 Coming up on DTNS cyber espionage goes IRL a new attempt at a social network You won't be angry with and our online ads worthless This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday November 7th 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm Roger Chang the shows producer I Was having a good time talking about Ford versus Ferrari. We were talking a little bit about Olympia in Washington That's all on good day internet If you want to find out what we talk about there and become part of the crew join us patreon.com slash DTNS Let's start with a few tech things you should know Sources told the Wall Street Journal that Google is considering changes to its political ads policy and has held internal meetings on the subject Maybe sharing information with staff later this week Google's employees speaking to the journal suggested that the changes may involve restrictions on what audiences ad buyers can target Tumblr added a group chats feature that they can have up to that can have up to a hundred members Be you can be created and managed by any user and be publicly viewable chat owners can invite and remove members Delight delete messages and any tumblr user can report a chat for violating tumblers hate speech policy or community guidelines Group chats will surface in tumblr searches along with other content Uber and Waymo agreed an illegal settlement over those trade secrets that were allegedly shared by former employee Anthony Leventowski To have an independent expert review Uber's autonomous car code Well the results are in in a quarterly securities filing Uber disclosed that as a result of that independent review Uber would either need to pay Waymo a license fee or Reengineer its software which uber says in the filing quote could limit or delay our production of autonomous vehicle technologies Microsoft HoloLens 2 has begun shipping The headset cost thirty five hundred dollars and is being delivered to customers who pre-ordered in France Germany Ireland New Zealand The US Australia and the United Kingdom HoloLens 2 is lighter and more comfortable Supposedly and has an increased field of view from 34 to 52 degrees along with full gesture tracking Google announced it open sourced the software for its phone based VR cardboard saying it shipped more than 15 million Cardboard units, but has seen usage decline over time Google says it will keep adding new features to the open source project and Add an SDK package for the Unity game engine Google previously published the technical specific Specifications for the cardboard VR viewer back in October Google discontinued its daydream VR platform And YouTube announced an updated design meant to maximize room to the videos and their titles plus other new features Including an add to queue option on the desktop and a desktop version of YouTube stop suggesting feature Redesign also adds higher resolution previews and gives more space to the channel icons beneath each video Wouldn't be nice. We we could we can have longer titles now. There's more screen real estate Oh, if only we were still on YouTube. Well, I guess we are still on YouTube. So sure we can yeah the collective way Let's talk about the death of advertising which will now ruin the internet Justin Mmm reporting live from the death of the internet Tom the correspondent published an article today entitled The new dot-com bubble is here. It's called online Advertising and quote the argument walks the reader through the evolution of online ads starting with a 2003 meeting Between then president of Viacom being horrified that Google's Larry Page Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin Believed that ad value could and was being measured at all fast forward to 2018 when more than 273 billion dollars are spent on digital ads globally According to research firm e-marketer with the majority going to Google and Facebook reporters Jesse Frederick and Morris Martin tracked down data and economic experts who had worked on a variety of big-tech companies over the last decade plus Coming to the eventual conclusion that the math men quote unquote don't really know how to accurately track consumer behavior Yeah, the this is there a lot of really good things to pull out of this. It's it's a well done piece the quote that I want to pull out particularly is most Advertising platforms can't tell clients whether their algorithms are just increasing increasing the selection effect or whether they're bringing in people who Wouldn't have come in otherwise. There's a there's a great example in there about eBay Saying we're making so much money off of our ads We look at the conversion rate and the amount of money we can attribute to each click and an economist was brought in and said Well, yeah, but you're also the top search result Like if you didn't pay for that ad you'd still be at the top of the page Let's do some a B testing and they found that paying for the ads Didn't really boost things that much that if they stopped paying for the ads that they would still Bring in a lot of clicks and make a lot of sales. So I Disagree a little bit with this headline and with a somewhat with the Conclusion because what they're saying is for a long time people didn't understand whether advertising worked But now they've been sold a bill of goods that it does but guess what? Maybe it doesn't maybe it doesn't work as much as they think it does and the conclusion I have a problem with is and that's going to stop people from spending on Advertising if it didn't stop them back in the television and radio days. It's no reason it would stop them from doing it now Absolutely, like there's at least some level of accountability here in a world where there was absolutely none You had no guarantee that there were any eyeballs on your ad now Where we could see a bubble is Fraud on the back end or some kind of increased understanding that these are that you are deliberately Wasting