 Coming up on DTNS, will social media give you a misimpression of what's happening with COVID-19? Yes, but how bad a misimpression? Plus, Huawei's new Google-free phone and exoskeletons for your ankles that make you run faster. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 26, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We talked quite a bit about what we wear on our legs on Good Day Internet, if you'd like to hear that. And more, of course, you got to become a member and get Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google published instructions for local businesses to update their search and maps profile to list them as temporarily closed. The option is available to Google My Business users under the Close This Business on Google option, along with permanently closed and removed listing options as well. Google previously said it is researching out to businesses to confirm and update operating hours, reaching out rather. Epic Games launched Epic Games Publishing, partnering with Game Developers Remedy Entertainment, who made Limbo and InSight, and Gen Design, which made The Last Guardian. Developers working with Epic will retain 100% of their IP and full creative control. Epic Games Publishing will cover 100% of the development costs. After costs are recouped, developers will get 50% or more of the profits. Games published by Epic will not be exclusive to the Epic Games store. Qualcomm announced the QCC 514X and 304X audio systems on a chip with ultra low power Bluetooth for entry level and mid-tier earbuds. Both offer up to 13 hours of playback on a 65 mAh battery and active and hybrid noise cancellation. Both support voice control with the 514X offering hands-free access with the wake word. Qualcomm expects the system on a chip will be in products released in the second half of the year. Micron forecasted its current quarter revenue will come in above analysts' estimations. I was saying expectations and estimations and so it got weird. Work from home is fueling demand for laptops and data center services driving up demand for Micron's parts. Polaroid Originals is releasing a $99 camera called Polaroid Now that works with eye type film. It has autofocus that chooses a 35mm or 40mm lens and has an improved flash that takes into account lighting conditions. The rechargeable battery lasts for 15 packs of film. What an amazing way to judge a battery life. I know I kind of love that too. A UK app called C19 COVID Symptom Tracker is asking people to self-report symptoms in an effort to gather detailed data that could be useful for medical professionals. This is not a diagnostic tool and so you'd think well a lot of people might just ignore it but the app has more than 750,000 downloads and is the third most popular app in the UK Apple App Store. Duolingo launched a free iOS app called Duolingo ABC to teach children three through six years old how to read English with more than 300 lessons on the alphabet, phonics and sight words. Kids can perform tasks like spell a given word from a jumble of letters or trace the outline of various letters or words, tap objects that start with a certain letter, read a specific word in a sentence. It's available now in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK and the US of course and Duolingo plans on an Android version in the future. Airbnb announced that it will provide quote free or subsidized housing for 100,000 COVID-19 frontline health care relief or first response professionals. Airbnb can opt to make their space available or Airbnb hosts can opt to make their space available and Airbnb will waive its regular booking percentage fee. The program includes new protocols around cleanliness and Airbnb will work with the Red Cross and International Rescue Committee, the International Medical Corps and other nonprofits to help allocate space where there is the most demand. Yeah that's necessary. There's a lot of these first responders are having to find places to rest and sleep while they fight this. Finally, someone contacted AMD back in December claiming to have source code and test files related to a subset of current and future graphics products. Reparositories of the files were hosted on GitHub and according to TorrentFreak included details on AMD's Navi 10, Navi 21 and Xbox Series X GPUs. AMD alleges that the leaked IP was stolen and sent takedown notices to GitHub claiming the IP is not core to the competitiveness or security of their graphics products, but nevertheless qualified for copyright takedown. All right let's talk about that brand new announcements from Huawei Sarah. Oh let's Tom. Huawei announced the launch of the 6.1 inch P40 and 6.58 inch P40 Pro and the P40 Pro Plus its first major launch without any Google apps or services. The phones run on Huawei's 5G Kirin at 990 processors with curved glass that wraps around all sides though there is still a small visible bezel. The Pro and Pro Plus have 90 Hertz refresh rates. The front facing camera is in a hole punch at the top left and the phones can unlock by face or 30% larger in-screen fingerprint sensor. Now some specs. The P40 has a triple rear camera with a 50 megapixel RYYB camera with a 1.9 f-stop, a 16 megapixel 2.2 f-stop 17 millimeter ultra-wide camera and an 8 megapixel 2.4 f-stop telephoto with 3x optical zoom. Huawei uses a large 1.128 inch sensor to produce 12.5 megapixel images by combining four pixels into a single pixel. The P40 Pro gives you a time of flight sensor and raises the resolution of the wide-angle camera and telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom. The P40 Pro Plus has two telephoto lenses. One is 3x optical and the other is a periscope lens with 10x zoom. The Huawei CameraSofter can remove glass reflections and unwanted people in the background as well, that's handy. Now also some apps were announced. A tool called a phone clone can copy non-Google apps from another Android phone, though they won't get automatic updates. You've got to copy them yourself. You can also add the Amazon App Store and Huawei is also launching its VideoChat app