 Coming up on DTNS Jeff Bezos is going to Washington Intel builds anti malware into its chips and get hub changes master to main This is the Daily Tech news for Monday, June 15th 2020 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane And I'm the shows produced Roger chain welcoming back to the show Adobe Spark product manager Veronica Belmont Hello So happy to be here. We were just having a good time on good day internet talking to Veronica about me going to the mall Drilling content Drilling mall content. Yeah, lots more stuff comes in good day internet become a member get that show at patreon.com Slice DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know Walmart and Shopify announced a partnership to add 1200 Shopify sellers to Walmart's third-party marketplace by the end of this year 2020 Walmart's marketplace will remain invite only with all sellers vetted by the company in Q1 Walmart's marketplace grew at a faster pace than Walmart's own overall web business What's app users in Brazil can now send and receive money using Facebook pay transactions will require a pin or Biometric authentication But you don't have to pay a commission fee unless you're a business businesses will pay a 3.99% Processing fee to receive payments users can link their whatsapp account with a visa mastercard or debit card and local partners that launch include Banco de Brazil new bank and secretie By dance announced it plans to shut down two of its apps Vigo video and Vigo light across all of its markets having already Shuttered the apps in Brazil and countries in the Middle East these apps allowed users to create and share short-form sketches and lip-syncing to Bollywood songs by Dan says that it will help migrate videos over to tiktok before they're shut down in October According to mobile analysts the apps had five point five a million monthly active users in India The Apple card now offers zero percent financing for 12 months on Macs and iPads I feel like I'm doing a car commercial suddenly With six months financing on AirPods Those purchases still qualify for your 3% cash back at Apple purchases And accessories bought with iPads or Macs are included in the 12 month financing window Apple watch However is not included Apple launched 24 month zero percent financing for iPhone purchases back in December Apple also announced it will start start selling a solid-state drive upgrade kit for the Mac Pro The kit will let consumers upgrade the Mac Pro to eight terabytes of storage The company also announced you can now get the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Radeon Pro at fifty six hundred M card Which offers six gigabytes of HBM to memory and acclaimed at seventy five percent performance boost over the 4G 5500 m cards the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced the automated vehicle transparency and engagement for safe testing or AV test Initiative that creates a voluntary online platform for sharing automated driving system on-road testing Activities the upshot here is they want to eventually provide the public with testing locations and activity data for Autonomous vehicles so you can see what's actually going on with them among the participants at launch will be Fiat Chrysler Toyota GMO cruise Uber Waymo and the states of California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas Norway's data protection agency asked that the country's contact tracing app be suspended by June 23rd Because of threats to user privacy the Norwegian Institute of Public Health disagreed with that evaluation But will indeed disable GPS and Bluetooth in the app as of June 16th and delete user data quote as soon as possible and the Microsoft Insider Program is changing from the ring model of Slow ring fast ring and release preview ring a new system will have a dev channel that replaced the fast ring And that won't be tied to a release It'll have new features on OS improvements as they become available the beta ring will replace the slow ring I'm sorry the beta channel will replace the slow ring That'll have a reliable version of features tied to a particular upcoming release And then the preview channel is just renaming the preview ring And adds some support from Microsoft as well. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Mr. Bezos. Oh, let's Amazon told Politico that the CEO Jeff Bezos is willing to testify before the US House Judiciary Committee on the issue of antitrust Amazon sent a letter to the House Committee on Sunday Antitrust hearings are scheduled for July now according to letters seen by Axios the US House Judiciary Committee Contacted Apple alphabet Amazon and Facebook to seek voluntary testimony from their CEOs and documents as part of a larger probe into big tech Competitive concerns these letters also suggested that subpoenas would be used to produce documents and testimony if not offered voluntarily Yeah, so one of the hang-ups here was that Bezos Said they were saying that Bezos was not the guy to talk about whether third-party data from other merchants was used or not But I think they've now walked back to realizing that it's just probably good for them to have the CEO at least show his face even if they have other people also testify so some of this is around their treatment of Competitive products competitive companies and how they appear on the platforms, correct Yeah, that's the third-party data that I was talking about where they like take third parties from their platform Who've sold things and say like oh that's selling. Well, let's make one of those. Yes, exactly Yeah, I'm really curious to see how this kind of plays out because I think this is something that people in the industry have been watching for a Really long time and I mean we know they have the data We know that they like kind of why wouldn't they use it at this point I mean, I can't imagine that they're so It's on such a moral high ground that they that they wouldn't at least in some departments be looking at that data and