 Coming up on DTNS, why Sony won't make as many PS5s as it could, why Amazon doesn't want you to buy so much, and why Twitter is a great place for oncologists. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 16, 2020 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 the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were having a very musical conversation, ranging from Wu-Tang Clan to rap music to limpisk it and more. On good day, internet, get that wider conversation, become a member of Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let us start with a few tech things you should know. HP Unveiled, the Z-Book Studio, Z-Book Create, and NV-15 is part of its Create ecosystem which it launched last year. Both Z-Books come with Next Gen Intel Core and Xeon processors, either Quadro or GeForce graphics cards, and claim 17.5 hours of battery life on a charge. Both are expected in August at hp.com exclusively, although no word yet on pricing. The HP NV-15 has a 10th Gen Intel Core i9, GeForce RTX 2060 graphics, optional 4K OLED display, up to 32 gigabytes of DDR4 memory, and a vapor chamber and two 12-volt fans for gaming. The NV-15 arrives in June and starts at $1,350, available at Amazon, Costco, Office Depot, and other U.S. retailers. Apple is reopening its first store outside of Greater China in Seoul, South Korea. Apple's single store in the country. On Saturday, April 18th, they will have reduced hours from 12 to 8 p.m., Apple closed all retail stores outside of Greater China on March 13th due to the coronavirus pandemic. Never heard of it. Lenovo introduced the 15.6-inch Legion 5 with AMD's Ryzen 4000H series chips, delivering six- and eight-core processing, GeForce RTX 2060 graphics, 1080p display, and a terabyte solid state drive for $850, arriving in May. Also coming in May is the 15-inch Legion 5i, starting at $830, $1130 for the 17-inch version, and $1,600 for the Legion 7. Any more entry-level 15.6-inch IdeaPad Gaming 3 has a Core i7-H series processor, GeForce GTX video, a 512-gigabyte solid state drive, and a 120-hertz 1080p display for $730. Samsung announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite. Let's get that right. The design of the device takes cues from the standard Tab S6, but features a smaller 10.4-inch 2400x1200 TFT display, a 1.7GHz octa-core ARM processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage that's expandable by microSD, a 7,040mAh battery, a USB-C port, and a headphone jack. An included S Pen stylus is supported but lacks the Bluetooth air gestures found in the Galaxy Note and standard Tab S6. The S6 Lite runs on Android 10 and Samsung's One UI 2.1 pricing not yet announced. Tic-Tac. Tab S6 Lite, just not a great name. Go ahead. Tic-Tac announced new parental controls are coming to its platform. The company will launch a new family pairing tool in the coming weeks that will let parents pair their account with their children. This will allow parents to set time limits on the app, restrict content available, and set who can send messages to their child. Also, starting April 30th, direct messages will be disabled for users under 16 by default. Facebook announced new measures to fight misinformation on its platform. In the coming weeks, the company will show a pop-up message from the World Health Organization to users who liked, reacted, or commented on content with harmful COVID-19 related information. The pop-up will include a link to the WHO's COVID-19 debunking site, which can be shared to other users. Facebook also added a Get the Facts page that curates accurate COVID-19 information and includes media fact checks. Facebook also announced in a related move it's no longer planning to host local events in place of its F8 developer conference and has in fact cancelled all of its physical events with 50 or more people involved through June 2021. GamesCon announced its conference in Cologne, Germany beginning August 14th has been cancelled. GamesCon plans to conduct a digital version of the conference. And the Libra Association, remember those days when that was a big thing that we talked about? Well, they've kind of thrown in the towel, at least they've changed the towel, they're using a different towel. They've updated their white paper to abandon the plan to create a stable coin tied to a basket of currencies and securities. Instead, Libra will release multiple stable coins, each tied to a single currency. In other words, just not a cryptocurrency, it's just based on real currency. They will have some sort of composite coin made up of fractions of all those currency-based stable coins, but it's essentially one-to-one. The first proposed currencies to have Libra equivalents will be the US dollar, the Singapore dollar, the Euro, Pound Sterling. Apps that want to use Libra also need to register and get licensed by local financial authorities just like they would with any other currency. So they've almost removed all of the reasons to use Libra instead of just using currency. But we'll see. Maybe they'll have some faster processing or something like that. All right, let's talk a little more about a rumor coming out of Bloomberg about Apple stuff. You're right, Tom. I do have an Apple rumor from Bloomberg. And indeed, Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu say that Apple is developing a high-end modular over-the-ear wireless headphone. They will reportedly feature magnetically-swappable earpads and headphones as well as feature Siri voice support, noise cancellation, and some built-in touch controls. Apple reportedly plans to release the headphones later in 2020. Earpads and headbands that you can swap out. So there'll be a leather one for when you want to go out on the town. There'll be a plastic