 Coming up on DTNS, how the supply chain disruptions will affect your technology. Yahoo starts a cell phone service and whether the internet can handle everybody working from home. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 11, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from a conference room in the Presidio area of San Francisco. I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about a lot of the things, both technology and not technology, being affected by the coronavirus, things that are being canceled, talking about all kinds of things on good day internet to become a member. Don't miss out, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. You know that March announcement that Apple was expected to maybe make about possibly an inexpensive iPhone model? Well, cult of max versus say, not going to happen. Delays to the supply chain of pushback production levels and thus new product releases. Also, Apple is located in Santa Clara County in California, which is banned gatherings of more than 1000 people. And Apple executives were reportedly wary of even holding a smaller gathering than that. I feel like I'm not going to get my iPad pro update. A vulnerability in version 3.1.1 of the server message block 3.1.1 for Windows, which is used to share files and printers and such could be exploited by a worm. Yeah, that's right. The flaw effects Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. Microsoft does not yet have a patch, but vulnerable servers can disable compression to block unauthenticated attackers from exploiting the vulnerability. Microsoft also recommends blocking port 445. That's the bad Microsoft news. The good Microsoft news is that Microsoft, along with a bunch of other folks announced the takedown of the Neckers, Bach net that spelled any CURS believed to have infected more than 9 million computers worldwide. Microsoft teamed with cybersecurity firms, ISPs, domain registries, government certs and law enforcement across 35 countries in the effort. The team broke the botnets algorithm that generated random domain names for their command and control servers used to operate the botnet. So the Microsoft team was able to predict what domains would be registered and then prevent the botnet from registering them. Microsoft also got a court order to take control of some existing domain names hosted in the US by the botnet and ISPs and cert teams are working with Microsoft to notify affected users so they can remove the malware in the UK. They announced in a policy paper that it will begin taxing digital services starting April 1st. Not an April Fool's joke. Search engines, social media services and online marketplaces with revenues of more than 500 million euro will derive at least pounds. What? Sorry. Pounds, not euros. Oh, did I say euros? I meant pounds. That's what I meant. Anyway, who derive at least that or derive at least 25 pound 25 pounds million of the revenue from the UK users will pay 2% of the revenue in tax. Disney Plus is live in India 18 days before the expected launch date of March 29th. Disney owned Hot Star is now called Disney Plus Hot Star. Disney Plus Hot Star premium subscription is currently priced at 299 Indian rupees. It's about $4.05 US dollars per month or 999 rupees or $13.55 per year. All right. Let's talk about one of the more prominent technology cancellations today, Scott. Let's do indeed the entertainment software association or ESA announced Wednesday it will not hold E3 2020, the electronics entertainment expo. This was scheduled for June 9th through 11th in Los Angeles, California. The USA cited the COVID-19 virus as the reason and saying it is looking into quote an online experience to showcase industry announcements and news in June 2020. Microsoft and Ubisoft are among companies indicating they will have their own digital events to replace what they would have done at E3, but with Sony already not being a part of the show well before any COVID-19 news and Nintendo doing their own thing for years now. It was already kind of becoming a bit of a sparse event. One of the announcements ESA had made earlier this year and late last year was they're going to try to make a more fan focused event. They're going to have a lot of influencers there. They're going to try to turn it more fan facing and a little less industry facing. Not going to happen this year. Yeah. A lot of people are wondering if this could be a death blow for E3. I think it's a little early to say that, but yeah, the creative directors had backed out at the end of last month. Jeff Keely had canceled his perennial appearances there. So it certainly was going to change no matter what happened. And this is an unfortunate push in the direction which probably honestly made it easier for them to decide to cancel it. Well, and if E3 has life yet, and if there can be a sort of a successful pivot into something that's a little bit more of a community, you know, let's celebrate games rather than industry thing, like you said, Scott, having another year to regroup could it's almost this is not a good situation that we're in right now, but for E3, you know, and figuring out what the identity of E3 is going forward this year sounded like we're kind