 Bill W became a member of DT&S today and now has access to secret things you don't. Unless you're a member at patreon.com slash DT&S. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 12th, 2019. My wife's birthday, happy birthday, Aline. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Sir Dewey Fielin's grandma's house, I'm Sarah Aline. Back from a well-deserved vacation, I'm Len Peralta. Without any disturbing vacations, I am the sweltering producer, Roger Chang. I'm already in slip there. I'm glad it's good to have you back. It's good to be back. It really is. I'm excited. And it's a suspicious day because not only is Len back from his vacation, but Nicole Lee, senior editor from Engadget is back on the show as well. Hello, happy to be here. Happy birthday to you, wife as well. Oh, thank you. I will pass that along to Aline. We're gonna talk a little bit about the accuracy of menstrual tracking apps and fertility apps. We're gonna talk a little bit about the upcoming strike in Minneapolis against Amazon, but let's start with a few other tech things you should know. Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission voted this week to approve a roughly $5 billion settlement with Facebook over an investigation into the tech giant's privacy violations. And now for something completely different, Google is really not a redesign of its news tab on desktop that is more prominently highlighting headlines and publishers and a new carousel that notes what people are also searching for. The redesign does mean fewer links per page, so it will be a new look and fewer related in-depth or opinion articles appearing underneath the story. Starting next week, Twitter is rolling out a new hide replies feature for users in Canada. The posts are not removed from Twitter, just hidden from your default view. The company says it knows that distracting irrelevant and offensive replies can derail discussions that people want to have and we believe people should have some control over the conversations they start. Gartner and IDC both report that after more than six years of quarterly PC shipment declines, both 2018 and 2019 showed positive growth in the Q2 after Q1 slumps. Both point to a Windows 10 refresh contributing to at least the game this year, but IDC predicts that the game won't last and Gartner points to a U.S.-China trade war or a potential trade war eventually affecting the PC market as more laptops and tablets, as most laptops and tablets rather are still manufactured in China. Volkswagen will invest $2.6 billion in Pittsburgh based startup Argo AI, which coincidentally, well, not coincidentally, it's actually a team up, also has a $1 billion investment from Ford. Ford and Volkswagen have been teaming up a lot lately. As part of this deal, Ford will get access to Volkswagen's electric drive matrix system, which Ford says it will use to build a fully electric vehicle for Europe in 2023. Ford and Volkswagen will both use Argo software in their separate autonomous cars. They're both making their own versions. If you're keeping track, there's a lot of autonomous car team-ups going on. Apple bought Drive AI, Honda's partnered with GM's Cruise, Volvo and Uber build an SUV together, Waymo is teaming up with Renault Nissan and Fiat Chrysler, Hyundai and Amazon are all partners with Aurora. Spring is a wonderful time for autonomous car people to fall in love with each other. Also a wonderful time to be a Hulu user if you care about 4K because 4K streaming is now back for Hulu users on fifth generation or later Apple TVs and also Chromecast Ultra devices. Only Hulu originals are available in 4K though the company says it intends to expand availability in the future. All right, let's talk a little bit more about what Amazon's doing in the research lab. Bloomberg sources say Amazon's lab 126, the company's R&D arm is working on a higher quality version of the Echo speaker and continues to work on its home robot that we've heard some things about before. Prototypes of the new Echo are reportedly wider than the current Echo so you can have four tweeters in there that would put it closer to being on par with the sound of a Sonos one or a HomePod in audio quality. As for the robot, internally it's known as a Vesta. It's said to navigate by computer vision and now the sources are saying it rolls around on wheels so now we know how it gets around and can be controlled as you might guess by voice command. It was hoped they would launch Vesta this year but it's not quite ready. Amazon is putting more engineering and development resources into the team working on its release according to Bloomberg sources so it doesn't seem like they're giving up on it. They're just trying to push forward and get this ready. Who wants an Amazon Echo that rolls around your house? I do and also I love the fact that they're like, and now sources are saying it has wheels. Like how else would it get around? Well, I mean, I guess it could walk. I don't know. I guess that would seem like there would be a lot more R&D. We didn't know and now the sources are like, no, we saw it rolling around. It definitely rolls around. I want this. I want this very much. Nicole, I don't know how you feel but the home assistant, I've got a whole smart home thing going on with mixed results but yes, the robot would be welcome in my home. As long as it knows when to go into rooms when it's supposed to and when it's not supposed to, like it doesn't like barge in on me when I'm sleeping. If it works, I want it. I'm kind of like, I kind of liken it to like my dog or I'm like, yes, privacy thing is, you know, you got to know your place, little robots. I don't think it has any ability to open doors. Well, that's good. That's good to know. So unless it's strong enough to barge through one. Unless your doors are, you know, Alexa controlled, then, you know, I don't know. Oh, like, could the echo on wheels? Could