Talking across groups to kind of figure out how best to use it But I don't that's just my opinion, but I'm curious to see how they defend against that Yeah, I mean I I'm with you Veronica There there have been instances that we've talked about at least on this show in the past where it's like Amazon executive saying Well, you know, we don't always know what employees are doing those employees might have been doing bad things But we certainly didn't sanction it. Is that true? Well, we don't know but you When a company gets to a certain size you start to roll your eyes a little bit when when you hear stuff like that I think also somebody like Jeff Bezos saying well, I you know, I I don't want to go testify Do I have to I don't if I don't have to I don't want to do it after a while Again, the perception of the public whether or not you have a variety of really good reasons for not doing so It makes it looks like you have something to hide. So, you know at that point you kind of you just got to do it He's like, don't I pay people to do this to Veronica's point I think it'll be interesting if they come clean about what they do use and what they don't because you're right There are some things that they do use and I think Amazon will try to say there are things We know about general trends on our platform. Of course, we pay attention to those but we don't look at Individual companies data. We do keep that separate because that's probably anonymized. Yeah. Yeah And I think they'll probably come come with that kind of defense Last year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission completed an 18th month investigation into how digital platforms were affecting media Competition in the country the report called for the creation of a voluntary code of contact Conduct that would see platforms negotiate in good faith with news media to pay to use their content Advise news media of algorithm changes ahead of time favor original sources over people quoting original sources and Share data back to the news people now some of these were not controversial to the platforms But some of them were submissions from the news industry called for platforms particularly Facebook and Google to either pay a Centralized license fee that would be allocated to organizations based on the cost of making news not on usage on how much they had to spend to make news That's why news Corp wanted it that way Or sometimes up to 10% of the company's revenue in the country That would be around 411 million dollars United States This code was set to be finalized in November But in April the Australian government tasked the regulatory commission with creating a mandatory code after limited success with early negotiations That code followed the same basic principles of the voluntary code but added penalties and binding dispute resolution mechanisms in response to the initial draft of these Mandatory rules Facebook has rejected many of the draft rules stating it has healthy competition with news organizations and There would not be significant impacts on its business if it stopped sharing news altogether Google Australia's managing director Mel Silva also wrote that the direct and indirect value of news to the company is quote very small Facebook said both it and Google were being unfairly singled out because they're the only ones mentioned by name and Proposed an Australian digital news council as an alternative that would mediate complaints from news Organizations based on the Australian press council as a model rather than creating a separate regulatory body Now what I haven't been able to pin down for sure is if they're talking about Facebook having to pay to use news in a Facebook news section like the one they just launched or if they mean Everybody's sharing on Facebook because if they mean everybody's sharing on Facebook I don't know first of all how you stop that and second of all that is material to Facebook's business But if they're just talking about like when Facebook posts a news post that's different or when Facebook promotes it, etc Certainly in Google's case we've seen this happen before in Spain. They just got rid of Google news. They said fine Yeah, we won't do it at all first of all two two thoughts one I'm totally okay with Facebook just not showing any news on its platform that would be fine with me To they could definitely do some kind of Blocklist or deny list around certain news domains to prevent those from being shown on the platform pretty easily to get around those So that's one way that they could definitely stop the sharing of potential news sources Yeah, this is you know, we've seen this across various markets You know that the fact that a company like Facebook is like well, it doesn't even really matter if we do this or not But we'd like you to completely We think the regulatory body that you put together in order, you know for us to be a little bit more compliant with you know with Publishers and and what their their values are as well is a little I don't know if it's silly It's just it seems I don't know how you are really working with a government organization when you go about it this way agreed Well, I don't know how much we agree about Quibi Well, let's talk about Quibi anyway The Wall Street Journal sources say that the streaming service Quibi is on pace to sign up less than two million users by the end of its first Year in operation under the company's original target of seven point four million So that's quite a bit under in fact according to the analytics firm sensor tower Quibi had three point eight million downloads as of June 7th after hitting the reported peak of 379,000 downloads on its April 6th launch Gosh was that already April all right seems like a long time ago Miss streaming service did not exceed at twenty thousand downloads for any single day in the first week of June at the end of May 1.5 million users signed up for a 90-day free trial which began which began ending early in early July So you're starting