 Robert Spalding has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Be like Robert. Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, June 14th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm one week away from vacation. I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We've got a packed house today. Joining us, Patrick Norton, host of AVXL. How's it going, Patrick? Patrick? Patrick? Are you there? Patrick? When Patrick unmutes himself, I'm sure he'll tell us it's going great. I'm trying to unmute myself. Oh, there you go. I'm trying to keep the background noise down. Sorry. No, no problem. Also joining us, Donald Bell, host of Maker Update. Donald, thanks for joining us. Good to see you, man. It's great to be back. Yeah, good to see you too. It's been too long. We're going to talk a little bit about what's going on in Maker Media and how that might affect the maker culture in general. But let's start with a few other tech things you should know. Cryptocurrency Exchange Binance announced it will launch a US-based service that is regulatory compliant, but in the meantime will not offer any services to verified US users. New users from the US can't sign up and existing users will not be able to make deposits or trades after September 12th. The US-based service will be launched soon in partnership with FinCEN registered BAM trading services. Sources tell CNBC that Charter and Comcast will be able to sell iPhone to their wireless phone customers after agreeing to sell other Apple products as well. Comcast reportedly agreed to sell thousands of iPads at a subsidized cost and pay the difference itself. Charter will let customers use Apple TVs as a replacement for set-top boxes for Charter's legacy boxes, and it reportedly will sell iPads as well, though without a subsidy. More than 400 women signed up for Africa's first platform for female agricultural entrepreneurs called Value for Her Connect at a trade fair in Nairobi. The network is part of a program led by the Technical Center for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation, or CTA, to empower women in agriculture. It will offer access to buyers, market information, investment opportunities, and encourage strategic partnerships with other ag entrepreneurs. And Broadcom announced Friday that the US restriction on doing business with Huawei will reduce this year's sales by $2 billion. Huawei accounted for about $900 million, or 4% of the company's overall sales last year. But Broadcom says the forecast extends beyond just direct income from Huawei because of other reductions from other companies in the supply chain to Huawei. The situation is also complicated by an already slowing chip market. Micron will be the next major chip supplier to possibly be affected by this. Their Q3 results will be announced on June 25th. Now, we got a little other news about Huawei, Sarah. We do. Huawei has delayed the launch of its foldable phone, the Mate X, from this month, June to September. A Huawei spokesperson told CNBC that after Samsung's foldable smartphone had some issues with media units earlier this year, it wants to take a little more time to do some extra testing itself. Huawei also confirmed that it will run Android, having been certified before US restrictions went into place. The 5G-capable Mate X foldable was first unveiled in February, targeting a June launch. So it's not really that postponed at this point, two months, but that number could also change. I guess the question here is how much of this just would have happened anyway and how much of this is Huawei's going to have a hard time getting parts? So why would they spend a lot of time building something that everybody's a little unsure of? Being a foldable phone. Yeah. It's Huawei's in the news for so many reasons. I mean, how much of this is just a, hey, you know, Samsung's had some trouble. Let's just double check our own foldable device and how much of this is the business issues that the company isn't in general. Patrick? I know, sorry, it just seems messy either way because it's problematic because they're worried about parts supplies. It's problematic because they're running out of revenue. It's problematic because Samsung screwed up so badly. And I think they're just terrified because if Samsung, one of the best phone manufacturers in the world in the space of three years can have a phone that lights itself on fire and then turn around and have a phone that they apparently only tested in hyper clean labs and didn't notice that the screen was prone to destroy itself. You know, I could see where they might be a little conservative before launching something like that. It's just a mess either way. Yeah. It's hard to tell. It's probably more than one thing going on here, but it's hard to tell what Donald, what are you making these foldable phones? I was just thinking they're probably trying to get out ahead of it too. If the idea of the Samsung foldable phone was the mistake there was that they rushed it out. They didn't want to have that same story plague their foldable phone too. The idea that it was rushed out without them doing enough testing. So even if they're just holding it back and not doing anything with it, if they can get the story out there and create the story that they're spending extra time making sure it's right, then they at least will hopefully be able to get