 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon closed a small warehouse because a worker was infected. How should you treat those packages you ordered online? Intel has a chip that can smell things for you, and automakers volunteer to make ventilators. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 19th, 2020, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Lockdown, I'm Justin Robert Young. And from the SoCal LA area, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were talking about podcast and tech and how that's now just become all entertainment's tech. We were also talking about the significance of what's going on right now on Good Day Internet, get that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start here with a few tech things you should know. A report by Loop Ventures, Gene Munster notes that increases in availability of the 64 gig iPhone 11, 64 gig iPhone 11 Pro, AirPods Pro and the second gen AirPods imply the company's supply partners in China are returning to regular production output levels. Munster believes that lower lead times mostly point to a restart in production in China, regular production anyway, and the softening demand accounts for some, but a minority of that bump. The New York Stock Exchange announced that it will temporarily close its physical trading floors and move to an all-electronic trading following two positive COVID-19 tests. This week, all electric trading will begin on March 23rd. Plug in. Uber CEO Derek Kozarsahi said on an investor call that ride volume has dropped by up to 60 to 70% in cities hit hardest by COVID-19 like Seattle. Kozarsahi stressed that even in a worst case scenario of rides down 80% for the year, Uber would still have $4 billion of unrestricted cash in the bank and a $2 billion credit line. The company is also considering using its network to deliver needed items like medicine and basic goods. Microsoft announced that Microsoft Teams had 44 million daily active users as of March 18th, a 12 million user increase in the last week alone. 20 customers have over 100,000 employees each using Teams. That's up from 14 last week. And in November 2019, Microsoft announced Teams had 20 million daily active users. So quite a jump and not surprising. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced that it temporarily waived quote, unquote, gift rules for its rural health care and E-rate programs until September 20th, 2020. These rules ordinarily forbid rural health care facilities, libraries and schools who are part of the program and receiving subsidies from accepting anything of value from ISPs participating in the program. The change could let ISPs donate Wi-Fi hotspots, upgraded network equipment and offer free service for telemedicine and distance learning. September 20th is my wedding anniversary. So I'll remember that they're losing that exemption then. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that Amazon Prime Pantry, which launched in 2014, is temporarily closed in the U.S. due to high order volumes tied to, of course, people preparing to stay at home because of COVID-19. Prime Pantry is that one that lets Prime members buy packaged groceries and household items as a discount because you pack them all together in one shipment. No word on when service for Prime Pantry will resume. Let's talk a little bit more about what Europe is saying to Netflix, Justin. Well, Tom, the European Union's Internal Market and Services Commissioner, T.R.A. Britain, called on streaming video providers to switch to standard definition content during peak usage and take other measures to ease the strain on internet infrastructure. Netflix says it will reduce bit rates across all streams in Europe for 30 days and estimates that it will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25 percent. Later, Bretton warned that network providers, that while they can take, quote, exceptional traffic management measures and, quote, to ease congestion, they must not discriminate against individual content providers. The commission also called on users to use Wi-Fi over cellular whenever possible and choose lower content resolution when possible. Bit saving measures are going into effect. Watch, watch in standard depth for our survival. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, this. This is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Broadband distancing, please distance your bits appropriately. Don't pack them in too tightly. Bits will be two meters apart as delivered to your Netflix stream. At the same time, it would be hard to argue. No, no, no, I am not going to standard depth. It's just not that big of a crisis. Yeah. And honestly, there is a lot of, you know, video delivering that can literally grow or shrink the internet based on on how you do it. If Netflix is taking those steps, then I think everybody can can deal with a few more pixels and hats off to the people who are working to keep the internet running. It isn't as easy as it might seem to folks. It's kind of amazing that it's still working to me. Yeah. No kidding. Well, speaking of video streaming, a lot of folks are experimenting now more than ever with a Chrome extension called Netflix Party that lets a group of friends who all have Netflix sync up their video watching together. So