 Coming up on DTNS AI may rule the future of insurance adjusters, what the TikTok and WeChat bands mean in the United States and whether a ransomware attack has killed some. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 18, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland Ohio. I'm Len Peralta. Sorry, Len from a studio Colorado. I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty. Shannon and I were just comparing our foldable phones on Good Day Internet. We were also talking about grammar rules with Sarah. If you want that story, including some reminiscence about tech TV, you got to get Good Day Internet to become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple will open its online store in India, September 23 at apple.com slash I n bringing direct sales to the country for the first time. The store will be available in English and Hindi and physical retail stores are on the way as well. Cloud Flare announced a joint effort with the Internet Archive to share Cloud Flare's hostname and URLs with the Internet Archive's way back machine. So websites can be automatically archived. Cloud Flare is always online service, which stores a static version of sites to use in case of downtime will store pages in the way back machine and draw on the archive when needed. Cloud Flare users will need to opt in for that to happen. The Chinese version of TikTok is called Duyen and it has a tough rival. Kwaishu reports its short video service had 500 million e-commerce orders in August. Kwaishu reported 200 million 300 million daily active users, which means that users made on average at least one order. By the way, that's why Walmart wants in on this TikTok thing is there is a burgeoning e-commerce aspect to it. Kwaishu seems to have caught on in small towns and rural regions in China because its algorithm did not favor polished content from influencers and early e-commerce efforts have focused on farm goods like produce, which has made it more popular in urban areas where they don't get as good a produce. A bug in iOS 14 means that a new function will change your default at email and browser apps to reset to Apple software if you reboot your phone. How convenient. A Google Chrome engineer acknowledged the bug on Twitter but didn't mention any plans from Apple for a fix. IBM and Pro-Mare have launched an AI enabled robotic research ship called the Mayflower Autonomous Ship or MAS for short. The ship departed from Plymouth, England with no humans on board for six months of sea trials and research missions. On April 19th, 2021, it will attempt to cross the Atlantic following a similar route to the Mayflower of 1620. You can follow the autonomous ship's progress over at MAS400.com. According to documents obtained by Bloomberg, the European Union is considering a law that will prevent mobile device manufacturers from limiting access to embedded NFC chips in smartphones and other devices. In June, the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation into whether Apple unfairly blocks competitors from using NFC payments on its platforms. And even though it's not really technology, we have been updating you on vaccine progress because we all have an interest in it. Here's the latest. Pfizer says it believes it may have evidence that its vaccine is effective by the end of October. This would be before its phase three trial is totally finished, but it would be enough evidence to seek emergency use from US regulators. Moderna says it may have similar evidence in November. The US Department of Defense and the Centers for Disease Control have plans to start distribution of vaccines within 24 hours of regulatory authorization. Now emergency use wouldn't allow widespread use, but the first vaccines could go to healthcare and other essential workers. And then once it's approved for wide use begins the slow process of vaccinating all 330 million in the US and of course billions in the rest of the world. Although many vaccines are already being manufactured, CDC director Robert Redfield told a US congressional hearing Wednesday that vaccines may not be widely available to everyone in the United States until the second or third quarter of next year. Alright, let's talk about a somewhat disturbing story. German police have begun a murder investigation into the death of a female patient in Dusseldorf, who was about to undergo critical care, probably surgery, but they have very strict laws about what they can say. Some kind of critical care when the hospitals in systems in Dusseldorf were disabled by a ransomware attack on September 9th. The woman had to be transferred to a hospital 30 kilometers away for that procedure to happen because the equipment they were going to use wasn't available because of the ransomware, and she did not survive. Attackers of the hospital took advantage of a vulnerability in VPN software from Citrix. Citrix released a patch for a VPN vulnerability on January 19th. I was not able to verify that it was the same vulnerability, but it seems likely. So it could be that this could have been patched. The attack was reportedly meant for a nearby university as well. And attackers gave the hospital the decryption keys as soon as they realized they had accidentally shut down the hospital, but it was too late. If the investigation determines that the delay in care was responsible for her death, there could be other reasons why she died. She might have died anyway. They're