 Coming up on DTNS, the UK postal system admits its software was buggy after 20 years and hundreds of wrongful convictions. Apple's airdrop could leak your phone number and the Evercade game console is back with a new cartridge based game console for you. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, April 23rd, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Illustrating from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. What's up, Lauren St. Louis, I'm Patrick Norton. I'm Roger Chang, the show's pretty smooth. We were just talking about Jeff Foxworthy and interfacing with IT people on Good Day Internet. If you would like to find out what that means, become a member and get our expanded conversation Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Motherboard reports that security researcher who calls themselves sick codes discovered a pair of flaws in John Deere's apps and website that would let attackers access personal data of people who owned John Deere vehicles and equipment. That includes name, address, equipment ID, and VIN number. The first bug didn't rate limit username availability requests that enabled the second exploit to use an API cookie to expose personal information associated with the user names. Sick codes reported the vulnerabilities to John Deere on April 12th and 13th. The company fixed one bug within three days and the second bug on April 21st. Chris Poole has left Google. Poole, aka Moot, founded 4chan in 2003 and it was kind of a big deal when he left it and then joined Google in 2016. Back then he joined as part of the Photos and Streams unit, which included social networking, which was Google Plus back then. He later moved on to working Google startup incubator and on Google Maps. No word on where he's going next. In Q1, Intel reported its revenue and earnings per share were both virtually flat on the year at $18.57 billion and $1.39 billion respectively, but both beat analysts' expectations. Intel's client group, which includes PC chips, saw revenue of 8.5% to $10.61 billion, with Intel reporting total PC volumes up 38%, while data center revenue fell 20% to 5.56 billion. Consumer Reports conducted a test of Tesla's autopilot where it tied a weight to the steering wheel and then fastened the seat belt with no driver in the driver's seat. The autopilot worked at 30 miles per hour on a test track with painted lines. Tesla's autopilot requires a seat belt to be fastened and your hands to be detected on the steering wheel. It checks for torque, hence the weight, and it won't operate if it doesn't meet those conditions. So the Consumer Reports test does demonstrate that actively subverting the safety system can accomplish autopilot with no driver in the driver's seat. As part of its Q1 earnings, SNAP reported 280 million daily active users. That's up 6% on the quarter and 22% on the year with Snapchat's user base on Android now surpassing iOS. The company also reported its first positive free cash flow as a public company with 126 million, with overall revenue up to 66% on the year to 770 million, also beating analyst expectations. All right, let's talk about the Horizon software story. Settle in if you're not familiar with this one. It's a doozy. In 1999, the UK Postal System installed Fujitsu's Horizon software for use in things like accounting and stock taking and transaction software. Postmasters, which is what kind of the local branch people are called, complained early on that the system was buggy, consistently reporting shortfalls that the sub-postmasters insisted did not exist, but some people just decided to use their own money to make up the imaginary shortfalls. Others, however, could not, and post office management insisted that the Horizon system was robust and reliable, and the shortfalls must be a result of theft, such that between 2000 and 2014, the post office successfully prosecuted 736 people based on evidence from the Horizon system on charges of theft, fraud, and false accounting. That was that until 2009, when Computer Weekly published an in-depth report on the bugs after talking with a lot of the sub-postmasters, and in 2012, the post office decided to order a review by auditing firms' second site. However, they didn't seem to like what was in the review because one day before its publication, the post office ordered second site to end the investigation and handover or destroy all paperwork. In July 2013, the post office admitted that the software did have some defects, but insisted that it was effective. However, the confidential report from second site was leaked to the BBC in September 2014 and revealed that the second site evaluators found the software not fit for purpose. Estimating that 12,000 communication failures per year occurred and that Horizon did not properly track money from lottery terminals, tax disc sales, or cash machines, which made up a lot of the inaccurate shortfalls. Inadequate training and outdated hardware also contributed to the mismatch. In December 2019, the post office agreed to settle with 555 claimants. A high court judgment said the Horizon system was not remotely robust