 Coming up on DTNS, Apple has new iPad Pros and laptops. Sony reveals specs for the PS5 and how much location info would you give up to fight COVID-19? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 18th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake, shaky, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang, show's producer. Yes, Scott had a 5.9 earthquake in his area there over in Utah. We were just talking about that, our toilet paper acquisition strategies, and more, get the wider conversation, become part of the show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A bug in an anti-spam system on Facebook started making posts linking to information on COVID-19 as spam. Facebook VP of integrity Guy Rosen tweeted that the bug was unrelated to changes in its content moderator workforce who were all sent home due to the virus to work from there. The posts were restored and Rosen clarified that not only COVID-19 posts were affected. Just a quick clarification, they weren't sent home to work. They can't work from home because of the private nature of moderation. So that was the worry was that they were sent home and weren't moderating. And he's like, no, it didn't have anything to do with it. Got it, got it. Interesting. Slack, everyone knows Slack, launched a redesign aimed at new users who can now compose a message before choosing which channel it goes to. Channels, apps, and people can now be arranged under custom topic headers in the left-hand navigation. Apps will be able to be available through a lightning bolt button in the text entry box. And a top nav bar will show frequently used channels as pending and pending messages. That is the features will roll out on desktop over the next few weeks and mobile afterwards have not seen the change yet. But I think it's long overdue. Let's go. Samsung forecast Wednesday that the effects of trade disputes and COVID-19 would reduce sales of smartphones and other consumer electronics. But that demand from data centers would raise sales of its memory chips. Chief Executive Kim Kinnom said he expects chip makers to focus on upgrading manufacturing processes rather than increasing chip capacity. Google's second Android 11 developer preview is now available with hinge angle detection support called Screening Improvements and updates to its neural networks API. It also includes a preview SDK with system images for pixels 2 through 4 XL and the official Android emulator. Those with the previous preview will get an OTA update. Google did, however, pause updates for Chrome and Chrome OS with the development team explaining on Twitter that adjusted work schedules have impacted Chrome progress. They'll prioritize updates related to security. All right, let's talk a little bit about what probably would have taken an hour and a half to tell us in a previous world that just came out as a bunch of press announcements today. New Apple products. Yeah, that's right, a whole bunch. Apple announced iPad Pros with LiDAR for depth sensing in the back of it looks a lot like your new iPhone 11 Pro if you have one. 8-core GPU, A12Z Bionic chip in a neural engine or with neural engine rather and embedded M12 core co-processor. Presser back and I can't speak today. M12 co-processor. The new chip allows for 4K video editing, 3D editing or 3D design and the AR. The 11 inch model starts at 799. The 12.9 model starts at 999. This is in silver and gray. They still call it space gray. Coming in May is a new magic keyboard with a backlit keyboard and trackpad amounts with a circular cursor that changes shape over different interfaces comes to the iPad models. And that means all of them, not just these through iPadOS 13.4 that starts March 24th. You can see a little bit in their commercial and in their video where they show up being used. It seems interesting. And some of the oldest iPads won't get it but if you bought one in the last four to five years it's going to get it. Yeah, if you can, I guess if you can support 13.4 you're probably okay. Apple also launches a 13.3 inch MacBook Air replacing the butterfly keyboard with scissor style keys. Many are rejoicing at this news. Storage ranges from 260 gigabyte, 56 gigabyte up to two terabytes of space. The new Air has Touch ID and 10th Gen Ice Lake Intel Core CPUs and Iris Plus graphics starting at $999. Apple also updated the Mac Mini with twice the storage capacity, a base model with 256 gigabyte. SSD costs $799 and the 512 gig model costs $1099. Mac Mini still use the 8th Gen Intel CPUs. Well, I gotta tell you, I haven't used an iPad regularly for some time now. When the iPad Pro came out I went, oh that's probably a good reason to get an iPad. I never have. I've never even played around with an iPad Pro honestly besides quickly at an Apple Store a couple years ago. So this is getting to the point where I'm like, I really want that. Don't need it, but really want it. Even just Apple's own teaser video which is always very splashy and makes it look like the coolest thing ever. It's so close to a laptop. It's like we're halfway through Morph right now. It's a solid hybrid situation although people who have other types of hybrid laptop tablets can probably point out how the iPad Pro isn't quite there yet on some of the features. But this is what I want. The trackpad has a lot to do with it. Keyboard looks good. The mouse stuff. We were talking before the show. We knew that that was happening already but it is a pretty cool little machine that I want to find a reason to need. Quick note for artists real quick. I meant