 Coming up on DTNS, Binance goes to Venus, Reddit goes live, and Twitter goes in with the ban hammer. For Monday August 19th at 2019, from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Also helping us produce today is Amos. Hey Amos. I am no longer the intern Amos. I am now just Amos. I could call you intern Amos if you like. You could, but it'd be... It would be outdated. It would. Yeah, I think, you know, you've graduated to just Amos. That's what he is, everybody. Just Amos is with us today. Tom Merritt is out this week. He's doing a little vacation, had a fun meetup over the weekend, so I hear in Dublin, Ireland. But we're going to keep the show rolling here. In fact, before DTNS started, we were talking about zombies, how their brains work, do they have brains, and all sorts of CW shows. You can get the wider conversation on our expanded show, which is called Good Day Internet. It's a lot of fun. And you can join us by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sources tell Reuters that the U.S. Commerce Department is expected to extend the delay on U.S. trade embargoes against Huawei, granting the company a temporary general license to buy from U.S. suppliers for 90 days. The license would enable Huawei to buy supplies, maintain existing telecommunications networks, and provide software updates to Huawei handsets. However, the company would still be barred from buying components for new devices. Some good news for families, at least if you use Spotify or Roku, Spotify's new premium family plan will give parents filter options to block songs that include swearing or have violence or drugs, and more through an explicit content filter that can be applied to individual accounts on the family plan. Another feature called Family Mix gives user access to personalized playlists for the family, and Family Hub makes it easier to add and remove users, adjust controls, and update accounts. Roku's own Roku channel is launching a new kids and family section alongside the channel's other content, including its free ad-supported movies and TV, live TV, and also subscriptions. Roku's also rolling out parental control features, so parents have more control over what their kids are watching within that channel. Speaking of kids and adults alike, Disney released launch dates and pricing for its Disney Plus streaming service. The U.S. starts November 12th for $7 a month. We're prepaid for $70 per year. Canada and the Netherlands will also start on November 12th. Canada goes for $8.99 Canadian, and in the Netherlands, $6.99. 6 euros and 99 Euro cents. Australia and New Zealand will follow on November 19th, priced at $8.99 Australian per month, and $9.99 New Zealand dollars per month. Platforms supported at launch include Apple TV and iOS devices, Android mobile devices Chromecast, and Android TV web browsers Roku, Xbox One, and the PS4. AI startup Cerebrus System unveiled the largest semiconductor chip ever made. The Cerebrus wafer scale engine is a 1.2 transistor processor designed to specifically tackle AI. It features 400,000 cores on 42,225 square millimeters, and unlike traditional processors in which a batch of processors are created on a single 12-inch silicon wafer, only a single-scale engine processor is created from the silicon wafer. Good work, Cerebrus. And Xiaomi announced it's working with fellow Chinese OEMs Oppo and Vivo to develop an interoperable peer-to-peer file transfer system for their Android-based devices. The protocol will use Bluetooth to pair devices with a goal of 20 megabits per second transfer speeds. A beta will be available by the end of August, and Xiaomi stated other smartphone makers can also apply to join. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about the future of crypto. The cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced that it plans to launch an independent regional version of Libra, and it's going to call it Venus. Libra, of course, is Facebook's upcoming cryptocurrency. Venus would be based on the Binance chain blockchain and develop localized stablecoins and digital assets, pegged to black currencies. Binance will provide technical support and compliance control while offering its existing technical infrastructure and regulatory establishments for Venus. Binance's CEO, Cheng Peng-Xiao, said that he hopes that Venus would help push overall cryptocurrency adoption and is more than happy to coexist with Libra. That was a tweet that he sent out when someone said, ooh, Binance, they're going after Facebook. Now, whether or not he would like to peacefully coexist with Facebook or just be a lot more popular than Facebook's upcoming Libra, well, you can draw your own conclusions there. But, Roger, it seems like what Binance is doing might be kind of smart because it's localizing these currencies based on country rather than create something that feels all-encompassing globally. Yeah, like, you know, a lot of the details still haven't been revealed. But the way I understand it is that they're going to kind of do a localized version of cryptocurrency in which they will use existing infrastructure and the public blockchain, their Binance chain and an international payment. So the way I understand it is that they are trying to pegged to fiat currencies that are more localized. So instead of which Libra, which uses a basket of internationally traded currencies like the U.S. dollar, the euro, Japanese yen and any other currencies into a basket where then that basket will be weighted to see what value a Libra coin will be worth. This