 Coming up on DTNF, Last Pass makes some free tier restrictions. Roku makes original content, money moves, and how remote work has been with us the whole time. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 16th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Snowy Cleveland, I'm Rich Trafalino. And this is Allison Sheridan from the PodVit Podcast. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Before the show, gosh, what were we talking about? Plain paintball in space, whether or not water guns are allowed and all sorts of other things. If you want to know what we talk about in our wider conversation in our expanded show, Good Day Internet, you can do so by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. All right, Nintendo announced it will hold a 50 minute Nintendo Direct live stream on February 17th at 5 p.m. Eastern. That's tomorrow if you're watching live, the event will feature updates on already released games like Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, as well as new games coming to the switch in the first half of 2021. Motorola's budget G line added two phones available in the UK now and rolling out to the EU in the coming weeks. The £129 pounds as in currency, G10 and the £179 at G30 both offer a 6.5 inch HD plus LCD display, a 5000 mAh battery and rear fingerprint readers. The G10 has a Snapdragon 460 system on a chip, four gigs of RAM and a 60 Hertz refresh rate. The G30 bumps up to a Snapdragon 662 chipset, up to six gigs of RAM and a 90 Hertz refresh rate. Microsoft will launch a $99 Xbox wireless headset next month, which connects to consoles. I'm assuming they hope it's an Xbox, PCs and mobile devices over Bluetooth with support for pairing to multiple devices at once. It features rotating earcup dials similar to the Surface headphones, supports Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos and DTS headphone X spatial sound technology, offers dual beamforming microphones and has a 15 hour battery life. It's like my headphones, but no wire. Like the look of them. Microsoft updated its unified office mobile app to now support iPadOS rather than running as a Windows iOS app. This provides access to all of the regular tablet variants of Microsoft's productivity suite within the unified app, although the standalone Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps are still available and updated regularly. One quick interjection on that, I tried to get it on my iPad, but I had accidentally downloaded the iOS app version first. So when I went to look at the iPad version, it was still the iOS version. So you've got to get rid of the regular iPhone version. And then so you got to uninstall and reinstall the exact same thing. And now it'll be the iPad version. A good tip. A filing with the UK Intellectual Property Office shows that Andy Rubin signed over ownership of Essential to Carl Pye's new startup, Nothing on January 6th. This provides nothing with Essential's brand intellectual property, but it's unclear if patents were included in the transaction. It's like they did this just for Twitter jokes. You know, plays on words. Oh boy, I had that all weekend. All right, let's talk a little bit more about how last pass has upset some folks. I would include myself in those folks, but we'll talk about why. The company announced changes to its free tier starting March 16th. About a month from now, you free users will have to set an active device type choosing what type of device they can access their password vault on between desktop or mobile, not both, which also includes access on tablets and smartwatches. So you either have kind of your mobile life or you say, I use my desktop, but not interchangeable. Currently, free users will set their active device type by the first device they log into last pass with after March 16th, after which time users can change the active device type three times before being locked into the choice. So definitely more restrictive. If you're on the free tier, things will change. And it's particularly for new users. The company is also limiting email support to paying subscribers after May 17th with free users directed to last pass support center for self help resources. Well, I'm sure this gets people upset because people love the fact that it was free and why a lot of people chose the last pass. And it's great that they were using it. But last pass premium starts at three dollars a month. OK, you know, come on. This is all of your. This is the crown jewels you're talking about. I mean, I should be more sympathetic, but I have trouble being sympathetic to people using such an important service and not wanting to pay three dollars a month for it. I'm with you at the same time, you know, if you're if you're saving your pennies, every little thing helps. You know, there are a lot of folks who talk about not wanting to pay even one dollar a month for something when they've been used to it being something that they had for free, I will pay for premium. I don't have a problem with that. It's it's yes, it's less than a cup of coffee, which is always the comparison that people make to, you know, make you think, I do more than that per month. Not a huge problem. What I am in the midst of. And this is something that I actually I didn't use last