going to look into that and try to determine was the delay in care the key thing that was responsible for her death, then the ransomware attack may be treated as negligent homicide. And if so, it would be the first ever death linked to a cyber attack. Shannon, this is a huge deal in the security world. It really is. We had heard earlier this year from one of the hacker groups that was doing a lot of ransomware attacks. They specifically came out, I believe it was on Twitter and said, we are not going to attack any hospitals, which is kind of an ethical code that you will often see with hacker groups is that they don't want to affect the actual lives of people in hospitals. They don't want to hurt anyone physically. What they do want to do is take money from people that they don't agree with, and that's generally the kind of attacks that you will see. So hearing that they say that they accidentally hit this hospital, and it may not have necessarily been the target could have some truth to it. But it's still the first time that we are seeing somebody that had potentially lost their life because of a ransomware attack. And that's a really, really big problem. Now I was looking at the Citrix vulnerability that you had linked to. And one of the things I was wondering is if they were using a VPN vulnerability, couldn't they tell based on what kind of information they saw that this is a hospital? Because depending on what kind of infrastructure you're trying to hit, you're going to be able to see different data from the attacker standpoint. And it doesn't really delve into the specifics of what an attacker can do other than just saying that they could remotely execute code on the gateway without needing a login. So I don't know if they could have been able to tell if it was a hospital or not. Or maybe this was just some kind of faulty mistake on an attacker's part. But either way, it shouldn't have happened. Would it have been possible for them to be trying to implant malware to exploit the vulnerability and it accidentally got forwarded to someone at the hospital instead of someone at the university, maybe somebody works in both places, which happens quite often? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like there's always the potential of some kind of vulnerability happening because of like, bring your own devices. Yeah, for example, if somebody works at the hospital, they got attacked at the university, they brought their own device into the network at the hospital that could have infected the hospital as well. So we're not really exactly sure. And I do hope that this investigation that they're implementing into this woman's death does give us some findings and give us some information about who was at fault, because I want to know, like I want to know if this was the same attackers that earlier this year on Twitter said that they weren't going to attack hospitals. I want to know if this is another group. No matter what it is, it's malicious. And this is a really, really big problem, especially when even even black hat hackers often have a moral code, they have ethics that they stand by, they have the hackers manifesto if we really want to go like historical. And if they are not following in those same beliefs of, you know, we are only going to attack certain kinds of infrastructure industries, then there's no ethical standard for hackers to really live by. Yeah, this is going to have an impact no matter what if they find out if they determine that she would have died anyway, it's still going to have an impact just because of the headlines and because it started a conversation. If, however, they find out that the delay was key to her death and they go after these attackers for negligent homicide, it will have an even bigger impact and and cause a lot of conversations about, you know, what is an ethical cyber attack if you can't really control where your gun is pointed, which you know, could be the case here is like we didn't mean to hit the hospital, but it's just the nature of attacks that you can't always control where they end up. Yeah, I mean, from what I understand, Düsseldorf University and the University Hospital are next to each other. Yeah. Geographically. So it may have been like, all right, we're just, you know, we're just it's a whole, you know, certain area that we're attacking. But man, you know, the whole wish she could have died anyway, or she would have died anyway and are attacked mean much. That is a pretty bad argument. You know, it's that that's a tough one. Well, all right, moving on to something else, a little bit more curious. Yes, give us something else. All right, an app distribution agreement between Roku and NBC Universal expired at the end of August. All right. So Roku offered to grant an extension to allow NBC's existing apps to continue to operate under the old terms, while the two companies negotiate on the new Peacock service, NBC's Peacock service. Thursday, NBC Universal notified Roku, it wouldn't take advantage of the extensions and would pull its TV everywhere apps from the Roku store this weekend. Those are apps that give streaming access to cable subscribers of channels like NBC sports, sci fi and others. The dispute regarding Peacock is over ad inventory. Roku usually requires 30 percent of ad inventory to distribute apps for free, but says it had offered a lower split for Peacock. And BC says Roku keeps adding other provisions to