one for when you're working out or like if it gets a rubberized one. It's kind of, this sounds very Apple-y. We have yet to see any pictures of these and of course it's just sources, although Gurman and Wu do some great work. So I believe this is probably a real thing. But it really sounds like Apple's like, okay, we want to take the tech that works inside the AirPods and make really good over-the-ear headphones out of it. Yeah. And if that's the case, then really what you're looking for is Siri control, which is really, really good on especially the AirPods Pro. They do really, really good balancing of outside sound. So even when you are wearing the units, you can don't feel like you're totally in a cave unless you want to. I don't know. I don't like over-the-ear headphones, but whatever. They're a passion statement. So this makes sense. I don't know how it really fits in with some of the Beats headphones that this would be indirect competition with, but I assume with the price points, you've got two different markets that you're. Yeah. You're marketing too. Bloomberg sources also have more news today that Sony informed assembly partners. It will make five to six million PlayStation five units for the fiscal year ending March in 2021. This is significantly fewer than produced for previous console launches. For example, 7.5 million PS4 units sold in the first two quarters after launch. The production limit is reportedly at least in part accounting for lower demand due to an anticipated high launch price, which might be 499 to $549, along with effects on consumer spending caused by the global pandemic. The pandemic has an affected production capacity. It's just kind of what people might want or be able to do. Sources also say Sony plans to use existing PS4 models to bridge new users onto PlayStation network services with price cuts on PS4s, probably coinciding with the PS5 launch. Yeah. It sounds like it's not a supply chain thing, which is what I had when I first saw the headline jump to the conclusion. It's that they just don't think they'll sell as many. I mean, that's what it comes down to. They expect that people will have less disposable income. They'll be not wanting to spend as much. I don't even think the price is so much the problem. This isn't that much more expensive than a PS4. It's just that they don't think people will want to spend money as much. And so then not having a super bargain item, which this won't be, makes sense that they wouldn't want to make as many of them if they don't think they're going to sell them. Kang Wei, Kang Wei, I'm making my way to the window because I'm buying early on the Sony has underordered PlayStation fives so they could build demand hype train. Everyone else, you're on the wagon behind me when this sells well. So you're saying you're going to get out there first to say Sony's doing this on purpose to build up the hype. I see. I got it. Yeah, that's that's that's my point. I mean, I think right now, look, everybody's betting right in terms of the supply chain, we have no idea whether or not we're going to have an economy that looks a lot like the one that we had in January or the one that we have right now. You know, it's so rare that we go from like everyone's betting. Well, I don't know whether it's going to be a raging bull economy or we're going to be in a great depression. So choose now because three years depend on it. I mean, that makes sense, right? If you if you think you can ramp up production fast, if you need to, it would make sense to under order. Yeah, but this is their Christmas. I mean, like there's no way that they're going to be able to probably run up. I mean, maybe if things turn around in two months, but who knows? Yeah. Earlier this week, we mentioned the UK app proposal for contact tracing. That's the one that has two levels, a yellow alert and a red alert. The red alert would require a health agency to confirm the diagnosis. But the yellow alert would let everyone know just based on what you say. If you're like, oh, I have a temperature. I have the symptoms. I better let anyone I might have run across know that I have been infected. Again, this is the privacy protecting thing where you don't know who the person is. But that, of course, raised concerns anyway about whether people might report they were infected when they weren't either by mistake or out of maliciousness. In a BBC article, Oxford University epidemiologist Christoph Frazier said that delaying contact tracing even by a day can make the difference between epidemic control and resurgence. So he's arguing that the yellow alert system is good because even though it risks false positives or malicious positives, that's better than being too late and waiting around for people to get a confirmed diagnosis. He said, quote, there would be more people receiving notifications as a result of false warnings, but actually it results in fewer days of people in self-isolation and quarantine because the effect of suppressing the epidemic more quickly outweighs the risks in waiting for a test before the notification. This is very, very, very important information. I'm glad it's getting out there. There's going to be a lot of conversation, not only in terms of effectiveness, but also civil liberties and a lot of these tracing apps as we go forward and make our way through this pandemic. However, and I say this with all due respect to our medical professional, but I believe that their opinion on this particular instance is about as good as a board 13-year-old who would like to troll and maliciously try to turn over the Apple Card on systems like this. And I mean that in that. Yes, all of this is correct, but I think that if you put out a system that is being relied