 Coming up on DTNS, a Swiss student adds USB-C to an iPhone, a detailed look at Tesla's racial harassment lawsuit, and an amazing natural language processing advance from Microsoft and NVIDIA. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 12th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Roger Scheng, the show's producer. And joining us, technology contributor to ABC News, author and host of the Tech John podcast, Stephanie Humphrey, AKA Tech Life Steph. So happy to be here. So excited for this conversation. Oh, I'm so glad to finally get to talk to you and have you on the show and everything. I've really been enjoying the Tech John. It's been so fun listening. Thank you. And thank you for all of your support. I mean, it's been really, you know, integral to the success of the show so far. And we've been having a lot of fun with it. So let's just keep this thing going. Yeah, yeah. Keep it going. And Stephanie is also still here. Even though on good day internet, we were talking about elephant messes. If you'd like to hear that conversation, become a member at our Patreon, patreon.com slash DTNS. That is where you can join our top patrons like Mike McLaughlin, Miss Music Teacher and GMC Smith. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft said that its Azure cloud service mitigated a 2.4 terabytes per second distributed denial of service attack at the end of August. The largest EDOS attack recorded to date. Senior program manager for Azure networking, Amir Dahan said that the attack was from a botnet of approximately 70,000 bots, primarily across the Asia Pacific region, and identified the target only as an Azure customer in Europe. Another Microsoft tidbit, the Windows subsystem for Linux is now available as an app you can download from the Microsoft Store in Windows 11. One password launched a new feature for securely sharing login credentials called Password Secure Sharing Tool, P-S-S-T, aka Psst. It is reportedly one of the company's most requested features. Psst allows for sharing a generated link that other people can access even without an account. Generated links can be set to expire within an hour or last up to 30 days. Apple sent out invites to a special event to stream live October 18th at 1pm Eastern Time. The tech press anticipates that Apple may announce new M1 MacBooks, a new Mac mini, even new AirPods. The invited video called the event Unleashed. Magic Leap announced it's readying the release of the Magic Leap 2 AR headset next year for select customers using it in an early access program with general availability to follow. Right, I said Magic Leap. Magic Leap initially was developing a consumer-friendly AR headset, but it has changed the headset's name from Magic Leap 1 to the Magic Leap 1 Creator Edition and then abandoned the consumer business in 2020, brought in a new CEO, and now it's very enterprise-focused and apparently getting enterprise customers, so there you go. In the Apple vs. Epic lawsuit that will never end, Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers largely ruled in Apple's favor. The only exception was a permanent injunction that stated Apple could no longer prohibit developers from pointing users to outside payment systems with Apple having until early December to revise its app store rules. Apple now plans to appeal that decision, not surprising, asking the judge for stay on the injunction through the appeals process. Epic previously announced it was appealing the decision as well, and Google has countersued Epic Games in its dispute, saying that Epic willfully breached its Play Store Developer Agreement when it added in-app purchases to Fortnite. Yeah, so not a surprise. We expected the appeals, and now they're here. All right, let's talk a little more about new products from Tile, Sarah. Let's do this. Tile announced a new line of tracking devices, including new versions of its Bluetooth trackers, the Mate, the Pro, the Slim, and the Sticker, available now. The new models have louder rings, three years of battery life, and increased range of up to 250 feet. But Tile also announced that Tile Ultra come in in early 2022, which uses Ultra Wideband or UWB in addition to Bluetooth. Apple's AirTag and Samsung's SmartTag Plus products both use UWB as well. But Tile Ultra will work on both Android and iOS. UWB can offer more precise location than Bluetooth, and in fact, Tile will let you use augmented reality to find Tile Ultra's. Tile also announced some new services for its trackers, lost and found, lets you scan a QR code on the back of new Tile models, except the Sticker, of course, because it's a sticker. Scanning pulls up whatever contact information that the Tile owner provides so you can get the device back to them. And there's also an abuse prevention feature called Scan and Secure. That's coming in early 2022 that will let any Android and iOS user use the Tile app to scan if any unknown Tile devices are in their vicinity. You don't need a Tile account for this, and using the app won't make you part of the Tile find network, unless of course you want to be part of it. Yeah, this is interesting on the tech side of UWB getting more adoption. UWB, like you said, is a more precise finder. That's why Apple uses it, that's why Samsung uses it, and the more companies that use it, the wider that adoption and the better those networks will work for everybody. We've got to know a little more about that. But that Scan and Secure feature is Tile leveling up, not catching up, they're catching up with UWB, but I think that Scan and Secure is really interesting to say, hey, we