your money not necessarily that they're that they're trackable, but they're wasted Yeah, I mean the the the the What you said Tom about eBay being at the top of search results and maybe spending money that it did not in fact need To burn to get the same result. That's interesting. You would think that a company would would would go a Heavier R&D into figuring out how to spend less money Instead of just spending money that some you know department at some point was created to have and there's a budget And you got to get through it through the year type thing, which I think is I think that is in general What the article is going for here is we have set up this process based on a lot of data And you know a lot of economic experts and when you really sit down and talk with a lot of these folks It turns out that there are a lot of differing opinions on what's really going on and there are a lot of really smart people who are simply working for Very high wages at companies like this because somebody at the company heard wants that you had to do it this way Correlation is not causation is a big lesson pulled out of this this piece from the correspondent And I'll leave it at this. I'll end it with this The disruption to advertising is going to come from someone who can appear to Verify better than what we get from Google and Facebook because that's what Google and Facebook did to the existing advertising industry AMD announced the Ryzen thread ripper 3970 X and 3960 X processors built on the Zen at to Architecture offering 15% better performance per clock the 3970 X features 32 cores and 64 threads running at a stock 3.7 gigahertz frequency with turbo speeds of up to 4.5 gigahertz The 3960 X offers 24 cores and 48 threads running at 3.8 gigahertz with a turbo speed up to 4.5 gigahertz as well Both processors have 128 megabytes of L3 cache 88 PCIe 4.0 lanes for IO and a 280 watt TDP The processors will run on the new TRX 40 platform would support for quad channel memory the 3970 X costs $1,999 and the 3960 X costs 1399 at launching at November 25th I will not take away from Roger Chang's enthusiasm here Roger. I know I know you're probably the most excited of all four of us This means this means a lot. I mean other than the fact that you get 88 PCIe lanes Although once you go through the massive whittles down to like 64 or 68 This really proves that AMD is in it to really win it. I mean they don't just want to be the crown on the Power versus the value proposition. They want to be like top dog like just pure performance and They're doing really well It's so much so that Intel recently as we know a couple of months ago cut their prices in half because they were feeling the heat Yeah, so if someone would like to buy Roger one of these cards, so let us know feedback Yeah Give Roger a card T-Mobile will activate its 5g network in the US on December 6th of This year 200 million customers will have access at launch with 5,000 cities and towns covered by the end of the year At least they might get to that in a second T-Mobile also plans to launch a $15 a month 2 gigabyte plan and a $25 a month 5 Gigabyte plan each plan would get an additional 500 megabytes added each year for up to five years as a little bit of a loyalty Thank you T-Mobile will also offer 5g service for free to first responders So police firefighter EMTs for a decade and lastly 10 million children were 10 million low-income households with children We'll get a hundred gigabytes of home broadband access a year and a mobile hotspot for free But the children won't get that Wi-Fi unless those mean 15 US attorneys general Drop their lawsuit trying to prevent the merger of T-Mobile in sprint that that trial starts on December 9th It's not gonna get resolved by December 6th. That's for sure So I'm a little curious how that's gonna work John Legere, but T-Mobile really on the charm offensive here You know, it's and I understand that you know T-Mobile stands whether or not It's true or partially true is that well We need the influx of you know the combined company to be able to have the money to be able to provide these services Sure And and maybe maybe it's lip service and maybe maybe it's all true But it's very hard to be like, you know what we'll do we'll throw in some some some data to the firefighters You know when they're trying to keep people alive, but you know what we're not gonna do that if this merger doesn't go Through we don't care that much the merger to go through first It's almost like bringing it up makes them look bad Yeah, well, and you know next what I've heard and I'm reporting exclusively is internet for wounded veteran dogs from overseas and for newborn babies, you know Look, look, they won't have the network capacity to cover all those firefighters if you don't approve the merger Exactly and and they won't have the 5g to save this puppy in John Leger's office Unless you approve the merger and we're not saying we're gonna kill the puppy I just feel like they it's you kind of run the risk and there are a lot of jokes going around about this today because Again, it's just you know, it's it's dangling something in front of people being like, don't you want these cool things? Well, you better approve our merger But uh, but you run the risk also of being the company that promise something that then you took away And and and these are really nice things. It was the 15 attorneys general that took it away, sir That's that's now, but you don't always remember the story that way. Do you remember this? T-Mobile said that they were gonna give kids the internet and then they didn't poor kids Hey, I got something for the kids. It's a new attempt to solve social network concerns and it's launched today It's called friended and it's available for iOS. Let's you post one thing Every eight hours Responses to that thing are only sent to you and not posted publicly So you can have a private one-on-one