 Jason Fletcher has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Why not be like Jason? Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 13th, 2019 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We have got a show for you, a way to make yourself look smarter in front of Generation Z kids. A 200, what is it? 293 inch television, 292. Okay, so I exaggerated. So much good stuff. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sources to Bloomberg that Alibaba confidentially filed for a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Alibaba hasn't reportedly finalized a fundraising goal for the listing, but sources say it could be as high as $20 billion. Alibaba listed on the New York Stock Exchange, back in 2014, raising a record $25 billion. AT&T is launching its first 5G phone, the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G, to business customers and developers. Business users in 5G rollout markets can get the device for $999 on June 17th, while developers can get the device for free at AT&T's Shape Conference in Los Angeles on June 22nd. No word on when the phone would be available to consumers. AT&T is also officially canceled pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy Fold, offering affected customers about a $100 credit. Telegram said Wednesday that it experienced a state actor-sized denial of service attack originating from IP addresses that were mostly in China, but they weren't saying who did it. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Telegram CEO, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said they were unaware of anything, any connection. Basically, they denied any knowledge of it. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said attacks like this had occurred in the past, coincidentally, at the same time as protests in Hong Kong, which coincidentally are happening now as well. Geng Shuang is the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman who said he was not aware of the situation. All right, let's talk about that big TV, Justin. Tom, Samsung has announced The Wall, a luxury television, a 200- The Wall Luxury, the name of the television- Oh, I'm sorry. The Wall Luxury, yeah. The Wall Luxury TV, I apologize, because when you have a 292-inch modular micro-LED TV with 8K resolution, you better get the name right. The TV is rated for 100,000 hours of use and capable of up to 2,000 nits of brightness. Samsung also announced a slightly smaller 73-inch 2K model as well, both launching in July. No pricing was announced, but a lot is a safe bet in case you're looking to make a budget. Yeah, this is The Wall. They've been showing off at CES for a few years now. And the whole big cool thing about it is it's modular. So if you want more resolution, you just add more modules and the TV gets bigger as a result. This is also a different, the micro-LED is different because it can do true black levels because black just means the LED's off. It's not a light that's blocked like it is in some, like an LCD version. If 100,000 hours of use means very little to you, as it did to me when I read this article, I was like, okay, well, if you watch between like three and six hours of television per day, I don't know. I'm probably somewhere in the middle of that. You've got between 50 and 100 years. Yeah, that's a pretty good investment. This is only gonna last half your life. Yeah, yeah. One would think about 20 years into that lifetime, there's probably gonna be something cool. There's gonna be a 16-day TV. I would imagine that even for, you know, the, I guess, prosumer market for, I don't know how many people need a 292-inch modular TV, but you would be using it largely for a display, right? Like you would want to be able to show something. So I think the 100,000 hours is an interesting limitation because it isn't just a regular TV. Yeah, a lot, basically on all the time. Yeah, that's a really good point. That's a lobby-nest-play kind of thing. Yeah, that's a good point, very good point. I just wanna know how many people have a wall that big. I don't, even if I was really wealthy, you gotta have a really big wall. Amazon is being sued in the U.S. in two separate class action lawsuits that alleged the company didn't obtain proper consent to keep records of children's interactions of its assisted-enabled devices. Amazon says that it only stores data with permission from a device owner and that parents or other adults in the home can delete a child's profile and recordings. The lawsuits cover nine states. I don't know how this is going to play out legally, but Amazon does cover themselves by saying if you want these recordings, they warn you that this is gonna happen legally. What they may not do very well is make sure you understand what that means when you agree to it, right? It's the old, click the terms of service and agree, and then I didn't read it and now I'm upset situation. I'm always interested if judges will interpret this to say like, just telling them isn't enough, you have to make sure they understand because that seems to be what judges have been doing a little more over the years. And I think that is more consumer-friendly, especially though, Justin, when you bring children into this, certainly the tenor of the conversation around it outside the courtroom changes. The kids, Tom, the kids, who will think of them? This is a sea change in how we are dealing with the technology platforms that we use so often, even compared to where we were before, which is, oh, look, these amazing companies build these tools and these platforms that we have gone out of our way, taken our own actions, signed up our accounts, read the ULAs, clicked okay, and now we are here, but