would be a little more localized and might be able to help countries that may or currencies that may not have the weight or the heft of like the U.S. dollar or the euro on the international scene but still allow people to kind of engage in a cryptocurrency. Especially trading within that, within their local currency. Yeah, which could be huge for a lot of these economies because up until then you basically, if you're like in Argentina or something you would have to trade your currency of the basis into an international currency like U.S. dollar or whatever to kind of then get into that cryptocurrency. Yeah, it's interesting. It's funny because while we have talked about Libra quite a bit since Facebook announced that it was working on the rollout and has had some government pushback there are still a lot of questions about how any of this is going to work. Yeah, and they still have to figure out how they're going to deal with countries who, you can peg anything to any currency, whether or not the country that you're pegging to will be happy about it is a different matter and then whether or not those citizens in that country will be able to take use of it is another matter unless they have a different investment or usage scenario that they haven't explained. Well, something Reddit is explaining is it's new public access network also known as our pan. It's a test limited time live stream experiment set to run from 9am to 5pm through the end of this week with a full rollout in the coming weeks. Yes, you heard me right. Reddit is adding live stream capabilities for its users and says any user on the platform can start a live stream. Alex Lee, Reddit's VP of product says, we know that our users are familiar with streaming across their internet experience because they're seeing it on other platforms. It's become an expectation that a platform should offer this. They also says that the network will be tightly curated with a maximum of 100 concurrent streams that are running no longer than 30 minutes each. The Reddit community will be able to upvote and down vote streams just kind of like how Reddit works in general live chat during other people's broadcasts. Again, anybody can launch one broadcast whether or not anyone watches it is going to have all the same problems as on other platforms. Restrictions for live streams because of course people say, oh, it's Reddit. Oh, no, what kind of Pandora's box are we opening here? The company says we've thought a lot about this. Live streams can't have any not safe for work content, no dangerous or illegal activity, no quarantine eligible content that refers to what other Redditors might find defensive or upsetting. That's why certain subreddits get shut down, for example. So, you know, it's funny when I first read the story and it actually got sent to me from a friend who goes, oh gosh, you know, this is it's Reddit. You know, because we have had as of late some issues with bad content being live streamed and those live streams not being taken down in what some people in the community feel was fast enough and there are algorithms who might be missing this sort of thing. And you see questionable content on Reddit. You also see a lot of great content on Reddit. In fact, the lion share of Reddit content that I at least consume, I find invaluable. It's a cool community. It kind of depends on how you use it. I just don't really watch a lot of live stream content in general, mostly because it's such a raw feed of so many things that unless I've got a really good reason, I find it not edited well enough. You know, you got shaky video, you know, it's and that's probably just due to the business that we work in where we're trying to, you know, make everything as well as we can. Yeah, but I just, you know, I don't, I don't, I haven't launched Periscope, which is Twitter's live stream products for I can't even tell you how long. Don't have a reason to don't ever watch anything live on Facebook or Instagram. I will say this Reddit is actually being very proactively cautious about this. They're implementing human, or at least they say, moderated by Reddit employees for the content of the video. You know, this could either turn into one of the greatest things that Reddit has done, or it could turn it into a giant, let me paraphrase Justin Robert Young, a portal to hell or a hell portal where this could literally devolve into the worst mess. It really is up to Reddit at this point and how they kind of manage and regulate the content here, because as anyone who's used, you know, Reddit, the subreddit can be, I've come across some really, really informative and well-spoken individuals on certain subreddits, and then you get the exact opposite if you hop somewhere else. So if they can, if they can manage it to keep it on the rails, it could be a pretty good thing. And I think the Reddit community has, and somewhat fairly, somewhat unfairly, again, yeah, depending on who you're talking about, there is a reputation for gaming the system in general. And the community aspect of Reddit is so strong, which is part of why people like it so much and why it works really well in many aspects. And so, yeah, a live stream that's designed to break the rules, let's say, and go into any detail of what the content would be, break the rules, and figuring out how long that stays up before it's taken down for violating those rules. I think there are legitimate concerns, but we'll see how it goes. NVIDIA announced its upcoming GeForce Now streaming service will be coming to