on like this, that can be altered by anonymous data, then you're going to have problems. So you're saying that the epidemiologist, Christof Fraser, may be underestimating just how much somebody might be willing to try to upset a system that they can manipulate like this. In other words, it's not just, oh, a few people will make mistakes. Maybe we'll have some bad actors, but the worst that would happen is we end up quarantining a few more people than we would have otherwise. And that's airing on the side of the right. That seems to be what he's saying. But what you're saying is this is a country that has seen a campaign to convince people to burn 5G masks. So yeah, maybe let's not underestimate what people might be organized to try to do to disrupt this. And that's before you even get into state actors, right? And that this is just citizen hack, you know, citizen of the facing, right? Like, let alone somebody if you really, really want to do. Because I think, you know, the worst that could happen is that you have people quarantining based on bad information, right? But if the system gets flooded with people saying they have symptoms when they don't, then it just becomes useless. The yellow alerts become useless. And you and then you people ignore it. And that just that undermines trust. I think it's the tech angle is a good example of on one hand, you know, a lot of us are saying, you know, people, humans are pretty good after all, and we're all kind of banding together and trying to help nobody for the most part. We're all doing the right thing when it comes to technology. And there's a hole to be poked in a piece of technology or a system that's designed to work as flawlessly as possible. That's where humans don't always do the right thing because you want it. You want it. You want to break something that's breakable. Those aren't even contradictory impulses. Most people won't send false yellow alert things, but it's like spam. Most of us don't send spam either, right? But it doesn't take that many people to do it to start to undermine something. The Wall Street Journal sources say that Amazon made changes to its website to get customers to place fewer items in carts. Yes, you heard that right. This includes removal of the widget that shows what customers had similar items and they had bought that might relate to the item that you're thinking of buying. Maybe you want to add something on at the last minute, scaling back coupon availability as well and canceling several sales promotions. This is reportedly to put customer focus on ordering essential items to ease Amazon's logistical capacity, which is stretched real thin right now. Amazon also canceled Mother's Day and Father's Day sales. And sources say that Amazon estimates it's not going to be back to pre-pandemic fulfillment capacity for at least two months. Yeah, this is very similar to the story we had yesterday about them changing the percentage that they were giving on referrals. And we talked about that a lot in the context of advertising that this is money being spent and you don't want to spend money to encourage sales when you don't need them or they're counterproductive. This is even more to that point because this isn't spending money. This is trying to change consumer behavior to say, look, we're prioritizing getting hand sanitizer out to people who need it because that's important. And so we need to change our system. They the Amazon is literally trying to get people to spend less money on their platform right now. Yeah. And this is one of those logistical decisions that I think are probably made a lot more frequently. Obviously not this drastic, but we're just paying attention to a lot more because especially in the world where there are some states that are banning the sale of inessential items and physical locations. This is the only place where you're going to very easily get it. That is optimized for it. And as we're finding out now to optimize. Yeah, I think it's I think it's really interesting because we had someone right into a saying and they work for Amazon. So they didn't want to say anything else about who they are or what they do. But they said, look, Amazon, at least in part, is trying to prioritize doing the right thing. And that means cutting into their bottom line to do it. All right. Who knew video conferencing would become the most important tech product of mid 2020 and who knew Zoom would become the leader in the field? This show that was telling you the problems with Zoom back in January certainly didn't think that and apparently Zoom didn't think that either because they were not ready. However, they are trying to get their act together and Zoom pushed out a security update this week that will configure minimum meeting password requirements like length, special characters, et cetera, to try to encourage or mandate better passwords. Randomly generating media meeting IDs will go from nine digits to 11 to make them harder to guess and brute force. You can now stop the content of a chat message from showing up in your desktop notification so you don't get embarrassed if somebody's looking at it. Third party file sharing has been restored after a security review. Passwords are on by default now for all cloud recordings and must be complex and a capture challenge has been added when you click a link to watch a stored video to stop bots who might be trying to access it. Those last two, the password on default for cloud recordings and the capture challenge to stop bots for much of videos helped mitigate a security vulnerability discovered last week by CBS Interactive Security Architect, Phil Guimond. He found that using information in URLs for shared meetings, he could search for and find Zoom