 Coming up on DTNS, why you may have heard there was a DDoS yesterday, but there was not. Contact tracing apps launch in Germany, but will anyone use them? And whether Instagram will pass Twitter as a news source. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. Also Los Angeles. I'm Lamar Wilson. And also here is Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about baby names and Phillips Hue light bulbs and wearing pants on Good Day Internet. Get that full conversation and find out why become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google Meet has arrived in Gmail for Android and iOS as well. Users will not need the Meet app to join a conference. And a Meet tab is now located at the bottom of the main Gmail interface. Dropbox Launch, Dropbox Passwords is dedicated password manager along with Dropbox vaults for encrypted storage of sensitive documents secureable with a six digit pen for mobile users on the Dropbox plus plan. Well, that's a lot of Dropbox also added the ability to backup system folders from PCs or Macs and beta for Dropbox basic or Dropbox. Excuse me, basic professional and plus users. Lenovo's Flex 5G laptop, which it announced back at CES as the yoga 5G is now available for pre-order for a thousand three hundred ninety nine ninety nine as a Verizon exclusive in the United States. The Flex 5G has Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8CX processor, which has 24 hours of use off a single charge, or at least it claims it does. And Qualcomm's X 55 5G modem, which supports LTE millimeter wave and sub six gigahertz 5G networks. Lenovo is partnering with double E in the UK. That's a sunrise in Switzerland and CMCC in China for more market launches later this year. We were talking about some hue light bulbs before the show. And Phillips Hue announced the white A 21 bulb with a sixteen hundred at lumen output equivalent to a traditional one hundred watt bulb for twenty dollars. Now, if you're not familiar, it's a that's a that's a that's quite a bulb. Phillips Hue is also releasing a Bluetooth enabled light strip plus with the ability to cut a strip to any size or connect it to up to eight extensions for seventy nine ninety nine, all with one meter extensions for twenty four dollars and ninety nine cents with first availability at Target. Phil to also updated its bloom table lamp with new colors and also white light at five hundred lumens. That's now Bluetooth enabled as well. And we'll go for seventy dollars when it arrives in July. I might get one or two. Apple announced or Apple. Hello. Can we read today? Adobe announced updates to software across its creative cloud suite among the new features, Photoshop and Lightroom get a button to switch between the two programs on the iPad. Lightroom gets the ability to save versions and share edits with others. Premier Pro gets the option to preview and license audio from within the app. Adobe Rush now has auto frame and illustrator now supports cloud documents. Most of the features will come in the June creator cloud update with some to follow later this year. Parallels announced its working with Google to bring full Windows applications support to Chrome OS enterprise devices. You heard that right. Parallels promises that by this autumn, full featured window apps, including Microsoft Office, will run seamlessly on Chromebook enterprise devices. Amazon launched its distance assistance system for monitoring social distancing at its warehouses and office. The system will show workers at a safe distance with a green circle around them and a red circle around those too close to each other. So everybody, you know, kind of knows what the deal is. Amazon plans to make the code for a distance assistance also open source as well. And Google cut the price of its Stadia premiere package from $129 to $99. But it also dropped the three month free Stadia Pro subscriptions. And now we know how much that was worth. And that's $10 a month. So kind of makes sense. The $99 premiere package does still include a Chromecast Ultra and a Stadia controller. All right, we mentioned that contact tracing. App Lamar, tell us a little bit about what's going on in the world of contact tracing. Yes, sir. So Germany launched this contact tracing app called Corona Warn app on Tuesday based on the Google Apple Exposure Notification Program or platform. So Italy, Poland, Latvia and Switzerland have also launched apps on that same platform. Now, EU member states have agreed to standards of interoperability between contact tracing apps with implementation expected in weeks. However, France's app does not use the decentralized Apple Google platform. France's system stores data centrally and adoption of these apps are slow, too. Now, South Korea and Taiwan are notable exceptions, but France's app, which launched June 2nd, has 2% activation. Norway reached 10% adoption before it pauses that Monday over privacy concerns. Singapore has had their Trace Together app available since March and has adopted or reached 25 or 20 to 25% adoption give or take. Now, in the US, only Alabama, North Dakota and South Carolina say they intend to use the Google Apple platform. Most states are relying on human tracing instead. In Massachusetts, human tracers have managed to talk to 70% of cases and reach 74% of those cases context, not perfect, but higher than most tracing apps have reached. Wow. I mean, ideally tracing apps would be helping the manual tracing. But in a lot of places, they just can't get enough people to adopt it to make much of a difference. 