 Coming up on DTNS, a better robot for flipping burgers, a possible solution to ads on the internet, and the tech that helps you not even need to be in an office. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the dark Finnish forests, I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were talking a lot about dentistry on today's Good Day internet, some of the tech involved in dentistry, some of the things that are not involved in tech and dentistry. But we always have fun, and we always talk about lots of good stuff on Good Day internet, get the whole show as a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Tesla has offered its customers in China free supercharging until the coronavirus situation is resolved. China has restricted transportation in large parts of the country in order to impede the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 100 people at this point. The idea is to make it easier for those who do need to move around the country, being able to do so without having to expose themselves to other people unnecessarily. What if you are a carrier though? The UK international money transfer service from TravelX is fully operational as of Tuesday. The service went offline almost a month ago because of a ransomware attack. TravelX has not disclosed whether it paid money to attackers. Facebook announced a set of recommended bylaws for that proposed independent oversight board, including a 90 day process for hearing appeals, a requirement that one board member from the region involved be on the panel that hears the appeal, and all decisions must be published in 18 different languages. The board will be used to make decisions about content moderation. Facebook said, but has narrowed down its list of prospective board members to a few dozen and expects to make formal offers to those prospective board members in the coming months with the goal of starting hearings this summer. New data from Gartner estimates that smartphone sales dropped 2% in 2019, the first drop since Gartner broke out smartphones as a separate category 11 years ago. Gartner forecast sales will rise 3% worldwide in 2020, partly due to 5G rollouts. Apple reported earnings per share of $4.55 on revenue of $88.5 billion. So it looks like a decent quarter. We'll get more details as the earnings report becomes fully available and Tim Cook comments on it on the earnings column. We'll talk about all that on tomorrow's Daily Tech News show. Let's start this show by talking a little bit about a new Facebook tool. Amazing, they never stopped coming. Facebook made its off Facebook activity tool available to all 2 billion plus members. It shows 180 days of data Facebook collects from code used by non Facebook sites to serve ads or offer Facebook interactivity such as likes or embedded posts. You can see how Facebook received information such as whether you logged in using Facebook or did a search, et cetera. And you can disconnect the third party from accessing your Facebook data with a clear history button, though any data is has already collected would not be affected. It also isn't the setting that will stop the third party from collecting data in the future. That's in a different section of settings. Over the next few months, sorry, over the next two weeks Facebook also plans to prompt all users to review those settings in the privacy checkup tool. It's that simple. Yeah, right? I mean, just review them, you'll be fine. Yeah, I mean, this is of interest, I think, because if you don't realize who's getting your data it might be surprising to look at this and see like, oh, that site gets my data because if you're logged into Facebook and let's say they have an embedded piece of content like button or you forgot that you use Facebook to log into that and you haven't logged in for a while but that means that they're still able to collect data. You might wanna know that. Clearing the data from the history means they can't go back and get it after that but they may have already obtained it and so you would have to go to the individual sites themselves to get them to get rid of that data. So it's not a perfect solution, but I think it's instructive. It is not the be all end all of protecting your privacy and it certainly isn't the only thing you would need to do on Facebook if you did want to purge all of your private data and disconnect third parties from seeing it. It's an interesting one because this is, as mentioned in the story, not the first tool that Facebook is giving you to manage your data. As you mentioned, it's not ideal but we're starting to have a pretty comprehensive set of tools to manage how you use Facebook. Anything I think beyond that would be to just not use Facebook which is also an option available to you. It is a little bit convoluted but I went and did the Facebook activity tool thing and as always when I do any of those things I should know better, but I was shocked at how many and which websites had information on me through the Facebook system. I only had four for this month. I was actually surprised, that was for you. But honestly, we've all been there. It's like you're kind of in a hurry and you're like, Facebook or Google login and I'll just pick Facebook type thing. I mean, I have done that so many times to the point where it's like, I did the same thing as you Patrick and I was like, wow, there are a lot of platforms that have my information and it's limited. I mean, they don't know where I am necessarily or what I'm doing day to day but they have information that they don't need to have and that it is powerful for me to know that. I wonder how much we talk about this sort of stuff all the time. How much of the greater Facebook population will understand that this tool exists and take advantage of this tool? Okay. UK ministers on the National Security Council agreed that the National Cyber Security Center should issue guidance that high risk