videos that had been made of those meetings and watch them because so many of them didn't have a password. Now, there were ones that did had weak passwords. There was a limit on password length for the passwords you put on your stored video. So he was able to create a tool that could exploit a limitation in those passwords to crack and view those videos. That's why they put the capture on. That's why they're requiring more complex password. That's why they're making passwords default. Guimond says Zoom stores all recordings in a single Amazon cloud bucket, making them easier to target. All right, but at least Zoom's trying to fix those things. Well, that's not helping them everywhere. India's Ministry of Home Affairs has become the latest like a Google, Apple, Germany, Taiwan, NASA and the US Senate who advise against using Zoom. Government officials in India may not use Zoom for official purposes and the Ministry issued guidance for those who wish to use it for personal communication. So everybody's clamoring to be the alternative to Zoom. Obviously, there's Skype, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, High Five, Fuse, et cetera. But Google's out there improving Google Meet. That is the tool used by schools, businesses and governments. It's the enterprise conferencing tool, not Hangouts, which is the one that anybody can use. Meet now lets Gmail users take meet calls directly from Gmail and a new layout option lets you show up to 16 participants at once. Something Zoom has made very popular. Also, Verizon announced Thursday it's buying BlueJeans to be sold as a secure communication system through Verizon Business. BlueJeans is an enterprise level video conferencing app as well. Among BlueJeans existing customers are Facebook, LinkedIn, Red Hat, Inuit, Zillow and Nordstrom. So that is a big get for Verizon. And the gold rush is on, y'all. Everybody's trying to be the next Zoom. Man, it's a real. Not with the security problems. It's a real neat one. It's funny because Zoom wasn't even the first Zoom. Zoom just got really lucky. I think, you know, a snappy name goes a long way. And it was a product that, you know, once people are like, we need we need a solution. We've never done this before. And someone says, I'd used Zoom and it kind of spread like wildfire. But it is one of many options that have been around for some time. Yeah, you know, there's obviously this is the new hot vertical. And it's not exactly a technological marvel. A lot of these protocols have been out there forever. It's just a matter of how you're wrapping wrapping it up and deploying it. But I think that this is a story that deserves to get the kind of attention that it is my town that I live in Oakland has a, you know, there are mayors giving weekly meetings and updates as many local governments are the broadcast, which was a full screen grab of a Zoom call had the Zoom ID visible like this is being used by people that are not exactly savvy on some of these problems. So that means that the baseline level of security needs to ratchet up. And I think that there's going to be a hot gold rush for a lot of these enterprise options. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, before we wrap it up, Tech Dirt called attention to a recent Andres and Horowitz podcast where several oncologists, those are doctors who work with patients who have cancer, talked about the great information they have been receiving on Twitter. Now there's other things that happen in the episode, but Mike Maznick over at Tech Dirt called out a couple of examples where they were praising Twitter, which you don't hear. And you also don't hear about anybody but trolls and journalists using Twitter for the most part. So this is particularly fascinating. The episode's participants were Dr. Bobby Green from Flatiron Health, Dr. Summit Shaw from Stanford's Cancer Center, and A16Z's Vanita Agarwala, a physician at Stanford's Cancer Center as well. The topic was how oncologists were dealing with cancer patients during COVID-19. These are high-risk patients, of course, so they are at bigger risk from the virus, and they also need to be treated for the underlying cancer. One of them, one of the doctors talked about how this is one of those circumstances where, quote, the art of medicine and judgment and how to apply knowledge about data to great areas of uncertainty really comes into play. So in other words, we need informed opinions from other people who know this because there is no playbook to follow. One of them had solicited opinions on Twitter and found it useful. Apparently six other oncologists responded to a question about treating a lung cancer patient with chemo, giving the increased risk for COVID-19. The doctor said, look, I would normally do chemo, but with COVID-19, I'm thinking not, what do you think? And he got six oncologists on Twitter to respond rather than people just making jokes about why you're trying to treat them for cancer in the first place, which is what I would have expected on Twitter. Another of the doctors talked about receiving information from experts on Twitter faster than if you had to wait for publications. In other words, other experts on Twitter posting some of their information before it hits the journals. Towards the end of the episode, they mentioned using Twitter to organize the creation of an international cancer registry for patients with coronavirus, something that is logistically difficult, especially when you can't travel anywhere right now. And Twitter was very helpful in getting people to contribute the data and the creation that was needed for that. So I don't know, this is a good story of like, hey, Twitter in itself is a tool like any other tool, right? Well, and maybe a