 Sine King Seychal has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Be like Sine King. Become a DTNS member at patreon.com. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, June 21, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Allison Sheridan from the podcast empire. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Is that the Outland Empire? The podcast empire? Yeah, you take the 234. It's a good day, internet, for more on that. We got some great stuff to talk about today. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Huawei says its smartphone sales have risen in the past few days in Western Europe, though no actual numbers were released. Meanwhile, Reuters sites a report from the state-owned RIA news agency in Russia saying a Russian deputy of communications minister told it that Huawei will begin talks to possibly use Russia's Avrovra operating system. That makes it way better. Well, after a meeting with Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, German economy minister Peter Altmaier said Huawei must demonstrate it can meet security requirements in order to be part of building out the country's 5G infrastructure. In March, Germany established tougher criteria for telecom network equipment vendors. Foxconn founder Terry Gao told the company's annual general meeting that he is officially stepping down as chairman of the company in order to run for president of Taiwan as part of the Kuomintang party. You will remain on Foxconn's board of directors. He will remain on Foxconn's board of directors. Gao also urged Apple to move production to Foxconn operations in Taiwan. Foxconn handles some of Apple's production in China and elsewhere. But, you know, his parting shot was like, and everybody move their stuff here, bye. A study from Sweden's Ericsson finds that India has the highest rate of average data use per smartphone at 9.8 gigabytes per month at the end of 2018. The study predicts that the rate will reach 18 gigabytes per month by 2024. Increased LTE subscriptions, better data plans, and increased video watching are among the reasons given. Regionally, average data use per smartphone in Northeast Asia was 7.1 gigabytes per month, followed by North America at 7 gigabytes. So that that whole thing is just fascinating to me. Now, one of the things I thought was interesting was that that the statistic is average data use per smartphone and India's average are the penetration smartphone penetration in the country is not as high as a lot of other places, but the rate of change of the number of smartphones is its bananas, right? It's really, really growing quickly. That's why they're expecting that 18 number, right? Because people are just going to keep using, keep using, keep using. Yeah. So not only is your penetration increasing, they're using it much more than anybody else. That is really interesting. All right, Allison, tell us about the study to find out if these names of automatic systems and cars are misleading. This is a story close to my heart. A survey from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety asked 2,000 people about advanced driver assistance systems, referring to them only by their brand names, such as autopilot, traffic jam assist, supercruise, et cetera. Respondents were asked about two systems and were not told the car maker or capabilities in order to test the perception of the feature based on its name alone. Respondents were asked to rate the safety of things that the car makers say you shouldn't do, like taking your hands off the wheel, watching a movie or taking a nap. More people believed it was safe to perform these behaviors with autopilot than the other six systems. Forty eight percent said it was safe to take hands off the wheel for autopilot versus thirty three percent for pro pilot assist and less for others. Thankfully, only six percent said it was safe to take a nap with autopilot. Three percent said so for the others. At least it's below 10, right? You know, there's been a lot of debate about whether the name autopilot just kind of makes people think it's safer than it is because they think, oh, I can just let go and on autopilot. And a lot of times the argument is, well, airplanes still need a pilot. So calling it autopilot shouldn't mean you can just let it go. But it's not about what it does mean. It's about what people think it means. So this the study was an attempt to kind of evaluate that in a controlled manner. Allison, what do you think? Yeah, that was that was really fascinating because it absolutely does change your mind about how you think about something is what it is named. It's like, well, they wouldn't have called it autopilot if it wasn't autopilot. But I also find people's reactions to these things really interesting. I recently about a test and a guy said to me, he said, well, you know, Allison, I know I know a friend of mine. She had that has that Tesla there and she had it on auto navigation. And she fell asleep at the wheel and woke up two miles past her house. Yeah. Where would she have awakened if she hadn't had autopilot two hours? Did she fall asleep because she had autopilot? I mean, that's a whole different question. Could be. Yeah. Yeah. But I think she woke up dead if she fell asleep behind a regular car. So, you know, I think these things are great. But I agree that the naming convention. But to tell you the truth, in the Tesla, there's like 12 different names for things. There's and some of those names are a little nuts, right? In sanity mode, like that doesn't sound good. But you know what? But it's actually a feature that works really well when used appropriately. But the autopilot thing in particular, there's auto navigation, which is a completely different thing than autopilot auto navigation. It's actually changing interchanges for you. It would take the one thirty four to the two to the one ten. For you. Yeah. At. But what kind of speed? Uh, freeway