 Coming up on DTNS, non-fungible token version of digital art sells for $69 million at Christie's. More details on Verkata's surveillance camera breach and why Amazon might avoid at least one anti-trust investigation. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 11th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm John Merritt. Drawing the top tech from Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Sarah Lane had a power outage, so she's unable to join us today. But we are here for you with all the tech news. In fact, we were just talking with Len about his home improvements. It's like you're in a brand new house now. I am in a brand new house. You can get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Adobe released Photoshop for M1 based Max Wednesday. Photoshop product manager Pam Clark said in a blog post that Adobe's internal tests show features like opening and saving files, applying editing filters, using automated tools for filling in regions, selecting subjects. All of that runs about one and a half times faster on the M1 than on previous generation systems. Facebook launched a quote unquote, very small test letting users place sticker ads in Facebook stories content with users receiving a share of the revenue it generates. The company is also expanding in stream ads to shorter one minute videos, spending $7 million to promote its stars tipping feature and expanding its paid live events and fan subscriptions to more countries. The first delivery of COVID-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca by drone took place in Ghana starting last Tuesday. Zipline, which has been conducting drone deliveries in Irwanda, Ghana and elsewhere since 2016, delivered 4,500 doses on the first day. Ghana is the first country to get vaccines through the COVAX initiative, in part because it has drone delivery available to get vaccines to any facility in the country at low costs and with high reliability. Zipline operates four distribution centers in Ghana with 30 drones that autonomously drop off packages by parachute. No contact delivery there. Zipline has made more than 50,000 deliveries in Ghana since it started there in 2019. Apple is suing former Apple product design architect Simon Lancaster, former employee for selling trade secrets and releasing other details about unreleased Apple products to someone in the media. Apple alleges Lancaster fed information to an unnamed contact starting in 2018 up until, in fact, he was downloading files the night of his departure for a material design company, which happened in October 2019. Lancaster supposedly believed the startup he left for would get coverage as a result. And Dashlane introduced a new version of its password changer in beta that does not need to contact Dashlane servers, thus making it a little more secure. The feature lets you click a button in the Dashlane interface to automatically change a password at a site without having to visit that site itself. It only stops the process if the site asks for a form to be filled out or request multi-factor authentication codes, which you then enter in and will continue on its way. Feature works on about 100 sites right now. It doesn't work everywhere, but Dashlane expects to increase that number as they go along. All right, let's talk a little more about non-fungible tokens. We have a new episode of Know A Little More Out. Patrons get that in their feed or you can go to knowalittlemore.com to get it, which explains the blockchain. If you're like, I don't understand even how this blockchain stuff works, go listen to that episode. I mentioned non-fungible tokens, NFTs in that episode, but essentially what they are is a way to determine who owns a digital thing. Obviously, digital things are infinitely copyable, but if you have an authoritative blockchain, you can kind of indelibly, it would be very difficult to change, say, I have sold this piece of digital art to this person. So they are the authorized owner of it. And digital artist, Mike Winkleman, better known as Beeple, has sold an NFT of his work every day, the first 5,000 days for $69 million at the 255-year-old Christie's auction house. This puts him, according to Christie's, in the top three most valuable living artists. The work itself is a collage of art that he has been making in a project where he publishes a new piece of digital art every day. Beeple has around two and a half million followers on his social channels. That's part of his popularity. He has been on the forefront of the NFT trend. His first work posted to Nifty Gateway, resold for $6.6 million on February 24th. But according to the Verge article, he had never sold anything for more than like 10 bucks before October. Like he has really, really made good use of the NFT trend. Len, I know you have been experimenting with NFTs and art as well. Yeah, boy, you know what I would give to be Beeple right now, right? I mean, I think seeing Beeple gives people that idea like, oh, I can do this, I can do this. And it's really, really hard. It's a really, really tough nut to crack. I'm still trying to wrap my head all around it. And I'm on open sea. I have a bunch of my art up there. Actually, I'll have three pieces from Daily Tech News Show that I have up there. They're a little bit different than the ones you get at my store or at Patreon. So I'm trying to find like, well, what is it about the digital art that makes it different, makes it unique? Other than the fact that it's connected to a blockchain, you know, and you can actually, it's almost like it has providence and you can follow that particular piece of art. But it is really, really difficult to crack because a lot of stuff I'm seeing is, you know, not necessarily the best art, and I guess art