they have become such a part of the fabric of our lives that legally, politically, culturally, we are taking another look at exactly what should their role in our lives be, and the tip of that spear will always be children, because that is indefensible when it comes to the larger media landscape, and you saw that with the stuff with YouTube and their comments and the videos and the fact that they were recommending kid video on kid video and allowing comments on videos with very, very, very young children that were being used for disgusting reasons. This is another example of that, and I don't think we are going to see not only a stop to this, but also more challenges legal and otherwise. I wonder how much the ages matter as well. I know one of the two, of the class action lawsuits, one was filed in Los Angeles and one was filed in Seattle, one involved a 16-year-old female and one was an eight-year-old male. Well, anybody under the age of 18 is a child, but if you're eight, you can't get a Facebook account. There's all sorts of things that you're, in general, it's sort of accepted that you're not old enough to do because of privacy issues and security of children. So it'll be interesting to see if that matters at all as this plays out. Yeah, because here's the thing. This frustrates me a little because the harm here is that Amazon didn't tell them that they were storing this even though Amazon says they didn't. It's not what they're doing with the information. It's that it's stored in the cloud. This isn't, and then they made recommendations to my children. This isn't, and then they showed my children ads. This is, it's there, and I just don't trust that what they might do with it, right? The harm being shown is trying to show, they're trying to show harm of storage, not harm of use. And you may say like, yeah, but I don't trust Amazon. I bet they're using it for other things. That's not what the case is about, though. Dave Limp from Amazon told the BBC that the firm only profiled anyone under 13 if the parents agreed to the terms of service and opted in. He said, you have to verify through a parent that the parent themselves has given consent for the child and we do that by verifying an actual credit card number. So if you don't do that, and we don't keep any of the data for the child, and we wouldn't ever do that. It comes down to at that point, like do you just not believe them? And if this was all happening on the device instead of in the cloud, would that make this go away? The only reason it happens in the cloud is doing it on the device. It doesn't do as good of a performance. You can't do the processing that you can in the cloud. There is a trend of let's move the stuff on the device even if it doesn't perform as well because at least people won't just suspect us of things. Right, yeah. The argument is essentially, well, you say that I can delete all the stuff but you'll still have it and we don't trust that you won't do something with the 100 hours of my kid talking to this device. CERN, the folks who brought you the World Wide Web and the Large Hadron Collider, they've had some hits over the years, posted an explanation of the Microsoft Alternatives or Malt project that started last year to mitigate license fee increases and move to more open software. Microsoft revoked CERN's academic status at the end of March when the contract ended and said we're just gonna start charging you by the number of people using the stuff. So that led to license costs increasing about 10 times or more. Microsoft agreed to kind of a gradated price rise over time, so that didn't all hit at once. But they decided to do Project Malt because they don't think they can continue to afford that. The principles of Project Malt are to deliver the same service to personnel as existing software that they're using, avoid vendor lock-in, keep their hands on the data and address common use cases. So the first change going into effect is a pilot email service that I assume would replace Outlook for a lot of people while in parallel, a replacement for Skype using some telephone voice software for conference calls and such. Ah, what a throwback, Tom. Evil Microsoft is back, tired of this good guy Microsoft where they're just making alliances and trying to build out fledgling businesses. No, this is penny pinching anti-science Microsoft. Revel, revel in the dastardly behavior. I just don't quite understand why Microsoft would revoke CERN's academic status. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation that I just haven't seen, but it does seem odd that Microsoft, which as we've documented, has become the kinder, gentler Microsoft, the more embracing of open source. However, the one thing Justin that they do is they charge people for services. They charge people for cloud services. They charge large organizations and that's where the money's coming from. So it makes sense to me that we would see them going to a large organization like CERN and saying, well, over here, we actually need to raise the price. We can't just give away the software to a large organization because that's where a lot of our money comes from. Yeah, that seems like a reasonable explanation. You never know whether it's some kind of oversight or misunderstanding or personal beef, but I think that you kind of hit the nail on the head. Look, they are a services company and also that's not only where their future is, that's where their past was in terms of licensing. It seems like if there was some sort of misunderstanding, the fact that this was revoked at the end of March, gave Microsoft ample time to be like, oh, okay, CERN, sorry, sorry, sorry. We'd let as big of this understanding. And it also