it's like a party, but you're all, you know, shelter and placing. It adds a chat room so you can chat while you're watching. All users in a party have the option to pause or rewind or fast forward unless the initiator reserves that function to themselves could get a little crazy depending on how many people are doing it. Polygon points out that there are other similar options like Metastream for Chrome and Firefox to seven, which has a paid tier to access some services like Hulu or Disney Plus and watch two together, which also supports audio streams if you happen to want to listen to podcasts with your friends. As with all browser extensions, be careful. All extensions are not created equal. And it's hard to tell who is making some of these programs. So be, you know, vigilant and stall at your own risk. Yeah, I was trying to figure out who is behind Netflix Party. They don't have about us page. There's not much detail about them. They have a three star rating on the Chrome extension store. So that that raised my hackles a little bit. Just just just be careful, be wise and make good choices. But this idea of syncing up and watching things is always one where I'm like, do people really want to do this? And this is the time, right? Like, if it's ever going to work, this is it. I actually have a group of friends who we're all kind of scattered around. We're all in the US, but, you know, no one lives anywhere near me. So I'm not going to be in the same room watching Netflix with them at any point. But we all have Netflix and this kind of got floated as a great idea. And we all said, yes, let's do it. We can't agree on a time as humans where we all want to do this together because it requires us, you know, everyone's on appointment viewing now. So it's like, well, I can't do that at nine. Nine, your time is midnight for me, Sarah. So it's still hurting cats a little bit. But I love this idea. I've always wanted something like this to work well. And that's not even because I'm stuck at home. Just this is like a fun thing to do with people who you just aren't going to see that often. I mean, I will say that this is something that I am. I am taking a fresh look at all of these things. Like I have never went when they announced FaceTime to have multiple parties that you could put a bunch of people in there. Initially, I'm like, ah, whatever. I mean, I barely like it when anybody FaceTimes me, let alone FaceTiming with many people. And yet there I was last night with two friends that I normally go out with on Wednesdays. We now can't because of shelter at home and we were enjoying each other's company on a multiple face FaceTime. So I'm I'm all about this. I do think, however, please, please, friends, you cannot double check these plugins enough they can that they are they are backdoors. And not all the ones that Sarah mentioned are extensions. Some of them are independent services. But again, you know, you're given your information to other people. You can just try to get on chat and say, well, three, two, one, press play. But it won't perfectly sync. So that that's kind of what these services are providing is the ability to do this. I wonder if Netflix will just they've they've had a service like this out of their hacker groups before. I wonder if they'll ramp up something like that that they offer themselves or some of those other products out there come back. But but yeah, this is go check out that polygon article that has a wrap up of all the ones that Sarah mentioned and kind of evaluate them, pick the ones right for you. Monday, Intel announced it had trained its low ehe neurotrophic trip chip to identify the sense of ten different hazardous chemicals. A paper in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence describes work done with Cornell University on the Louis he chip with the output of 72 chemical sensors teaching low ehe that a particular response corresponded to the presence of a particular chemical. So it's not just a sensor that detects a molecule. It's actually trying to mimic the human brain's ability to detect smells so that it can distinguish chemicals, even among interfering smells. If one smell is overpowering the other, it might still be able to tell that it's there. Wednesday, Intel announced the general readiness of Pohoiki Springs, a self contained neuromorphic system running on 768 low ehe chips available to researchers in the cloud. Intel says Pohoiki Springs is similar in neural capacity to the brain of a small mammal. So the first thing I thought here was just safety, like industrial safety, that if you have certain situations where you're dealing with chemicals where it might not be immediately clear to a human brain that there are that things are raising to unsafe levels, that this would be a way to do it. You know, kind of digital canary in a coal mine. But I don't know. Are there any applications that you can think of up the top of your head? Yeah, that's a really good one. Any kind of safety situation where you're looking for leaks or spills, any kind of security situation. There's there's a lot of you go through the TSA here in the United States or any security at an airport and they'll do those swabs and things because they're checking for chemicals. This could just smell the ambient air and say, hey, hold on. We