their agreement. So yeah, this is a negotiation fight. It'll be interesting to see if the extra pressure of maybe having these apps disappear from Roku brings focuses the minds and brings them to an agreement. All the public statements about this are very emotional, very accusatory, like they're trying to harm consumers is what each of them are saying about the other. But well, consumers are who are being harmed. Well, sure. But this is a very cold blooded negotiation behind the scenes. I mean, in public, they want the consumers to get mad at the other side to put pressure on them. You if you get mad at one or the others of these, you are being manipulated for the purposes of getting. What's really here is the deals over and Roku said, all right, we'll soften our position. You can keep your you can keep your apps on here. While while we figure out this peacock thing and NBC said, no, the deal's over and under the deal, we aren't allowed to to have our apps working under the terms that we want. So, you know, why would we why would we continue to provide them have a deal? We don't have permission to have these apps on here. So yeah, it's nobody's right here, I guess is my thing like this is just two companies trying to see which one will blink first. Well, we were talking a little bit in our pre show meeting about this. It's like, does NBC Universal think that Roku is just not a big enough player to care and is like, ask or it or do they think they're such a big player that they're like, we're going to make a big fuss right now and upset people and force Roku's hands. Yeah, what happens when the consumer calls the support line? Who are they mad at? Are they at their cable company? Probably the prime man at the cable company has nothing to do with this. Because they're like everywhere is gone. Logging in with my spectrum account. And it doesn't work because the app's gone. What happened? Yeah, I don't know. As a Roku user who keeps on losing access to all these really cool apps. I just want everybody to get along like the Care Bears. Yeah, I'm just tired of this drama. Yeah, well, moving on. Well, you would you might be forgiven for thinking like, gosh, it's Roku's fault, right? Roku is picking these fights. But remember, they're picking fights with companies that are all bigger than them. Yes. And so what Roku is trying to do is saying, look, well, all these agreements we have now are going to set the precedent for the next decade. And if we don't set it right, we could go out of business. Absolutely. It's in Roku's best interest to get the best deal as well. Don't forget that. I don't want Roku to go out of business. Well, the New York Times reports on a company called Mitchell International in San Diego that uses deep learning to train its system on image classification to process insurance claims for auto accidents. Customers who have been in an accident take photos of the damage and they simply upload it to their insurance companies app. Mitchell's algorithm then estimates parts and labor costs in seconds. The estimates are generally as accurate as an in person insurance adjuster as well. Now a London based company called tractable has a similar service that has settled more than $1 billion in claims in Europe and Asia. And lockdowns have made these kinds of services a lot more popular. Chicago based CCC information services, which makes apps for insurance customers, companies called Quick Estimate reports a 125% increase in usage since March despite a plunge in accident numbers. USA also filed a trademark on the phrase flash estimate, which it plans to market starting next year. Yeah, the most interesting part of this story to me was that human adjusters looking at pictures versus going in person were less accurate about what the damages were, which is bad for the insurance company, because then they have problems with the body shop. When they say like, well, actually, it's going to cost this much more. And then they have to figure out well, is the body shop right? Because if they are, then we have to cover it. So you would think, OK, well having an AI do it probably is going to be as good as the insurance adjusters doing it with photos. But the AI, this is the key point, got as good at it with the photos as the humans were in person, which means best of both worlds. You don't have to send a person out, which is costly and in these days exposes people to each other. But you got the same amount of accuracy as if you had sent somebody. That's that's pretty good. I've only had one experience where I've had to have a insurance person come out and look at my car to tell me how much something is going to cost and what kind of check I would get in the mail. And it was hail damage from a really big storm. So I could have easily taken a photo and just sent it to them as opposed to having to wait a week and then get somebody to come out to actually send me a check. It would have been way easier if they could just make the entire process digital. So since USA is doing this, I'm a USA user. I love the fact that they're considering marketing this thing next year because this will just save people so much time and potentially save insurance companies a lot of money as well because it'll be a lot more accurate. So I feel like they will be able to save money whenever they're sending out paychecks or sending out checks. Well, it's sort of like it's kind of like the grocery store model, right, where