 Sam Leung has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Be like Sam. Become a DTNS member at patreon.com. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, July 8, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feelings Grammar's house, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Joining us today as part of the This Week in Science Daily Tech News show exchange program, we're very excited to have Blair Bazderich from This Week in Science and Blair's Animal Corner. Hello, so excited to be here. Thanks for... So we just had Roger was on This Week in Science with you guys not too long ago. Thanks for returning the favor. Any time. How was he? Oh, he was fantastic. Yeah, I listened to that episode. It was really good. Roger was awesome if you haven't listened to that. Go check it out at twist.org. Meanwhile, we are going to talk about growing your meat, but not in the way your parents or grandparents have in just a few minutes. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Movie pass shutdown services to customers as of July 4 at 5 a.m. Now, according to CEO Mitch Lowe, the shutdown will last several weeks to complete work on a new app. During the time, the service won't accept new signups or charge existing customers. So subscribers who have already paid for the month will be automatically credited for downtime once MoviePass resumed service. Apple is testing biometric sign in on the web with iCloud.com. Users running the betas of iOS 13, iPad, OS 13 and Mac OS Catalina who go to beta.icloud.com can choose to sign in with Face ID or Touch ID at WWDC. This year, Apple announced that sign in with Apple tools would be available to developers this summer ahead of the features public launch in September. All right, let's talk a little bit about one of the biggest GDPR finds yet. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced plans to find British Airways 183 British pounds, million million British pounds for violating GDPR rules in a 2018 data breach that affected 380,000 people. The ICO's investigation found that poor security arrangements led to the breach of credit card information, names, addresses, travel booking details and logins. It was a big breach. GDPR allows for finds up to four percent of a company's worldwide turnover with British Airways fine amounting to 1.5 of 2017 revenue for the company. British Airways has 28 days to appeal the ruling and it says no fraudulent activity has been found on accounts linked to the breach. That has also been disputed by several people already. Well, yeah, British Airways says no fraudulent activity has been found on the accounts that's going to be a big part of their appeal is to say, hey, this is out of proportion. There hasn't been harm done. People who are accusing British Airways of lying or being incorrect about that can bring forth that as part of the appeal. But really, what I think is fascinating about this story is that the GDPR fine is being assessed for British Airways having to have known better. In other words, it's not really about whether the data was used or whether there was harm. It was about the fact that British Airways didn't take the proper security precautions to protect it in the first place. So I doubt they went on appeal, if that's going to be their main argument. I've also seen a lot of conversation around the Internet about, OK, well, if you if you do the math and, you know, figure out, like, OK, this is the fine, you know, based on how many people were supposedly affected. How much is is data worth, right? How much is one user's data worth? Oh, Malik was somebody on the Internet who was like, OK, well, when you're looking at the British Airways breach, it's about 457 US dollars. Right. So if you looked at maybe the Equifax breach, which impacted more people, well, Equifax by the same math numbers should have been fined quite a bit more than than it was. So and I don't exactly know if, you know, it's it's it's as cut and dry as that. But it was a different situation because it happened in the US, not in the US. So you're comparing apples and oranges there. Well, but I mean, it's, you know, a company, a breach, how many people are affected? How much was the company find and, you know, do a little division? But but it is an interesting thought of, OK, well, you know, when these fines get handed down and you think of it in terms of anybody who was affected or potentially affected, you know, what what what is that number? And what's what is what's the adequate number? Yeah. And what the GDPR is trying to do is not fine you for the damage, but fine you as a punishment to scare that company and other companies into taking better preventative measures in the future. So there won't be a breach. That's what I find fascinating about this. Waymo has begun testing complementary Wi-Fi for customers of its Phoenix based Waymo one self driving service. So it's a limited test right now. There's always a human driver inside, but the cars are mostly autonomously driven. Waymo also makes sure all many vans in their fleet come with an installed child seat and are cooled to 72 degrees before they pick you up. This follows the addition of ad free music streaming from Google Play Music for passengers that came in April. Waymo one is being tried by a thousand users in a 100 square mile service area around Phoenix, Arizona. So it's not a lot of folks and not all of them get the free Wi-Fi. That's like a subtest of certain people who've opted opted into early features. So yeah, this is an interesting one. Blair, I know you've you've started to change your tune on whether you want a car to drive you without a human. Yeah, this still makes me a little itchy just because, you know, that's really what you want to do is add the stakes of putting a toddler in a self driving car. I don't know about that, but I definitely