 Coming up on DTNS. What apps are kids using these days? Brave caught adding referral links to domain names and why Airbnb and other vacation rental services are booming. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 8th, 2020 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about salted versus unsalted butter, the state of the Fonda family and so much more on good day internet. Become a member right now at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sony rescheduled its PlayStation 5 event to Thursday, June 11th at 4 p.m. Eastern time. They still plan to show off games for over an hour at PlayStation.com slash PS5. Google updated Google Maps to show COVID-19 related information, including locations that require a mask to be worn, COVID-19 checkpoints, and how crowded public transit is likely to be. Google Maps will also show requirements when going to a testing or medical facility, including if an appointment is needed for COVID-19 testing in some countries. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources say Apple is preparing to roll out interest-free payments for Apple devices paid for with an Apple card. The company will reportedly offer 12-month interest-free payments for iPads Max, Apple Pencil, iPad keyboards, with six months no interest on AirPods, Apple TV, and HomePod, interestingly. Last year, Apple introduced 24-month zero-percent financing on iPhone models. Motorola announced the One Fusion Plus smartphone, which features a 6.5-inch FHD Plus display, Snapdragon 730 chipset, 6GB RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5,000 mAh battery. It also has a pop-up 16-megapixel self-cam and four rear cameras, including ultrawide, macro, and depth-sensing cameras. The phone runs Android 10 and comes to Europe later this year for €299. Apple published password-manager resources on GitHub designed for developers of password managers to, quote, create strong passwords that are compatible with popular websites. The resources include the requirements of particular websites to generate compatible passwords, groups of websites with shared credential backends, the URLs of sites to change passwords, and Apple hopes those resources will improve the overall quality of all password managers and provide an incentive for websites to use standards to improve their compatibility with password managers. The Chinese car battery maker Cattle announced it's ready to manufacture a battery that can power a car for 1.2 million miles over 16 years. According to Cattle chairman Zeng Yuquan, the battery will cost 10% more than its existing batteries. Automakers currently warrant electric car batteries for 60,000 to 150,000 miles from three to eight years. The company currently supplies batteries to Tesla, BMW, Daimler, Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo. And Facebook published new group moderation guidelines. Facebook now recommends that groups create specific lists of topics that aren't allowed so that it's clear to everybody. Facebook also recommends mods educate themselves on issues that create opportunities for new and diverse members to join as moderators and acknowledge current events with a post that outlines group rules. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about this Brave browser thing. Oh, let's Twitter user Yannick Echel. Notice that when visiting the cryptocurrency exchange Binance in the Brave browser, the browser automatically redirected to an affiliate version of the URL and review of the browser's code on GitHub found similar redirects for the exchange's ledger, trezor, and queenbase referral URLs inevitably track clicks in order to pay a percentage to the affiliate. And in this case, it was brave. Brave promotes itself as letting users receive advertisements without revealing personal data. According to Brave CEO Brennan Eich, the affiliate links were only meant for the opt-in trading widget on a new tab page. So there's a little discrepancy here. AutoComplete should not have added the referral code. And Eich wrote on Twitter, quote, we are clearly not perfect, but we correct course quickly. According to Eich, the redirects never revealed any user information. Yes, if you're not quite sure what these referrals are, they're just in the case of Binance, let's say, it's just binance.com slash question mark gobbledygook. And the gobbledygook lets Binance know this URL was referred by Brave and therefore will check a tick mark so that we can give Brave a little bit of a payment. Amazon referral URLs work the same way. It's the same URL for any Amazon page, but it has a little thing at the end so they can know where it came from and sites get paid based on that. What Brave wants to do and is still doing is when you opt in to have a widget for Binance and these other things on the empty tab page, there will be a referral URL there. But the way they coded it also used the autocomplete system to say like, hey, when you type Binance anywhere in the browser, let's add the referral code and that's what they got wrong. And that's what he's saying, like, look, we're not perfect. That was the wrong move. It was a mistake. We apologize. The question is, this isn't the worst thing in the world and Brave has corrected it quickly, but you're talking about an audience, Sarah, that is laser focused on privacy and went to Brave specifically because they were going to be treated better their privacy-wise. Yeah, I think the current state of companies saying, hey, we're sorry. We didn't realize this was going on. That happens all the time. And that's OK. And you'd learn from mistakes and you grow a better product because of it. And sure, give Brave the benefit of the doubt here. But there's just a lot of folks who are trying to sniff out like, what are