through without having that same story told about them. And if Wally only has three months of stockpiled parts, it may make sense for them not to spend it on a riskier like this. It's, again, it's multi-levels. And I also think simply because sometimes you look at a company like Samsung and it's like really nobody. How could they not have noticed the problem? Was that an internal management communications like nobody could tell the managers? The wonderful phone isn't working because they wanted to launch it so badly, or did they literally not test it with real humans in a real environment? Did nobody throw it in a backpack or a purse? Wally is very glad that you're turning this into a Samsung story, which goes back to what Donald just said. That's probably why they're trying to get ahead of this. Sorry. My problem with it, having spent like one minute with it, it's just that it reminded me of like a taco. It's just designed to keep like crust inside of it. Like it just seems like anything I would have in my pocket would collect in the credits that you're buying here. A $2,000 lint rag. That's going to be on the box. The Wall Street Journal reports that more than a dozen companies will back Facebook's upcoming Libra cryptocurrency, which is expected to be announced June 18th. Financial organizations like Visa and Mastercard, plus internet companies like PayPal, Uber, Stripe, and Booking.com will reportedly each invest around $10 million to fund development of the currency and be part of an independent consortium called the Libra Association. A full Libra release is said to be set for 2020 and to function as a stable coin. So this is not about speculation. This is about Facebook being able to make it easier for you to spend money on the Facebook platform. The stable coin will be pegged to government-issued currencies limiting the volatility so that it's not like a Bitcoin. Does this creep anybody out other than me? You know, I can't tell. This could just be a more fancier, modern version of a point system like the Xbox had, where you like change your money in for points and then it makes it easier to transfer them around. It's not just a point system, it's a currency. But because it's a stable coin, I'm not nearly as creeped out as I would be if this was, in fact, a speculative currency. And it's got an independent association, so they're doing the right thing and trying to say, like, let's have it independently managed. I mean, Sarah, I think the interesting thing here is that you have so many financial companies involved. Yeah, I think when I... The story has been brewing for a while, but when I read the latest story over at the Verge this morning, it was kind of like, all right, Visa and MasterCard. These are incumbent companies that Facebook would be taking a chunk out of, right? That these would be companies that would be competing with something like Facebook's upcoming Libra cryptocurrency. So why are they on board? And I think, I mean, the most obvious answer is, because if they can't beat Facebook, they might as well join in on the billions and billions of users that could potentially be using this in the future. Yeah, I was gonna say 2.4 billion users globally is probably a pretty big market to want a piece of. Yeah, they want to cut to that for sure. Donald, will you be getting your Libra coins? I know. No, I'm already kind of scared of cryptocurrency in general. I've just been on the sidelines. I don't think this is going to be the thing that pulls me in. And I also just always... My instinct with anything Facebook is attached to is that it's just like one other way to stick users to having Facebook installed and not ever leaving their ecosystem, whether they profit from this or not. I think it's one more way that they can keep users glued to Facebook somehow. We've got your bank account. Now we just need your health insurance and we completely own you. I think Facebook will be targeting this at developing countries. It's a great product for somewhere like India where you want to cut down on money transfer fees. That's a big deal, especially when sending money back home from people working overseas, but also within the country, trying to convert currencies and saying, hey, we've got a stablecoin. It's on a platform you use because Facebook is pretty popular in India and WhatsApp particularly, very popular in India. I think that's where to watch what they're doing with this because I imagine that's what this is for, mostly. Hold on to your hats, everybody. Get ready. Google has started showing new icons on its search results for categories like news, videos, images, maps, and shopping. This is only on the desktop search page. It's already on mobile. If you want a little bit of background, Google had icons next to these search filters back as early as 2010 on the desktop and then added them to mobile in 2011, then removed them from desktop search in 2011. So welcome back icons. How does everybody feel? Yeah, everybody? All right. This is in the show because this is a top story everywhere I look. Even Search Engine Land is on top of tech meme with the story and in the Search Engine Land story, it says, this really won't have any impact on anything, but people sure are excited about it. Right. It's cosmetic. There used to not be icons on desktop search, which as many of you probably agree, I mean, I use a million times