 Coming up on DTNS, is screen time bad for kids' relationships and self-control? Turns out maybe not. Also, Uber starts using its drivers to deliver more things, less people, and the state of contact tracing apps, what you need to know. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, 4, 20, 20, 20. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the Podfeat podcast, I'm Allison Sheridan. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about volume and audio control and whether your apps can be too loud or not on Good Day Internet. We also talked briefly about the IBM earnings. It's all there in the expanded show. Get Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google announced it's now displaying information on 2,000 COVID-19 testing centers that are approved for publishing by health authorities across 43 U.S. states in its search. Google also added a new testing tab to its COVID-19 SOS alert with links to the CDC's symptom checker and links to testing information from local health authorities. Now information about specific testing centers for Connecticut, Maine, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Pennsylvania not shown because they haven't been approved. Citing financial pressures on traditional media from the COVID-19 crisis, the Australian federal government ordered the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, ACC, to create a mandatory code of conduct governing sharing of data, ranking of news content online, and the sharing of revenue generated from news between traditional media outlets and large digital platforms. The ACC has been negotiating a voluntary code of conduct since December. A draft of the mandatory code is expected by July. As part of Microsoft's work with COVID-19 Plasma Alliance, the company launched the COVID-19 Plasma Bot, a self-screening tool for plasma donations to create a treatment for COVID-19. The bot will be available on the web, social, and search channels. Checking if recently covered COVID-19 patients are able to donate plasma, which the Plasma Alliance hopes to use to create an effective therapy for COVID-19 patients if eligible users will be directed to a plasma donation location. Fandango has agreed to acquire Walmart's on-demand video service Voodoo for an undisclosed sum of money. Voodoo will continue to power Walmart's online movie and TV store, and Walmart says customer access to their Voodoo library will not change. Facebook launched Facebook Gaming, an Android app that lets users create and watch live gameplay. The app includes a go live option to live stream mobile games directly. Monetization is currently limited to fans make one-time payments by giving stars. The app had been in testing for 18 months in Southeast Asia and Latin America, and an iOS version is in development. Riot Games announced a bug bounty program for its Vanguard anti-cheat system used in the game Valorant, with rewards up to $100,000 for code execution on the kernel level exploits. Valorant is currently enclosed to beta, but the Vanguard system is automatically installed with the game and was discovered to always be running even if you're not playing the game. Canon announced the upcoming EOS R5 mirrorless camera will be able to internally record AK video without a sensor crop in either RAW or 10-bit 4-2-2-8.265, which is really good. The R5 will also record 4K video of up to 120 frames per second. Dual pixel autofocus will be available across all resolutions, and the camera includes in-body image stabilization as well. LG released a teaser video for its upcoming Velvet smartphone. The triple camera arrays range vertically on the back, and you can also see a headphone jack. The trailer shows the phone in black, white, green, orange, and pink. It will run on a Snapdragon 5G765. They should give a disclaimer that there is actually no Velvet in the phone as far as I can tell anyway. Maybe there is. Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched RT.Live. This is a US-based COVID-19 infection tracking website. The site uses data from the COVID tracking project to calculate the effective reproductive rate of COVID-19, or the RT. That's an estimation of how many secondary infections, retransmissions, are likely to develop because of a single infection in a specific area. It's really important to get your RT below one. Germany got its below one, and now they're starting to slowly open some things up. The site shows state-by-state RT calculations and can be filtered by region, preventative measure taken, or population. Now that is taking actual test results. Let's talk a little bit more about another, a couple of other efforts, actually multiple efforts, to track where infections might go next by having people self-report systems. Symptoms, rather. Facebook partnered with Carnegie Mellon University's Delphi Research Center on a survey asking users to report their symptoms. Both Carnegie Mellon and Facebook have now published websites with their initial findings. You can see a little heat map. Go to covidcast.cmu.edu and you will be able to see these heat maps later this week and eventually provide forecasts based on the data to help local health officials anticipate where hospital capacity needs might spike next. Facebook's own site provides a symptom map of the U.S. at the county level, showing what percentage of the population has reported systems county by county. Facebook's also partnering