 Coming up on DTNS, you hear a lot about the effects of the virus, but what about what people are doing to stop it? We've got a roundup of hackathons, open source projects, 3D printing efforts and more to help the fight against COVID-19. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 25, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. 90 Aftershocks later, I'm Scott Johnson in Salt Lake City. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. So the earthquakes have finally stopped in Utah. We're still having aftershocks, but they're mostly small. They had one yesterday. People could feel, um, I haven't felt any since last Thursday, I guess, but downtown it's apparently, it's a little nerve wracking, but this all seems normal, I guess. Like all the experts are like, no, that's how it trickles down and you stop having them. Trust us out here in California. They're right. Yeah. Well, we were talking about a wonderland of life hacks on good day internet. Got to get that show, support the show and become a listener of good day internet at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google's redesigned podcast app is now available to all on Android with three tabs home for your feeds, explore to find new shows and activity, which shows your listening habits. Google also launched its podcast app for iOS and activity will sync across both platforms. Very handy. Yep. Very good news there. Workers have tested positive for COVID-19 at nine Amazon warehouses, including distribution facilities near Oklahoma City, Louisville, Houston, Jacksonville and Detroit and facilities on Staten Island, New York, Wallingford, Connecticut and Moreno Valley, California, east of Los Angeles. Amazon employs 750,000 people in the U S Amazon says it has increased sanitation efforts limited to our face to face meetings and staggered break times to promote social distancing. Yeah, we had some tips on how to deal with packages in this time on good day internet as well. Samsung shipped the first million 10 nanometer grade DDR for DRAM modules based on an extreme ultraviolet process, ultraviolet, not ultraviolet. The technique improves scaling to give better RAM performance, shorter development time and better yields. Mass production of ultraviolet made RAM is expected sometime in 2021. Microsoft announced it's pausing all optional non security updates for Windows and server products starting in May, which means C and D updates that usually arrive in the third and fourth week of a month. Google paused non security updates to Chrome last week. We talked about it and it will skip version 82 of Chrome as well. Microsoft is also delaying the scheduled end of service date for the enterprise education and IOT enterprise editions of Windows 10 from April 14th all the way out to October 13th. Those devices will receive security updates for the next few months. All right, let's talk a little bit about a lot of these headlines swinging around about ad declines and how that's affecting some of the big tech companies. Well, as businesses shut down worldwide, many of them ad spending is declining and Cohen and company analysts estimate Google net revenue will be 127.5 billion for the year, 28.6 billion less than previous estimates. Facebook is now estimated to make 67.8 billion on the year 15.7 billion less than previously estimated. Both companies are still expected to be profitable. Facebook reported a weakening in ad business Tuesday as traffic increased in non monetized services like messaging. Cohen also estimates Twitter revenue will be 18% lower than previously expected and Spotify 30% lower overall Cohen estimated US ad revenue fail or will fall a total of 11% year over year in 2020. Yeah, so there's a lot of effects on the economy from shutdowns and nobody has really got a full handle on it. But this is one aspect of it. And Facebook putting out that guidance made a lot of people nervous because they were worried like, well, if it could Facebook go down, because the trouble with Facebook is they've been very carefully putting out motivations for you to use the private sections of its website, most famous being Messenger, right? They haven't been monetizing those. So now that ad revenue is declining, they're not making money from the increased use of those parts of the website. Yeah, and it's, you know, you sort of go and good because I don't want ads in my message in app Facebook or otherwise. But this is a company that yet 2020 is going to be a weird year for for a lot of books, whether you're a huge company like Facebook or a smaller business. So it's almost a wash. But if it's a trend that continues, you know, if more people just change their behavior, you know, behaviors sometimes change after repetition, enough after enough of a period of time, does Facebook have to get advertising revenue on more of a fast track in some of these products that it hasn't been touching, or it has been very deliberate about slowly introducing to not upset the masses. And if not, do you know, how does the company spin the whole well, revenues down, but we're still profitable. But but we're not as profitable as we used to be because that just doesn't work on paper. Yeah, no, I think that's it. And the good news for these companies or any of you that hold stock in them is they're still