 Coming up on DTNS how tech may keep airlines from losing your bag parents of Alexa protest Amazon and should you destroy your Echo Dot instead of sell it? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 2nd, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And joining the two coolest people on the internet, your boy, big Chris Ashley. We're on the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peraldo. And on the show is producer, Roger Cheney. The only thing that makes us cool is that we have Chris Ashley on the show. See, it's all a circle. We were just talking about the origins of the Wizard of Oz, among many other things on good day internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. General Motors announced that it's the first investor in an Australian company called Controlled Thermal Resources, which plans to extract lithium from the Salton Sea geothermal field, which is near Los Angeles, with GM getting first rights on any lithium that gets extracted. The project is expected to begin lithium production in 2024 and would be used in GM's Ultium battery cells. Currently, the U.S. only has one lithium production site. Two days after DD, the operators of DD Xuxing, went public on the New York Stock Exchange, the Chinese government announced it's conducting a cybersecurity review of the ride-hailing giant, during which time new users will not be able to sign up for the service. In its IPO prospectus, DD did warn that it could not guarantee investors that the regulatory authorities will be satisfied with our self-inspection results, and the company will receive greater and continued attention and scrutiny from regulators. They're just the latest to get that kind of attention in China. After launching in beta back in October, Facebook's cloud gaming service, Facebook Gaming, has expanded support to 98% of the mainland United States and is opening up availability in Canada and Mexico. The service initially launched with five games and now has over 25 mostly mobile titles, including Assassin's Creed Rebellion as part of a partnership with Ubisoft. CEO Arvin Krishna's big moves continue to have effects at IBM. IBM's second highest-ranking executive, President Jim Whitehurst, is leaving the company two years after he joined because IBM acquired Red Hat. He came over from Red Hat. He was a Delta before that. Senior Vice President of Sales, Bridget Van Kralingen, also announced her retirement. She'll be replaced by Rob Thomas, neither the hockey player nor the musician, different Rob Thomas. Whitehurst departure is the biggest since Arvin Krishna took over as CEO of IBM in January 2020. OnePlus announced on Friday that the OnePlus 8 series and all newer flagship phones will get three major Android OS updates and four years of security updates. It's pretty close to what Samsung is already offering. The new support schedule is a result of merging OnePlus's oxygen OS skin with Oppo's color OS on the back end. The interfaces of the two skins will remain distinct. It's also helped by Qualcomm offering updates for flagship systems on a chip for three years and security updates for four. All right, speaking of chips, let's talk about those chip battles, Chris. So this chip battle is getting interesting. DK, that's from Asia, sources say Intel and Apple began testing chip designs using TSMC's free nanometer production technology. With commercial output expected in the second half of 2022, TSMC estimates its process will improve performance by 10 to 15 percent and reduce power consumption by 25 to 30 percent. Now, Apple will reportedly use the chips in iPads next year. Intel confirmed it is working with TSMC for products in the 2023 lineup. Nvidia and AMD already use TSMC for five nanometer chips, but Intel wants to be the first to use three nanometers. Meanwhile, Qualcomm says it can make a chip that beats the Apple M1 partly because it has former Apple chip designers like former A-series chip lead Gerald Williams, who left the company in 2019 with two other executives to start Nuvia, which was acquired by Qualcomm, which is the more interesting chip battle, guys. Intel trying to leapfrog AMD by using TSMC designs or Qualcomm calling out Apple after grabbing their engineers. I don't know, I got two different answers because the most significant is Intel finally saying, yep, we told you we were going to outsource, we told you we were going to use TSMC, here we go. We're going to do three nanometer chips. They can't, they just delayed their seven nanometer chips. We're going to use three nanometer chips. They keep saying that this is temporary until they can get their own development back on track. But I think that's the more significant. But man, it's hard to pass up Qualcomm saying, not only did we steal your people, Apple, but we're going to beat you on the M one, especially because the M one, you know, whether you love or hate Apple, everyone agrees that is a heck of a chip. That's a tall order. Just saying, what do you think? I don't, I mean, as someone who's got an M one chip and in my newest MacBook Air, I'm like, let's see it. Qualcomm, I really care, you know, let's let's make better chips, everybody. Let's do it, you know, first to the finish line wins. I have to agree