won't track you, you don't even have to, you don't have to give us any information. You can just find out if there are any Tile trackers around you just in case. Stephanie, what do you think of that? That is, it's interesting though, you made that distinction between catching up and leveling up, and I'd be curious if Tile had leveled up before AirTags were released, would they still be in the Apple stores? Would Apple have even needed, I mean, not that AirTags haven't been in development for years and maybe this was inevitable, but if this was something that could have been done two or three years ago, would this have made a difference in their positioning inside the Apple store? So I guess we'll never know, but I think this definitely changes the game because it can be used across platforms. So it'll be interesting to see if they bounce back from that hit they took when AirTags were released because they are across platforms. Definitely that security feature, I think, is going to be probably the game changer because if you are looking at Tile versus AirTags and you need something to sort of differentiate which one you choose to buy, that would probably be it. You know, it wasn't that long ago where on my set of keys, I had a little Tile tracker and it came in handy a few times, and I eventually was like, I don't know, I'm not using all that much. And so I took it off my key chain, but it's that early adopter issue, you know, I kind of liken it to fitness trackers, you know, you had the fitness trackers of the early years and now everybody's got a fitness tracker. And so when you're that first company saying, well, hold on, we champion this movement. Now we just have to keep up. We've always been here. Yeah, like AirTags are great, but we're across platform and we were here first and we've got all this new stuff. So you know, good on you, Tile. Yeah, yeah. Keep it up. And that cross-platform, I think you're right, Steph. I think that that is one of the keys to keep in Tile in the game. Apple has added USB-C to its iPads, but not its iPhones. The idea of USB-C in an iPhone has come to the fore once again recently as Europe considers making USB-C ports mandatory on phones and other devices. One defense of Apple not using USB-C is that the ports may not be as workable as lightning in Apple's phone designs. So Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Robotics Engineering student Ken Pillanell decided to put that idea to the test. Back in May, Pillanell posted that he had succeeded at getting an iPhone battery to charge from a USB-C port that he had created, but the connection was too large to fit inside an iPhone. So it was a proof of concept that it could be done, but again, not fitting within the design. However, he found there's a chip in the lightning end of third-party cables, not in the lightning end of the Apple first-party, but in the third-party cables made by Apple called the C-94 chip. Pillanell reverse engineered that C-94 part and created his own flexible printed circuit board version of it that he can fit inside an iPhone. He connected that reverse engineered flexible PCB to USB-C port on one end and the phone's lightning apparatus on the other. Essentially, he squeezed the adapter cable down into a small bendy circuit board and stuffed it inside an iPhone X somehow, an iPhone X too, not a Max, a 10, leaving room for the USB-C port to replace the lightning port. And in the pictures, it looks just like an iPhone, except it has a USB-C port. He now has an iPhone X with a working USB-C port that transfers data and charges the battery just like the lightning port does, because it's essentially just going through to the lightning apparatus. Pillanell plans to post a video showing details of how he reverse engineered that C-94 chip into a flexible PCB and how he was able to fit it inside the iPhone X. I think that's the part I'm most interested in. Obviously, this is just a fairly interesting hardware hack from a really clever student, but it also, to me, it was like, well, Apple, he showed you, you can do it. He didn't remove the battery, he didn't remove anything, he's able to fit it in there. Yeah, it's definitely like shot spired, basically, for Apple, because I don't think they have any choice but to respond. I don't know that that necessarily means we see an iPhone 14 with a USB-C port, but they have to say something, I think, so it'll be curious what that response is. I'm actually interested in what the, oh my God, the word just slipped out of my head. The people that make fraudulent iPhones, like, what is the word I'm looking for, guys? The fraudsters is all I could think of. Well, like, there's a specific, it's, yeah, the knock-offs. Knock-offs. Yeah. Knock-offs. Yeah, that wasn't the word, but I'll think of it and then I'll spit it out like 10 minutes from now randomly. Yeah, of course. But yeah, the knock-off iPhones, you know, are we going to start seeing this? Because he was very detailed in his first video on how this could be done, so he kind of walked you through step by step. I have to think that somebody else is going to try this sooner rather than later. Yeah. It's also, you know, there's this ongoing question, of course, especially since the newest iPad mini's, you know, USB-C port. And everyone went, ooh, okay, what's going to come next in this Apple announcement about iPhones? No USB-C port, Lightning port still. And it's, I'm sure whether or not it's great for the consumer, Apple has its reasons for this being the case. Is it because there are just so many lightning cables that Apple had collected