vendors should be excluded from the core of telecom operations and no high risk vendor should make up more than 35% of the edge access network. For example, phone masks. In addition, high risk vendors would be barred from sensitive locations like nuclear sites and military bases as well as any critical national infrastructure. The NCSC doesn't keep an exhaustive list of high risk vendors but Huawei is considered one of them. Huawei has more than 35% of the equipment in UK access networks. Telcos have three years to modify their implementations to reach the recommended levels and the guidance has been issued to telecoms but parliament will need to enact legislation to implement the guidance as law. A little bit of a technicality there. I mean, it will probably be enacted as law although there are some PMs even in the conservative party saying that they shouldn't be allowing Huawei any access. So there may be a little bit of a fight there but people expect this to become the law. The Telcos are on board to follow it and it's a compromise. The United States would like the United Kingdom to just not use Huawei at all and they're expressing disappointment. The UK is saying, okay, there's questions enough about Huawei even though we haven't seen any actual evidence that we feel like we'll err on the safe side and keep it out of critical systems but it is cheap enough and it's already implemented widely enough that it would probably slow down implementation of 5G more than we're willing to accept. So we'll allow it in these cases at this level. It seems like a strange way to go about it. I understand why they're doing it like that but I guess these are high risk but not actually determined to be risky. It seems like high risk should not be used at all if it's labeled as high risk but barring that it seems like a reasonable, I don't know if it's reasonable to have 35% of your network using high risk stuff. I don't know, it seems like if I was given the choice of having anything I use be 35% high risk or 100% non-high risk, I probably would want to choose non-high risk. So still this whole thing is mostly problematic because it's about Huawei for which we still don't have super strong confidence that they are indeed high risk, just suspicion and that makes all of it weird including I think this setup of the rule. Yeah, a quick, when you put it like that, it makes sense, right? Everybody's like, why would you have any high risk equipment? The equipment is not high risk. The vendor is high risk. They have not found any evidence that the equipment is even risky at all. What they're saying is when you attach it to a phone mast, it's pretty dumb. All it does is send the data on. There is very little that could go wrong there under current implementation. So we're okay there, but even there, we're gonna limit it to 35% of the market just to be on the safe side. In the central core, we don't know that it could do anything wrong, but that is where if there was a back door, they could actually get hold of data. So there, we're gonna say none at all. Yeah, I still think it's fishy. It's fishy. Sure, sure, but it's not as simple as like it's all high risk all the time. And I think it's important to realize that the phone mast stuff, maybe in the future, they'll be pushing out more control to the edge and it will become high risk. And that's a valid criticism that plays into your concern, Patrick. But right now that stuff's pretty dumb. And so they're saying, well, it's not, even if there is this back door that we haven't found any evidence of, it couldn't do anything at the edge. So that's why they... Yeah, I think the point I'm trying to make is that if this wasn't Huawei specifically with all of these specific issues the world is having with Huawei, I'm not sure the rule would have been put together in that way, maybe it would have, but... How about this UK government proposal for security requirements for internet of things and smart devices? The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has worked with the UK National Cyber Security Center, security experts, product manufacturers and retailers on a proposed law that if passed would require all device passwords on IoT and smart devices to be unique and not resettable to a non-unique setting. So in other words, you'd have a password for your device that wouldn't work on any other device and you couldn't reset it to factory settings and make it a password that everybody knew about. That is not the case in a lot of IoT devices right now. Device makers would also be required to provide a public point of contact for people to report vulnerabilities and they would be required to act on them in a timely manner if they're real. And at the point of sale, whether it's online or in person, manufacturers would have to state somewhere the minimum amount of time they will provide security updates for the product and they'd have to stick to that. Products not following these rules would be banned from sale in the UK under this law. The Department said it hopes it introduces legislation as soon as possible. However, it didn't commit to a timetable. So that's not a good sign. It means it might be a couple of years before this thing actually becomes law. Europe and the United States are also working on their own legislation to secure IoT devices. Doubts on whether this is actually going to get passed by parliament in a timely manner aside, I like these laws. Please, everybody make this the law everywhere for IoT. It's a good start. Yeah, absolutely. I was trying to pick this apart earlier and be like, well, why would this be a bad idea? None of this is a bad idea. This is all a good idea. The fact that you have a bunch of different companies with a bunch of different implementations of IoT devices and software as well, that's the problem. It's a little bit of a mess, but I think that this is going in the right direction. There's another