 Coming up on DT&S, TCL shows off its scrollable mobile device screen. You can get a robot to request companies delete your data and then have the robot sue them if they don't. And a big fact check dispute hits Facebook. This is the Daily Tech News for March 5th, 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 were just talking about all kinds of stuff. Justin's tails from the road, dentist appointments, Justin's birthday band today. Happy birthday, Justin. You can get all of that by becoming a member and getting good day internet. The wider show at patreon.com slash DT&S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon and Facebook have shut down their Seattle area offices after confirming that workers at both companies had contracted COVID-19. Amazon recommends that all Seattle and Bellevue Washington employees work from home. Facebook encourages its Seattle employees to work from home. Google asked all of its employees in Washington state to work from home. And yes, Microsoft will let all of its Seattle and even San Francisco area employees work from home. Twitter announced that it's expanded its rules around prohibited speech to include language that dehumanizes people on the basis of their age, disability or disease. New tweets that break these rules can result in account suspension. A vulnerability that impacts the Intel Converged Security and Management Engine, CSME, is worse than originally thought. And the patch that was issued in May 2019 does not fully fix the issue. The CSME cryptographically verifies and authenticates all the firmware running on a system. And Mark Ermolov from Positive Technologies found the bug can be exploited by malware with root privileges to recover the chipset key and grant an attacker access to everything on a device. Previously, it was thought you needed physical access to exploit the vulnerability, but apparently that's not the case. So for sensitive systems, the only recourse is to replace the hardware and only Intel's 10th generation chips are free of this vulnerability. Samsung is launching its 8K and 4K QLED TV lineup in the US. There's a few different models, but the flagship model is the Q950TS. Comes in 65 inch, 75 inch and 85 inch models running at 76080 by 440320 native resolution. They have full array local dimming or fold for short to maximize HDR quality and peak brightness by up to 20% over last year's models. The TVs offer support for both AMD's open source FreeSync and NVIDIA G-Sync technology for gaming and contain a neural network for upscaling powered by the quantum processor 2.0 8K to play 4K programming because, you know, there's so much of that already. No exact price or release dates just yet. Ball till you fold. The South Korean National Assembly unanimously passed an amendment to the country's financial services law that would authorize Korea's financial regulators to provide a framework for the regulation and legalization of cryptocurrencies and crypto exchanges. Regulators will develop rules around anti-money laundering and other processes, but loosen restrictions. It placed on blockchain adoption during the crypto boom several years ago. Leading the way, Korea. Well done. And Anthony Lewandowski, the former employee of Google and Uber's autonomous car units has been ordered to pay $179 million to Google for unfair competition and a breach of legal obligations. Lewandowski and Leo Ron, who settled separately with Google, started their own autonomous car company bringing over Google employees and then sold the company to Uber. Lewandowski is also under federal indictment for stealing trade secrets from Google. That's a different case. Lewandowski filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after the decision. All right, let's talk a little more about something DuckDuckGo is doing to help other competitors protect your privacy. Indeed, DuckDuckGo has been collecting data about online trackers and has created a data set called TrackerRadar that it will share with other companies to help protect user privacy. TrackerRadar has 5,326 domains from 1,727 companies. Browser maker Vivaldi says that it has begun using the data set to protect its users. TrackerRadar data will be updated monthly and DuckDuckGo also sells an optional license for help using the data. Yeah, and DuckDuckGo says Vivaldi won't be the last. They have some other folks that are interested in taking advantage of this. Pretty good to make it open. Pretty smart to say, and if you want help with it, you know, we can make some money off it that way. But otherwise, we're just sharing the wealth, so to speak, as a way to help make people in general safer from tracking, which is what DuckDuckGo builds its brand on. Yeah, and they know there are enough users who care about this that it makes the DuckDuckGo look a lot better in the public eye as well. It's so funny that the online advertising world is so profitable that now there is a side hustle against online advertising. Right. You can make money stopping online advertising. That's how much money there is in this is that there is money to stop it. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple told technical support staff at its stores that replacement iPhones for damaged devices will be in short supply for two to four weeks. Staff were apparently told they could offer mail, offer to mail replacement devices when they arrive and offer loaner devices in the meantime. Some of Bloomberg's sources indicate replacement parts have also started to run low. Yeah, this is mostly just a public service announcement. If you're thinking you might need to take your phone in or if you drop your phone and break it and need to take it into an Apple store, you may not get it replaced right away, which usually that has been the case because they're running short because of the supply chain issues with the virus. Yeah, and I've been there many times and usually it's sort of like, I need this done right now, kind of a situation. I wonder what the loaner device