20, 25% is not bad in Singapore, but 2% is pretty pitiful in France. And then France's app isn't even going to be easily able to work with the other apps in Europe so that when you're traveling, you know, the idea is you won't have to worry about that. It does seem like Apple and Google did a great job building a platform, but it doesn't look like it's going to be used well. Yeah, and that. Oh, go ahead, Lamar. I was going to ask, is it fear of the privacy concerns for those two companies? Or is it that if you have somebody to opt in to do something like this, they're not really going to do it, you know, unless you kind of force, you know, like this is one of those opt in things that I wonder if it's better to have it on and then have people turn it off if they want, because it's so important. Or does that raise more issues if we do that? I mean, yeah, that is the question, and I think it's both. I think there are just gut level privacy concerns, even if you understand that the Apple Google platform is incredibly privacy-protecting. They did a very good job with that. There's just part of the idea of like, but do I want to be traced, right? And there's also the delay of people saying, oh, but I have to download. OK, I'll remember to do that at some point. Now, at some point at the Apple Google platform will become an operating system option where it will prompt you like, hey, do you want to turn this on and you won't have to download an app unless you get COVID and unless you want to report that you've been infected. So there is that aspect of it that will likely increase adoption, at least in the places that are using that platform. But again, in the U.S., only three states are using that platform. And, you know, there are, well, probably some people would be fine with it, but most people don't want any government to be like, this is mandatory, you have to do this. So, OK, it's an opt-in situation. In most cases, it seems pretty cut and dry. How the app works, how it's supposed to help you stay safe. But it still requires people, yeah, to act slightly differently than their routines. And that is such a hard sell for people all over the world. I mean, it's tough, as you can see by some of the paltry numbers of adoption in some of these countries. People are just sort of like, is it really going to help me? Like, there's privacy issues. Look at Norway. I don't want to do this. Yeah. Dark 927US in the Twitch chat says he thinks governments are upset with Google and Apple because they won't give them the tracing data because it's secured on your device. There's no centralized. And that's certainly what's going on in France. But most European companies are using Apple Google. It's the U.S. that's not really adopting Apple Google. And in those cases, they're not adopting anything. California doesn't even have an app. They're just doing manual tracing because they're like, that's where we want to spend our efforts. And to be honest, manual tracing does have better performance. The apps were only ever meant to be supplementary. Yeah. I think what you said, you just answered it. You said at the beginning that they should work together, right? Yeah. One that rules all. So I agree with that. Well, speaking of Apple, the European Commission opened a formal investigation into Apple's app store and also mobile payment system policies. One investigation will look at the policy that requires app makers to use Apple's in-app payment system. There's a Spotify complaint about the policy to the EU last year. And has been pretty vocal about that. Rakuten filed a similar complaint over e-book sales back in March. A separate investigation will look into Apple Pay, particularly the fact that it is the only tap to pay system that is allowed on Apple devices. Apple doesn't want other financiers to be able to use NFC in their standalone apps within iOS. Apple called the complaints baseless and accused companies of wanting a free ride and, quote, play not play by the same rules as everybody else. Apple published a study Tuesday noting that the Apple app ecosystem generates $519 billion in billions in sales worldwide. $61 billion is digital goods and services that Apple gets a cut of. The rest is physical goods and advertising that Apple doesn't actually generate revenue from. Yeah, I feel like the study is well timed to make it clear that Apple's like, look, we could make a lot more money. We're not doing this to make money. We're doing this to be better for the users. And that may be true. It could still be considered any competitive, even if your point is to do it for the users, not to make money. There's an example out today. Basecamp