of, you know, stumbling toward the finish line here. Maybe in a year, things will look better. Yeah, it may be actually the one silver lining here, the one possibility that they could turn things around. Unfortunately, their plans or their efforts in the past couple of years to make it more fan facing have not been great. They've not been very successful at it. They've been kind of bad events, still some cool stuff happening in there. A lot of us who follow this stuff really wanted to continue. So it's hard to say, but there's no question that this nudges them either to make drastic changes and come out strong in 2021, hopefully, or maybe all this goes digital and we're done with the need for a physical event like this. I don't know. A special Institute for Supply Management survey showed almost 75% of U.S. companies have experienced supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19. 80% expects supply chain impacts with severity of the disruptions increasing after Q1. Lead times have doubled, shortages are compounded by limited air and ocean freight options. Even if the order can be filled, having a hard time getting to anybody. Other notes from the survey, Chinese manufacturers are operating at 50% capacity with 56% of normal staff. 44% of respondents didn't even have a plan to address the supply disruptions. This is an important survey to pay attention to, which is the effects of just what happened in China, which is starting to abate there, haven't been felt worldwide yet. We are just now seeing supplies start to dwindle. Manufacturing is not quite up to replacement levels. And even when they can ship out products, it's getting harder to find options like freight and air to get things places because transportation is being restricted. So it is, you know, I don't like to be alarmist about these sort of things, but it's going to get worse before it gets better as far as the supply chain issues go. And that's something to be aware of, not just in technology, honestly, in a lot of supply chains. And it's easy to look at this and just say, oh, this is only in effect, you know, the apples and the Samsung's of the world or whatever. But I have, this immediately triggers me, this kind of stuff reminding me of an old company I used to work for where we bought and manufactured a bunch of cable products in China. And we would just have regular delays that just happen all the time, like supply chain headaches or a thing everybody knows about. And it's a huge pain. I cannot imagine what that world looks like right now. So this is affecting not just the big boys, but everybody down to little old cable link I used to work for where they were trying to just get cables out to their buyers. It's hard. TikTok plans to open a transparency center in Los Angeles in May to let experts observe the way the platform moderates content. It will also share details of its source code and independent security measures. These are meant as a way to head off some of the increasing criticism that TikTok has been getting from the United States government officials. Depends on what experts you let in, what you let them see. Right. Like, can you say I'm an expert? Let me in. I want to see your transparency. I'm sure it's more real than a Potemkin village kind of situation. But I don't, I, you know, am I seeing the actual moderation or am I seeing a demonstration of the moderation? That makes big difference. Yeah. Well, so much of TikTok is algorithmic. I did a little test on my own. This is no, by no means scientific and I don't have all the details, but I was very curious how it decided what to show me. And so what I started to do as just an average user of the service is I would stop and watch entire videos that were about a certain kind of subject. So if it was a funny cat video, I would watch the entire cat video. Didn't matter if it was a full minute or anything less, I would watch it. Even if they were bad, I would watch them. And sure enough, over about three days of time, I started getting almost nothing but cat videos. And I'm not changing anything in a search or I'm not changing anything in my preferences or settings. It's all 100% just sort of generated by what it thinks I want and what I like. And so I wonder how much of their transparency will be worth anything. I think it was great that they're doing it. I'm not actually sure what you're going to gather from it, because at the end of the day, that thing is designed to give you what you seem to want. And what else is there? This, this is not about that. Although this opening the source code is partly able to trans to shed light on that. This is not about the algorithm feeding you things. This is about was something censored. What was removed and why? It's about the things you don't see, not about the things you do see. Well, in that case, yeah, I guess it would be good. But I mean, how are you going to like, are you going to be, are they just going to sit around and wait for a video to show up? You just lean over somebody's shoulder and like, oh, what are you deleting there? I don't know. Hey, that looks like somebody making a political statement. Why are you censoring that? That's going to be, oh, it's critical. I mean, I hope it's just