profitable. So they'll probably survive. Also, strange time in India, India's flip cart paused all shopping on its website and mobile app Wednesday as India began a 21 day nationwide lockdown ordered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Delivery drivers from Flipkart, Amazon and Alibaba's big basket all reported instances of being stopped by police. Flipkart has resumed deliveries after receiving government assurance of the safety of its delivery staff. Alibaba is working says it's working with authorities to allow movement of big basket personnel and vehicles as well. And assemblers Foxconn and Wistron have suspended production at their India plants, which cover some iPhone models in order to also comply with this lockdown. Foxconn at least says operations plan to resume April 14. Yeah, this is this is a difference in approach. Here in Los Angeles, they when they put in the lockdown orders, they made a big deal Mayor Garcetti here of saying, look, we're not going to be running around arresting people. We just we just want you to do the right thing. In India, it seems like they took a stricter approach. And we're out there really enforcing the rules and some of these delivery folks got caught up in that. I mean, normally you would see it as a, I don't know, incremental approach. You start with the honor system, and then see how people comply. Does it curb the spread? Does it actually show up in the data that it made a difference? And then if it doesn't, you go to harsher measures, like, you know, stay where you're at, shelter and don't move. If that doesn't work, then you start enforcing with with harder rules. It seems like India just jumped right to part B instead of playing with a very long. Yeah, a different, different style of doing this. The other thing you mentioned, Sarah, of course, Foxconn and Wistron goes along with us talking about LG Samsung and others ramping down production. And there was an interesting wired article today about how the fact that the virus is shutting down in phases around the globe might actually end up working out okay. It won't be great. They weren't trying to say it was great. But as China's just getting its manufacturing back in in gear, demand is going down in places. But also India manufacturing shutting down. So that demand could be enough to keep China going until the demand starts to come back and India like it might all time out to just be kind of a slow curve, slow down. We'll have to wait and see, of course. Dell now supports the ability to mirror an iPhone screen to a Dell PC using Dell's mobile connect app. You can control the phone screen using mouse and keyboard drag and drop photo and video files, not all files, Android version of this you can do a lot more with. But you can drag and drop your photo and video files between the phone and the PC. And speaking of those Android users, Android's mobile connect for Dell can now use a PC to send MMS files from smartphones as well. This is really cool. And I have some experience with needing on a PC and a Mac and kind of different platforms being able to mirror iOS devices or iPad OS devices, which we'll now call those because they have their own OS. And that is when I need to stream or share artwork that I'm doing. Sometimes with a client, they need to be able to see it in a screen sharing way that isn't just screenshots. They want to see it while I'm zooming in doing replays of some of it or whatever. And I use something called Reflector 3, which has been pretty good. It's not amazing. It's got its problems occasionally has a weird little glitch here and there, but basically mimics airplay on both platforms. And it works pretty well and does a good job of sort of replicating everything you would normally do with that screen. It doesn't have some of these other features like drag and drop photos and video files and moving content from device to desktop from desktop to device. That's really exciting here because I would use that stuff all the time. I use AirPlay when I can or not AirPlay AirDrop when I can. But that's again only on the Mac side on the PC side. I'm kind of stuck and I have to use Dropbox or other slower ways to sort of handle that sort of thing. So I think this is going to be a big deal for a lot of people for lots of productivity reasons, but I can tell you if you're out there and you're like, man, I want to start streaming my art on Twitch or YouTube and you were looking for a way to do it. This now has a built-in way to do it if you have this Dell machine. Dude, sounds like you want to get a Dell. You know, I have exactly one Windows machine and it's a Dell laptop and I'm so excited to just use this just so it works. I can say that's handy. Yeah, it's very handy. It's one of those things also. This one feels like one of those things that Android people got early because it's a more open platform. It's less cracked down in terms of, you know, what Apple controls and that sort of thing. And Google's made it more open and iOS users are like, ah, man, here's one example where I'm ticked. But this is great to hear. I mean, this kind of usability is huge, especially if you're a cross-platform user and you're not necessarily in the Apple universe, but you like their phone. Great way to just increase productivity when it comes to moving