 Coming up on DTNS, why it's still too early for online voting, do you want a phone that swivels? And we break down Twitter's approach to COVID-19 misinformation. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 12, 2020, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the forests of Finland. I'm Patrick Beja. And from a cul-de-sac somewhere in Southern California. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about hot sauce and my terrible tale of technology woe on Good Day Internet. If you want to get that and more, become a member at patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bloomberg sources say that Uber has made an offer to acquire food delivery startup Grubhub, and that the two companies could reach an agreement as soon as the end of this month. Sony has created a logo for PlayStation Studios to be used by its internal studios like Naughty Dog and Insomniac. A Marvel Studios-like cinematic will play along with the logo before each PlayStation Studios game starts showing characters like Uncharted's Nathan Drake and Horizon Zero Dawn's Aloy. Android police noted Instagram is rolling back its Instagram light app after disappearing from the Google Play Store last month. Instagram lights low install size and bandwidth requirements were designed to help adoption in countries like Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines. Instagram did tell TechCrunch it'll take what it learned from this test and build a new light app. Microsoft launched a preview for its Family Safety app for Android and iOS. The app syncs with Windows and Xbox devices and tracks screen time and app usage, sets time limits and content controls and turns on location sharing. Estonia's Parliament approved the Electronics Communications Act Tuesday, requiring security reviews for telecom gear used in development of future networks. Details of implementation are left to the government and the intelligence services are included in reviewing authorities. YouTube Music's rolling out a button that lets users move artists, albums, songs, playlists, music, personal uploads and recommendations from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. Another notch on the road to the death of Google Play Music. The option will roll out to all users over the next few weeks and appear as a banner and a setting option in YouTube Music. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology said Tuesday that smartphone shipments from China's factories to vendors rose 17% in April compared to the same month a year ago. Phone makers shipped 40.8 million handsets in April, up from 34.8 million in April of 2019, but the organization didn't report the percentage of Android devices shipped, which might mean something for iPhone shipments. August launched the Wi-Fi Smart Lock it announced at CES. The new version is 45% smaller and includes Wi-Fi, meaning there is no need for a bridge. It is available now in silver and black for 250 American dollars or bundled with optional keypad for 310 American dollars. Iceland began manual contact tracing of COVID-19 infections in March and in early April launched its app called Rocknan C19 that uses GPS data. The Icelandic app has the highest adoption rate in the world at 38% of Iceland's 364,000 people. Detective Inspector Gester Palmosen, who oversees Iceland's contact tracing efforts, said the app quote has proven useful in a few cases, but it wasn't a game changer for us, adding that manual tracing is no less important. Alright, let's talk about Quibi. Patrick, why not? Do we have to? I guess we do. Jeffrey Katzenberg told the New York Times, I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything. Maybe he didn't have that emphasis, but it sounds like it. It sounds like he did. Yes. Quibi predicted it would have 7 million downloads by the end of its first year. Right now it says it is halfway there with 3.5 billion, 1.3 million, which are active. It's ranked number 125 on the Apple store. Yet Katzenberg said the company is making enough gold out of hay here that I don't regret it. Quibi will add support for casting to TV to its iOS app this week and Android in the next few weeks. Quibi also plans to add features to share content on social media. A company named Echo is suing Quibi over theft of intellectual property regarding the turnstile feature. Tuesday, Echo named Katzenberg and a few other Quibi employees as defendants. A lot of people take a pot shot at Quibi for Katzenbergs. I blame it all on the virus, but honestly, I think that's fair. Quibi was meant if it were going to succeed, to succeed amongst a populace that's out and about. Its entire use case was, you're waiting in line at the store, you're waiting in line at the subway, you're walking around between meetings. So I think it's fair for him to blame coronavirus. Maybe not for everything, but to blame it in front. I'll give him that. The question is, okay, how much more successful would it have been whether they're not a lockdown going on right at the beginning of its launch? We talk a lot on the show about the idea of, in particular, games and game developers. The game launches are getting delayed because it's just harder to get certain things done when you want them to be perfect before launch. Okay, so if you think about the whole Quibi scenario, yeah, the premise was a little bit hard to