MeTime, that's M-E-E time, in Europe with its own voice assistant, Celia. It's working with TomTom on a Maps app as well and it has offerings from Microsoft, Amazon, Opera and Snap but not Facebook, Slack, Netflix or Twitter. The P40 arrives April 7th starting at 799 euros, the P40 Pro arrives April 7th as well starting at 999 euros and the P40 Pro Plus arrives in June starting at 1399 euros. So I mean this is a beautiful phone. We're used to Huawei putting out beautiful phones. The wrap around glass, some people are like well it's not the display wrapping all the way around but it's still pretty nice. But everyone's going to get hung up in Europe on not having Google services and Huawei's doing its darnedest to say yeah well maybe you'll miss them but you can definitely do without them if you want this beautiful phone. It's a tough sell. There's not a Maps app on this thing that works outside of China very well and like you said they're working with TomTom but they don't have that yet. Yes you can clone a bunch of apps over not the Google apps but a bunch of other apps over with that phone clone app but then you have to keep doing that if you want to keep your apps up to date. There's just all kinds of caveats on how this works. Huawei says it's continuing to work with developers to get apps into its own gallery app store but I don't look at this and think that the loveliness of the specs, the greatness of the camera and the prettiness of the form factor are going to outweigh all the trouble you would have to go to to get the apps that you would get on any competing Android phone. Yeah I agree. It seems like a situation where Huawei's it's like they're too far ahead of the game as saying well you have other options. You can still do stuff and everyone's like yeah but there's no market leader that isn't Google in so many areas yet. We're not there yet so yes the alternatives do exist. The phone is very nice but the innards are what most people care about. Well look at like this if they are going toward a non-Android Google future right the journey of a thousand miles starts with one phone and this is them getting out there with a slick phone that will convince people to at least maybe give it a try. Yeah ask Windows. The Nikkei Asian review sources say that Apple may delay the autumn release of a new iPhone. Apple faces supply chain issues as well as a possible doubt in demand. Yeah so that's the two things that people are saying and it's not just Nikkei is that they might not be able to get all the parts they need to build these at scale. They might not be able to get the people to visit China to sign off on supply chain issues. Usually you have people from Apple visiting China by now for this and there might be a lack of demand. Either people won't have the money to spend on flagship phones or people just will be distracted and not interested in upgrading their phone right now. They'll be prioritizing other things this autumn. So I have two big questions. One is does Apple delay this to just later in the autumn or do they delay it to next year. Do they skip what do they do there and then what effect does that have on Apple's development cycle if they do. Yeah I mean oh go ahead Justin. Just we don't know what the supply chains are. Like there there is there was obviously a massive disruption as COVID ripped through China earlier this year which feels like it's been five years but yes it was only like 25 to 30 days ago that this actively happened. Yeah then we got word at least rumors were that things were getting going again. Factories were asking for purchase orders. They were trying to get back up to speed specifically because again like Tom mentioned this is when you are putting in the orders now. March is when you are putting in the orders for Christmas when you are getting everything running because you want to build out enough time for things to be perfected and you can make sure that the items that go out are up to snuff. I think that if we're having these questions now and we are still looking at instability in China they just put a blanket ban on the world basically. It's not just specifically targeted in terms of travel into China. I think that this there's no doubt that it's going to be delayed and my guess would be delayed until next year. Yeah the ban on non-citizens returning to China that just seems warranted given that it's now the rest of the world that is spreading the virus. I don't know that that disrupts the internal supply chain but it certainly disrupts things like I was talking about where Apple people want to visit or you know it may not disrupt cargo shipments but it's disruptive. I don't think it means China is not recovering any faster but it means the rest of the world is not going to make it easy to get these supply chains flowing again. And really even the supply chain let's say I don't know things look a lot different in six months than they do today and the supply chain while affected now figures out how to basically get back on track. I really do think that when it comes to the average consumer who may have been saving up and maybe skipped a couple iPhone cycles and this is going to be the year type thing. If you're a good budgeter you probably know you know in September or October whenever this gets announced and you might buy a new phone that's over a thousand dollars potentially you know how much money you have and a lot of people who would have had that money do not and it doesn't matter if everything gets back to normal it's not going to get back to normal for a lot of folks for you know quarters and quarters perhaps years. So that is something that Apple is keenly aware of and Apple does not want to have a bad selling quarter for a new flagship phone no matter what the reason is because it reflects poorly on the company. Although if they don't have a phone they're gonna have a bad selling quarter. They're going to be eating up there's no no goose on Christmas for any of these companies. This is gonna be a black yeah it's gonna be hard. Hey here's something that you just need to