files around and more much more mobile these days. I mean, it's awesome. So I can't actually, in your particular case there, I can't wait to hear how this works with your notebook once it comes out because you'll have more access. Yeah, me too. I do wish it was truly cross-platform. You didn't have to have a Dell, but I've got an Alienware. Maybe I'll try it on that too. Never know. They own them still, right? That's still theirs. Yep. So maybe they got a little sneaky something going on in there. I mean, I'm all for this stuff just being more available in general. And like I said, Reflector 3 does a really good job of a lot of these features, but me moving a big file around, not one of them. So I am all for this and I'm also really tired on the PC side of it, having to think about where I want to put a very big video file or a very big, you know, some other graphic file in some sort of cloud storage service. Find out, oh, I've already got more than three things synced for my Dropbox. This is a really cool solution. I hope it spreads. Safari for macOS, speaking of macOS, iOS and iPadOS, now blocks all third party cookies by default. Third party cookies are set by domains that aren't the same as the page you're visiting. This prevents cross-site frequency or sorry, excuse me, cross-site request forgery attacks and cross-site tracking. Safari now also now limits website scripts to storage for one week. The WebKit team behind the change will report results to the World Wide Web Consortium Google, not just to say Chrome, plans a similar change for 2022, but some developers have noted that while blocking third party cookies is generally a good thing. Deleting all local storage after seven days hurts online apps. Offline, offline apps. Offline, sorry, offline. Yeah, particularly, yeah, that's the whole point, because some folks who develop these apps for offline use, these web apps, are saying that getting rid of that JavaScript storage really undermines their ability to make the app work. I can't tell whether this is just because they designed the app to take advantage of that long-standing storage and they could work around it, but it's going to be a pain, or if it really fundamentally undercuts the ability to do offline web apps. I'd be curious if you're a developer who's upset about this, you don't need to write in. We get that, we were seeing a lot of that. But if you're a developer who's like, yeah, honestly, it's annoying, but I know I can still do my offline web app this way. We'd love to hear that if there's that side of it. Yeah, I know that the complaint, at least yes, from the developer community who's like, this actually isn't a very good thing for us, is, well, if Apple's claiming that this just makes everybody more private, then why don't apps in the App Store have to adhere to the following rules? Because offline apps are, at times, rendered kind of dead, depending on what it does, if the data is getting blown out every seven days, but it's not exactly the same with Apple's App Store. But it's a little bit Apple's and oranges, but I feel like I understand what the complaint is. But yes, I would love to know from a developer why this isn't always a bad thing, because I have heard from what might be a very vocal minority. Yeah, and then this is going to happen, no matter what, because Chrome's going to do it too. There's already browsers out there that do this to a certain extent, like Brave, with some very minor exceptions. So this is the new normal to say, look, we're just not going to allow this to happen by default. It's a little surprising that it's such a disparity in time. 2022 versus now just seems like a big huge chunk of time. I don't know why. I mean, maybe Chrome has their reasons, but I'm a little surprised that they're taking it. Well, Chrome takes things slower in general, and I think that's probably why. Safari was the first to build ad blocking at all into the browser. Chrome takes a little more time, because I don't know, maybe because Google makes most of its money off advertising, to help advertisers adjust to the coming change. Sure. Maybe that's why. Maybe it's not. I don't know. Hey, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, folks, you're hearing a lot about the bad effects. In fact, we've had a couple of them on the show already of the virus. So we want to take some time. Each show to talk about the things people are doing to try to fight COVID-19. We did that on yesterday's show. We're going to do it again now. The state of New York has started a COVID-19 technology SWAT team and is looking for people with experience in product management, software development, engineering, hardware deployment, end user support, data science, operations management, design, or other similar areas. If you fit this and want to help the state of New York, go check out the link in our show notes, dailytechnewshow.com or just do a search for the COVID-19 technology SWAT team New York and find out information about that. Also, volunteers from Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, MongoDB, Cloudflare and other tech companies have been working closely with epidemiologists to launch a virus tracking website. Took them less than a week, six days. COVIDnearyou.org asks people to voluntarily share whether they have symptoms. Other