 Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft thinks all countries should make Google and Facebook pay for news. Two years later, Bloomberg follows up on the super micro backdoor and Bitcoin gets a boost from Jay-Z. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 12, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado. I'm Shannon Morse. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about my horrible apartment in 1995 and also sourdough on Good Day Internet. Get that wider conversation by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google updated Google Photos on Android to now offer Google One subscribers access to machine learning powered editing tools previously available only on pixel devices. Google also said the iOS and Android Google Photos apps will get more feature parity in the coming months with the iOS version getting an updated photo editor and Android getting a revamped video editor. The Video Land Foundation announced version 4.0 of the VLC media player arriving in the next few months. It'll have a redesigned UI featuring modernized icons, transparent interface elements. Developers are also working on a version that will run inside a web page using WebAssembly and supporting extensions to offer third party videos from online sources. A little bit like how Plex does things they might do some ad supportive videos that way. VLC is also developing a project called Moviepedia, which would be a user maintained film database similar to IMDB. Public Wi-Fi hotspots across Cuba are the most popular way for Cubans to access the internet, but connection options and improvements have been made back in December of 2018 phone based 3G data plans became available in the country between 2015 and 2019 hourly Wi-Fi connectivity rates dropped from 450 an hour to $1 an hour. It's a big drop. Today, government data shows that 7 million Cubans now have some form of internet access, but a 2020 inclusive internet index reports that access only reaches 18% of Cuban households, lots of room to grow. Yeah, 18% still up for them too. That's interesting. Nvidia confirmed that it is supplying RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cord cards to its board partners to meet market demand from the ongoing chip shortage. The RTX 2060 of course was released in January 2019. The GTX 1050 Ti in 2016. Nvidia notes that neither has reached end of life status. They're still being actively offered. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is readying the space born computer to headed for the International Space Station. It will be linked to Microsoft's Azure cloud through NASA and HPE ground stations. So the ISS will have more data processing power and better connections with Earth than ever before. The first gen HPE space born computer still then a proof of concept traveled to the ISS in 2017 and back to Earth in 2019. Now, can you really call it the cloud if it's above the clouds? But I mean, if the clouds are still there, you just think of it is when you're on the ISS drops down to the cloud. It's above the cloud. Yeah. All right, we'll work on that work on that HPE and Microsoft. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about Jay Z. Shannon. Alright, let's do that billionaire executive and artist Jay Z and Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey announced the creation of an endowment to develop Bitcoin in India and African countries 500 Bitcoin currently worth 23.6 million USD will be set up as a blind irrevocable trust called B trust and that's a B as in Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin sign trust three board members will be hired and given independence to pursue the goal of making quote Bitcoins the internet's currency India's government has been reluctant to embrace Bitcoin while Nigeria has the second largest volume of Bitcoin trading behind the US and just in front of Kenya. The central bank of Kenya also announced this week that it will use Bitcoin as a reserve currency. Yeah, this is an interesting way to promote Bitcoin. It's a another and actually to my way of thinking a more substantial move towards continuing Bitcoins rise as a legitimate something, whether you think of it as a security or a currency or some other store of value. This is trying to promote that and interesting that they they are targeting both India and African countries because as you mentioned, cryptocurrencies doing well in several African countries, not just Nigeria and Kenya, but being somewhat opposed in India. So this trust again, not to be run by Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey, but to be endowed. So they're going to set it up and then it'll run itself after that. That's the idea of a blind irrevocable trust just to try to promote its use. So to make its use better in the places where it's already active in Africa and to try to get it to be accepted by working with the government of India. I think it's pretty cool. And given that, you know, it has the backing of Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z. I feel like this is a very, very, it has the potential to be very successful in these these countries, especially since they do have this, you know, economic value for Bitcoin already kind of implemented in those areas, even though like you said, what was it? India is kind of iffy about it. Yeah. India's internet economy is a little more advanced. The government metals a little more in things as of late over the past couple of years. I know that the pandemic is sort of messing everyone's trajectories up, but Nigeria and Kenya particularly, we're shaping up to be the next place where we would see a lot of internet and tech related innovation, just like China and Southeast Asia wore that in the 90s. And we were seeing a lot of it even still in India. So, you know, this is another way to try to continue that to try to boost that innovation along. And, and yeah, I think this is overall a good project and one that I'm going to pay attention to and see see what comes of it. I have no idea if Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey are already, you know, do business together or just buds or both. I can see where a company like Square, this makes a lot of sense, you know, in the future, Square will spare Square will be completely involved in the development of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. Jay-Z, I'm a little less clear about, but I know that for a variety of reasons, especially just in the last, you know, month plus, a lot of folks who have a lot of money and have money to, you know, play around with money making moves are more and more interested in this type of thing. And, you know, I mean, it's got title. Yeah, I'm really involved somehow. I feel like the idea behind this is like what Kenya is doing with with using Bitcoin as a reserve is to encourage that Bitcoin becomes a stable store of value that's transnational. The dollar, the US dollar has kind of been that in the world economy for the past century or so. And I could see Bitcoin be kind of smoothing the transfer of of value across lines, making transmitting of money and exchange of money smoother and and possibly sort of, you know, potentially becoming an international reserve of some sort, whether you consider it a security or or some kind of stand in for gold or something else. I don't know. It's way too early, but this is the kind of project that that moves it along towards becoming something like that. Apple released its first AR experience for Apple TV Plus. One of its shows on Apple TV Plus is a show called For All Mankind. The app is called For All Mankind Time Capsule. It's available in the US now was available last night. There's more regions to follow and the app lets users interact with virtual objects that are set in the real world, you know, typical AR experience and includes exclusive experiences for LiDAR. If you've got an iPad Pro, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, which I do not, but the app does work. He just get fewer cool features. I didn't know the difference. You interact with a box of items that are set in your location. So if you, you know, give it access to your camera, it'll be in your living room, right? Right? Wherever you end up pointing the camera from the perspective of a teenager that is a character in the show named Danny Stevens, who's the son of two astronauts for All Mankind's new season premieres February 19th. So it is certainly a way to drum up interest for folks who either haven't seen the first season and want to get caught up or are excited about the second season or want to play with VR or all of the above. I saw this headline last night and I was like, oh, neat. Let's see if this is fun on my phone, which is, you know, a few years long in the tooth at this point. I've got an iPhone, but it's a 10S Max. And so I don't really know what would have been cooler with the LiDAR features because I simply don't have them. But I loved it. I, it was, you know, downloaded, installed easily. And I have not seen the show. Tom, I think you said that you've seen the show. But I have. I have. And I'm doing it right now. And honestly, I'm kind of bored. I just want to watch the show. Yeah, right, right. So I think and maybe because I have not seen the show. In fact, if you said, quick, Sarah, for one Bitcoin, what's for all mankind about? I did. I had never heard of it before. So I had no idea it was about, you know, astronauts and set, you know, in, I guess, the mid 70s sort of a, you know, time in history. And so there's going to be a lot of, you know, historical references and that sort of thing. It's an alternative history. That's important to note too. And they tell you that when the app launches, that this is an alternate world where the Soviet Union lands on the moon first and then everything kind of changes from there. Yeah, I guess I saw, yeah, I kind of, I was sort of waiting to get to the air stuff. So I predict. There's a lot of text at the beginning. I didn't read all of it either. OK, yeah. Listen, I think the text. Yeah. What do you sign things without reading the fine print? That wasn't signed anything. What do you click? I read all the legal conditions. And you didn't? Yes, I read all my terms of service. Trust me. Jeez, Tom, I mean, you're a wild man. Listen, I, I do not watch the show. I know a lot of people who listen to DTNS and are listening right now say, well, I don't have Apple TV Plus. So I mean, like, what good is this app for me? Well, maybe not much. You know, if I don't watch the show, it was kind of a fun little experiment that didn't really take me anywhere. But I definitely got more interested in the show than I would have otherwise. And I think, and this is certainly not exclusive to iOS, it's, you know, any device or platform that has AR features or VR features or, you know, anything, anything in that kind of category can capitalize on drumming up interest and promotion for other media. And this is a great example of where production companies can get creative. Well, you've seen something similar with Google in their augmented reality where they bring in like Mandalorian characters into their Google camera lens. So you we've definitely seen similar experiences. But I like the fact that they have this whole app and just like you never seen the TV show. But now that I have Apple TV, I can actually try it out for Apple TV Plus. I don't even know what it's called. And I've never heard of the show. But now I want to check it out because the app was really neat. Also, the folks that are going to write in and say, I can't believe you've never heard of the show. Just don't just don't write that in just because you've heard of it. Doesn't mean everybody. I mean, trust me, I watch a lot of shows you haven't heard. OK, definitely. Microsoft President Brad Smith told Axios, the United States and other countries should consider adopting media rules similar to those being proposed by Australia, which might be great for Microsoft's Bing, which is not covered by Australia's proposed law. Australia believes there is a power imbalance between large platforms and news publishers that prevents a fair negotiation. That's