is subjective, but it really is more like just to own. You know, I think a lot of it is for the Laws. You know, I mean, the NBA getting into it, that's a pretty expensive law. Oh, that's what I was. I know, but, you know, and then the other thing that's really interesting when you get, when you get an organization as big as the NBA getting into it and selling Zion Williamson gifts, right? Like, that's where I think people are like, what the heck is going on here? So, yeah, so I don't know where we are in this. If it's going to be, if this is a bubble that's going to burst, or if this is something that's going to just keep growing and growing and become more and more prevalent as people start to learn more about cryptocurrency and the blockchain and crypto art. So there is something there. There's something about being the owner, which, you know, digital stuff often often does this where it takes an element of something that we didn't really realize was as important as it is. And it highlights it. And I feel like this is highlighting the idea of being the owner of a thing is is what's most important to some people. If you're one of the people out there who very reasonably are like, why would I pay for a thing that is infinitely copyable? Why would I pay to be listed as the owner? This is not you. You're not the one that's going to make NFT successful. But there are people that do love the idea of being able to say, I'm the one. I am the owner of record of every day, the first 5,000 days by people. And I have a relationship with people now because of that. Yeah. Well, the best way I had it explained to me was that if you go to the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa, that does not mean that you own the Mona Lisa. But if you have a digital piece of art of that and you have once again you can show provenance and ownership, then yes, you can own that equivalent of the Mona Lisa. So wrapping your head around NFT NFTs is going to take a little while, I think for people to do. But good on people, man. That's six. What is it? 69 million? Gosh, now he can focus on his art. Right. Exactly. And he's a good artist, too. He's a really good artist. That's let's let's point that out. It's not that he's just sort of putting crap out there, but he's good. He's a good artist. Now, I see many of you out there, some in our chat room and Discord and elsewhere shaking your head saying, I just don't get it. I want to buy a tangible thing. Well, here's a tangible thing you'll be able to buy start in April 14th. Oppo announced it's Oppo find X three pro smartphone. It's a nice flagship phone. Snapdragon 888 6.7 inch 120 Hertz AMOLED screen, 10 bit panel display. So you get all those extra colors, 12 gigabytes of RAM, 50 megapixel wide and ultra wide sensors, three X telephoto as well. But what sets it apart is a three megapixel micro lens, which gives you 60 X magnification of shots close up. So no more than two millimeters away, but you can get closer. That's essentially a microscope built into the phone's camera. It includes its own ring scope ring light, too. So if you're when you're that up close, you might need a little extra light. The Oppo find X three pro starts at 1099 pounds in the UK available April 14th. It reminds me of macro lens photography, which is a it's a subset of photography as a hobby where you do take super detailed, very close in shots using a macro lens that allows you to taste like the head of a grasshopper or an insect or something very tiny and pull it up in a way that isn't just it isn't distorted, but it's fully pulled in. And it's it's an amazing thing because there's so many people into it. If you love the minute details, say, like a flower petal or certain certain patterns of you know, rivets on the on the side of a building or something. And it's this is cool. What it does show me, though, is that there is a need to differentiate their phones. And it used to be purely spec. It's how many it's the resolution of the screen or it's how fast the processor or what else you could do with it. But you know, the photography aspect of it is really taken off. It's actually kind of cool to see because for the most part, smartphones have pretty much killed the low end point and shoot market. And it's nice to see them take up that banner of, you know, photographers or at least a photography mindset. Well, it's a different direction, right? For years, flagship phones have been distinguishing themselves as being like the best AI that helps you get that night shot or Google being able to take a picture of the moon with your phone. And it like better and better, higher megapixels, more resolution, you know, this is a different way of going for it. I think it's a little more niche, but it's a little more attention getting because you don't see up close photography being touted that way. And like say, it's kind of cool. May not be for everybody. Maybe this is not the thing that, you know, launches the Oppo Find X3, you know, into the stratosphere, but Oppo is riding high right now because they just became the top seller in China passing up Huawei because of Huawei's troubles with the US. So good for them. Wednesday, we talked about the security camera company, Verkata. Verkata was breached. An outside group was able to get in and access their super admin accounts and those super admin accounts could access all Verkata's customers' cameras. I speculated on the show when we talked about it yesterday why that was possible. Was there not multi-factor authentication? Why would a super admin account be able to access all of a company's customers' video feeds or the customers aware of that? We had a lot of questions. We now know a little more about those accounts and why they were able to be accessed