several years ago that they're just going to stay with it for a few more iPhone cycles? You know, is it the fact that having a proprietary charging apparatus is advantageous to Apple somehow? I mean, I doubt that that really makes all that much sense to the company at this point. It's a mystery to me. Yeah, I actually don't buy that Apple just wants to sell you more lightning accessories or they would have kept it in the iPad. So there's more to it than just that. And and I used to think like, oh, it's probably in a phone. It's smaller. It's it's harder to fit in and keep that battery as big. This shows that it's not just that. Maybe there's something else still there. I'd be curious what it is, what the reason is. But it obviously can fit if you if you're a clever Swiss robotics engineering student. And be done. Well, Twitter launched that feature that lets you remove a follower without blocking them, a.k.a. the soft block. We talked about this back on the show. This is a feature that is now rolled out to you. If you so desire to use it. So to use the feature, you need to go to your own profile, then click followers, look at your followers, find the follower that you want to remove, then click the three dot menu to bring up the option, remove this follower. The follower won't be notified that you did this, but will stop seeing your posts in their feed. Maybe they'll just never think about you again. Maybe they will, but this is what it does. Unlike an actual block, they can find your posts in Twitter. If they go looking for them while logged in, they can DM you and they can follow you again if they see, oh, wait a second. I thought I was following this person. Let me follow them again. Previously, you could have the same effect by blocking somebody and then unblocking them. That is what a lot of folks on Twitter have done for years. And that's what a lot of folks brought up when Twitter announced this feature, like, well, we can still do this, but it wasn't something that was officially a Twitter feature. Now it is. This obviously isn't good for all situations, but do we think that there are situations it is good for? So we were having the conversation about this earlier and the idea that this wouldn't deter a serious stalker, but maybe a casual stalker would lose interest. It seems though, now that the more I'm thinking about it, as you were reading, it seems though all they would have to do is give users the ability to mute themselves to other people. That's what I said. That is exactly what that does without going through this whole, I mean, there was a whole lot that you just read there and like, oh, you follow, but you don't unfollow, but you don't block, but you listen, just let me mute myself to that user. The self-mute the problem. Yeah. This and then the user just thinks you just haven't been around lately. Exactly. Exactly. Twitter, Jack, are you listening? Just let people self-mute themselves. That's it. This does seem overly engineered as a solution because what I immediately thought was, well, if you mute yourself to the other person, then they can't find your posts when they're logged in. But that just leads me to the question of like, but why would you want them to? This new soft block feature lets them find your posts if they're logged in on Twitter out by just going directly to your profile. They just won't show up in their news feed. So is there a reason you would want that? You know, and of course this is, you know, sort of known as the soft block, I get why there would be a situation where you think if I block this person, it's going to become a thing. I really want to avoid that conversation or any confrontation that might, you know, result, you know, and if they can't get to your profile, then they'll know. And okay, yeah, yeah. Right. So, so I, so I get why this could be helpful. But I feel like if someone is, if someone is trying to cause trouble and, you know, anybody who's on the internet long enough, we all know who that, you know, those people are, they're going to see this and know what you did because they understand how Twitter works and it'll anger them. You know, I'm not saying, oh, this is a horrible feature and Twitter is worse off because of it, but it seems like a very passive aggressive feature. Yeah, I think they felt like they needed to do something. This may not necessarily have been that something, but it's something, I guess. And it is, I think it sounds like it is more meant to not stir up an aggressive stalker. You know, like you said, Sarah, you don't want to piss anybody off. I've had that happen where people were aware that I, you know, blocked them or unfollowed them or whatever. And then why did you do that? So it's, it's, it's, it's that thing, but I don't know that it's going to be as effective as they think it's going to be. Yeah, it's ghosting people on Twitter. You just like a light kick from the chat room. You know, just a little kick. I, I, yeah, the, the only thing I will say is in Twitter's defense is they tested this first. It isn't like they're rolling this out, out of nowhere. They, so they must have found something in their test that showed it was used or proved useful. Self mute would help much better. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, listen to stuff, please. All right. Hey, folks, if you like our conversations here and want more of these kinds of conversations, do I have a show for you? The Tech John podcast featuring Rob Dunwood, Terence Gaines and Stephanie Humphrey takes a second look at the Weeks Tech headlines delivered from an African American perspective. You can follow it over at the tech john.com. That's T E C H J A W N dot com. Go do it now. Monday, October 4th, an eight person federal jury awarded $136.9 million in damages to Owen Diaz. Owen Diaz worked as an elevator operator at Tesla's Fremont, California factory from 2015 to 2016. In the case Diaz described racial slurs, swastikas scratched into bathrooms, derogatory cartoons and his suit claimed that Tesla subjected him to a hostile work environment, failed to prevent him from being racially harassed and was negligent in supervision and retention of an employee that caused harm. The jury found in favor of all three claims. Now, Tesla argued that because a staffing agency employed Mr Diaz, Tesla wasn't at fault. They were trying to say, Hey, it wasn't us. You go after the staffing agency in a blog post after the case, Tesla's vice president of people, Valerie Capers Workman said the company ensured its staffing agencies took action against the complaints, but wrote, quote, we do recognize that in 2015 and 2016 we were not perfect. Reuters noted Friday that in a 2002 case, State Farm versus Campbell, the US Supreme Court ruled that punitive damages should not generally exceed 10 times compensatory damages. And you heard me say 136.9 million earlier. The punitive damages are 130 million. 6.9 is what's called compensatory damages. So it was 19 times in this case. Therefore, Tesla has grounds to appeal. They could say, look, that Supreme Court case says it shouldn't be that much. And Tesla is likely to appeal. However, Reuters does notes that the guidelines don't need to apply if the misconduct has a widespread impact and is found to be highly offensive or reprehensible, something that Diaz's attorneys made the case for in this case. So Tesla might appeal, but they might not win. It's not the only case like this either. Melvin Berry won a one million dollar judgment in arbitration. That one didn't go to court. It was arbitration that happened in May for being called racial slurs by his supervisor, along with other misconduct and a class action suit against Tesla for race-based harassment is pending in California. Stephanie, you guys talked about this on the Tech John this week, but kind of give us the top-line view of what y'all are talking about. So it just appears that Tesla's record on this kind of thing is pretty abysmal across the board. I said on the podcast that I have not heard one positive story coming out of a Tesla facility around race relations ever, you know, since Tesla facilities existed. And it's just it's disheartening that they don't seem to care about the optics necessarily, even just the optics, because their response to it has always been, you know, very, very dismissive, very, you know, placing the blame on, you know, he's not an employee. What difference does that make? He's in your facility, you know, he is, for all intents and purposes, working for you, you know, this is, this is the the opportunity to step up and deal with this and create an environment where all of your employees feel welcomed. And you're just within it like every single time and it doesn't even seem like you care. So it's problematic from that standpoint. And then two, you know, one of the things we talked about as well was the idea that we get a lot of comments on our show about, you know, why make everything about race? This is why, you know? And when you see a story like this and when you hear of someone, you know, finally getting to the point where they brought this lawsuit, that's been a long time coming for that individual, you know? This guy needed his job. He sucked up a lot, you know? And the idea that this is some frivolous thing and, you know, there was a whole, even on Tesla's blog, they had a whole lot of rebuttal statements to, you know, what Mr. Diaz was claiming and it's just like you gotta look at it from a more humanistic standpoint because people are going to work every single day being subjected to this type of thing. And it gets to that breaking point. I actually listened to Mr. Diaz and his attorney were on NPR last week in an interview and I happened to be in the car listening and I caught his interview and he talked about the breaking point for him to file this lawsuit was that, you know, his son is they tried to use the fact that, well, he got his son a job here too. So clearly he wasn't that, you know, oppressed but the breaking point for him was when his son heard a supervisor calling him a racial slur, you know? And it's just like, why would we have to get to that point where you are, you know, being demoralized in front of your child, you know, to get to this point? And so it just, it really, I think the messaging I would love to leave with people is that, you know, believe people when they say that these types of things are happening, you know I don't know what the solution is because human nature kind of is what it is that you can't legislate people's hearts and minds but I think settlements like this create consequences for people. I think that's the only thing that some people are ever going to respond to is the fact that there is an actual consequence in place for this behavior. So that they understand that that behavior is not appropriate for this particular workplace. Yeah, I could actually see the Tesla legal justification of like, hey, if the staffing agency is the problem they should pay the fine, not us, I get that. But Tesla should also be saying, you know we tried to take action, we tried to push the staffing agency, this was wrong, we won't let it happen again. I'm not saying any of