speeds, like on the speed. Sorry. Yeah, you just you just don't want to sleep through that. My I think this shows that possibly calling it autopilot has an effect that makes people trust it more. It's not a the last word definitive study. I don't think it means calling it autopilot is is recklessly irresponsible. But I have been of the opinion that I don't know, maybe just don't call it autopilot and you'll have less problems that this just seems to bolster that. Yeah, something more like assist rather than auto makes a big difference. I have a friend who he's had a model S for a few years and does a lot of long distance driving and is like, oh, yeah, you know, I like watch movies on Netflix. Uh-huh. I want to do that. I want Adam and you shouldn't do it. But he's like, no, it's it's so good. It's so reliable. I'm like, oh, my gosh. I hope that nobody does that ever. A friend of mine bought one just because he said I was already texting and driving. So I figured I might as well have a Tesla so I can text and drive. The horrible reason. No, OK, these are not representative people of the general population. All right. No, no, right now. These these are the things kind of scare us about the whole autopilot situation. Moving on, though, France, which has the rotating presidency of the group of seven, also known as G seven, has ordered the creation of a task force to study how central banks can make sure things like Facebook's Libra are governed by proper regulations and protect consumers and prevent money laundering. The group doesn't oppose the creation of an instrument for financial transactions, but wants to make sure that Libra and others don't become sovereign currencies of their own. The task force wants to define what a stable cryptocurrency is and how fixed exchange rates should be. Yeah, from my reading of the Libra Association, they want all this stuff. They want governments to set the rules and tell them what they can and can't do as far as as being used as a currency. They want to play by the rules for for preventing money laundering. So I don't think the Libra Association has a problem with any of this. This is what this is why they announced it so far in advance of when they plan to launch it because they want to work through these issues. Alison, have you got a chance to wrap your head around the whole Libra thing? No, not really. I did listen to you guys talk about it. But I don't know. I still I still feel like it's fake. I mean, I understand it's real and it exists. And it's and it's going to be a real thing, but it's not fake. Yeah. Well, but you could be forgiven for being there. Here's the thing. It's really no different than when you send money over the internet right now. When you send money on the over the internet, you're not sending paper bills, right? You're not faxing things or anything. There's no teleportation. Yeah, but it takes three days for no reason. Exactly. Well, it takes three days because they want to prevent money laundering and fraud and they didn't have an efficient way to do that until blockchain came along. Libra Association is saying, hey, we have the technology to do this better now. What if we did this across multiple currencies and just eased things up for people? Yeah, but I still don't have an explanation for why ACH doesn't work on a weekend. Do you know that that doesn't because you need a I think it's because you need a guy named Pat to push a lever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's why. See, I'm comfortable with that. Second, you go to store it, you go to Starbucks, there's no line. You're like, what's wrong? I got to get out. I got to go because everybody used their Bitcoin to buy their Starbucks over the app. That's why Walmart confirmed that it uses computer vision technology as part of its missed scan detection surveillance program that identifies scanning errors as well as missed items at checkout. The system began to roll out two years ago and is deployed at more than 1,000 stores looking at both self-checkout and human cashiers. You can understand why this might be needed at self-checkout for sure. But even human cashiers might miss that somebody grabbed something and stuck it in a bag or maybe they're colluding with the person who knows. It's down at the bottom of the cart. The system works fast enough to notify employees about the miss and scan the missing item it leaves before it leaves the store. So this is meant to to prevent theft. It's interesting that it it's sort of mimics Amazon goes store model where you just take stuff that you need and leave the store and you get charged for it based on what you've taken. This is this is a theft prevention tool. But it, you know, as as the lines kind of blur more and more, you know, how often are are you going to be able to go through a register and kind of not worry about, you know, you know, arguing with somebody over whether the eggs were on sale or not because it's all just sort of in the system and and automatic. That would be nice. I would like to understand more about the computer vision technology. I didn't catch like exactly what is it doing? Is it looking at the shapes of the stuff left in your cart? And then saying, OK, wait a minute, we didn't have a shape like that. I didn't really mean it's AI. So they trained it to say this is what it looks like when something has been missed, send an alert when you see that. And so you don't train it on a thing. You train it on like we pretend, you know, having it do this sort of process and then alerting and and doing reinforcement and saying, yes, you got it right that time. That's the thing about AI. We don't always know. We don't know how it's doing. Yeah. I yeah, that bothers me. But OK, I'm I already said I didn't believe in cryptocurrency, so I can't say I don't believe in this. Only get one each show, right? We'll let you have as many as you want, to be honest. That's that's that's fine. I don't believe either controversial. I can see where you could have some healthy skepticism of whether cryptocurrency and blockchain would work in practice for what they're saying they want it to. I think it's likely that it can. It's been proven in other ways. This this sort of thing, though, I mean, this you've got a whole Amazon Go store, like you said, that just does even more than this. This is almost a limited version of what's possible. And Walmart did say that it's it's reducing what was the word they had for the shrinkage? They did say that they have been able to measure significance or some amount of shrinkage for these stores that have this computer vision technology. I was in the pool. Yeah, nobody has stole a portable pool since this went into place. All right. Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act or CDA 230, as you'll often hear it called, says, and I'll quote, no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. In other words, if you're running Facebook or a message board or whatever, you're not liable for the things people say on your platform. This is especially important for ISPs that are transferring all kinds of stuff all the time. U.S. Senator Josh Hawley has proposed ending this. He has the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act that would remove CDA 230 protection from any company that has more than 30 million active monthly users in the United States or 300 million worldwide or more than $500 million in revenue. You meet one of those three criteria, you lose your CDA 230 safe harbor. Now, companies could apply to get it back. They'd have to go to the United States Federal Trade Commission and submit an audit of their content moderation policies. And then the FTC would look it over and see if the platform's moderation was politically neutral. If four of the five FTC commissioners agreed that it was politically neutral, then they could get their CDA 230 protection back. Wait a minute. So this is only about politics. This is about political neutrality. So Senator Hawley is about decency. Well, forget the name of the act. The it doesn't matter about decency. CDA 230 says you can't be liable for what someone else publishes. And places like Facebook rely on this to be able to allow folks to publish stuff. Otherwise, they'd have to approve every single post. Right. Hawley is saying, I'm going to take away that protection. Unless you can prove to me that you are not oppressing speech based on political orientation. It's but so they can suppress speech on all kinds of other things. Well, it's not politics. No, that I think you hit the nub of this. If I lose my safe harbor protection, it is now in my interest to suppress all speech, whether it's political or not, just in case I want to get my safe harbor back. I have to prove somehow something that's probably very difficult to prove because it depends on who's looking at it. What they think is politically neutral speech. And so if I can't get that back, I am definitely going to be suppressing all kinds of political speech, whether it's not because I don't want to be liable for it. This makes absolutely no sense. And the specifics of 300 million worldwide, 30 million active monthly users are 500 million in revenue. So basically, are there. Yeah, is there basically just one or two companies of Twitter, Facebook, you know, Apple, maybe Google, Amazon? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is this is so obviously targeted. They're definitely going after Facebook and Twitter in this. And it's need some mouthwash. Well, it is a bill designed to appeal to voters because it says, hey, I'm going to protect you. You got you folks have been worried that you're you're you're not able to say what you want to say, I'm going to protect you. That's great. But the solution is just a stick to say, hey, you big tech companies, I'm going after you, which also appeals to the voters. Everybody hates tech both sides of the aisle these days, right? So it's not about this bill making sense. It's about winning votes. I'm going to wash my mouth out with a better story. OK, Verizon has been dethroned. AT&T and it's fake. I mean, it's 5G evolution isn't actual 5G, as Tom will tell everyone. But I have had like three or four people last three weeks think it is 5G. Anyway, the 5G evolution does make AT&T America's fastest mobile network in 2019. PCMag reports it drove through 30 cities and 25 states running 60,000 speed tests to determine the fastest mobile network nationwide with Samsung Galaxy S 10 phones. AT&T currently has more LTE spectrum than T-Mobile or Verizon, according to Fierce Wireless. However, AT&T spectrum is often fragmented, coming in many small pieces rather than few large chunks, which is advantageous with many modems. That part I didn't know. I didn't realize that that that would take advantage of this fragmentation, which helps AT&T be able to make better use of its spectrum where it couldn't before. Oh, OK, so you're not saying fragmentation is a good thing. It's just fragmentation makes your network run more smoothly, at least with new modems. It didn't used to before. It was like, well, we can't use all of this spectrum all the time. But now new modems can grab those pieces of the spectrum. So now even if your spectrum is fragmented, you're like, yeah, but we got more, these new modems can handle that. I need to start running some speed tests so that I feel like it's faster. And it doesn't matter. It's still not going to work in my house, just so you know. Well, and that's why Sasha Segan and the PC Mag folks do a great job at this. They go drive around the country, taking samples. They don't hit every state, but they do get a good representative sample. And I always rely on this to kind of get a sense of where things are going. And it makes sense to me that AT&T wants to boost up its LTE speeds, whatever they're calling them, their LTE. They want to boost