swallow for a lot of folks because it's a crowded market, and the whole idea is it's highly produced content, it's on the go, it's not meant to be on large devices, you're not supposed to cast your television at home, and it's not free, and you're going to love it. So a lot of folks like me were kind of like, okay, well let's see what you got. Well then, when their April launch came around, which wasn't delayed, that was the original launch, you know, within a week or so, it was really tough to sell, you know, and a lot of folks go like, well, I mean, short-form content, look at TikTok, you know, it's killing it. Well, this is different. I mean, it's apples and oranges, so I do see why, and I think the quote may have been taken slightly out of context. Katzenberg would have said, I do believe in the coronavirus for everything, because he lambs the launch in the coronavirus, and that did become a, what may have been something that you had to iterate kind of quickly, that happens to a lot of companies, something that it's like, well, everyone's at home, you know, our whole workflow has been ground to a halt at very, very, very inopportune timing. Also, I would submit that things aren't super incredibly dire. They planned 7 million downloads by the end of the year, 3.5, I'm sure, you know, you get a huge boost in when you launch, so maybe they were hoping to capitalize on that boost, but 3.5 isn't, you know, a tenth of it, it's half, and 1.3 million still active. A lot of people who download it are expected not to be to remain active. 1.3 is not nothing. Now the question is how many of those will cancel their free trial before it ends or shortly after, but it's not like they completely flopped, which is notable, I think. There you go. That's the headline Katzenberg wants to see. Quibi, not a complete flop. We'll see when everybody's free trials are over. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey emailed employees on Tuesday saying that jobs that don't require a physical presence may continue to work from home. Indefinitely. Forever. Business travel has canceled in September and Dorsey said it was unlikely that Twitter would reopen the office then anyway. Twitter has canceled all in-person events through the rest of the year and raised the allowance for work from home supplies to $1,000. Yeah, so we've been saying, you know, we wonder when we'll see evidence that these companies are changing what they would do based on the fact that they're having to work from home. This is the first example of that. Granted, Dorsey had said he kind of wanted to move this way before the virus happened. So this is a chance for him to do something he wanted to do anyway, but it's ahead of schedule. And it's Twitter deciding that there really isn't a reason, there really isn't a good reason given what they're seeing for them to force people back in the office. So unless you have to be in that data center swapping out the RAM or you're maintaining the office when they eventually open it back up, at least Twitter is not going to make you. I hope, I'm sure many companies are going to move that way. I hope they still have an option to go to the office if and when they want to for at least part of the week or the month because I think some people need that. And I mean, unfortunately, I don't have that opportunity because I'm independent and I work from home and my office is right here. So actually I do have the opportunity. I just go to the office every day. I also don't get the $1,000 of work from home supplies, which I would like to get from Dak Dorsey, please. But yeah, work from home is awesome. I've been saying it for years. But I think for many people it's also nice to have an office if you can. The Twitter headquarters in San Francisco is the only Twitter office I've ever been to, but it is nice. It's like when you go to the Google cafeteria for the first time and we go, are you serious? Please let me work here. I'll do anything. It is nice. The fact that whatever its form used to be is going to be very different. One would think they'd like to save a lot of money by not leasing that space anymore, but it kind of goes back to the conversation that a lot of us were having right at the beginning of this is, oh, if everything's on pause, what happens to all the people who work in the food service areas, who clean the floors after employees that are working late at night? The whole ecosystem is affected by a company like Twitter saying a lot of people are just never going to come back. It's never going to happen. So I wonder how much of this we're going to see as an effect long term. And you know, it's nice for Twitter that they can do this. Not all businesses can do this. Not all businesses are able to have their employees work from home, not just because they don't prefer it, because the business doesn't work that way. And not all employees work for a company that would be able to let them work from home. So there's also that gap opening up between tech companies which can do this and other industries that can. Here it's Lily Hey Newman has an article up called online voting has worked so far that doesn't mean it's safe. West Virginia has switched from votes. We've talked about that before on DTS VO ATZ, which was found to have security flaws to democracy live for overseas military and residents with disabilities