has a brand new email service called Hey that has not had its second version approved because the Apple reviewers and this is not just one reviewer got escalated say, well, you have a $99 a year service and you're not offering it through the app. You have to offer it offer it through the app. You don't have to offer subscriptions to the app and reader apps like Kindle, for instance, but Apple says an email app isn't a reader app. So that's not going to help their their their cause any to have an email app that is not being allowed in the store unless they force people to be able to buy a subscription through Apple pay. I really do think Apple's not trying to be greedy here for money. I think they they're just being stubborn about their rules. Like we're Apple. We made the rules and this is how we want it to work. We want control of the system. Yeah, and it makes me wonder in the, I mean, I'm not taking Apple side here, but I wonder are they even that big in Europe to make it anti competitive? Like, you know, the Android seems to be more of a dominant thing there. Not that that really matters. They're big enough, but that's a fair point because Android is particularly dominant in Europe. It's a fair question. So folks, you may have seen some headlines yesterday or even today saying that there was a massive denial of service attack on the United States Monday. You may have experienced outages from T-Mobile or maybe even some other carriers not been able to get to websites like Twitch. We had an outage in the middle of DTNS. We couldn't stream the first part of DTNS on Twitch yesterday, except there wasn't a DDoS. Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, explained on Twitter why those coincidences, and it is the definition of the word, a coincidence, things that just happen to happen at the same time but are not related, do not indicate a denial of service attack. Cloudflare is the predominant provider of defense against DDoS attacks. They have the data to look at this. And Matthew Prince explained that the T-Mobile outage was caused by a configuration change that went badly leading to six hours of cascading failures. That shouldn't happen. It doesn't happen that often, but it can happen and it did. Bad news for T-Mobile. They had a horrible day. That caused a lot of people to complain on Twitter about not being able to get a particular site because maybe they didn't realize the T-Mobile outage was happening. Here we also had some other coincidence yet unrelated outages like Twitch. So suddenly you have a lot of people on Twitter, some on T-Mobile, some not complaining about not being able to get to websites. And the number of people complaining about popular sites being down caused down detector to report those sites as down because down detector relies on Twitter as one of its main signals. People on Twitter don't necessarily know why the thing is down, but down detector will go, hey, everybody's complaining that Twitch is down. Everybody's complaining that T-Mobile is down. Everybody's complaining that all these sites are down because their T-Mobile is out. All right. That led to people looking at an attack map from Arbor networks that seem to show a massive attack. And a lot of the stories that talked about this show this attack map, and it's got all these lines coming from all over the world into the United States, and these DDoSs are happening. And obviously it's very clear from this map that a massive DDoS attack is happening, except for Prince claimed that Arbor, which is a competitor to Cloudflare, always makes its app look like that. It's a marketing measure to say, hey, we protect you against these horrible DDoS attacks. Look at them happening. Prince posted a screenshot of Cloudflare data that indicated no denial of service attack was happening. And in fact, if you look at the Arbor attack map Tuesday, the day we're recording this show, it shows the same massive attack lines as yesterday, except today all of those services we were talking about are up. So this is just a lesson in be extra careful when you're assuming things and spreading information, because you could be part of the problem that causes down detector to report something down when it's not really. Yeah, the way you outline this is amazing, because I see it. It all comes from Twitter, people panicking. I mean, even so that I got on my group chat with my friends, it's like, are you all down? Because they're in different states or whatever. And they're like, no, what are you talking about? And then I opened up apps, they were fine. So I was like, what's really going on here? And thank you for explaining it so clearly that it was just not what everybody thought it was. Yeah. And you're not alone. There were some other folks that I know, no technology like you do, who were looking at this like, oh man, there seems to be. Because Arbor is a legitimate source, it's just if you're not familiar with the fact that they always make their map look like that, it would stand out on the one day you look at it for the first time. So we should talk about cameo briefly. So we talked