with Tom deal. It is very interesting when you get out of your comfort zone and you start doing things that are a little bit different because having fresh eyes, I can tell you from personal experience with working in software can change the whole game for a product that you're developing. Because once you get, unfortunately, you get these guys that have this deep knowledge and they know what they're doing, but they just look at things one way because they've been doing it for so long. And when you get another team involved, you know, things really awesome things can happen when that happens. But my goodness, when you just start calling out the big dog on the block, how can you ignore that by any sensitive imagination? Definitely gonna be an interesting chipboard. Yeah, if people don't know all the baggage around this, Qualcomm and Apple, of course, have sued each other a few times. Apple still uses Qualcomm parts for modems. Apple sued the people who left to start Nuvia because they claim they only left in order to take intelligence with them and then Qualcomm snapped it up. A lot of people thought the idea with Nuvia was that Gerard Williams would start this new company and they'd get Apple to acquire it and Qualcomm acquired it itself. So there's a whole made for TV movie going on behind the scenes there. Well, doesn't that also kind of, you know, make more lawsuits inevitable if Apple was already like, hey, hold on, this Nuvia thing doesn't seem right. Well, going after Qualcomm is, you know, that's a much bigger deal. Yeah, if Qualcomm makes a chip that's too much like the M1, Apple's going to bring the hammer down. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Security researchers at Northeastern University purchased 86 used Echo Dot devices and found all previous passwords and tokens remained in the flash memory sometimes even after a factory reset. Some of them hadn't been factory reset, which that's something you absolutely should do before you sell any tech product. But even when they had been factory reset, some of them still had info in there. All right, here's why. If you don't reset an Echo Dot, you can pretty much get all your data from it because it's still sitting there. But it also depends on how you reset it, how much information is left. They did need physical access to this, but if you're trolling around on eBay, you might find some stuff. You need to unscrew the bottom and read the memory and then you can get the information out. So this isn't a remote hack. It's not even a particularly easy hack, but it's one that can be done. If you don't have it connected to WiFi when you reset the Echo Dot and you forget to delete it from your Alexa app, they could recover the authentication token to log into your Amazon account and then be able to go in and control Amazon stuff. So that's a big one. You need to either be connected to WiFi when you reset it or delete it from your app. If you don't do both of those, they're gonna be able to get your token, at least the way it is now. If you do remember to do at least one of those things, either have it connected to WiFi when you reset it or delete it from your Alexa app, they couldn't get that token, but they were still able to get your WiFi SSID names, passwords for those routers and MAC addresses of the connected router. Now, if their point was to try to get into your router, to use your WiFi without your permission or get into your router, they could do that. Probably it's more about finding location by using your MAC address and using your WiFi SSID. In either case, the attacker would need to do some soldering to extract the data. So this is again, not something that people are gonna do on a whim. The researchers proposed a possible mitigation would be to encrypt the user data partition, which they said could be done in a firmware update and not degrade performance. Amazon, of course, responded by saying we recommend factory reset and removal of the device from your account before disposing of it in any way. And Amazon is working on mitigation methods. If you're worried that someone wants to go to the trouble of cracking open an Echo Dot that you got rid of and soldering it to find out where your router is and how to log into it or where you are, then your only option is to destroy the NAND chip inside at this point. But I don't think most of us have to worry about that. Chris, how does this make you feel though? So there's a different perspective on this. And while you lay it out perfectly, right? That's a lot of work just to recover somebody's data that's stored on a device. But what it kinda exposes is that even to this day with all that's going on and all the hacking that's going on, the manufacturers are still not thoroughly thinking about how to protect user data, right? Because yes, in this particular case, it's extremely challenging to get the information, but why are you not encrypting this data to begin with? And so, and then the kind of the flip it responds, like, oh, we would recommend how you should delete. No, come on guys, we gotta start holding these manufacturers more accountable for this stuff. Take user data seriously because breaches are every day now. Yeah, I'm with you on that, Chris. I understand