it's like self checkout. Oh, no. Well, there won't be any employees at the grocery store anymore. Well, no, there still need to be plenty of employees doing all sorts of stuff. This can be the first plan of attack. Yes, wherever, you know, when there's sort of like, hmm, OK, well, you sent some photos and there's still some discrepancy. Let's get an agent out there to, you know, to take this forward. That makes the most sense to me so that insurance companies can, yes, put people to better use unless they're needed in particular situations. Yeah, they said at least they had one of these insurance company executives in the New York Times article saying like, look, we don't want to fire our adjusters. We want to let them spend more time on the less tedious stuff that actually needs their expertise. And Roger was was pointing out in our pre show that he was in an accident that this wouldn't worked for because there was internal damage. So this only works for certain kinds of damage. It's not going to work for everything. And you can have your human adjusters saved for those really more complex situations. Then I think that's good. Bloomberg sources say that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has sent letters to League of Legends Studio Riot and Fortnite Maker Epic Games asking about their security protocols protocols in handling Americans personal data. Chinese company Tencent owns LA based riots. Also has a minority stake in Epic. Other U.S. companies that Tencent owned stakes in like Activision Blizzard may have also received letters. The committee is charged with reviewing transactions by foreign companies for national security implications. With tech companies it often has to do with the access to sensitive data. But lately has focused on simple amounts of data as well. Yeah just the amount. They're like it doesn't even have to be sensitive if you've got a lot of data. Then the committee is going to look at that too and say you know what maybe we don't want to have all that data in the hands of a company say in China that has been the political wind that has blown through the committee on foreign investment in the United States where they used to rule very rarely but we've seen them come up a lot more often because of this. And it shows the next step after TikTok and WeChat which we're going to talk about in a minute here. But the eye of Sauron of the United States is not done once TikTok and WeChat is resolved. It's going to start looking at Tencent's other investments. I really don't know if this is just the new way that this administration wants to do things or if there is a thing that China could do to take the heat off if it is just a negotiating tactic. It could be either or both to be honest. As somebody who is quite an advocate for freedom of like educated technology use, educated use as in like make sure you educate yourself on terms of service and what you're sharing what kind of data you're sharing before you accept all the agreements. I don't like the fact that they're that this is becoming a trend. I won't say that they're necessarily banning certain kinds or certain specific types of apps. But it seems like it's starting to become a trend. And you're right with this with our political or our specific government. And it's a it's worrying. It's a little concerning because I like to have the freedom to be able to use what I want. And if there isn't specific proof or evidence of some kind of malicious use of data, then give me the option to use it if I want to and allow myself to take that bargain with my own data. I don't want government hands getting involved in that. Well, too bad because the government hands are not moving away. Apparently. We're going to talk about that more in a second. That's why I said it that way. Get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes. There's so much to keep up on these days, folks. And just five minutes a day keeps you up to date. Subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. All right, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be flippant. But here's an example of what you're talking about, Shannon, possibly earlier than I expected, the U.S. Commerce Department announced the details of what qualifies for banned transactions under the two executive orders affecting WeChat and TikTok. I thought we wouldn't get these till Sunday, but we got them today. Both WeChat and TikTok's apps will not be legal to distribute in the United States as of September 20th. So app stores will need to remove them, just like Apple decided to remove Fortnite. They'll have to remove TikTok and WeChat as will Google Play or any other app store. Now, these executive orders can be rescinded if the oracle deal is acceptable to the administration. So keep an eye out. This isn't the final word. But if conditions stay as they are now, that has to happen as of Sunday. Additionally, on September 20th, taking payments through the WeChat app will be illegal. So stores in the U.S. can't accept WeChat. That is often done for Chinese tourists to make it easier for them to pay. So that will not be allowed. For WeChat in particular, on September 20th, the U.S. is forbidding the following. Any U.S. company hosting any part of the WeChat app, a CDN service, providing service to WeChat. Any contracted transit or peering services. This doesn't mean that they can't transit the service, but any agreement that says, we'll give you