 Coming up on DTNS, long-term support is essential when the tech is in your body, how Google Cloud might help ease supply chain issues, and Justin Robert Young explains when a log file might also be spying. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 17th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty soon. There's a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet, where I blaspheme about vinscully. You can find that at patreon.com slash d-t-n-s. Big thanks to a few of our top patrons today, including Mike Acons, Norm Physicus, and Chris Allen. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung announced an event for February 27th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, coinciding with Mobile World Congress. In a blog post, Samsung's computing R&D team head, Hark sang Kim, hinted that this could involve the next-generation Galaxy book lineup, involving a seamless experience across devices and operating systems, though he didn't name a specific laptop, although didn't name Intel as a partner. No, that makes sense then. Amazon and Visa reached an agreement to keep accepting Visa on Amazon sites. Amazon will allow use of Visa cards in the UK, and it will no longer charge customers an extra fee in Australia and Singapore. AMD announced new details about its 15-watt U-Series Ryzen 6000 mobile chips. These Zen 3 Plus cores offer 40% higher clock speeds, also offer a 17% increase in CPU performance, and use integrated Radeon 680Ms for 81% better graphics performance, and also add up to three more hours of battery life over the 5000 series. It is unclear that their comparing specifically to Intel's Alder Lake mobile chips, AMD only provided benchmarks compared to 28-watt 11th gen Intel CPUs. Now there's no chip shortage of news. Intel announced its ARC GPUs are still set to arrive in laptops this quarter, but the desktop versions won't arrive until Q2, so sometime after April 1st. ArcStation versions are coming in Q3, Intel also announced a cloud service called Project Endgame that will let customers access these ARC GPUs remotely. Now Intel didn't give any details of whether this is a gaming service or just a general GPU cloud service, but it did say it'll arrive later this year. I'm sure we'll get more details later. Intel also said the third gen of ARC GPUs, we're talking about the first gen just coming out now. They're working on the second gen. They announced that the third gen, codename Celestial, will address the ultra enthusiast segment. So apparently two gens down the road is when they're going to be taking on the high end Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Peloton wants you to think of something a little bit more positive than layoffs and potential mergers when you hear its name. So Meet Lane Break. This is a video game now available to Peloton Bike and Bike Plus owners. You use the bike's resistance knob to change between six virtual lanes of varying resistance. You get points for being in a particular lane, pedaling faster for certain stretches and keeping your cadence at a certain level. It looks kind of like a cross between Tron and Beat Saber. So have fun out there. I was kind of hoping Lane Break meant you'd get a discount. You yourself on a Peloton. Yeah. You should get a discount. It's about giving me a break, people. Yeah. Come on Peloton. Geez. All right. Let's talk about this IEEE Spectrum article. Yeah. So first of all thanks to KV who submitted the IEEE Spectrum article about technology for the blind to our subreddit. This is really fascinating. So I'll do my best to explain what is going on here. Starts with a story of a woman named Barbara Campbell who's blind navigating through the New York City subway and she's hearing a beeping sound. Now this is before her Argus II retinal implant system that she had in one eye taking her vision from zero to at least patches of light and dark. Abruptly stopped working. Obviously a very bad thing. Although the company that made the implant which is known as Second Sight tried to repair her unit never worked again. A defunct Argus system in an eye has caused medical complications. It can also be painful. It can also be expensive or even impossible to remove. At the time Second Sight was selling the Argus II for around $150,000 in the U.S. That doesn't even include the cost of surgery, rehabilitation, ongoing medical visits, all of that stuff. Not cheap. Now Campbell needing a new unit that she couldn't get anymore actually not a fluke for Second Sight. The company's founders started developing the technology way far back as 1991. Then after having quite a bit of success with at least some of their patients, neared bankruptcy in 2019 at which point they abandoned support for their products. Yes, that affected more than 350 blind people across the world with the company's implants that were already in their eyes. It got worse though. Second Sight laid off much of its staff in 2020 did not look good for the company. Went public in 2021 drumming up some interest promising to work more on a brain implant. This is a different one called Orion that also provides artificial vision and is currently in a clinical trial. But recently the company stock wasn't doing well and it announced a proposed merger with a biopharmaceutical company called Nano Precision Medical or NPM, which develops an implant for drug delivery does a whole different thing. Now executives told IEEE Spectrum they were still committed to developing products for the blind, but they were pretty vague about it. It's very unclear how this will help patients with obsolete implants that are already in their eyes. Another example is a patient named Ross Dorr. He's actually really interesting because he became the first human on earth to have Argus II retinal implants in both eyes that was back in 2015. He couldn't get an MRI scan in 2020 when Second Sight was going through its