for the first 10 years of its use and it continued to have problems even after that time period. In December of 2020, six convictions were overturned. Thursday this week, judges overturned the convictions of 39 former postmasters. Pre-appeals were not overturned as their convictions were determined not to have relied on Horizon evidence and a government inquiry into how the post office handled this issue is set to report in the summer. The prosecutions have been deemed, quote, an affront to the public conscience, which means that the victims of this can further claim compensation against the post office in court. And as well they should. Can you imagine? This is, first of all, this is a long time ago, right? But got a new system. All right, you know, it's we're going to be more efficient. You know, mail is going to go where it's supposed to go and to to to have not just one or two, but a bunch of people saying something's wrong here. Something's not adding up. There there's there's an issue. There's a software issue happens all the time, right? To say, no, you're probably a thief. And yeah, we're going to go ahead and yeah, we're going to go ahead and prosecute many hundreds of you. Yeah, I I if it were me, this would not be OK. And for so much time to have gone by and perhaps I've gone on with my life, I would certainly open up the case again. Yeah, give me some money. Yeah, some people spent time in prison. People were bankrupted. This was a horrible situation. And it strains my credulity to understand how you get to hundreds of subpostmasters being thieves as a more believable problem than your Fujitsu software might have a bug that's this is this is an incredible example of not wanting to take responsibility for the cost of what was the problem, which is that this thing is buggy to the point that they're still using it. They're just now deciding to announce that they're going on April 8th to replace it with a new system. I'm trying not to do things like, hey, remember when there was the big fallout after the mortgage crisis and people realize that two primary rating systems actually lied so they actually came up with a new system and all those people were held accountable. I mean, what's heartbreaking about this is right hundreds of lives, you know, disrupted, crashed, you know, they've got records of conviction, but literally nobody in management, nobody in the decision making process, nobody at Fujitsu. Has been held accountable anyway. And that to me is, you know, it's just it's it's, you know, this is like the worst case ever of I told my manager the widget didn't widget. My manager said it's OK or ignore it or go ahead and reboot the machine every 35 minutes or I'm sorry, we've not only closed your bug report without resolving it, but we're taking it to court and accusing you of theft, adding insult to injury. Awful. I don't do this. Well, this could be awful, but I'll I'll I'll set it up and we'll all decide how we feel about it. Researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany will present a paper in August at the Usenix Security Symposium describing a method for discovering the phone number and email address of anybody in Wi-Fi range of view who opens a share pane in Apple's AirDrop. So AirDrop users with discovery enabled can see nearby devices that match entries in their contact list. Maybe maybe there are no matches, but there might be AirDrop does this by creating a cryptographic hash of your contacts, which then compares to the cryptographic hash of the contact info that's being broadcast by a nearby device. If the hash is matched, the device is displayed. If there's no match, the hash is supposed to protect the email and phone info from being accessed by unauthorized devices. Now, the TU researchers were able to crash Apple's hashtag method with a brute force attack. The researchers propose that Apple replaced the hash exchange with an optimized cryptographic private set protocol. They designed one they say could be used as an alternative. They did some work here until then. If you're using AirDrop when other people are nearby, be aware that malicious attackers with some effort, it's not effortless. They really have to want to do this. Could try to get your email address and phone number. If you open the AirDrop sharing pane, this would likely be a targeted attack given the effort required, though it could be used to harvest information at gatherings like conferences. You can disable discovery in the system settings, but you need to turn it back on if you want to use AirDrop again. The researchers disclosed the vulnerability to Apple in May of 2019, but Apple has not yet acknowledged the issue. I mean, I don't know how you feel, Patrick. This one doesn't strike me as a high priority fault. It's just email and phone number. It takes a little work and it's a limited set of circumstances. That said, while I don't think this is like a P1 critical bug, it should be acknowledged and Apple should at least say, well, we're not going to fix it because if they're not going to fix it or they should just fix it. Given the resources Apple has, they