peering as long as you give us peering back, right? Or we'll give you transit service if you pay us this much. U.S. companies can't do that anymore. And any use of WeChat code in other apps or services in the U.S., a lot of folks think this is a First Amendment violation because code is considered speech under a lot of precedents. But the idea here is to stop clones. To say, well, you can't just go take the WeChat code, put it in a different app, call it something else under a different company. So you can't use the WeChat code in other apps or services. This one's tricky. It doesn't seem to mean WeChat has to be actively blocked from the internet. They're not asking ISPs block the WeChat service. They're slowing it down. It means CDNs and transit providers can't work with 10 cent on the WeChat service, which would greatly reduce its reliability and availability, possibly to make it almost useless. Those same prohibitions will not apply to TikTok until November 12th. So basically oracles got until November 12th to get the deal done or TikTok becomes unusable as well. In summary, as of September 20th, you won't be able to download WeChat download WeChat and TikTok from app stores in the U.S. But if you have them already, you can keep them. They won't get security updates though. And WeChat won't work very well, but TikTok will still work as normal if you've got it until November 12th. A couple other notes here, US Magistrate Judge Laura Beeler ruled Friday that she would not issue a preliminary injunction against this WeChat order. She previously had said she might be willing to because the original executive order issued in August was a little vague, but said Friday, hey, now we have the details. It's not vague anymore. So she says this complaint is now moot. Further filings from the WeChat user alliance are expected to argue that it's not moot. We'll see if those come. Also, Instagram head Adam Moseri tweeted that quote, a US TikTok ban would be quite bad for Instagram, Facebook, and the internet more broadly. And in response, TikTok's interim CEO, Vanessa Pappas, the head of TikTok in Santa Monica, asked Facebook and Instagram to quote, publicly join our challenge and support our litigation. In other words, like, fine, if you believe that, we need your help. Of course, the president, as of this recording, has not yet issued his decision on the proposed deal for Oracle. It's expected at any moment. Oracle wants to become a trusted tech partner and minority owner in a new US-based TikTok company owned by ByteDance. The saga continues. I imagine we might have this all solved by Monday, but of course, then it's on to the next thing. How are you all feeling about this? Well, Shannon, I don't know about you, but I was late to the TikTok game, but I'm an enthusiastic TikTok user. I don't make stuff, but I watch other things, and I really like the app, and I'm not alone. It's a very, very popular app, and I just can't really think of, I have thought of, I was trying to think of, has this ever happened before some time where there was something that I liked technology-wise that was then kind of taken from me based on where I live? A lot of other countries and regions in the world are very used to this. I can't think of one. I really can't. I can think of apps or services that were available somewhere else, and then they came to the US eventually, or never did, but not something that was sort of taken away. So I just wonder what the creator backlash of all this is going to be like. There's a big creator backlash. I'm sure that it's going to happen quite soon too. There's a lot of people that are creators on TikTok that have not diversified, and just thinking of it from that creator side. There's a lot of people that are going to lose income, just specifically with TikTok, but also with WeChat, because WeChat has always been so internationally friendly where people can use it across borders. So there's a lot of developers, there's a lot of companies that use WeChat for business. So this is not only going to be hurting TikTok and WeChat, but it's also going to be hurting the people that use it as well for their own businesses. And I don't know if this was considered when they decided to put this ban in place. And that's very, very concerning, not just because that freedom of the internet, as I was mentioning earlier with the previous story, but also from the whole income aspect of like at all times in 2020, when we have a pandemic and they're going to remove these applications because they're based in a different country. And we're going to be losing the opportunities to conduct business because of that. Keep in mind, folks, when you're forming your opinion about this, and I'm not telling you what opinion to have when I say this, that it is not against the rules for the United States to ban an app. We ban all kinds of apps. They're apps that we all agree should be gone, child pornography, fraud, those kinds of apps. What's at issue here is the administration is saying, these two apps are just as dangerous to our national security and to your personal data as a fraud app. And therefore, yes, it's gonna have fallout, but it's because they're dangerous apps. Like they pretend to give you something good, but they're really supporting an enemy. And we can't allow that. That is the argument that is being made. And we could say the same argument about a lot of social media platforms. I mean, we have