why the law is targeted at Google and Facebook. They're not saying everybody should pay for news. They're saying if the power balance is out of whack to the point that news publishers can't use any leverage, then we have to have this law. Right now, the large platforms deemed to have a power imbalance are just Google and Facebook, but regulators have the power to add other platforms if they grow to qualify. Australia's proposed rules would require Google and Facebook to negotiate payments with a certain list of qualifying news publishers in order to link to their content from anywhere on their platforms. This is different than previous attempts at laws, which were focused, say, on just the Google News section, right? This is anywhere on Facebook, anywhere on Google. Google and Facebook would also need to provide information about how their ranking algorithms work. News publishers would get an exemption from antitrust in order to negotiate as a block with Google and Facebook. And if the parties can't achieve an agreement amongst themselves or with an arbitrator, a government-appointed panel would set the payout rate in a form of forced arbitration, similar to what they do in baseball. The proposed law is expected to be introduced to Parliament next week on February 15th, and it is likely to pass within the next two weeks. Facebook has said that it might prevent Australian users from sharing news links to avoid this law. Should it be passed? And Google has gone farther in a securities filing saying that it might have to alter or withdraw products and services in Australia if this is passed. Google pulling out would affect a lot of other companies. Apple, Telstra, Optus, iiNet, Mozilla and Opera all pay Google to use Google search in their products. It would also have effects on Google's own devices in the country. Would Android in Australia switch to Bing for its default search? What about Google Assistant and, therefore, Smart Speakers? The Smart Speaker market in Australia is dominated by Google right now. And even if they get updates that let them continue to work, will they sell? Will people hear this news and go, maybe I don't want to buy that one? That would affect Big W, Kmart, David Jones, other electronic sellers. And there are lots of other smaller deals like restaurants that get orders from buttons in search, something Bing doesn't offer right now. The Australian Football League lets fans vote on rewards through search. In the meantime, Google launched Google News Showcase in the UK and Argentina, which pays publishers in exchange to access paywalled articles and other enhanced content. Google controls the terms of that and they're saying, don't pass a law, let us do this. We will benefit publishers. There's billions of dollars we can give them. Facebook also launched a similar project with Facebook News tab in the UK. So the battle lines are drawn and over the next two weeks we're going to find if Australia will stick to this or succumb to lobbying from Google and Facebook. My first question is, you know, Microsoft's Brad Smith saying, yeah, this is probably the right idea for Google and Facebook. But, you know, Bing might reap some rewards from this. But he didn't say Bing would reap rewards. But no, no, but that I mean, it's implied on some level. And I've seen, you know, some folks saying, well, of course, he would feel that way. I mean, it's a little blatant that just like my competitors should, you know, you know, get a slap on the wrist and need to need to pay up. But we're excluded from that. Is there any situation where Microsoft becomes part of the regulations that Australia wants wants to attach to Google and Facebook? You know, the country saying, OK, right now it's Google and Facebook, but could be another company if they get big enough? I find it a little bit concerning the the idea that Google would pull so many of their products out of Australia when even in the analysis, well over 50 percent of Australian share of like smart gadgets is Google products. So there's a lot of products already in Australia that use, you know, Google search in their devices. So they would be very much changing the entire market in Australia if they were to, you know, strong arm the Australian government and just choose to stop allowing those products in that entire country. Yeah, it'd be interesting. They might not remove Google search from Google Assistant. They might say, well, that that isn't the same thing. That's that's a different product. So they might try to push that and then Australia would have to sue them. They they wouldn't pull out of Australia altogether. Obviously, people in Australia would be able to go to Google.com. They would just be, you know, they would have to use a VPN potentially. We don't know how Google would enact this, whether it would be an IP block or just taken down Google.com.au. So there's a lot of questions here and nobody wins. If that ends up being the case, I think Australia has a point. There ought to be a better negotiated settlement between search engine places and news publishers. But I don't know if this is it when you're forcing these kinds of decisions to be made, as we've seen Google pulled out of Spain. Pulling out of Australia, bigger deal. Maybe that's why Microsoft Brad Smith out of character for him to make a self-interested argument like this. Usually he's making more world-oriented arguments when he does speak out. He's their chief lawyer, not their CEO, right? But maybe that's why he brought it up, is that if it seems like all countries would do this, it would be harder for Google to pull out of Australia and call their bluff because they're certainly not going to pull out of Europe. They're not going to pull out of the United States. They only pull out of Australia if they think they can win the argument and eventually go back into Australia. Hey, folks, if you want to join the conversation in our Discord, you can talk about all this stuff with a bunch of other folks joined by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Hey, remember that 2018 Bloomberg Business Week