with the University of Maryland to take that survey global and Carnegie Mellon is building an API to let researchers access the data. There are a lot of similar efforts out there. One of the early ones was covidnearu.org. We mentioned it on the show before. That one's created by a team of epidemiologists and bioinformaticists at Boston Children's Hospital. They created the successful flu near you map. Engineers from Apple, Amazon, and Google worked on covid near you. Flu near you was also self-reported symptoms, but they were able to show that the trends that came out of it were useful in predicting where flu outbreaks would happen. So they're applying what they learned there to covid near you. They don't have the reach of Facebook, though. As of Friday night, covid near you had reports from more than 440,000 people in the U.S., whereas Carnegie Mellon says its Facebook project is seeing 150,000 reports a day. Wow. You know, this reminds me of a simpler time when I remember seeing that Google figured out that they could actually track the progression of the flu. This was regular flu way sooner than I think the CDC. Yeah, but was people basically searching for, you know, my nose is running. Do I have the flu? And so if they could do it then, you'd think now they've got a lot more data, a lot more people pulling this kind of information. So this is what big data is for, right? This is perfect. This is the positive use of big data. Yeah. It's what it then slides into that gets everybody's nose bent out of shape, right? Well, and it's also, you know, how do people take advantage of the wealth of information that can be put into understandable terms? Like, this is great. Who that needs to know this information is going to seek out this information. I mean, Facebook is pretty good about making all that stuff front and center. But then you have a lot of people who are like, ah, Facebook's not the place for me to get information. So it really is just a matter of, you know, who uses the information and is it for the right reason? Yeah. And if we could pool some of these resources and get, you know, because there's more than just the two we mentioned here, get them to share the information, we'd have an even better, more robust data set to work from. The New York Times sources say that Dropbox offered bug bounties on Zoom vulnerabilities both internally and externally. The sources said that when the vulnerabilities were discovered, Zoom was slow to fix them, citing a major vulnerability found at a 2019 Hacker One event in Singapore, which then took three months to patch only after other researchers publicly disclosed a vulnerability with the same root cause. So took a while. The bug bounties aren't limited to Zoom. However, on March 27, 2019, Dropbox announced a vendor security program that encoded reasonable security requirements into vendor contracts and made the model terms available for any company to also use. Among the terms were legal authorization for Dropbox to offer bug bounties both internally and externally for its partners products. In a statement to the New York Times, Dropbox says it was grateful to Zoom for being the first to participate in this vendor bug bounty program. It also added that Dropbox itself used the video conferencing service for internal medians and that Zoom had become a critical tool in keeping our teams connected. Yeah, a lot of the New York Times story really is just telling you stuff you already know if you've been listening to the show. And we know if you've been listening to security bites on the Nocellicast that Zoom has really been making strides in improving its security. But I thought it was significant this part about Dropbox kind of under the radar last year announcing a bug bounty for its partner software. So in other words, Dropbox people were using Zoom and they're like, you know, we need this to be secure for our own reasons. Let's do a bug bounty for Zoom as well as other products that they use. I thought that was fascinating. Yeah, that is interesting. I'm glad you pointed out like the problem that they had with Zoom being slow to respond was back in March of 2019. April of 2020 is a completely different response time speed for Zoom. They have done amazing things in the last, what, six days? Yeah, less than a week. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're not forgiving them for all their ills. But but the news here isn't that Zoom was slow to fix stuff. We already knew that. The news here is that Dropbox was paying people to find bugs in Zoom. And gosh, it would have been nice if they paid attention to them back then. But that is a really interesting thing, not just for Zoom, but for partners. I guess maybe the lesson to learn here is if there was more transparency, if people knew about this more, then maybe there would have been more pressure on Zoom to fix these things. Right, right. I do really find it interesting that they put it into the contracts too. They wanted to have people for production for offering those bug bounties. Yeah, yeah. Uber announced two new services, Uber Direct, which will offer deliveries from local retailers. In New York, it will start with Pharmacy Cabinet, an Australia pet food company Pet Barn in Portugal, the Postal Service, and South Africa Medication. That's kind of hitting a lot of different bases. But the one that really excites me is the other new services, Uber