about them. Okay. I was expecting you. So we previously talked about cameo, the service that lets you buy a recording from a celebrity, like me. I'm kidding. Cameo has now introduced cameo live, which lets you buy a 10 minute zoom call with a celeb. Now price is very, very high. So you can buy a 10 minute zoom call from a celebrity with a chat with skateboarder Tony Hawk costing $1,000 and actor Jeremy Piven costing $15,000. And if you want him to insult you like his character from entourage, it's probably even more as my guess. Yeah. If you don't remember cameo is the one that, you know, you pay like a couple hundred bucks and then you can get like some super celebrity like Jeremy Piven to send a video message. And it's a fun birthday present for some people. You know, you can get a bunch of money depending on the celebrity. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a novelty thing that you definitely see people doing, you know, a lot of reality stars take advantage of this. And I've, I've, I've had a reality star send me a, it wasn't a birthday message. It was like a merry Christmas or something. And I mean, I was floored. It was so funny. And, you know, made my day and she made some money for me. However, when, okay. So that it kind of, some of the stuff I always like, I have a testy relationship with because I never want to like feel like, I don't know, people are being exploited too much. And cameo sort of walks that line a little bit. And it depends on, you know, who is the person who wants to talk to the celeb and why and all that stuff. So it's a little bit case by case. So the idea of getting on a 10 minute call with a celebrity to me is like, you know what, if you have $15,000 and you want to talk to Jeremy Piven, you go. But it kind of like breaks down the fun of why social networking had allowed all of us to, well, all of us is, I, you know, I have, you know, lots of people that I'm a fan of to be able to kind of be on level playing field. And so maybe I selfishly I'm like, I don't want to go back to the old days where, you know, you just, you know, saw them at a, you know, you had to go to a convention to meet somebody, you know, and pay for your entry ticket, or you had to, you know, watch their movie and they'd never respond to you otherwise. Like it feels a little backwards. Yeah, it's pretty expensive too. Now the celebrity could set their own price. They're also coming out with something called group chats where people pay five bucks a month to be the group chat with their favorite star or fans. You know, there's a cheaper option. I guess there's like a description fee that sounds good. That one sounds a little more palatable, but yeah, $15,000 for who is it again? Jeremy Piven. I mean, even just $400. It's like, ah, you know, wasn't the whole fun of all of this that we all could just follow each other? I mean, unless you get blocked for some reason for acting poorly, like we were all kind of in this together. Like there's something about it that just feels, it just doesn't feel right. It does feel a little exploit. I don't think, I don't think cameo is, I think the video grams are fine. You know, you pay for someone's time to send you a video, but the live stream thing definitely seems excessive. That's worth the premium. A live conversation, not just a video message. I think that's worth money. Maybe not 15,000, but then people won't pay it. If you can afford $15,000, you probably already have Jeremy Piven's phone number. Honestly, I think Jeremy Piven said it there because he's like, I don't want to talk to anyone. Make it $15,000. No one will ever pay that. Right. And the rest of us are like, who's paying that? Turns out no one. Yeah. Boston Dynamics has put itself balancing Spot Robot up for general sale after beginning leasing it last year. Spot has four legs and can be used for dangerous or mundane tasks. It does a lot of stuff. It's used to create 3D maps of construction sites and survey for machine faults. And has more recently helped triage COVID-19 patients and work with bomb squads as well. Spot can be customized with different sensors and custom programming. Its latest OS, Spot 2.0, has advanced autonomy and navigation features. And an update planned for later this year would allow for a head-mounted arm. Potential customers can take Spot for a test walk with remote tele-operation. The license prohibits harmful use. So that's important. But almost any US company could buy a Spot Robot for $74,500. Speaking of people who have a lot of change, Limit 2 per purchase though. You can only have Spot. That's why I'm not playing for Jeremy Pithing because I save up my money for a Spot Robot. Yeah, man. I mean, you only get two. I keep seeing videos of these in the wild. And I assume kind of like engineers taking them out for a stroll. There's one like famous one of a spot in Golden Gate Park. And it's funny, you see that the way that people react, they're like, oh no, this is the beginning of the end. Because they walk so well and they look like animals. They do. They look like pets. But the fact that something could be this precise to actually work in situations that humans really shouldn't be in is awesome. Stop thinking that they're going to kill us all. Let's help them work for us. Yeah. In hospitals, I think it's already been tested. But I mean, remember back to the future type of thing, we all thought, yeah, 2020 is going to be where all that stuff will happen. Where nurses won't have to be in those kind of situations. And I'm like, what's taking so long? Come on, Spot. Let's go. Yeah. The fact is most of these uses are like, Spot walks around a factory that's kind of dangerous to walk around in for humans and checks gauges. Like they're so boring in their actual use. But important, important stuff. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. The 2020 Reuters Institute digital news report notes that people are starting to rely on Instagram for news twice as much as they did in 2018, particularly young adults. I've responded, surveyed in 40 countries, more than a third of all people who answered the survey said they use Instagram and two thirds of under 25s said they use it. Two thirds of under 25s said they used it. So it's particularly prevalent in the under 25s. Seven percent said they use it to get news, which is not that much, but growing and only one point behind Twitter, which everybody thinks about as a place where you get news. Turns out, really, it's journalists who think people use Twitter to get news, because most people are using the top three, which are Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp. Instagram's on the rise, Twitter's just kind of hanging out. However, only 26% of people said they trusted social media as a source of information about the coronavirus, particularly national governments and news organizations were both trusted by about 59%. So it's interesting, people are using it, but they're using it warily. Now, Lamar, I know you're fascinated with Instagram, and you've talked about the fact that you like it before. How do you feel about it growing as a source of news information for folks? Inevitable. I was surprised to actually see this. I know during the Black Lives Matter movement, a lot of people were, including myself, were able to see kind of videos, and I won't say real time, but versus going on Twitter where you see a lot of text and you can kind of get lost in that, having that rich video or picture, a picture is a thousand words to have those as you're scrolling. I definitely think that was more powerful and going from thinking about how a young person would think, I could see that being very valuable for them. Like, okay, cool, that's happening. Do I see them following CNN or Fox or one of those on Instagram? As a young person, probably not. It's probably more, you know, someone, I don't want to say the word influencer, or some group that like curates news a little bit better for them. You know, like maybe a, I don't know some kind of channel that might do that. That might be better. I don't hear about people in mass signing up to follow CNN on Instagram, for instance, but it definitely is growing. It definitely surprises me that more people want to have news on there, but with the IGTV on there, it kind of makes sense. They can put two, four minute clips or more about what's going on and people will watch it. You know, when I first, so it's funny, Tom, when you had mentioned because of so much of the news that has been dominated all of our lives for the last couple of weeks, particularly the, you know, protests after the murder of George Floyd and the fact that you were using Twitter more than you had in a while, I kind of started to think about that too. Like, I'm kind of like looking at my usage because I want to be, you know, I turn on the TV and I'm like, uh, turn it off. Like cable news just like doesn't work for me. Twitter, I'm definitely using more. Some of the stuff, I'm like, who goes to Facebook for news? Okay, a lot of people do. A lot of people do. I don't because, and it's not so much that, well, there's definitely some misinformation, but you get that anywhere. It's more that I don't find Facebook to be immediate enough for me. Instagram is more so, but I also feel like, you know, the whole kind of Instagram experience for me, if someone shares a piece of news, it's like, what are they screen-shotting something without proper, you know, like sourcing or the, like, link is in their bio and like, that's all very clunky. But I hadn't really thought about the live aspect of it and how much people are using that because I guess I'm just not one of those people who's using it enough. Yeah, I feel like Instagram is for things happening now. And you mentioned that I was using Twitter to find out a lot of stuff. A lot of times what I was seeing on Twitter were links to an Instagram live stream, to an IGTV live stream or links to a video post on Instagram. Sometimes they were on Twitter and Twitter's got a lot of this going on too. I think Roland S. Martin has been streaming 24-7. The guy never seems to take a break just, you know, talking about Black Lives Matter and interviewing people like Spike