 Coming up on D T N S apples notarization bug and privacy kerfuffle Uber getting out of the self driving business maybe and why some video games might be good for you. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 16th, 2020. Happy birthday, mom in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and the shoes producer. We were just talking about bagels and why Sarah Lane will never go to space on good day internet. If you want to find out why become a member and get good day internet at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. GitHub has reinstated at YouTube D L after determining that it does not violate the DMCA, a filing by the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that the app works like a browser to initiate a video stream by deriving a JavaScript signature value. GitHub said it will revise its DMCA takedown policy to have all claims reviewed by technical and legal experts err on the side of developers in ambiguous cases, give developers a chance to respond before legitimate takedowns and establish a $1 million developer defense fund to help protect open source developers. Qualcomm has received a license from the U.S. Department of Commerce to sell some of its chips and components for mobile devices to Huawei, including 4G products. This is an exemption to the current trade restrictions. Sales to Huawei have required the U.S. to approve a license since September, though few have been granted. A Qualcomm spokesperson said the company is currently having other license applications pending with the U.S. government as well. PayPal announced that customers can start paying with Venmo and PayPal QR codes at CVS retail stores in the U.S. Transactions will not carry any fees and customers can apply Venmo and CVS rewards as well, if you go there all the time, might be kind of worth it. CVS is the first national retailer to roll out the touchless system with PayPal saying 10 other national brands are testing similar rollouts. Yeah, next time I go to CVS, can I Venmo you that? Zoom launched the at-risk meeting notifier, a new backend security feature which scans for Zoom meeting links on social media and other sites. Meeting organizers will receive a notification if a link is found, warning that there is a risk of Zoom bombing. The feature is enabled by default. The Turkish competition board ruled that Google violated the terms of fair competition in its online ad business issuing a 196.7 million lira fine, which is about 26 million U.S. dollars. The board found that Google text ad business in search skewed results to the detriment of those companies that didn't pay for ads. The board gave Google six months to change its search policy and Google has 60 days to appeal the decision, which it probably will. Ma'am, once the U.S. election ended, my screen time went way down, which everyone tells me is good for my digital well-being. We're getting that phrase thrown around a lot, Sarah. We are. Digital well-being is a term that does get thrown around a lot often in regards to the amount of screen time you spend in apps or you spend in games. Well, a study from Oxford University found that people who played more video games tended to report greater well-being. The researchers used questionnaires to assess well-being. Time spent gaming was determined by gameplay data, so some factors in play here. The study only looked at two specific all-ages games, however, Animal Crossing and Plants vs. Zombies Battle for Neighborville. So one could argue both sort of fun games, maybe games that would make your well-being better, but nonetheless that was in the study. More research could lead to different outcomes from different types of games, and the researchers hope that the study can serve as a basis for more research-based views on things like game addiction, policies, and the like. Yeah, this is great. They actually used gameplay data, so the amount of time people spent was not self-reported, so that's pretty solid. These questionnaires are pretty well-tested in sort of assessing well-being. Even though you answer the questions, they're not just asking like, do you feel good or not? They're going like, have you slept well? These kinds of questions, so that's pretty rigorous. The fact that they only looked at two games, I think, is what's notable here. This is saying, for these two games, these are all-ages games, Animal Crossing, supremely positive. Plants vs. Zombies is a little edgier in comparison, but still like an all-ages game. It's not scary, really. They make you feel better. Now, it could be correlative. It could be that if people are feeling better, they're more likely to play these kinds of games, too. We don't have that teased out, which is why the authors are calling for more research. They're like, there may be some toxic effects in other games, in other situations, but they're like, at least now we have some data to build on. They said in their paper that they were very surprised how little data