Connect. Way for you to use Uber to send something to someone else in the same area on the same day, like a courier service. Uber Connect will be available in more than 25 cities in the U.S., Mexico, and Australia at launch. Uber CEO, Castro Shahi, says the new services reflect Uber's primary focus, quickly adapting our technology to meet the evolving needs of communities and companies. I love that Uber Connect idea. That is just like, I bought a bunch of pipe cleaners to try to make my mask fit better under my glasses, to attach to my cloth mask. So now I have 200 pipe cleaners. I would like to send them to Tom and to Sarah and to Roger. That would be great. What's funny about that is you're right. That's a great little service and it comes in handy. It already existed with Uber drivers. I can't tell you. I mean, okay, I probably can count all of the times I've done this on two hands. But if a friend was going on a date and all of a sudden she spills coffee on her dress and it's like, well, I'm not driving across town to give you the dress that would look cute that I've got in my closet, but all of a sudden, an Uber, that has happened. I have done that. Yeah, really? Oh, wow. Now the thing is, is that the Uber driver can be like, no, that's not really what this is for. And that has also happened. So I'm not advocating that this was always, you know, the thing that you were supposed to do. But for the most part, the Uber driver is like, I don't care if you're in the backseat or not. I'm going to the same place. You gave me this, you know, something on a hanger or in a box or whatever. I'm going to assume it's not anything that's, you know, an illegal substance, right? Because there's, you know, depending on the person involved, who knows what's in that box. I wonder if you could put a dog in the car and have take it to the dog sitter. I mean, if the driver agreed potentially, yeah, that is not what Uber Connect is for. So Uber Connect made Sarah's dress situation legit, right? She didn't have to work around the system. Yeah, I didn't have to be like, hey, driver, wink, wink, can you just do this, do me a solid? But yeah, this is something that was definitely already going on. So now we need Uber pet delivery on there is the next one, right? Well, and the whole idea with the partnership with retail shops, Uber had a, I think the partnership with Nordstrom went for a couple of years, but super limited. I never bought anything, but I remember being like, oh, this is the beginning of something interesting. And then it kind of went away. So maybe it just wasn't in wide use or they couldn't get a lot of good, good partnerships at the time. But this all makes sense to me as well. I mean, the only thing I would say is if you are ordering from some sort of independent store where they might have some sort of a delivery service of their own, you know, you get a lot of people, especially these days saying go straight through the source. Don't use a company like Uber because they're just going to, you know, they're going to take some cream off the top. But in general, Uber's got to figure out what to do with all these people that have cars and want to work. And Uber Direct is only done with particular businesses. So presumably if you're using Uber Direct, that business made the choice to like, I want this to be the way my delivery is done. Both of these Uber Connect and Uber Direct are products of the virus, they're products of our time. It'll be interesting to see if people get used to them enough that they continue to be useful after we're out of lockdown, or if they just kind of fade away as the drivers go back to driving people around. This will be, this will be interesting to watch. Well, everyone, the reviews for Apple's Magic Keyboard for the iPad are coming in. Overall reviews found the backlit keyboard to offer a better typing experience than the old folio keyboard, although opinions vary if it's on par with the new Scissor Switch MacBooks. Build quality and touchpad performance also standouts. Several reviewers though noted that when attached, the keyboard and 12.9 inch iPad Pro actually weighs more and is thicker than the current MacBook Air. So there's some bulk involved if you want that nice experience. Dieter Bohne over at the Verge also found that the max 130 degree angle was kind of limiting and the lack of a function row forces users to dig into settings for things like backlight strength. And the keyboard might not appeal to artists because it can't be folded behind the iPad like the folio can. And everybody mentioned that, yeah, it's expensive. I am super excited about this. I have asked for one for my birthday and I believe it might be on order. But I don't have one of my hot little hands. It's kind of funny thinking that it's a problem that you can't lay it down on the table. But yeah, you can. One of the things they said they liked about it, Dieter Bohne said in fact, was it's really easy to just tear it off of the keyboard. And so you can just set it on the table like that, right? That seems pretty easy. But you can't have it like at a slight angle to the table. The weight, that's a bummer because obviously one of the things that's fun about an iPad is that it's really thin and light. My 12.9 inch iPad Pro is not very light to start with, but having it weigh in as big as a MacBook Air might be might be significant. But I'm looking forward to those