you really doing to us type thing? And I think that in this case, Brave got a lot of attention because people are just kind of paranoid. Yeah. Were they bravely admitting their mistakes or putting on a brave face over a sneak attack? See what you did there. Yeah. Michael Spector of MIT and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan released a report called Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System. It analyzed the security of OmniBallot from Democracy Live. You may have heard us talk about this back in January. It's a system being deployed in Delaware, West Virginia and a few other jurisdictions to let you download a blank ballot that you can then choose to mark and return either offline or online. The report from Spector and Halderman recommends avoiding using OmniBallot if possible. After they did the security review, they said our recommendation is don't use it. But they're like, we know there's some accessibility issues and this may be the best choice for some people for other reasons. So if you have to use it, they say download the blank ballot from OmniBallot, print it, then mark it by hand and mail it back. They're like, that will limit the number of vulnerabilities you could fall for. They also recommended confirming that the ballot looks right for your precinct and that you got the right mailing address to mail it to. OmniBallot can mark the ballot on screen for you, but the research shows that will share your identity and selections with Democracy Live servers. Now Democracy Live says on its own page that the ballots are secured with AWS Object Lock and the selections are encrypted. So they're saying even though it's sent to us, we won't do anything with it other than use it to make your ballot. But the report notes that potential vulnerabilities could take advantage of this system at any point. And again, these are not new vulnerabilities, but they're the kind of vulnerabilities you might be more tolerant of in just downloading a page from Facebook or looking at a catalog page even on a retailer, but you might not be tolerant of them with an election. So software engineers and sys admins at Democracy Live could either be corrupted themselves to introduce problems or be phished to allow people to have access to introduce problems into the system. AWS employees the same way. Again, maybe it's not likely, but it is a vulnerability. There's not protections against that, at least according to Hallderman Inspector. There's also the problem that the website for OmniBallot runs JavaScript, and there are multiple JavaScript vulnerabilities that could be exploited to create some cross-site interceptions. Potential attacks could be used to misdeliver ballots. So you might select your ballot and get the one for the wrong precinct. That's why they recommend checking to make sure you got the right ballot. It might delete some races. So it looks like the right ballot, but maybe one or two races are missing. They could interfere with ballot return to delay it because you can use OmniBallot to actually email or fax your ballot back, and that could be intercepted and maybe sent to the wrong place so it's delayed. They could replace return envelope instructions, which is why they say confirm that you've got the right address. That could cause printed ballots to be mailed to the wrong locations. Sarah, these aren't particularly high probability attacks, but when you're talking about elections, they're the kind of thing that it only has to happen once for people to lose all faith in election, or people can just suspect that it might happen and lose faith. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the whole, hey, accessibility might be an issue for a lot of folks. Let's give them options. Great. Great. On the surface, absolutely great. The fact that there are a lot of holes that can be poked in a lot of these current solutions. I mean, all it does is really introduce just a lot of doubt and there's so much of that going on now. Even, you know, not only the people voting, but everyone else was like, how'd you vote? Oh, you know, how much does that really matter? Like, how were you influenced and what's really going on here? I don't know. I mean, I hope we get to a point where something like OmniBallot is pretty rock solid and it isn't, you know, studied by researchers who kind of go, avoid it if you can, but if you have to use it, I mean, it's better than nothing. You know, we have to get to the point where we're just better than nothing. Yeah. I'll be honest. I looked at this and I'm like, well, OmniBallot looks like it's pretty secure. The problem isn't that it's pretty secure. The problem is pretty secure isn't secure enough. Right. Yeah, exactly. Well, the digital safety app speaking of security maker Custodio. That's with a Q you released a survey of 60,000 families looking at apps used by children aged between four and 14 from the US, the UK and Spain from February 2019 to April of this year. The survey found that YouTube is watched by 69% of kids in the US, 74% in the UK, 88% in Spain, while YouTube kids, that's their kids app that is separate and supposedly four kids, was used by 7% of kids in the US, 10% in the UK, and not meaningfully enough to even really get registered in Spain. Overall viewing was down in all three countries by a few minutes, still accounting for 86 minutes a day in the US. Now, Netflix remained the second most watched video app with 33% in the US, 29% in the UK and 28% in Spain. As of February of this year, TikTok was used by 16.5% of US kids, 18% in the UK and 37% in Spain with watch time up 116% to 82 minutes a day in the US peaking at 95 minutes during the COVID-19 lockdowns. In the gaming arena, Roblox dominated in the US and UK with 