know that doesn't relate to the virus directly. You got a D-Link or a Linksys router or someone you love pay attention bit defender and website bleeping computer both are describing attacks against those routers D-Link and Linksys where attackers are using brute force attacks to guess admin passwords. So if your admin password is default they're getting in quick. If it's short and not particularly secure they're probably getting in and then they're changing the DNS settings to point to the attacker's server so you might not even know this is happening certain domains would work just fine but other domains are redirected to malicious sites that encourage users to install an app with COVID-19 information. That app carries the oski trojan which steals your account credentials and hijacks crypto wallets. So check the router's settings. If the DNS server is set to either 109.234.35 230 and or 94.10382.249 you should remove the server record and change the admin password. The sad thing about this is the kinds of people who can have the skills to go check the settings and look for those IP addresses on the DNS server are likely the kind of people who set up the server with a strong password so you're going to have to help out your fellow friends with their routers if they want to check against these security issues. Yeah I mean most of the folks in our audience are like I either don't have these routers or I understand what you're saying but think of all the people you know who don't be a hero today. Don't shame them for buying a D-Link or Linksys router just help them fix it. Yeah strengthen numbers. This is a cool story if you've ever wanted to I don't know run a marathon and win potentially Stanford University engineers tested a motorized exoskeleton that attaches around your calf ankle and your foot to make you run 15% easier. This can extend the amount of time that someone can run as well as increase speed by as much as 10%. The motor pulls a cable running from the heel to the calf to pull the foot upward at the beginning of each step. We are becoming bionic. There's obviously health health reasons that you might want to implement this to assist people walking and all of that but the story that the stories that I were reading were had the researchers saying like this could also just be a transportation aid. Let's say you you get off the bus and it's two miles to your destination just use this thing to jog on over without having to expend the energy that you otherwise would have to expend to do this is my dream. Well I don't know because I haven't tried it yet but I this is my dream as something I want to test immediately. I want this. Well and because it does give you what e-bikes have done for bicycling right where we're now you're just your range what you can expect yourself is just fundamentally different because you're not expending as much energy as you would otherwise. You know the question is obviously how feasible these will be as consumer devices but I think that the idea is brilliant. I love the idea of we've got sidewalks and then we've got bike lanes and then we have like the running lanes because you're like you're going to be annoying to everyone strolling along the sidewalk. You're not quite bike level. You need some other land you know for the people who are like you know when let's let's speed it up it's like the people who use the um who use the the people who are on the at the airport and walk really fast that's me. Yeah on your left. On your left. Yeah yeah. So when you get off the bus in the future there will be a bike lane a running lane and a walking lane there will then be a row of scooters e-bikes and rental exoskeletons that you can choose from. It's going to be an amazing road. Not to mention all the delivery robots. Right there also needs to be a delivery robot lane as well. Yeah you're very pro lane I've noticed. Yes yes that was not lost on me Tom. Love a lane story. Yeah but all kidding aside you're right Justin we we don't know if this is going to be practical to to make it scale at cost right. Is this going to be like the segue where some people use it but it really doesn't cause cities to be re-architected hard to say but at the very least it's going to be a great assistive device for folks. Yeah yeah I think yeah in terms of disability and stuff like that or or folks who are just you know can't put the same kind of pressure that they would at one time on their ankles knees and joints and stuff like that like this is life changing life life extending. Hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes subscribe to our other show DailyTechHeadlines.com. The Pure Research Center surveyed 8,914 adults in the U.S. the week of March 10th back when COVID-19 was just hitting our shores here in America. Users were divided into lots of different segments but one of the ways that that we're looking at this is the main way the main platform by which you get your news generally speaking print some kind of broadcast television radio etc or social networks or websites. One question asked that if people had seen information that seemed completely made up and this was what TechCrunch ran with for the headline 57% of people who use social media as their main platform for news said they had seen information that seemed completely made up. Print media much lower 37% although interesting to me that if you're reading print media you're not seeing random info passed along by strangers so you're choosing to pick up stuff that you then think was completely made up I think that you should not lose that but the the idea here is that more people realize that they're exposed to made up information on social networks or think they are. On the question of when a COVID-19 vaccination should be expected the answer is a year or more 12 months to 18 months that is the scientific consensus that's what Dr. Fauci says that's what everybody says who's involved in the industry they they hope it could be faster but they basically say 12 to 18 months so they asked the people and judged whether they got the answer right