situation is because I have not historically known Apple to be like, yeah, we got a refurb iPhone 10 in the back here. We'll just give it to you until the part comes in. Yeah, that's not that has not been their situation in the past and and Gurman sources don't make it clear what the loaner device would be. My guess is either they have a limited number of current iPhones that are set aside to be circulated, you know, as soon as somebody gets their replacement, then they hand it off to the next one. Or it could be older, different model iPhones, which is, you know, like you brought in an iPhone 10 S to be to be fixed. All they have is an iPhone 7, which isn't, you know, good enough for a replacement, but at least you have something. Yeah, exactly. Something like that. But we don't know. We don't know what that's about. Although I do want to highlight again, because I think we're going to see more stories like this, that we are seeing the supply chain issues from the coronavirus come home. These are the kind of real world effects that you don't think of it when it's a far off a city in China that's suffering from it. You suffer from it when your screens cracked and you can't get it fixed today. TCL showed off two prototype devices with flexible screens. The first we saw it see. Yes, that's the tri fold phone, a 6.65 inch phone that folds down kind of unfolds three ways into a 10 inch tablet. The phone uses two distinct hinges to fold flat. TCL demonstrated using it as a two pane fold as well. The other device, however, is a sliding design with a screen that rolls up into the back of the phone. So it scrolls out. A dummy device was demoed by TCL and a video concept showed a motorized screen unrolling at the push of a button. The dummy device you had to pull out yourself. TCL says it's experimenting with a dozen or so form factors and has no timeline for any of these devices to come to market. But I love the scrollable. I've been asking for a scrollable since I was doing Buzz out loud at Scenet more than a decade ago. The scrollable screen just seems like the best way to go because hinges are tricky. But scrolls, if you can make them work, they just they hide away. They're really nice like a pocket door. I applaud you for even thinking of a concept like this 10 years ago. Because when I saw that for anybody who's like scrollable, I mean, don't you scroll on your phone anyway? No, it's the phone itself gets bigger and smaller. Yeah, scrolling in and out of itself. It is pretty cool. And yes, this is a dummy device. But once I saw it, I was like, oh, my goodness. I had never thought about this. Yeah, I'm so I'm so focused on whether foldable phones are the right way to go. Scrollable phones are much more fun. Yeah, think think scroll less like the gesture you make with your finger. No, it's not that kind of cement like the parchment that unfurls as it as it gets a longer. I mean, this seems a lot more structurally safe than right hinges, which have continued to have problems. And we're now finding out that the rubber is kind of the once now that the rubber's met the road, it might not be ready for prime time. But I mean, I guess my larger question with all of this is. Is there a hunger for and I'll say novelty, but but I guess I could probably be more nice and say experimental form factors like this. Are people excited for it either as a fashion accessory or as something that you could build a killer application on top of? Practically speaking, I have wanted from time to time the ability to just have my small phone that I can fit in my pocket. Yeah, be able to have a bigger screen when I wanted it to when I'm reading a book or a comic book or playing a video. So that's where I think a scroll or shall I say unfurlable screen furlable. Yeah, it is would would be amazing, right? Because you don't have to fold it up and then now it's twice as thick as it would have been. It just it just rolls up into a corner of the phone and can get bigger or smaller and it could actually have multiple sizes. That would be very, very cool. That's the dream, right? You've got your phone. You've got your tablet. It's all one thing. Apple updated its app store review guidelines. Those now state the developers must submit new and updated apps using the iOS 13 SDK and implement sign in with Apple for apps that author that offer other services to log in with both starting April 30th 2020. Apple also announced that new apps in the dating and fortune telling categories will be rejected unless they provide a quote unique high quality experience and quote developers will also no longer be able to use custom notifications to ask for a user review. They'll have to use the API but apps can now send advertising push notifications. If a user authorizes them and a way to opt out is provided. Yeah, the dating and fortune telling is a little weird until you consider that people just spam the app store with low quality apps that say they're dating. So they're just trying to crack down on that. But the push notifications has some people very angry. A lot of people do not like the idea that apps will be able to send you an advertisement. Even if you can tell them not to they're worried that they'll package the advertising notifications in with other notifications that you want to trick you to getting them et cetera, et cetera. I'll be honest, Justin. I've gotten ads as notifications from apps before even though they weren't supposed to be allowed. So really I'm kind of glad that Apple has set some rules to say look we know you guys are going to try to do it anyway. So here are the rules to follow. Yeah, absolutely. And I actually applaud Apple has been very customer first in terms of trying to corral push notifications in general. I think that the additions to the newest versions of iOS that alert you that hey, you don't seem to respond to these kinds of push notifications. Do you want to see them at all is something that has been helpful? So yeah, I think from the developer side giving them an