thing. I was on this weekend tech yesterday or the day before time flies. And I came to a realization before we even got to this story, we should have a time of support on all consumer devices, at the very least IoT devices, but maybe even phones to inform the public of how long a manufacturer is going to support with security patches, at least the device you buy on phones. It would make for a very strong purchasing decision factor if you knew that one manufacturer would support it for five years and another one for two or three. That is also something as this rule slash law, which I think would be very beneficial. All right, The Verge has an article about a new service called scroll that removes ad from participating websites for $5 a month. Scroll has partnered with sites like Buzzfeed News, The Atlantic, Vox and Gizmodo to set a cookie that tells the sites not to show ads on desktop and mobile. The tool allows for some native ads like internal promotions, referral links and some basic analytics, but most all ads will be gone. Scroll keeps $1.5, $1.50, $1.5 of the monthly fee and splits the rest up based on what participating sites you visit. You can see what sites got how much when logged into Scroll's site. Yeah, so this is a fairly ingenious way of approaching both the problem of I don't wanna be tracked. Can I just pay you not to track me? And publishers saying, yeah, but if we don't have ads, we don't make money. This is a very elegant solution. They claim they're paying the companies that are participating more than they would have made off the eyeballs had these people gotten ads. I don't know if that's sustainable if they get more and more publishers involved in this or not, maybe they might have to raise their price, but it seems believable for now. And the benefit to me as a consumer is I don't have to see ads. I get a faster loading site. The tracking is minimal. It's not eliminated. There's some analytics in there, but that tracking is minimized and it doesn't need to be shared because I'm not an eyeball that's on ad. So it doesn't need to go to a third party. And we're kind of on that publisher side of this where people be like, I don't know, there are plenty of ad blockers that I don't have to pay for kind of thing. But if you understand the money making situation that a lot of publishers are going through and the fact that this is just sort of a part of life, it does kind of make sense to be like, okay, well, if there's an elegant solution for getting rid of stuff that you don't like on a particular website, five bucks a month, not sure that that's the right price seems kind of high to me, but it's certainly an elegant solution for somebody who doesn't want to take away money from publishers and journalists that they care about. And I don't want to talk about those I used to. Oh, sorry, Patrick, go ahead. It's a five bucks a month is a high price if you want ads off of one site, if they managed to spread this enough and it represents a significant portion of the websites you enjoy, then I think it might be worthwhile. And a lot of people would like to support these sites while removing the ads is there just isn't a system that has wide enough adoption for this to be feasible. That one might be that. It's been a while since I've run into the multiple sites saying, oh, you seem to be running an ad blocker because I have privacy, like, you know, privacy badger on or something, but it would help with those too. And it's a really elegant solution that says, look, we're just going to set a cookie. So you don't need an app. You don't need some, you know, like difficult, you don't need to use a whole new browser. There are, if you're using Safari on mobile, I think you have to add an extension. There are a couple of hoops you have to jump through, but for the most part, this is a very elegant way of doing it. And it's saying like, hey, you know, this company, The Verge may not be overdoing it in their ad setting, but if you want to get rid of ads, here's a way to do it and make sure that you're still supporting that show or that site, right? I mean, I think that's the key here is like, hey, they have to make their money some way. If you would like to encourage them not to make it off ads, here's an option for you. I think that's positive. I also want to thank CDNDude74 who threw the story into Discord today in our DTNS Discord, and that's where I saw it first. Thanks, man. Thank you. Let's talk about burgers. Miso Robotics has a new design for its Flippy Robot. We've talked about Flippy in the past that can fry burgers and prepare french fries. Flippy Robotics currently sit on the floor in our use in Dodger Stadium in LA and Chase Stadium in Phoenix, as well as certain restaurants from Miso Robotics Investor Cali Group. The new design of the Flippy Robot hangs over the grill or a fryer, which may boost adoption as it won't take up floor space, and Miso says we'll also operate more efficiently. Miso Robotics offers Flippy for free, charging based on usage, and the new design will be certified and available for kitchens in the second half of the year. This is great. You look in design. Yeah, don't you think? Kind of. Yeah, and I think it might be one of the very few robots taking our jobs that people don't complain about. Right, right. Because yeah, I don't think, I mean, I'm sure there are gonna be some fast food workers. To that point, Patrick, they're having a problem staffing some of these. Like the problem here is not that they have, you know, it would take someone's job. It's that they can't find people to staff some of these fast food restaurants. It's one of those weird sectors where there is an employment shortage. So it's going to help companies in that way too. Everybody wins. Including the burgers. Rogers tried to see this, and every time he goes to a location that has one, it's not on though. But apparently it hasn't worked. I don't