the Vesta play you a recording of you saying to itself open? Yeah, no, that's it. I don't know. Ooh. Yeah. Well, another Amazon news workers at an Amazon warehouse in the Minneapolis area are planning a strike next Monday, which happens to be Amazon Prime Day. It's a big day for Amazon. The workers want higher wages and they also want better working conditions. The strike, which will be accompanied by a rally and Shakopee, which is in Minnesota, is being organized by the A Wood Center, which advocates for Somali and other East African workers and is a partnership between the Service Employees International Union Local 26 and the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. Nicole, you've been covering this story for Engadja, right? Yeah. So I'm going to be probably publishing a sort of a background or piece on Amazon. Obviously, Amazon has faced these accusations before. But however, this kind of large, this kind of the scale of this protest is more part of the largest in as far as the US goes. And it's very interesting because Minnesota and Minneapolis is like the hotbed of this issue, partly because they have such a strong community there of these East African immigrants who've immigrated there. And they have actually already set in with Amazon, they've sort of negotiated a few things here and there. But this upcoming protest will be, I think, it might be the tipping point, I think, because some workers in Staten Island are trying to unionize as well. So yeah. Is there any chance Amazon could avoid this strike? But could they agree to demands and? They could. Here's the thing, they've given them notice. They've given them a week's notice, even in the December round. They've given them a month's notice. And they could very well say, hey, if you just make it so that we don't have to work so hard, they have to, every one of them, they have quotas to me, they have to pack 350 items per hour or something like that. It's a very, very pressurized environment. So they just want not so pressurized kind of thing, better job security in general. So if they had just said, okay, instead of like 300, you can pack 200 or something. Even that would be like something, but they haven't made anything like that. So. Well, you know, this is a modern day face off. We'll see what happens on Monday, which will be a big day for Amazon shipping. They'll wanna ship more things, not better on that day. Well, just about every government official in the United States and then multiple countries around the world have criticized the Libra Association Project. Facebook gave an interview to TechCrunch's Josh Constine about some of the measures it will take to address concerns with the Libra Associations. There are multiple people that are working on this. We're talking to Constine. The company says they expect Libra to incur sales tax and capital gains tax. Really the upshot of this interview is they're trying to say Libra Association is just going to be the currency management. And all of the things that people are concerned about will happen because other entities will take care of them. It'll be a store or a wallet or something that will have to be governed by regulations to do this. So if you're paying for something with Libra and sales tax applies in the region where you're paying for it, then that sales tax should be collected. Capital gains taxes will be collected based on whatever wallet you're using. And they point to things like Coinbase as an example of how this already works. They're in talks with convenience stores and money exchanges to apply anti-laundering checks when you buy or cash out Libra. Anti-laundering checks already happen if you're in say WhatsApp and you wanna link your bank account. That already is part of that. So they're like, that will already happen if you use Calibra in any of these other situations. But if someone wants to use a cash checking place for cashing out Libra, then we're working with those kind of checking, cash checking places to have the anti-laundering checks in place for people who wanna use Libra. The spokesperson emphasized that Libra will not operate as a bank or interact directly with consumers. Facebook's head of Calibra, David Marcus, of course, testifies in front of the US Congress, Senate and the House on July 16th and July 17th. So it does seem to me that the Libra Association is actively engaging with regulators and all political spectrums who are standing up and condemning it haven't really talked to the Libra Association yet. Not that there aren't concerns to be worked out, but it sounds like Libra wants to work them out. Yeah, Nicole, I don't know how you feel about this, but I'm sort of in, I'm in the crypto world of like, if I can use a Calibra wallet to interact on Facebook in any way where I get a better rate than I would somewhere else, I'll do it. The more regulation, the more that certain people will feel, they can rest easier that this is currency that's going by the rules that govern other currencies, but also continue to kind of take back the fun part of this, that this whole sort of like, oh, the new currency, this whole thing, it's a sovereign nation, blah, blah, blah. Well, it sounds like it's gonna be a lot harder than that. Well, that's the thing. I think most of these regulators and government entities, they're very critical and skeptical of this because Facebook's name is attached to it, obviously, because there's a lot of concerns about privacy and all of those issues, which Facebook has understandably, that's why they're so skeptical of Facebook, but the way this is being done and whether or not you trust it or not, the way at least what it's presented as seems to be kind of on the up and up, just because there are 28 members of this organization, Facebook is only one of the 28, so they have, there is no majority voting sticks for Facebook in this liberal association. Each of the 28 members