to see people drop off because they're they're Their trials are ending since its founding in 2018 the company has raised 1.75 billion dollars, but estimates by Q3 of this year Uh-huh it will have spent one billion of those 1.75 billion dollars including a budgeted 350 million on content in 2019 so Sunset Quibi needs to raise more money or really rethink some things Yeah So if so the trials will start ending in July the 90-day trials will start ending in July when that happens two things will happen They'll either start making money off people who forget to cancel, which will probably happen and to certain people who like the product and stay Or or also, I guess there are people who like the product and state It's fair it's fair that there's there are people who like Quibi and will Willingly stay But one expects a large number of people to cancel in which case they not only lose that potential subscription revenue But those eyeballs as well now a lot of those people weren't watching it anyway But the people who have been watching it are generating advertising revenue And that was the other thing is quibi sold a lot of advertising up front They are not going to with these numbers have the Volume to deliver the impressions that they promised Yeah, we don't know anything about what their monthly active users looks like they're they're dhu We don't know like how many people what their return rates are we don't know There's probably a lot of churn It's just there's there's so many questions these numbers obviously tell a pretty bad story about the the rate of new sign-ins and account creations, but I don't know how you raise money with that kind of trend But yeah, I think there will be more information coming when we start seeing those those trials and and see if people do stick on Because if they can if they can make some kind of sustainable Tell some kind of sustainable story about their about their their usage That might help them, but it doesn't look good. Well in the whole quibi thing, you know, again Some pretty bad timing just on the part of the world Being like we're a mobile first company You're not going to be able to cast to televisions and people are like that's crazy. No one can leave their home All right. Well, let's figure out How to let you cast your televisions chrome cast Yeah, and so and so, you know, we might we might see, you know, the The tide turn a little bit, but you know, I don't know with a fickle audience. I It it's it doesn't look good. Maybe they should have called it omakaze, which is another thing in this story Yeah, I don't know about that Intel announced plans to build anti malware directly into its cpu's tiger lake mobile chips will be the first to integrate something called control flow enforcement technology Or c e t which was jointly developed by intel with microsoft now bear with me here c e t addresses something called return oriented programming or r o p r o p Was the bad guy the malware makers response to something called executable space protection and address space layout randomization or esp and asl are Those stopped malware from making changes to system memory. So r o p came around And started hijacking functions that were already in memory Malware makers said you're gonna keep us from getting into the memory fine We'll find things that are already in the memory and manipulate those Essentially reordering when the functions ran, which would return information to the malware So one way c e t blocks r o p Is a shadow stack Say that five times fast Shadow stack makes a copy of the order of operations that are executed in a cpu for each app That way when the r o p when the malware makers try to manipulate the order the functions run into gain information The cpu looks at it and says Not the right order And stops executing the program c e t also defends against other attacks like jump oriented programming call oriented programming Intel released the c e t specifications back in 2016 In order to give app makers time to update the apps that support them and windows insider builds already include support in the operating system The operating system has to support this for it to work intel says it plans to integrate c e t across desktop and server platforms as well Got nothing to say about that. That's pretty cool. I mean it's good. It's good Let's just give intel credit. They've been getting a lot of heat For the side channel execution vulnerabilities, which intel is not the only chip maker to suffer from And those but those side channel vulnerabilities keep on coming This is this is something that I think is a a better fix for arguably a more widespread problem problem Yeah, I mean Any company who's like we're going to build anti malware into our cpus. My first reaction is great Let's all do that Are there any sort of glaring issues that anyone sees with this? It's like no, I mean moving in the right direction The real silver blade in our our twitch chat, uh, which by the way twitch is back up Says wouldn't malware makers just work around this and yeah They'll come up with something the way rop was the arms race. Yeah But this is a good fix. This is a good move in that continuing arms race A company calling itself open core computer launched a pc called velociraptor She's a really great name for a pc which it also says comes pre-installed with mac os catalina and windows 10 pro Yeah, open core is only accepting bitcoin as payment So some eyebrows have been raised apples and user license agreement for bids third party installations of its software And any commercial mac clone is a violation of that agreement as well as the dmca the digital millennium copyright act Apple sued and won a permanent injunction against the company size star back in 2009 for selling hackintoshes Harkening back to the The makers of the open core bootloader. That's the open source project acid in thera Said they're in no way affiliated with this company and they called it shocking and disgusting And this was very confusing