details like have you had the flu vaccine? Because if you haven't, maybe you just got the flu. And then add in gender, age, and zip code in order to help public health groups better understand the spread of the virus. Any data collected will only be shared with health groups, not with tech companies. Remember, these are volunteers from the companies. I did this this morning, by the way. Oh, you did. Took about 15 seconds. You know, what you mentioned, Tom, is exactly what they ask you. They don't ask any more data. They don't want to know your name, just what your zip code is and how you're feeling and if you've had a flu shot and and the more, yeah, the more the more data that can be shared very easily for a really good reason, the better. Yeah, I found out today, my son has a, what appears to be just a bad sinus cold thing. But when I saw this, I thought, you know what, I should have him do this because some of the data is going to be people with symptoms have nothing to do with COVID. It could be, you know, I've just got regular flu or cold. Yeah, so yeah, really cool thing. I'm going to have him especially because now is the time where people still are getting the flu. People are getting colds. It's still really, I mean, not that you can't get a cold in the summer, but it's still really cold in a lot of places in the world. So, you know, what I hear a lot of is my friend saying, well, my brother's got a cough. You might have coronavirus and I'm like, he might have lots of things. You know, so this is this is just a way to kind of be able to follow the general pattern of sickness that we experience every year anyway. The government of Singapore is making its trace together app source code freely available to developers around the world to use and modify. This has proved very effective in Singapore. Trace together can identify people who have been within two meters of infected patients using Bluetooth. So it's basically open sourced. The World Health Organization is partnering with multiple tech companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, WeChat, Slack, Giffy, TikTok and Pinterest for a hackathon to develop software to help fight against COVID-19. It's called build for COVID-19. Look for that hashtag out there accepting project submissions from Thursday through Monday and the top projects will be announced on April 3rd. MIT researchers plan to publish open source designs for a low cost respirator on the MIT emergency ventilator project or event. There's a few of these going on. The motorized device uses a motor to compress widely available bag valve masks. The designs are waiting for emergency approval by the US Food and Drug Administration. And if the design does prove safe and effective, which it still needs to do, it could be used as a backstop when full ventilators run out. This isn't a replacement for ventilators, but it's an emergency measure that hospitals could use or maybe people in remote areas that don't have access to hospitals could also use. I love that one. I love the ones where designs and open source stuff or projects that are being worked on at universities could get into other hands and that means manufacturing could go up. It means people have more options in places they normally wouldn't have these options. That's my favorite on this list. I love that one. I'm also interested when you talk about emergency approval by the FDA, because sometimes getting drug approved or some sort of medical technique, there's all sorts of things where they go, ah, might be tears, clinical trials and the whole thing. Emergency approval obviously takes away resources from something else because it's more important to focus on this. How fast does that turn around? Yeah, I don't know. It's a call for rapid review under an emergency use authorization. I'm sure there's a lot of things that fall under that these days. Yeah, I just I don't know enough about how that's all set up internally. Kind of fascinated by the whole thing. We have a lot of 3D printer stuff going on ZDNet reports. A lot of these Stratasys printing thousands of disposable face shields at its facilities in Minnesota, Austin and California, and giving them to healthcare professionals for free. Medtronic and Dunwoody College are providing support for the materials. Also posted printing and assembly instructions online with a form if you want to help join the effort in printing these. Stratasys also joined coventchallenge.com hosted on GrabCAD, which is a group trying to develop a rapidly deployable mechanical ventilation solution similar to the one we were just talking about. HP is printing and delivering components for face masks, face shields, mask adjusters, nasal swabs, hands free door openers, and respirator parts. HP also testing and validating designs for other applications, including a mechanical bag valve mask. A lot of people working on that. Hospital grade face masks and HP is taking the validated designs and posting them freely online for others to use as well. Protolabs is pressing ventilator parts in the thousands and working with the University of Minnesota to design a new ventilator that is easier to make. Formlabs is printing COVID-19 test swabs and personal protective equipment for hospitals. They collaborated with several hospitals, including the