there is out there on actual studies of the effects of game play or any kind of app on well-being. We've been talking about this for years. Of course, certain games are racier or edgier enough that they sometimes garter the attention of folks saying, this isn't good for the youth of America or the youth of the world type thing. But I think, so sure, Animal Crossing, Plants vs. Zombies, like you said, pretty innocuous. I think a lot of it has to do with the actual world that you're in when you're not playing the game as well. A game could be, I don't know, violent and a little sus, depending on the person who's watching it. But if the real life outside, which many could argue 2020 encompasses beautifully, is not that great, then your well-being might actually increase by playing any game, not just like a fun cutie game with cute animals. I will say that depending on the game you play, oftentimes there are certain goals and achievements that you collect or gain as you play. And so that adds a certain amount of accomplishment, even if it is virtual. And so that could definitely help. Oh yeah, the dopamine hit, right? You collect all the things and you get that dopamine hit. That's one of the things people point to when they say, oh, games might be addictive. They might be bad for you because they give you that dopamine hit and you're not really accomplishing anything. But you're right. It also could work the other way, like, oh, but that constant feeling of accomplishment, if it doesn't lead to addictive behaviors, might just make you feel better about stuff because you're like, oh, I did. I feel like I accomplished something. I mean, like how many people have read a book and feel accomplished because they finished it, not just because they read a book. Yeah, there's the catharsis aspect of it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I look at the fact that Animal Crossing has essentially made Nintendo the most successful gaming company of 2020 as a bit of a factor that should be investigated. But it's like, that seems to bear out this idea that in all ages, positive game is going to make you feel better because you're right, Sarah. I mean, the study covers a period of time before 2020, but man, if you were feeling anxious and upset like so many people in the entire world were earlier this year, and this game made you feel better, you're going to want to play it more. And that would explain a lot of the uptake and the sales of that game and other goods like it. Yeah, and not to take anything away from Animal Crossing, because I know it's a great game. I don't personally play it, but pretty much everyone around me was playing it. Certainly, you know, it kind of like the March, April were, you know, the sort of the apex of Animal Crossing. And it was, you know, people would say to me, it's fun. It's great. I like it. But also, you know, the world is burning and you got to, you know, get your dopamine hit where you can. Yeah, I think the biggest thing to take out of this, though, is you can do studies that use actual gameplay data. And so these researchers are not saying this is the be all end all study. They're saying, hey, look, you can do it. You can actually collect the actual data instead of asking people, wow, do you game much like use that actual data? And we can we can actually find out what games are good and what games are bad. We were joking at the prep meeting, you know, you don't say like movies scare me thinking of horror films. And then somebody's like, well, I just watched Princess Switch. That didn't scare me much like movies are different. Games are different too. Yeah, absolutely. Last week, Mac users experienced a short period of time in which apps took a little longer to launch, maybe a lot longer to launch among a few other issues. A Mac process called trust D was failing in attempts to connect to ocsp.apple.com. That was causing the delayed launches and the issues with Mac OS. It was happening at the same time as the Big Sur launch, but it was happening even to devices that weren't using Big Sur or even trying to install Big Sur. The host name ocsp.apple.com is responsible for validating multiple Apple cryptographic certificates, including ones used for app notarization. And that was the cause of this particular issue for developer signed software. Apple will scan your software at launch for malicious content and check ocsp to make sure there's a valid certificate. And it does that because if someone does get a hold of a certificate, they could make a malicious app that pretends to be the right one and then developers can revoke it. So it wants to check like, okay, is this still the developer signed version of this software? It's a way to prevent malware. Now, you may ask what happens if you're not online. The status check will just soft fail in that case and you get to launch the app. You can also override this yourself by checking some settings and using some keyboard combinations. But for the