to mention this before I forget. If you were going, hey I may upgrade to this because I really like all the new features but still it's primarily an artist tool for me. The good news is the Gen 2 pencil still works with this version of the iPad. You don't have to buy a new pencil like what happened last time. The downside is if you were a Gen 1 or Gen 1.2 owner of the iPad Pro and you have a Gen 1 pencil, those don't work with the newer iPads and you'll have to get one of these $130 if that's your plan. So just wanted to squeeze that out. Yeah, that's a good tip of mine. A lot of people are talking about the mouse capability. We've talked about this before on the show but it's cool. It's not always there. So if you're using it as a touchscreen, it's not gonna get in your way. It shows up when you're using the mouse as a circle so that it doesn't obscure things and also if you're using the touchscreen, it doesn't get in your way. But it adapts based on the interface which that was the part I found the coolest is it's not just the circle all the time. Sometimes if it needs to be a different shape to make things make sense, it turns into that. So that'll be kind of fun. This thing is more powerful than a lot of PCs but it's also at the top end anyway, the same price as a 13.3-inch MacBook Air which gives you full multitasking and a mouse all the time and all of that. So kind of depends on what you want at this point but it's a very powerful tablet. Yeah, it's sort of like the iPad Pro gives you more flexibility as to the form factor but still depending on again, yeah, which apps are you running? Which programs do you use all the time? What do you need it for? The air is possibly the better idea and it is about as light as air. Back in a quick note about the Mac Mini's in December, I picked up a Mac Mini maxed out as much as I could for production work here in the studio and I've been very, very happy with it but I was really sad this morning when I heard about this until I read up on it and so it's, there are improvements but it's not that big of a deal. So if you were like me and you weren't late last year, early this year picked up a mini, it's not that different. It's a nice incremental change but not that much. Sony announced the PlayStation 5 will have a custom 8-core AMD Zen 2 CPU at 3.5 gigahertz variable frequency with a custom variable frequency GPU based on AMD's RDNA2 architecture which promises 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units. The PS5 will also have 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 RAM and a custom 6,825 rather gigabyte NVMe SSD for load time of five gigabits per second. The PS5 will also have a 4K Blu-ray drive and support USB hard drives as well. That's five gigabytes per second in case somebody was paying close attention. It's gonna load fast. That was what Sony was really paying attention to here is the fact that they will have fast loading times off of that solid state drive. They're trying to make an argument that because they have variable frequency in the processors that a lot of times this will be as good if not better performance than comparable or more advanced CPUs looking at you, Microsoft, which just edged them out on pretty much all of these specs in the Xbox Series X announcement. Fact of the matter is, if you get powerful enough games down the road that will max out the CPU and then you don't get the benefits of the variable frequency. But at least at the beginning, you probably will. And I'm sure Sony will put out upgraded versions with upgraded CPUs at some point down the line. But Scott, I mean, that said, what do you think of this PS5? I'm impressed with the specs. You're right about them being, I mean, honestly, an actual practicality is probably not gonna be all that different when you get the same third-party game side-by-side and we won't really know until we start doing that with Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. However, the five gigabyte per second load times, that's crazy. We're talking like a 45 average second load time today will be diminished to like a four, four and a half second load time based on what they told us. That's just crazy time and a very exciting thing for gamers. I'm also really happy to hear they're gonna let you continue to support external USB storage. I assume that means not just SSD external storage, but USB-based spending drives and things that are cheap right now. And probably for the PS4 games because those don't get the advantage of the fast load time anyway. Yeah, that's a good point. Plus, at some point, a lot of times what you're doing is just storing data and you're not so worried about access times. The real access time performance is gonna happen on the main drive with the game you're playing right now anyway. All of this looks good. I think both consoles look like they're really shaping up to be interesting. Honestly, to me, it's going to be a fight over services and exclusives. Sony's gonna have a strong out-of-the-gate exclusivity deal going, which they have already, which is what made their last generation so strong for them. And Microsoft really poised to do interesting thing with services. So that particular point of competition is maybe more exciting than the specs to me. So well, yeah, the specs are close enough. But as Roger, our producer points out all the time, it really depends on the prices of these things. Like the spec difference can seem larger or less important, depending on what the price of the Xbox and the PS5 are. Yeah, $4.99 each, by the