transparent, so transparent China, not the nation. Well, and it's also, it's somewhat odd. It's, it's a physical center, as I understand it, somewhere in LA, you know, it hasn't opened yet, right? So yeah, what is it? Are you walking through a bunch of cubicles? Is there a cafe? Like, what is the experience for the expert in order to feel better on their way out? I imagine it's just them letting you into the moderators doing their work that they already do here, but they're calling it a transparency center to make it sound all fancy. That's my guess. I don't know. It, yeah, it's, it's, I don't want to poo poo it before it exists, but it sounds like something where it's like, okay, now we're all going to act this way because we're in the transparent. Yeah, you know, when the expert's there, even if it's just the normal moderator office, Sarah, if they do have a cafeteria, we all have to dance there. That's the beginning. Verizon has launched a Yahoo branded cellular service in the United States of America called Yahoo Mobile. Remember Yahoo, everybody? Anyway, it offers one plan, unlimited LTE data, limited tethering and Yahoo mail pro for 40 bucks a month. The plan is almost identical to Yahoo's own visible phone service. Verizon charges 65 a month for unlimited data for other plans, but for this Yahoo cellular service way cheaper. Yeah. I mean, and if there is a person who was on the visible service, they're probably saying this is just the same thing. Yes, it is, but it's got Yahoo on the name. I don't know. Yahoo is still more recognizable than visible to people and people do use Yahoo mail. You may not be one of them. You may be making fun of them, but there are a lot of people who use Yahoo mail still for one reason or another. So this is probably got a better chance of somebody walking in or looking up, I guess, not even walking in, but looking up service online and saying, oh, look at that, $40 a month. That's a pretty good deal. It is a pretty good deal. Yeah, it's a great deal. Unlimited LTE, some tethering anyway. Yeah. I mean, what's the throttle limit? How different is that from the Verizon? I want to see some of that fine print, but that's a $25 difference. Still pretty good. I also, I pay more than $65 for my unlimited plan on Verizon. So I had to take another look at that. You call it Verizon and say, hey, what's that? Hey, man. Hey, man. Yeah. Give me that Yahoo deal. As with cable and anything else I've learned over the years that if you don't go in there, they don't go out of their way to let you know that you're on a plan that's aging out or that is that you're paying more for, even though there's a better one, which is still happily continue to take more money than they need to. Yeah, turns out that seems. Yeah. Can you imagine? Hi, this is Verizon. We noticed you're paying $20 over what you really need to pay us per month. And we'd like to save you some cash. It's not unimaginable. There have been carriers who have sent those kinds of notes and I already hear someone typing the note one time. I got the thing, but it's pretty rare. Usually they hold on to them until you're in there and then they give you a deal to make you feel like you just got some amazing in-house customer service. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That works on me. I'm a sucker for it. Well, anybody who is like me and is constantly almost missing a flight might appreciate this next story. Airport Hospitality Group OTG will adopt Amazon's Just Walkout technology in its stores. The Sebo Express Gourmet Market in Newark, Liberty's Terminal C will be the first to operate the cashierless technology starting March 16th. OTG operates 350 outlets in 10 North American airports, including JFK, Toronto Pearson, Chicago O'Hare, and Houston Intercontinental and others. Yeah, one of those others is LaGuardia. LaGuardia apparently is going to be the next one after Newark to get this. So there'll be one positive thing at LaGuardia. Oh man, LaGuardia, you needed a win. I mean, all kidding aside, we were just talking recently like, ah, the airport thing, that makes a lot of sense. It's just one place where people are, I mean, there are lots of reasons that you would be in a hurry, but its time is so of the essence. And I can't tell you how many times I've been like, gosh, I really want to water, but I don't have time. Anything that would cut down even a minute can be super helpful. Yeah, and if people missed the original story, what Amazon's doing here is it's licensing out its technology that it uses in the Amazon Go Store. That's the one that's not just cashierless, it's checkoutless. You scan your Amazon app when you walk in, it tracks you and you just walk out and it knows what you took. This will work by scanning a credit card when you walk in, then it will track you and you just walk out. If you want a receipt though, you have to go to a kiosk and enter your email address. Once you do that once, you don't have to do it any other times that you visit any of these stores that are powered by just walk out. Even if you're in the Minneapolis airport instead of Newark, once you've done it, it'll, it'll send you that receipt to your email. But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's