gives Microsoft, it gave Microsoft a pretty ample amount of time to come up with an explanation that wouldn't outrage people. If you want to think of Microsoft as a villain, which clearly the company has worked very, very hard to change its standing as the public sees it. It's true though. It does make me wanna pop on some vampire weekend to pretend it's 2007 again, to hear about Microsoft versus open source. Oh man, yeah. Did you hear those latest rumors about the Apple phone? Yeah, it's crazy. They'll never do a phone. They don't know anything about phones. The Verges Russell Brandem spoke with Google's product, management director, Mark Reicher about Apple's new sign in button. Reicher noted, quote, we only log the moment of authentication. It's not used for any sort of retargeting. It's not used for any sort of advertising. It's not distributed anywhere, end quote. He also pointed out that the security checkup page where you can see all the sites that you use a Google login with where you can disk, you can also disconnect that connection. He said Apple's handling or Apple handling redirecting emails ended slightly more invasive since it means Apple would have to handle all emails to end from that company. But Reicher did say that it will be better for the internet if it means people are less likely to use insecure of one password or recycling a password thanks to Kenji for emailing us about this article. Yeah, this is a really level headed interview where, you know, Mark Reicher, there's a tiny bit of spin. You know, you're not gonna be standing on perfectly stable ground through it because he does point out the thing about email, which granted, if you're in a trust no one situation, letting Apple handle redirection of your email means your email's going through Apple. For a lot of people though, their email's going through Apple anyway because they're using Apple mail or they're using iCloud or something like that. So that may not be as big of a concern for a lot of Apple users, but he's right. Google, if you're not using Gmail, doesn't make you use any of their email systems to use its authentication. But what I did like, and what Kenji pointed out in his email about this was, this was Google saying, hey, I know everybody's talking about, oh, but Google, they're bad with privacy. This particular product, I mean, he doesn't even comment on what else is going on, but he's like, this particular product doesn't do that. It authenticates you and that's it. It is not plugged into anything else like our ad serving or anything like that. Yeah, mostly. I mean, the pushback is because Apple has tried to carve out their niche as we are not the company that is targeting you for ads. And if they want to get, and by the way, that is not only marketing, that is also in the coming world of new legal action from Congress. That's also, I think, a very public position that they want to pull that they are privacy focused. They are not looking to use your personal data for anything else. They make their money selling you a way too expensive cell phone. That is what they do. And they, in fact, what a bolster, their privacy stuff. Google pushes back on that. But I'm glad, like you, that at the end of the day, we can move toward the universal goal of a more secure internet. And when Silicon Valley is at its best, it's when these companies agree on these kind of bedrock ideas. The Atlantic reports on a thriving teen trend you may not have heard of, selling clothing. The article focuses on shopping social platform, Depop in particular, where users' profile pages act as storefronts with photos and descriptions of what they're selling, like stuff out of their own closet along with their listed price. PayPal's offered as easy payment and prices are affordable overall rather than aspirational as they are with certain other clothing platforms. There's a familiar Explorer page, kind of looks like Instagram, featuring curated picks, trending items, top YouTubers that get lots of interest from their peers who wanna wear their wares, as it were. And if sellers are successful enough, Depop encourages them to start their own brand to be distributed exclusively through Depop. This is fascinating to me, because this is one of those things that feels to me like it's pointing to the direction when everybody's like, what's coming next? What's the next trend? And this is kind of a combination of a lot of things, YouTube celebrity, social networking, and just saving money and getting something online without having to spend a lot of money. A lot of times we talk about services online, like Uber Eats or something, right? It's like, well, but you have the money, you're spending a lot of money to do this. This is, I wanna do something online instead of in person, like going to a thrift store, but I also wanna save money. So people selling their used articles of clothing to each other is a very interesting manifestation of that. And I love the story they tell in this Atlantic article about the person who started by just wanting to get rid of a couple of articles of clothing they didn't want anymore, and then suddenly getting caught up in Depop and going to thrift stores and buying things to sell and then eventually creating their own YouTube channel and becoming a celebrity, exactly. Yeah, I actually produce a podcast that's about the consignment world called Never Get Sold. So when I read this article, I was like, I know all about Depop. I don't always know what teenagers are doing. This is really interesting and you can compare it to something like Poshmark, which is a very similar platform. However, Depop is based in London and very skewed towards teens. It doesn't mean that any of us