good example of this is, you know, if you are an oncologist who is soliciting not just like random opinions from everyone, but opinions from people that you would probably take into consideration or already trust or both. And maybe there aren't that many people following you because maybe the kinds of things you tweet are pretty limited to your field. Twitter can be used all sorts of different ways. It's a great way to say, yeah, when you don't have a lot of troll followers, like if you didn't get on some, you know, suggested user list a long time ago, this is actually pretty great. And the whole kind of, yeah, like echo chamber of journalism and celebrities and people saying bad things and politics and all the sorts of stuff that you go like, oh, Twitter, what a cesspool. That doesn't need to apply. In fact, you could live your life on Twitter every day, never having to come into contact with any of that. I really think it just means, unfortunately, the greater your numbers, the more BS you have to wade through. Well, the more you have to prune, right? And the more you have to organize. And I think what this does shine a light on, which I think is undercovered, is when we were in a world where everybody could interact, you could always say, oh, you know, somewhere between healthy, holistic living and Luddite was this instinct of like, well, turn off your phone, go out into the world and experience life. Whereas now we're obviously dependent on technology a lot more. And a lot of the things that probably didn't get a lot of coverage that had been happening for a long time, including teleconferencing for health or getting data or communicating with patients over Twitter are now being talked about. However, it does take work, you know, for me because my primary occupation is political journalist these days, my Twitter is a hellscape. And I have to keep it like that. I have to inject this poison into my eyes so I can then synthesize it and turn it into a podcast. But even then, like I found the fact that I had to mute a lot of friends of mine. I had to mute other people that I found to be non-contributing to the stuff I wanted even knowing that the stuff I was going to read was going to be pointed and angry. So please, please, please with Twitter, especially now, do not hesitate to groom your garden. Like you are not gonna win a prize for it. You're not gonna get the free speech award emailed to your house. Yes, years ago, I went through and started a policy of if someone was just making me feel like I wasn't getting good information, I wasn't getting another perspective, I was just getting angry, I muted them. And that wasn't just one perspective. That was like, you know what, you're inflaming things from this direction and you're doing it from the other and neither of you are helping. And I actively went out and found other perspectives then I'm like, okay, you're telling me things I don't agree with, but not in a way that makes me angry. It took work to do that. But because I've done that and because I've unfollowed and muted people carefully over the years, I feel like my Twitter feed is pretty good. I've maybe had to mute a couple of people recently and even when they unmuted after the time expired, I was like, okay, that was just a temporary thing. So I like that kind of control. Twitter's funny and this applies to lots of other social networks but maybe Twitter more than others. You know, I've always mumbled and grumbled when someone said something to me like, stick to tech, Sarah, because that's how they know me. They know me as being a tech reporter, although I actually don't really tweet about technology, although I don't really tweet much at all these days, but it's always just sort of been, it's about my life. So it's whatever I want it to be. But I have found that the people that I'm following, sometimes they're great for the things I want them to tweet about and then they go on a tangent and I go like, well, I don't want to mute them completely but I only like about 35% of the stuff. So yeah, again, it is a constant pruning process. Also a pruning process is the folks that you want to hang out with on Reddit, but you know what is a great place on Reddit, our subreddit. You can hang out with other people, you can participate by submitting stories, you can vote on other stories and let the DTNS team know what stories you care about at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's, Josh wrote it and said, just thought I would mention that the SCOTUS audio of oral arguments has always been available unabridged. We had a story last week, wasn't it? That we're gonna get live streams. Josh says, this is the first time though that it is streamed live. So that is new, but the content's the same. The podcast Oyez, O-Y-E-Z is good about sharing. That's like the old fashioned, Oyez, Oyez, Oyez. Oh yeah, well, all right. Is good about sharing that audio, Oyez. I'm guessing it's also on the Quartz website. Side note, love what you guys do. Listen to a lot of podcasts. This is a regular. My startup is in the process of winding down. We're a victim of both a COVID pandemic and lack of funding. But I'm close to getting a job and when I do, I will definitely contribute on Patreon. Thanks again. Oh, thank you, Josh. And thanks for letting us know about that. I didn't realize that if you don't know SCOTUS, that's the Supreme Court of the United States. I didn't realize that those were available after the fact before. So that's really cool. I might go do some listening to some of my favorite Supreme Court hits. I'm kind of a Supreme Court fan. I'm not going to lie. When you make your playlist, share it with me. Yeah, I will do. 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