Android through a new mobile app later this year, similar to Google's upcoming Stadia service, probably trying to coincide on the date a little bit, although NVIDIA did not give us exact dates, just said later this year. Now, it will officially launch out of its current public beta for Mac, PC, and Shield TV with flagship devices from LG and Samsung. Now, Google Stadia is going to come to the Pixel 3, Pixel 3a, and the assumed Pixel 4 in November, so it's possible that NVIDIA might have some bit of a leg up using devices from multiple manufacturers. A Bluetooth gamepad will be required as some games will be unplayable on an Android phone without that gamepad. And NVIDIA is also rolling out GeForce RTX servers for next-generation gaming in the cloud with data centers in Northern California and Germany, and says it plans to roll out more data centers across Northern California and across Europe soon. Roger, I know you, in fact, you mentioned that now that you've got a phone, so many mobile games can be played on that phone, don't even necessarily need another dedicated small mobile gaming device, does this excite you knowing that Google and even Microsoft with XCloud will have competing services at the ready as well? Well, what's interesting is I've used GeForce now for at least three or four months, and that is on my NVIDIA Shield that I have connected to my TV. And I have to say it works pretty well. So long as I use the wired connection to the Shield and not my Wi-Fi, it works really well. This is getting to be a very crowded field. I think some of the questions I still have regarding, especially specifically on mobile platforms, is their demand for some of these types of games, because essentially what they're doing is they're giving you PC games that you can access on your mobile device and play that way. A lot of these games require a controller with a lot of buttons, and if you try to replicate that on the screen, it gets kind of messy. But you also have issues of connectivity as you are streaming these over a data connection. And what if you hit a cell tower on your commute to work on the subway that just happens to be loaded with people trying to catch a new trailer or something, and the connection begins to get kind of wonky? Does the experience get affected that way? So, honestly, there's been a lot of attempts to make smartphones into gaming. Gaming devices on par with game console or PC gaming. I haven't seen anything in here that would at least change my mind and say like, yeah, this is something I totally need to get for my phone. If it's for the living room, that's a different matter, right? That's a different experience. Being mobile, that's kind of a harder thing. Up until now, a lot of the games that have been most popular on mobile have been freemium games. Not necessarily the style of games that Nvidia or even Google is offering up. Well, here's a story that is still developing as of our recording, and it involves politics, but we're not going to try to stick to the tech angle of the story as much as we can. Twitter and Facebook have suspended numerous accounts suspected to be tied to a Chinese state-backed information campaign. Amidst current protests that are happening in Hong Kong. So here's the story. Twitter suspended 936 accounts associated with the believed misinformation campaign. Twitter has a blog post saying that's exactly what it is. Accusing that I'm trying to quote, so political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political protest movement on the ground. In a blog post, Twitter also said, quote, Going forward, we will not accept advertising from state-controlled news media entities. Any affected accounts will be free to continue to use Twitter to engage in public conversation, just not our advertising products. Twitter has now said it also proactively suspended about 200,000 spammy accounts before they became substantially active alongside its initial ban of those 936 China-linked accounts. As for Facebook that we mentioned at the top of the story, the company said, A tip from Twitter led it to remove seven pages, three groups, and five accounts also believed to be involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior targeting Hong Kong. A lot of people saying, well, applause for Twitter, because this is setting a precedent that folks had accused Twitter of not having enough of a ban hammer-on initially. That is anything that is state-organized, anything that is state-controlled, they can't buy advertising to promote a tweet that ends up in my timeline. So I think on the surface, that's the good part of this. The bad part of it is misinformation campaigns that are going to cause more confusion and chaos to an already chaotic situation, obviously bad and designed to confuse, which it probably has on some level. I think what this really underscores is how much social media has now become the preferred medium for a lot of these kinds of misinformation campaigns or disinformation campaigns, but even beyond that, in the way the political space back in the 80s, as recent even as the mid-90s, typically your choice was big newspaper outlets where you would put an opinion piece, whether it's from a diplomat or from someone else to kind of carry your point forward. But now, because of the ubiquity of Twitter and Facebook, and because it is such a global reach, China's version of Twitter, Weibo, is still localized to Chinese citizens who use it and then move abroad for study or work. It's going to be increasingly, I think, more