have an equal vote, I guess you could say. And the 28 members are Visa, MasterCard, PayPal. So these are not like run by night, like random companies, these are as well-established financial entities. So, you know, and here's the thing, people still don't really understand cryptocurrency to be fair, like there is still a lot of confusion about what is Libra, what's cryptocurrency, what's Bitcoin, so what's a blockchain? And I think because there's so much confusion and people don't really know what it is, whenever there's like this confusion, people don't know things, whenever there's ignorance around something, people are going to just point your finger at somebody about something. And Facebook, unfortunately, is the favorite punching bag of everyone right now, and it doesn't surprise me that there's all this confusion, but honestly, if you look at the documents, if you look at the white paper, it seems to be on the up and up for now. The biggest problem with Libra is gonna be whether anybody wants to use it. Yeah. Telling enough for someone like Sarah to use it, who already has access to banking and whether it will be accessible enough for people who are unbanked to be able to use it. Libra has answers to that. We'll see. At VidCon going on this week, YouTube rolled out a new monetization tool, a few of them actually for creators, such as Super Stickers, which will roll out in the next few months that lets viewers purchase animated stickers to display in chat during live streams. YouTube also updated channel memberships to include up to five different monthly membership levels, each with its own set of perks. YouTube's Merch program is also expanding partners with CrowdMade, DFTBA, FanJoy, Represent, and RoosterTeeth joining its debut partner, Teespring. YouTube is also launching learning playlists, which offers dedicated landing pages for educational videos on topics like math and science and music and language. Playlists will feature chapters around key concepts and be ordered from beginner lessons to more advanced videos. And learning playlists will not show recommended videos and videos won't autoplay after the playlist is over. Learning playlists is a great idea. It's right now limited to a few partners, which is fine. Part of me says, well, you know what? You roll these things out slowly. You pick the people who can make the best advantage of them. Ted Tox is gonna make great advantage. That's a wonderful thing. I love that it doesn't do the autoplay. It doesn't fall for a lot of the things that are a problem with YouTube. But if you can roll this out to limited partners, which is picking winners, saying these are the people most important, I don't understand why YouTube also can't moderate its homepage and its recommendations better and pick winners there. They keep saying, well, we don't wanna touch the algorithm. We wanna stay unbiased on one side, but whenever they roll out new features, they limit it to people. Yeah, it's almost as if they can control it. Oh, I think they could. Yeah, I suspect they could. And actually, YouTube will say, yeah, we could, but it's a bad idea in this case, but it's a fine idea in this case. And I guess eventually they will roll this feature out to everybody. And I think it's a great feature. I don't mean to... Yeah, it's good, I love that. I think the educational playlist is something we could take advantage of on the Daily Tech News Show channel. Yeah, absolutely. Researchers from the Bangurian University of the Nejiv have developed an attack called Control-Alt-LED that can exfiltrate data, that means get data off of a computer by reading the LED lights on caps lock, and them lock, and scroll lock keys. Now you may say, why would they wanna do that? Well, that means it would work on a secure air-gapped system. So this is a hack for intelligence agencies, for governments, for secrets, for classified information, but you have an air-gapped system that you have your super classified information on. It's unconnected to anything else. There's no network connection at all, not even close to an internet connection. First, how do you get stuff off there? Well, you got to infect it with malware. That's not impossible. These air-gapped systems can be infected with malware by tricking someone into putting a USB drive into it, or some such thing. That's probably the most difficult part of this exploit. Once you got the malware on there, even if the malware is running, it can't use the internet. This is an air-gapped system. There's no network connection. So how do you get the data off? Well, you make the LEDs on the keyboard, blink at rapid speeds to transmit the data. The attacker has to have some kind of line-of-sight view of the keyboard to record the flashes and decode them. You could just record the flashes and decode them later. A smartphone would work. That would mean you'd have to be in the room with the device, but if you could get a CCTV camera pointed at it and you could get that footage, that could also work. The possibility of this method was explained in a 2002 paper. So this isn't a new concept, but this is a good demonstration of it. And the same team that's demonstrating it here did a similar method using hard drive and router LEDs in the past. So it's kind of their thing. Wow. Yeah. Before the show, Tom was like, what's your follow-up question here, Sarah? And I was like, I'm not sure I have one. Don't have a lot of air-gapped computers in your house, I guess, yeah. Right, but no, and this is sort of, there's one of those stories where you're like, okay, somebody would really have to be going for it to make use of this at all, but it's very genius, isn't it? It's like using the caps lock almost in Morse code form to transmit data is really genius. I'm not saying you should do it, but I'm just saying I'm somewhat impressed just by the idea of how this would be effective. This is the kind of thing you're