story that alleged chips were inserted into super micro boards, boards from the company Super Micro for malicious purposes by China? Remember Apple, Amazon, the US NSA, Homeland Security all denied the story? A third-party investigation by Super Micro found no evidence to support the story. Bloomberg Business Week never back down, never followed up, though, until now. This time it's Bloomberg, not Bloomberg Business Week. Bloomberg's Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley with an in-depth follow-up on Super Micro with interviews from, again, more than 50 people in law enforcement, the military, Congress, intelligence agencies and the private sector, they got more people to talk on the record. Bloomberg sources say that in 2010, the US Department of Defense found that super micro servers in unclassified networks were sending network data, including a partial map of the unclassified network to China. And here's where an explanation comes out in this story that wasn't in the previous one. Undetectable countermeasures were put in place and the attack was allowed to continue to run in order to determine its aim. So it seems like if this is all true, what the intelligence agencies were doing is we don't want them to know that we know, which would be why they didn't tell any companies and kept it under wraps. In 2014, Intel found a Chinese group breached its network through a server that downloaded malware from Super Micro's update site alongside unaltered firmware. So this was a zip file attached to it. It was caught early and caused no data loss. In 2015, the FBI warned multiple companies that Chinese operatives had concealed backdoor code on a chip in manufacturer's servers. Each attack was kept quiet while US agents tried to counter them and learn more about the capabilities behind them. Investigation started in 2012 when the FBI obtained FISA warrants, according to Bloomberg, to monitor the communications of some Super Micro employees, not executives, people down at the engineering level. And no Super Micro employee has been accused of wrongdoing. The company itself has never been told of the investigations or targeted. So again, they just wanted to find out what these guys were doing, who they were talking to. It was a bit of a honeypot. Bloomberg was unable to find out if the investigations are still ongoing and if they've ended what conclusions they may have reached. Super Micro, of course, notes that federal agencies, including those said to be conducting the investigations, continue to buy Super Micro products. But all through this article, there's a lot of examples of, yeah, we left it on our official approved list. But for certain purposes, we don't let you buy Super Micro stuff. Also, what did the investigations find? Well, a little bit of tech is in this story. Initially, investigations determined that malicious instructions were embedded in the BIOS. So code in the startup order would load code that was hidden in unused memory and domain memory all before loading the operating system. That code only showed up in Super Micro servers. It showed up in servers from multiple factories. That implies it was implanted in the design phase. It was not at the construction phase, further implying infiltration of Super Micro's BIOS engineering department. In 2014, the investigation did discover malicious chips, but they were in small batches and motherboards. Many Super Micro products did not have them. So the idea that, like, we couldn't find one with the chip in it might be because of that. This was a targeted operation. Private companies and government agencies were briefed on these risks, but the risks were downplayed in the briefings. More of like, just don't use Super Micro for that. And we're not going to tell you why. They didn't share any technical details. Frank Filiuci, who was the FBI's assistant director for counterintelligence until 2012, told Bloomberg, this is a don't let it happen to you moment for anyone in the tech sector supply chain, which would explain why sources might be talking to Bloomberg this time around is we want companies to know there's a danger. We still don't want China to know how much we know about them and what they're doing. This is like a lot of the investigations that I read about online where companies, they don't have enough of the technical information that they need in order to understand how they can do their own risk assessment on their own networks and determine if there is an actual exploit happening or if there is an actual vulnerability on their networks. They're just informed, hey, this thing is out there. So you might want to be careful, but there's no additional information. And they really need that in order to be able to do an investigation on their own machines and on their own networks. Yeah, it's where good security practice and good spy craft come into conflict. I finally this this article gave me an explanation of why we might not know, which we didn't have before and why I was very frustrated with the Business Week article. This article says the reason we don't know is they were trying to keep China from knowing they had found them because they wanted to use that as a mine of information. Let's see what they do. That will tell us what they're after, which will tell us their priorities. We'll do some countermeasures to try to defend them from finding out too much. And that would be why everybody said we don't know anything about this because they were probably telling the truth. The intelligence agencies were keeping it from them. But like you said, Shannon, that's bad security practice. If your only goal is to defend the networks, you're leaving the networks vulnerable in order to try to gather information. If there was some kind of way that authorities could put businesses under an embargo while they're still under this investigation, but also give them enough information so that they could investigate any kind of potential vulnerabilities or flaws or backdoors, then that could definitely be a ways to protect the companies that are purchasing super micro products. But