think we detect the faint odor of something that shouldn't be in somebody's luggage. And then you can you can start checking around to find out where it comes from. That's that's a lot more sensitive of a situation than you have where you have to you have to look for the actual molecules themselves. I mean, carbon monoxide alarms at least at least in California, you know, it's it's you have to do it. It's it's it's a legality. But, you know, even in situations like that where there's something that is unsafe at a certain level, but maybe you're burning a candle, you know, and you just you aren't able to discern between that kind of thing, having the technology to be able to, you know, be like at where we are detecting something for a variety of things that shouldn't be shouldn't be sniffed or or just been around is pretty cool. Amazon closed a small warehouse in Queens, New York, following a positive COVID-19 test by an associate associates at the warehouse were sent home with pay as Amazon sanitizes the facility. Amazon said it has increased sanitizing surfaces at facilities and staggered shift times among measures to prevent further spread. The US National Institute of Health says the virus can stay active on cardboard for up to 24 hours and two to three days on plastic and steel. But but those are droplets, not necessarily just the well, what the droplets are the way they think transmission happens in most cases, if people who get COVID probably get it from a droplet, which is usually sneezed or or coughed more likely something in the air. It's not airborne, but it's droplets that happen in the air. And and so if it gets on a surface, it could possibly transmit the virus. What they're saying is, look, we find that the virus is is still valid and active for up to 24 hours on cardboard. But they also don't think that is the major way that it is transmitted. So if you if you've got someone who is at high risk, you might want to take that into account and keep those cardboard boxes away from them until you're sure they, you know, they've been away for more than 24 hours, etc. But it's not a high likelihood of getting something from the package. That said, Amazon needs to be more transparent about what they're doing to keep these facilities safe. I've gotten banks telling me more about how they're wiping down the counters at their at their branches. Then we know about what Amazon's actually doing in their warehouses. Some transparency would go a long way to having people understand how this all works. And it's another indication. If we had more testing, you could just say, look, if you're in a position where you're going to be touching things, you know, US post office, Amazon, let's just test everybody. The problem is we don't have enough tests. So we can't afford to just test everybody like that. Hopefully they're they're at least doing tests for fever. Make sure that if anybody has a fever, they're not allowed to come to work at these warehouses, things like that. But you don't there's not a high risk of getting this from a package. We did want to pass along those facts about the activity of the virus just just so you have the facts as well. Wash your hands. There's there's the one then now forever. Wash your hands. If you got an Amazon package and you handle it, wash your hands, toss the packaging as soon as you get it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the Amazon has so many warehouses at so many different sizes all over the place and you've got you say, well, OK, let's say you more or less trust Amazon to do the right thing. OK, well, they figured out a certain facility needed a thorough a thorough cleaning and they're being really fastidious across the board. OK, even so, I mean, I don't know how someone who is driving in Amazon freight truck interacts with anybody at a warehouse and how many people that might go through before it gets to me. I mean, there's there's so much involved that unless Amazon says here's exactly what's going on in here. All the steps we were taking from the point that you order something to the point that you, you know, plug in your new smart light bulb because it's been delivered to you. It is really hard. It's it's it's hard to know. So yes, as you mentioned, Justin, you have to go overboard in in keeping yourself safe because that's all you can really do. Yeah, I mean, it's annoying. Everybody knows it's annoying, but just it's, you know, just wash your hands 50 times. It's fine. You know, I got some I got some hands up that smells really good. I am enjoying it washing my hands. Not the worst thing in the world. I mean, I did it before, but now I do it a lot. Yeah. Conan O'Brien announced on Wednesday he will return to full shows on March 30th. He wrote on Twitter, I will shoot at home using an iPhone and my guests will Skype. This will not be pretty, but feel free to laugh at our attempt. Stay safe. Jimmy Fallon has been filming YouTube videos that are incorporated into the evening's rerun of the tonight show. Stephen Colbert has been filming a new monologue for the late show reruns and Jimmy Kimmel has been sharing his own mini log. That's a hashtag on social media. We talked a little bit about this during Good Day Internet, but it is it is quite fascinating to see the world of entertainment, high