couldn't use it, but it's very much for the younger set. But it has a lot in common with Poshmark in that you can, I mean, not everything is under $10, but you can get a t-shirt for $2 or some jeans that are maybe a couple of years old for $5, it works with what we consider. Most teens are pretty budget conscious. They're not making a ton of money. They don't have a ton of disposable income. The PayPal thing is nice and convenient because that sort of wallet that anybody under adulthood is using more and more often. And the whole kind of thing about, yeah, I love this YouTuber, right? Or some other internet star, particularly a younger one, I'm gonna subscribe to their channel. Okay, well, we're all familiar with that, but I love this celebrity on Depop and I want to wear their clothing. That's going to make me feel closer to them. That's gonna make me feel cool. That was the shirt that she was wearing in that video. Oh my God, that kind of thing is, it's fascinating. It doesn't mean that it's weird or wrong, but it's fascinating. And I actually think it's like, in a way it's kind of encouraging because the more we sort of keep swapping the stuff around, maybe the less people buy a bunch of junk anyway. Yeah, I think it's an interesting deconstruction of fear of the other for a younger generation that I think that all this technology has been here for a long time. And certainly consignment shops are nothing new, but in terms of online, the idea being like, oh geez, I'm gonna get a shirt or pants from somebody online. Like, Lord knows what they were doing before. I don't know, it's the weird internet. And now not only is it ubiquitous, but everybody online just seems much, almost more verifiable than the random person that you have no idea who they were that gave up stuff to the thrift store that you would go buy it at. At the very least that these people have eBay-style accounts and I'm sure that there are reputation measurements there that if you defraud somebody or don't send people things that you are rung up for it, so it's fascinating. Yeah, I'm looking at, this is a fake account selling a lovely cute Banana Republic men's pattern shirt for 15 bucks. Bobby Fake, the name on the account, has five stars, five sold reviews, and is selling 12 other things. So despite the name seems to be well-reviewed. And this shirt would probably be 70, 80 bucks if you bought it new in the store, maybe more. Exactly, and if you're not totally on the latest fall trends, like I can't have anything from last season. I mean, I don't care about stuff like that. And I think a lot of people don't care about stuff like that. And if you had bought the shirt a couple of years ago, you'd still be wearing it anyway, so what does it all matter? But it does also just lend itself to the idea of celebrity. Okay, if my favorite celebrity is wearing some beautiful gown at the Met Gala, there's no way I'm getting that. She's not gonna like gift it to me or sell it to me. And I wouldn't be able to afford it and there's no real way to connect with that person. But celebrities online are a whole different breed and it's a big deal. I mean, it's legitimate stuff. So this whole kind of you're a human and I'm able to connect with you on this very personal level. I mean, it's stuff that you're wearing on your body. And let's just say it's like not gross, it's, you know, everything's clean about it, but there's still this kind of strange human connection that you're getting that we're seeing more and more of. Long-term trend here, something I suspect, maybe this is crazy and maybe this isn't the example of what I'm talking about, but there do seem to be more services popping up like Patreon, like Depop, that pull money out of the system and then circulated around amongst the users. In Depop's case, it's, you know, they're pulling money that would otherwise have to be spent at retail clothing shops and circulating it around amongst people who are buying used clothing from each other. The Atlantic article had lots of examples of people who sell their clothing back and then use that money to buy more clothing. I wonder, right now I think it has almost zero effect on the economy, but I wonder if that trend continues if we start to see an effect on how the wider economy works. Just a thought. Yeah, I mean, the whole kind of sustainable nature of this, you do see, there was like a pop-up store or a pop-up in a Bloomingdale's in New York. This was a couple of months ago now and it was all about like vintage secondhand stuff. It wasn't new things. Now you don't think of a department store as a place that this would happen, but and the Bloomingdale's was probably just kind of fishing to see if there was a lot of interest. So it's a trend, you know, it's a trendy thing to be like, yeah, we really care about the environment and you know, don't pollute and you know, all that stuff. So there's a lot of marketing involved in this movement, but yeah, how much will this affect big retailers in the long run? I don't have the answer, but I would guess it's going to affect them on some level. All right, Google said 42% of all malicious extensions detected since January 2018 abused the web request API, which sent all data in a network request to the extension. The declarative net request API applies rules set up by the extension and the browser makes the changes and the extension never receives page data. This is one of the main arguments around changing the way the extension work. We've talked several times on the show about how folks who do no script or privacy protection extensions don't like this. One of the main arguments has been around the maximum number of rules with privacy extensions wanting 90,000 