pass until I started working at DTNS, because we have a fair amount of shared passwords, certain accounts that we all log into collectively, and that's where they're stored. And so I had a last pass account and I also had one password kind of phase things over to last pass. But I still had a lot of passwords out there in the world that weren't part of the last pass, you know, ecosystem. And I have slowly but surely tried to take it a lot more seriously. And it is a bit of a slog. It really is it sure last pass does its best to try to, you know, delete duplicates and that sort of thing. But but it is not just, you know, a one button. OK, now this is just, you know, all my passwords are changed type of a thing. So when I heard this news today, I was just particularly like, oh, man, come on, you know, working so hard because it's because if it wasn't three dollars and it was thirteen dollars, I'd still pay because now I feel locked in. And I think it's really more the principle that upsets people not so much the price tag. Well, yeah. And for some context, through November 2016, up until then, you could only sync a free account to one device total. So just one laptop, one phone or something like that. You couldn't even do like one category of devices. I think part of the reaction is this is a change that does not like there's no silver lining to this, not like, OK, we're limiting the free tier, but we're introducing a one dollar a month, you know, more limited, you know, plus tier or something like that. For me, the bigger story here is, you know, as a business move, OK, I get it. They want to, you know, move more people over to the paid tiers, make sense as a business move, maybe not the most consumer friendly. As a security move, as like a security company or, I guess, they're a privacy company, whatever. As a security move, this is introducing inconvenience to users now because I mean, theoretically, regardless of which tier you use, I'm assuming you can still get browser access, even if you have to emulate a mobile agent or a desktop agent on whatever device you're using, you should still be able to access it from the web. If you really, really, really need to get a password and all you have is your phone or your laptop or something like that, but it's inconvenient, right? Any time you introduce that, you're going to cause people to either write down passwords so that they remember them when they're not on that device, have sloppy or password etiquette, you know, not use the strong password generator if they're on their phone and they only have the laptop support and stuff like that. So for me, the curious move is how you justify that introducing that inconvenience that kind of we all know is going to introduce insecurity to your users. So that would that would be the case. I can see that, but I look at services that are free and look very suspiciously at them, you know, where follow the money, what is going to happen to it? And if you look at services, even if you take the privacy angle away from Google, you look at services that are free and then they disappear, I wouldn't want last pass to disappear. Would it be worth $3 a month for me for them to stay in business and keep having a good business model? I would absolutely say yes. So I'm sure they'll lose a few customers, but if you've been using it for a while and you've invested the time like Sarah has to get her password secure, you're going to stick with it. So, you know, they'll be whining for a little while like everybody is when they lose $3 and then, you know, an hour from now, nobody's going to remember. I mean, I think it's, I don't know, depending on how you slice it. Last pass was smart to say, here, you know, look how seamless this is, especially again, I'm a great use case, you know, because I'm like, Oh, no, I'm on the run. My computer's at the house. I got my phone. Yeah, I just open the last pass app. Great. Good. Copy, paste. Great. But as soon as that goes away, it's like, Oh, this is not seamless at all. But I think Rich, you make a very good point is I can either say, all right, you know, cough up a couple bucks. That's, that's what I need to do. Or I go, I hate this. No, this is even worse. This is hard. This isn't seamless. I don't want to use this anymore. I'm just going to use one, two, three, four, five, six as I've been using for the last 10 years. A new report from trend micro details and unpatched vulnerability in the Android version of the file sharing app share it, which could allow for file access or installing other apps without permission. Trend micro discovered the app did not have adequate protections over who could access the app's underlying code, notifying shared of the issue three months ago, but got no response. Rich, I know at least what I read about this this morning was a lot of three months, no response from, from certain articles. Yeah. And that's a pretty standard disclosure window. I mean, there's been some, you know, discussion in the security community over whether that's adequate and what you should do if a company doesn't respond to that. But usually if they would have even gotten a response, hey, we're working on it. Don't go public with this. We wouldn't be seeing this today. I mean, the fact that they've gone