to do absentee voting. Delaware and New Jersey are also piloting democracy live this summer for their primaries as well. Democracy live uses AWS is fed ramp. That is a cloud service that is certified for US government use so it has the security precautions that the US government requires for voting. You fill out a PDF in the cloud and then the most secure version of this service has you print that ballot at home and mail it in or the less secure version submitted electronically. Those electronic submissions use AWS is object lock to try to prevent any tampering to that PDF after you have submitted it and an end user has no way of confirming what got printed when they sent it. So the election officials printed at the end but you don't know you have no way of checking. Wired notes that healthcare companies financial institutions tech companies even the NSA have all been breached. So even with all these security precautions. Do you need voting to be more secure because these very highly secure instances that I just mentioned all got breached and a bank only has to preserve privacy from third party so there's the privacy aspect of this too. It's okay if the bank knows how much is in your account because that's kind of the point of the bank is knowing how much is in your account, whereas it's not okay for election officials to know who you voted for. There is a presumption of privacy with ballots that needs to be maintained as well so it makes it extra difficult to create secure voting that is end to end. Beyond these test systems from Democracy Live keep in mind 19 states let ballots be emailed right now which is even less secure and 26 of them allow facts which isn't particularly secure either. Last Friday the US Department of Homeland Security Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with the Election Assistance Commission in the United States, sent a risk assessment to the states, warning that electronic ballot return technologies are high risk, even with controls in place. So it's that different risk tolerance plus the extra difficulties involved in protecting privacy that I think dispute the notion that some people have like hey if a bank keep my financial information secure why can't we have secure voting online. Do you all feel like you're on board with this assessment or do you think we should move faster or even slower? Gosh I mean listening to all of this my first reaction is well online voting doesn't sound like it's ready yet. Sounds like we have all these instances of it just not working well or there being breaches or you know just something being insecure. Well in person voting has its problems as well. So I'm not going to sit here and be like well we all just have to get to the polling booth and that'll solve everything because that is right with own problems. Patrick I don't know how you feel being outside the US but I know here I'm kind of uncomfortable with all my solution options. I mean you're, I think there are two things you consider. First of all, voting is kind of a different case than most other things where technology can apply because the stakes are so high that it seems to me and the big question is how does it improve the process and in most cases I don't think electronic voting improves it significantly. There are other ways if you really want to make sure that voting is accessible to more people. There are other ways like changing the day of the vote things that have been discussed many many times and that you were asking Sarah how I look at it from here. We have voting on days that are days off and that is a no brainer, complete no brainer. The second thing is of course there are some people for whom it would be useful. The two examples you gave Tom are excellent ones and I think if you try to apply the best possible solution even if it's not perfect for those people it might indeed have value. And even in this system that you described it's not what you think of when you think electronic voting. You might think you know oh I vote through a computer. No, in order to make it as secure as possible you actually have to print the thing and mail it in etc etc. So it's like to make sure that people can do it from home maybe a little bit more easily. And for those people if it provides a definite benefit I think it's more acceptable because the target for hacking isn't as wide. And so that makes it less attractive to mount ambitious operations to hack stuff. If everyone's voting by electronically obviously then the potential for things getting screwed up is much bigger. To sum it up I think that's a really good way of putting it. If it doesn't improve the voting process we're not ready for it. As you mentioned Sarah there are problems within person voting almost entirely related to electronic in person voting. If you're doing the old fashioned paper ballot without electronics it's actually really secure. But as soon as you put an electronic machine in there then we start to see problems and if you put it online you see more problems. So until it can meet Patrick's test of did it actually improve the voting? I'd say yeah it someday we'll get there but not yet not there yet. Well maybe this whole next story will help improve phone form factors. I don't know stay with me. The Korean Herald and ET News showed a concept phone called the LG Wing with a 6.8 inch display