know if it requires some sort of oversight like a person needs to watch it work, but I've never seen it on. I'm trying to remember the name of the restaurant Pasadena that has one, but it's always off, although the restaurant itself is functioning. Yeah, and it's the kind of thing that can improve efficiency. Usually what happens with locations, if they're fully staffed and they add these is they don't get rid of people. They move them on to customer service that generally seems to be the case anyway. If you work at a place that isn't like that, then your boss is pretty crappy and not doing a good job of business in my opinion. But I think this is interesting that Miso Robotics is actually making this work in a sector where a lot of other people have tried this and gone out of business. So we'll keep an eye on them. Hey, folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. OursTechnica is running a series called The Future of Work, and an article in that series to kick it off from OursTechnica editor Lee Hutchinson describes how OursTechnica itself functions without a physical office. 30 staff members for OursTechnica work in locations across all U.S. time zones and in multiple locations around the world. And Ours has operated that way for 20 years, more than 20 years, they've been around since 1998. There is technically a mailbox for OursTechnica at Condonast headquarters, which owns them, has owned them since 2008 in New York City. But most of the people never go there or if they do, it's very rare. Now, this is a great article and I highly recommend you read it if you're interested in this topic at all. But one of the things that caught me was the parallel between how Ours does this, how we do Daily Tech News show, and how so many people have been saying, well, I think you need to be in the same office. And I entirely agree that there are benefits to being physically present together in the same office. But I'm very curious how OursTechnica overcame this. The tools they list as being essential are part of this, but they also say you need the right kind of people. Not everybody is built to work away from everybody else. And you need to follow some principles to make this work for you as someone who works from home. So I think those are important to keep in mind, but I know you wanna hear about the tools. They use G Suite for email. They're like, that's a reliable cross-platform, asymmetric on-the-record way of communicating. They use Google Sheets for tracking a lot of work because it's collaborative, although they don't require it. Apparently the reviews editor uses Trello. They use Slack to brainstorm. We do that too here at DTNS. They workshop their story ideas and their headlines, ask each other for help, do brainstorming. That's something they used to use IRC for until about five years ago. They have a Polycom VoIP phone with three-digit extensions that they can dial through and talk to each other through OnSIP, as well as a conference bridge to dial in for conferences with each other or with people from outside the company. They use WordPress as the CMS, coupled with PHP BB forums for commentary on those pages. They use Duo for their two-factor authentication and require it on all accounts. They use something called Parsley, parse.ly for analytics, for being able to just see referrals in social media and that embeds when they look at ours, technica.com, they can actually see the Parsley analytics laid out so they can tell if stories are doing as well as they expected and adjust. They don't do video check. They say it just didn't work. The one time they tried it, it just ended up with people putting on silly hats and most of the people couldn't even make it work. So this is interesting because we use most of these tools, obviously email, we use Google Docs, Google Sheets for our rundown preparations. We use Slack. We use Discord and Skype for our voice chatting, but we use WordPress ourselves. I just found this fascinating about the tools they use but also some of the challenges to working from home. Some of the ways they deal with the fact that they're not present with each other. Patrick, what did you think of this? Yeah, it was, I definitely can relate very much. I understand that there are some people who need an office. I've met many of them. I personally, I'm very happy to be alone in my house to work. And there's a part of it is that you can decide when and how to interact with others. So for someone who's maybe a little bit anti-social like me, it works well. The never seeing anyone, which is one of the challenges that they talk about is possibly problematic, especially for me again, since I live in the middle of the forest now. There are literally days when I don't go out of my house and see nothing, but maybe a couple of deer running by the window. I think that means you need to have a specific kind of personality to be able to do that. We do have a dedicated workspace at home, which is good. The routine that they also talk about, you need to set a routine for yourself is, I think, important because if you don't, then you end up always working all the time. And that's part of it as well. Overall, I think things have gotten a lot more possible. I know ours has been doing it for a long time. I think in the past five years, we've gotten more tools that make it or tools have gotten good enough that mean it's really very easy to do for people. I don't know if you guys are happy with the situation or if you would like to, I don't know, have be close enough to be in an office twice a week or something like that. I mean, there were, and this article, honestly, if you're a freelancer or maybe thinking about freelancing, I mean, it is a great way to kind of drill into all of the different ways that a successful company makes this work. And so many of those tools, I was like, yep, we do that. Yep, we do that. Or I do that with this person or this