used to be very scared of the whole technology in general. But I have a close friend whose husband works at Tesla and I've been able to see some of those test cars. And he's really been able to show me how autopilot works at a Tesla and knowing that at least in that case, you have to have somebody with their hand on the wheel. They're supposed to be paying attention, but that it's essentially just augmented adaptive cruise control with the ability to change lanes and stuff like that. I think that that stuff is really valuable and could save a lot of lives. But yeah, this one, throwing the toddlers in right away in the testing of these self driving cars is a little bit sketchy. Although at this at the same time, it's funny when I read the story, I was like, ah, so many of my friends who have kids who don't use Uber or other ride hailing apps, ride hailing services because nobody's going to have a car seat in the back and there might be a kid involved and especially being where I am now, which is wine country, California, where it's like getting a driver to drive you around is very important, right? You know, because it's like people are drinking wine, your wine tasting and the whole thing. So it's even more of an issue. You hear people talking about all the time, who's going to drive, how are we going to get there, blah, blah, blah. And you know, if there's a kid in the child seat, it is actually it's a feature that is so important for parents that people who don't have kids kind of go, yeah, that's that's a nice perk. The the complimentary Wi-Fi, depending on how good it is, also a nice perk, you know, kind of sit in the back and do you do your job? I wonder, since you're not allowed to put minors in rideshares on their own, if you would be allowed to put a minor in a self-driving car. No, that I would I would think. Yeah, maybe a teen. I don't know. Maybe that's an interesting question, though. It's something that hasn't come up. I don't know that anyone's tried, but it'll come up more and more. People in these things, they're they're subject to so many restrictions about what they can say in certain cases that, yeah, it's way too early to be for sure about whether that that sort of thing is going to to be a concern enough, but it will be someday. And I think what's going on with the story is Waymo is trying to make it attractive for people to want to use this service more by saying, hey, you know what? You don't get in a Waymo, even though it's an automatic car. You don't get a stinky driver. You don't get a car full of cigarette ashes. You get a nice, you know, cool car. It's not going to be super hot. Yeah. So I think they're trying to they're just trying to make it feel like a better option anyway on top of the whole technology. Researchers from Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute found that up to one thousand three hundred twenty five Android apps that were gathering data from devices after people explicitly denied them permission. The apps don't violate the permissions, but find other ways to top access data such as gleaning location information from photos which are approved for access by the app or using Wi-Fi to estimate location and Google Q location information and photos will be hidden. And apps wanting special access to Wi-Fi must also get approval for location information, thirteen apps, access to unprotected files from other apps to look for info like your phone's I am EI number. Yeah, that's the the way they can tell that. Oh, this is the same person who used that app went to this website if they can collect the I am EI number of both places. It's it's an easy way to track you. And this is such a crazy story as far as them not violating policies, right? They're not they're not breaking the policies about what data they're collecting. They're saying, oh, you won't allow us to directly get your location information. Well, you didn't you didn't protect that file over there. And you let that app use it and we can look at that file. We have the rights and the so it's it's loopholes. And thankfully, Google sounds like they're going to try to close those loopholes in Google Q, but something to keep aware of. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure how much to really be upset about that sort of thing. Right? Well, again, you said, you know, it's it's a loophole, right? So it's it's there is no real fault here. You can't point your finger at an app and say, you know, you knew what you were doing and you were, you know, trying to get around stuff. It's like, I mean, those were the measures in place. And for Google to say, all right, well, let's let go back to the drawing board and make some new measures is kind of all you can do at this point. I feel like a lot of the time we're happy when apps will pop in and give us something with our information that that we didn't know we wanted. Like, hey, you said you're on vacation during this time. Do you still want to set a meeting? But we get upset when they take things that we're not anticipating. So it's it's kind of tough to decide when we're OK with them taking our data without us realizing it and when we're not OK with it. Yeah, it would be nice to know when they're taking it. Yes, it was. Mozilla denies claims from the UK Internet Servers Provider Association, or ISPA, that it plans to enable DNS over HTTPS by default in the Firefox browser in the UK. The system DNS over HTTPS encrypts your domain name system requests. That's when you put in a domain name like DailyTechNewShow.com. That's a DNS request. They are not currently encrypted. They could be and that would keep man in the middle of text from happening. Sometimes people can try to intercept your DNS request, hijack it and redirect you to a malicious page. It's not super easy to do, but it can be done. However, DNS over HTTPS makes that attack not happen. It