that it's not always as easy as a race button. And then everything's fine, right? But we spend so much time when I say we, it's people who understand these things maybe more than other people, that you have data that is open, vulnerable, private, and you don't take good enough care of it, and it's on devices, then you're gonna get in trouble, it's a bad way to live. So if you've got a device where there is a method for doing the right thing, but it's a little bit more convoluted than that, then yeah, I think it really is on the company to say, if you're gonna take the initiative to secure your privacy as much as possible, then something like this is, it's asking too much of a lot of people, especially Echo Dot owners. Well, I didn't take Amazon as being flippant. I took Amazon as reminding people, like you do need to reset your devices before you sell them. That's just good practice everywhere, and saying this is the proper way to do it for us. I'm with you, Chris, that Amazon should have been encrypting that data from the beginning. Too many companies take that shortcut. I'm glad that they are doing it now. It seems like, I'm hopeful that we'll get a news story soon that it's done, and I overall see this as a good news story. It's somebody responsible found it and held Amazon's feet to the fire to fix it before somebody was able to use it for nefarious purposes. I can't tell you how many times I've had to make a decision in the direction of a software, not because it was the easiest decision, but because I didn't want our users to end up shooting themselves in the foot. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The BBC has a report about how airlines are updating data management in ways that make it less likely they will lose your luggage. In the past, data on you and your flight and your baggage was handled by email, PDFs, and some fairly rudimentary dashboard interfaces. Anybody who's tried to, I don't know, organize a simple party using those resources may wonder how any bag really even made it to its destination using a method like this, but hey, that's how it was going. None of this information was accessible by the passenger either. So you just kind of said, buy a bag, hope you make it. Normally it did, not always though. You knew what happened with your bag when it showed up or didn't on the carousel. Didn't really know ahead of time. New systems like Sysense, which is used by Air Canada, are app-based and work on desktops and tablets and watches, pushing information to employees and also passengers as they need it and as it progresses through its own path. American Airlines was able to consolidate approximately 100 systems into 10. Another trend is decentralization. Centralized baggage handling system airports have a centralized point of failure. So when it fails, it's kind of a big deal. Decentralized systems allow a lot more flexibility. These platforms are also working on algorithms that can anticipate problems before they happen. Yeah, I recently flew on Delta and was very pleased that my Delta app was telling me, hey, your bag just came off the plane. I'm like, okay, at least it got here. It says it came off the plane where I am, that's good. And then in one case it even said it's coming into this carousel and the carousels still had a different piece of information on them. And I was able to go to the right carousel and get my bag because the app was correct and the sign above the actual carousel had not been properly updated. So there's obviously some miscommunication going there but the apps were working, at least for me there. Yeah, this is very cool and I like it. I travel both of these airlines, Air Canada as well as American Airlines. So I don't check bags a lot anymore. I try to consolidate, but when I do, there's always that anxiety of where's my bag? Is it gonna be here? So the only thing that they need to do for, at least from my experience is they need to add, your bag has been dragged across the tarmac alert and your clothes are strewn all over and when you stuff them into the bag and yeah, all your shoes and stuff are burned and melted together because of the heat of being dragged across the tarmac. Yeah, that is a true story. Yeah, some sensors. Your bag is at a high temperature. Man, I'm sorry to hear that's a true story too. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, I guess it is good to know. Listen, if I'm halfway across the world and I'm making a couple connections and my bag is not gonna be there when I land in London at 3 a.m. type of a thing, I would like to know, hey, your bag is headed to the North Pole a little bit earlier through a text message doesn't, you know, at that point, it's kind of like when, because I use United Airlines as my preferred carrier, carrier of me, but that airline as well as other airlines have also gotten better at, you get your text alerts well before the gate might tell you, oh, we've changed the gate or the flight is canceled or delayed or whatever the update is, which is helpful and it usually is happening on my mobile device first or my computer if I happen to be on it. It's at the point where you're like, oh, there's a problem. Now I got to go customer service. So it's still air travel. And the