it would also still give authorities the ability to continue this investigation without informing potential attackers that about the amount of information that they know. And I would guess the reason you're getting more people willing to talk on the record, maybe more people willing to share more information this time around is because of SolarWinds. SolarWinds made it very clear that there are operatives linked to China penetrating networks. And this is a similar kind of attack that's older. And so, you know, the best before date of getting information out of super micro may be passed. I've mentioned before, and I will totally mention it again, but SolarWinds is a excellent example of supply chain attacks. And this is the exact same thing in a different implementation. But it's still a supply chain attack in itself, in its essence. Even Intel in the article, it explained that Intel found a firmware update that was zipped on the website that they were able to download that did have an exploit within it. So it was kind of like a Trojan horse. And in that way, there are many of these kind of attacks happening that are potentially going to be exploited on vendors, but not necessarily targeting those vendors. They're targeting the prospective originator for the firmware instead of all the potential clients that they work with. So these supply chain attacks have been around for a decade easily. And this is just one of the many examples that we get to see. Yeah. And, you know, again, SolarWinds made it clear that companies know that China is in their network. So protecting super micro, not as big of a priority suddenly after December. Let's take a trip to Dublin, shall we? Dublin's big belly trash bins are the trash bins, but they're kind of smart. They're solar powered and they're already capable of sending alerts when they're getting full to help streamline collection schedules. Now, as a part of a pilot project with Dublin City Central, they'll also include timestamps when somebody adds to the trash inside. Dublin's smart city program manager, Jamie Cudden, says, this will help understand when parks or the city center itself or the suburbs get busy versus quiet kind of, you know, foot traffic. Small radar sensors at about 20 of the bins. There's about just over a thousand total that are smart are also going to pick up footsteps to be able to gauge busyness like people jogging or people congregating, just kind of knowing where people are near each other, which is particularly important these days when we're all contact tracing. Dublin is exploring furthering the platform for small cell equipment and improving 3G access all with trash bins. Five. Five G access. What did I say? Three. I said three G. Why did I do that? It's OK. It's Friday. Yeah, I think it was Cuba, 3G, Dublin, 5G, two different stories. They don't have much to do with each other, although like better access. That's good. That's the crack in Dublin going around fooling these trashcans by just throwing a bunch of stuff in all of them to make them think there's a lot more people in the park. Yeah, yeah, we got them now. How smart are you? Really rubbish container? I don't know. I mean, listen, this is neat. It's no, it is. Anytime you live in any sort of urban environment or suburbs, too, it's like you're, you know, you need to have trash cans around, right? You need to be able to think it's so full. Throw your stuff away. Yeah. And so that is a great indicator of what's being used and when. And, you know, for a variety of cities and townships and villages around the world, I think all this data can be really helpful. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So we we talked about transparent wood a few shows back yesterday. We noted that several folks had written in and said, you know, transparent aluminum exists. Remember Star Trek four? James says just a note regarding transparent aluminum. It's not just a Star Trek thing. There is such a thing. And he links us to an article from make zine.com that explains how transparent aluminum came to be. Well, it's transparent aluminum based ceramic, not metallic aluminum. So I don't know if that makes a difference to anybody, but just just noting that. Thank you, James. No, love this, even if this is a 2012 article. So we've had some transparent aluminum for a while. Yeah, very, very cool, James. If you ever have feedback like, I don't know, transparent anything. But you also have questions or comments or ideas for future shows. Feedback a Daily Tech News show is where to send that email. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Bjorn Andre, Scott Hepburn and Dale McKayhi. Also, big thanks to Shannon Morse for being with us today. Shannon, you got a lot going on. What is new and where do people find it? YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse. I actually just did a really fun video about fingerprint scanners and sensors and phones, what the differences are and how the security actually works. It's pretty interesting. So make sure to go over there and check it out. Excellent. Also, we're very excited that the first episode of Noticias Technologie Express is up. It's in the Apple podcast store. There's an RSS feed. There's an episode at DailyTechNewsShow.com. There's all kinds of ways for you to experience headlines weekly in Spanish. So go check it out. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash N-T-X. It's not hosted by me. It's hosted by Dan Campos. He is in Mexico City. He will do the headlines in Spanish for you. If that is your language of choice, go check it out. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash N-T-X. We are live Monday through Friday at four thirty p.m. Eastern twenty one thirty UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Live Book Markets. Then you'll never forget. We're out Monday for the U.S. President's Day holiday, but we'll be back on Tuesday. Rich Trafalino will be filling in for Tom. Don't miss it. See you then. Go, James K. Polk. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I'm in the club. I hope you have enjoyed this program.