most part, if you're online, it will do the check. And if you're not online, it'll just let you launch whatever is on your computer. Well, the problem last week was that the Macs were online, but the hostname was not responding properly. And so the soft failing didn't happen because it's like, well, we're online. We should be getting a certificate and it kept waiting and waiting and waiting. That problem was caused by two things. A server-side misconfiguration interfered with macOS being able to cache OCSP responses. And that combined with a second unrelated CDN misconfiguration caused the delays. Now, these delays only lasted for a few minutes, but it caught everybody's attention because it was widespread. And that led people to look into Apple's gatekeeper security service. This is a part of that gatekeeper service. Once it became known what the problem was, folks started immediately asking, as we do in this day and age, what info is being sent to Apple servers when I launch an app? Well, in an updated support document, Apple clarifies that the gatekeeper system does not collect users. Apple ID does not collect any device identity. The company has even stopped logging IP addresses just to be extra safe. Those used to just be there. They're there with every website you visit, but Apple's going to go the little extra mile and say, we're not even going to log the IP address. We're going to just do the certificate check. And in fact, over the next year, Apple will also add an opt out to gatekeeper security protections. So you can say like, don't check. I would rather fly blind and be subject to malicious apps than even pretend that I trust you. So you'll be able to do that if you want. Apple maintains it as never combined app verification data with device information. But a lot of people were a little, you know, a little suspicious, a little sus about. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the whole thing is, you know, I sort of love how this all progressed, right? People are like, something's taken too long. Something's wrong here. Well, what's going on here? Okay, let's let's identify the problem. Well, wait a second, Apple gatekeeper. What do you need from me exactly? I want to be able to tell you that you can't have any of that stuff. And like you said, Tom, kind of fly blind and deal with something that may be malicious that comes my way. Because I feel confident that, you know, that is worth it in order to not share information that I didn't know was being shared. A lot of times these security checks are sent HTTP, which is unencrypted. And the reason for that is the encryption certificate would come from the same server as the server you're trying to set the security of, which could then cause a loop, which would cause a delay in launching whatever it is you're trying to launch with that certificate. So it's standard practice to send these unencrypted also because there's not much information involved in there other than is this certificate there? Yes or no. But Apple's going to encrypt this going forward. They're going to develop a system to make sure this is encrypted as well. Now, another big sir thing that happened as with all major OS updates, we get a thing that is goes wrong. That is not unusual. Every operating system major update has this and now we know big sirs is the black screen. If you have a 2013 or 2014 MacBook Pro laptop, you might not want to upgrade to big sir. A lot of people are reporting getting a black screen when they try to install big sir on those machines and an inability to reboot. In fact, even the key reset combinations, NVRAM, SMC, Safe Mode, Internet Recovery don't work. It's not every person that tries to install this, but it's enough that they're looking into it. Apple Engineering is involved and it's probably best if you're on those machines and you haven't upgraded yet to just hold off until they patch that. I actually have a 2013 MacBook Pro that really is ready for recycling. I just haven't sent it back to Apple yet, but it works. And I thought, all right, well, it's not a huge deal for me to give this a try in case my computer gets bricked. Worked okay. Yeah. Good. I will be holding off upgrading the machine I'm on right now. Oh, me too. Until the first patch of big sir, because this is the machine I stream off of. So I'm not even gonna mess with that until they're sure they fixed most of the stuff. Folks, if you want to join in the conversation in our Discord, you can join it by linking to a Patreon account, patreon.com, slash DTNS. In 2015, Uber started a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotic Center to develop autonomous cars. Uber then acquired Autonomous Truck Company Auto the next year, 2016. A couple years later though, in March 2018, an Uber autonomous car was involved in that fatal collision and Uber halted all testing. In spring 2019, it decided to spin out the Uber Advanced Technologies Group or ATG that oversees autonomous driving and got