keys. It looks fun. And the idea to meet something that a lot of people don't talk about that I'm really excited about is just having it up a little bit more off the table. I don't know about you, but I think I'm getting a bend, a permanent bend in my neck from being leaned over looking at the iPad, my phone. I, you know, I've got a Logitech on an iPad Pro and I have a folio like an Apple folio. I much prefer the Logitech. I have seen some people saying that the new Logitech version of the Magic Keyboard is also superior to the Magic Keyboard. But the Magic Keyboard does look like it's much superior to the folio. So I'm wondering if it's going to make that much of a difference between the two because I really do love that Logitech iPad keyboard. Do you have the newer folio one or the original one? Like I have the newer one. Yeah. Oh, because I love it. I think I like that keyboard better than the new Scissor Switch keyboard. Yeah. Oh, I don't like it better than the newer Scissor Switch. We will have words about that, but good. The new Scissor Switch is at least better than the old one though. But yeah, the newer folio is better than the original one too. Like so I assume that the Magic Keyboard is going to keep getting better as well. All right, folks, if you're confused about the opinions surrounding contact tracing apps, don't worry, everyone is. The BBC has a good article summarizing the positions, and we're going to break down some of what they say and some of the other things that we've been bringing you in following this. If you're new to the concept, the idea of contact tracing is that when you find out someone has COVID-19, you can contact everyone they might have infected. That would be the ideal, right? Then those people can get tested. All of this depends on ubiquitous testing. But if you have come in contact with someone who is COVID-19 infected, you can get tested whether you have symptoms or not. In fact, especially if you don't. And the aim is to catch people who are infected and contagious before they can spread it to people because they don't know they have it because they don't have the symptoms. That would reduce the spread of the disease. Now, contact tracing doesn't have to be 100% to help with health. The downsides of the errors are usually just more protection. In other words, a lot of times, this is used to say, oh, this person can now go about their business because we feel like they're safe. They don't have the disease. Now you know, right? The making up for the error is everybody just please stay in their home. So contact tracing is one of the ways you can help ease the lockdown. Manual contact tracing is labor intensive, but generally agreed to be the best way to do this. You interview someone about everywhere they've been in the period when they were likely to be contagious, and you get so much more information that way. Even if some of it's kind of vague and fuzzy, it's good enough to try to contact the people they could have come across. Now, because of this, several efforts have been made to improve the accuracy of manual tracing by using technology. So the most famous, of course, is the Apple Google effort. And generally it's seen as one that protects privacy the best, since it doesn't use location data, keeps what data it does use on the device for the most part, and doesn't have a central server. Any system like this would need to be downloaded by 60% or more of the population. So you have an adoption hurdle you have to get past first. It's one of the reasons Apple and Google want to make this integrated into the operating system in the second phase. So they can just give you a pop up and say, hey, would you like to participate in protecting people from COVID-19? Say yes here. However, there are other downsides to using apps as contact tracing. Not everyone has a device, first of all. Bluetooth is not precise with distance, and it's subject to interference. And the device can't gauge the interactions like a human interview would be able to do to know whether it was more or less likely to result in contagion. Were you in a ventilated room or a windy area? That kind of stuff comes out more often in manual contact tracing efforts. It doesn't come out at all in the Bluetooth contact tracing. There also might be attempts to undermine the service by using multiple devices, false reports, denial of service. We've talked previously that the University of Oxford Big Data Institute suggests that even with those downsides of spoofing, it would still result in slower spread than not doing anything, which is the goal. So one approach is to recruit the thousands of people needed for manual tracing. Do the manual tracing, but then use the apps to supplement that and increase the effectiveness. There are different systems being proposed, though. The German-led Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing, or PEPPT, we've talked about on the show before, that's a centralized project. Unfortunately, several participants have quit over criticisms of it being centralized and alleging a lack of openness and transparency about how the data would be handled. This has caused the creation of the Swiss-developed Decentralized Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing, or DP3T team. That one is aligned with the Apple Google system, because it does a good job of protecting privacy and it is decentralized. In fact, 300 academics