that swivels up horizontally into a T-shape to reveal an additional 4 inch square display below. There's kind of two displays that look like a wing span really more than a wing. The second display can show a keyboard, editing controls, supplemental content. Now we've heard complaints that phone factors these days are kind of boring. They all look the same everyone's ready for something different. But then you look at foldables they're not necessarily necessary and often have a lot of issues with the way that they're built. So what do we think about swivelables? I can't wait for that to catch on that's the name. Again I have two things to say here. My first reaction to this is wow this is super dumb. My second reaction is actually maybe why not? You know it might be for people who don't know what it looks like. It essentially looks like a sidekick you know the thing you would flip and the screen would go up and be in landscape mode. And you could type on the keyboard on the part that remains. But the second thing is probably the issue would be the thickness of it. And that's where and you know the use and tear of the mechanism of it and stuff like that. So yeah that might kill the product for most people. It feels like it could be pretty solid on that hinge but I'm still trying to figure out what it's going for. This is kind of like foldables like what do I need this for? This is going to be more solid than a hinge. But what's that use case where I'm like oh man if only I had a T swivel phone I could totally do this. The advantage to me is that you still get the full surface area for editing while having the keyboard available. So you extend your surface area with the same form factor that you had before. For editing what? Oh documents like if you want to. Yeah just anything you do on a mobile device. Yeah I don't edit documents on a mobile device. I type as little as possible. Because you don't have a swivel phone. Change my whole perspective. Alright maybe. I mean this all seems like we just need that perfect device. You know there are hybrid tablets you know where people are like this is actually great. Because sometimes it's a tablet and sometimes it's a laptop. This is we're trying to still get to that phone version of that. But the form factor is so small that we now are in a wing shape. Well folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Twitter as we mentioned in the quick hits yesterday on the show at the very top of the show. We'll have two kinds of notifications added to tweets that aren't considered serious enough to remove. So let's dig in now that we've had a chance to look at these a little closer. One of these kinds of notifications they call a label. That leaves the tweet intact. You can read it. You can see it in your timeline. But it adds this label. Get the facts about COVID-19 and those words link to either a Twitter curated page or an external source that have vetted verified information. The next level above label is a warning. The warning text blocks content but includes a link to the view to view the tweet if you want. So if you've seen a block of sensitive content sometimes you'll see that we're like make it take a sensitive content and click here if you still want to see it. This will say some are all of the content shared in this tweet conflicts with guidance from public health experts regarding COVID-19. Learn more which links out to those same vetted sources or view which lets you view the tweet that they think is wrong. Each tweet will be assessed on not only whether it's misleading or disputed but on how harmful it is. So if something is unverified it'll be left alone. They're like no we don't know. Maybe this is right. Maybe it's wrong. This is information which could be true or false. An example would be chloroquine is our best shot at a cure for COVID-19. I don't know. Could be true. Could be false. Might be controversial but nobody knows. We're going to call that unverified. Disputed are statements or assertions in which the accuracy, truthfulness or credibility of the claim is contested or unknown. So in other words chloroquine is the cure for COVID-19. A lot of people are like well maybe it's not. That's contested. So that would be a disputed fact. And then misleading is plain old statements or assertions that have been confirmed to be false or misleading by subject matter experts like public health authorities like fish medicine can cure COVID-19. No it absolutely can't. Do not take fish medicine. That's for fish not for people. Those categories disputed misleading unverified are combined with the estimated propensity for harm. So the Twitter is going to say is it possible that it would cause moderate harm or severe harm. If either of these is moderate harm disputed or misleading then they put the label on the one that lets you see the tweet but says hey here's some more information about COVID-19. If a disputed claim the one where like it might it's contested but we may we you know we're saying it's probably not true. If it's disputed with severe then it gets the warning. That's the one where it covers the content and makes you click to see it. If it's misleading and has potential for severe harm like take fish medicine then it gets removed. You don't even see it. That's when they actually just take it off Twitter. The question of how they will be judging