a day. I didn't even notice that they were there when I was prepping for the show this morning because I'm always opening tabs and starting from scratch and doing all this stuff. They're there. I didn't notice. But now that I realize that they're there, I kind of look at them and they're black and white. They're not even colored. They're not even really that great. I'm not sure why people find this such a big deal. Google's always had issues with graphics design and they've always done a lot of really random stuff with graphic design. I think for me, the worst one was when they were like, we're just going to change all the icons inside of Gmail that you become used to over the last 70,000 emails and now you won't know which one to press for spam until you learn all the new icons. But they've always, I've had friends who are graphics designers who could go on for hours about what a train wreck, different applications have been in the fonts and the layouts. Google's like, you know, splat. Let's see if anybody notices. What is the purpose of them? That's the problem I don't get. Why? Why did they bother? I have to think there's some benefit for people who are either illiterate or have trouble reading or children or people who have a hard time. English is maybe not their first language and they haven't changed over their browser to another language. There's got to be some usability. Maybe some accessibility thing in there. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I get that, but does anybody do enough people read newspapers at this point that they will know the little smush next to the news icon is actually supposed to be a newspaper and the physical paper tag. I actually didn't realize that's what that was supposed to be. Yeah, there's a shopping tag is in like a paper shopping tag next to shopping. I thought it was just a hamburger menu. All right, speaking of hamburger, you know, you want to wash your hamburger down with a nice water, but the Netherlands-based water peace and security partnership is developing a machine learning tool to predict water shortages and resulting conflicts, which is a serious issue in a bunch of places in the world. In tests, the AI used water supply information from NASA and European Space Agency satellites combined with social demographic and economic data to predict more than three quarters of water-related conflicts in Mali's inner Niger Delta. That's a pretty good test, pretty good track record in a place that is complicated and conflicts happen for multiple reasons. The WPS hopes to launch the total worldwide, launch the AI worldwide later this year to be able to detect possible conflicts up to a year in advance and the alerts could then be used to investigate causes, provide help, and alleviate some of these water concerns possibly, and at the very least mitigate the conflicts. It's really cool. I mean, talk about a great way to use a bunch of data to try to keep people healthy and safe. And this is... I commend the water peace and security partnership for doing that. Water shortages are going to be a bigger and bigger deal in larger parts of the world as the climate changes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this might be the forecast that we actually all are more concerned about in the not too distant future. No, there'll just be a giant round of people denying the science once again and do it in exciting ways. Okay, Patrick. Right. What do you mean there's no water? There is. Just imagine it. I mean, honestly, this is a super... this is a good story that involves AI, which I don't think we see that enough. We hear a lot of people hyping AI isn't designed to do or can't do and over-promising. And it seems like this is a responsible use of it to make the world a better place. No, I think it sounds amazing. And anytime AI actually does something useful and necessary or that people can't do, I am super stoked. I'm just saying like the whole idea that people are going to pay attention. It's going to be when they can't... when they need to dig a well to 8,000 feet in Arizona to hit groundwater, you know, or they start hitting the core of the planet before they hit groundwater. I think that's when people are going to be like, hey, we've got a water problem here. Yeah, and honestly, it's a good point that this is not meant to raise awareness of the water problem. There are plenty of efforts for that. This is meant to help solve water problems that are actively happening in places in the world that need it. Researchers at a healthcare security firm, CyberMDX, have found that an infusion pump, the Alanis Alaris, rather, Gateway Workstation, which is developed by a company called Bekton Dickinson, has two critical security flaws that could allow it to be remotely hijacked and controlled. And if an attacker installed malicious firmware on a pump's onboard computer, it could be possible to then adjust infusion rates on the pump or even remotely brick the onboard computer taking the pump offline. You can imagine in a hospital, that's a pretty big deal. A second vulnerability could allow an attacker to access the workstation's monitoring configurations through a web browser. An attacker would need a few things to be able to make this work, though. You would need access to the hospital network. You would also need the workstation's IP address. You would also need to have