totally in communication, you know, with no communication, not exactly great for share it and to put some context around this, this vulnerability in share it does require a malicious app to already be have a presence on your device, right? So you're already in a kind of a compromised security situation here, but it really is exploiting kind of how Android treats external storage. And you may think, OK, I don't have an SD card on my phone, no big deal. It can actually be a partition on your actual internal storage is considered external storage. It doesn't do the sandboxing really well when you do that, doesn't have the same protections as internal storage. And essentially from what the security researchers found, they can do what's called a man in the disc attack. It's like kind of a variant on a man in the middle attack. Basically, because that storage is not as locked down, you can a malicious app can then kind of see everything that's written to and from that external storage and then go ahead and overwrite it as well. So that opens up the door to installing third party apps without your knowledge, running apps and that kind of stuff. So it's it's really, you know, again, the surface here for this is not huge. You still have to be kind of exposed already with a malicious app. But once that's there, that's kind of something you want to get locked down right away or at least talk to security researchers that you're working on it. All right, next up here, the European consumer advocacy group BUE, excuse me, B-E-U-C. I knew I was going to do that as filed a complaint against TikTok with the EU's network of consumer protection authorities claiming the app's vague and frequently changed terms of service, violate GDPR and for tracking users regardless of age or preferences and failing to adequately protect children. TikTok told Reuters it contacted the B-E-U-C for a meeting to listen to the group's concerns and has developed an in-app summary for its privacy policy to make it easier to understand. OK, we want to listen to your concerns and we appreciate that TikTok, but I guess not surprising to see, you know, the EU going after this. My question is, you know, is this just, you know, Sarah, from what you've been reading about this, is this just lip service by TikTok? You know, what what is the scale here? You know, this is 15 different consumer advocacy groups. GDPR has some hefty fines to it. Not exactly a trifling matter for TikTok here. No. And, you know, like you mentioned, TikTok or any company saying, OK, we have some consumer advocacy folks citing perhaps legitimate concerns. We are willing to listen. We are willing to work with you. Is step one in a many step process of, you know, making sure that folks are happy and also the company doing what they need to do without doing something that they don't want to do, right? It's it's it's a it's a back and forth type of a thing. Having an in-app summary of a privacy policy that's easy to access, not bad. Wish all apps had that somewhere. At the same time, the complaint that frequently changed terms of service on an app that we all know is heavily used by the younger sets, and it's very easy to set up an account and claim that you're an age that you're not. Easy to do that on a lot of social networks. But TikTok, you know, has a lot of young people on the app and there have been some issues with with tracking users that are of a certain age and and TikTok at least being seen as not adequately protecting those younger aged users. I think there is an issue here and I don't know if it means hey, you can't change your terms of service too often because people aren't reading them anyway and it's going to get really confusing really quickly. Sure, we still blame the user for not reading in terms of service when the user says, well, wait a second, I didn't know that. So but but again, there's it's almost a little bit of a bait and switch. At what point is it does it start to be kind of a bait and switch? So it does sound like TikTok is addressing some of the other things. There's the changing of the terms and conditions. But it sounds like TikTok had a problem with clarity. So they they didn't detail the ways that personal information can be collected. And it was kind of ambiguous and they said that they felt the obfuscation of the apps advertising practices were it was again a little difficult to understand. So it sounds like they are in their response that they are responding to exactly what they were asked to work on. It's not like they said, well, your privacy policy says you're going to track children in their homes and turn cameras on them. It was that it was difficult to understand what they were doing and they and it was kind of a moving target. So it sounds like they're going down the right path to me. Yeah, the report was entitled that this is all these complaints are based on confusing by design. So, you know, that's kind of the core of it. But some of the other issues I think will be a little bit harder for, I guess, TikTok to get around or maybe avoid fines on, I mean, you know, it was things about like copyright of content, you know, basically TikTok saying, you know, they have a copyright and everything. There's no really way for users to monetize that. Some of the