so easily. Bloomberg source says the super admin accounts used multi-factor authentication. So that answers that, but any user could switch it off. So they had 2FA, MFA, but it was useless. If any user could switch it off, any super admin user could switch it off, well, then it's useless. And so that's why the outside group was able to get in. They didn't need the multi-factor authentication. It must have been switched off. Customers could also turn on a privacy mode to prevent Verkata from accessing their feeds. Okay, that's good as a customer. Maybe none of the customers turned it on. No, apparently a super admin account had the ability to turn the customer's privacy mode off again. So again, kind of useless if you as a customer can turn privacy mode off on, but the company you're getting the service for can just turn it back off again. Former employees told Bloomberg the super admin accounts were shared within the company among more than 100 employees. So this is something it sounds like they just wanted to make it easy for any employee that needed it for whatever reason to get it. Now, there are legitimate reasons why engineers or certain sales associates might need to have access to this account. Verkata says access was limited to employees who needed to fix technical problems. That's a legitimate reason or address user complaints. You're on the phone with support talking to your client like, okay, let me help you figure this out. The Verkata policy required employees to get permission before accessing a customer's feeds. Well, we all know that if a policy isn't enforced and if a company culture makes it so that policy is winked at, it's not going to be followed and that appears to be what happened. A former employee told Bloomberg that the system did make you enter a reason for accessing a customer's camera, but the logs were never checked. And in fact, you could just put a single space in there and your access would be allowed. Yeah, you didn't actually have to type anything. IPVM.com's sources said engineering teams and company executives had super admin accounts for things like debugging and product improvement, but did not disclose that they had that access to customers. Verkata says all super admin accounts had been disabled. We mentioned that yesterday when we talked about this, but this just sounds like bad company security culture. Yeah, it's bad poor discipline, poor oversight and frankly, a management that really didn't seem to have security anywhere near the top five, even the top five list or top 10 of things that they wanted to ensure. And this is what's so frustrating. Security is one of the cornerstones of their product that they're selling and it boggles the mind to just leave it off the list. And I honestly would love to be a fly on the wall when someone probably brought this up in the meetings like, hey, you know, maybe it's not the most secure thing to do it, set up. And so it's just like, I don't know. Yeah, some of the employees talking to IPVM.com and Bloomberg and Washington Post did a story on this as well. We're saying, yeah, this was brought up before and just kind of brushed off as like, oh, it's not that big a deal because they weren't sharing logins. I think that's important. They weren't sharing one login. They were just granting super admin access to something like 100 employees. Well, it's like, it's like mint. It's like making one master key that opens all the doors in the office and then making 100 of them. Making 100 copies of the key. Everybody's got their own key. Yeah. Yeah. Folks, you like what we talk about? You want to hear us talk about a particular story on the show. One way to let us know is in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Financial Times sources say that European regulators are having a difficult time finding enough evidence to justify certain antitrust charges against Amazon. The investigation in Europe began in 2019 over accusations that Amazon favored its own merchandise over competitors in its search algorithms. You will be forgiven for thinking like, wait, aren't there other reasons? Yes, there's a lot of other investigations going on. Amazon also faces a separate European investigation began in 2018 over how it uses seller data against third-party sellers. EU competition chief, Margaret Vestiger, said in November that formal charges over that investigation will be filed. So this isn't about them looking at the data and coming up with products to compete with their own sellers. This is about did Amazon favor its own merchandise over competitors in search, all right? And that's the one where they're not finding the evidence. One of the problems is that trade secrets rules prevent regulators from directly examining Amazon's code. So one way to find evidence of this would be to look at the source code and see some code that clearly indicates preference. They're not able to do that. And investigations have found that Amazon makes the majority of its money on its retail platform from its third-party sellers. So favoring its own merchandise does not appear to be in Amazon's financial interest. And again, if you're trying to convince a court that Amazon is doing something illegal, you would have to convince them that this thing you're accusing them of would be in their own self-interest for it to be antitrust. And they're having a hard time proving that. In a way, this kind of reminds me of the way illicit funds are sometimes laundered through real estate or casinos in order to kind of obfuscate any sort of trail that you could use in any sort of court case against them. And maybe Amazon is just coincidentally in a spot where all this information is just hard to find, or maybe they were a little more thorough about making