 coming up on D T N S an easy way to get drone flight exemptions. Why human curation of data is still necessary and the commented out code that wiped out hundreds of hard drives. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 29th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the shows producer Roger Chang joining us Bloomberg Tech editor Nate Langston. Welcome back to the show Nate. Thank you. I'm back again. The third wave. We were just talking about Pokemon Go and it's connection to graveyards and so much more on good day internet. If you would like that wider conversation become a member patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft GitHub and open AI are making a tool that will suggest code to developers as they work on programs works best for JavaScript, Python and TypeScript. The system is called GitHub Copilot and was trained on code from GitHub repositories and it continues to learn based on whether or not its suggestions are used. The model used in GitHub Copilot is called Code X, a derivative of open AI is GPT three. The code X model will be released for all third party developers later this summer. Couple of Windows 11 related Microsoft tidbits here Windows 11 will offer a new display feature called dynamic refresh rate or DRR, which will reduce refresh rates to save battery life and boost them when they will be most needed cycling between 60 and 120 Hertz apps will need to support DRR while in preview. Windows 11 will offer a scrolling refresh rate boost in office only speaking of office office for Windows 11 will include a native 64 bit ARM version and support for 64 bit add ins as well as a redesign. It's available now for testing to office insiders running the Windows 11 insider preview. Intel will delay the release of its next generation server chips to Q one of 2022. They were previously expected by the end of this year. Intel said the extra time will be used to improve performance, especially around AI processes. It's the first Intel delay since Bob Gelsinger took over as CEO back in February. HP announced the pavilion arrow 13 its lightest consumer laptop stopping off at 2.18 pounds offering an AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU 90% screen to body ratio with a 2.5 K 400 nits of brightness screen available in July starting at $749. Nothing founder Karl pay announced that the company's debut pair of true wireless earbuds the nothing ear one with one in parentheses will be unveiled at 9am Eastern time on July 27. Nothing the company previously delayed the launch by a month because it had a few things left to finalize Karl pay is a co founder of one plus and he left the company last year. All right. We'll allow the audience to make all their nothing jokes and we will move on to talking about alphabets wing. What do they got going on? Yeah, well, this is something in fact alphabets drone delivery company wing launched an app in the US in cooperation with the FAA called open sky. The app was earlier launched in Australia back in 2019 in cooperation with the C as a in the country. Open sky lets hobbyist and commercial operators alike see where they can legally fly and then request approval to operate in areas that might be otherwise restricted. It expedites that process which otherwise can take days. Wing says it's helping other operators out because quote compliance will ultimately expand the uses and benefits of drones. So in other words, if people get used to drones behaving well, it's easier for wing to get its drones in the air. The rising air lifts all quad copters principle. You know it, right? Probably doesn't hurt also that open sky is going to be collecting a lot of data this way about where drones are being flown, which could help wing and developing its own navigational systems, which makes sense. Our associate producer Amos in Alaska tried to download this and it told him it was not available in his region. So this may be mainland US only at this point. We'll see if it opens up later, but it is an interesting idea and pretty useful for people who want to fly quad copters, especially in urban areas where there are so many restrictions. Right now it takes some paperwork in a couple of days if you want to lift that. So most people don't do it, making it easier and still maintaining safety. I think is a great way to encourage more use of drones, get people comfortable with drones. Nate, do you do a lot of quadcopter flying at all? Yeah, we use a lot of it for filming at Bloomberg. And funnily enough, I was over at the old Olympic Park London Olympic Park. That is just just a couple of days ago, because we're preparing for quite a big shoot over there in a couple of weeks. And the conversation, as soon as you mentioned, can we use a drone for a couple of aerial shots? You know, the number of questions that come up around paperwork and insurance and who's covering what and how many meters away from a road you have to be to, you know, to go a certain height. It, you know, sometimes it feels like it's not worth bothering. And you look at a company like Wing, it's been around for the best part of 10 years now. I think it was 2012, it got off the ground, so to speak. You look at prime air as well, how that is, you know, still very much in its infancy. And these are some of the biggest companies in the world with the most resources that they could possibly throw at it. And we're still not yet at a point where we've even necessarily got an app that shows you like, okay, here are some of the places you can use it. It's just, I think it's a real sign of just how far we have yet to go with this technology. But also really just how damn hard it is to do this in a safe way that people actually are comfortable with. I also, you know, I think