opportunity to do it. If somebody wants to opt into it is good, right? But for the people complaining, good, sweet, sweet molasses get a life. Well, I think it's ex-desperation really. I mean, how many times have you seen some sort of notification where you're like, okay, I'm going to go into my settings. I'm so sick of this. That happens all the time. And it's not because I changed my mind about letting an apps and me notifications. It just kind of, I don't know, fell through the crack. So when people see this and then they say, and then it's going to be some sort of upsell that I see why it's an annoyance. But it is really just an annoyance because you do have control over your own notifications as long as you want to take that into your own hands. You can do it from the screen. Like you can do it from the alert screen now. Like you don't even have to go into your settings and find the app and turn off the push notifications. You can do it at the point of ex-desperation. So I would get it. If they didn't have those, I would say that this is going to lessen the experience. But come on, people. There's already plenty of toggles. Do not pay. Remember the robot lawyer service that started disputing parking tickets for you. It's expanded to multiple services like cancelling streaming services. That's always annoying. Requesting compensation from airlines for poor customer service, stuff like that. The latest service from do not pay called digital health automates the process of requesting your data be deleted under the California Consumer Privacy Act. The system contacts more than 100 data brokers and requests your data be deleted shows you what data they collected and can even file legal paperwork to sue if companies fail to comply. Do not pay cost three bucks per month for access to all of its services. Yeah. If you haven't checked in on do not pay in a while, go to do dot pay dot com. You can schedule your employment with the DMV in Texas and California, Arizona and North Carolina. You can you can block robo calls and sue people who do robo calls like. And when I say do this, I mean, you can just tell the robot do that. And then it does all the work. Yeah. This is a brilliant company. I use them a few times and maybe it wasn't do not pay. But it was one of the somebody with parking tickets because back when I had probably before it was called do not pay because that's how it started. Yeah. It was another name. Yeah. And then they had to stop operating in Oakland because I guess too many people were using it and there was some kind of dispute with the local government. Oh, maybe it was a different one then. Yeah. Who knows? I don't know if they're back. Anyhow, a brilliant idea. Absolutely loved it. And I look forward to do more interaction with this concept for $3 a month. I want to sue robo callers and I'm I'm happy to work with do not pay on that. I also, you know, stuff like, oh, the airline, you know, you had a bad experience on an airline. How how often do you go back and like get your $5 back because the Wi-Fi sucked? I mean, some people are probably really diligent about that. I tend to just go, it's going to be such a nightmare. I'm going to be on the phone with someone from United for like 20 minutes. Again, it's the convenience. Sometimes it's worth it. Yeah. And the effect of this will be to change those policies because right now they have a policy so they can point to it, but they know no one will go to the trouble of going through the steps to make it happen. But now that you don't have to go to the trouble, you can have the robot do it for you. Maybe more people start taking advantage of it. Then you start to see these policies change when we start to see those policies change or we start to see companies saying you, we will not accept robots submitted complaints. That's when you know, do not pay has really made it big. Yeah. All right, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day, but you only got five minutes to spare. We have the solution daily tech headlines. Go get it at dailytechheadlines.com. We're going to talk about the Facebook fact checking problem that is occurring this week. There's a controversy. As Justin has foretold, this could never work perfectly forever. And we have our first. It's not the first problem, but it's the first big showdown between a fact checking entity and a big publisher. Here's what happened. Facebook's fact checking partners have been certified through the Pointer Institute's nonpartisan international fact checking network. So these are not picked by Facebook. They're picked by a highly respected journalistic agency. Anyone who is picked by the IFCN can then label a story partly false, label it as having a false headline or just say the whole thing's false. There's other categories like satire and opinion too, but as far as false goes, those are your three choices. And it only takes one partner to do that. There are different partners in different regions. The partners in the United States are AFP United States, the Associated Press, Check Your Fact, factcheck.org, Lead Stories, Politifact, Science Feedback and Reuters Fact Check. Check Your Fact is a subsidiary of a conservative publication called The Daily Caller. And this week, the president of the United States was speaking about the coronavirus and said, now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? The coronavirus, they're politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They've been doing it since you got in. It's all turning. They lost. It's all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. That's what he said. Snopes raided that quote from the president and has mixed saying, quote, despite creating some confusion with his remarks, Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax. Now Snopes is not one of the fact-checking organizations working with Facebook, but they are used by a lot of people and Snopes said didn't call the coronavirus itself a hoax, but it was confusing. Politico wrote a