baggage. But it's nice to know a little bit earlier. The baggage claim perk, definitely a huge plus because all of us have been part of that stampede when you're all at like one and they're like, oh, no, we switched it to 10 and everybody's like, you know, just let's go. Yeah. I mean, to put a button on this, this is actual digital transformation. This is, you know what I mean? Like this is, if you've heard that phrase kicked around, like this is it actually doing something, changing something, making things actually work better for people right there. Well, we've been reminding you all week and we're going to do it again this Saturday, July 3rd, our science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns will kick off a limited series called Seniors in Tech where she chats with seniors about the impact of technology on their lives. The first episode kicks off with Allison Sheridan whose engineering career ended up being a gateway to technology and also podcasting. Check your DTNS feed this Saturday, July 3rd for more. The BBC reports that some parents who have children named Alexa are calling on Amazon to change its default wake word to a non-human name. One parent says other children only stop teasing and bullying their daughter after they legally changed her name. They told the BBC, we have cut off friends and moved her to a new school to allow a fresh start. There was clearly not enough ethical research into using Alexa. Amazon responded in a statement, we designed our voice assistant to reflect qualities we value in people being smart, considerate, empathetic and inclusive. We're saddened by the experiences you've shared and want to be very clear. Bullying of any kind is unacceptable and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Alexa-enabled devices came to the UK in 2016 and the popularity of the name has dramatically fallen from the 167th most popular name in England and Wales to the 920th popular name by 2019. That is quite a fall. Yeah. I'm tempted to say children can be awful, but that's not as an excuse, right? That's sort of like this should have been expected and I think that's what the parents are saying. You should have expected this. I'm not sure that any of us when Amazon launched the Echo thought of that. I'm not sure how much I hold Amazon culpable for that. On the other hand, it was a much smarter move for Apple to call it Siri since there's not a lot of people named Siri. In fact, if you're named Siri, it's likely because you got named Siri after the voice assistant, not before it. And, you know, okay, Google, right? Yeah, Microsoft. A whole lot better. Microsoft used Cortana for the Google game. Yeah. So this is not something where I would necessarily say we should have known ahead of time. Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't, but certainly now it's like, you know what? Maybe don't name voice assistants after people for lots of reasons, this being among them. Yeah, going forward, definitely let's not do that. But, you know, and I do feel bad because for the little girl, because I hate bullies. I really can't stand them. But, you know, that's way out, you know, they're not changing the name. It's been a while since, I don't know, I was a kid on a playground, but my first reaction is, but what are you getting teased about? I mean, it's a name that represents a wealth of information, reordering cool things. You know, you can do math, you know, ask Alexa to do kind of everything. But let's just say, no, it actually sucks to be a human with that name and the standage. Totally get it. Legally changing your kid's name seems like a dramatic way to solve this issue. Again, I don't have a kid nor am I named Alexa. So I can imagine that it might get pretty bad at some point. There are other wake words though. I use Sonos to talk to my Amazon assistant. So I actually don't have the options to, I think it's Alexa computer and Echo, right? That you can change to, not the default though. So okay, I get that perhaps Amazon has some choices there. You changing the default word is not going to stop kids at school from knowing about. I also just, you know, we're at some point, I don't know when, but at some point we're going to have more customization options for our wake words. So I think that's what the solution is here. I think that's the ultimate solution is just let us all name it whatever we want. And then there's not this one iconic word. Cause sure, you can get made fun of for having the same name as somebody that was in a movie or a TV show or a book. The thing is that fades away, whereas the Echo doesn't. The Echo stays in your house and everybody keeps using it, you know? This whole baby girl would be like, listen, honey, it could have been worse. Your name could have been Joe Deer Taye. Oh, man. See that's Dan Ackerman has an article up called why giant e-ink screens like the Boox Note Air are my favorite underrated tech. He points out that most people think of the Kindle when they think of e-ink screens, but it's not the best example because it's very specialized and the screens are small at six or seven inches. The 10.3 inch screens of the Remarkable 2 and the Boox are much more comfortable. He notes that e-ink screens are good for lag-free