 Coming up on DTNS, we're out of IP addresses, folks. Evidence that trolls don't actually change your mind and tips to stay safe when shopping online. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 26, 2019 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the dark forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Becho. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about Sarah's couch assembly challenges, as well as Patrick's experiments with virtual reality and even some cloud services. You got to check out Good Day Internet. You're missing out on some good stuff, folks. You can get it by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook is offering a new market research app called Viewpoints that lets users in the US, at least for now, to complete surveys, conduct research, and other tasks that will help the company enhance its products. Points are earned, and then you automatically receive money via PayPal when you reach point milestones. Have to be at least 18 years old to use Viewpoints. And Facebook says it won't sell data to third parties or publicly share your activity without your permission. Which you have already given because you exist. That's how they make it. No, it's not. In terms of service. Microsoft is making Outlook.com and Outlook for web into progressive web apps. That means their websites, so you don't go to an app store to get them, but they work offline with caching, notification features, and background functionality. Outlook.com is available as a PWA right now on Chromium browsers for Windows and macOS. MediaTek formally revealed its previously teased 5G system on a chip, which they have named the Dimensity 1000. It's touted as the first system on a chip to support 5G on two sims, tool sim 5G. That gives you two lines that support 4.7 gigabit per second downstream and 2.5 gigabit per second upstream on sub six gigahertz 5G networks. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 plus are supported as well. The Dimensity 1000 also claims four ARM Cortex A77 high performance cores for low power Cortex A55 cores and a new AI unit that's twice as fast as the previous generation. First phones using Dimensity 1000 chips should arrive sometime at Q1 2020. The attorney's general of Texas and Nevada have settled out of court with T-Mobile and Sprint and withdrawn opposition to the merger. The companies agreed not to raise prices in Texas for five years, as well as offer milestones for 5G deployment, especially in rural areas. The companies agreed to deploy Next Gen Wireless early in Nevada, as well as add 450 jobs and donate $30 million to help women and minorities in Nevada as well. The 13 remaining states will begin their combined court case on December 9th in Manhattan federal courts. And Twitter's sending emails to owners of inactive accounts, warning them that they need to sign into that account by December 11th or lose the name. Accounts that haven't logged into Twitter for more than six months are getting the email. No details about when they might make those re-appropriated account names available for you to register, but it is a step towards making more account names. I definitely have a couple of those. I'm wondering, I'm gonna keep an eye on my email to see. I have a Django the dog Twitter account that I've definitely not signed in for more than six months. Right, right, yeah. Curious about that. All right, let's talk a little bit more about IP addresses, Patrick. The RIPE network coordination center, which is responsible for allocating IP addresses in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia has assigned its last blocks of IPv4 addresses. RIPE received its final allocation of internet assigned numbers authority from the internet assigned numbers authority in 2012. Companies that need new IPv4 addresses in the region must now go on a wait list for companies to hand back unused addresses. That's estimated to be a few hundred thousands per year. As secondary market for IPv4 addresses is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. This puts the pressure on companies to make the transition to IPv6, which has 340 undecillion addresses. That's 340 billion, billion, billion, billion compared to IPv4's 4.1 billion, so many more billions. Today I learned undecillion is a number. Indeed. Yeah, it's four billion, four X billions. I think the biggest part of this news, the most noteworthy of course, is the fact that the RIPE network coordination center has not given any that I've seen any actual punny headline between IP, RIP and any of those. And I don't understand what's happening. Well, it's such a missed opportunity. You're absolutely right. I get some emails from folks in the backbone and the backbone is such an outdated name, but in the industry that provide the internet, that make the internet happen. And I got a couple yesterday from people who were like, this is it, finally the push is really gonna happen. Companies are really gonna have to get IPv6 addresses. Because Sarah and I were saying, we remember reporting on this on tech news today back in 2012 saying like, all right, the last block's been handed over to RIPE. And once they run out, they're out, at least in this region. And here we are, seven years later going, hey companies, you probably need to switch to IPv6 now. Now would be the time. You know, I think everyone knows that we need to do it, but I'm not sure what's preventing it from happening. My understanding is that IPv6 not being backwards compatible with IPv4 is one of the factors. But is it really as simple as, well there hasn't really been an incentive that was strong enough and people have just figured that. It's a problem that everyone knows is coming and we have to do something about, but people don't wanna put in the work or pay the money to fix it. What is that one? It