should just fix it. Even if they aren't going to fix it, they should acknowledge that they're not fixing it or that I agree. Ignoring it is just always a bad choice. Part of me is also, my first reaction to this was, wow, that's right. People use AirDrop. I always forget that. I don't think I've, I think I used AirDrop once just to see what it was like. And then I was like, huh, and then I continued emailing photos to my mom or rather than using AirDrop or something. I've used AirDrop in work settings often. I mean, it just, you know, someone somewhat close to me and we're both on Macs. I use it to share files at home with myself all the time. But yeah, I mean, not that it's not designed to be used out in the wild. It totally should be able to be used out in the wild. But yeah, I'm with you, Tom. It's not the sort of thing where I go, oh, gosh, you know, let's stop using AirDrop. This is horrible. And I think Apple probably feels the same way. There are better ways to get ahold of a bunch of email addresses and phone numbers. Just just publicly scrape information from Facebook. So, you know, this isn't by it's all a matter of priorities. And if Apple said we don't think this risk is is worth all of the effort, I would like to hear them say that, you know, it may be maybe that it's it's not worth fixing. I don't know. I generally use AirDrop to share files with my wife or to see who has AirDrop turned on for everyone when I'm on an airplane, because that's always fun. It's really not. No, Tom, don't be that guy. I mean, I just look, I don't I don't give him anything. You see, that's the first. At first, you look, then you're running an air crack on your laptop and suddenly you're in prison and not because of the postal service. All right, let's talk podcasting. We're going to try not to gaze at our navels here, folks. But the Wall Street Journal sources say that Spotify will be announcing a program soon that will allow podcasters to offer paid subscriptions, just like Apple just announced. But Spotify will not take a cut if you choose to sell your subscription on Spotify. Apple's new podcast subscription feature costs podcasters $20 a year just to do it. And Apple takes a 30 percent cut of subscriptions the first year, 15 percent every year after that. Neither subscription system supports RSS. So I mean, they support RSS. Well, Spotify doesn't even support RSS. But but Apple will let you paste in an RSS feed for free subscription subscriptions, not for paid subscriptions. Paid subscriptions have to be managed entirely within the platform. So if you wanted to offer subscriptions on both of these platforms, you'd have to set up one in Spotify and set up one in Apple and then go set up one in Pocketcast and Overcast and Downcast, which is why Patreon and Acast and and others have created cross-platform situations. But they're not as easy for the end user to implement as somebody who's like, oh, I just use the Apple podcast app. So it's easy for me to just tap a button there. Boy, I mean, OK, so I've set up many a podcast, you know, on on on many a podcast platform. And it's, you know, it's it's gotten to the point now where it's like, yeah, it's like, where are you hosting it, you know, using Feedburner or something equivalent, you know, and you submit your your information, your podcast, your RSS podcast information. And yeah, there are a lot of hosting companies that will make that process slightly more seamless for the creator. I don't know. I I don't hate the idea of someone saying, if you like my content and you feel that it's worth money, you know, this is a way that you can help me make money from creating content. I think that's great. There are so many different ways to do it. Apple wants to do it. Well, a lot of people use Apple podcast app. They they say, oh, podcasts, I go, you know, into my well, it used to be iTunes, right? But until recently, but I go and the podcast is always there. No one's. Well, unless it's an exclusive somewhere, very few podcasts are not in that particular library. And that's fine. So Apple just benefits from that, you know, the way that it benefits from certain apps being in its app store and not others. Spotify is is is getting there. Spotify has taken so much time putting, you know, money and resources into beefing up its podcast arm. And I can see why if if if I was like, OK, I got a new podcast, I'd like to monetize it. I have two options and and Spotify isn't isn't keeping me from also offering some other version on, you know, in Apple podcast app. It's kind of just like what what platform do you like better at that point? I mean, it's also good and what platform your audience is on, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the discovery, where are people going to go first, you know, or or most likely go? I mean, it's really messy because you look at this and it's like, OK, I will be able to generate revenue on this platform. One at a, you know, a fairly healthy discount for the first year because of the money, because I think after the first year, Apple drops down like 15 percent. You know, one, it's really bizarre to watch