that, yeah, if you're a drone operator, let's just say on the hobbyist level, it's, you're probably, I mean, the majority of those folks aren't going to want to be illegally flying the drone, you just might not know, right? So this is great for just knowing this is cool, my route is safe, that sort of thing. But how many people just are still operating under that because drones are still relatively new, especially, you know, in the hobbyist sector? Oh, I just didn't know that I couldn't do this. How many folks will even take it upon themselves to look up and make sure that they're doing the right thing? It's a good question. I guess when you start getting these insane fines for not doing so. If in doubt, call a local authority and say, hey, can I fly a drone? They're usually pretty cool about it and say, yeah, it's fine. Just don't flight net children or houses. And that's around here, that seems to be fine. There's a lot of systems stopping your drone from flying if you're in restricted space until you get that approval. So sometimes if you try to take off, you may not realize you're in restricted space and your drone's like, no, can't, sorry, I can't do that here. Right. So that happens well. Yeah, it's worth everyone's while then. I think your last point there, Sarah, was probably the biggest one behind this. Obviously, getting people comfortable with drones and flying is a good thing and this seems like a really cool app for people who want to do this, but it also is going to help wing, collect a lot of data about where drones can fly and do fly and often fly, which is going to help their whole delivery business as well. Yeah. The information sources say that as of May 2021, Apple's on track to spend $300 million on cloud storage through Google. That's about a 50% increase over the previous year. In November 2020, apparently Apple was storing eight exabytes of data in Google Cloud. Apple Insider helpfully equates one exabyte with a 237,000 year-long video. If you need to understand how big the file is, that's eight exabytes. It's eight times that. Apple's now Google's largest corporate client. ByteDance, which runs TikTok, is Google's second biggest customer. ByteDance uses 470 petabytes, which happens to be around the amount Apple added in November 2020. So Apple's far and away Google's biggest customer for cloud data. Spotify and Twitter are third and fourth, if you're curious. Apple does operate its own data storage. You may be forgiven if you're like, wait, I thought iCloud ran on their own servers. Some of it does, but it has apparently outgrown its ability or the cost effectiveness or both to keep building everything for itself. Apple also uses AWS. It's not just Google Cloud, but Google Cloud seems to be their largest storage partner. Apple users iCloud data is encrypted before it's stored in these cloud services. If you're worried about Google and Amazon getting a peek, that's likely not to happen. But I thought this was interesting, Nate, because I know some of our audience already knows this, but a lot of people in our audience may be surprised to learn that Apple pays Google hundreds of millions of dollars, even though they compete in other sectors. Yeah, and you know what? This surprised even me. Now, I knew that Apple did this. I knew that it did outsource some of this storage. What doesn't surprise me is the growth here over here. It is just that sheer volume of data that is now being stored there. I find that enormously surprising because Apple has so much money. Apple can go out and say, we are going to build our own chips. We're going to buy this part of Intel so we can do wireless better. We're going to do all of this stuff ourselves. And yet what is, and I say this knowing that I'm going to annoy a lot of sysadmins out there, what is essentially a lot of hard drives and computers in a room with some cables. I apologize, but you know what I mean? There is very different from designing a semiconductor end-to-end for products. It is amazing to me that Apple needs to do this. What is the roadblock? Is it just that cost effectiveness? I don't get it. It surprises me enormously. It is all encrypted. That makes me very happy because I do have this belief that I don't use, I almost use no Google services, I don't use Facebook at any of those things because my feeling is if I'm going to give one giant company all of my data, I'd rather it be the one that needs it the least. And that's why I tend to give all my data to Apple to store. So it does kind of irk me that some of it, albeit all encrypted, is being stored in a company that I would rather not have control of my data in some form. So yeah, that's a very surprising development for me that it is this much. My guess is the reason Apple is doing this is not because they can't afford to build the data centers, but the managing of the data, the provisioning of access. Think of how many situations where a new streaming service tries to launch and the streaming goes down right away and they knew there'd be demand, but it's difficult to meet that demand even when you know it's coming. It may be that Apple just said, you know what, if we stick this in AWS and Google, we won't have outages and we won't have to deal with those outages and maybe we can get up to speed at some point in the future. I do think that'll happen and I think what would be an interesting distinction to see is where that line is drawn in terms of what data is stored where, what is stored in Apple's own ecosystem and what is outsourced, because there will be a difference I'm sure. Also they probably couldn't agree on the design of the building. They just wanted it to look right and it just wasn't right yet so eventually they got there. Well speaking of Google, the company