way. That's just my guess. That's your prediction? All right. Tesla workers who produce, service, deliver or test its electric vehicles showed up for their job Wednesday at its Fremont, California factory despite the fact that Alameda County is under an order to shelter in place. That's where that factory is. Alameda County requires non-essential businesses to close. Tesla's human resources head Valerie Workman reportedly told employees that the Department of Homeland Security considers Tesla to be national critical infrastructure. But Tuesday, Alameda County's sheriff declared Tesla non-essential. However, in an email to employees Wednesday, Tesla said, quote, we have had conflicting guidance from different levels of government and so they're staying open for the time being. Now this is in a spectrum situation. If you can work from home Tesla wants you to work from home. If you're sick, they want you to stay home. They're doing a lot of things to help employees work from home if they can. But they're keeping the factory open and doing a lot of cleaning and things to keep it safe. Whereas other automakers are just shutting down. Han does shut down its 12 U.S. plants for six days. GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler are expected to announce shutdowns for all factories today if they haven't already. You will hear that they will. So Tesla's bucking the system here and I'll just go ahead and say it right now. These companies need to either not be shutting down or continuing to make their vehicles. They need to be retooling their factories to make what is important to fight the virus. This is becoming a World War II type situation. And I remember my grandpa worked for American Can Company in the 40s and they became Amritorp. He worked for Amritorp and they made torpedoes until the war was over and then they went back to be an American Can Company. And that's going to have to happen to a lot of factories. I think if we're going to make up the gap in this country anyway of a lot of the supplies we need for hospitals to fight this. Yeah, do you see a day where, I mean, I know so little about either industry but people talk about the shortage of respirators and that sort of thing. But it seems like certain manufacturing concerns may have capabilities beyond just the card. We did a story on DTNS about, I can't remember who it was, Foxconn but it was a consumer electronics supplier. I think it was Foxconn that was retooling to make, I think masks, but they were making health products. I don't know enough to say what Tesla's supply, what Tesla's factory is best suited for but it is perfectly conceivable that it could retool to make something. It could make batteries. There are all kinds of things and that's what these companies should be doing is saying, what can we do to help? Tesla's trying to say, our batteries are important, our cars are important for transportation. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Sounds like DHS might be telling them that but what I wanna hear Tesla saying and all these companies is, we are here, tell us what you need and we will try to make it. I will do a quick note that I think it was sharp that was transitioning one of the factories to making masks. Yeah, I think Tesla's saying, well listen, we're getting conflicting reports. Sheriff wants us to shut down but Homeland Security says we're critical infrastructure. That is true, I mean cars are critical infrastructure. If there's an emergency and you need to get somewhere and you can't do it on foot, you need a car, right? So Tesla is in that category but yes, I think in this situation that we're in now, you're right Tom, I mean being able to flip a factory to do something that really is extremely important in an emergency situation that we're in that would be critical infrastructure. Yeah, that's my thoughts in a nutshell. Well, also infrastructure for the future anyway, perhaps critical in the future as well. Satellite company, Link, that's Link with a Y, tested one of its orbital cell towers meant to provide phone connectivity from space without needing special satellite phone hardware. A text message was sent to an unmodified Android phone using one of its satellites which the company claims is the first time this has been done from space. Link satellite was deployed from the International Space Station on January 31st after being delivered by a SpaceX Falcon 9 back in December. Link needs a few dozen satellites to provide service and believes if it can get regulatory approval it could have service running by the end of this year. Now 4G service would require thousands of satellites but this is a start. And the satellites are small, these are mini satellites. You can launch several of them at a time. So it's possible for them to get thousands up within the next two years and Link doesn't want to be a main service provider. They wanna be a supplementary provider. They actually wanna sell their service to existing carriers to say will help your coverage map become 100%. So that no matter where you are even if you're out of your ground cell service area you can connect seamlessly to ours. That's the technology Link has developed. So they wanna provide supplemental coverage in those little places that don't have great coverage and also rural areas where there just aren't cell towers built and this is a promising technology if it works as advertised. It's impossible to not read this and not think about the kind of supplemental connectivity we might be able to enjoy during times of crisis. Yeah, right. Yeah, so