might be something. Until it's actually necessary. So the idea is that now that it's actually necessary, I guess if you want to launch a business and you don't have an IP address, you have to go IPv6, right? Well, or find a block that you can buy from somebody else. Sources tell Bloomberg that Intel's hired a financial advisor for a potential sale of its home connectivity unit, which makes chips for home internet gear like routers and gateways and sees annual revenue around $450 million. Now this is part of a larger internet of things group which had sales of $1 billion last quarter. So the routers and the gateways aren't making a lot of money for Intel anymore. You might recall back in July, Intel sold its smartphone modem business to Apple for $1 billion. CEO Bob Swan has been looking to get rid of areas where Intel is just not competitive. He's also indicated he might look for a partner for Intel's memory business, which is losing money as well. Yeah, Krizanich did a similar thing when he took over. He started to sell off bits of Intel that just weren't productive, but those were kind of more obvious and less close to the core business things. Like they sold their set top box development to Verizon for instance. This is something that's a lot closer to the core. In fact, part of a very valuable group, the internet of things group is making a lot of money for Intel and something that I think Intel did well to get ahead of and start capitalizing on it. But routers and gateways declining part of this business. So I don't know. I think Bob Swan doing a good job of keeping on top of what keeps Intel efficient here. Certainly, but there's also a component that's a little bit different in my opinion. Intel, its core business has always been CPUs, right? That's the main activity that they have. And currently they are more and more lagging in that business. AMD is for the first time in many, many years out innovating them in CPU design. And they are also having difficulties at Intel with thinner processes. And honestly, because all of these other activities could have been seen as trying to diversify in case CPUs don't manage to get back on top. I'm wondering if that isn't... The first of many, many, many steps, maybe they're getting money in to reinvest in R&D or something like that. I don't know. It's just, it smells funky to me what's happening with Intel and what's been happening for the past two or three. An example of what you're talking about was creating the internet of things group years ago, which is bringing them in a billion dollars a quarter. What they're getting rid of is the part of that group that isn't bringing in the revenue anymore. So I think they are doing what you're talking about. They're diversifying beyond the desktop and laptop CPU section. It's just not what we're talking about today. We're talking about them cutting off a bit that isn't necessarily that valuable. Sure. Research published in the journal PNAS examined what effect the Russian internet research agencies influencing campaign had on Twitter users in late 2017. There's no debate that the organization posted content with intent to influence. That's been well demonstrated, but this paper attempted to look at whether it did shape the attitudes and behaviors of US users. Twitter provided a dataset of accounts associated with the Russian organization's campaigns. That was linked to a survey of Republicans and Democrats in the United States who used Twitter during this time period. And the study of that data found no significant effects of interacting with the trolls and found those most likely to interact were already highly polarized. This is consistent with a theory in political science called the theory of minimal effects, which says that the people most likely to engage with political messaging are the least likely to be influenced by it. In fact, the PNAS author on Twitter referenced a paper in the American Political Science Review from a couple of years ago that found minimal effects from general election campaigns. Primaries have a little more effect, but general election campaigns generally didn't seem to sway people at all. Now, this new study about Twitter has limitations and those limitations are in the paper and the author Chris Bale posted them on Twitter. It looks at a limited period of time where interactions were rare and usually brief and was limited mostly to likes, mentions, follows and retweets. And Chris Bale said that the findings are preliminary, but this is the first step. He called on more studies to expand on what they've done to help understand the issue. So this is good science. It's not saying, well, we did a study and we've proved nothing ever happens. It's not that simple, but this is the first step towards looking at the actual effect to be like, okay, did it cause anything? Are we right to spend money going after this kind of behavior? And this study said no, at least in this area, we didn't find any effect. This is also known as the, people are following Tom's advice about this whole affair. I've been in that drug for a while, you're right. Yeah, it is definitely an interesting, not data point, but study point. I'm also interested in figuring out if the inherent feeling of chaos that these things create are also might have an effect because swaying people's opinions, I'm not sure is a serious factor we're taking, we're trying to, you know, we're considering when talking about these things at this point, I think we realize people don't really change opinions because they see an aggravating tweet on Twitter. The research study I would like to see is the one that tries to look at the willingness to engage with political affairs or even just voting when there's so much noise and so much chaos created around elections and issues that you get into a mode where you don't