other person on various projects. One thing stuck out to me and that was the whole we need to hear each other's voices. Now, we're on the show right now. We're talking to each other and we're doing the show, but we're in job mode. The collaborative efforts of not being in the same room as everybody because we're all on opposite sides of the world at this point. But there is something about that that I think is really important. And I'm not sure I would have said that a couple of years ago. I have grown to kind of rely on that to feel closer to the people that I'm working with. And I think that's really important. And that's something that a lot of, you know, like a, I don't know, a platform like Slack. Slack does lots of stuff, but we still use Discord to talk to each other at noon every day to talk about the show before we do the show just to make sure everybody's on the same page and everybody's doing okay. Yeah, and backing you up on the routine thing, Patrick, having your boundaries set is very important when you're in the same place living that you work so that you don't feel like you're just always at work or when you're working, you're always at home. Part of that is setting a routine that says, oh, I get dressed. It doesn't have to be formal, but I get dressed and I go to a place, I do my work and at a certain time I stop. And all of us work after hours sometimes, but that should be the goal. Yeah, the last thing I wanna mention is the Polycom, the VOIP thing, the three digit extension is awesome. I would love if there was a Slack for work, phone, voice type tool that became very easy to use and very popular so that when I have a question, I can actually push three buttons and get Tom on the phone because nowadays it's like, oh, is he on Slack? Is he, should I call? Should I send a text on Twitter? So yeah, that's it. No, knowing how to communicate is a huge part of this as well. I think that's something that I'm still trying to crack, like you said, but I used to be a skeptical about having to have a dedicated space that is in my house separate for work and since I started making myself do that, it really, really has made things better. I can't say enough how different it is than when I used to work in my old place. I used to work upstairs until showtime and then go downstairs for the show. Now I do all the work in the same room as I do the show and it really does make a difference. It's your office. Yeah. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. We know a lot of you are freelancers as well. You can submit stories and vote on others that you think we should care about at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord voice or text, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Brian had some thoughts on Netflix subscriber numbers in the US versus in other countries. We talked about this the other day. Brian says, for a country where the internet started, he's talking about the US, we have the weakest structure compared to other countries. Unless you're in a metro area, you're most likely suffering bandwidth, throughput issues and limits or limits. I live in an area that we can't get cable or fiber. DSL is not available. That leaves us with either mobile or satellite. Mobile suffers in the evening as others get home or they're using the internet as well. Satellite is expensive and goes out in inclement weather. Add the fact that these last two have limits on their bandwidth and streaming is just not a viable option. This is a case where the communication industry is causing others to suffer because of the stranglehold they have over who and who doesn't have good connectivity. Yeah, well, first of all, I have such a hard time dealing with these kinds of complaints because for Brian, this is a very real problem. Unfortunately, the numbers are that it is not a problem for as many other people. And if it were, you wouldn't see Netflix at 100 plus million subscribers in the United States. The United States, if Brian, if you didn't realize this from our story, Netflix doesn't have lower subscribers than other countries. It smashes apart the numbers in other countries. More than half of Netflix's subscribers are in the United States. It's just growing faster in those other countries, mostly because it hasn't been there as long and its catalog isn't as good there. The problem in the US is that the growth is slowing as we reach the number of people that want Netflix. And that's where Brian may be right, even though it's a minority of people that have these outage problems. And again, I don't mean to minimize them. If you're one of those people that is in an area that doesn't have a choice, it sucks. And it may be slowing down Netflix as it tries to expand more than Netflix expected. Maybe they're not taking that into account. So that is a good point. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Tim Ashman, Philip Shane, and Jeffrey Zilx. Also thanks to Patrick Beja, besides hanging out with Deer in the Woods. What's been going on in your worlds? You know what? Just go check out my Twitter account, not Patrick. You'll find everything there. Or if you like websites, frenchspin.com, you'll see my gaming show and my international discussions slash politics slash news show that's at frenchspin.com. Excellent. Also folks, we have new Patreon reward merchandise to celebrate six years of DTNS. If you sign up right now and you get on your credit, the February charge, which is coming up on February 1st, that will be one month towards getting a DTNS mug or a shirt or a sticker or a poster. Depends on what level you sign up on. But if you're already signed up, you've already got a month credit from January underway. I believe that's how it works. Once you get three months in a row though, then you get the stuff. Get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We are also live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.