a billion dollars in funding from Toyota, Partsmaker Denso, and SoftBanks Vision Fund. And that's where it's been till now. It is a separate, wholly owned unit of Uber, but sometimes you do that for liability reasons. Sometimes you do it for a lot of other reasons. Sometimes you do it because you want to make it easy to sell. And now, TechCrunch's sources say Uber has been in talks since October to sell its advanced technology group, ATG, and that Aurora innovation appears to be interested. Aurora was founded in 2017 to develop a full self-driving stack. So to make the software, its co-founders are former Waymo Lead before it was Waymo, when it was just Google Autonomous Cars, Chris Ermson, former Lead of Development of Tesla's Autopilot, Sterling Anderson, and former Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor, Drew Bagnell, who helped launch Uber's Autonomous Car Program in that partnership I just mentioned. So these are three of the top leaders of autonomous development at three big companies. If Aurora was to acquire Uber's ATG, that would see Aurora expand from its current 600 employees, which are spread across the Bay Area in California, Pittsburgh, Texas, and Bozeman, Montana, to add 1,200 more employees from Uber's ATG. Aurora would not only get all that talent, but also an agreement for a pilot-scale development of automated Toyota Sienas, which would still run on Uber's ride-hailing network, so Uber doesn't lose out in that case. And this would follow Uber already selling off Scooter & Bike Company Jump when it flipped that out to Lime, and Uber is now an investor in Lime because of that. They've also sold a stake in Uber Freight and have agreed to acquire Postmatch, which is expected to close this quarter. If you look at all this, if they do end up selling ATG and you look at these other acquisitions and sales, Uber appears to be focusing on ride-hailing and food delivery and extricating itself from other businesses, or at least running those other businesses. This is really interesting because, as you mentioned, this doesn't mean that Uber's like, hey, we want to sell the business, but if they were to do this, they as the company itself, this would be the first steps toward doing so. Okay, let's figure out autonomous stuff, let's sell that off, let's make sure that the core business is what's at stake here. But the whole promise of, and I know life is different than it was just a couple of years ago, and things have changed a lot with all sorts of ride-hailing businesses, not just Uber or food delivery businesses, all of that. Some companies have experienced massive growth. Some companies very much the opposite. But the whole promise of Uber a few years ago was, okay, the whole you have a stranger picking you up and taking you somewhere, that is a stop-gap measure to what our real goal is, which is autonomous cars taking us around, and people don't have to drive as much, and there'll be fewer cars on the road, and that whole thing just sounds like it is a little bit more DOA than ever. I disagree. I don't think it's DOA because of this. I think what this shows is that its profitability is delayed. I think Uber still believes in that vision you're talking about. Like, yeah, we're going to have autonomous cars moving people around eventually. It won't be drivers, but that's not going to be a profitable arm of our business for a long time, and we need to be profitable. We're a publicly held company. We're under the gun because we're not having a lot of ride-hailing going right now, and we're building up our food delivery to make up for it. Let's shift this out to somebody who's willing to wait for it to become profitable, and we can still use them as the provider. We can still have autonomous cars when they're ready. We can still use those Toyota Sienas in a test pilot on our network. We just won't lose the money that we would have to spend to do it. Yeah, I guess you're right. I guess for Uber to say, let's spin this off and put it in the hands of people who have demonstrated much capability in this arena and be able to then buy back the technology when we're all ready for it. Maybe that's actually the best call. Yeah. I mean, long-term it might prove to have been a bad idea because this may be the more profitable enterprise in the future. But short-term, they're getting out of regions where they don't make a lot of money. They're just trying to balance those books because, again, they've got the public investors. Breathe them down their necks. Well, Samsung launched its M series line of what it's calling smart monitors. You might say, what's a smart monitor? You might also call it a clever rebranding of a television. The M5 comes in 27 or 32-inch models, 1080p displays for both. The M7 is a 32-inch 4K display. Both offer HDR10 support, USB-C charging at up to 65 watts, Bluetooth 4.2, and built-in stereo speakers. The monitors run Tizen, the OS that's used in Samsung's watches and its own smart TVs, and