really care anymore, which is I think equally, if not more dangerous. That would be a really interesting study because there's obviously people who care more because of that, but you're not hearing from the people that get turned off by it, are you? Because they're turned off by it. They're not talking about it anymore. Indeed. Oh, that's me, Microsoft head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, told Australian gaming site, Stevevor, that he has some issues with VR. Spencer said, it's isolating and I think of games as a communal kind of together experience. We're responding to what our customers are asking for and nobody's asking for VR. Arstechnica points out that analysis firm Superdata estimates the install base of about 14 million VR users in 2018, Arstechnica also points that the 100 million in VR software sales for Oculus over more than three years does not match the launch window revenue for Red Dead Redemption 2 alone. So it's not nobody, Phil. There's 14 million of them out there, but also they're not spending a lot of money. You're not wrong about that. So we were just talking on Good Day Internet about your experiences with virtual reality as somebody who's been donning the visor regularly recently. How does this sit with you? As to what, sorry, you're breaking up a little bit. As someone who's been using VR regularly recently, how does this sit with you? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely early. It's definitely early in that area. And I think what Phil Spencer is saying that makes complete sense. Nobody is asking for VR, but if we can use the most overused comparison in the history of technology, no one was asking for cars until cars were a thing and they were asking for faster horses, as Ford was saying. It's not a one-to-one comparison. We've had VR headsets, but we're not there yet. It's pre-technology for that. That being said, it completely makes sense to not jump in because it's not ready. So I think it has more to do with Microsoft wanting to provide a solid core experience with a current generation of consoles where they failed significantly compared to the PlayStation because they didn't focus on the core gaming experience and maybe at some point they'll look at VR. I'm not a big fan of the idea that VR is isolating and games are communal. Like most people play games alone at home in front of their computer. Yeah, I mean, video games themselves have been accused of isolating people for many years. So the idea that VR would somehow be more isolating, that doesn't really fly. It seems more that the company is like, huh, we're not really selling all this, as many units and as much hardware as we would have liked to at this point because we've all been talking about VR so much for the last few years and that's because the technology is expensive and sometimes pretty clunky still. Yeah, yeah. Google Assistant's Ambient Mode lets a device display images or play music or control smart home devices and more while it's charging. So it's kind of just sitting there helping you out, being a little helper. The feature started rolling out to select Android 8.0 or newer devices from Nokia and Xiaomi devices last week and ours Technica reports that it will hit Sony and OEM at Transgen next week. Pixel users still have the similar Pixel stand UI but Ambient Mode attempts to be a little bit more proactive. Yeah, I've got the Pixel stand UI. I think if I, yeah, if I pick it up I can kind of show it to, no, it goes away. But it basically just shows me a clock in the weather and it's kind of nice. This new Ambient Mode is much better. It shows, it gives you shortcuts to things like setting an alarm or going into do not disturb mode. And like they say it's supposed to anticipate what you want. So if you're the kind of person that wants it to show a slideshow, it will do that. It knows what time of day it is. So it can dim itself, things like that. I'm looking forward to this coming to my Android device as well because it seems like it'll be interesting to play with whether I'll actually want to use it a lot. I don't know. Sometimes I get annoyed. I'm like, I just want it to turn off and I realize, oh no, it's supposed to be doing that. That's a feature. It seems like something that is a little bit of a novelty, but also I'm sure some people will be, you know, when my phone is the main way I look at time and if it can be telling me time when it's resting, sure. Why not? I guess it does beg the question of energy consumption and it's not a lot, but does it- No, no, the whole point of this is that this is very low power mode and you only do it while you're charging anyway. And it does way more, the ambient mode does way more than tell time. Tell time is what my Pixel Stand UI does right now. This is doing a lot more cool stuff. I think it would work really well, sort of like you have set up, Tom, where you're sitting at your desk anyway. Why not charge your phone? It's right there, not using it. So the fact that it's a clock there kind of just becomes part of your setup. Because if you, for example, in my house, I have a few different iPhone chargers and sort of depending on what I'm doing in my phone, I'm like, ah, crap, I need to charge my phone. It gets plugged into all sorts of places. So there's not really like a great stand where it's like a reliable, some sort of information that's being fed to me. But if I had a good reason to do that, I would. So I like this idea. At the same time, when you're sitting at your desk, you're probably on your computer and you have all that information on your computer. But maybe it's proactive enough that it will show you stuff and ping you with information you need without realizing you need it. I think that's where ambient mode becomes more attractive to me, because you're right, right now I can see like the temperature, the date, and then the time. And it's like, okay. But if it could show me a slideshow or pop up reminders that I could also get, but maybe it's too distracting to have it on my main. There's more options and it's more proactive than I think that could be more useful. The more I think about it, the least helpful, I think it will actually be, but we'll see. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Well, Black Friday, it happens in Europe, doesn't it, Patrick? Even though it's a US thing based on a holiday that you don't have. And in fact, it's been spreading around the world. It's no singles day. Which we also get in Europe. Yeah, right, you get the best of everything. But even if you're not participating in Black Friday, a lot of people are gonna be shopping for holiday gifts in the next several weeks. And we thought it would be a good opportunity to pull some tips that, sure, a lot of you guys already know this, but it's always good to just kind of go over it again and certainly stuff that you might want to share with your friends or family. First of all, do you know the site your shopping for is the deal on it too good to be true? Is it really the site? Don't click on links on emails. If they send you coupons or deal updates, just be careful. Be super careful what you click on. Type in the actual store URL by hand unless you have to use a particular referral to get the discount. And if you have to use a particular referral to get the discount, be really, really skeptical. And make sure you know how you ended up on the site. Make sure it's the real one. It's not Amazon with a two ends or Rakuten, but the R is actually the Russian P, not the actual R. Like stuff like that can happen. And if you are at a site that you're unfamiliar with and you think, wow, I really want that deal, go to Better Business Bureau, bbb.org and check it up. They have something called the scam tracker there where people report scams. And then you can actually see if there's a scam that's been reported about sites. Use those resources and be careful when you're shopping at places that are unusual. And it's really helpful if you do come across something to enter that information in there. I've gotten scammed a couple times. And yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm not proud of it, but you're going through some sort of buying process a little bit too quickly. And there's some telltale signs. There almost always are. So it's more something that I consider I wasn't panicked of attention and not that they were all that clever about it. But yeah, the more that I have information on from other folks, just like any Amazon review, you know, it's all strength and numbers, the more that we can stay away from problematic sites. There's a thing, I mean, that's really good advice right there, Sarah. Go slow. Even though the sale is on and the clock's ticking on the deal, don't let that get you to be careless. Make sure you look to see that you're on a locked site with HTTPS. As I said, make sure it's actually the site you mean to be on. Don't enter any info or check out if you're on public Wi-Fi or a public device like at a library, if you're on public Wi-Fi and you're using VPN, you might be okay. But even then, I get a little twitchy about putting in any bank info. Make sure that if you do log into a site like Amazon that you're using strong, unique passwords, if you have to use a password manager to do that, don't reuse passwords across shopping sites. Do not do that. It's tempting. I know. Don't do that. And it's slower, but this will help with our tip that we just said of go slow. Check out as a guest or don't store your payment info and don't give them any info they don't need. If they're asking things that aren't required, leave it blank. You don't need to volunteer up a lot of information. And if you don't store your credit card with a company, like you check out as a guest or you don't store the credit card, then that credit card can't be stolen from their data banks later, which as we know happens all the time. I think out of all of those, don't give them more information than they absolutely need is super important. But also password managers, if there's only one thing you remember out of all of this, I would say it's password managers, even if you don't want to use them for your important stuff because you fear that your passwords would be stored in someone else's servers, whatever. But if you want to use them for the sites you don't care about, at least you can create unique long passwords and make sure that even if those sites get hacked, more likely than not your data that you had for them with them will be safe because the password is long enough. Yeah. A few other tips, use a separate card, separate credit card. Don't use debit cards online. They don't have the safety protections that regular credit cards do if you can avoid it. Use a separate card for online uses or if your bank provides it one time use numbers, a lot of times you can get a one time use number that you can use at multiple sites, but it's based on time period. You can only use it that day. That way if it does get stolen, it's not of any use. Some people recommend using PayPal. That is a way, especially if you're unbanked and you don't really have a credit card or even if you're not fully unbanked, that might be an option. Some people don't trust PayPal. So that's an option though or gift cards is another way because they have a limited balance on them as well. And stuff like keeping your operating system up to date, keep your antivirus definitions up to date, use different email addresses for sites that you care less about. Don't shop with your work email address. That way if it gets phished, it won't seem as legitimate and protect your data privacy. I know GDPR provides a lot of great