something that it's going to take some people a little while to understand how it works and probably to trust that they're not actually stealing from, from the place. But this is one of those, you know, those little convenience stores that they have in airports. And if this is pretty easy to scan in, uh, yeah, Sarah, you're absolutely right. Like what, what a deal to just grab a water and not have to stand behind the four people are like, wait, I think I have change here. And you're like, Oh, I gotta get to my flight right now. Yeah. This environment is perfect cause it's a, it's an airport. Everybody's late for everything. And imagine just the, the feeling of walking into a place. Ah, there's the shelf. There's a thing I need. I got my chapstick. I'm out of here and just not think about it. I'm, I'm so ready for this across the board. Let's then integrate it into everything. I don't care if it's Amazon or whoever wants to compete with this and make this possible. Let's go like, yeah. And, and I, I know many cashiers who are just lovely who work in airports, but it's also, I feel like maybe, you know, psychologically, I might be a little bit more inclined to buy like the trashy magazine because you're not going to be judged. Yeah. How many cashiers do you really know? Come on. Listen, some of my best friends are cashiers. And I don't want to, I don't want to poo poo. They're going to be people who are like, this is creepy. This is weird. I still don't feel comfortable about this idea that they know enough about me. I can just walk in and walk out. And I don't want to poo poo on those people. I get it. I get that it's strange and it's new, but I'm, I was ready for this 10 years ago. Let's just go do it. And they will still have employees there though. There are security personnel. There are people to stock the shelves to help you if you have problems and restock and all that sort of thing. Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Well, more and more companies telling workers to work from home if they can. Tuesday, Google advised all of its North American workers, not just workers in San Francisco and Seattle, but all North American workers to work from home until at least April 10th. Fortune reported that about 29% of the U.S. workforce could work from home. In other words, the bus driver can't work from home, has to be on the bus, that kind of thing. But 29% of the U.S. workforce could work from home. That's about 42 million people. Add to that, schools either shutting down or going to remote classes means a lot more students of all ages, college students as well, possibly working from home if they're not in dorms, for instance. That's a lot more people on home internet than your ISP is used to, especially during the day. AT&T and Verizon told Fortune that the fiber optic cable that provides the ISP's backhaul should be fine. The volume of traffic isn't expected to change too much. There'll be more video conferencing and such, but they expect that the pattern of change will be the bigger problem. The traffic will be coming from homes, not offices. One network insider told DTNS, a lot of packets will go in odd directions, with odd routes, and people won't be able to address issues quickly enough. It won't break, but get ready for a ride. Some people who live in snowy areas know on snow days, suddenly the internet doesn't always work as consistently because everybody's trying to use it at the same time. Imagine that on nationwide levels. The choke points are lower bandwidth cable and copper wire services. Your corporate network trying to handle all that increased VPN traffic, also companies need to find out if workers at home have sufficient bandwidth and be prepared to invest in things like mobile hotspots and temporarily maybe subsidizing, increasing their data plans. Of course, your home Wi-Fi network, you're not on Wi-Fi 6 in most cases, so you don't have that increased capacity, and if suddenly all the students are home, you're home, everybody's working from home, you're overloading that Wi-Fi network because more devices are using it at once. As I mentioned, video already estimated to be about 70% of network traffic already, and we're going to have more video conferences, so that puts a little more strain on the system. And don't forget apps themselves. The Internet Society notes that individual tools need to provision sufficient compute storage and bandwidth resources to deal with increased users. Yeah, Zoom wants everybody to use Zoom for their video conferencing, but Zoom better make sure that they've got enough bandwidth and cloud resources to handle that. I'm sure they have, but any kind of app you're using from home will need to prepare for that. We have a test case. China has gone through this. Baidu's iQIYI streaming service, an educational application called Sui Xitong, popular office applications, including video conferencing applications, DingTalk, and WeChat Work, online games from Tencent, all reportedly crashed at one time or another due to all the increased traffic of people using them from home. So before we start talking about how we want to approach this, now we want to deal with it, I want to remind people about DownDetector