gonna see in Mr. Robot, right? Yeah. Or the next hacker heist thriller film that wants to try to get something right is they'll figure out how to get the USB malware on there and then they'll hack into the CCTV cameras and be able to read the LEDs flashing on the keyboard screen and that's your most likely to encounter it in the movies or TV much more than in real life, but it's a real life thing, it could happen. Hey folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. So apps that track your menstrual cycle and often your fertility are quite popular these days. Garmin added cycle tracking last April, Fitbit added what they call a female health tracking feature last summer, Apple announced at WWDC, it's going to bring cycle tracking to the health app or at least improve it and add it to the health app on the Apple watch. But Nicole, I know you've been digging into a feature on this very gadget, do these things work? Are they useful? Are they helpful? What's the story with them? I think first of all, there are, it depends on what you're gonna use these trackers for. I think that's the number one question that I would have. If you're using them just to track your period, right? I think that's important for a lot of people, just for a lot of women, especially they wanna know what their cycle length is and when to expect their next period just because it's easier to like plan your vacations if you know what your cycle is like. Or are you using it to like get pregnant? Completely different use case. Like now you wanna know like what your fertile window is, what your ovulation time is, like all of those things. And having an app does make it easier because you just enter it into your phone and it taps into it. Of course nowadays, they're incorporating it into all kinds of things, the Garmin, the Fitbit, the Apple watch. So it's more like convenient on the go. Part of me wondered if this was like a weird like, oh, this is for you women now. And I wondered if there was like a weird like gender, like a gender marketing thing for these devices. And maybe it is, right? Maybe there is some aspect of that. But I also think it is actually somewhat useful. But then so I kind of looked at a few studies. I talked to a few researchers. And a lot of them kind of come to the conclusion of what I just said. It really depends on what you wanna use it for. And even then all of these apps have different algorithms of how they calculate it, depending on what you enter in each month. And truth be told, the difference between one app and another, there's almost like no difference between a glow or a dot or a clue or whatever else app name I can think of. It's almost always based on body temperature, right? And there's some sort of, there may be a thermometer involved it may be only app-based it might be something you're wearing on your wrist but it's something that it can be quite accurate but you have to feed it some accurate information as well. Yeah, it's still up to the user to provide that information, essentially. Even if you do wear it on your wrist if you forget to wear it like that's not gonna be entered into the database. So it's still up to the user to have that information. And not last thing that it isn't useful, it is useful. It's just that it's not any more useful than so-called traditional methods. You know, as somebody who I have not used any fertility apps in order to have a baby but I have used them and being able to have some data on your own cycle, super interesting and helpful as you mentioned vacation, great example of that. It's also just, I think at least for women it plays into this whole kind of these data points of what we're doing with fitness trackers in general are just interesting to us. Do I really care if I climb 10,000 stairs rather than 9,000 stairs? Like, no, but I kind of wanna know, I like that. You know, these are interesting things throughout the month that I'm like, that is a cool thing that I can know about my biological, you know, being. Yeah, I think another point to sort of keep in mind and to be mindful of with any of these tracker apps. You know, this is data that you're feeding into this app and the company is getting your data. They are finding out when people ovulate and what their cycle is, what their cervical mucus is like each month. No, maybe you don't care that these companies know about it but just know that it is being fed into these companies and they're probably gonna use it for some kind of marketing, some kind of data, database of information. So whereas like if you just kept it to yourself and just give it to your doctor, that's private information that only you and your medical professional will keep because that's under the oath, a medical oath thing. Whereas this one is kind of like, you know, if you want this information, head at it, which it's up to you on how you feel about your data privacy. Which I mean, that's a good reason to maybe not use an app. Roger, I know your wife was using a device for fertility tracking, right? Yes, and we did it for our first child and, you know, it was just a simple ovulation tracker. I had a bunch of tests strips. I'm just wondering, do these apps provide any advantage other than convenience in terms of like, oh, these are more accurate. These are gonna be more precise in over these like basically drugstore, you know, you buy it off the shelf options. I think those sticks, you mentioned the ovulation stick tech. I think those are still probably more scientifically accurate than an app just because the app does rely again on user input and all of those things can be variable entities. Whereas the electricity just literally adjusted the amount of luteinizing hormone in your urine, which is, so that's a very specific, you know, quantitative thing. So I do think the sticks are probably more accurate, but then you have to buy them, which, you know, they're kind of