conversation with other users Once you talk to someone you can add them as a friend And the app is free unless you want to post more than once every eight hours Which will cost you four dollars and 99 cents Awake Wow Gets you a few other features like being able to talk to folks near your location I will say as an intrepid reporter I signed up for friended before the show and I just on my watch got an alert saying They think i'm a bot What? Yeah, what kind of alert is that? It just says Uh, uh, hello from friended. You're not real for real. All right, it actually Oh crap. I can't bring it up. This is breaking news. I signed up with no problem Uh, it just wants an email address because it's going to authenticate you by email It's only for iOS. They do say they have an android app under development But you just use the same phone all the time and it's it's going to assume you're fine and Uh, it seems to be full of people who are lonely That's what I have found so far because it's kind of like how tiktok just gives you stuff You don't follow people. It just gives you stuff. That's what friended does It just gives you stuff and the stuff i'm seeing are like man just sitting at home alone wish out of friend Like okay, is this Stuff that the company created to make it seem like you were connecting or is it just that there's a lot of lonely people That have downloaded friended today. Yeah, the problem with this the the the idea that Okay, you know you use instagram as the most obvious example like everybody's life is so glamorous everybody looks so good You know filters have you know made it a beauty unattainable and and and it's and it's screwing with the rest of us Because yes, you might be that lonely person being like wish I had a friend right now and I really don't So I understand what friended is doing by saying we're going to take away the likes We're going to take away, you know the the all the glamour that kind of is is is potentially screened with people's heads by saying, okay, if sarah posts something Anyone might see it, but as soon as just in response to me, it's just between us So there's no kind of outside influence going on you're not you know posturing for other people But the problem is is that the company has has said yeah There's you know, there's a lot of social network loneliness and people Needing to connect and we think that this is the better way to do it It might be in certain instances, but I think you're going to get a lot more lonely people using it and if nobody responds to your post Then that's not helping that's it's almost worse in a way because you're just maybe looking for like just the one friend To talk to you. I don't I don't really see what this is solving unless it's a little bit more of a Hey, you want to talk about something really heavy? This would be the social network to do it and maybe friended will become something like that It's kind of a dating light app too, right? It's like, oh, I just want to have a conversation Maybe I'll lead somewhere. Maybe I won't I could see that being a pivot for them at some point Just just to give you a sense when you log on they ask you a prompt And so for me it was what takes what's something that takes you a lot a long time And I said answer emails and apparently that's the exact thing about say I just had to take the kindness pledge This is like the fifth time I've opened the app today and it said you you agree You agree to be nice to people if not say no and delete the app Yeah Who's the guy who's like, nope, I will not take the kindness pledge. Bye Yeah, by the way, we didn't have Tom. So do you still have the app? Yes, good question Yeah Speaking of kindness, this is a weird one overnight in the u.s Some mobile customers from pretty much all major carriers reported receiving text messages That appear to have originally been sent on or around February 14th, which is valentine's day in the u.s of this year So almost a year ago the texts all appear to have never been Originally received so the send never happened. Nobody received them not getting it twice These are new texts except for the fact that they're just extremely old and there's a lot of context missing iPhone and android users were all reported receiving the delayed messages t-mobile sprint at&t and barizon also mentioned As were some regional u.s carriers some carriers in canada even a few Google voice users So somewhat of a widespread issue that there doesn't seem to be a very good Answer for a sprint spokesperson said that it was a maintenance update last night that caused the error T-mobile said the issue stemmed from a third party vendor and offered no information Further and and and the other carriers Haven't responded either because they don't want to or they don't know As with any instance of delayed messaging there are upsetting instances of texts Of you know referring to people who may have died Uh, who you there's no may have about it. There are texts from people who are dead They're just saying in general There are a lot of reasons you could get a text from somebody who actually sent you a text in february Where it would be extremely upsetting This is upsetting because these people are now dead and they weren't when they sent the text message Or weren't somebody that you you've fallen out of favor with and it is it's not a text message that you want to That is another example. Correct. Yeah But there there are verifiable examples of someone like I got a message from my sister and she died three months ago Like this message was sent when she was alive, but it didn't get to me. Don't know There are there are some examples of messages where someone said, oh mom's doing great today Because she was on february 14th, but she died since then like this this is upsetting to people I you know, I'm not saying there needs to be damages or anything But this is weird and it's it's really Unusual that we're seeing it spread