problems. He needed to rule out a brain stem tumor, but Second Sight needed to sign off that it was safe to interact with the electromagnetic fields that are in MRI machines. You can really hurt yourself if that's not signed off on, and the company kind of wasn't picking up the phone anymore. Another customer, Jarron Perk, needed a new video processing unit of VPU. His broke. He couldn't get another one. He was lucky enough, and I don't think everybody would fare as well, he was lucky enough to sort of put it out there into the internet, was able to reach another patient who had a VPU they weren't using, and a doctor who helped him replace his parts, so he's currently using a refurbished system. That is something that I think a lot of people can relate to when it comes to hardware, but probably not implants in your eyes. That's somewhat unusual, and obviously a little bit scarier. Now, Second Sight isn't the only company that's been working on this. Another is called Pixium Vision. It's based in France. It's conducting European and US feasibility trials on its Prima implant system. Some clinicians are still committed to working with Argus II patients who have the implants that simply cannot be updated anymore or don't work at all. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are experimenting with a thermal camera to help users see faces, a stereo camera to filter out the background AI-powered object recognition. It's not over for the science, but boy, this really, if you've ever been upset that some sort of hardware, even software system has been deemed obsolete and will not be updated anymore, this is a little bit bigger of a deal than saying, well, I better transfer all my photos to a new service. Yeah, it is an absolute shame, and while the mobile revolution with its smaller and faster processors and better battery life have been a boon for a lot of accessibility users, this is a huge example of why sometimes being on the bleeding edge of tech can really harm you in the long run. What I would suspect in the next five to 10 years, nothing immediately, but as we move further with stuff like this, is you might see, especially in Europe and possibly in the United States, some kind of governmental regulation to either mandate or subsidize long term basic updates of this kind of technology. Yeah, to say, even if your company goes out of business, you have to have a plan for how to continue to support these devices if they're going to be implanted, especially if they're going to go to brain implants. I don't want to lose support for that. If you're talking about licensing, maybe as part of the licensing for every bit of runway that you have as a company, you have to have 10 years worth of baseline support. Talk about your right to repair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think this is a symptom of the expansion of technology into the mainstream. As technology matures, we're going to have more and more cases where it impacts people's lives more directly and where old problems back in the 90s were like, if your device goes out of service, I guess you just go get another device or figure it out yourself is not a good answer. It's not a good answer when that device is in your eyeball. All right, you may see some headlines out there about websites breaking in Chrome, Firefox and Edge soon. I'll be honest. I found most of the headlines out there pretty measured on this when they could have been very clickbaity. To understand what's happening, you need to know a couple of pieces of information. First, there's something called the user agent or user agent string in browsers. It's a header that tells a website what browser is accessing it. Also operating system and other things, which is helpful in making sure the website delivers an optimized page. If there are features of the site that only work in Chrome, Chrome has a few features that only it supports, then they won't send it if you're saying, hey, I'm in Firefox. Now it just makes websites look a little smoother depending on what browser you're using. One of the elements of the user agent is a major version number and we're headed toward upcoming version 100 releases of Firefox, Chrome and Edge. Now don't get too hung up on the version number if it doesn't sound right to you. This is the actual major version number used in the user agent string. It may or may not match the version in marketing materials for the browser and browsers also have subversions. For instance, Safari reports itself as major version 15.2, which is way far away from this problem, but subversion Safari 605. The 15 is the one we're dealing with in this problem, so Safari isn't going to have it. The problem for the other browsers is that some aspects of a web server, maybe it's parsing libraries, only handle two-digit numbers in some cases. So version 100, as you sharp-minded folks have noticed, has three digits. Mozilla started preparing for this a year ago. It was conducting an experiment to see what sites might be affected. Among those still having problems today are Daimler, T-Mobile in the Philippines, HBO Go Bulgaria, Bethesda, a bunch of Yahoo's pages, and those problems can range from site rendering problems to 403 errors to just browser not supported errors. So they're not always critical. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. Browser makers are taking some actions to help. Developers can enable a flag now in these browsers so that they can test their website themselves by making the browser appear to be version 100. That way they can look for hidden issues. And if issues become widespread, both Mozilla and Google have said they can push out a frozen 99 version so that the browsers all say their version 99 even though their version 100, so that they don't cause the problem. Chrome's releasing its version 100 on March 29th. Edge will release theirs on March 31st and Firefox on May 3rd. Now, why would Mozilla and Google say, OK, if this is a big enough problem, we can call it 99? I mean, temporarily, how could they call it 99 for quite some time? I think it's, they're like, we've done our best to test this. We think it's going to be fine. So we're pushing out version 100. If we're wrong, because we're going to be pushing this out at the scale of the internet and you can't test for all of those issues, we have a backup plan. We're ready. We hope we don't have to use it. But if we're ready, our break glass in case of emergency plan is just revert the version number back. Right. Yeah. Can we come up with names that people will run with? Sensational names, if this becomes a thing? Like the internet pocalypse, the browser out there. Yeah, the browser pocalypse, sentry. Oh, I thought you meant that the browser should just come up with cool names and stop using numbers where someone would say. That might be the other way to do it. Hold on a second. We can only handle two digits. We never thought we'd get this far. I think about 99 problems. When you think about it, especially if they were case sensitive, you could do lowercase a, lowercase a, lowercase a, lowercase b. You have a whole new system. The thing is, it's about the fact that some coding was like, oh, it'll just be two digits for a long time. We'll just use two digits. So if you change the versioning, you're just creating another problem somewhere else. You should have had open-ended variables that weren't limited that way. And honestly, it doesn't look like this is terribly widespread. Yahoo and Bethesda were the two major names on there. Others are like subsites. Oh, the HBO Go and Bulgaria needs to fix this. They must be using an old parsing library or something like that. Someone is sweating bullets in Sofia. Yeah. So, as always. Hey, you know, one of the big problems affecting the supply chain right now is finding viable routes. But James Thatcher from Tech and Trade tells us about a way to use the cloud that makes it easier with better data analysis. On Wednesday, Dunn & Bradstreet announced a strategic agreement with Google Cloud to provide cloud-based innovation solutions. Of a specific note to those in the supply chain is the fact that Dunn & Bradstreet has agreed to become a founding data provider to Google Cloud's supply chain twin service. This service enables members of a company-specific supply chain to communicate in real-time and view data as to what is and what could occur. So let's say, for example, you're a planner in a major United States manufacturing company. And your supply chain twin dashboard shows that you're in danger of running out of a specific part. You look to see who and where these part providers are located. Huh. There's three of them. And they're all in Southeast Asia. All right, let's take a look. Oh, their inventories are looking low. And the reason is logistics congestion. With the inclusion of the Dunn & Bradstreet data, you can now look to see if other vendors might be able to help. Oh, hey, look, there's a few vendors in South America. And it looks like they're not reporting logistics issues to the US. Maybe we should source from there. And probably quickly, so we can avoid a stockout. This collaboration is just one example of how tech firms are working more and more with supply chain to overcome our current supply chain shortage and crisis across the globe. Will this be the solution that changes everything? Who could say this early on? But I do think it's going to be an important factor for several years to come. At least, that's just my two cents. From the tech and trade desk, I'm Big Jim. Cool, this was something Big Jim put in our Discord earlier this morning. And I thought it was really interesting, the idea that, and it doesn't sound like this is going to fix supply chain issues tomorrow, but the idea that it would make it easier to find a new supply route, which seems obvious, but I like the way Big Jim explained it, where it's like, oh yeah, it might have been really hard for you to see all the alternate routes and this will help make it easier. Absolutely. Hey, folks, if you're feeling social, you can get in touch with us. We just changed the name of our Twitter account. If you're already following us, you would notice maybe, but if you're going to go follow us right now, you'll want to find us at DTNS Show on Twitter. And we are still DTNSPIX, P-I-X, DTNSPIX on Instagram. So go give us a follow, why don't you? You may have heard of the Durham filings related to the U.S. Special Counsel, John Durham's investigation of the FBI probe of President Trump. There's a lot of politics around that and for that, I will direct you to Wednesday's episode of Politics, Politics, Politics, but there's some tech in here too. So Justin, Robert Young, host of the aforementioned Politics, Politics, Politics podcast is going to help us understand the tech side of it. Justin, what do we got going on here? All right, I'm going to zoom by a bunch of stuff, but there's a few building blocks here that you have to know going into it. All of this is about a man by the name of Michael Sussman. He was a partner at a law firm called Perkins Coe that represents a lot of tech firms. Now they also represented the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. It was at that point in 2016, the summer of 2016, that Sussman went to the FBI and said that he had information from DNS researchers that connected Russia to the Trump Organization. He has been indicted by the Durham probe because the Durham probe alleges that Sussman did not disclose to the FBI that he was working on behalf of either a tech company or the Hillary Clinton campaign. He said he was a private citizen. It's flash forward to the last few weeks when as that trial is coming to fruition, Durham files an additional bit of information for Sussman's prosecution. And that is that