Lee and all these folks. That's on Twitter, but a lot of that is happening on Instagram. So once I thought about it, it didn't surprise me that people would turn to Instagram right now for both the coronavirus and for Black Lives Matter protests to say like, okay, what's happening and where is it happening? Is there anyone to interpret it? Then you want to read about it or you want to watch a television source where someone's interpreting it, but if you just want to see it unvarnished like what is happening right now, Instagram's actually really good for that. Yeah, my only complaint is I'm in line with Sarah is that linking. Like there's nothing in a post. Again, unless it's an IGTV post, which they need to really streamline that so it's not two separate things. I think that's why I'm so polluted with Instagram. Yeah, and that's why I think it's probably best for, you know, I was at the March and here's my video or I'm at the hospital and here's what's happening with the treatment live. You know, that sort of thing. I think it's good for that. Well, you know what works well, linkwise, everyone who participates in our subreddit because you can submit stories. You can vote on them and everything's linkable. So, you can go to dailytechnusho.reddit.com All right, let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's do it. So, we got a lot of feedback from our conversation yesterday on the idea that people and companies in quite a few companies are supporting changing tech terms from something like master and slave to things like host and request. We also asked you how you feel about our Patreon levels master and grandmaster because those are levels that people do pay for and most folks seemed okay leaving those at is and we're happy and if you have feedback and you haven't offered it yet, please do. But we got an email from Todd that I thought summed up nicely and he said there are a lot of references to master teacher or leader. That's what I think of when I hear master a master someone who has mastered a craft or skill or activity often will have one or more apprentices who are learning craft or skill activity from their master. They're the teacher. A school has a headmaster. That's the person in charge. The elected person in charge of Masonic Lodge is the master of the lodge. The elected person in charge of many lodges is called the grandmaster. Chess has masters and grandmasters depending on skill level and then there is grandmaster flash. Listen, I'm okay with this. Just if you want to be clear anybody has any awkward silences I'm literally fine with the word master and how it's used. I think Todd nailed it. The issue that I've really never thought about being honest with you is that when I was actually building computers back in the day, it's like, yeah, why is the secondary drive called the slave drive? It just seemed like an unnecessary word to use. Right, not necessarily offensive but you didn't really know how to do that. Why are you making me think about that? The word is never in a good context. Yeah, exactly. It's just one of those things. The master one makes sense. The other one is weird. It just doesn't need to be a word that we have to use anymore. Just secondary, if you want to talk about drives we even talk about slave and master drives anyway anymore. Client server, host request. There's so many things that make it perfectly clear. I know that you suggested grandmaster I saw your commentary on titles because of chess, Lamar. But I kind of like retrofitting it to mean grandmaster flash. You a hero. A hero of millions. Speaking of master and grandmaster levels shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including Tim deputy, Kevin S. Morgan and Dando. Thanks to Lamar Wilson for being with us today on this fine Tuesday. is a pleasure. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of what you're up to. You can find me primarily on YouTube. YouTube.com slash Lamar Wilson. I'm a big gaming enthusiast and that's kind of what I'm talking about primarily. I'm probably going to do something today. I wrote it up about the PlayStation 5 and that's my latest video. So you want to, you know, follow more about some gaming stuff, follow me there. Also, Instagram.com slash Lamar Wilson. So if you're talking about Instagram, I'm more universal there and you can find all kinds of things. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for supporting us, allowing us to keep doing this show every day. It feeds myself and Lamar and Sarah and Roger and his kids. So we appreciate you supporting us at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. And hey, I know not all of you need a mask right now, but if you do, we have them in the DTNS store. And like I say, you can have the old retro DTNS logo right there on your face. Go check it out, dailytechnewshow.com slash store. We love your feedback. Please keep it coming. It really helps us shape the future of the show. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. And we are also live. If you can join us, please do Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.