launched a fine food support website at g.co slash fine food support which provides food support resources including a Google Maps locator tool that shows things like local food banks, food pantries, and school meal program pickup locations. It'll show addresses, phone numbers when the location is open, when that information is available. Google worked with food support nonprofits and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to list 90,000 places offering free food support across all 50 U.S. states. The company says it will continue to add more locations to the tool so it's a start. You might be thinking well couldn't you just search Google Maps for food support or something like that already? Yeah you can, but in addition to food banks you're going to get other things like grocery stores or businesses with food in the name or a pet store maybe just food for dogs, that kind of thing. If you search for food bank that might be better but it's narrow so it's going to leave out some perhaps relevant resources. The human curated website, human curated, makes sure that listed items are useful and is adding other information like benefit guides and informational videos as well. So it's interesting that even Google is using human curation to improve the quality of this kind of search. Yeah I think this is a fabulous resource in a time when when food insecurity has been higher in the U.S. than any recent time because of the pandemic and hopefully this is something they could roll out in other places where food insecurity has been an issue. But I was most taken with the idea that to do it right, to do something important like this right, they needed to figure it out themselves because they needed to refine the message. The algorithms are good but they're not perfect. And so yeah if you search food bank you're going to get mostly food banks but will you get all the food banks? Will you get these other resources? No. So when we when we worry about like either when we worry like the algorithms are going to take our jobs or on the other end that everything's going to go algorithm and there won't be any human interaction anymore, this kind of gives me some hope that neither one of those are true. It's still if you want to refine the message and make it so that it's perfectly relevant, you need to have somebody come in at the end and polish it up. I actually put this to the test. I went to g.co slash find food support I put in my address and before that I had typed in yeah like food bank, donate food, you know I tried a few queries and a bunch of stuff was surfacing but not anything that was particularly close to where I live and this resource actually popped up something that is pretty close to where I live and it's a it's like a children services situation and it went to the website it was kind of like after school program stuff but there was also some there was kind of a food category so I called them and I said hey you know I often you know at this Airbnb I manage end up with like unused food that people just leave behind I don't want to throw it away do you take donations you know because I can help on the other side of things sometimes and they were like hold on let's put you on hold that would be great hold and she comes back and she says yeah I'd love that you come anytime between nine and five Monday through Friday and I was and I explained you know this is the first thing that that showed up on this new resource from Google and they had no idea what I was talking about of course this is news just today but it was like that was like that was pretty cool because that was not a search I was finding any other way I was just looking at the map actually at the website and it just intrigued me that there was what looked like 300 odd places out in the middle of the the Pacific but of course that is Hawaii isn't it out there that makes sense yeah there's probably not a whole lot of floating independent food bags so I would hope that's a way three 300 just on those islands alone and that's pretty comprehensive there's a lot of people in Honolulu alone right and and then spread out among the islands so yeah yeah well folks this Saturday our science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans will be releasing a new limited series in your feed right here don't have to go anywhere it'll show up right in your daily tech news show feed called seniors in tech Nikki will interview seniors and how technology has impacted their lives in a few cases their roles in developing it we start off with Alison Sheridan a familiar face and how her job as an engineer served as a gateway to technology and podcasting so keep your eyes on the DTS feed starting this Saturday and every Saturday for a few weekends starting this Saturday July 3rd last week we talked about the attack on out of support western digital my book live network tech storage devices that attack was originally attributed to just a 2018 remote code execution vulnerability well it turns out the attack also took advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability that let attackers perform a factory reset without needing a password there's some interesting twists to the story an examination of the code by ours Technica and Derek Abdin who's the CTO at a security firm called census indicates that someone commented out the code that required a user password before a factory reset normally you send a remote factory reset they're going to be like let's make sure it's you comments are notes developers leave in the code that are ignored when the program runs so if you're not familiar commenting out code means oh I don't I want to keep this code in here because I might need it later but I don't want it to run this time so let me pretend it's a comment