54% and 51% of kids playing respectively in Spain. The game only saw 17% playing with Brawl Stars being the big hit. On average, children played Roblox 20 minutes longer than any other video game app with 81 minutes per day in the US in February. Interestingly enough, COVID-19 increased time spent on Roblox by as much as 45% in Spain, however, didn't significantly alter the other percentage plane. Yeah, so the upshot here is YouTube kids, not popular with kids. YouTube still popular, but TikTok is growing and even during the lockdown took a bite out of it. And outside of Spain, Roblox is the thing. And I guess Brawl Stars being the thing in Spain. And we mentioned this to Roger, our producer. Roger, you were saying you can verify locally the Roblox phenomenon. I can mention because it seems so my child actually doesn't play the game directly, but she watches a lot of YouTube videos that incorporate elements of Roblox gameplay into it. And she watches a lot of YouTube, like a lot. And it's very interesting to see her gravitate toward things, mainly because the YouTube algorithm is amazingly well crafted toward picking what kids like, because kids like a very specific set of video content. And, you know, Roblox, but also a lot of maker videos and a lot of kind of pretend play with child or children actors, you know, going through the motions of playing and those are the most popular with my eldest child. My youngest just likes music videos, but Netflix is also very popular. And what's interesting is she likes the Netflix children's setup versus the adult where the Netflix has nothing but, you know, when you set up the Netflix UI so it shows nothing but children-friendly content as opposed to YouTube where because of the way YouTube, YouTube for children works, it's a lot more limiting. So a lot of the content that she likes isn't available. And you can only get it on the adult version or the regular version of YouTube. So it's a parental decision. That's interesting. Yeah. No, it's I was going to say the same thing. I mean, the fact that something like Netflix can be filtered to be, you know, it's for kids and your daughter's like, Yay, I like this one, but YouTube kids for some reason. I mean, it's not just her. It's just not sticking with kids. It's part of it is they're very, they're very, very sensitive, I guess, because of because of a lot of the criticisms they have on it to be very, very child safe. But unfortunately, it also limits a lot of the content that is super popular. There's a lot of creators out there like Jojo Siwa. There's some stuff on her that is available on the children's side, but there's a lot more available on the regular YouTube app, which includes a lot of her. Hey, look at my room. It's filled with candy and plushies stuff. And it's it is it is I've always wondered why didn't YouTube just incorporate a you'd like a child filter into the main app instead of having a separate app that the child would go through because like so we had a guest on before say once it. No, Emily knew it. She said once a child moves away from moves up to the regular YouTube app, they don't want the other one because they're limited by a bunch of restrictions. Yeah, so I see what you're saying. Why didn't they do what Netflix did, which is basically the same thing as YouTube kids app, but just make a lockdown version. I think they were they were trying to defend themselves against criticisms that they weren't doing enough to and it was it's easier to defend yourself if you say we're making an entirely different app for that. I wanted to get lost what Sarah said, TikTok making big gains on YouTube. So keep an eye out for that. That folks that that is significant here that that TikTok that YouTube is essentially flat during the lockdown. It's not like people stopped watching it. But we've wondered if anything could ever take a bite out of YouTube. And this is the first thing we've seen in a while that that might show an indication of doing that. Of course, the other one is Twitch, at least with live and at least with video games, but Twitch has largely escaped the YouTube copyright controversy until now. Twitch posted on Twitter that it has received a sudden influx of DMCA takedown requests for clips with background music in them from between 2017 and 2019. According to the Verge, the claimant is listed as the RIAA, the Recording Industry of America Association. Now, if you're unsure about rights to audio and past streams, Twitch says, we advise removing those clips. We know many of you have large archives and we're working to make this easier. You're a little confused about this clips live on Twitch streams don't live on past 60 days or so. But clips are snippets of those live streams that are saved by the users to promote a channel. So the music is sometimes something that was allowed to be streamed. They're allowed to play the game Beat Saber, but they're not allowed to use that music in a stored video. It's the quirk of the license for music. And like most services, creators can be suspended on Twitch if they get three copyright strikes, which leaves a lot of creators racing to delete thousands of clips that they didn't create. The users created these clips, sometimes in the thousands. And the creators don't always know which clips have music in them and which don't. And there's no both delete. And Twitch has said they're going to work on a way to make this easier. It doesn't look like they're suspending anyone right now until they figure this out. But this is the working of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States. It is an exception to the Safe Harbor Rule of Section 230 that says platforms can be found liable for copyright infringement. And so Twitch has to actively pursue this, or