at DownDetector.com. You're going to run into a problem if you're working from home. And to help you figure out whether it's you or the app or your ISP or something else, you might want to bookmark that or just memorize it. DownDetector.com is a good way to check on that kind of stuff. Wow, it's hard to even know where to start with this, but I feel like once in a while we need to be reminded that the Internet isn't just magic air flowing around us and that it has capacities and places where it can bottleneck. And by places, I mean, like you said, patterns. Like you don't think of it in that way, but usage patterns are going to make a huge difference. And I thought a lot about this. This is going to affect so many aspects of Internet usage. I actually think most companies and services are probably up to the challenge. And I'll bet there are some that are even kind of excited about experiencing this. I mean, maybe they aren't, maybe they are, but I think of it from a gamer perspective, there's going to be gnashing of teeth. It's going to get ugly because a lot of those people are going to go home and say, well, that's cool. I'll just play World of Warcraft all weekend. Or I'm just going to, you know, play Modern Warfare, that new battle royale game they released yesterday. I'm going to play that all day. So is everybody else. And they're all going to be fighting for that stuff, not to mention Netflix and Hulu and everybody else is going to be getting a big uptick in usage at times of day. They're not used to, like you could get weird, but I think it's actually a good test of the metal of that industry. You know, we get to see, see how it gets handled. And I don't, I'm weirdly optimistic about it. That's funny way. I feel like I don't know if optimism is what I, what I have a lot of in the short term, but I do, I keep, you know, in so many industries, you know, medical staff having to stay home from their jobs because their kids are out of school and everyone's at home. So who, you know, what else are you going to do kind of thing? You got to stay at home too. There's so many industries that are going to see ripple effects. Now I, you know, it would be ridiculous for me to be like, well, we're all going to show the ISPs that they have to work harder to get us the internet that we need. That's not going to happen in the short term. But I really do think that there are so many instances where if, you know, just the Google employees alone, staying home till April 10th, that's a long time for a huge number of workers. Some of those workers are going to figure out what, or their superiors or their, their teams or whatever. Yeah, this actually worked out better. We're going to change the way that our, our, you know, we have, we have, our team flow works because we were forced to do it a different way. Now it's not, it's in many instances it's going to be like, God, we're all in the office again. You know, life goes back to normal and, you know, the internet works and, and we can look at each other and that sort of thing. But I think in a lot of cases, this is going to spring forth a new era of how people work and, and, and when and why. And if you are in IT, and I know a lot of you are, if you're not already having these conversations, start having these conversations about how resilient your network is to unusual use cases, your VPN service isn't tuned, at least it wasn't tuned to the kite type of usage it would need to be if you're sending an unusual amount of people to work from home. You know, I, and I know you've probably already thinking about this, but some companies are not quite in that mindset yet. And then of course there's weird use cases, like, like, you know, in the visual effects industry. Can you, can you, you bring your computer home and do visual effects from home? What kind of bandwidth do you need from that? Does the company want to provide that? How, how do you figure that sort of things out? So, so there's a lot of preparation that needs to happen and a lot of disaster recovery plans bear on this. If your company has a good disaster recovery plan, you may need to start executing parts of it, because this is in many respects a disaster that you need to adapt to. Yeah, I'm like, and Sarah put it really well that that it's not optimism so much as it is. I don't know, like it becomes just a clear and present problem in the way that it seems to be shaping up to be. I think we're going to, you know, we're going to attack it and go for it. And I don't know, I just, I feel optimistic about our capability to to figure it out and to learn something from it and to be better prepared for this sort of thing next time. And yeah, lessons to be learned across the board for sure. And patience to be had. That would, that's the one thing I want to leave people with is, yeah, if you're, if you're working from home or maybe you work from home regularly, you got a lot more people working from home on your block that might slow down your cable node. So, so be ready, be prepared for that. Hey, you can join in the conversation in our discord. We talk about lots of things, not just pandemics. And you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Yesterday, Tom, you were