all of this is vague. They say they will proactively monitor and rely on trusted partners. They don't talk about how they'll do it in the post on this. My guess is something like what Facebook is doing which is using fact checkers to determine if something is false. Then adding the warning labels and in Facebook's case reducing distribution which I think Twitter does too. And if it might lead to imminent harm on Facebook they remove it. According to the community standards enforcement report Facebook put out today. It's still relying on humans at 60 partner fact checking organizations to identify misinformation. So a human's got to see it first and when it's flagged by a human then an AI can go look for similar stuff. Stuff that's either absolutely identical or like wait a minute somebody's doing the same thing but they changed a little. AI is good at finding that but it can't find new instances on its own. In fact Facebook's CTO Mike Schrepper said in a press call about this report building a novel classifier for something that understands content. It's never seen before. It takes time and a lot of data. So back to Twitter. They've got this kind of four part test here that they're going to combine to decide whether you should see it or not. Patrick do you feel like this is fair. It certainly seems like it is better than other solutions. No I think it's fair. The theory is fair of course then the implementation is always the biggest difficulty. But it certainly seems like it is fair. Twitter has been notoriously timid with content moderation. It is one of their principles. And I think at the very least this gives us this gives them more tools to use because essentially until now and this applies to go with 19 it will be likely applied to other things in the future. This gives them an opportunity to do something about a tweet that they don't want to remove for various reasons. And that can be very useful on Twitter where these kinds of tweets are very common. So I think it is a very positive move for Twitter. Is it going to fix everything. No, but it helps in specific ways. Yeah, I think actually in a lot of ways I think COVID-19 is an easier one to attack. No one likes COVID-19. No one's out there defending COVID-19's right to exist. Everybody wants to get rid of it right. So you have an easier target. You also have more consensus over what's true about it. I'm not saying you have perfect consensus by any stretch but more so than the more flimsy stuff that you get in the in the general political waters. Because there are some solidly knowable things about a virus even with the number that are unknowable. So I think it's a little easier to attack here. I don't think this will cause as much of a controversy as if they applied the same things to politics. If this was going to political statements or other speech, I would start to pick at the difference between unverified and disputed. Because unverified is this is information that could be true or false. We don't know. And disputed says it's either contested or unknown. Those are the unknown part of that is the same. So how do you tell if something's unknown, whether you call it unverified and just leave it up or you call it disputed and slap a label on it? I think with COVID-19, that's less of an issue because the disputed stuff really is the contested stuff. And verifiable like Chloroquine I used as an example, because that's one where there is some truth to the fact that this could be useful. But some people are exaggerating the claims about it. I think there are other examples of things that could be in the same category. You're right. It's not going to fix every controversial thing that is discussed on Twitter. But there are other things that could fall in the same bold part. It could give a couple of examples, but certainly and again, it keeps Twitter from having to absolutely remove the content, which is something they are very, very reluctant to do. And it gives them a tool to do something about those kinds of that type of content. And yeah, well, yeah, as you said, it's not going to fix all of the contentious stuff, but some of it. And when it is possible to decide to see is this, does most do most people agree about this thing, then they can do something about it. I think that's a good thing. Yeah. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. It kind of polices itself in a cool way. You can submit stories and vote on others to get them up to the top at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Not that we don't thank our moderators who do a very, very good job keeping that place clean. But I know what you mean. Like people do the voting, right? It all just kind of floats up based on the vote. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Chris Christensen, our amateur traveler, we miss you, Chris said, I almost laughed out loud that Newton Mail was still being supported. That was a story from our show yesterday. Chris says, I wrote the email for the Apple Newton called Newton Mail clients back in 1993. And for a minute, I thought that's what you were talking about. I wrote back to Chris. I was like, I imagine these code bases are entirely different, but I don't know that. And he's like, well, I wrote the Newton Mail client for the Newton in 1993 in Newton script. 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