I mean even if this rolls out slowly and it's not the fastest types of connections the sort of things we're used to with our broadband home-based land-based stuff. I don't know, every time a story like this comes up I just think oh here's an opportunity to learn a little something like maybe we can come up with some cool back-end solutions that are also very usable when times are great and everybody can have the full coverage you were talking about for these carriers and everything else but in these off times maybe this is a great way to bring connectivity to places that can't get it to really need it when a crisis hits. Well folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Washington Post sources say the US government is in talks with tech companies including Google and Facebook about how cell phone data could be used to slow the spread of COVID-19. Health experts involved in the talks believe that aggregated anonymized location data would be useful. They don't necessarily arguing that you have to have individualized information in this particular conversation. In other words, knowing general patterns of human movement could help inform disease spread. You wouldn't need to know who the people were or whether they were sick or not you just know oh people are going here or there. As an example, Andrew Schrader is a Vice President of Research and Analysis at Direct Relief. That's an international disaster relief organization in Santa Barbara, California. It's one of 125 nonprofits and research institutions that use data from Facebook's data for good program. Direct Relief has used it to track population movements during natural disasters and disease outbreaks since 2017. So he's been working with California officials to gauge how much people are complying with recommendations to stay home. Facebook data is chunked in 600 meter tiles. So that's enough to not be able to track individuals but to know like oh yeah people are still going to the bar even though we told them not to. Facebook also launched co-location maps in Hong Kong to show where people from different geographic locations are most likely to cross paths. That can help understand how likely people in an outbreak spot might intersect with other locations. So if you're in a neighborhood with an outbreak and you know oh those people from that neighborhood they actually go to the neighborhood too over all the time. You know to tell that neighborhood too over hey let's start testing you. Let's start doing preventative measures here. It's only useful if there is useful case location data and here in the United States the CDC only releases data on a statewide basis. So they can't do it here yet. Now separately from all of this conversation about hey can we get some of this location data to be used by the government. A letter was co-signed by epidemiologist executives physicians and academics suggesting that tech companies provide an opt-in privacy preserving OS feature to support contact tracing for individuals who might have been exposed to someone with the virus. This would allow if there's enough testing to say okay we know I know I came in contact with someone from the virus because I was in this place at that time let me go get tested to make sure I'm okay. Israel is enabling something like this by passing a law requiring the use of mobile phone data to track people who have COVID-19. It can be used to identify and quarantine those who have come in contact with them and enforce the quarantine restrictions on those who are definitely infected. Again this requires testing to carry out carriers will be required to share subscribers location data with Israel's security agency and health officials. So here we have proposed ways of doing this a sort of a broad way of saying hey can we just get some generalized data so we know where people are. There's a little bit more specific data of hey can we get people to give us their information so we might be able to track where infected people are going. That only works if you have very comprehensive testing and then you have the government in Israel's case just mandating we're going to know where you are and we're going to test you and if we find out you're infected we're going to take appropriate action. You may have levels of comfort that differ with all of these different approaches but there are some examples of this that we can look to that have already happened. South Korea created what's called a virus patient travel log and the government published routes of people from before they were diagnosed. The government just went and mandated this information and said look if you were diagnosed with COVID-19 we're going to publish GPS history, credit card transactions, surveillance video and personal interviews with patients to say this person went here, here, here and here so that other people could check that. A central website and text messages were used to alert people if they might have crossed paths with infected people because they knew this infected person went to this store this person was in that store at the same time let's alert them so they can go get tested and they had comprehensive testing in South Korea. Anybody could go get tested they had drive-through centers etc. As of Tuesday, South Korea's 50 million people appeared to have greatly slowed its epidemic. It reported 70 new cases on Tuesday down from a peak of 909 February 29th and it has done so without a lockdown. This system was what they used to mitigate the spread. If you don't know this kind of information then