Sussman later after Trump was elected went to the CIA and said, hey, I've got some DNS information. This time it wasn't from security researchers with public DNS lookups. Instead, it was from Newstar. That was a vendor, a cybersecurity vendor that had the contract to look over the DNS records of the executive office of the president. It was a contract signed in 2014 under President Obama and specifically it related to Newstar executive Rodney Joff. Now, this is very important to know. Newstar and Joff had legal access to these server logs. These server logs are governmental and non-public. So while he had access to them, the public did not. What Sussman did is go to the CIA and say, hey, look, there are some very suspicious things in these DNS logs, specifically the fact that there were communications with Yoda phones, YOTA phones. There are smartphones that are popular in Russia and later it was sold to a Chinese company and the company itself went bankrupt in 2019. But the existence of these DNS lookups specifically in 2017 was something that Sussman, according to Durham, tried to kick up suspicion with the CIA that Donald Trump was connected with Russia. Now, what Durham says is that these DNS lookups are not at all suspicious. In fact, if you go back, there are similar DNS lookups that happened during the Obama administration and it wasn't a big deal then. This was cherry picking, again, Durham's allegations, to keep this in the public eye. And all of that has obviously a lot of political context. However, what I believe is relevant to a crowd that already understands the concept of DNS lookups and doesn't need ham-fisted sweaty metaphors like phone books and street maps that are seen in every other mainstream coverage of this is one simple question. Is the accessing of private DNS lookups from a cybersecurity company and then using that information spying? Yeah, and a lot of that, obviously, like you said, a lot of it's political but a lot of it's also legal, right? What were the agreements with Newstar? What is Newstar's privacy policy? Did they say in the event of an investigation we may hand over records? Does handing over records to the CIA without a subpoena, without a warrant, those are all, there's a lot of legal questions in there. But what it comes down to me isn't just our DNS records spying because I guess they could be. DNS records can tell you things like an IP address. An IP address is not always location. If someone's being careful, they're masking their IP address but there are things you can tell from a log of IP addresses. So that could be valuable. I don't know if it meets any kind of legal qualification for spying but what caught my eye on this story, Justin, was that Business Insider noted that there were three million Yodafone IP addresses in the Newstar logs from 2014 to 2017. Only 1,000 of them were near the executive office of the president during that same time. So you're talking about people with Yodafones on the streets of a very populous city, walk them by and accessing the network, even if they're invited in, there could be all kinds of folks with a Yodafone in their pocket. It seems like a very small percentage should be any kind of significant piece of data. Yeah, so the closest metaphor that I could come up with with this after sitting with it for a couple of days technically is that the most that you could say that this is equivalent to spying and again, let me illustrate here, there was no eavesdropping even alleged in this. It's not that there's anything that was taken or recorded, but if let's say you were eavesdropping and you got a private conversation that was not supposed to be made public and then you cherry-picked elements of it and brought that somewhere else, would that be considered spying? That's surveillance, right? I mean, I guess the question would be is it spying technically if you were, let's say you were a secret service agent or you were contracted to be the caterer and you recorded somebody, I mean, I guess maybe the Mitt Romney example of being recorded by the bartender or something like that. Was that spying? Again, usually people like to just come up with their own definition and then use that. I don't know legally, I haven't looked into it legally to know like what's, there's one party states, two party states. I don't know what the IP address log-sharing policies are here. If it's against the law, then it's illegal to share it. It's not illegal for them to access it and look at it. So that's kind of vague. I just keep getting hung up on, but it's also useless. Like this isn't very useful information, right? This is not good to tell you a lot. That's part of what Durham is alleging is that this information, when you look at it in context, is fairly useless. In the way that it was presented, it looked very salacious, specifically in the moment that was existing after a gigantic upset election where there was this idea that quite possibly the president of the United States was a Russian agent. Yeah, I don't think some Yota phones in an extraordinarily busy office building had a very small percentage accessing a network at all, not even knowing what they're accessing it for. It doesn't feel very significant to me. Anybody who's looked at DNS logs knows. You get some crazy stuff in your log. Crazy stuff in DNS log. The craziest thing about all this is that it's been spun, obviously, in a million different directions. And the Democrat outlets are, oh, what a big nothing burger. And the Republican outlets are worse than Watergate, which was President Trump's quote on it. But I think really, you need to know what the hell DNS records are. And even appreciate what's going on here, in my opinion. Yeah. All right, Sarah, take us away. If you find yourself vacationing in the Silicon Valley, and you think, is there anything here? What's this place all about? Chris Christensen has a great idea for a day trip. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. Here's another place that you ought to check out if you're interested in technology and you're traveling, in this case, to the Silicon Valley or the Santa Clara Valley. This is my stomping grounds. And one of the museums here is the Computer History Museum. It's an interesting place to discover or rediscover technologies, since this is where quite a lot of it came from. You may or may not have the same experience that I have walking through there, have that, worked on that. I think I've got one of those in a drawer. But even if you don't, they have an amazing collection of old devices and even some older than I am, from the dawn of the computer age. If you find yourself in the Silicon Valley and you have some time, the Computer History Museum up by the Google campus. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. And the website is pretty good for them too, computerhistory.org. I haven't been to the Computer History Museum in quite some time, but it is great. It is true. I haven't actually been there in a while either. It's probably even better now, right? I mean, I don't know when y'all are gonna be in Silicon Valley, but I think a lot of our audience would enjoy that day trip very much. Oh yeah. Yeah, and a lot of more people are looking for domestic travel. So if you're in the US, becomes more of an option for you. All right, let's check out the mail bag. This one comes from Chip and Boston. And we got a similar email from Derek as well. Chip says, hey, Tom, I heard you talking about that Buzz Hum and your AirPods Pro on Tuesday show. I had a similar issue with one of my pros. It was cracking and buzzing occasionally. There's an Apple service program for this very issue. I brought my AirPods into the Apple store. They put them in some piece of test equipment, determined both were bad, gave me new ones on the spot. Same charging case, but new AirPods. Even gave me new silicone tips. Mine were out of warranty. So it might be worth checking out if nothing else. You might get a new set of AirPods out of it. Yes, thank you, Chip. Thank you, Derek. Allison Sheridan also reminded me of this. You are all right. That is what I should do. But every time I think about doing it, I think about having to go make an appointment and how my nearest Apple store, their appointments are always two weeks down the road, it seems like, and I have to drive really far for the one that has close, that has nearer appointments. And then I think, yeah, but if I just squeeze the AirPods a little, it goes away for a couple of weeks. And that's, so yeah. I will say that our mutual friend and DTNS contributor, Darren Kitchen, took his AirPods in there and they replaced them on the spot. They were just like, no known bug here. Just take two. Did he make an appointment? If I can just walk in, then it gets easy. I believe he just walked in. Yeah. Driving over. This is one of the things where they, this is an issue. I've been told an appointment is mandatory for Apple store visits in the past. And you know, come on in with a smile and sometimes they take you. Not saying they always will, but you have to, yeah. I'm just, I'm just ridiculously lazy. I'm just like, you know, I could just squeeze it in and it goes away. And then I don't have to drive over there. I don't have to smile. It goes away for a couple of weeks. It goes way longer for you to forget that there was a problem in the first place. It kind of unbends, then I do it again. I mean, but if you, what you would be waiting for with a, so just squeeze and make the appointment. Squeeze, make the appointment. I know, I know. I don't like leaving my house, Justin. That's really what it comes to. It's like now talking my language. Let's get down to the root of the problem here. I'm wants to stay home. Hey, we have some new bosses to thank. They include today, Kerry Perez and Alice Victoria Nichols. Both just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, Kerry and thank you, Alice. Yay, we had a couple of days there without a new boss, which, you know, in most businesses is normal, but for us, we like having new ones every day. Yeah, whether you're a patron or not, we always welcome your feedback. Feedback at daily technewshow.com is where to send that email. If you have thoughts on anything we talk about on the show or ideas for future episodes. Also, thanks to Justin Rubber Young for being with us today. What's been happening, my man? Oh, I'm so glad you asked, Sarah, because we have a great show for listeners to the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast tomorrow, Friday. We just recorded it. It is a panel show featuring Jen Briney of Congressional Dish, which if you do not listen to it, you are not as smart as you could be about the workings of the American government, not the politics. That's what I do. What she does is actually examine the laws. Brian Brushwood, the host of World's Greatest Cons, season two coming at the end of this month, by the way. And the one and only Tom Merritt. You would be shocked. Well, you probably won't, because you listen to Tom all the time. You would be shocked if you were to assume how much this man knows about Ukraine and Russia. It is a staggering amount of knowledge. It was a shockingly informative conversation and I would encourage you all to listen tomorrow on the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast. Excellent. Well, that's a good promotion. I will listen. I want to know more about Russia and the Ukraine. We are live on this show Monday through Friday. Even if we don't talk about Russia, it happens at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, put it on your calendar and join us if you can. We'll be back to have a look at the hacktivism surrounding the Canadian trucker protest with Annalie Newitz. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.