to 150,000, even some saying they need 500,000 to feel like they could cover all the situations they need to to keep an effective privacy protection extension working. Google had suggested a 30,000 maximum, that wasn't popular. Now it says it's going to set the limit at 150,000. That'll satisfy some but not all of the extension makers. No script and you block particularly say they won't have enough information to maintain accuracy. It's not about the number of rules. There's context when you're blocking scripts that you may think, well, wait a minute, this isn't the exactly the domain that I have in my list. In fact, NoScript says we keep a white list. So having rules doesn't really help us. We want to know if this script is coming through a domain, the context of how it's used because that's how we effectively block scripts. And the change to the declarative net request API doesn't let us continue to do that, which means NoScript won't work if this change stays the way it is. Google has changed a couple of times like this has said they're continuing to listen and they want to work with developers to make the legitimate extensions work. I admire what they're saying is their goal which is we want to stop malicious extensions from getting more data than they need. So they're trying to narrow it down to giving extensions only the data they need to do what they're doing doesn't sound like they've quite perfected it yet. And correct me here because I'm not familiar with the technical elements of this, but is the solution like a white list for some of these very high volume scripts that? What these privacy protectors and very often ad blockers want to do is say we want to look at what's coming through decide what's an ad and block it. And what Google's saying is great you describe what that looks like and then the browser will do it. That way you don't have to see all the page data. So it's not quite a white list. Although NoScript says all we do is a white list. We say any domain that is on this white list we won't bother with, but they will bother with every other domain. And so that's why it doesn't work for them. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. And thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit you can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. We're also on Facebook, Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. That's where the St. Louis Blues Hockey Puck used to be. And so it wasn't holding that controller up anymore. Let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. We got some feedback on our question yesterday of who should buy Have I Been Pwned? Cause it's first sale was a story from yesterday's show. Mohan wrote in and said, I love that you thought Mozilla Foundation should run Have I Been Pwned as I was screaming that in my car throughout the whole segment. When you, Sarah and Scott were talking about it and this was addressed to Tom of course, they would be a perfect fit considering it's built into Firefox called Firefox Monitor already. We also got a tweet just a second ago from Jesse Virgil or Virgil who said, who do I want to buy Have I Been Pwned? One password, although Mozilla is a good option too. Yeah, I heard some people say last pass as well like a password manager being able to tap into this. Which they already do also, just like Firefox already does but being able to run it and own it means they can integrate it more and improve on it. Yeah, I'm with you Mohan. I'm with you Jesse. Somebody who's going to run it for good and use it responsibly. My only issue with one password is that they don't have the safeguards for the public good that a Mozilla Foundation has but they're a fine company. I'm not trying to say one password is bad but if you're trying to find tie breakers there that's one of the reasons I like Mozilla as a potential for this. We'll see, who knows. Well thanks, always keep the feedback coming on anything we talk about because it's always nice to hear from you. It helps flesh out every story that we choose. Thanks also to Justin Robert Young. Justin, you seem like a busy guy. Where can people keep up with your work? Well, not only can of course you listen to my podcast Politics, Politics, Politics or PX3 for short but you can come see me live in the historic piano fight theater in San Francisco, California. Normally we do these shows on a weekday. It's like a Thursday or a Wednesday. No more, we're moving up Saturday night, June 29th. You can get your tickets right now, bit.ly slash PX3 June. That's where you can get tickets and it's Pride weekend in San Francisco. So if you want a reason to come down it's a very fun weekend to be in the big city. So come on down, see me on Saturday night, go see the parade the next day. It'll be a blast. We're gonna talk all about the debates. The debates will have just happened. The ones in Miami, the first debates are the primary season and we're gonna make fun of debates throughout all of history. It's a show I'm calling, can I finish? You're no Justin Robert Young. I worked with Justin Robert Young. Hey folks, there was a person who canceled their Patreon because they said we mentioned the Patreon too much. So I'm gonna keep this brief. Please make up for that person canceling their Patreon by joining our Patreon right now at patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also do this show live. If you wanna join us live Monday through Friday at 4.30 PM Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow to talk about maker media shutting down with Donald Bell, Patrick Norton and Len Peralta will be illustrating. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club, hope you have enjoyed this program.