story headline, Trump rallies his base to treat coronavirus as a hoax. NBC News wrote a story headlined, Trump's calls coronavirus Democrats new hoax. Check your fact, raided both headlines as false on Facebook with the explanatory note. Trump actually described Democratic complaints about his handling of the virus threat as a hoax. Now Politico and NBC News took issue with this saying, no, we were describing a quote and we don't think it was false. Check your fact said, well, we do. Publishers have only one route to appeal on Facebook's labeling. It's to go to the fact-checking agency itself. In this case, check your fact and ask them to reconsider. The only other remedy would be to try to get the IFCN, the Pointer Institute's arm, to reject the fact-checking entity entirely for failure to meet its guidelines, which that's a bigger thing to prove. So who you think is right in this case, whether it's check your fact, Politico, NBC News or somebody else, that's not the issue for us. The heat of this controversy is. This is the first big case where you have the vetted fact-checking agency that Facebook has deemed to be appropriate at odds with not small blogs, not leftist publications, but mainstream publications over something that they say, look, no, that's, that's not right. What your headline is not correct. Justin, you've been saying for a long time that this was going to happen. Where, where are you sitting with this sitting? Tom, you can't sit when you're taking a victory lap. That's exactly what I'm doing right now because say it with me, everybody. The idea that you can try to police this, especially if you're trying to deputize other people to do it is a hashtag hell portal, hashtag portal to hell. It's both at the same time. There's no, there was no doubt in my mind that this was going to end here for the following reasons, regardless, again, about the facts of this, when you are in a world where you are deputizing outlets, content outlets to be the ones that determine whether something is a fact or not, maybe misleading, maybe with some kind of tag, but the idea that you are so concerned about whether or not there are lies told on the internet that you are putting these people in charge and giving them such authoritative language, thanks to your platform was always going to end up in disaster because Tom, in your experience in this industry of tech journalism, how excited by your estimation do reporters get when they are reported on by another outlet? Oh, quite, quite excited. Excited may not be exactly the right word, but there is excitement. Yes. Angry would be the way that I would, I would, in any, in any instance, in any form of journalism, journalists, it's one of the great quirks of the industry, journalists hate being reported on by other reporters. They hate having their, their work challenged and this is literally just that this kind of conflict was inevitable beyond that, like the beyond that the fact that this was always going to be a surface fight. It's just hard. It's very hard. In fact, I would say it might be an impossible task to determine with authoritative language facts on the Internet. Like it is, it is far more complicated than, than anybody who really pays attention to this or who just barely pays attention to this kind of story would like to admit. Well, and this, this is the issue, right, right here today. Everybody agrees that the obviously untrue story should be labeled false. There's, there's no right when someone says, you know, the president of the United States is an alien. We're like, that's not true. Every, everyone agrees that the plausibly untrue stuff that is, you know, when you scratch the surface, not true, like this person was fired and then you find out, well, no, they weren't that stuff should be labeled false. It's these edge cases. Yeah, that are the ones that are difficult. So yeah, you risk throwing the baby in the bathwater out at the same time. If you say, well, you can't check any facts because there are things that are untrue that these organizations can be good at finding. But where you draw the line is where you always have a problem. And if you noticed the fact-checking organizations in the United States, I mentioned were not the or the news organizations, they were fact-checking arms of news organizations or fact-checking institutes of their own that just stand on their own, like from the Annenberg school or something like that. So Facebook's trying to do it right. They're like, we're going to get people who do this for a living. We're going to get them from across the spectrum so that it's not just one perspective on what's true and what's not. And the fact of the matter is you're always going to have these edge cases. Now, Justin, are you saying that means you shouldn't do it at all? Or should it just be like, well, occasionally this is going to happen. And we take that as a cost of doing business. I tend to lean toward the harder you work at this, the more you're trying to squeeze and the more falls through your fingers. But if Facebook doesn't do it, then they're facing worse criticism from people, aren't they? Sure. Yeah. Then face worse criticism. I mean, like, I think there is a expectation that we have as consumers as to what Facebook can do that I think is unreasonable, that they should not be held to the idea that everything that might be a lie can be filtered out. There's again, I just think that it's very hard. Now, you're right. Out and out falsehoods, like, you know, Hillary Clinton dead at the age of 51 or something like that, that comes out tomorrow. Like, yes, that's something that Kennan should be marked and weeded out. I think that there are different, that that's a different problem to solve for other than getting into a situation where you are fighting over intentionally sensational headlines. Like, I think that Politico and NBC News are great organizations that do great work. At the same time, that Politico headline is written to be clicked on. Yeah, like all