signed a letter Monday endorsing the Apple Google system and DP3T as preserving privacy better. So there, I hope you have a little better handle on what contact tracing is, where apps fit in, why we still need manual tracing, and what the Apple Google system is, and where it fits into the various protection efforts going on. I have to wonder at the baseline problem being that it would need to be downloaded by 60% or more of the population. At least as of 2017, which is the latest statistics I was able to find, on TechCrunch, they reported that 50% of consumers don't download any apps at all. Yeah, and that's why they want to put it in the operating system. The first phase would be an API that would require an app download. The second phase would just be a pop-up when you get your operating system update that says, hey, would you like to opt into this? Then you don't have to download anything unless you get infected. That's when you would download an app so that you can verify your diagnosis. Yeah, I think that's the only way it's ever going to happen. Yeah, and that's supposedly coming after the first round in May, so probably end of May, sometime June, it would go into the operating system. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the Tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. So, Allison, you pointed out a study by sociology professor or led by sociology professor Douglas Downey at the Ohio State University, comparing teacher and parent evaluations of children who started kindergarten in 1998 about how they related with other kids with parent and teacher evaluations of kids who began kindergarten in 2010. The hope was to see any difference caused by increased screen time use among the children born in the year the iPad was released 2010. Results showed both groups had similar ratings for forming relationships and self-control. Allison, I love the way this story started out. Douglas Downey wanted to prove his son wrong by showing there was a difference and he didn't find one. Yeah, he said, he was talking to his son and basically said, you kids today, you're all horrible people. And he said, how do you know? And he had to go check and started the study and the starting with the 1998 study and then trying to replicate the results in 2010. I found this fascinating because it's so much easier to find studies that tell you that that screens make children horrible people. My niece is actually writing a book about the fact that she removed screens from her children's lives. She has four kids and two foster kids, so she's got a fairly large samples that just in her house. And, you know, she watched our kids kind of turned into monsters when they were at the very best zombies when they were on screens. And so she simply removed them completely and then started watching their behavior and the things that they learned and how they reacted to it. And they've gone completely screen free now. They were just going to do like a two-week detox and now it's been, I don't know, eight months, something like that. So I got into kind of a discussion with her on what she thought of these results and she sent back about 35 other studies that showed things like that the number of hours kids are spending on screen today is something like six hours a day and that they're seeing increased levels of depression and anxiety in these kids that are on that lawn. What I never saw in some of the direct studies I didn't get to look at to say, okay, compared to what? You know, what did they, maybe the kids who spent six hours a day or the kids who were already depressed and high anxiety, I'm not really sure. And we've also seen studies counteracting that saying that there isn't a statistically significant uptick in depression anxiety. That's why you need multiple studies. He can never go on just one study. And it's important to note that even Professor Downey's study shouldn't be taken as the only proof of this, right? This is like, he wanted to find a result and didn't find it. Doesn't mean there isn't some other result there or a different study might find a slightly more statistical result. But it does say that it's not obvious. It's, you know, it's not that sort of thing like, well, I could have told you that. Well, no, you can't. You got to look at this stuff and you got to study it for multiple angles. I'm sure there are effects of children using screens, some of them positive, some of them negative. And so if you just ban your children from using them at all, you're not seeing what the negative effects of them not using the screen are because you don't have anything to compare it to anymore. And that's more nuanced. So you really do need to look at this from multiple angles. I think the most significant thing that caught me about this was the idea that here was a professor who really wanted to find a different result and didn't, but still publish the results. Alison earlier in the show, you mentioned, you know, hunching over over your iPad and being like, Oh, my neck hurts. I mean, that seems like the most obvious thing that's going to happen earlier and perhaps worse. You know, if you've got logging a lot more screen time earlier in life, because it's just, it's just going to happen over a longer period of time. I wonder, and also your friend who's got a bunch of kids in the house and being able to limit screen time or eradicate it completely. It's like, I wonder