consumer groups are taking issue with that. The other thing also having involved with microtransactions, effectively, I think it's coins or something like that, that you can buy virtual gifts for other creators and stuff like that. And we know the EU has come down pretty heavy on those kind of regulating those kind of microtransactions, especially when you're dealing with minors. So I would not be surprised if we see, you know, some kind of punitive action in the future, even if TikTok takes, I mean, I'm assuming TikTok will take steps to be more in compliance. But, you know, probably the first in a series of updates that we'll have on the story. If you want to hear us talk about something in particular, something that's moving the needle for you, one way is to let us know in our subreddit. You can submit stories there. You can also vote on other stories at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. All right, recently we talked here on the show about Salesforce being yet another company to allow a lot more of its workers to be remote in fact it proclaimed the nine to five work week is dead. Some still have to work their full time, but most employees are being given the option to work remotely or a part-time situation. Alison, we're glad to have you on the show today because you used to manage a very large team. Not everybody was in the same place. So you were managing remotely all the time. So what is your take on this trend of work from home or work remotely work somewhere outside that office you used to go to from really big companies like Salesforce and smaller companies as well? So I managed 170 people in eight different locations. Not some of them. A lot of them were fairly close together buildings, but some were pretty distant, you know, a couple of hours away by drive. And I developed some interesting observations about that. And earlier in my career, I had a really interesting piece of advice. And I was thinking about both these things in the context of Salesforce. So what Salesforce said was we're going to have people who work always in the office, people who never work in the office, and then people who are flexed where they work two to three days in the office. And one of the things that my old boss, Bik Nguyen told me was that your career will be directly related to your advancement in your career is directly related to how close you sit to your boss. And I thought that was a dopey thing to say at the beginning. But then I started watching as I walked out of my office, I would turn into the first office next to me and talk to those people. Those people always knew what was going on. They had their fingertips on what I was worried about, what I was thinking about, what I saw was important. So now picture, you've got people who've got choice. So Sarah goes to work and she sits right next to Rich and I choose to work from home. What's the impact on my career as a result of that? Having a mixture I think is actually a little bit dangerous. I think it's sort of like ideally you would all either be there or not be there from that one perspective. And I think that's part of the complexity of the problem is there are so many different things to think about. I mean, the great thing about everybody, people working from home is you got fewer cars on the road, less traffic less pollution in the office, buildings are no longer necessary. People gain all those hours of their life back by not commuting, but there's impacts that are hidden like that. The other side effect that I looked at was we used to do ranking rack and stack of all the employees. It was a horrible, horrible process. It was just terrible, but you had to fight for your people to be put in one to, I mean, I worked in a site that was 6,000 people and all 6,000 people got ranked one to whatever within their salary grade. It was a nightmare. It was a big one. Well, it was one to what? So if there were say a thousand level fives, all level fives would be one to a thousand. You would have a number associated with you. And the process. Sounds horrible. It's horrible. Well, think of the process because you got a little group that decides their group and then that group merges with a bigger group and it's basically was like four months of activity to do this. It was horrible. But what I realized was the person that worked in the office that was two hours away by drive was at a huge disadvantage in fighting for his people. So I actively made the decision that no one got to be in the room with me during these meetings because those people could lean over and whisper, pass me a note, have little discussions with the other people in the room. So again, one of the advantages, one of the ways you can make this work is if when really important decisions are made, don't let anybody be together. Everybody's got to be disparate. And I think you can kind of make this thing work. There's a lot of these little side things you don't think about when you think, oh, wow, it's gonna be great to everybody working from home or partially working from home and some not. I know when I was, well, I mean, I won't mention any company specifically, but I have been in roles where it was office-based. You know, you go to work in the morning, you come home at night, very nine to