written custom malicious code. Updated firmware includes vulnerability fixes for the devices which are sold in about 50 countries. So, you know, you update your firmware, you're good to go, but this is something that affects a lot of medical facilities. Is anyone frightened by this, or does it seem too hard to carry out? It seems pretty mission impossible to carry out. Doesn't it? There are easier ways to get rid of somebody. Just hire a nurse to spike the line. Yeah, exactly. I think this is actually one of those good stories that appears frightening. The reason I say it's good is because they fixed it, right? Yeah. Where I get cautious is, we are seeing more and more vulnerabilities discovered in medical devices. Hopefully, that's not just the local news effect where we feel like, oh, suddenly all the medical devices are insecure. Hopefully, it's the other thing, which means actually we're paying more attention to these devices and making sure they are secure. Well, also that there was a firmware, because I've also seen medical companies be like, oh, yeah, right. Or we don't support that anymore, or you should buy our new model, which is now secured. I mean, the Internet of Things is all over, we didn't call it the Internet of Things, but Connected Devices have been all over hospitals for a long time. Security there is just as abysmal as it is in every other business environment. I mean, security through obscurity worked really well when there was no general Internet, right? It does not work anymore. It's funny how that works. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Last week, Maker Media, most famous for Make Magazine and the Maker Fairs, laid off its entire 22-person staff and paused operations. CEO Dale Daugherty told TechCrunch, print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works barely. Events are hard. There was a drop-off in corporate sponsorship. Daugherty is trying to get hold of assets through an alternative assignment for Benefit of Creditors process. It's a bankruptcy process, and he'd like to restart at least the print magazine and continue to license the Maker Faire name. It looks like independently licensed Maker Faire events will proceed as planned, at least for now. Oculus founder Palmer Lucky has expressed interest in helping out with some funding. Donald, I'm sorry to say that you are one of the people affected by this. Yes and no. I worked as a projects editor for Maker Media from 2014 to 2015. Then I also came on with my showmaker update to their YouTube channel this past year and was working in their office. For the most part, I was not fired in this event, so my firing happened earlier on when there was different financial troubles in the company. But I'm definitely familiar with the situation and all the people involved and have been on the Facebook ex-employee group, watching people roll in. It's been kind of a slow train wreck over many years, but it's been interesting to see this finally really go to the full extent. I think the question that a lot of folks in our audience are going to have is, is this a bad sign for the maker culture? The maker subgroup out there, the maker subculture, has always felt like it was getting stronger and stronger, and a big proponent of that has been Maker Media. Yeah. Is this an anomaly or is this a sign of something? I'd actually take it as a positive sign in some ways because a lot of the reason Maker Media struggled to keep the magazine going and popular, although the magazine, oddly enough, still remains to be pretty popular. But sites like Instructables, and there's so many other ways that people could get online project content that they couldn't when the magazine was founded in 2005, 2006. The popularity of DIY content, I don't think it's ever been higher, it's just that MAKE doesn't have as much of a lock on that as being the conduit for that content. So Patrick, I know you're involved in the maker culture directly in a lot of ways. Does that fit with what you're seeing and feeling out there? Yeah. I mean, I've buried so many magazines over the last 20 years just to put a blunt point on it. I've dealt with computer magazines going down. This one was so, in the way for me, going through the screensavers shutting down, or me leaving the screensavers, it was this thing and it was a signpost and a whole bunch of people saw this light and they were drawn towards it. It was amazing. People talk about maker fairs the way they talk about burning matters. They're charged, they're full of ideas. It was amazing. I saw all these things I'd never seen before. There's all these things I can do. It was fun because people who never really thought of themselves as potentially being makers suddenly thought, like, I can do that. More importantly, I was already doing system, I think, around the time the first maker fair took place. I'd never really thought of myself as a maker. I'm like, oh, there's a label for this thing I've been doing since I was a relatively small child. That was all really, really interesting. It was this huge, it was something for people to find and learn about and be attracted to. It was this incredible source of information. I'm frustrated and I'm sad. I'm glad I actually had a booth at the last maker fair. Me and my friend at Ivory, we did a take a party booth and people were taking stuff apart. But to emphasize what you