they could be liable for the infringement. Yeah. I mean, as content creators, and I know a lot of our audience are as well. I'm acutely aware anytime I watch a video, whether it's 10 minutes or 10 seconds, where I'm like, oh, copyrighted music. Wow. How's that going to work? And something like Twitch. Yeah. The whole idea of your community being able to, you know, I don't know, retwitch or regram or whatever the, whatever they call it. Just clip or clip. Yeah. On, on Twitch, a small portion of what your stream might have been. It's like, that's a big part of the fun of Twitch. But Twitch not allowing bulk delete. If you get into hot water as the creator who is, you know, kind of on the hook at this point. And, you know, you kind of, you know, it's a creator and Twitch kind of looking at each other being like, I don't know. I mean, there's a thousand clips here. What do we do? That needs to be a tool that's either offered or they have to have a better solution. Well, and it's something I think Twitch just didn't realize would be exploited, right? Twitch has gone through lots of rule changes, allowing you to stream background music, providing licenses to stream background music, and, and, and making it easy and legal for people to do this. But they didn't think about the fact that those licenses don't cover on demand because, hey, they don't have on demand. They don't keep archives forever. And they forgot about clips. And so there's, there's no bot out there looking at the clips going, hey, you've got music in this. Are you sure you've got the license to allow this, which has led to this current situation? Well, the US Air Force Research Laboratory or AFRL launched a project to create an unmanned AI driven fighter jet back in 2018, hoping to show progress on the project within 18 months. Now the head of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Lieutenant Jack, Lieutenant Jack Shanahan says its researchers are working on an autonomous drone that can take down a fighter jet in air to air combat with hopes to begin trials in July of 2021. If the trial is successful, if our AFRL team leader Steve Rogers said that the system could be integrated into human operated planes to help humans to make tactical decisions in combat situations. Lieutenant General Shanahan said that the military should head the lessons, should he the lessons rather of the self driving car industry, and that these technical advances are not always immediately successful, saying that despite billions in investment, these aren't yet any level for autonomous vehicles that we can use. Yeah, this came out last Wednesday, but it's just too interesting to pass up, especially because the captain's name is Steve Rogers. And we're sure that he won't end up frozen under the ice for decades like Captain America, but he has named Steve Rogers. This is a demonstration, right? I talked about Tom Thumb the steam engine versus the horse drawn cart last week. This is the modern version of that, right? They're going to try to see if the AI flying the plane can outperform the human flown plane. They're going to do a quote unquote dogfight, but that is sort of a laser tag kind of approach. They're not actually going to have the AI shooting at anyone, but it will try to show like, can AI manipulating a plane fly it good enough to compete with a human flown plane? That's going to be a very interesting result, no matter how it turns out. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Bloomberg reports that Airbnb saw more nights booked for U.S. listings from May 17th to June 3rd than it did for the same period in 2019. This despite the lockdown, this isn't just people flouting the lockdown, no. There has been a similar boost in domestic travel in other markets with more listings available now than prior to March. Expedia, VRBO, and booking holdings are seeing similar rises in searches for vacation home rentals, and that's important. Searches at VRBO are up year over year. Airbnb searches are down 10%, but that's not bad. Hotel searches, on the other hand, are down 60%. That's probably what you would have guessed. Nobody's traveling. Nobody wants to go anywhere. People don't want to be in a hotel around a bunch of other people, but they do want to get away locally. Vacation rental searches on Google are equal to last year, while hotel searches on Google are also down. The searches seem to be happening within days of travel. These aren't long-planed trips like when you're going overseas or going on a long trip. And the bookings are for more than a week at a time. This isn't, oh, we're going to go to Paris for a week. We're going to go somewhere within striking distance of where we live for maybe up to a month. Airbnb said more than 50% of May bookings were within 200 miles of a user's home compared to less than a third back in February before the virus hit. Booking Holdings says it's seen domestic destinations shift from being about 45% of its rentals to about 70% of its business, and the top destinations in the U.S. are local tourist areas, Big Bear Lake in California, the Smoky Mountains on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, Port Aransas right there on the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. I've rented a condo in each one of these places. Like these are places where it is built on vacation rentals. And Sarah, you actually live on a vacation rental in a touristy area of California. You've been experiencing this firsthand. Yeah, I do. Studio Redwood is actually also a property management firm of sorts. And there is a rental where I live that I manage, and we go through Airbnb. We originally thought to go through some other portals as well, but that seems to be working for us. But when things got weird