I'll put the comment marks in front of it developers will sometimes do this when troubleshooting so that they can see what effect removing a snippet of code will have without having to delete it entirely and then reconstruct it or go find it somewhere else so either Western Digital intentionally removed the password check by commenting it out or maybe they did so temporarily and forgot to put it back keep in mind that Western Digital stopped supporting these devices in 2015 six years ago which means it makes no patches it looks for no new bugs so this previously undiscovered vulnerability shouldn't be too much of a surprise another interesting thing to consider is that both the bugs used in the attack aren't needed if you got one you don't really need the other in fact they're kind of across purposes the original remote code execution vulnerability gave the attacker root access to the device and there's evidence that it was used to inject malware and install a bot net it seems odd that you'd install a bot net and then turn around and wipe the device and even order to use a separate bug to do it when you already had full control with the root access Abdeen believes that a rival group of attackers may have wanted to reset control of the devices to disrupt the bot net this may have been might have been bot net on bot net violence Abdeen also points out that Western Digital's MyCloud Live devices have a different code base now so if you have a newer MyCloud Live not a digital MyBook different code base doesn't have either vulnerability so existing supported devices aren't going to be subject to this but Nate pretty crazy story that this might have been gang warfare of bot net makers that ended up wiping out these devices but it kind of makes more sense to me because I don't understand why someone would just want to wipe out everyone's nases exactly means the kind of thing that that used to happen where it was just for bragging rights and look how much disruption I caused whereas these days when you tend to see these sorts of attacks it tends to be for ransom and we've seen everything up to the scale of WannaCry and and below where ransomware has proven to be very very effective obviously with the recent events with the pipeline shut down in the US again ransomware so it strikes me that given the amount of data that may been stored on these hard drives based on some of the comments we've seen from the people who've lost access to it this could have been a prime opportunity for hackers if it if it indeed was you know hackers which I think we've concluded here it definitely was to have maybe made some money and didn't which also reinforces the argument yeah that maybe this is to rival rival groups I just feel really sorry for the people that didn't listen to I mean this podcast talking about why you should maybe back up in more than one place but at the end of the day if you sell someone a product and say it's going to be a great place to back up your data then this really sucks yeah and keep in mind too that the botnets could have been on these devices since 2018 when that or even before when that vulnerability was first discovered and only noticed now that these devices got attacked and got the spotlight shined on them which is another reason not to use unsupported devices you know you can be mad at Western Digital for pulling the support back in 2015 but once it was pulled and you knew you weren't getting security updates you are taking that responsibility on on yourself at that point I know a lot of people may not have realized it there could have been better communication possibly but you know if you've got a device out of support maybe maybe it's a good reminder to go check and see like hey are all my IoT devices in support are my video cameras actually getting firmware updates it's good thing to check you know what that just just playing devil's advocate though I there is part of me that that really hates technological obsolescence and the idea that just because a company pulls support for a product that means that it is it suddenly becomes unsafe and we should stop using it like I do feel like maybe it's a communication issue maybe there should be some I don't know there should be something in place to to say look with pulling support for this but we're cutting it off so it can't access the internet and if you want to access the internet from this device then here are some steps to enable it but for the time being we've we've halted it to protect your data so it's just an offline hard drive otherwise I just feel I mean 2015 the ended support that's six years ago I don't know it feels pretty soon I think that's a pretty poor move on that part but I can't argue that maybe they should have done things different but it doesn't change the fact that these were unsafe to use oh yeah true yeah yeah yeah well if you're in the market for a new webcam you might be interested in what Dell has launched the $109.99 ultra sharp webcam offering up to 4k resolution at 30 frames per second or 1080 or 720p at up to 60 frames per second you can set a field of view at 65, 78 or 90 degrees depending on how wide you want your shot to be can correct for light I was about to say lightning but I guess that's also that is a form of lighting a type of lighting yeah lighting in general lightning included I can do 5x zoom and also autofocus the webcam connects over usbc supports windows hello and includes an ai auto framing mode to track a subject in the frame it works without drivers on windows and macOS but some features like the ai framing will require the Dell peripheral manager software doesn't include a microphone although I mean webcam microphones are usually not the greatest some people like them I like the idea of