Spotify embrace podcasting with the intensity they have, because they spent like three hundred and forty million dollars acquiring a couple of of serious podcasting companies, which is, you know, to me, still a lot of money. They like Gimlet Media and Anchor, you know, they're really embracing the advertising, they're really pushing the whole like access our influencers. And on one hand, it's all great because something I don't think a lot of people understand is how brutally the advertising market has crashed for content creation companies and how it's it's really, you know, my favorite observation was like all these people that are creating sub stacks, you know, with their analysis and hot steaks aren't entirely aware that all of the actual reporting they base all of their, you know, all of their commentary on is going away or at least being profoundly underfunded or, you know, the advertising company is dropping through the floor and it's really kind of intense to figure out how to make a living off of media these days. So any additional opportunity is fantastic. On one hand, on the other hand, you now have this layer of abstraction between you and the fans that are paying your salary, which means you can never leave if you want to rely on that money. And that's every every wall begins with a single line of bricks. If it's a brick wall, I don't know if it's a concrete wall. I'm with you. We know where you're going, Tom. Folks, if you have thoughts on this, I see P squared does and Eric, the red does join the conversation in our discord. That's where they're talking right now. You can join them by linking a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Apple is facing two class action suits over its sale and rental of TV shows and movies. In one suit, David and Dino argues on behalf of the class that the term buy in the app store is deceptive because Apple can terminate a person's Apple ID, which terminates access to purchased content. U.S. district court judge John Mendez denied a motion to dismiss the suit in another class action suit. Matthew Price claims on behalf of the class that Apple causes financial damage when it terminates an account. He says he lost $24,590 and five cents worth of iTunes app store and in-app purchases when his account was terminated. Apple's videos and apps are all available to be downloaded and stored, though Apple does encourage using cloud storage, including offering settings that will automatically remove files that are not frequently accessed. Apple also doesn't let you download 4K copies of content. Those can only be streamed, though it doesn't charge extra for offering the 4K versions. I get why Judge Mendez did not allow this to be dismissed. There is a reasonable claim to be evaluated here. In the end, if I were a judge and I'm not, and I don't know the law as well as Judge Mendez, but if I were, I would probably think that I would rule in Apple's favor that as long as you can download the files and keep them somewhere and watch them, even if you lose your Apple ID and the DRM isn't trying to call home and say, well, you can't watch it now, then you could still call that buying. The 4K thing is a weak point for Apple, but I think Apple could have a defense of saying, like, yeah, but that's just a perk. That's not what you're buying. Where you're buying is the 1080p version. That doesn't mean that I think that it's wonderful that if you lose your Apple ID, you lose access to all this stuff and you may not have had space on your phone to download it all. I mean, I think there's some real complaints here, but whether they're legal complaints or not, I'm skeptical. Well, if you're going to go after a company, may as well go after a company with staggering amounts of money. Sure. One, two. I, you know, this is this is really messy because one of the things is could could this could establish. And one, I think probably both of these are going to get tossed out because, you know, there's 2,000 pages. This is an exaggeration. This is hyperbole. You know, there's several dozen pages of the Eula. And, you know, if you if if you if you've essentially signed off that if you violate the terms or whatever they are, it's messy, right? So I don't know why they were cut off. But more importantly, you know, losing $25,000 worth of content and apps, that's a significant change in a chunk of change. You know what I mean? That's that's that's not like, you know, I just I just don't know at what point the thing I'm struggling mightily and failing terribly at saying is there are so many things now where you purchase it, but you cannot access it unless you have, for example, an internet connection or you are online or you have access to something. And I think it becomes really problematic. One, from a, you know, a financial standpoint and a legal standpoint, but also, you know, moving out 10 or 20 years. It's going to be amazing how much of our gaming history, for example, is going to rely entirely on people's ability to reverse engineer either servers or hack code to make this stuff accessible because these servers aren't going to run forever. You