wondering how an AR app and iOS, which was sort of rumored to maybe have a partnership with Starbucks going forward, how that would work. What would we get out of that? George and Mike both wrote in forwarding an email that they got from Starbucks sent to customers, which reads as follows, Starbucks rewards a Starland over 2.5 million prizes. Get ready to play our newest game, Starbucks reward, Starland, a celebration of Starbucks rewards. Our first game with augmented reality and your chance to win dreamy prizes. Will you be one of the lucky people who takes home $15,000, $15,000 bonus stars or free breakfast every day for a year? So hold on, hold on. What is this? No one knows. No, it used the word augmented reality. And I get why, you know, George and Mike both forwarded this like, Oh, Starbucks and Apple are doing some augmented reality. Maybe this has to do with it. Makes perfect sense. But I don't know what this is. It's also way too early for this to actually be related to iOS 14. So, you know, it may be laying the groundwork for it, but also this is this is one of those things where people just throw around buzzwords like AI, augmented reality. And let's put Starbucks means by get ready to play our newest game means when iOS 14 launches someday. Yeah. This might be very much someday. It's hard to say, but I know this and I'll say it with confidence. It's a terrible game and it will be bad to play. That's all I'll say because these things are never fun. They're not fun games. It's not optimistic. All right. We have a great email from Brendan. Thank you, Brendan, for doing this. He says, Hey, DTS crew, I wanted to share the experience we're having with the Seattle area response to the Corona virus. Brendan on the ground there in Seattle. I work for one of the tech companies up here and have been working from home since leadership directed us to do so. It's been a great experience by most accounts and has actually helped my team collaborate and meet online to discuss work issues and topics. We're a security team covering three continents and our virtual social gatherings have let us get to know each other better. Last night, we were all putting our dogs on camera and swapping stories of wrangling kids while working. My wife works in medicine, so she has obviously been very busy between the influx of patients and our kids doing classroom to the cloud where all the students are learning from home. The school district provided laptops to anyone who needed them and Wi-Fi hotspots for those without internet good school district. I feel this adds to the growing discussion around internet being as important as electricity. The kids have been joining Zoom video conferences and getting classwork through Google classroom. There are some hiccups as some assignments had to be printed and we've had neighbors without printers, but workarounds have been figured out like using the library or good old lined paper and taking a picture to email back to the teacher. My kitchen table has turned into a computer lab with simultaneous conferences. It's giving my fiber internet connection a nice workout. Thanks for the great show and letting me provide some insights. Thank you, Brendan. Yeah, that's uh it just goes right into our our our main discussion uh from just a few minutes ago. Thanks Brendan and thanks to everybody who provides feedback to us every day. Also a special shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Dustin Campbell, Andrew Bradley, and Justin Zellers. Also thanks to none other than the one, the only, Scott Johnson. Scott, what's been going on with you? Well, thank you for saying so. Um, hey uh if you like daily content like the Daily Tech News show, maybe you're already in the mood to get other daily shows and you just sort of just listen to stuff all day. I do a morning show every day, Monday through Thursday. That is that very thing. It's the kind of morning show that isn't the kind you hate on the radio. So if you're curious as to what that means, go check it out at frogfans.com slash TMS that's short for the morning stream. And we'd love to see some of you there. If you'd like to reach out personally, I'm always online at twitter.com slash Scott Johnson. We have our six year anniversary merch going out. I'm loving seeing these pictures and reports of people getting their mugs, their t-shirts, their stickers, their posters. Uh and if you are at the level where you need to get where you get a t-shirt, don't forget to put your size in. I was talking to NCB about this. He's like, am I getting one of these? And then he realized, oh, I needed to put my size in. So I think it is on its way now, NCB. If you would like to start the clock ticking on getting this, the offer still stands. You just need to back at any level for three months. So go sign up and get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. If you've got thoughts or questions or I don't know anything at all, our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com. We love hearing from you. We're also live Monday through Friday. That's 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. Back tomorrow with David Spark as our guest. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this bro.