is controversial. We've talked about it on the show. Fear joins other identifiable emotions that recognition already has, like happy or sad or angry or surprised or disgusted or confused. There are a lot of them. You know, it's an emotion that you can sometimes read on someone's face, like lots of emotions. It also improved age range estimation accuracy. You think, OK, that seems like it would be helpful as well. Well, there are a lot of critics, a lot of critics speaking out against this. AWS is a major U.S. government contractor that's part of the controversy. Now, Corey Quinn, he's an author. He writes this week in AWS Newsletter, tweeted angrily, AWS comes under fire for recognition sales to the federal government who in turn build concentration camps for children. And AWS is response to improve age range estimation and fear detection in the service. And then he added some expletives. Now, of course, keeping keep the political conversation out of this. But I think what they're getting at is that while some emotions seem helpful and seem appropriate for this kind of technology, if it was used completely above board and was designed to help people make sense, fear does not. You feel like fear, fear is a loaded word, right? It's more loaded than sad, angry, disgusted or confused, which are the other sort of negative emotions they have here. Happy, calm, nobody's worried about those. Right. And even angry, right? It's like, we all know the angry emoticon I use it on Facebook constantly when someone's like, hey, this horrible thing happened. And you go, oh, I'm angry for you. I think I think the idea that, OK, if sort of widespread facial recognition technology is designed to be able to pick up fear among a variety of ages, a variety of people, it's kind of like, OK, well, what would you? Are you? You know, what is what is the situation involved? Because most of the time it's going to be something pretty bad. Yeah, I'm trying to think what you would need to recognize fear for. Well, perhaps people in compromised situations. And yeah, I mean, there's there's lots of disturbing ideas that I can come up with. And it I guess, yeah, I guess it's it's it's an emotion that I don't know. I feel like that's it's relevant. That's something that if if the facial recognition is is able to pick that up, then again, on the surface, I'm not sure why it's a bad idea. I guess it's just once implemented, you're almost always going to be. You know, I mean, unless you're like, oh, let's scan a bunch of people on a roller coaster to see if they're scared. Well, that's not how it would be used. It'd be used for something that's that's a lot heavier than that. It's also interesting if they came to this whole thing. Let's say today's article or today's news was AWS has facial recognition. It can recognize emotions such as happy, sad, angry, surprised, fear, disgusted, calm and confused. And it's gotten better with age ranges. Everybody would gloss over it. There's something about the fact that they're adding fear to it that's pissing people off. It's not that if it was already there where you just said a range of human emotions, fear is one of them. I don't think anybody says anything. I think the fact that they're adding it is is the part people are getting caught off guard by. And they're thinking of the implications of it. Like if you're using fear to help people, it would make sense. If you're using fear to see if the thing you're doing is scary enough and it's not working and you want to generate more fear, this would be a tool to help you gauge how much fear you're causing. Well, then you can get into some pretty dark stuff. But in my mind, it's just, it's almost like just a weird juxtaposition of fear not being there in the first place. It had always been in the set of normal human emotions. I don't know that anybody would be calling it out this way. Yeah. Well, in much different AI technology, we've talked on the show about Elon Musk's Neuralink Initiative, the project to make us sort of half human, half robot or partly robot anyway. Ars Technica has a really, really good write up on how this sort of thing might actually work by being surgically implanted into our brains. And we can't get into all the details but definitely read the article for a lot more in depth details about how this would work because it's pretty involved. But they kind of checked in on the status of Neuralink and the plan is to access the brain in a hole, a small teeny hole less than eight millimeters across and then implant a small chip and some wiring into the brain. The chip would be drawing power and communicate with wireless hardware perhaps put behind your ear. And the point would be to get raw readings of neural activity and also be able to stimulate neural activity, process them and then use wireless hardware to transmit back into the skull. Electrical impulses can be taken advantage of, neurons in the brain, electrodes that stimulate brain activity. All of the stuff is, you know, it's highly conceptual but we're learning a little bit more about how Neuralink might plan to implement this. Now, a robot surgeon would be providing the, the robot surgeon would be actually putting the chip into brains, you know, for precision. But a human surgeon would actually be like, okay, now you're gonna do this, now you're gonna do this. So the human surgeon is really flying the plane, so to speak. And it sounds like existing systems, they're not quite there yet, electrodes have their own hardware, Neuralink wants to change this and there's quite a bit of work yet to be done. But I was thinking, Scott, I mean, just on it because I was thinking like, ooh, robot surgeon, like is that gonna freak anybody out? And I'm like, meh, actually they're, they're seems to, you know, they're not gonna have shaky hands, you know, the way a surgeon might, if they have too much coffee before they put a chip into my brain. But what if as a surgeon, I get a chip put into my brain to make me more precise as a surgeon? That would be cool. That would be pretty cool. I wonder what that would be, some kind of, I don't know, nervous system control that would keep your hands rigid, steady and that sort of thing. Yeah, you just run some sort of a program where I'm like, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. You know, like the robot part of me is like the precise part. Yeah. Thinking of real world scenarios where something like this, and again, there's so much research to be done. This is, we're talking far off stuff. But real world situations, I keep thinking of good examples. Amazon AWS will not sense any fear from me from these implants. I look forward to this, I want this, I'm ready for it. I want it good and right and done and you know, safe as possible and all of those things, don't get me wrong, but I am ready for this kind of hookup and I'm ready for it yesterday. So hurry up Elon Musk and your weird idea. I await you patiently. Thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. That was one of the stories that I got today from y'all. You're the best. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook. Join our group, facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. Scott Johnson, you are just the best. Thanks for being with us today and let folks know where they can keep up with what you're gonna do the rest of the week. Well, there's always something going on and you can find all my shows. It's live schedule, when the podcast come out, all the art stuff that has been happening, my new card game that's coming out, all that stuff can be found at frogpants.com. And if that's not enough for you and maybe it won't be, you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. We love our patrons. Patrons, you're Scott's the best but you're the extra best. Thanks so much for supporting the show. As a patron, you get all sorts of cool perks. As a member, you get ad-free RSS feeds. You get special episodes behind the scenes stuff, newsletters, all sorts of updates from us and some special kind of look back the tech of yesteryear. The list goes on patreon.com slash DTNS. If you're not a member, consider joining our group today. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com We're live Monday through Friday. If you can join us live, well, we're happy to have you. 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC is the time and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow. Justin, Robert Young will join us. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program. 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