know, it's it's also it's kind of I'm still also stuck at like $25,000 worth of iTunes app store and in-app purchases. I thought I owned a lot of stuff and I'm just like, well, apparently I own nothing. We are that's a lot of commitment for getting your account terminated. We are purposely not talking about why these accounts were terminated because it doesn't matter for this legal case. Like because if you agree that their account should be terminated, you may be like, well, I'm more likely to agree that they they should lose their case. And that's not what this is about. This is about doesn't matter why your account got terminated. If it did, should you still have access? Should they be able to call it by, et cetera, et cetera? It's interesting to bring up the idea of preservation of video games because this next story is about something that helps with that. Last year, Blaze Entertainment released the Evercade, a handheld retro cartridge based game console has a 4.3 inch screen can output to HDMI so you can put that on your TV. But the form factor is meant for handheld gameplay. So Blaze just announced the Evercade VS, which is meant to sit by your TV and output at 1080p with support for up to four USB controllers. Evercade offers its own controllers, or you can use the Xbox adaptive controller, 8 bit does wireless controller or even the Evercade handheld if you have one as a controller, it will also have two cartridge slots. So you'll be able to have two games in there and be able to play all but two of the same cartridges as the handheld Evercade. The two cartridges that feature the Namco Museum, which includes like Pac-Man, Gallagher, Dig Dug, they are only licensed for the handheld. So those two cartridges and a lot of really good games will not work on the VS, but all the other cartridges are supposed to work and will keep your save and load states so you can swap them between different machines without losing progress. Evercade VS will cost you $99.99 with pre-orders starting May 28th, not shipping until November 3rd. It's preservation. It's what you wanted. It's even got cartridges. Yeah. I'll stick to the cloud. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. Is this something that you're into, Pat? I'm actually trying to find a game I ever actually played on it. The interesting thing about Evercade is they're trying to do it right. There's been there are no end of projects out there that take ROMs that you may or may not legally have acquired and help you figure out how to play them and you may like those better. But Evercade is trying to play by the rules and go to licensed, which is why the Namco cartridge doesn't work in the VS. But they are trying to say, like, look, when you buy a cartridge from us, we have licensed it. We have got the rights to make a product out of this. And I support that because if they can prove that as a business, it might encourage more video companies to loosen up on licensing their older content. I agree with all of these things. And I'm looking at the Namco Museum collection. And there are at least those games that I've played here. I was just laughing because the first time I looked at it, I think I just ended up looking at the wrong, the worst possible page. And I was like, I've never even heard of the platform much less actual games on here. So yes, I agree. And making this stuff available would be so fantastic. It would be truly awesome to be able to buy rights for older, especially arcade games, to have that made more easily. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've got good news, everybody. He's been gone for some time, but today he's back. It's Chris Christensen bringing a travel tip with him. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another tech in travel minute. Well, it's been a while and we haven't really been doing a lot of traveling this year with a pandemic going on. But now as vaccines get out there more and more people are starting to travel, there's some things you need to know that have happened while you've been stuck at home. One is a news from Uber that has a new option called Uber green. If you're taking an Uber, you can in a number of different markets these days pay an extra dollar more to get an Uber green, which is going to be a hybrid or fully electric vehicle. Half of that dollar will go to the driver to encourage them to drive efficient vehicles. And the other half will go to a new program from Uber called Green Future that will help hundreds of thousands of other drivers transition to battery electric vehicles. If you want to support that, just look for Uber green the next time you get an Uber. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Yay. I know the world isn't fixed yet, but this is one more sign that we're on the road, right? Chris is back. It's great to hear your voice, Chris. It feels like it's as always. I was going to say, it feels like it's been more than a year. I think it's only been about a year since we last got a tech in travel minute from Chris, but it feels like forever. We missed you, Chris. Thanks for coming. Absolutely. I am preparing my class action lawsuit against Uber when my Uber green shows up and it's blue. And I can say I was confused. You said it was Uber green. I was in a hurry. Yeah. And then I was late at blue car. All right, enough of that. Let's check out the bail bag. Let's do it. Martin wrote in and said, I'm not a Mac user, but similar to Sarah, I have my windows bar on the right side of my screen. Now, he's referencing my latest live with it. Right. I have taken the new MacBook Air with M one chip for a spin over the last few months. And I said, one of the things that was not M one specific, but just something that I decided to do with a new computer is have my dock running along horizontally along the bottom of the screen, which is default rather than vertically on the left, which is how I've done it for years. That's how I do it. Martin says, I do this with windows for two reasons. First, when editing text documents or browsing websites, they're generally more vertical than horizontal. So having the bar at the side of the screen allows more of the text to be shown. Martin, I agree with you. Some might argue that the gain space is minimal, but it feels better to me. The second reason is about 12 years ago, Ubuntu, which I also use, change to have the bar at the side, changing the windows bar to the side as well, gave me a more consistent experience across the two operating systems. Well, there you go, folks. I was you'll hear the shock in my voice on the latest live with it. When he was like, why? Yeah, why did you do that? I get it. I do get it. I it's it's the better placement. I stand by this, but, you know, sometimes you can't beat him and you join him instead. Hey, if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on this show, on GDI, on Live With It, on Know A Little More or anything that we might talk about in the future, do send us an email. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. Today they include Paul Reese, Jeff Wilkes and Bjorn Andre. Very special thanks to Mike Akinz, who is in our top lifetime supporter list for DTNS. Thank you, Mike, for all your years of support. Thank you, Mike. You know, there's a podcasting device out there called the YOTO that's for kids that it's not just podcasts, it's also music. And I know, Len, you saw that it was in our potential topics for today and you were just captivated by it. I was captivated. You know, in the seven and a half years I've done this show. This is the first time this has ever happened to me. I I was so captivated. I drew this little tiny podcast speaker or audio book speaker for kids. And it got cut out of the out of the main show. But that's OK. This piece is called Podcasting is for Babies because, you know, Tom, you and I were there at the beginning of podcasting 15, 17 years, I remember many years. And now it's like, you know, it feels like podcasting has become like a, you know, I mean, I don't know, you're you're marketing to babies now with podcasts. It's it's pretty terrific. Out of all that, I thought, oh, of course, what a great. This is more self-indulgent. What a great show to to introduce the kids to. But my old show Job on Radio with my wife, Nora. So that's kind of a throwback of self-indulgent, indulgent throwback to to the old world of podcasting and my old show. This is available at my Patreon, Patreon.com, forward slash line also at my online store at Len for all the store dot com. So check it out. Excellent. Thank you, yes. Thank you, Len. Good stuff, as always. Also, thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us. Patrick, what have you been up to? Oh, Studio Buildout, admiring the aesthetics for the third time of the Yoda player, because it really is cool and making any of you excel with Robert Harris. I've got a question about speakers or headphones or televisions or screens or projectors. Or if you're trying to figure out what you're going to do now that harmony is no longer making remotes, do me a favor and tweet at Patrick Norton or go listen to baby excel dot com. Excellent. Folks were live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. Tom's out on Monday, but we'll have Rich Strafilino back in the hot seat. Talk to you then. This week's episode of Daily Tech News Show was created by the following people, host, producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host, producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino, video producer, Twitch producer, Joe Coontz, associate producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter, social media producer, Shannon Morse, our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottis One, Zoe Brings Bacon, BioCal, Captain Kipper and Jack Shit, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Way, music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Looters, a cast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show included Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Patrick Norton. Guests on this week's show included Tim Stevens, Charlotte Henry, Nika Monfort and Terence Gaines. Live art performed by Len Peralta and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.