just heard is there's so much out there going on and there's so many groups and there's so much activity. There's over 200 mini maker fairs. Like Don said, it raised the profile in this whole area and it got a lot of people thinking about it. A lot of publication started. Think of all the YouTube channels and all the people that are doing stuff on YouTube that didn't exist when make started. So am I sad about it? Yeah. Do I want maker fairs to continue? Absolutely. But makers aren't going away anytime soon. There's just too many people doing too many interesting things. That's got to make you feel good, right? It does and I think it was the, when I was at Maker Media, it was part of the open secret of maker fair is that we really didn't have a lot to do with, we didn't have to really push very hard to get people to come out. Aside from a little bit of curation there and making sure everyone, all the waivers were signed, it really is a party that is there because of everyone else's interest and enthusiasm and it could happen without maker media tomorrow just as well as it happened when maker media was run on the show. And with all the hundreds of independently licensed maker fairs that are out there, that's really the legacy of maker media is that they've been able to kick off this movement. I think they've done it well. And I've also seen the other side of what the movement has done in education. I feel like any grade school, on through high school educator you talked to today talks about making in the classroom and the idea of how transformed education has been because of the idea of getting kids and integrating things like digital fabrication into the classroom too. So there's a lot of change that's been a big push for what maker media has done. It's sad that they're no longer going to be doing it, although they may be able to turn around to a nonprofit. That's what I feel like Dale's been alluding to, but even if they never come back, the legacy they leave behind is important. Does there need to be a torchbearer though? I mean, obviously, if he's able to rescue the company and at least still license the maker fairs, maybe he's trying really hard to keep the archive of content up and maybe restart the magazine, et cetera, then they are the standard bearer still. But if that doesn't happen, should there be a foundation or something to sort of be the organizing force here or have we moved beyond that, do you think? From my perspective and I had a lot of conversations at this past maker fair Bay Area about what the future would look like because there's already stories swirling around that might be the last maker fair Bay Area. What would it look like if someone else took it on? Like if Google took the helm or if Autodesk or Oculus or whoever it was, I'll do maker fair this year, but it's going to look like this. I feel like no matter who takes it on from here on out, at least for the maker fair, the Bay Area edition, it's going to look a little different. I feel like what people have to appreciate is that the maker media organization did a really good job of having as large an umbrella as possible for what the definition of maker would mean. So that you have the craft people and yeah, go ahead, Patrick. And it shifted a lot over the years because the maker fair in, was it 2005 or 2006, the first one, it kind of all bleeds together at this point, but it shifted, right? Because there used to be huge craft sections and they shrank down, then they came back and there was a whole steampunk phase. But it was interesting to watch it evolve and more. Like there was certainly, there was always an R2 Corral, there was always at least something on fire up in the front lobby. There was always at least one corner where people were felting and knitting and crafting, but everything else it always, there was stuff that was always there, but it shifted a lot. At one point it seemed like half the fair was 3D printers and then a couple years later, there were like 12 3D printers companies instead of like 3200, like that wave had crested in popularity and broken. And it was, but it always changed and kind of morphed and evolved over the years, kind of tracking what people, what was new and what was exciting, what people were interested in. That was part of the fun thing to see what was going on or just what fringe stuff would show up at the corners. Like I'm still, like it's been 10 years, but I remember seeing a guy building surfboards out of hexagonal rigidity, basically cardboard crafting hexagonal sales for rigidity to replace foam for surfboards. It's still one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. And it was a dude who's like, I'm going to do a thing and I'm going to show people this at Maker Faire. And that was, that for me is the big loss, is the stuff you would never find otherwise showing up there at a table and just being, Yeah. And I think that was because their focus at the core of their business was always, at least started in editorial, right? They always want a story to tell about what the next thing is. Whereas if a Google comes in or some other interest actually has a very specific point of view on what they want to showcase at a Maker Faire, that could skew what that looks like and how people define it, right? And that's what I'm a little bit afraid of happening. It does seem like the best case scenario