of the people who use social networks as their main platform only 37% knew that answer every other category except people who got local news as their main source answered correctly more than 50% of the time so that is kind of a canary in the coal mine of how good are you at understanding information if you're watching local news 32% got it right social networks 37% everybody else more than 50% of the time there was also a question of whether the threat of COVID-19 was exaggerated people who use social media as their main platform 45% said media greatly exaggerated the risks whereas almost every other platform was less than 30% radio was 44% so talk radio made you think it was greatly exaggerated social media make you think it was greatly exaggerated but but for example only 26% of people who read print sources thought it was greatly exaggerated across platforms around 50% thought covid was a minor threat while around a third thought it was a major threat on social media 17% thought it was not a threat at all on radio 16% and then it was mostly below 16% down to 12% on the other platforms so so the pattern you're picking up here is that most people are fairly well informed about this but on social media sometimes local news some more often radio you're seeing a distortion in how people are trusting what they're hearing for instance whether they were have we're seeing consistent information the most consistent sources rated by people in the survey were local TV network TV and print that means I usually hear the same information over and over least consistent was social media and radio now a different question was where are you getting conflicting information more often that was social media again but also website or app users those sources that felt like it was greatly exaggerating the risks local TV and social media 10% said they got it right whereas cable TV and radio again radio and outlier here saying 70% time or 68% of the time they were getting the story right and then just asking how well the media covered the outbreak among the people who said I don't think the media is covering the outbreak too well 23% of those were radio 22% for social media website or app and it was below 20% for all the other platforms so most of the other platforms the vast majority 80% or more thought it was being covered well again Justin this sounds like what we're saying is most people think things are being covered well but if you're using social media or perhaps radio you might be getting a little more misinformation and maybe have some misapprehensions about what's going on slightly more likely than the other platforms yeah I there are some general questions that I just have about this study because I social media is functionally different than TV print and radio in that TV print and radio have an editorial direction they have editors they have assignments they are are choosing what goes in based on a finite hole that they have to fill social media has no editorial direction it is all editorial directions at once at the same time so when you then mix that with we have a very polarized country obviously there are questions about authority on many different levels based on some of those fault lines it does not surprise me that there is such a high level of mistrust or conflicting information that comes from it beyond that I really don't know what to take from this beyond like yes there's going to be more consistency on places that actually have editorial direction versus places that don't well I think you know looking at this and obviously tech crunch took it as like hey if you're on social media you're more likely to see misinformation I don't think that's news to any of us though I looked at the overall results here and I'm like honestly this is could be kind of heartening which is yeah more people are getting misinformation than I would have liked but I do think that we are seeing more people you know there are some pretty high percentages of people saying no I'm getting consistent information I'm getting quality information I'm not seeing too much misinformation then you might have expected so I still think the good advice is you as a person should not expect social media to clean this up you should curate your sources if you're seeing things that make you say oh my gosh is that true maybe unfollow that source or certainly check for other sources that are saying the same thing you should you should not just you know trust that because it incurred a strong emotion in you that it must be true and that may sound obvious when we're saying it right now but that is human nature when something makes you feel strongly you're more likely to pay attention to it I also think in the category of whether or not media is exaggerating the risks and you know there's social media says yeah 45% of those polled said yeah the media is doing that in radio 44 print 26 and it's interesting because I figure at least that's in part because on social media we know that it is often yeah it's something where it's like you got to check your own sources who is this coming from it's supposed to all kind of police itself with the entire hive mind of the world but that doesn't always work so it's many things are grain of salt on social media and like you said Tom we all kind of know that so you know you just try to you know look alive when you're reading news before you send it to the next person when it comes to media and again this is just because it's the old guard I think more than ever whether or not you like what you're hearing a lot of people watch something and they think well I don't have any control over this I can't like downvote it I can't stop following this person you know this is a person of authority who thinks they can tell me what's going on and if they have some sort of an opinion then it's all biased and you hear a lot of that more and more and I think that that is uncomfortable for a lot of folks because it's like spoon fed news when that is only one option of the way that you can kind of create your own news for yourself yeah you can unfollow