chaotic space, and I think both Twitter and Facebook will need to invest more resources into kind of setting up some sort of framework in order to address it because they're no longer just companies, they are a platform for anyone. And with that comes all sorts of not liabilities but burdens that you're going to have to carry and need to decide, which is something, when you start a company, you might not necessarily think that was something you had to worry about. Well, yeah. Well, it's such a weird conundrum, right? Because the companies are saying, okay, we've built these tools that are so good that they can be manipulated using the techniques that we described for bad reasons. We've built them and they're being used and now we have to roll back some of this and figure out how to keep the tools but keep the people who are misusing the tools from the tools. And I know this because Sarah and I went to college together. We both took media literacy classes as part of our undergrad work. I think this is something, understanding social media and how to navigate it will need to become a standard kind of thing where you teach kids not just in college but like high school or maybe even earlier because it is so easy to get wrapped up because Twitter, Facebook, it's more about emotion than actual facts, right? Because you're dealing on a level of human interaction that kind of just blows by and you need a way for people to kind of at least self-regulate by understanding what's happening and what they're looking at. Yeah, I think it's definitely literacy and it's also just the barrage of information. I find myself having to check myself regularly on this too when I'm kind of following a story and stuff is coming in so quick and I might believe something without really double-checking that second source here and there and have to do a little backtrack. I mean, that'll happen to anybody. I now double-check everything just as a habit now just because of the way things have evolved. Well, the story will continue to evolve. I can bet my Bitcoin on it as the week goes on so you will probably be revisiting it with us on another DGNS in the coming days. But for now, let's move on to Scooter. Scootermaker Segway Ninebot unveiled the semi-autonomous three-wheeled KickScooter T60 which has a cool feature. It can return itself to a charging station all on its own. No driver required. Early customers for the new Scooter include Lyft and Uber. Segway Ninebot will start road testing in September with hopes for a Q1 2020 launch. The price is estimated to be close to $10,000, which is about $1,420 US. So it's not a cheap Scooter, but it's a cool Scooter. You know, in my old neighborhood in LA, which was way out the beach in Venice, scooters have been ubiquitous for a while to the point where they'd be piled up in certain areas, you know, in alleys. There were so many scooters, but it was also just kind of beachy. There were lots of little trails and stuff. It was perfect for the scooters, very widely used. Less widely used in the area of town I live in now, but they've started to crop up. You see the munk corners, you see them in front of someone's house. You see people scooting around, you know, alongside traffic, this and that. So in a way, I think, wow, this is really cool because right now, if I scooted home, well, then it's going to stay there until someone takes it and then I don't have another Scooter, but it's also kind of running out of juice because I'm nowhere near a charging station or not near enough anyway. So if the Scooter says he has some little internal thing saying like, okay, I can take myself back to the station and then I'm good to go in the morning, that's great. That's much more efficient than having buses round up the scooters, which used to happen in Venice, also more efficient than having the public help you charge scooters, which did happen a few doors down from me where I used to live, and then the house caught on fire and burned down and the fire department came and it was the whole thing. So I like this idea. I just feel like people are going to vandalize scooters that they see zipping around by themselves. You know, this is kind of one of the big, the big holy grails for a lot of these products is a way to get your product that someone rented out short term back to where it's supposed to be without involving the customer, right? I'm done with this scooter. I'm going to leave it here. If it could make its way back without injuring someone or getting itself in an accident or causing a fender bender of sorts, that would be great. There's still a lot of potential hazards, right? I was asked, we were talking about this earlier, is it going to ride exclusively on the sidewalk or on the road to get back? And if it does that, does it need lights? Does it need horns? What if you had one of these scooters walking in front of someone who's carrying groceries and not particularly agile enough to get out of the way or someone who might be vision impaired, you know, what do they have to warn them that this autonomous device is rolling down the block back to its nest? I would think that the only way to do this with any kind of success is it would be limited to certain routes back that would be a dedicated bike lane, back to the charging station. You know, even if it wasn't as the crow flies the best way to get back to the charging station, it would have to be some sort of designated route because, yeah, the rules of sidewalks are, I mean, you know, in general, I like to stay to the right