University of South Florida and Northwell Health and are sharing their designs. Ford is using its 3D printing factory capacity to produce plastic face shields and components of other personal protective equipment with the first batch testing at Detroit Mercy, Henry Ford Health Systems and Detroit Medical Centers Sinai Grace Hospitals and Smile Directs Club which usually makes teeth straightening kits and claims to be one of the largest 3D printing manufacturers in the United States is working with health organizations to print face shields and respirator valves but is also making its global HIPAA-trained contact center team and support system available for use. Interested health organizations should email resilience at smiledirectclub.com. Now the heroes come out of unusual places a little bit. I mean, I don't know how heroic it is but it's awesome to see as much as it's you don't want any of this to be going on. I'm always interested to see like in wartime where like World War II you'd see a company that used to make tin cans. Was it your grandpa that did this? Was it you that was telling me this? Yep. Yeah. Okay. Eric and Ken company. He started working for Amrtorpe, making torpedoes. That's just amazing. He was an accountant helping them account for the torpedoes. Well, it takes a village but I just love the idea of them shifting gears and coming up with a way to do this and it's greater good stuff that just makes me feel a little better about everything. You know what I mean? This is great. French startup Miracle has developed and that's M-I-R-A-K-L by the way has developed an e-commerce marketplace called stopcovid19.fr to centralize supply and demand of essential products. So starting with hand sanitizer but they're going to expand to other products. It'll help companies and health organizations coordinate. So if somebody making the hand sanitizer needs a warehouse to store it in they'll be able to find them on here and of course hospitals and other health organizations will be able to obtain the materials and find out who has them and where are they. Only health care facilities and companies making COVID-19 protection goods may participate in this particular marketplace. Yeah it's not the people who should be getting all that hand sanitizer going to the right folks. Academics at Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government have launched the Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker aggregating data from 11 indicators. So they look at like oh are the schools closed in this area or is transport closed? What are the fiscal indicators? What's the monetary policy? And they're creating an index that compares the effect of worldwide policy responses containing data from 73 countries. It's freely available. It's meant for policymakers to understand the impacts of different state interventions so they can see what's working. Like oh we saw in this country that when they closed transport it had this effect maybe we do or don't want to do that. And finally IBM's The Weather Company has launched a COVID-19 mapping tool at weather.com and also in the weather channel mobile app combining data from multiple sources. So Johns Hopkins a lot of people have been using that. The WHO as well as locally reported data from states and counties putting it all together in an incident map. There's also an analytics dashboard that reports things like the rate of spread. This is using IBM's Watson and Cognos analytics tools and it's being made for researchers and public officials but it's not behind a wall. So anybody can access it if you're just curious and want to see more than just what you'd find at any one of these sites. That's very cool. Yeah I mean just kind of thinking of it you know from a macro perspective macro perspective I try to stay up on what's going on in my immediate area for obvious reasons but this is the the wave happens in different places in different ways because of different behaviors that people have and so it's you know it's a big anthropological study along with the immediate situation that we're in. Yeah it's like you get comfortable sometimes in where you're at like we look at New York or I look in California and I just think man it's so much worse there why is it so much worse than here and I know the answers to a lot of that it's about proximity and population and everything else but then stuff will happen locally and you're like no no wait guys that's a thing that you're doing a thing that will get us to where now they're all talking about us like we're New York or whatever so stop doing that thing and the more resources we have to have people be able to track things locally as well as nationally the more technology put into play to do that the better I absolutely love that the daily tech news show is talking about these things not just from my own mental health to hear positivity during a time of you know so much uncertainty but it's actually just good information to know that these things are being worked on where they're being worked on what you can do to be a part of it like it's a real it's a real awesome thing Tom I don't know I made the joke earlier today that I'm practicing social distancing with my news as well and trying to focus on these actual sources of information from healthcare professionals from