production value entertainment turned to what we've been doing on shows like this, you know, for 15 years. And it's I'll be honest. Part of me wants to be like, ah, look at you guys doing what we've been doing. Part of me is is is heartened like, oh, welcome to our club. Yes. This you can do this. Oh, absolutely. I mean, my first reaction was like, doesn't he have anything besides an iPhone? You know what? iPhone has a pretty nice shot. I do it all the time. So it's like as long as it's funny, it almost doesn't matter as much when I watched the latest last week tonight with John Oliver. He he wasn't at home, but he was sort of in a kind of look like an Apple ad. It was just like a white background behind him, you know, but there's no studio audience. They didn't do canned laughter, so there was no laughter at all. And I was like, this is a weird way to watch the show. But I appreciate the effort. I appreciate everyone's effort. I mean, they they they want to keep going. They want to keep their audiences. They want to, you know, to keep people happy. So, you know, you got to work with what you have, get creative. Yeah. And look, there are radio shows that are now going fuller remote and some of them have ISDN lines. Many, many don't. And many sound like all the podcasts that you've listened to. Many of our voices on in in our earlier years, except now they are at the height of entertainment and media. There there has never, never been more of a mainstream showing of Skype callers and of various different focusing and refocusing from automatic cameras. It is it is just a bizarre time to live in. And I do think that part of the lessons here will be remembered for a long time. I think that that the idea of the gigantic studio or shows being predicated on a studio audience, you know, may may recede from from this point. You know, it's not needed for all of them. There's there's some interesting things. One is like what you were saying, Sarah, without a studio audience to laugh, you need a different kind of joke. You need a different rhythm. So there may be the situation where they're like, you know what? If we want to do a traditional monologue, we've got to have a studio audience. That's one thing we learned. And if we don't have a studio audience, we have to write differently. Yeah, your rhythm has to be different. I've noticed that in the Colbert stuff. Some of his jokes work great because of the way he delivers them. Others, you can tell he's just out of habit, pausing for applause. And it's flat because you're like, I'm not going to be. The cadence has to change, you know? And that and a lot of that goes for sporting events, right? OK, we'll play to an empty stadium. Well, the stadium also matters that all of that stuff is it's just we've always done it this way. This is the way that works. Oh, well, now we have to do it differently. Let's try to do it the same way. Well, that didn't work either. OK, let's rethink this. So I don't know. Maybe some good will come of this. I think what we'll see is more of these kinds of of, you know, DIY segments, they've been creeping into the high production value shows here and there, but I bet they'll be doing a lot more of these. And though they'll realize like, oh, we've we've developed this skill. We figured out what's appropriate. We figured out how to make it happen. Like Justin was joking before the show that, you know, they'll figure out that a USB mic is not great. And they still want an analog mic with a USB extender. Like they'll figure all that stuff out and we'll we'll see more of this happen like in these shows, even when things go back to normal. Knock on wood. Yep. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Man, yesterday I was talking about how Elon Musk should offer his Tesla factory to to make things that that hospitals and health care providers might need. I swear I hadn't seen any of the stories that happened almost immediately after that when I said it. Ventilators particularly are needed for critically ill patients. And there's a real concern that the number of critically ill patients could soon exceed the number of ventilators on hand in the United Kingdom. Companies, including the jet engine maker Rolls-Royce, not the car maker, Airbus and Jaguar Land Rover have been asked if they can help address the pending shortage. Toyota has also offered to help there. In the United States, General Motors CEO, Mary Bara, told the White House she's looking into making ventilators at her company's factories. Ford's talking to the US and UK governments about doing so. And on Twitter, which is where Elon Musk does most of his talking, a user asked Elon Musk if he could have Tesla make ventilators. And Musk responded Wednesday, quote, we will make ventilators if there is a shortage Thursday morning. New York City's mayor wrote, our country is facing a drastic shortage and we need ventilators ASAP to Elon Musk. He wrote that we will need thousands in this city over the next few weeks. We're getting them as fast as we can, but we could use your help. We're reaching out to you directly, although reaching out to someone in an at reply on Twitter is not the definition of directly. But OK, there are other efforts going on, too. Razor CEO, Min Liang Tang announced they will shift a number of