sure that they could hide the track. I mean, I find it very interesting that this is a company that everyone loves to hate, but just coming up with the goods that you can use in the court of law to kind of pin these allegations against them is proving more difficult than first thought. Yeah, you have to have more than loving to hate something to actually prove a violation. And I like to point out that just because you don't like a company or just because they're successful at something doesn't mean they're performing antitrust. It may be, I know it's probably heresy for me to suggest this, it may be that Amazon isn't, in fact, preferring its own products in search and not guilty. It's possible. And, you know, it's, I mean, in many ways, it's actually good that the bar is relatively high in terms of, you know, evidence and having this prosecuted in court, because, you know, if it wasn't then you could be opening up a huge can of worms, all sorts of frivolous lawsuits with a lot of vagaries that might not help anyone. Yeah, so I think I wanted to talk about this, not just because, you know, Big Tech, antitrust, everybody wants to hear about that stuff, but we tend to think that the scenario in these cases will be, well, they're definitely guilty and it's a matter of whether you can show the evidence and convince the court and then whether they can weasel out of it with appeals and get a punishment that doesn't hurt them that much. I think a lot of people think that's the scenario here. This scenario doesn't fit that. This scenario, it looks like, because remember, this isn't the investigation part. This isn't, they brought the evidence to court and then some of it got thrown out or whatever. This is, gosh, we really don't think it's in their best interest to do what we're accusing of, which would mean they're either not very good at things or they're not doing it. They're not preferencing their own thing. And I don't think you have to let Amazon or anybody off the hook to be like, oh, you know what, looking at the evidence, maybe they're not guilty of that one. But let no one be misunderstanding that Amazon will still be under the crosshairs of European regulators. Oh, for the other case. And they may or may not be guilty of that either, but they will continue to be investigated there and they'll be investigated in the U.S. We mentioned Wednesday that Russia used some equipment it has installed in ISPs after a law it passed in 2019 to slow down access to Twitter. Russia accuses Twitter of failing to remove illegal content and according to their laws, if that happens, they can take measures by pressing some buttons, putting in some configurations on this equipment that will, the ISPs don't even have to do anything. The government can just say, we're going to slow down access to Twitter. The deal was they were going to slow down access to Twitter on mobile by half and they were going to slow down half of the sessions on the desktop. Anyway, the order was followed by many Russian users starting to complain that they couldn't access other websites, including Kremlin.ru, Reddit.com, Microsoft.com and others. Restofworld.org has a source that says one explanation for the problems is how the government ordered the block. Apparently, because Twitter has a link shortening service that uses the domain name t.co, the government did not bound the expression such that any domain name that included t.co in it, like reddit.com, Microsoft.com, were caught up in the block. Still unclear why sites like Kremlin.ru were affected. That must have been something else. Russian government blamed the outages on a router failure. There were some stories kicking around that data warehouse fire in Google's domain was the problem, but it does not appear to be the case. A similar situation has occurred before in Russia. Back in 2018, Russia attempted to block Telegram. This is before they had the new equipment though and they accidentally affected thousands of unrelated IP addresses and left Telegram relatively unaffected at that point. You know, what's interesting for me from this story is the approach that another large government entity does in managing their internet citizens access to the internet. That's China. China has a very overwhelming mindset of control or we have a domestic analog of that particular service, right? Weibo versus vis-a-vis Twitter or whatever. Whereas Russia, a lot of the citizens and government still rely on a lot of those things like Google or Twitter or not this case, Twitter or Microsoft. Twitter is not so popular in Russia, but yeah. Not Twitter, but things like Microsoft and stuff. And it's very interesting where the Russian government is allegedly picking and choosing targeting whereas China just has a great firewall and if we don't like it, well, you're never going to see it. Yeah, it's a different approach. China blocks things off and decides what to let in whereas Russia is letting everything in and then trying to decide what they might need to block. And this is a big moment for those laws in that they're saying, okay, we're going to test it on Twitter, which they may be testing out on Twitter because they're accusing Facebook and Google and Konkakte and others of being in violation, but those are more popular. So they cause less outrage if they go after Twitter, which I think has like 700,000 active monthly users in Russia. All right, Vertical Farm startup Oishi, the Japanese word for delicious or tasty, has been getting a lot of investment in a crowded space. Vertical Farm's hot stuff right now. A lot of people getting a lot of investment. So how did Oishi get the attention? Well, because it's strawberries are really, really good. They just grow strawberries. The company grows Japanese