five. And if you left early or you kind of, you know, you sort of read the room and no one's really getting up to leave at 6 p.m. Maybe you got somewhere to be and you leave. It's maybe you don't get in trouble for it, but it's something that's noticeable if it happens a lot. Now, like you said, Alson, you live two hours away. I've worked with people where I'm like, how do you even do it? You know, you have four hours of commute on top of all this, you know, I only live 20 minutes away. I have an advantage over you. It's easier for me to get here in the morning and make the morning meeting kind of a thing. But it's like, if you've got the boss who cares about the comings and goings of people and time, and some people are remote and other people aren't, then like you said, it gets imbalanced pretty quickly, even if a lot of that is subconscious. If everybody's remote, then it's like, okay, we've even the playing field. But again, schedules are different, you know? It's like, do you still all take lunch at the same time? You know, are you the one person who's kind of always unavailable when everyone else is? And so certain things get passed onto people that you should have maybe been working on. I'm sure a lot of this will present itself as more and more people try to navigate this new world. And I think part of it is in terms of like, oh, well, we treat the remote workers just like we would treat people in the office, and it becomes an issue of equity versus treating everybody equally in terms of like, okay, how do we, Allison, as you've been alluding to this entire conversation, how do we think about office and work culture and all these weird little knock-on effects that kind of impact how we see people, how we maybe view conversations as adversarial versus consultive versus remote versus in-person or something like that, I think is going to be a very interesting development as we see Salesforce and other companies really engaged in. There's another piece to this, and it's to think about the relationships you build that when you're there in person. I mean, Sarah, you guys talk how many times about tech TV, right? How many people associated with the show we're working physically together at tech TV at some time? The people who never worked physically there are at a disadvantage. It's much harder to get to know those people when you have never been part of the office environment and enjoying Bagel Friday or whatever. Yeah. We have Bagel Friday? That sounds vaguely familiar, but yes, I totally get what you're saying. Yes, it's a context you simply don't have. Yeah, I do want to say before we cut out that if you found this discussion interesting next week on Chichette Across the Pond, which is one of my podcasts, I'm going to have Lindsay Tondi on as the guest to share her more modern views on the way this works. She happens to be my daughter, but she and I talk about work stuff all the time and she's got a whole different perspective because she's less than half my age and much more recent experience with how this kind of thing works. Yeah, definitely we'll have to check that out. And speaking of remote work, the productivity app Trello announced a redesign and new features to help businesses manage third-party integrations like Google Drive, Jira, and Slack, plus better previews to third-party services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and YouTube. Trello, which Atlassian acquired in 2017 now has more than 50 million users. And some of this redesign is really about, I think, Sarah, you're familiar with the platform is really about kind of moving from a task-based kind of emphasis with the platform to kind of taking a more people-centric kind of view of where people are and how to manage their time like that. Yeah, that's what it seems like to me. I have not given the new design a whirl and I'm not actually actively using Trello. Although in the past, I was always frustrated because Trello and Slack at that time was fairly new. It was very new to me. And where I was working at the time, they were both task management tools that people were using. And there was a lot of like, ah, where did you send me that note? That's not where I am right now. Where is it? Oh, it's in Trello. Oh, got it. Oh, I forgot to look at Trello. Now it looks like my task has expired kind of thing. So having better third-party integration, again, haven't taken it for a whirl yet, but I think that's something that frustrated a lot of Trello users in the past. Yeah, and what's interesting to me about this redesign is it's not just about, okay, you have this many tasks assigned to you and these are assigned to these cards and these are assigned to these projects, but it's really trying to give a better view of what's a person's bandwidth look like. I know it's a very kind of buzzwordy kind of phrase, but looking not just at how many tasks are assigned to someone, but like, okay, how many meetings are there in a day? How many different projects are there on stuff like that? So again, putting more of a people focus when you can't necessarily be with someone and just kind of checking and being like, hey, do you have too much on your plate or something like that? And at least giving you, it can't fully replace it, but using that redesign