also speeds up browsing. It makes your browsing faster in this case to have an encrypted connection. But the ISPA and the UK government have expressed concern that DNS over HTTPS would also get around ISP blocks on sites banned by the government for copyright infringement or blocked by ISPs at the request of child protection groups or parents because apparently being a man in the middle attack is a easy way to implement a filter or a block. Now, Mozilla said in a statement, quote, a more private DNS would not prevent the use of content filtering or parental controls in the UK. There are ways to do it that don't require you to intercept. Since the ISP is the one getting the DNS request in the first place, the ISP should have a way to be able to filter and block if they need to for whatever reason, Firefox has included support for DNS over HTTPS. If you want to turn it on, it's been in Firefox since November 2018, but it is not enabled by default. I guess my my my initial question of this is it seems like it should be enabled by default because what you're talking about, Tom, are exceptions to the rule and and and very important ones. But this is there a reason that it would not be because most I feel like the majority of people would would hear this story and say, yeah, that makes sense. But they're not going to go looking for that in their in their browser settings. Well, the reason you don't turn it on by default is is that is that there are side effects to it. And well, sure. And it's always better to have people opt in than opt out because if suddenly people opt in and they can't get to certain things or there's there's websites that that act unpredictably because of this, you want to be the kind of users like, oh, it's because I have that DNS over HTTPS. Maybe that's why versus just implementing it, you want to get to a point where implementing it will have very few side effects. And one of those side effects is, you know, having ISP blocks and Mozilla is working with governments on this to say like, hey, we'd like to roll this out. We'd like to make everything more secure. But they want to do it responsibly. That's why they haven't actually turned it on by default yet. Does anybody want it on by default? Well, yeah, I mean, I you're right, you're right. It should be opt in rather than opt out. That's the way to upset the fewest until you're sure that this is definitely a good idea with no side effects. I think that that's the way I look at it anyway. Well, how about we go back to transportation? Yeah, OK, yeah, yeah, all right, everybody. The SI Shinban has an article talking about how Japanese car sharing service, Oryx Auto, found an unusually high number of people who rented a car and logged zero miles of actually driving that car. Other car sharing services have noticed the same oddity. What's going on here? NTT Docomo found that in 2018, one in eight of its car sharing services customers used it for purposes other than transportation. So car sharing service times 24 co conducted a survey asking its users, how are you using your car rentals and for what? Taking naps and making private calls led the way in non driving uses along with eating lunch, using it as a temporary workspace, storing bags when coin lockers were full and recharging cell phones after the 2011 earthquake. That makes sense. Other less frequent uses were watching TV, getting dressed for a Halloween party. That's what they said. Practicing your your rapping or singing or, you know, that's kind of just singing. Practicing English and facial stretches to reduce face size or among some of the other less common uses. Cars cost around 400 yen, which is close to about US $4 for 30 minutes. That's plus mileage. So, you know, not real expensive unless you don't drive it for any miles. Yeah, it's plus mileage, but it's only going to be four bucks for that 30 minutes if you don't take it anywhere. So that's where these companies are getting a little cubby. Yeah. The way they plan the charge is well, it'll be a base for dollars. And then the farther they drive it, the more miles they're putting on it, the more we charge them. And that that's where we make our money. And if people are just getting in and running the engine for air conditioning without taking it anywhere, it's actually costing the company more than they are charging you for it in some cases. Sure. Yeah. I actually have a funny story about this and that is that I've done this. When I was backpacking through Europe in around 2007, I think I got stuck in an airport in Europe for about 18 hours overnight. And I ended up renting a car to sleep in it. And it was it was a similar situation. I think I paid the equivalent of about 25 bucks for the night for the car because I didn't drive it at all. And it was extremely uncomfortable, but it was better than trying to sleep in the middle of the airport. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have to like try to find two seats that don't have a bar set. You know, you've got a little bit more privacy and maybe some control. And yeah, you know, I've never done that. But I can see coming up against a situation, you might be like, this is this is better than any alternative I can think of. Blair, you had unlimited miles, right? On the car. Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't remember much about it, but the only difference between this and your situation is this is an app where you at the drop of a hat can be like, oh, give me this car for the next 30 minutes. And the mileage part is kind of built into the cost recovery process. But also the convenience of like, oh, I'm a block away from the car sharing parking lot. Boom, boom, boom, I can go change in my Halloween dress now. Like that's that's what's going on here. And it's it's I don't know how it's not a majority of the use of these things, but it is does seem to be a significant number of them. There's definitely a cultural thing going on here, too. I know this is this is the story is based upon Japanese users. You know, the idea of needing to like go eat lunch in your car, you know, to me, I'm like, what, you know, it's better in the open air. But in Japan, in many cases, it's it's not it's not done to just kind of eat lunch on the go. You definitely don't eat while walking. And yeah, like you're kind of somewhere where you're supposed to be eating. And so if you're kind of caught in the middle of that, you you may actually be like, I eat lunch and, you know, I need sort of a private space to to to keep things kosher. I was lunch was only one of these. I mean, I think the bigger the bigger part of this is needing private space in a large city. It doesn't even just have to be in Japan in any large city. This this could be the kind of thing that happens. Because Japan, in a weird way, is more set up for this not to happen because they have capsule hotels and short time rentals that aren't CD and and that. So there are other options, but this one's a lot cheaper and more convenient. So there you go. An unexpected public was lined away. Unexpected use of technology, I think. Yeah. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. That'll keep you up to date on the quick. In the meantime, Blair has brought us a story about meat. Meat grown from animal cells rather than harvested from a conscious animal is a real thing that is improving in scale. It's getting close to being available as a consumer product, just like the plant based burgers like like Beyond Burger have now taken over in the consumer space. This meat grown from animal cells is kind of the next wave. It promises to let us enjoy meat without the ethical, environmental and health concerns associated with livestock production. But a study published in the journal's Frontier in Nutrition tested some public perception of different labels for this kind of food to find out just how accepting we would be. Blair, what did what did they find? Well, we know that meat is a huge impact on environmental issues in general and extinction, extinction possibilities, climate change, all that good stuff, bad stuff. But what they found was something pretty similar to when genetically modified foods were first hitting the market, which is depending on how you talk about it, it could sound like a really good thing or really bad thing that can make people want to eat it or stay way away from it. So the GM foods, when they first showed up, people started calling them Franken foods, maybe they thought it was pretty funny or colorful or fun reporting, but ultimately it made people terrified of the food. And something similar is happening here. So this research from University of Portland looked at about four hundred and eighty US adults. It was a pretty broad representative covering age, gender, geographic distribution and diet. Only eighty eight percent of them were meat eaters, so they were also talking to vegetarians and they wanted to see how they responded to cultured meat framed in the following ways. A, as an innovation, which benefits society. B, as a high tech development or C, as basically just like normal meat. And what they found was that when you brought technology into the conversation, people had more negative attitudes towards the concept and were less likely to consume it. They were about 14 percent less likely to try it compared to when talking about social benefits or when they called it the same as meat. And even before they started these framed conversations, people across all four hundred and eighty participants, the most common words that they used to respond to a conversation about this lab cultured meat were artificial and science. And this might be because in general, in the news media, we see when people start talking about these lab, quote, unquote, created meat, they show usually a piece of meat in a Petri dish. And so that is kind of the narrative that we usually get. But when cultured meat is ready, it won't come out of a laboratory. It'll come out of a food processing plant, just like some of the food you may want to think about that way, like your chicken nuggets. So it actually won't be that different from the food that you're eating now. But this is just proof that the way that we talk about technology and the way we talk about solutions to environmental problems can have a huge impact on people's likelihood to adopt that new technology. So instead of pens of living animals that are then slaughtered and processed into your meat, you will have pens of growing cells that will then be harvested, I guess is the word, and turned into the meat that you buy. Yeah. And there's a huge amount of benefits to that. It creates, it uses less water, it uses less energy. If you think about trophic levels in nature, one acre used to make meat and one acre used to make corn. The corn is going to feed 10 times as many people. So in terms of worldwide hunger issues, that's going to help. There's less carbon dioxide output, all that good stuff. But also there's less chance for contamination. You're less likely to get sick for meat made this way. So there's a huge amount of benefits there. But ultimately it sounds like people are just afraid of science getting their fingers in their food, which is part of the whole narrative. I feel like the selling point of your E. coli. Oh, we lost you there, Sarah. You froze up on us, but when you come back. Yeah, you froze up on us at E. coli. Sorry about that. Yeah. I think that the selling point of being physically safer, you know, the opportunity for E. coli to spread, you know, based on bad meat, because the meat is being produced in a lab, is a selling point for a lot of people who otherwise are turned off by this idea. Yeah, I think it's interesting that