whenever possible. But yeah, you got dogs with leashes, people, you know, which way you got kids. A sidewalk is not like a road where there's traffic, like legalities for, you know, stepping in front of somebody or stopping short or whatever. So, yeah, when it comes to scooters, you think, OK, well, if they've got the right amount of sensors slash LiDAR, they should be able to start and stop and do all that stuff. But it sounds like a great experiment. I wonder how well it's going to work in practice. Officials in Texas say a coordinated ransomware attack hit 23 local Texas governments on the morning of August 16th. Governments reported having issues accessing the Texas Department of Information Resources. The ransomware encrypts files and adds the .JSE extension to affected files, although no ransom note was left directing payment. The Texas DIR, the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the FBI, DHS, and the Texas Department of Public Safety all coordinated on recovery efforts. Man, last week we talked about Georgia and voting machines. This week it's Texas, even though this happened last week. This is going to become increasingly more frequent because, typically, most criminals target the softest parts of society and it seems that for a lot of them it is the data management or the data infrastructure of municipal or even state level governments. I think this should be a wake-up call because this stuff isn't slowing down, right? A month or two months ago we had two cities and two communities in Florida that were hit with something very similar. And I guess IT or at least security used to kind of be blown off like, well, who would want to hack us? But apparently if they secure some of the data that you actually need, perhaps a little more emphasis in those areas will help mitigate, right? If you had a backup copy of all the data, they'd just ransom word out. You could say, well, yeah, you know, nuts to this. I got a backup, you know, you go hack someone else kind of attitude as opposed to, oh, no, we're really in it because all the data we have for taxes or whatever bills or billing or payments is all in this one spot. It's not going to be any easier and I think it's definitely something that cities will need to take a closer look at. Yeah, the way that private enterprise stepping up IT efforts in places where it is deemed inadequate, same with governments. I think in general, we're moving in the right direction, but yes. 23 local Texas governments all being hit with ransomware. That's a lot. That's, you know what I mean, that's... Yeah, that's, you know, even if there was no ransom that was demanded, it's not really the point. Is it? The point is that this is an insecure infrastructure. Everybody to get all the tech lines, tech headlines rather each day. They're kind of like lines in about five minutes. Subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. And thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on others. DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. If any of you are going to be live streaming on Reddit, you should let us know. We'll check you out. Maybe you're really good at it. And we're also on Facebook. Join our group if you haven't already. Facebook.com. Slash Groups. Slash DailyTechNewShow. Dave from L.A., right now our hometown, well not hometown, our current town, wrote in about our discussion of the Amazon Choice Program last week. He says, Sarah, that's me, noted that it was sometimes hard to trust reviews on products due to the prevalence of fake reviews trying to game the rating system. You're right, Dave. I did complain about that. Dave says, a company called Fake Spot offers an effective tool in Dave's opinion in combating fake reviews in companies who use them by analyzing reviews of products and producing a trustworthy score, graded A through F. They offer plugins for popular browsers. It inserts the product grade onto the page where you can paste the product URL into the website for a full report that way. If they haven't analyzed a particular product on their analysis or their analysis is out of date, you can reanalyze the product and get more up to date reviews, support a number of e-commerce sites, not just Amazon, but also Walmart and Best Buy and other consumer review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Dave says, I've been using it for years. I found Fake Spot to be an invaluable tool in identifying good products and vast landscapes of Amazon. That is so cool. I'm going to check it out. I've never heard of this before, Dave. And I would rather be able to discern the fake from the real rather than ignore them entirely. Good stuff. Thanks for that. All right. Thanks also to our patrons, Roger, Amos, and I, and Tom, of course, in spirit today. We love our patrons. We love our patrons. And as a patron, you don't just get our love. You get good day internet. You get an ad-free RSS feed. We've got special behind the scenes episodes. Roger writes a weekly newsletter. Tom is doing more and more interviews that are more of a deep dive into a topic. They go a little bit longer. We're getting more in depth than ever. It is a wonderful place to be. And the patron community at DTNS is wonderful as well. So if you're not a patron already and you're thinking about it, today is the day. Sign up at patreon.com. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Write us early and often. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Patrick Neesha. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.