resources in Europe, Patrick. Yeah, it's a little bit annoying to actually go through all of these cookie settings every time you go to a new website, but it's at least worth it to do it when you're not sure what's happening and when you're shopping, because that's when a lot of the data that they get is going to be reused and used for targeting. So if you're worried about these things, which some people are, but we're thinking, ah, whatever, it's okay. Just open the cookies setting for that site when you get on there. And more often than not, there's gonna be a setting that says reject all but necessary cookies. Click that thing, click accept and you're done. And the other thing is you can unsubscribe from mailing lists that you don't want, usually at least in Europe, but you mentioned, Tom, something I didn't know, many states are actually, it's federal level. You have to take into account the request to unsubscribe from a list. So you don't have to just hide it by clicking, this is spam button on your email software. Just find the unsubscribe button or link in the email, in the body of the email. At least in Europe, they have to provide one. My experience with US companies is that they often don't. No, they are required by law in the United States to provide an unsubscribe button. Yeah, absolutely. There are bad actors that don't, but they're breaking the law. And in the U also, of course, and some actors will say, yes, sure, you're off our mailing list and then send you a million emails on the next day. But yeah, taking the time to do those things, especially at a time period when you're gonna be visiting a million different sites, might be useful and you might wanna do it. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our sub or Reddit. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the lively conversation in our Discord happens 24 seven, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Hey, Sarah, what's in that mailbag there? Oh, Tom, I'm glad you asked. Mwepu from sunny Senegal. I'm jealous. It's not sunny here today. Says, I was a little surprised by how lenient you were with Uber. He's referencing our story yesterday about the London situation and uninsured drivers and the fact that London's Yankee and Uber out of there says, I think for them to not know them being Uber, who exactly is driving for them is a huge security risk. Would you get into an Uber with a violent criminal or a sexual predator behind the wheel? I'm guessing no. And if Uber doesn't know who's driving, that could end up being the case. I know that Rob Dunwood brought up the security question, but I think you breezed past it a little too quickly. Well, Mwepu, that's a fair point. I think if we didn't give it as much time as you think we should have, it's because we have consistently covered Uber's efforts to make sure that only their background checked drivers are behind it. So that's not new. What Transport for London found was a vulnerability that Uber hadn't closed. So saying that that's equivalent to Uber putting violent criminals behind the wheel, I think is unfair. Of course, nobody wants to have violent criminals behind the wheel. That's not what was going on here. What was happening is drivers were taking advantage of the fact that Uber hadn't put in a way to prevent you from changing the picture or validating the picture. And that is something that Uber needed to fix. So I don't think it's as bad as having no checks. They have lots of checks and you're always going to have people trying to figure out a way around whatever checks you have in place. What TFL decided was Uber didn't fix this fast enough. Uber should have prevented it before it happened, which you can agree or disagree with. But you're right. We shouldn't give the security question short shrift. I think I was just assuming that people have been following the story for a while and know that Uber has closed a lot of those loopholes. They used to not even do background checks. Now they do, for instance. Hey, shout out to our patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels, including Ruchan Brantley, Adam Carr and Andy Beach. Also thanks to Patrick Beja for being with us today. Patrick, besides your VR sort of wormhole you've been in lately, what's been going on with you? A bunch of things. If you want to hear more about gaming you can go check out Pixels, which is my gaming show. We're going to be talking about Stadia in detail. We're recording in a couple of days. We're also going to be talking about VR and game streaming and those two put together. We'll also talk about the recent acquisition of Beat Games, the Beat Saber developer by Facebook. This happened just a few minutes ago. So yeah, Pixels, if you enjoy gaming is the show for you. We have new patron rewards, folks. In fact, just for the next couple of days you can sign up and if you are a patron of DTNS on November 28th, whether you stay one or you join, you'll get free art from Len Peralta mailed to your address. You have to give us your address. If you want to make sure that we have your address go to patreon.com slash pledges. Look for Daily Tech News Show. If you don't see your address next to it, press edit and you'll be able to add that address. Or if you sign up new, we'll ask for it. When you sign up and make sure you get it then. We have a lot of other things that members get, including a special episode of Threat Wire that went out from Shannon Morse today about the Android camera vulnerability. If you want that and more, of course, you just gotta go to patreon.com slash DTNS. If you've heard anything today and thought, wow, I have some thoughts, we would like to hear those thoughts and you can email us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Last episode of the week tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.