you have to tell people to shelter in place because you don't know who's infected and who isn't. Singapore's government hosts a website that includes the age, gender and occupation of all its coronavirus patients and where they traveled recently Singapore also seeing a low transmission rate and some Japanese regions have made some public information about patients movements including gyms, restaurants and hospitals available but they've taken a little more of a privacy protection route there Japan's infection rate does not seem to be too terrible right now either. So here's the question knowing what the effects are where some privacy was trampled and there are lawsuits in South Korea over what the government did there and knowing what's happening in other places like Italy where the infections are still growing all the time and they are in lockdown, how much and I'm not saying I have the answer how much privacy are you comfortable giving up in order to combat this? Well, could it? Oh, go ahead Sarah. Well, here gentlemen first. I'll just throw this in because it seems like it goes a little bit with what Tom was saying earlier about manufacturing products during wartime or in a time like this where you tool up to do something else that will help with the situation. Couldn't something like this be couldn't some of this be temporary measures or do we need or is there enough data that can't be gathered if we're not doing it all the time? I guess it'd be the question is there is there a way to do this? So it's like for now for the next foreseeable months we got to do this and it's here are the benefits and yet well the other worry is that once you let them start doing it they won't stop even though they say they will. Yeah. Or people just get used to it and all of a sudden you know we're in a situation where it's gotten away from us and you know the privacy will never come back. I think that if this had been proposed I don't know as recently as just a couple of weeks ago without the data from certain other countries where it's like this was effective and here's why even though it's going to upset some people there's going to be some privacy issues there's going to be some people who are a backlash right? If it would I think a lot more people would be like hold on a second now we're not going to start tracking people who are sick kind of thing. The fact that a lot of this has to do with where you were before you were sick or before you knew you were sick that's the data because that's where before you're starting to act accordingly because let's just assume everybody in the world wants to keep everybody else safe for the most part right? We're all trying to do what we can. The lockdown thing happens because it's like we don't know how to get a handle on this so let's just go the absolute extreme measure because that's the only choice we have. If it was again temporary because this is a crisis situation and everybody wants it to go away as soon as possible for health and economic reasons and all across the board I am okay with this. I'm okay with at least in let's just take the U.S. government as one example because I can't speak for everybody in every country. This would be okay with me if it led to fewer cases of COVID-19 in the near term instead of skyrocketing numbers. I agree. I'm ready for it. I have no problem with it. I already feel like so much of me is already out there and again I want to speak for other people. I know there's going to be disagreement on this but if it meant slowing that to those rates take my data. I don't care. But what if it doesn't? Because that's where we are in the United States where one element of this that made it work in South Korea was they had comprehensive testing. So in exchange for, you know what? You're going to give up some privacy. You're going to have some embarrassing revelations that you went to a love hotel but we can have everybody tested. And so if you know you encountered somebody you can test, find out, add it to the app and then that will help everybody know where everyone else is and we can all go about our business a little more securely because we know where the infected people are. If you don't have that testing then you're giving away this private information for what? Yeah. I mean if it was sort of like hey this is going to help and someone somehow knew it wouldn't help then of course that would be a huge problem. But if it's designed to help and doesn't end up being super effective down the road it doesn't mean you shouldn't try necessarily. We know what I'm saying is the system that works requires comprehensive testing. So do you launch it when you're like look we hope to get comprehensive testing so it might not work but we would like to violate your privacy anyway even if it's for nothing. I mean it comes down to confidence. Are you confident that the testing can ramp up fast enough to make this work as well? I guess if you had situations where someone was like I'm not going to self quarantine. I don't think I'm sick. I got stuff to do and they at least had enough information to know that they had been in contact enough to have against reasonable doubt that they might have it then maybe they'd be more likely to stay home. I don't know. I'm just riffing here. It seems like more effort is better than less. But it isn't. At some point if you don't have the combination you don't have the effect. You need to have both sides of the system going for it to be worth it because otherwise you're just you don't have enough data because what's really