to show that in a more graphical way I think is really powerful. Well, all signs point to Roku perhaps producing its own original shows and movies and you might say, doesn't it? A lot of people use Roku, doesn't that what all the companies do? Well, not yet, not publicly anyway, but the company did publish a job listing for a lead production attorney to, quote, serve as lead production attorney for Roku's original episodic and feature length productions. Okay, sounds like that's what they're working on. Roku acquired Quibi's content library last month. The job listing was first spotted by data provider Revealera and though a Roku spokesperson declined to comment, the job description also includes handling, quote, option purchase agreements, script acquisition agreements, life rights agreements, agreements to hire writers, actors, directors and individual producers, production service agreements, below the line agreements, including for department heads, location agreements, clearances, prop rental agreements, likeness releases and credit memos. Now, I only mention all of those because it sounds like Roku is very much not just saying, hey, let's acquire some independent productions because that is also a very common thing that Roku's competitors are doing now as well, but definitely creating some original productions from scratch. Frankly, I'm surprised it took this long given what slice of the market Roku has. It's a very popular way for people to watch content of all kinds and knowing that really, you know, whether you're Netflix or Apple TV Plus or Amazon or Roku or Hulu or, you know, the list goes on, you just need a couple hits, Disney Plus, right? And then all of a sudden people are like, this is awesome. You know, I don't need necessarily a hundred hits, but just the two helps get me hooked and take my money. Well, and especially with the Roku channel, you know, kind of following Peacock and Pluto, I mean, not following, it was, you know, it came before them in some instances, but like Pluto TV, Peacock Now, all offering this ad supported and now adding in, you know, the component of originals. You know, Roku's kind of spent this past year putting the Roku channel basically everywhere. You know, you can get the app, you don't have to have a Roku device now to really, you know, buy into what is effectively an ad tech play to expand that business line for them. And my question is, you know, we've seen other companies balk at, you know, I'm thinking of Voodoo and Walmart kind of balking at the cost of putting out these, you know, high production originals that will compete with, you know, the major streaming providers. I wonder, you know, what the math looks on the back end for Roku, right, of being like, okay, we need to expend this much money to get this many more viewers. Is there a Roku Plus channel coming? That's gonna be a, you know, a subscription. Will they keep with just the ad supported? It seems to be where they're making their major technology investments. So interesting science. Also, shout out to all the interns and cub reporters that look through job listings for Roku and all these other companies because that's gotta be a tough beat. I just gotta say. Yeah, or, you know, depending on who you know, you're like the coolest person ever. Because, you know, someone gets tired at Roku before Roku's even ready to make an announcement about their original content. They're like, I guess we better do original content. We're hiring for it, evidently. Yeah, no kidding. All right, in the mail back today, Johannes wrote in speaking of original content, for those that don't have Apple TV Plus and wanna know what For All Mankind is about, because we talked about their AR iOS companion last week. Johannes says, the first two episodes are available for free, at least in Germany. I'm guessing it's the same around the world. Apple does that for most, if not all of its shows. Just doesn't advertise it. Greetings from Snowy Munich. Hmm, I didn't know that. I mean, I think I watched a couple things for free, but that was not recently. I think I watched the morning show first episode for free and I went, oh, I kinda like this. And then I've watched it up until the most recent episode. But yeah, yeah, it's good to know, especially if you're on the fence about whether or not you wanna pay for something. If you're hooked, maybe you will. If you have questions, comments, ideas, feedback at all, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. And of course, we wanna give a shout out to our patrons at the master and grandmaster levels, including Ali Sanjabi, Paul Thesen, and Kevin. Thank you to all. And also thanks to Alice and Sheridan for being with us today, working remotely. I mean, how do we do it? Ace team, Alice and where can people find the rest of your work? The best place to go is podfeat.com. You can find all of the finer pod feet podcasts right there. All right, if you want a DTNS hat, maybe a hoodie. It's been kinda chilly in a lot of places. Might want a hoodie, maybe you wanna mask. Mouse pad, we have all that and more. At the DTNS store, check it out, dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Thanks to all our patrons who help support our show. 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