to me when I read it this morning. Um, so if anyone else is confused It's you know, there's quite a few companies that are doing things or not doing things right now and and I know that that clearly um The open core bootloader folks are like we Don't don't bring us into this. We didn't do this open core bootloader is an open source project It is meant to allow You to make a hackintosh, but it doesn't actually break any of the the terms or anything It's just a tool that you can use or not use and they're they try to be very ethical about it Whereas open core computer is trading on that open core bootloader name Uh to probably get a little bit of goodwill and I think that's why the folks who make open core bootloader are very upset Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Man. I haven't heard the name size star in a long time It's kind of exciting Uh And and you know hackintosh is there's a lot of argument about whether you should be allowed to make your own hackintosh And that's where the open core bootloader people work. It's like empowering users open core computer by saying like Oh, we're not breaking the rules because we're hiding your purchase in bitcoin Uh, that seems pretty shady to me uh, yeah I am of all the Kind of back and forth that I've seen online from folks It all ends up coming back to well if apple just made their computers cheaper. We wouldn't be here You know It's like I don't totally know how this ends up You know apple's going to go after any company who's doing something like this As brazenly as it is now, but it you know, it's it's I think these things keep cropping up until Uh, you know the the faithful are are happier with their products Or if if apple opened up the operating system a little more beyond just the darwin or that or that yeah Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com Google chrome developer una cravitz posted on twitter last week Quote for what it's worth. I'm super happy to rename the default branch structure of master To main and I hope we can all do this together as a community with github leading the charge by implementing it In their products moving forward The reason for that is the master branch Uh, kind of calls up the master slave Terminology in technology. Uh, it's often used for for client server situations And una cravitz was saying look if this makes anybody uncomfortable if it brings up associations with slavery It's easy to call it main. Let's do this Github CEO nat freedman responded. It's a great idea and we are already working on this And he at replied cto billy griffin in his response of github now Keep in mind. There's github the company and there's git the open source project So you've got a little bit at open core confusion going on again. So those are two different organizations And developers in either can choose their names for various versions and branches of projects But github has a default That often is what people use because it's the default like we all do sometimes you look at the default and you're like Yeah, that's fine. So the open source git project is considering switching the default From master to main to denote the main branch of a repository github Sounds like they're going to go ahead and do that which would sort of lead the way on the issue The move comes as a bunch of other projects also work to remove terms from code libraries That may sound racially insensitive. Uh android open source project go programming language Grammarly and the curl download utility are among those who have all changed White list and blacklist to allow list and block list LinkedIn developer Gabriel Sapo said on twitter He is working to update microsoft's internal software libraries to make similar changes And drupal is one of the organizations that did this a while ago drupal cms project adopted The the primary replica language to replace master slave back in 2014 veronica I know you you brought this up because uh, you you deal with this kind of terminology and your job all the time Yeah, I think uh, I'm personally I I kind of came up with this earlier today I don't know if anyone else is using this but I like go list and no list Makes it easier than saying like allow or deny for some reason go list or no list But I think it's a really great trend. I think it's it It does seem rather trivial. Um in terms of the amount of work It goes into renaming these things and and the amount of of good that it can do and in making companies And projects more inclusive And welcoming to a lot of people who maybe didn't feel that way and felt uncomfortable when those terms were being used and with good reason So i'm really happy to to see those changes. I know adobe is doing this with some of our open source projects as well I hope that continues even further and on the technology end of the spectrum With what we're doing. So yeah, I mean, I I've definitely become aware of it now when I hear it More and more but as you know, as you mentioned drupal has been doing this since 2014 And I think there's been a lot of conversations happening in the the developer communities about this And there's been a lot of pushback And I think that pushback it seems so silly to me because like I said it from a technology perspective It's not difficult to do. It's just the naming of things And so going back and making those changes not not super difficult And it just seems like people get really set in their ways in the ways they like to do things And they make excuses sometimes as well I've heard a lot of the arguments about how master in a lot of instances when it's not something like like forking a repo or repo or whatever is more Referring to like a master recording But at the end of the day to me it doesn't really matter because if that thing makes people feel unwelcome in the technology world It it shouldn't be Even a conversation at this point, right? It doesn't really it's it's it's a it's a title for something that does a thing Yeah, you know you change the title the thing