how, you know, then it kind of turns into this like social pressure, right? Like kids who aren't allowed to eat the candy that the neighbor kids get to eat. You know, it's, it's not necessarily that kids feel like they need all of the screen time and being heavily using a variety of social networks, but it's kind of what everybody else is doing. It seems to me like, yeah, you can't really compare the kid who's always on Twitter, let's just say, to someone who's never used it, but it's more of like, well, what happens and how does it change when we pull back on the screen time or take it away or add it into something, you know, it's kind of this control group. Also, your friend could be absolutely right that screen time is bad for her kids and not be in contradiction to the science that says screen time in general is not bad for kids. She may have the outliers, right? It's not a representative sample. I did want to make the point that she was, she sent me like 12 books she's read on the topic and things and studies that she's been studying. So she didn't just do this independently as though this anecdotal evidence matters. I do like what you said, though, Tom, about that that, uh, Dr. Professor Downey went directly towards, I want to look for this result and I'm going to do a test to find it out. What, what is really common is to look at test results and go, Oh, now I'm going to draw these conclusions from the data that I found. If I learned anything from listening to Dr. Gary, what you do first is you start with a hypothesis, you do a test for that hypothesis and then you see what you find. If you find something interesting, you get to do a new test, but you don't get to start your, get your results from that test. You have to start with that as a hypothesis. And that's what made this a little more valid to me than maybe some other tests that I've read about. Right. He did proper science. Well, you know what? Screen time is really kind of fun. Discord screen time and you can join our discord by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon.com slash D T N S get to chatting. What's in the mailbag, Sarah? Tom, I'm glad you asked. Uh, one of our patrons, Alexandria wrote in and said, Hey guys, been a listener for a while now. And since Kroger, I assume your employer, Alexandria is giving us $2 per hour more for a month. I thought I'd support you. I also joined your folding at home team with a build server that doesn't see much constant use. It's a rise in seven and a two. So it ought to get some good results. Oh, that's great. I am a, uh, I'm a Ralph's patron. Ralph's owned by Kroger. So I go Krogering in a way quite often. So, uh, thank you, Alexandria. Uh, thank you for sharing the wealth. But it's heartwarming. Also, thank you, Alexandria, for working in the grocery industry, which is super important right now. Uh, you know, thank you for that as well. I can't, can't say how much that means to us. Thank you. Shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Sonya Vining, Tony Glass and Ruchon Brantley. Also, thanks to Allison Sheridan. Allison, so nice to have you back on the show. Where can people keep up with the rest of your work? Well, you can find that over at podfeed.com, where I've been talking a lot about my fun with programming. It is my happy place now. Yes, you are certainly, I can tell in your voice what you do when you talk about it on the show. It's pretty great. Yeah. I made a clock four and a half years. I've been taking programming by stealth from Bart Buchatz in an audio podcast and I can now make a clock. That's cool. Hey, that's, that's helpful. It's more than I can make. So yeah, good job. podfeed.com. Go check that out, folks. Also, we've been sharing the love here at the end of the show, uh, with lots of folks sending us a good deserving people who are doing some good deserving things. And I'd like to call out personally, uh, artist Ryan Officer, longtime great supporter of the show. You may have seen his artwork of the hosts of the show and you can now get a personalized portrait of yourself, a DTNS boss in the same style that he has driven that he has drawn all of us. Uh, this will not only help Ryan, but he wants to help others get through all this as well. So you'll get a 5,000 by 5,000 high res personalized DTNS portrait drawing of yourself, a social media avatar version for use on the web, a 36 inch by 24 inch digital poster art, uh, posing with the selected DTNS crew of your choice as you get us drawn together. Uh, this will all of course, as I said, help Ryan, uh, but he intends to take some of what he makes off of this and help support some local charities and cover the cost of support for other DTNS patrons. He's been working with people who might not be able to keep supporting DTNS and he wants to help them out as well. Uh, you can get all the details from creative vast arts.com. We'll have a link in our show notes, uh, as well. So yeah, get yourself a, uh, a self, uh, a commissioned portrait from Ryan Officer. You can also support our show at any level at patreon.com slash DTNS. And we want you to give us feedback, questions, comments, all of it, send it to feedback, a daily tech news show.com and join us live if you can Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 20 30 rather UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Jen Cutter joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com.