up their LTE speeds in advance of 5G actually rolling out. Because when people buy a 5G phone and subscribe to 5G service, when they're on LTE, they don't want to see a noticeable drop, right? So they won't have to be as fast as possible. So they've been improving that. Actually Verizon and T-Mobile have been as well. And AT&T has just, you know, given credit, done a really good job of that. You know, at the same... I heard you say something nice about AT&T, but we're having to, right? Well, Verizon too. Lying about what is 5G on there, they're doing a very good job. 5GE, come on, it's fine. They're number one. Extra 5G. I'm a Verizon customer. I'm more or less happy with... I'm not necessarily happy with my bill every month, but I am happy with the coverage. However, I think stories like this, they always tend to... There's always somebody who's like, yeah, well, you should hang out in my house sometime because I have to like be pressed up against the window on the western side of my house in order to make a phone call. Because you just have these weird pockets. No matter how good any big company's network is. And you turn on Wi-Fi calling and you still have four calls dropped this week alone. That's a saying. You should get a different provider then. I mean, I had Verizon in the Bay Area and it was great. Loved it. I moved down here and Verizon in the neighborhood I was, was awful. Hated it, switched to T-Mobile. Now it's great. Sometimes when I travel, T-Mobile, not so great. Just kind of depends on where you are. It's inside my house. If I want to go to the front door. You get a different provider in your house then. The call is coming from inside the house. Psych, it's not even going through. USB or a universal serial bus for anybody who might have forgotten has been historically a little hard to plug in correctly. Because you always get it wrong, right? Adjay Bhatt, who led the team at Intel that created USB, tells NPR in an interview today that the design for USB was intentional and that a version that could have plugged in either way would have been possible, but also would have required double the wires, double the circuits and double the cost. Bhatt went on to say, quote, in hindsight, based on all the experiences that we all had, of course, it was not as easy as it should be. The newest model of the USB interface, which is USB-C, very prolific these days, was released five years ago and is reversible. Wasn't always though. Did he explain why it takes three times to plug it in, though? In the article, why it's wrong, right? That is human error. No, my daughter gave me a video of my grandson. He's like two years old and he grabbed a USB cable for some reason. He tries to plug it in. It goes wrong, wrong, right. It was it's in human nature. It's there's some it there's some it's I think the first wrong is actually right, but we're too tentative. Yeah. Yeah. We're being wrong. And then when you get the second wrong, you're like, well, that one definitely is wrong. And so you go back and you give it a little extra oomph when you put it in. I think the USB-C has been out for five years and has solved all of this for all of us, right? Yeah. Yeah, we have zero problems. Thank you, USB-C. No, it is kind of funny. And I'm sure we've all had these moments where you plug it in and you're like, of course I got it wrong, of course, because you get it wrong so many times. That's like, you're used to blaming yourself. There just must be some reason why I'm getting it wrong all the time. It's the same way I feel about my Apple TV remote. I hold it wrong at the beginning every single time I'm trying to change the channel or change whatever. I got a case for mine, a little rubber case from Alibaba, and that fixed it. Well, there are solutions. Except when I grab it and we're actually watching Tivo and it turns the TV on, switches it to the Apple TV. But I think there are so many of us who have gotten it wrong so many times, we're like, the universe is conspiring. There's just no way I would get it wrong this much. And here's the thing. Do you remember RS232, do you remember all of the serial cables? Yeah, I have to sit there and go like, I think the angle is there. And then even when you know, it's right, you're like, but the pins aren't quite there. But that's usually because it was like on the back or something. You know, you were looking at the boat. These were, you could have had them be lots more expensive and be reversible. But I get why they said like, then people won't use it and we need uptake. Remember, USB is universal now, but it wasn't always. So they needed people to get use USB. So they needed to make the cables cheap so they could be included in the box with the device. So you'd just say, oh, well, I have the cable. I'm going to use it. So I like this this defense of like, yeah, no, we knew it wasn't optimal, but there just wasn't an optimal solution that would have worked. Now, you're going to be apologizing for how badly they name them with this USB 3.0 and 3.1 and then never defend that. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Yeah, they hate us. Yeah. Well, it's now it's 3.175 five G E. No, the naming is dumb, but most people don't care about the name. So if there is a defense of that, it's that man, probably doesn't affect most people in their daily lives, right? It only affects us when we're trying to buy the right cable and we get annoyed. USB C does get rid of the reversibility problem, though, right? Yeah, I love USB C and when it's thunderbolt and you don't know it or it isn't thunderbolt and you thought it was and it was USB C and it didn't charge. Other than that, I love it. How often does that happen to you? Oh, yeah. Well, there's the speed of the cable actually affects like I've got a dock that'll do. I mean, I realize it's an issue that does that happen like with any of your setups now? Well, I know it's happening. I don't notice the speed difference, but I know it's wrong. So it totally bothers me, Sarah. Well, I don't know. I think it's I think it's for all of us who have been like, ah, USB is the worst. Why can't they just make it reversible? It is nice to know that the new one who led the team is like, we knew that we were trying to make it cheaper for everybody. OK, we understand. Yeah, not. He was I guess that's why I like the story is this is a person going, no, I wasn't an idiot. And no, you're not wrong that it would have been easier to make it reversible. But you weren't there working on it, making the decisions. Here's why I did it. I will add before then you had to deal with at least two to three different style of cables, right? Whether it's a parallel, Centronics, you know, serial R S two, three, two. It literally made everything simple overnight. Yeah, you can plug in backwards, but you know what? Both ends are different, so suck it up. Yeah, Roger is the final word. Right. I see you. You're just tweaking us. He says, I've never put a three point five millimeter headphone jack in the wrong way. Like, entirely different thing. You don't have an option to do that. Analog signal. Wait, but then there's the three ring versus the two ring, whether you've got a microphone on it, too. Yeah, I see you. Yeah, plot thickens. Well, I think that's all that we have to say about the USB. So thank except to thank our dear friend and inventor, Ajay Bhatt, we appreciate your work. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. Also, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. We're also on Facebook. If you hang out on Facebook groups, join our group. If you haven't already, Facebook dot com slash groups slash daily tech news show. Let's check out the mailbag. You know, our very own Alison Sheridan, who happens to be our guest today, wrote in earlier this week about Monday's show. Alison says you were talking about Instagram not continuing their human help to regain access to a stolen account. You felt that a human helping would be better for users. I have a counter example. Most or all of SIM swaps have been accomplished by the user being able to talk to the human at the carrier at the carrier into thinking that they're the real owner, perhaps not having a human in the mix is better for the user to regain their account. Yeah, there's problems both way, Alison. You're right. It's it's not. And remember, Instagram isn't discontinuing the human help. They're adding the ability to do it without a human in the mix. But that it still bugs me because when you're talking about this, if you train people right, they are more effective at restoring the account if they do it. When you do the automatic thing, if it works, then I'm on your side. I guess I just wasn't trusting that Instagram would make this work because they haven't been able to make it work yet. Yeah. And I guess one thing that we don't know in this entire story is maybe 900 million people successfully regained access to their account with human help or without human help. But the ones that didn't, it was actually somebody scamming and doing the getting the SIM swap by faking who they were. So it might actually be very successful. It's just that when humans are involved, that's where you can do the well sort of stuff where you fake your way through. The SIM swap stuff usually has to do with bad practices, too. They don't properly have the impediments set up to stop someone because they're like, oh, well, nobody would ever do this. No one would ever lie. So it happens so infrequently. And then suddenly it was happening frequently and they didn't change their policies in my experience. When you fall back on, well, we just need to train the people better. That's where it always ends up failing. Because oh, yeah, no, I agree. People are the weakest link. But it wasn't even just about training the people better. It's they train them wrong. It wasn't it wasn't humans making mistakes. It was the policy said, if they say this, go ahead and give them the new SIM. And that was a bad policy. OK, OK, I got you. Thanks to everybody who gives us feedback every day. Keep them coming. And also, thanks to Alison Sheridan for being with us this fine Friday. Alison, where can people keep up with your work? Well, the best place is podfeet.com. And I want to plug a fabulous chit chat across the pond. Light episode. And I love my own definition of light. I interviewed Dr. Devin Palaszek about her work rehabilitating psychopaths in prison, violent criminal offenders and how she's been able to rehabilitate them. She recently won the Queen's birthday honor as in Queen Elizabeth. And her perspective on the work that she's done is absolutely fascinating and a little terrifying, which is always fun. Yeah, not light at all, but kind of amazing. You know, that's what I call light. People just write psychopaths in jail off, right? Yeah. Well, maybe we can actually rehabilitate them. Yeah, actually, she's demonstrated that they have been able to. That's great. Yeah, very cool. It's a fun interview to she's she's awesome. Well, folks, we like to remind you that the best way to support independent tech news directly is at patreon.com slash DTNS. It is the majority by far of our income. And we like it that way because it means we're only answerable to the people who actually listen to the show and want to support it. If you want to have influence over the show, if you want to. We just had our quarterly hangout yesterday and we asked people like send us things through our discord, through our Patreon. That's where we'll pay attention the most because we know you are invested in the show. Then become a member, patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Keep the feedback coming. We love hearing from you. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Be back Monday. Talk to you then. This show is part of the broadcast network. Get more at frogpants.com.