expensive. Like 30 bucks. But, you know, it's very interesting that, you know, all these fitness trackers, I mean, they're using data that they already collect or based on user input. And I've always been curious to know if there are ways to track parts of, you know, the human physiology without necessarily having something invasive. You know, using a strip isn't terribly invasive, but it's still kind of, you know, awkward to use. Yeah, it's not passive collection environment. I also wonder, and you know, this is me just being dramatic, but I wonder, okay, if data like this is leaked to a third party that may not have your best interest in mind, marketing, fine. But, you know, when is going to be, and maybe this has already happened, when is going to be the first situation where someone's like, well, hold on, look at that fertility data. This doesn't sound right. Now we have a paternity lawsuit involved. Wow. That's the kind of situation where it might not be leaked, but if someone is conducting a lawsuit and knows that data exists, they might subpoena it. And then, you know, and then the Fitbit or whatever it might be like, well, we've got a, you know, we've got a court order that we've got to hand this over, you know, this isn't us handing it over to a marketing company without your knowledge. This is complying with the court order. And our terms for all of our data say that if the courts, you know, tell us to turn over data, we're going to turn over data. That is a really interesting aspect of that, too. That's a very good question. Just remember, all of our parents got pregnant and none of them used apps. So, you know, you have to decide. That's true. I mean, I'm not, it's not like you have the audience to turn over data. Yeah. You know who else has options? Everybody participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories about fertility or other stories that you think might be great for the show, vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com or also on Facebook. We've got a group there. Facebook.com, slash groups, slash dailytechnewshow. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Got some good stuff. Yeah, we did. Mohan wrote in about our conversation about Amazon training its existing workers in new skills. Could do in some retraining going on in Amazon, saying that they're going to put quite a bit of money into it, 700 million if I'm not mistaken. Mohan says one aspect that wasn't discussed was sometimes that's all the option that people have. For example, if a warehouse worker is giving the opportunity to become a data scientist, then they might. Without this, they might not have any other way. People get into most of these types of jobs out of necessity and oftentimes can't get themselves out for various reasons, financial reasons being a major part of that. I know this personally because I have family members in that situation who are much older now and set in their ways. Yeah, good point. And we certainly, you know, we're trying to make it sound like the retraining would solve all the ills of everyone but it's better to have those opportunities than not as Mohan is saying. Chris in Fresno, California says, I continually get frustrated when hearing stories about paid subscriber numbers for major music streaming services. I can't open a webpage without seeing an offer for 99 cents a month Amazon music or Spotify free for three to six months. I know Apple has discounts for students for a limited time. Basically he's like, I'm not going to believe any of these numbers until I see average revenue per user, which is perfectly sensible. Like that's really the apples to apples comparison. Pardon my pun. Spotify reported $5.29 average revenue per user in Q1 of this year. Apple doesn't report its average revenue per user but it did announce 50 million paid users in January, a number that does not include free trials. So they announced a number that didn't include their free trials at 50 million. They had previously announced 50 million that did include the free trials. So if you scrounge around there's a little bit of that number, but I'm with Chris. I would like to see just give me some ARPUs so that we can really compare these to each other. All right, let's check in with Len Peralta who has been illustrating today's show. What have you come up with today, Len? You know, I found this topic pretty interesting. My wife and I are beyond this right now. We don't need it at all, but I can kind of see how it would come in handy for someone who's trying to be pregnant or not become pregnant. And what kind of made me interested about this was that the Fitbit was not really working properly. And I can just see this would be something that would happen to somebody. I tracked my monthly cycle on my device and all I got was pregnant. Not that it's a bad thing, but if you don't know. But there was someone in our chat room a minute ago who was saying, you know, what about people who are using cycle tracking to not get pregnant? You know, they're not in a situation to get pregnant. And yeah, it's like addresses that head on. Thank you. Yep. And it can get it at Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store, lenproffstore.com. Excellent. And so good to have you back, Len. And also so great to have Nicole lead back on the show today. Nicole, where can people keep up with your fabulous work? You can just go to twitter.com slash Nicole for any updates that I have about links to my stories. Excellent folks. Don't miss out, get the cool stuff, the early stuff, the ability to chat with other people, listen to the show live and all so much more by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you have feedback or email addresses, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday. Join us if you can for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Be all Monday. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.