American platforms that do pretty dangerous things. But they are not under the supervision of the Chinese government. So there is a difference. Not saying it's a definitive difference and you can decide what you wanna think about it. I'm glad you added that comment, that there needs to be a definitive difference. There needs to be proof and evidence. All right, real quickly before we wrap this up, yesterday we reported that the Oracle Deals term sheet would create a company called TikTok Global based in the U.S. with its own board of directors. We got a few more details on that term sheet. Axios's Ina Freed has more details saying the term sheet describes three boards. A board approved by the U.S. government would oversee TikTok U.S. and include a security director and an independent data security expert with national security credentials, which is pretty much the description of a former CIA or NSA official. So the U.S. government would put a board to oversee the operations of TikTok in the U.S. while Oracle would operate it. A security subcommittee of that board would be composed of U.S. citizens with veto power over TikTok Global's security and data privacy decisions in the U.S. And then there would be a board of directors independent of ByteDance over TikTok Global. So a little more detail there for you to consider. If you have thoughts on the TikTok saga that will not end, or anything in general that we talk about on the show, please join the conversation in our Discord and you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's get away from TikTok. What's in the mailbag? Oh, Toby wrote in about Amazon. You know, a little company you probably never heard of. Toby says, I think the only reason that Amazon is doing luxury portal stores, we talked about this on our show on Tuesday with the Snob OS podcast folks on their main site is to placate the legal action being brought on by the luxury brands against Amazon for allowing the sale of counterfeit goods by themselves and third parties. Man, Toby, if you hadn't put the word only in there, I'd entirely agree with you. It's not the only reason Amazon's doing a luxury portal. They think they can make a lot of money off this and so do the luxury brands. But I will give Toby credit. I'm sure this played a part of it. In fact, it may be the root of it. Amazon has been doing a lot of work with these luxury brands on anti-counterfeit. And I imagine that a natural outcome of all of that cooperation was like, gosh, couldn't you guys give us a better place to sell our stuff on your platform ourselves so we could just drive out those counterfeit goods? And that makes perfect sense to me. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Jeffrey Zilx, Steve Aya Darola, and Chris Allen. Len Peralta, ooh, man. Tough day for drawn news. What have you drawn for us today? Yes, as much as I wanted to draw TikTok, as interesting as it is, I wanted to kind of talk about the hackers who took down the hospital. I felt that that was, I've done TikTok, so I wanted to do something here. This piece is called Death Hack. Just like you would say life hack, this is death hack. And I think while I don't want to describe exactly what you're seeing, you really have to go check it out. It's, it depicts a hacker who realizes his awful mistake. There's some words that are kind of going down the side here, which are kind of indicating the situation he has created or they have created. And you just have to check it out. It's currently on right now at my Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash Len. Or also you can actually, if you're interested in purchasing this, it's at my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com. Oh man, that is, that's a chilling depiction of this. And editorial cartoon level, good stuff, Len. Thank you so much. Excellent, Len. Also excellent having Shannon Morris on the show with us. We always love to have you, Shannon, and let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Well, I always love being on youtube.com slash Shannon Morris. I am currently, I just hit 30,000 subscribers. So I'm currently doing a wifi pineapple giveaway of the brand new Mark seven wifi pineapple from hack five. I'm giving five of them away. So you still have time to enter. All you have to do is comment and comment on that wifi pineapple unboxing video and subscribe and you will be entered to win one of them. So thank you so much to everybody who subscribes to my channel too. I really, really appreciate it. Free pineapples. Free pineapples. Let's get it. Go, go, go. Also folks, don't forget we have a survey going on. We want your feedback. This is super helpful. We do it every year and it always makes the show better. So if you haven't done it already and thanks to the hundreds of people who have, but if you haven't, it only takes a few minutes. Head over to dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. That's dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. It's easy to remember. Thank you so much. And if you have feedback for us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We'd love to hear more from you. We're also live Monday through Friday. Join us if you can for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Put it on your calendar and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back on Monday. Talk to you then. Bye, have a good weekend. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.