them yeah yeah and you and in many situations you probably should don't don't feel afraid that you're hurting someone's feelings and try to diversify your sources to multiple reliable sources maybe some sources that you wouldn't normally follow one one last thing Tom you said please make sure that you're curating and you are double checking and you are following sources for social media I would ask for you to just delete social all media if you read something that that you feel and now in these very turbulent crazy times when everything seems like a world shaking revelation because we are actually having world shaking revelations happening around us uh right now now is the time follow the sources take a look at them click through those links and and read read about them yourself because uh editorial direction is good in that they're professionals it's bad in that it only takes two or three people to make the same mistake that now goes out on a platform that has more gravitas than you know whatever ding dongs are posting on twitter and take breaks don't just constantly scroll through instagram now more than ever take breaks from from the news to and distract yourself with other things but look at pictures of my dog it really will turn your you'll turn your day right around thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit you turn our lives around every day by submitting stories and voting on others at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com you can also just read a good book like trigger by tom merit all right let's check out the mailbag let's do it that charlie dude wanted to chime in on our conversation we had with allison charidan a couple weeks ago and she was saying listen it's not that i don't like android but she was really frustrated because she could not get updates for her moto g7 that charlie dude says i just received my february update for my g7 i wonder why they didn't roll march in with it as always love the show uh if nothing else allison will feel solidarity in uh your you're being behind allison's big point was she couldn't get straight answers from customer support so yeah i i think uh i think we'll make sure to pass this along to our charlie uh we also got harish from seattle who said especially enjoyed all the recommendations from tuesday's show the funny thing is i had just downloaded star dew valley the day before to play it again because i wanted a calm game to play in these times and here at sarah recommend it was a fun surprise there you go oh so happy to help and i've never even played it that's how good i am harish wanted to throw in a couple of recommendations for sports fans for anyone missing formula one or racing in general check out marbula one on youtube it's marble racing done with ridiculously high production value and if you miss the olympics check out marble league while you're at it too happy to be able to still support you guys in these times love the show keep up the great work thank you harish from seattle really appreciate that absolutely and special shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels including brad schick paul boyer and dustin thanks also to justin robert young for being with us this fine thursday justin i like your t-shirts but that's not the most interesting thing about you no no no i don't think so either uh i think the most interesting thing is they do a podcast called politics politics politics and for d tns listeners i think there's a great interview on the most recent episode that came out on wednesday and that is with eric galler he is the cyber security reporter for politico for my money there is nobody who is in a more important position and he does an excellent job in writing about this subject because although there are amazing cyber security uh writers and researchers they largely publish in places that congress people and their aides don't read or the white house doesn't read they read politico uh he's got a great point of view of the nexus between those powers and there's a lot of relevant questions now in terms of the technology behind vote by mail whether or not that's feasible to spin up for the primaries or the general election and the big question now of whether or not online voting is something that in this social distancing world would be looked at differently than it has been up till this point i know a lot of people have a lot of strong feelings about that eric galler's got a lot of strong feelings about that all the questions are answered on the most recent episode of politics politics politics i was literally bending uh down to pick up after my dog earlier today when eric galler shocked me with his opinion about this on politics politics politics uh dot com hey we continue to share the love and tell you about other creators out there making content you can enjoy and support if you want some wide-ranging talk about apple other tech uh the host's personal experiences in a highly enjoyable conversation you got to check out snobo s cast dot com uh sis admin terence gains aka brother tech and engineer and developer nikah monford host the show that'll keep you updated on apple news tech news of interest and the culture you got to find it try it support it at snobo s cast dot com also you can support our show at any level at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon and peruse our fine selection of d t n s stuff at daily tech news show dot com slash store i'm gonna wear my d t n s hat tomorrow because it's hat friday uh in the meantime if you have some i don't know i had ideas or whatever email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com we love your feedback keep it coming we are also live monday through friday if you can join us please do for 30 p.m. eastern 2030 utc and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live don't forget that we have a special on how to live stream in the feed as well thanks to shannon morse and everybody else who joined us for that she'll be with us tomorrow with lend peralta this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants dot com