note-taking and drawing and e-ink screens are easier on the eyes and good for long-term reading. The Boox uses Android, which means you can even get the Kobo, Kindle, and Nook Android apps on that big 10.3 inch screen. Sarah, you've been testing the Remarkable 2 for the next Live With It special. What's your reaction to Dan's write-up? I agree. I agree. In fact, I've got it right here. I haven't talked about it too much because I'm still in my review period, but yeah, I'm with Dan on this. I also, this is my first e-reader and the Remarkable 2 sort of specifically is very much considered a productivity tablet. I mean, it's an e-device, but the process of reading e-books on the Remarkable 2 is somewhat limited and there's some workarounds you have to do because of DRM, EPUB, anybody who's been through that, you know, it's possible, but there's some gray areas of legality, but just the e-ink itself and also the larger form factor, I have to assume makes a big difference, especially if you're using it as a note taker. I mean, the Remarkable has a pen and that's a big part of it. You know, it's signing documents and annotating things, but also doodling and it's very much made for the sensation of holding a pen or a pencil. In fact, there's all sorts of different pens you can choose from, calligraphy pens, stuff like that. So that part's neat and you want a bigger surface area. I mean, there's almost no situation where I wish it was much smaller unless I was trying to fit it into a very small specific bag, let's say. But yeah, I think and I was not familiar with the Boox Note Air until I looked through Dan's rundown of some of the other options that the Remarkable 2 gets put in the category of, not cheap. And some folks say is overpriced for what it does, but yeah, I think the larger form factor, something that resembles that eight by 11 piece of paper as closely as possible is for me, it makes the most sense, especially when I'm trying to go fully no paper in my household, not there yet, but I'm getting there. I like what Dan said about people think of e-ink, they think of the Kindle and it's not the best example of what e-ink can do. So I like what you're saying is like, look, if you really want to take advantage of e-ink, you might want to look at a Remarkable 2 or a Boox or something like that. Well, and I think a lot of people, especially like me, it's not that I wanted physical books, I'm fine with physical books, but it's not like I was like, e-read or suck, I like physical books, I'll never change, but I needed a little bit more of a reason to say, I could do that, but then there's all these other kind of productivity and task management things that I could also do. And this is this neat thing that isn't gonna glare up in the hot sun, it's easier on my eyes, especially late at night, there's a lot of things to like about it. I wasn't too sure about the one, the mentioning of the signing of the IQ, sorry, not the signing, but the note taking. But even though, I could see it as being somewhat useful, but the signing of documents is super interesting because I can't tell you how many times in the last year, I've had a digital document that I had to out of print and then re-scan in or just scribble my finger in a Word document to try to get that thing signed. So being able to send it to the device and sign it and then send it back, that's pretty cool actually. Yeah, there's some pretty seamless things I've already, I've already thought to myself, okay, well, I already had a solution, but this is a better one, it just feels better. So, you know, taking notes, taking notes. Make sure to become a patron by August so you can get the full live with it when Sarah's done testing, they're remarkable too. Well, I've got perhaps good news, perhaps bad news. You tell me, the blue screen of death, you might know it as the old BSOD, has been the crash screen displayed by Windows for decades now. Windows 11 will also feature a BSOD. However, hold on to your butts because the color is changing to black. The overall look remains consistent though, and it's part of the redesign introduced in Windows 8. You know, it would have been a lot better move if the acronym wasn't exactly the same. It's still frustrating also. Yes, you're still gonna be mad, you're still gonna be looking at a bunch of numbers, you have no idea what it means. And you're still gonna wonder like, why did you even bother giving me a QR code? What does that even do? And it's still gonna be the BSOD. Yep, yep. All right, let's check out the mail bag. We got an email from somebody who works at Wing, who chose to remain anonymous, who says, I'm not, and this is in response to our story from, was it yesterday or two days ago, about Wing and drones and the idea that we can, as consumer drone flyers get approval to fly in areas that we might need approval for. Worker at Wing says, I'm not quite sure if gathering data about where people fly drones would help Wing or Alphabet or Google in their ad services, unless they shared that data with other parts of the company, which they do not. I'm sure that somewhere in their terms of service and privacy policy. But anonymous says, one possible use case for making such an app is this though. Could