at the end of February, it sort of became a, okay, well, as a property manager, I had to go through a certification process. It wasn't hard to do. I did it online. But I mean, I said, yes, I'm going to follow the rules. And if not, I could be liable to criminal charges if I did not follow the health code for the county that I live in. That health code, as of the end of February, was you cannot have people in your Airbnb that are here for less than 30 days. If it's more than 30 days, they're considered long-term rentals. Otherwise, it's short-term, not allowed. The owners can come and stay here, but you cannot have people paying to be kind of having this revolving door. It's endangering the safety of everyone who lives in the neighborhood and yourself. And it's just a bad idea. And there's a lot of, again, health codes involved. That was actually kind of fine and good because we had a lot of folks who, San Francisco, that's our nearest metropolitan area, a lot of folks who, again, you say within 200 miles, we're within 100 miles of San Francisco. People just wanted to get out of the city. They were scared. They were like, your place looks cool. Looks like there's a lot of land. We just want to hunker down at this nice private property in the middle of nowhere and just ride it out. And I was like, you can do it for 30 days plus. And I won't share my laundry with you kind of thing. But when you have the same kind of very cool, high-end demand place in a city, for example, I mean, I can't tell you how many Airbnbs I've rented in Barcelona or Paris or London. All of a sudden, that stuff is not in demand anymore because it looks crowded and scary and people don't want to do it. And a lot of people lost a lot of money. Yeah, I think this is an interesting case of how an industry has unanticipated consequences. You may have been, and I may have been probably willing to say back in March, oh, I bet Airbnb is in trouble, right? They're going to be like AMC theaters, not going to have a lot of business. But while people weren't traveling and they don't want to be in hotels, they do want to get away. Even if people don't want to get away for 30 days, there are Airbnbs in certain areas where you can get them for less amount of time. And people want that. They're like, you know what? I just want to get out. I'll stay in lockdown. I want to cook for myself. I don't want to eat out in restaurants, so I want a vacation rental. And if I can get that in a low-density area, it's a break for me. It's kind of a vacation, but it's a lower-risk one. And I have a feeling that this will, you know, we'll start to see hotel bookings come back. But this will be the trend for a while. Well, and especially because restrictions are easing for a lot of folks, depending on where you live, but certainly in the U.S., people who have been very stringent, like, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to follow the rules. The slightest inkling that now you could maybe just get out of town for a week or two starts to become really attractive to people. People are, you know, they've been, they've been hunkering down for quite some time. And so you get that cabin fever, and it makes sense to me that we're seeing such a surge at this point. Maybe I don't want to get on a plane, but I can drive somewhere and just change my scenery. Exactly. Well, a change of scenery, if you're not hanging out in our discord, would be a very good one, because you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. And join the community. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So Gain wrote in last week and said, I wanted to give you a possible use case for the Samsung Zero. That was the one that's, you know, landscape and, and, The TV, the TV that rotates. Yes, that's exactly the landscape and portrait mode. Gain says, Samsung makes a commercial version similar to this called the Flip and also the Flip 2. My job is to design audio and video systems for corporate and government clients. And we've been specifying these in collaboration spaces for years now. The Flip has touch and annotation capabilities, which make it useful in huddle and collab situations. The ability to rotate the orientation and display video from sources like your laptop or your phone or your tablet and to annotate on all of those make it an invaluable tool without touch capabilities or the ability to annotate. I'm not sure if the consumer version would work as an at home version of these use cases. Ah, but, but that's interesting, Gain, because even if it's not exactly the same product, that rotating part may have been the best way to make the zero. And then we also got Chris's email who heard me mention using Twitter to kind of keep an eye on any possible civil unrest near my neighborhood. He said someone showed me snap map at maps dot snapchat.com. I watched things happening near me and other places. It isn't intuitive, but if you click on the map, you will see snap stories near where you clicked. It helped me see the protest near me where civil and didn't have anything to worry about. Nicely done. Chris, you can go check that out of map dot snapchat.com. I will. I had kind of forgotten about that. Hey, shout out to master's patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Fridja Kuebner, James P. Kallison and Degrescia A. Daniels. And you can become one of them, right? You could have your name right there next to them if you supported at that master or grand master level or any level, frankly, at dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon. Hey, if you've got feedback for us, I've got good news for you. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, and we love to get your feedback. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.