would be, and it's difficult with any kind of bankruptcy type proceeding, but turning this into a nonprofit, open sourcing some things, making kind of a Mozilla Foundation organization out of it so that it can still charge for licensing and all of that to keep itself running, but it doesn't have to be beholden to investors. Like that seems to be one of the problems that it has right now. When you find an article, something cool that the Maker community is doing, do us a favor. So we stay on top of it and submit it to our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Also, we have a Facebook group. Hang out there if you like, Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. We talked yesterday about Depop and this trend, especially in the younger set with teenagers, of swap and close, the second hand second market. And Maurice wrote in from Philadelphia and said, ironically, in the hardcore punk scene, which is traditionally more known for DIY and lower cost or little to no profit motives. I've noticed a lot of kids and young adults selling and buying classic t-shirts or shirts people simply might have missed out on for upwards of $40 to $80 on Depop. It's weird and I don't get it, but hey, it's not my money. Patrick, I heard you laughing at this. I knew you'd like this even. Well, one because my son has discovered a bunch of my old punk rock shirts that are too small for me now. So he's been running around in a fishbone shirt, much to the amusement of my mom being like, oh my God, I remember when you came home with that and I was confused then. But I also like, I laugh because this echoes stuff. I heard 20 years ago when people were like, man, we used to make our own shirts with like black magic. You would see guys show up at shows. They would have like, they would steal one of their dad's business shirts. So they buy a shirt at Goodwill. And they would use like marker to do the logo of the band on the shirt. And then they would go and tear ass out in the middle of the pit and their shirt would get shredded. I'm just laughing because there's always somebody who's going to pay too much money for something they weren't around to experience the first time. I mean, I paid $55 for a copy of a New York citizens album. I should have bought for four bucks at the CBGB's record store. You know, you do what you got to do. Deepop is just one example of the whole kind of limited edition or a limited run or a concert that you didn't go to. Something that is just, there just isn't a lot of it, has driven up prices, not just on Deepop, but on a lot of these platforms. It's fascinating. I've spent many, many an hour looking at old corn trophies on eBay. So I'm not going to judge. True story. All right, let's check in with Len Peralta, who has been illustrating this episode. Len, what do you got for us today? By the way, I have a lot to say about t-shirts, but maybe we'll stay that for the after show. Anyway, you know, it's really heartbreaking that maker and make is actually kind of going away. That doesn't mean that the maker community is going away. And so I wanted to put a positive spin on the whole thing. Very simple image using that red make logo and the little make robot. So maker dude, hold on to the maker. I love this. Who has like a little heart. And the maker community will not go away. So that's why it's called always keep making because that will not go away, although make may go away or is going away. Just trying to put a positive spin on this. That's so good. I love it. Thank you so much. You can actually get this right now. If you're one of my patrons, patreon.com forward slash Len, or you can go the old fashioned way. Go to my store. Len Peralta store.com. It's right on the front page and you can buy this with money. So there you go. Thanks so much to our guest today. We had a full house. Donald Bell will start with you. Where can people keep up with your work? Makerprojectlab.com is the site that collects all the stuff I do for DigiKey and Adafruit and cool tools. And I got my hands on a lot of different stuff here, but it all feeds into that website. So check out. Excellent. Well, thanks for being here. And also thanks to Patrick Norton. Since you've been here last, where can people keep up with your future work? Oh my goodness. A V Excel.com and the just about to launch Patrick Norton.com. Missing. Are you telling us that you've never had a Patrick Norton.com before? I've owned it for a long time. Somebody else maintained it and populated it for a while. I took it over. Cool. Well, I can't wait to see what comes out of Patrick Norton.com. Thank you. All right, folks, if you want to keep this show going and get some perks in thanks, the best way to do it is patreon.com. There's all kinds of ways to support the show, but this is the one that gives you a direct influence on the show's bottom line, a direct influence on the show's direction. And you get some special perks and special episodes and columns and all that sort of thing. You can check out all the details at patreon.com. slash D T N S. If you've got feedback for us, I've got an email address for you feedback at daily tech news show.com. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more daily tech news show.com slash live. We'll see you in a Monday folks. Have a great weekend. This show is part of the broadband network. Get more at broadband.com.