be to prevent mid-air collisions between Wing drones and consumer drones. The high barrier to getting flight authorization means that many people fly without getting one. When they do that, Wing has no way of knowing that their drone is in Wing's flight path, and Wing risks colliding with that drone by using a system like low altitude authorization and notification capability or ANC. Wing forwards the flight reservation to a UAS service provider, those are the people maintaining that data, and then checks with the UASSP when planning a delivery, that ensures people get their deliveries and no one goes home with a broken drone. Ah, that's fascinating. Thank you, anonymous person from Wing. I never thought advertising was what that data would be valuable for, for Wing. I thought maybe optimization or route planning or something like that, but this brings it into focus. It's like, oh yeah, and safety. And it's a great example of that. Thank you, anonymous Wing person for the clarification. Yeah, yeah. We love getting feedback from inside the walls themselves. It doesn't happen every day. Yes, between the wings. It doesn't happen every day, but when it does, we really appreciate it. But if you have thoughts, questions, comments on anything that we talk about on any of our shows, please do send them to us. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shout out to our patrons at our master and grand master levels. We're shouting you all out, but today we're shouting out three in particular, John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito, and Steve Iodorola. Hey, guess what? We also have a brand new boss. Hi, Dan. And his name is Steve Davis. Yeah, Tom. It's been five for five this week. Nice. Steve just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Steve. Be like Steve. Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve. Steve, go, Steve. I mean, we told you, if you become a patron, we make a big deal and we thank you very much because you're now our boss and we welcome you into the family. And five for five all week long. Love that. Thank you all. Thank you, everybody who is our patron. Also, thanks to Len Peralta, who has been busily illustrating today's show. What have you drawn for us, Len? Well, you know, I have a couple of Alexis's in my life and I found this story to be pretty interesting. What I found interesting is the chant of Alexa is human, which I think is pretty cool. So here is that image. It's a young woman who I'm assuming has the wake word name. And it's sort of like a poster for the wake words uniting. I don't wanna keep getting people's devices working here, but you can take a look at it. It's about no bullying. The young lady is actually crushing a device with her foot and is really trying to take that name back from Amazon. So if you'd like to see this image, you can go ahead, if you're a patron of mine, it's yours, patreon.com. You can also get it at my online store, lennperaltestore.com. And other than that, just check it out. It's pretty cool art. It's fun. Yeah, good stuff, good stuff. And we haven't set off my echo once during this entire conversation today. Well, good. I'm glad I was trying that too. I didn't want to be very... No, this is really good. This is really good, Lenn. I love it. Thank you. Good work, Lenn. Also, great to have Chris Ashley on the show. Just listened to the latest SMR podcast on my jog this morning, Chris. But what else you got going on? Oh, trying to figure out what to do for the barbecue weekend. Do I go all out or do I continue with this hardcore diet? But if you wanna figure out or find out what I did, come check me out on the SMR podcast. Me and the homies record every week. You might find out how to barbecue something. You may have to find out how to do some woodworking or you may find out some new perspective on some tech stories. Who knows? It's all good. It's all good. SMRpodcast.com. We are also live on this show Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 20 30 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will be off on Monday for the Independence Day holiday here in the US. Back on Tuesday with Owen JJ Stone, aka Odakta. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer writer Tom Merritt, host producer writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer writer and host Rich Strothalino, video producer, Twitch producer Joe Coontz, associate producer Anthony Lamos, Spanish language host writer producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter. Science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackerman's, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding. Our mods Beatmaster, W. Scottus1, BioCal, Captain Kipper and Shaq Shid. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen. Video feed by Sean Wei. Music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, ACAST, Creative Arts and Len Peralta. Live art also performed by Len Peralta. ACAST ads support from Trace Gaynor. Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors on this week's show were Patrick Norton, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Chris Ashley. And our guest this week was Nate Langson. Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover. Hehehehe.