support Tizen apps just like a TV would. They also support AirPlay 2 and Android Casting and DEX, which is Samsung's system for plugging a Samsung phone into a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and then using it as a desktop. So you might say, that sounds kind of good. What does this cost? The M7 costs $399, the M5 $229 for the 27-inch, and $279 for the 32-inch, all available in the US, Canada, and China now. It also includes a TV remote, all of them do. So you might say, sounds like a TV, but no, it's a monitor. Yes, because it comes in a box that calls it a monitor. It's a monitor. I think this is brilliant on Samsung's part. I guess the big difference between this and some models of TVs is that it doesn't have a tuner. It's not going to include an over-the-air tuner. A lot of smart TVs don't even have the tuner anymore. You got to be careful about that. Yeah, mine doesn't, but easy enough. There you go. I mean, and these prices, $399 for a, what was the M7 32-inch? Yeah, 32-inch 4K monitor. Kind of expensive as a tower vision. If I'm buying a 32-inch TV, I'm expecting it to be around that or less, but for a monitor, that's about right. I wonder if this is just Samsung looking at its supply chain. I mean, I don't get the idea that TVs are selling more slowly right now because of the pandemic, but maybe they know, like, okay, we had a blip when people bought more TVs, but TV sales are going down, and this is a way to take the supply chain we created for smart TVs and sell a few more units by billing them as monitors. Do people buy TVs and use them as monitors all the time because they're cheaper? Right. Yeah, and even if TV, you know, even if the consumer market for TVs hasn't dipped too much, I know that, I mean, for me, the monitor that I'm using right now was a lot more than $399, not 32 inches either. I mean, it's a perfectly fine monitor, but these prices are very attractive. And I think just being able to say, oh, well, don't think of it as a TV, although there's like a lot of smart TV stuff that you can do with this. I mean, I don't know how many people are kind of sitting at their desk setup and using a monitor like a TV now, but for those who are, this is already a no-brainer, but yeah, good pricing. Yeah, you know what? I didn't get the full, like, refresh rate specs and everything on these. There may be some other advantages to these that monitors have that you may not get from a television, but I also wonder if maybe the price is subsidized in a way by the ties in OS. I mean, that's one of the things that keeps TV prices low is you can charge people some advertising or other things for having the apps on the smart OS. That's Roku's whole business, right? And so maybe there's something to that, too, is if we can put some smart apps on your monitor, we can subsidize that price a little bit. Of course, there's privacy speculation involved there, or not privacy speculation, privacy concerns, I should say, involved there. And this, oh, here we go. I'm glad I looked at this, and thank you, Beatmaster, for pointing that out. Max refresh rate on these monitors is exactly the same as a television, 60 Hertz. Well, but it's a monitor, Tom, not a television. Speaking of Streaming TV, WarnerMedia announced that HBO Max is coming to Amazon FireOS devices on November 17, peace in our time. Users that subscribe to HBO through Amazon Prime's video channels will be able to use that account. So you buy HBO through Amazon Prime, but you can log in to HBO Max and get the wider HBO Max stuff. But only the HBO content will be on Prime Video. HBO Max stuff that's specific to HBO Max won't, which is eventually going to be very confusing to people because they're both called HBO. But it kind of makes sense now if you're like, oh, the stuff that's normally on HBO will still be on Prime, but the special HBO Max stuff will be on the HBO Max app, but I'll still get to access both just not through the same interface. The HBO app on FireOS devices will be automatically updated to HBO Max, and HBO Max remains unavailable on the Roku platform. Peacock is the opposite. Peacock has figured out a deal with Roku and is available there, but Peacock has not yet figured out its deal with Amazon. Well, this isn't confusing at all. No, it's perfectly simple. Oh, man. I mean, naming conventions, I don't know. I know the companies are doing, you know, they have their way of doing what they're doing as a FireOS device owner, which I am not. I would think that someone would be immediately confused by this, but, you know, I guess really it's the Roku folks saying hey. I get why they called it HBO Max because it's HBO plus a bunch of other stuff. Sure, yeah. But it's confusing when you're trying to explain to somebody like, oh, the HBO stuff is on Prime Video, but if you want more, it's on HBO Max because people are going to go, but that one's also HBO. Like, how do I know what stuff is HBO and what stuff isn't? Yeah. I mean, HBO now used to