this I $200 for a webcam is kind of steep the C920 which is the logitech webcam that so many people use and I'm using right now it works perfectly fine for me but I know I can bump it up a little bit so I don't know I guess that price point is right if it looks spectacular yeah everybody's waiting for the air to the C920 and I think this is Dell's shot at it right not having a microphone means it's going to rule out some people but like you say for folks like us it's like oh yeah we already have different ways of handling our audio so I'm not too worried about that and I don't know Roger what do you think we can't hear you Roger we still can't hear you Roger but Nate what do you think sorry oh go ahead Roger oh sorry real quick I was just saying they're position logitech has a $200 webcam called the Brio which has a lot of these similar specs so it might be like hey we really want to kind of do the beauty side of it and in order to kind of upsell instead of just doing this straight functionality Nate what's your take yeah I remember when these were were extremely hard to get um in the earlier stages of the pandemic you could not buy a decent webcam for months it seemed it was just everywhere was sold out and it made me very aware of the only ones that remained available were the very expensive ones that it turns out logitech makes and ever since then I've been keeping my eye on well what's the one that I would buy if I was able to have bought them back then and it's always been that C920 always comes back to either that or the Brio I don't use either because I couldn't get one I've got to raise a higher I think it's called which does a good job and which I'm using now because the HDMI cable from my Sony a7r2 that I normally use for all this sort of stuff decided not to work five minutes before this show so that's in that you know no matter how great the quality sometimes they just say oh a show live show you say sorry not working yeah yeah well to celebrate its acquisition of Boston Dynamics on June 21st Hyundai released a video of spot the robot challenging the band BTS perhaps you've heard of BTS yes the robot challenged the members of BTS to a dance battle spot chases in does push-ups with V challenges Hobie to a dance battle you know Hobie's like the really good dancer so Boston Dynamics has gone from frightening the internet with big dog the robot you know people are like oh my god they're gonna take over it's horrible it's you know the future is not right being expelled from Google now dancing with the group with the number one song in the world and we would mention that the song is called Butter but you already knew that because everybody knows that Nate is shaking his head do you you're you're unfamiliar never heard no idea no where have I been apparently I I've I don't know it either but I know that it's called Butter been number one on billboard for five straight weeks but it's only been out for five weeks well done to them yeah they uh they got some fans got some fans yeah but so you don't want to mess with army you don't want to mess with army you you do want to dance with them though so I think you know you get spot like BTS and spot are cool look we all can dance it's you know it's a friendlier robot it's a fun robot I purple robot that just wants you to sing along yeah uh I would have never never put my money on the idea when Boston Dynamics was was you know making headlines on DTNS five six years ago that they would be owned by Hyundai and uh doing a dance battle with BTS that's it's kind of crazy all right let's check out the mail bag we got an email from Charles from Sugarland who says if you mentioned it on the show I missed it but who did your new GDI logo because it looks good and is anything new coming for DTNS well yeah uh Len Peralta did the GDI the the new refreshed uh GDI logo so I'm glad to like it Charles we've been getting lots of good responses and thanks Len for making that we are uh standardizing on the new daily tech new show album art that we put out was it a year and a half ago two years ago something like that the the one with all the colors in it so you may see that in more places but it's not actually new but yeah if if you are a GDI subscriber keep an eye out it's refreshing in all the different places and you'll see it soon if you haven't seen it already well thank you for the question Charles if you have a question ask it and you shall receive an answer we have one if you have any feedback of any kind please do send it our way feedback at dailytechnewshow.com shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including Reed Fishler Michelle Sergio and Mike McLaughlin also we have a brand new boss everybody and that boss's name is Lee Englehartz Lee just started back on us on Patreon thank you Lee thank you Lee if it weren't for the Lees of this world that we wouldn't have a show so we like to make a big deal out of that out of the brand new patrons thank you thank you thank you really appreciate it yeah thanks Lee also a big deal Nate Langston Nate always a pleasure to have you on the show where can people keep up with the rest of your work well I have a podcast too it's not as good as this one or as regular it's great it's just as good if not better but but it is quite good that's a text message so uktechshow.com I do that every week it's a lot of fun we went to town talking about mobile phone roaming in Europe which is quite controversial for reasons we went into on Sunday's episode very cool definitely check that out and check us out live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m eastern 20 30 UTC find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live put it on your calendar we'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program