that that was brought in at this point. But framing is so odd and social science in general is so interesting because things that we kind of on the inside or track of an issue think will be compelling, aren't always compelling to the average person. So like when we talk about framing, the issue of climate change, talking about a climate crisis seems very compelling to people who are interested in the environment and animals, and this is their every day. But if you talk to an average person, that actually turns them off. But if you talk about responsibly managing resources for future generations, that turns them on and is more likely to create behavior change. So this is one of those situations where I think to us who are down with the development of science and technology for the betterment of society, both feet fully in those sorts of things get us really excited. But to the average person, it sounds like it's likely to polarize them and make them think about Petri dish meat. And they don't they don't want it just gives them the X, I think. Ultimately, there's a lot of factors that play. One is clickbait, right? Reporting agencies want something flashy headline. So saying lab grown meat in a Petri dish that gets people to click and anything that fosters fear gets people to click. And then you also have just a backlash against technology. So if it's pitched to technology, people like, yeah, technology has done a lot of bad things lately. This must be another one of those. So having the ability to report on it in a way that makes people accept it on its merits is important. But also being able to report on it in a way that if there is a downside that's found, you can report on it responsibly without it being exaggerated and blown out of proportion as well. Because I could see somebody looking at this and saying, hey, this is just telling us to spin this as positive. What are they trying to hide? And in fact, the the answer is nothing. There isn't anything to hide yet. This seems like a pretty good way to do it. And we didn't even get into the ethical situation of like, hey, if you don't eat meat now, would you eat this? Yeah. And I'm one of those people. And I honestly don't know. I'm not sure. But I do think it's ironic that a lot of people out there maybe have no idea how their current meat is made. And if you showed them that, they'd probably be grossed out and turned off. But if you start talking about this, they'll definitely be grossed out and turned off. There's kind of a disconnect there that if they knew how their chicken mcnugget was made, they might actually prefer some lab meat. If you've got a lab or culture story or any other tech story, you can submit it to our subreddit and be part of the conversation. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook. We've got a group, facebook.com, slash groups, slash Daily Tech News Show. And now our buddy Nick Langson has some notes on the latest in 5G service in the UK. Thanks, guys. This week we got some unexpected news. One of the biggest mobile carriers in the UK switched on its nationwide 5G mobile network, and from this week we'll sell an unlimited data package. No speed limits, no usage limits, and you can even tether your other devices to it. It blew the other operator we have here that already offered 5G out of the water in terms of pure value for money. So if you want to hear how 5G competition is heating up on this side of the pond, do check out episode one, seven, five of text message by going to UKtechshow.com. Oh, and the late at happy 4th of July to all of you on the other side of the pond. Well, thank you, Nate. Nice. Should we check out the mail bag real quick? Let's do it. Princess Willie wrote in about our conversation last week on Uber Eats, being able to, letting you be able to order food ahead of time and then go somewhere and eat it. Willie says, I used to do exactly what Uber Eats is offering. When I worked next to a few restaurants and got 30 minute lunch break, I would commonly call the restaurant, place my order for a certain time, then sit down and have a nice lunch before heading back to work. Uber makes so much more sense because then I wouldn't even have to call. Sometimes cutting out five minutes of my time means a lot. Honestly, since I started doing that for work, I have to call the other restaurants a few times and placed orders before showing up. So it's just so much more convenient. Excellent. Thank you, Princess Willie and everybody who keeps us informed with their perspectives at feedbackanddailytechnewshow.com. Absolutely. And thanks also to Blair, Bazdrich, thank you so much for being with us today. It was such a pleasure. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Absolutely. I had so much fun today. Thanks for having me. You can check out Twist This Week in Science at twist.org. We record live every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time. You can go to twist.org slash live to watch us there. You can also check out our YouTube or find us on iTunes this week in science. You can also follow me on Twitter. I am at Blair's Menagerie. You'll find pictures of animals musings about animal science and occasionally just what I'm up to. Excellent. Go check it out, folks. And don't forget our best way of being supported is by Patreon, patreon.com. slash dtns. You can get an ad free RSS feed. You can get special episodes from me. Somebody called my editor's desk last Friday. The best one I've done yet. Do you agree? I don't know. You have to be a patron to find out. Also, this coming editor's desk is going to be all Canadian. Actually, a few other Americans in there, but it was recorded entirely in Hamilton, Ontario, so you might want to check that out at patreon.com slash D T N S. If you have feedback for us, we'd love to hear it. 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