confuse me. HBO now, HBO, HBO Max, what do we got? There is now just HBO Max as the app. What makes programming HBO and what doesn't is going to increasingly be fuzzier in the future. But basically what makes it HBO or not is if it shows up on your HBO subscription on Prime Video, it's HBO. If it doesn't, it's HBO Max unless it's not from them at all. Well, I don't know what y'all were doing yesterday, Sunday. Sometimes people were watching a really exciting football game. Sometimes other people were watching SpaceX's latest flight. Crew one launched its second crew of astronauts to orbit. That was Sunday evening inside the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first operational mission of the Crew Dragon, which successfully launched at 727 p.m. eastern time on top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker were joined by Soichi Noguchi from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA. After over 24 hours in orbit, which they still are at the time of recording, the crew will dock at the ISS on Monday at around 11 p.m. eastern time. Yeah, this was exciting. People were taking breaks from their crown binging to watch a crew get launched on non-step to the International Space Station. And this is the return of the United States to being able to deliver its own crew to the ISS. The test, of course, was the first time they did it, but this is, do you think this crew was like, oh, it's like driving a used car? We aren't the first ones in here. I don't know. I mean, it's, you know, there's four of them. I mean, I watched it. I was counting down an hour plus beforehand because I like watching the NASA stream on YouTube. I like their commentators, although there are lots of ways that you could stream it. But it all seemed so seamless. And listen, I know that this stuff is very, you know, white knuckle nail biting for anybody who works in the arena. And some folks that I follow on Twitter were extremely worried about it because of course, you know, it's a big deal. But boy was that, it was a magical liftoff. Very nice. Everybody clapping. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. And the kind of inspirational stuff that's especially needed this year. All right, let's check out what it's not the mailbag exactly. What is it? It's not. So I, I decided, you know, we have so many conversations in discord and a lot of different channels. And if you haven't joined our discord, you really should. But one caught my eye in the, in the Apple channel and discord, it was doctor who was saying, my laptop keeps waking up while plugged in, but I disabled the wake up in power settings. Why does it do this? Now, doctor, I don't have the answer for you. However, I do have a similar experience. So over the weekend, it was middle of the night, I wear earplugs because my dog snores. And I heard kind of like somebody talking in my house, you know, and, you know, I'm totally terrified, you know, and I take my earplugs out like, what is this? And it's kind of looping. And I'm like, what is that? Is that a, was that the TikTok video I was watching last night? Why is this happening? My laptop was closed and it was unplugged from power. It had just like become like a sentient being of some kind. So I had to like open it up and, you know, like put in my password and like shut off my browser. Very confusing. I don't know if this has happened to anybody else, but it's scared the living daylights out of me. Well, if you have thoughts on why this is happening, jump in our Discord and help a doctor out. Also, CPOTS 50 points out that this capsule was a new one. So they got that new capsule smell. The one that went up on the test won't be used again until next spring. Well, there you go. You know, everybody gets a new car. If you have feedback, you can give it to us in a variety of ways, but one easy way is to send us a good old email. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We also want to shout out our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. And those three today include Dustin Campbell, Andrew Bradley, and Brad with 2Ds. Thank you all. Sarah, thank you for being here. Well, thank you also, Tom and Roger. It's nice that we all showed up on a Monday. Thanks to Rich for helping put together the lineup. And Rich as well. Yeah. Joe for streaming it into Twitch. Everybody, everybody who's watching. Yeah. Thank you. Right now listening to my voice. We're just listening. Maybe you're jogging. Yeah. Watch out for that truck. Yeah. All right. Hey, folks, if you want, DTNS is a video podcast to see the expression on our faces. You can get the video RSS feed at DailyTechNewShow.com. And you can always support the show directly. Get rid of those ads. DailyTechNewShow.com. Hey, y'all, we talk about being live. And if you'd like to join us, we are live Monday through Friday. We'll be back tomorrow with Aaron Carson talking about the science of happiness. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.