that stuff. I think that is bothersome as well, right? Yeah, they didn't do any of that. And thankfully, I guess their own argument kind of got used against them in this particular case because they're kind of harping on the idea that this is a contractor, this is a contractor but because he was a contractor he was able to sue them. The person that got the million dollars had to be forced into arbitration. There are a few other people that are claiming they weren't aware that they were even, that was a part of their contract as a Tesla employee. So, who knows how many other of these cases aren't even seeing the light of day because of that forced arbitration clause in the employee contract. And because people are just scared and they wanna shut up and keep their jobs. Well, Microsoft and Nvidia have created the Megatron Turing Natural Language Generation Model or MTNLP, which they call the most powerful monolithic transformer language model trained to date. The companies say it's unmatched in its reading comprehension, it's common sense reasoning and natural language inferences. The system should make it faster and also less expensive to train language models going forward. The MTNLP runs on 280 A100 GPUs, has 105 layers and 530 billion parameters. Generally, the larger the number of parameters the more sophisticated and nuanced a model can be. But as we all know, a model is only as good as its training data. So, what was it trained on? Well, the MTNLP was trained on 270 billion tokens of English language data drawn largely from an open source collection of datasets known as the Pile. The Pile gets its data from academic sources like PubMed and Arvix, as well as communities like Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, also GitHub. Microsoft and Nvidia also supplemented this with a crawl of a large collection of news stories and social media posts. You need that last kind of real world data to make the models work more like a human would work. But unfortunately, that also means that sometimes they work too much like humans. Microsoft and Nvidia said, quote, our observations with MTNLP are that the model picks up stereotypes and biases from the data on which it is trained. Microsoft and Nvidia are committed to working on addressing this problem. They also say they encourage, quote, continued research to help in quantifying the bias of the model and that any use of megatron terrain in production must ensure that proper measures are put in place to mitigate and minimize potential harm to users. And also follow Microsoft's responsible AI principles. Yeah, this is a great example of what is good and bad about AI, right? They're pulling from great sources, archive, PubMed, Stack Exchange. But they also need to pull from social media posts because you want it to work like a human. So you need to get that natural language that humans do that you don't write in a medical publication or something like that. But when you do that, you pull in the patterns of a human, which means you're introducing bias into the algorithm because humans are biased, which I don't think means we shouldn't be studying this. I think Microsoft is exactly right to, on front streets say like, look, this definitely has bias in it. We want your help in figuring out how to deal with that. And also what they didn't say, but what I would add is, and that means you should make sure you don't use this in situations where you don't want that bias to have an effect, right? Right, right. Yeah, it's, you know, you can't solve for human behavior basically, but I would be curious to know what it takes to create a dataset. And if that was something that was a possibility, like could we create a humanistic dataset of our own to train the system on, you know? It seems like the volume of data is probably too great to maybe consider that, but it's a curious question. Yeah, you need bulk when you want to have a good training dataset. And Microsoft even said that they curated this. They did go in and try to get rid of some stuff, but like you say, it's just so big that human curation still is done by humans, right? They're gonna miss stuff, yeah. Well, if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on the show, anything that you want us to talk about on a future show or have talked about on a past show, do send the feedback our way. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thank you in advance. We'd also like to thank a few brand new bosses. And they are Arthur, Kevin Brock, David Grizzly-Smith and John Suppala. All just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, Arthur. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, David. And thank you, John. Hey, I like that. Brand new bosses. Good to have four of you in. I know we had a long weekend here. Give you time, but the slate's clear now, folks. If you want to be the brand new boss tomorrow, now's your chance. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Indeed, also thanks. Big thanks to Stephanie Humphrey for being with us today of the Tech John podcast. Stephanie, let folks know where they can keep up with your work. You can find me all around the web at Tech Life Step and you can check out the work I'm doing in digital citizenship on tilldeaththewtweet.com. Excellent. Well, we are live on this show Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030, UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Please join us live if you can. Tom's off tomorrow, working on Know a Little More. Rich is here with me along with Scott Johnson. 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.