style strawberries in Vertical Farms near New York and then they call it taking a Tesla approach by selling their strawberries only to the city's top chefs. People like Cronut inventor Dominique Ansel. Oishi now plans to expand to a larger location, start selling to more markets than just New York. They even talked about having multiple models of strawberries like their current strawberries are the Roadster model, but they're going to have an S3 model as well. The farms are built around beehives, which could let them expand to other fruits and vegetables that take pollination like melons, grapes, tomatoes and such. Company has also developed its own harvesting robots. They didn't buy robots from someone else. They developed them themselves for automation. You know, this is actually a really, really screwed move because like Tesla, Vertical Farms are feasible business plan, but you know, in order to make it feasible, you either have to sell a lot, which you know, depending on what your crop is, you may not be able to do in the Vertical Farm, but or sell them at a higher price, which you can do, especially in a market like New York City, where you have a lot of high end, not just restaurants, but a lot of groups of people and individuals who perhaps have an affinity for those kinds of, you know, higher priced produce because it does offer a quality and a taste profile that you don't normally get from your Safeway or Vons or you know, even a Whole Foods style supermarket. Yeah, and we're going to, I feel like this is one of those burgeoning industries that may make a lot more sense to people than NFTs, but you know, it's a real product and it requires a lot of technology to make Vertical Farms work because you need that automation. That's how you get the savings out of it. You need the automation, you need the watering, you need specialized lighting, right? You can't just open up the side of a building, although they are planning on buildings with open sides for this purpose, but if you're repurposing an office building, it's not something you can easily, but it's really exciting and I really want to try one of those strawberries. I will have to wait until maybe they have a slightly more budget, a Model 3. Yeah, the Model 3 strawberries. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Daniel asked, I keep hearing about Sarah's tea mix. We've been talking about this, I think mostly on good day internet, but Sarah's been talking about her mix of tea. Daniel wants to know, will you be selling it directly or is there another site we need to see it? Not only is Sarah gonna have a tea mix, but we've been working with Phoenix Pearl Tea on one from myself as well, called the Morning Overclock. Roger's gonna be working on a tea as well, so I don't know the exact timeline, but when those teas are ready to ship, you'll be either able to buy them directly from Phoenix Pearl Tea at phoenixpearltea.com or from the Daily Tech News Show store, DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. So, keep an ear out, we'll let you know, but yeah, if you're into tea, we're gonna have our own tea blends for you. Be awesome. Keep those eat. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I was just saying, it's gonna be awesome, those teas. I think it is. Keep those emails coming, feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Shout out to our patrons, the folks who support us at the very top levels, master and grandmaster levels, including Kevin, Paul Boyer, Philip Shane, and we got some brand new bosses, Gary Hlusko and David Pete. Thank you for being our new bosses. They both just started back in the song Patreon. Thanks, bosses. You could be one of our new bosses too, Patreon.com slash DailyTechNewsShow. Patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's check in with Len. He has been illustrating today's show. What have you drawn for us, Len? So, we talked about NFTs at the top of the show and I am going to crack this nut. I am going to do it. So, and I think one of the best ways to do that is to pay homage to the king of NFTs, Beeple himself, Mike Winkelman. And this is, I see these all over the place. People are drawing his profile pic and this is called My Beeple. And this is my version of Beeple, kind of trying to do in the style of Beeple. This image is available right now in my online store and also at my Patreon, at Patreon.com forward slash Len. And it's also dropped as an NFT at OpenSea. So, go ahead and search me, Len P, over there. And finally, I want to real quickly, I want to talk about, I just launched a new Kickstarter Geek-a-Week masterpiece. It's with my son. Go check it out. We did some amazing paintings and Max did some amazing paintings as well. So, check it out. Go to Kickstarter Search Geek-a-Week and you will find it there. We'll have a link in the show notes as well. Man, Max is doing some amazing stuff. Yeah, it's pretty fantastic stuff. Really cool. Yeah, really excited. Hey, folks, we're doing a crossover show with This Week in Science in April, Saturday, April 17th at 4 p.m. Pacific. You'll be able to join me, Sarah, Roger, Dr. Kiki Blair and Justin from TWIS. So, we want to know what, if you could get all of us in a room, what would you want to talk to us about? What do you want to hear us talk about? Let us know topics you'd like us to tag team on by emailing us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Get those topics into us. The show, again, happens Saturday, April 17th at 4 p.m. Pacific. And, of course, you can always support the show at any level, dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Rob Dunwood and Allison Sheridan. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The retirement club hopes you will enjoy this program.