important is knowing who's infected and who isn't. And if you don't have that data you just have guesses and that's no different than what we have now. Then you're just taking data for nothing. I agree. It's got kind of a kind of it's got a real chicken and egg problem. And I I guess maybe you know hey how about how it ready to go so when the testing ramps up and we're actually there well then maybe then but I feel like I feel like I just I hope that whatever South Korea did it seems like they did it better than anybody else did it and I just hope we can learn from it and not lose our shirts in the process. Well if you'd like to discuss this further Discord would be one option that you could do it. You can join our Discord. Lots of lots of topics are discussed in Discord but it's a great community. Link your Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns and start chatting away. Let's check out the mail bag. Let's. Matt works for a technology supplier had some thoughts on our charter discussion from yesterday. Charter saying a lot of people should come into work. That's that's how we are more effective as a company and not encouraging stuff to work from home. Matt says since last week when companies have been announcing they're having everybody work from home we have been inundated with requests for everything from notebooks monitors headsets other related equipment. So much that the distribution channel has been completely stripped bare where weeks out on most hardware orders related to work from home setups on top of that if companies haven't been set up in advance with the most with the with the right VPN technologies it may be impossible to have their team set up with these policies for weeks now call centers are particularly difficult to pivot to a work from home configuration. He also says thanks for providing a really great podcast. I look forward to my daily drive home so I can connect with my DTS Palace. Thanks Matt and this is important to bring up just in general that there are a lot of work from home situations that can't happen because the the company's just never needed to prepare for this kind of situation is unforeseen circumstance that said and I'm not I'm not treading on Matt's point here at all Spectrum was not one of those companies from patrons who work at Spectrum to DTNS engineering information system administration and enterprise support teams already operate under a disaster preparedness directive they have VPN access company laptops and full remote access so in Spectrum's case it wasn't that they didn't have the infrastructure to do it they just want to prioritize super serving clients over what I consider to be the safety of their workers in this particular case but that may not be true of other companies just because this is what Spectrum's doing if you see another company not letting companies letting employees work from home it may be because of what Matt's talking about Hey, just want to mention really quickly that my next Live With It segment needs your help because we're trying to figure out the category that we should go with we've got a post up on Patreon you can add your thoughts in the comments you can email us at feedback at daily tech news show or any other way you'd like to get ahold of us but if you've got a great idea for a category a tech category within financial reason of course we'd like to know so that we can we can get me into that guinea pig pen again and making notes shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including Tim Ashman Philip Shane and Jeffery Zilx also thanks to Scott Johnson you made it through an earthquake this morning good to have you safe and sound here on the show today what else has been going on with you? Well, other than the various aftershocks a lot of cool stuff the main thing I would like to point people to is art makes me feel better in times like these so I draw a lot and I also have a comic that I put up every Monday called Fred and Ken it's about a guy named Fred and his sentient can of expired cream corn that he talks to all the time and if you think that sounds weird well it is and I think you might enjoy it today is very topical the current strip that's up there so go check it out fredandcan.com you can find everything else I do over at frogpants.com or on Twitter I'm at Scott Johnson Hey folks direct support is the best way to keep this show independent by that I mean Patreon it pays for our livelihoods we're incredibly respectful and appreciative of that now more than ever but just know that we understand a lot of people are getting laid off a lot of people are facing some hard financial decisions if you need to cut the direct support cost for a while we have other ways you can support the show and not feel bad about it take care of yourself and other folks here in our Patreon have already started to pick you up in the meantime because they have the where with all to do that more incredibly appreciative of those people as well you can always promote the show to others as a way to show your support patreon.com slash dtns our email address is feedback at daily tech new show dot com and we love your feedback keep it coming we're also live Monday through Friday that's 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC put it on your calendar tell a friend daily tech new show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young we know we'll be here we've got nowhere else to go talk to you then this show is part of the frogpants network get more at frogpants.com hope you have enjoyed this program