the razor manufacturing lines. And believe me, they're selling razor equipment right now because people are gaming from home, but they're still going to shift some of their manufacturing lines to make surgical masks. Those are also in short supply and essential for health care workers. Razor thinks it can make up to a million masks, which it will give to health care providers for free with the first shipments going to Singapore, where Razor's headquarters are located. And a related story, Nathan Proctor, who's the head of the right to repair campaign for the US Public Interest Research Group, called on ventilator makers to release all the repair documentation for their essential medical kit, especially ventilators. And I fix it has already begun to compile ventilator service manuals and make them available on their site so that there can be more onsite, faster repair of ventilators so you can keep using them longer. This is this is, you know, very interesting situation. It is exactly where my head was at yesterday when we were talking about this. Justin, what what should happen here? What's the role of technology and automaker companies and others in stepping in here and helping? So a real quick primer for everybody. The major issue here, if you are unaware, although this is pretty much all that anybody's thinking of, but in the interest of clarity, the problem with what we're going to face is not necessarily even the lethal power of the virus, but there is a choke point in terms of hospital beds and equipment. And so this on its face, all these companies coming together, saying, look, we have the engineers. We have the we have the the lines to make them. Let's make more ventilators is very, very, very, very good. I I have a few questions, including is a public conversation between Elon Musk and Bill de Blasio, the best way that we should be conducting public health policy during a pandemic. That's that's a big question mark for me. They are strong personalities that I will leave personal feelings about one or both of them out of out of this particular discussion. But where are they needed? How fast can they be made? How fast can they get there? There are logistical questions that I really, really have. And I hope that there is somebody that is a central clearinghouse to connect, you know, whether or not these ventilators are, a safe, be able to be deployed and whether they are able to get where they need to be. Yeah, that that seems to be one of one of the aspects of this that worries me. It's it's not that, you know, the automakers are saying the right things. They are. Even Elon Musk is saying, look, if you need ventilators, I'll make ventilators. That's that's saying the right thing. And it's not that I'm saying, well, I don't trust him. He's just saying that it's that it is something that needs coordination. You want to make the right ventilators. You want to make them in a way that they can be shipped to the places that need them. You need a central clearinghouse, whether it's a czar or or or its CDC in charge of coordinating it. You need someone to look over and say, who's making what? How many are they making? I mean, you need a freaking product manager for the situation so that you can make sure that you're optimizing these and getting them to the right places because lives matter. Lives depend on it. Yeah, I also don't think. I mean, Elon Musk saying, hey, you need ventilators. OK, we will do that. Let us know in the mayor of New York City. I doubt he was like, oh, now's our chance. Tweet back. If he's serious, he obviously contacted him another way. But this is like kind of holding the company's feet to the fire so that everyone else knows, oh, New York actually needs them to do this. So you can't say something and be flippant about it so that if, for some reason, Elon Musk and Tesla and whatever warehouses he has access to don't do this, then they look bad. So I'm sure there's more to it than just chatting on Twitter. Yes, I hope I certainly hope so. Yes, I hope as well as somebody that has had he's he's coming under a lot of fire for for some of the way that he is handling stuff and how seriously he is taking it personally, Google it, YMCA, Jim, just Google that to Blasio. And I hope I hope that he is that this is something where if because he's going to have a major problem, you know, and this is not the only private public partnership that we're looking at. There was a report today or during the press conference today that Carnival Cruise Lines was possibly looking to dock some of their ships that aren't going to be running as possible, floating hospitals. The military has already moved some of their floating hospitals off the coast of New York City. So there are a lot of things that can come together. I just hope that this is taken more seriously than a Twitter one upsmanship between whatever you might think of them to very loud personalities. Ventilators and beds are different things. If you could have all the beds of the world, if you don't have the ventilator for the critically ill patient, then the bed doesn't help as much as it would otherwise. So you can't say like, oh, well, you know, we we put a they put a navy ship off. I guess we're fine. Well, the navy ship might have some ventilators. In fact, the military has been