still does the thing And people are happier. It's hard to argue. Well, hold on. This is the way that we used to do it before Let's all you know, let's you know stop being so pc because I think that there is a lot of There is a lot of sentiment of like, oh, that's not what this means. This is just tech stuff And and maybe you do feel that way But if people don't feel that way and again like you know inclusion is such a big topic in our industry Why why not because it's such an easy fix and like you said like go or no. Yeah, it's like just say that Nothing changes. Why? The downside could be If we don't agree on On the right the the new term, right? It's going to cause confusion if everybody's using different things when everybody used the same thing before So you do have to I don't think it really does matter that much You do have to come to a consensus on that or or it will it will cause some temporary confusion But I imagine that consensus will coalesce And then there's also the the determination of well, where is the line? Where are the things that you don't change? I think client slave slave drives I think those are pretty obviously bad, right? Like I would say so. Yeah, I have talked to people who are like, yeah I was uncomfortable building PCs because I had to talk about the slave drive and the and the and the you know The master slave terminology really bothered me And so I think those are those are worth changing Even if there's a little bit of of a rough bump in trying to figure out what we all agree The new change is and and if you have enough Momentum which it seems like maybe you do certainly a github It should be easy to get on the same page about what the new terminology is at the end I'll just say if people are smart enough to make computers and build these systems People are smart enough to figure out what is going to work and what to use and what to change Now it brings up a question for us So I don't want to get too naval gazing here But all right, we have two patreon levels one called master Which is named after the the idea of like a master's degree a mastery of something And we have a name called grandmaster which was suggested by lamar wilson after chess grandmasters And so, you know doing this story today has made us double look at the sarah brought this up last week to be honest But but we're thinking like is is this on the side of the line? We're like no, it's too far removed It really won't bother people or does it? So we do want to hear you from you feedback at daily tech news show dot com about that. We're listening Absolutely, you can also join the conversation in our discord Which happens 24 7 and you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns All right, let's check out the mailbag. Oh do we one of our dtns bosses wrote it and said this past week You explained the changes coming to hbo apps at the time it seemed to make sense But I've discovered a problem affecting me and maybe a few others soon hbo go will go away And hbo says we're placed by hbo max. This is for people like me who subscribe to hbo with their cable tv provider Unfortunately, this only works if your provider is signed up to support hbo max My provider is frontier took over the fiber optic service for Verizon files here in florida and several other states I downloaded the hbo max on my apple tv when you run it gives you code as you to log in with your provider Unfortunately frontier communications not on the list like it was for hbo go The net result is I will be losing the ability to watch hbo on my ios and apple tv devices Even though I pay for it with my cable service. I just love it when I have things taken away from me when i'm paying for them Yeah, there are a few examples where uh, you know, it's not a majority of hbo users But because there's a dispute between the companies and they can't come to an agreement people like do we get lost What hbo would tell you is easy fix cancel hbo through frontier and sign up with hbo max directly And then you'll get it but then you wouldn't have it on your frontier tv system Would you and though then I think hbo would say well, you might want to think about changing your tv system So this this is when they're trying to use users as leverage between each other and poor do we gets caught in the middle I'm Sorry I give up Anything hbo these days and like what what are you subscribed? I just you know, I like a lot of your content you jerks Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including it dan colbeck urwinster and justin zealors Also a big thanks to veronica belmont for being with us after all this time We really missed you let folks know where they can keep up with your work Yeah, uh gosh, um veronica belmont is really just a Little portal page for all the stuff that i'm doing right now. Um sword and laser, of course still going strong after what 12 years? I don't even gosh. Yes So we're we're still Cranking out sword and laser every other week. Um super fun and spark Yeah, the project that I work on in adobe is called adobe spark and you can check it out at spark dot adobe dot com Also folks you can so support for daily tech news show at any level by going to daily tech news show dot com slash patreon There's lots of perks for thanking you if you find value in the show We just ask that you give a little value back there and uh, we also support the show through some merch You know, we got hats. We got sweatshirts. We know not all of you want a mask, but if you do We've got them in the d tns store right now Who wouldn't want to walk around with a d tns logo on their face? Come on Go check it out daily tech news show dot com slash store And if you got feedback for us, we'd love to hear it Email addresses feedback at daily tech news show dot com if you'd like to join us live We'll guess what we are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with lamar wilson as our guest talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com I hope you have enjoyed this brover