across platforms. This seems like like a sms wide issue And these explanations from sprint and team mobile don't only explain why the messages might have got delivered They don't expect they don't explain why they would never sent in the first place Right, like if if no one ever received on february 15th, why did that why did that not happen back then? Right, even assuming that the valentine's day thing is just pure coincidence, which sees a little weird But let's just assume that it is yeah We don't have a lot of other answers for something that confused a lot of people and like you mentioned I mean with with you know in some cases very upsetting results Yeah, I think we need more information about this and it will keep our ears open Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com The u.s. Justice department has charged two former twitter employees with spying for saudi arabia former twitter media partnership manager and u.s. Citizen ahmed abu ma I'm sorry. Ah, ahmed Abu amo was arrested in seattle tuesday He allegedly spied on the accounts of three users on behalf of the saudi government And is being charged with falsifying an invoice to obstruct an fbi investigation He received a payment He changed the invoice to say the payment was for something that it wasn't that's that's what he's getting charged with Saudi citizen and former twitter site reliability engineer ali asabara is accused of accessing the personal information of more than 6,000 twitter accounts on behalf of the saudi government twitter actually discovered this and confronted asabara on december 2nd at least the accessing part of it And he said he did it out of curiosity He was placed on leave and left for saudi arabia the next day in the criminal complaint filed by the fbi twitter employees Are alleged to have been cultivated by Saudi government as early as 2014 to be used as sources of information And twitter told the washington post that it restricts access to sensitive account information to a limited group of trained and vetted employees that doesn't explain how asabara or Uh, uh abu amo were able to get in there. Were they trained and vetted? We don't know But this is a Really interesting turn of events where it's not the company having a cyber attack It's not the company having loose privacy policies that are manipulated for nefarious ends It's cultivating, you know human human resources And and using humans to exfiltrate information Yeah, you know, it's funny that we even lumped this in as cyber espionage because really this is just espionage An old-fashioned espionage that involves a cyber element. Uh, this has happened from the dawning of Intelligence units, uh in in the major, uh, you know modern civilization Uh, what is interesting about this in particular is that The middle east and specifically Saudi Arabia Qatar, uh, israel, obviously Have very active very aggressive divisions that often do the kind of traditional cyber attacks You know exploit stuff like that But uh, this is old school. This is this is 80s. This is this is the the the the americans the fx series level of How you get information from sensitive, uh areas Yeah, I mean like you say it's it's straight out of the americans. Uh, it's it's cultivating human assets and and I think That is the part that I understand why twitter is not going to say more than boilerplate about this because from this washington post report It sounds like twitter Confronted alzabara because they caught him doing something he wasn't supposed to do so. Maybe he wasn't vetted Maybe he stole somebody's access or or something like that or went in on somebody else's terminal They caught him They suspended him and then he bolted because twitter probably then I don't know may have gone to the fbi to say We've got an employee that did something suspicious here Yeah, the out of curiosity, uh Reasoning is that's a tough one to swallow More than 6,000 accounts. I don't know. Maybe you're really curious, but but uh, and then And the fact that uh placed on leave probably means that the company was like, well, you weren't supposed to be knowing that and then uh, the fact that he Got on a plane Assuming it was a plane um is is uh, this is all This is it's a it's a story like you said, justin. It's a story that It's going to be we're probably gonna hear a lot more about this and it's probably happening at a lot of companies I'll go ahead and I'll go ahead and bet that it is. Well, I mean it's certainly You know if you are all major Industrial powers in the modern world are trying to spy on each other Like this is just a constant that is happening It has now the focus that we have had more recently is the very easy ways you can do it Like you too can have some kind of foreign intelligence unit if you have a basement enough computers and people that are willing to uh try to you know spear fish and and do the the garden variety ways that you can gain credentials and access computer systems What is fascinating about twitter and and you would have to assume google facebook Any organization that tracks a tremendous amount of data many of which are much of it location data is They now are probably richer targets than some government entities because this is real time softer target and All you have to do is convince somebody these assets I mean, I you know these are I assume younger people because a lot of the staffs at these companies are on the younger side There's a lot of things that are very attractive to to do folks like that Especially when you're coming from a regime Saudi Arabia obviously has very different values when it comes to personal freedoms and uh more government controls over the lives Of their citizens There are there are ways in which they can make these these guys or their families either an offer to benefit or a fear of reprisal Yeah, and to to wrap it up here data is the new Whatever oil gold supplies like oily gold good gold bars