headlines. All headlines. Yes. And some of the best are intentionally there. So people are like, wait, what? Click on it. You know, go and interact with it, especially the stuff that goes viral on Facebook. The last thing I'll add to this, because I know people out there thinking it is, well, why don't you get rid of the fact checking organizations that run a foul? And that is up to the international fact checking network. The Pointer Institute is fairly well respected. And even if you disagree with them as a result of this story, they're saying that these agencies are reliable. So if they're saying that and they're not willing to change their mind because of this one story, which honestly is not that crazy. It's, you know, it's not out of the realm of possibility. It's not like they labeled something demonstrably true as false or vice versa. It is a confusing statement. Then, you know, to me, that that is this working, right? You're going to have these controversies if this kind of thing is happening. Well, controversial or not, a lot of people submit wonderful stories to our subreddit and we thank you every day. You could submit something that you think is worth our time and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, let's move on to Chris Christensen, our amateur traveler who has a tip for finding work remotely. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you have a job that you can do remotely and you want to do so just because the coronavirus is out there or maybe because you want to do it near a tropical beach, you can search for remote jobs either on a specialized search engine like flexjobs.com or when you go to one of the regular job sites like indeed.com instead of putting in your location put in remote and you can find a job that might let you travel at the same time. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler and Chris Christensen. He's he's facing difficult times with reduced travel on on the rise here, but nice work finding a way to make lemons out of lemonade there. Let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. We had a great discussion yesterday about what makes a good coder and the answer may surprise you. Jason from Chicago wrote, I can attest to reasoning being as important as math skills in programming. I've been a working software engineer for 35 years. I was a liberal arts major with a concentration in math. I knew I wanted to do software, but my school didn't have a CS concentration in retrospect. I did better being more general. I can't remember any of the math, but the training and problem solving has stayed with me. I have a mantra for any of my teams, which says think about the problem, not the solution. And Ian followed up with his own experience in the late 70s. He says I was an undergrad in college and worked as a computer lab assistant. I would help students with programming and basics. Basic. I found a near perfect correlation between the person's skills with programming and their proficiency in doing proofs in high school geometry. I mentioned this to a professor and he suggested I write a paper about it. That never came about, but I always felt that the same skill set was used in both thought processes. This is similar to the field of logic as taught in math and philosophy. Got a lot of passionate responses all over the scale on this. So thank you. And as we said yesterday, more study indicated, but an interesting study nonetheless. Yeah. Thanks for all the feedback, everybody. Also, thanks and a special shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Mike McLaughlin, Phillip Less and Frederick Huber, Huber, rather. Sorry, Frederick. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us. Justin, not only is it your birthday, but you're back in the studio sleeping in your own bed. It's been a wild week or so. Oh, boy. Has it, Sarah. Of course, you can catch all of the latest political stuff at politics, politics, politics wherever podcasts are found. You can support it directly at takepoliticsseriously.com. But there is one thing that I even forgot to tell Roger to put here on the sheet and that is you guys heard me a few weeks ago. Talk about my history podcast, Raise the Dead. That is all about the Nixon versus Kennedy election in 1960. The lessons that we could have learned for 2016, Trump versus Clinton. And now, for the first time ever, you can listen to it as an audio book. So if you've got, if you have an Audible subscription, I know a lot of people listening do, head on over there. It's a five and a half hour experience, so I'm not going to waste one of your credits with something like a half hour, 45 minutes. And even if you've already listened to it, there is a bonus episode, a full-length bonus episode all about the Kennedy's relationship to the mob and Frank Sinatra. If you like that more glittering crime side of the story, then you're going to very much enjoy the bonus episode available now on Audible, Raise the Dead, Nixon versus Kennedy. And I got a sneak peek of that episode. That's one of my favorites of the whole series. So it's absolutely worth it. Hey, if you're not an Audible subscriber, there's a million ways to get a free audio book. Here's a chance, cash in, get raised the dead for free. And then if you stick around, I've got a book coming out on Audible March 24th. You just keep it all rolling. It's been three months since we started the counter on people getting a sticker, a poster, a mug, or a t-shirt with the special six-year anniversary DTNS logo on it. And the first batch is headed to the factory to get printed and mailed out to about 174 patrons. You can join them, folks. It's not too late. Start that clock ticking for your three-month reward. Get some cool stuff and insider perks on top of it. The details all at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thanks for all the feedback. We love you guys. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Nicole Lee as our guest. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.