requisitioning some of their ventilators and giving them towards the cause. But from what the people who are dealing with this say, we will likely need more. Yes. And we're going to need more than we would ever think we could have needed because this is this is so cute with a very at risk part of our population. Well, a great group effort that we are very appreciative of is everybody who contributes to our subreddit. You can submit stories. Any story you think is worthy of DTNS's attention and your peers. You can vote on other stories that your community submits daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. Thanks to everybody who does that for us every day. Yeah, thanks for that. And thanks for sending things to the mailbag. That too. In fact, Mike and Dusty and quiet Riyad, as he as he describes, it says, I work for an organization overseas and we're going to 50 percent or less staffing. Seeing things shutting down. I quickly made sure all my remote access tech was working and made sure my colleagues were ready to go after being locked away for a few days to deal with a minor sinus infection. I went in to drop off an old RSA token with my IT team. They were not at 50 percent staffing, rather at 100 percent, working frantically, dealing with other people's complaints. I had a minor rather unimportant ticket and my sys admin apologized profusely for not getting back to me. I reassured him I was fine. I knew he'd had his hands full because not enough people prepared for this crisis. I swear, I thought he was about to cry. He told me I was the first person to bring this up and burst out that my organization didn't have enough licenses or server capacity for the number of people accessing all our remote resources. This is just my long way of asking listeners to be nice to their sys admins as you're working remotely and recognize that they have their own bandwidth systems and budget limitations. Thanks for keeping me my mind going during challenging times. Thank you, Mike. Yes. They grow grocery store workers, healthcare providers, first responders and sys admins. There's there's a lot of people doing a lot of things to keep this from being worse than it could be. So thank you, Mike, for that reminder. Be be be appreciative to that sys admin that that's helping you out these days. You know, we're also appreciative of shout out to our masters and grandmaster levels, including Michael Keper, Paul Reese and Steve Ayandarola. We're also appreciative for Justin Robert Young, Justin Robert Young. I'm not glad that you're not able to travel, but I'm glad you're here with us today. Oh, I wouldn't be anywhere else, except for those times where I was traveling and I wasn't able to be here, but that's no longer a problem. I am I am here for the duration, sheltering at home with you. But I'm also doing my politics podcast politics, politics, politics. So if you want all of the latest on the political side of our ever changing apocalypse, then please go ahead and get it. I tell you, man, it's it's the weirdest thing to to crave your show. Like I when it when it shows up in my feet, I'm like, oh, good, politics, politics pop that thing in my ears right away. And it's a great thing. But I'm like, this is my buddy Justin. I started listening to this because it's my buddy Justin. It's so good. And it's it's really like, I don't know if you realize this, it's freaking reassuring to just hear you like have your take on all of this as as we go through this wild thing. So thank you for that. I appreciate it. It is it is a connection with the listeners. That's what they they want. Somebody's not going to hyperventilate about stuff. And and I'm not going to hyperventilate, although boy, howdy, really testing the limits these days. Yeah, no kidding, man, folks. And we know it's it's uncertain times out there. And and we extra appreciate the direct support that mostly funds this show. The best way to keep us independent is our Patreon, patreon.com slash DTNS. It pays for our livelihoods. We're incredibly respectful and appreciative of that. But mostly, man, I'm just blown away by how many people have said, you know what, let me cover for somebody. We had a situation yesterday where one listener wrote in and was like, you know, I'm really sorry, I'm not going to cancel, but I have to cut back because I'm a small business person and and I can't operate my business right now. And I totally understood. I wrote them back. It's like, no worries. We totally got you. And right after that, someone else wrote in and said, hey, I'd like to make. I'd like to add to my pledge to cover someone else. And it was matched up perfectly. So I can't tell you how how much it helps to see people stepping up like that and and letting it be for those of you who are getting laid off or having uncertain economies feel like you can still support the show in other ways just by telling people about it because you're covered. So thank you all for that. Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Keep it coming. We got nothing but time to read your emails. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live somewhere in this country. Patrick Norton is sheltering. We'll find out where when he talks to us on the show tomorrow. See you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.