validated data and so some of these things are great for that like the weather channel app other things are things that you might be able to join in on if you have a 3D printer or if you're involved in that world if you're an engineer and you can join that at New York City SWAT team it doesn't have to be just I'm looking at the news and it looks bad and I don't know what to do there's a lot going on out there Also going on conversations in our discord great community there you can join the conversation by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns Let's check out the mailbag Oh let's Brooks wrote in wanted to share a little parent hack that he came up with helping his family around the house because he and his wife and his three kids are all home together Brooks has a five-year-old girl twin boys that are both three because they're twins sharing has been a real struggle says Brooks I'm constantly setting the timer for sharing and it was getting annoying so I made an Amazon echo routine that will play a sound announce who his turn it is and then even change one of my Philips Whiz lights to the kids chosen color every two minutes it's a little cumbersome to set up but once it is it works well the kids had fun picking out what their sound would be and we came to an understanding of colors because all the kids wanted to have blue I've also had luck with using the Philips Whiz and fight electric lights as an okay to wake clock for the boys and a stay on task timer for my older daughter Oh these are these are great my niece we definitely use the Amazon timer on and until very recently she was an only child so we didn't have to deal with the sharing so it's cool to hear about using that routine that's super smart and the light they have a smart light in her room as well that she can't get up in the morning until it turns a certain color or or she does or else yeah yeah she doesn't get something I can't remember what it is she doesn't get but she's very much wants that so she respects the light it's good stuff thank you Brooks yeah totally Andre wrote in and said on your subject of getting together digitally my wife's birthday is this Saturday happy birthday to your wife Andre he says we were supposed to go out with a group of friends so now this weekend we'll have a group supper where everyone will eat at home and have face time so we can all chat together this will be a first for most of us old folks take care stay safe don't touch your face thank you Andre that's really good speaking of face time so every night at about not the same time but usually around eight or nine o'clock me my three kids we're all now out of here we all get together on face time a group size I've never done on that app before it works out great actually and we prop our phones up and we play animal crossing and talk to each other the whole time nice aww and how long does that usually go um an hour with animal crossing it probably takes all night it could take all night if you wanted Scott's like what do you mean how long does it take we're doing it right now yeah eventually some people have to like get out but uh just for time but yeah it's a great way to sort of laugh and hang out and we're doing a thing we all enjoy together and it's it's been really therapeutic it's a great thing to do aww I love that that's it's it's really nice to hear those stories please keep your feedback coming you know it's it's it's cheery for all also cheery our patrons at our master and grand master levels including Hayes also thanks to Scott Johnson I know you're playing a lot of animal crossing these days but what else is up well I have been it's been a nice respite away from the real world however um I'm busy with everything I always do and one of those things is I put together webcomic every week called fred and can and as much as I tried it not to be this it is kind of commentary on what's happening to us all so if you want to see what happens when fred gets a little lazy and can tries to explain to him why he needs to get up and move well there's some fun to be had there check it out at fredandcan.com you can find everything else I do at frogpants.com and as always I'm on Twitter at Scott Johnson Hey man during these times there are a lot of us who are creators trying to help make stuff to keep people entertained keep people informed and so I want to use this part of the end of DTNS to highlight some of the other folks out there doing good stuff today if you ever listen or watch Good Day Internet you know we use a tool called showbot to let people submit titles and vote on them that's how we pick the titles of the show if you want to support the person that makes that possible for us and a lot of other podcasts and shows you need to go support bio cow at patreon.com slash bio cow you can always support our show as well this is our livelihood thanks to everybody who stepped up and said look I'm doing okay right now I can help cover the contributions of those who can't at patreon.com slash DTNS I mentioned we'd love feedback and email's a great way to give us some feedback email address his feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we also do this show live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern that's 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program