covered in oil Data is the thing everybody wants and if you hold a lot of it You're going to be open to this this kind of uh of espionage. It's the it's an industrial espionage But I know what our show title suggestions will focus on good stuff guys Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit So many stories are surfaced every morning for the crew and we thank you for it You have good taste in tech submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com Also join in on the conversation in our discord happening right now But it happens 24 hours a day. You can link there at patreon.com Slash dtns All right, let's check in with chris christensen the amateur traveler who has a warning for travelers who take selfies This is chris christensen from amateur traveler with another tech. You're not hearing anything in it So as you know selfies have had a big impact on the travel industry But one woman recently went too far with her desire to get that perfect selfie According to an article from cnn travel She was spotted climbing up on the balcony railing on a royal caribbean cruise ship as they entered a port in the country of Haiti and when they were notified of it royal caribbean threw her off the ship metaphorically speaking that is And not only that but she has been banned for life from that cruise line So when you're thinking about taking your selfies do so responsibly i'm chris christensen from amateur traveler That's good advice chris christensen And i'm very glad you clarified that they just took her off the ship that they're over She just can't go back on the ship. She is safe on land We're on another ship i suppose let's check out the mailbag Let's do it allen who's written in before from the cornfields of southern illinois says as you all know I work in the manufacturing tech industry You identified that the driver In the uber story that we talked about yesterday that uber the autonomous uber car that had struck and killed a pedestrian Although there was a safety driver behind the wheel allen says the operator to me You identified that the driver which is which is what allen calls the operator was at fault allen says i agree completely but in my industry identifying that as a root cause Use not accepted is not acceptable to mitigate the risk We're expected to craft a solution that bypasses the operator from the issue So do you see that happening with driverless cars because you just can't depend on a driver? Well, yeah allen I think you hit on the the question right because at that point that's what uber was trying to develop right They're saying we want to get to a point where we bypass that operator. That's our that's our goal But we want to test to see if there's something, you know, we don't want to just deploy it. That's irresponsible So let's put it out there and test whether this works and see if there's any flaws in it Now that could be dangerous So let's put a human driver in the middle to you know be the safety net and and allen I had a great conversation back before with an email about this Essentially she was the safety net and the safety net failed now when the safety net fails that doesn't mean your design is wrong But it does mean that you need better safety procedures for your further testing and development Well, thanks allen for the email and also shout out to our patrons at our master and our grand master levels including jeff wilkes sonia vining and Tony glass also thanks to jesson robert young for being with us It's thursday We always love thursdays because jesson's on the show. What have you been doing since last thursday? Well, i'll tell you why I I would like to direct everybody to go ahead and listen to my politics podcast politics politics Because I think that we're in a pretty good stretch of episodes lately and if you enjoy a more You know I would you know, it's weird because I obviously have this kind of left of center personality So I like to think that I like to make jokes But the feedback that i've been getting on these episodes lately is that it's it's kind of more of a A sober take than you hear in the mainstream media about politics politics with an interest Of that is not about Inflammation I guess would be a way to put it but go ahead and check it out politics politics.com It's the ibuprofen of political discourse anti-inflammatory Uh, I really liked your your talk with andrew heaton yesterday. That was great. Uh, fantastic folks. Go check it out Yeah, this one was on the rise and fall of beto auror The the ascendancy of his senate campaign with the absolute Disaster that was his presidential campaign that ended last friday Well, folks, uh, we have new patreon rewards right here. Uh, some of you have been a little confused about the cookbook It's there at patreon.com slash dts. You click on posts You scroll down keep scrolling keep scrolling keep scrolling to november 1st Because if you turned off your email notifications or if it went to spam, you probably didn't get the notification And then you can get it. Uh, but we also have a new thing. We're just gonna mail it. You know what? We won't make you scroll at all. We'll just mail you a holiday card with art from len peralta If you sign up by november, I think it's november 28 says on the site But uh, sign up and uh, give us your address if if you don't feel comfortable giving us your address That's fine, but we can't mail you a card. Obviously if you don't do that So, uh, do all of that and more at patreon.com slash dts Feedback from you. We want it. We want you to send us email our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com We're also live join us if we can monday through friday at 4 30 p.m Eastern that's 21 30 utc and you can find out more and tell a friend dailytechnewshow.com slash live Back tomorrow with elson chariot. Talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frogpants.com Time and club hopes you have enjoyed this bro