 Coming up on DTNS, more of what tech companies are doing to fight COVID-19, what part of Sony just got spun out, and everybody's using Zoom, but is it safe to do so? Shannon helps us figure out. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 27th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Colorado, Shannon, congrats on the move. That's amazing. Oh, thank you. It's pretty cool to have Colorado represented more often. You occasionally get like a Brian Hibbit or something, but this is good. We were just pitching a show called Lockdown about the lock family under lockdown. It's our brand new sitcom from DTNS Studios. It's going to be fantastic. If you'd like to find out the details, you've got to become a member of our Patreon and get good day internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Instacart workers led by the Gig Workers Collective Plan to strike in the U.S. Monday demanding Instacart provide personal protective equipment, $5 extra per order, hazard pay, change the default tip to 10% and extend sick pay qualification to people with preexisting conditions. Bleeping Computer reports a security consultant in the Proton VPN community found a vulnerability in the VPN in iOS 13.3.1 version that may leave some traffic unprotected. Connections to the internet made before the launching the VPN will remain outside of the security tunnel. Apple is aware and they are working on a way to fully mitigate the problem. In the meantime, users of the VPN on iOS are advised to use Always On VPN or turn airplane mode on and then off after initiating VPN to kill all the connections which will then reconnect them within the tunnel. Google's Threat Analysis Group says it sent account holders almost 40,000 warnings of targeted and government backed hacking in 2019. Attacks, really, down 25% from 2018. Government officials, journalists, dissidents and geopolitical rivals were the most often targeted. Countries with residents that collectively received more than a thousand warnings included the United States, India, Pakistan, Japan and South Korea. A Yelp and GoFundMe fundraising program to help local businesses affected by COVID-19 has been paused after people complained, at least business owners anyway, that there was no easy or quick way to opt out of the fundraising without providing a driver's license or business ID verification or other ways kind of a complicated process. Not everybody wanted this, turns out. Yelp now says it's working with GoFundMe to create a more seamless approach where businesses would have to opt in. Facebook launched a coronavirus community hub for Messenger that will offer authoritative information from organizations like the World Health Organization as well as recommended activities for users to do remotely. Slack CEO, Stuart Butterfield, made some waves when he told CNBC that Slack is working on integration with Microsoft Teams for calling features. I mean, Slack will integrate with pretty much everything, so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that they want to integrate with their direct competitor, Microsoft Teams. Butterfield, however, did not mention a timeline for that development. Google announced it will resume updates to Chrome with plans to release Chrome 81 on April 7th. A new version was scheduled for release on March 17th, but the company suspended updates on Chrome Browser and Chrome OS to avoid disruptions as people started working from home. An official Chrome 82 release has been canceled with features rolled into Chrome 83, which is expected in mid-May. And Google increased the maximum number of people who can participate in a Google Duo call from eight people up to 12. Google increased Duo Group call sizes from four to eight in May of 2019. Cisco reports that spikes in internet traffic seem to be concentrated now between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. The normal peak time of 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., that's usually when everybody gets home and watches Netflix, has increased slightly but is not the primary driver of the overall increase in internet usage. However, the traffic load from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. while being the biggest increase is still below evening peak hours. So that's good because the entire internet is tuned for peak hours. Streaming video still happens in the evenings, turns out. Amazon confirmed a recode report that its shopping algorithm gave preference to some of its own non-essential items like sporting equipment and office supplies over third-party sellers with faster ship times. Amazon says it's working as quickly as possible to resolve this issue. And several food wholesalers that sell to restaurants are now developing online delivery features as restaurant orders dropped by 70%. Couple examples, Cafe Deli Wholesale in the U.K. has launched a website overnight where anybody can order delivery from them. Fresh Pastures, which supplies dairy and bread to governments and schools, has lost 90% of its business because all the schools are closing, now offers delivery to the public from its website. So if you're looking for groceries, you might look around for some wholesalers. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Sony Corporation. Shannon. All right, Sony Corporation announced that it plans to create a holding company for its, quote, electronic products and solutions business called Sony Electronics Corporation, which is effective on April 1st. So this would include imaging products and solutions, home entertainment and sound, and mobile communications. Sony Executive Vice President Shigeki Ishizuka, who headed the unit under Sony Corporation, will be the CEO of the new company. Semiconectors, financial services, game and network services, music and pictures are all not included under the new holding company. And in related news, Sony also says that its PS5, the PlayStation 5 launch, is still planned for the holiday season of this year. Yeah, there have been some rumors kicking around that Sony might have to delay, and that would be understandable with supply chain issues being what they are, but Sony's still sticking to it. They're saying we haven't delayed it yet, so that's good to know. This is the spin-out story that you mentioned, Shannon, is confusing a lot of people because it's imaging, meaning cameras, digital cameras, SLRs, things like that. It's not the image sensors that Sony makes because they make a lot of money off that. So this is just Sony's consumer electronics getting packaged up into a wholly owned company to make it easier to sell if they decide to do that. Doesn't mean they have decided to sell it, but it's certainly one of the first steps towards saying if we did want to get out of this business, the way they got out of Vio, they got out of the Vio business a few years ago, they could get out of this business of the stuff you find in a Best Buy or a car phone warehouse, the stuff you find on the shelves, that's your home consumer electronics stuff. It does roll off the tongue a little bit better, electronics rather than electronic products and solutions, which would cause people to be like, okay, what solutions? I think some of the gaming stuff, I understand that Sony wants to make its gaming its own category, that makes sense. So I guess that would be the only category you're like, well, that's electronics, but okay, gaming is separate. Otherwise, this seems just like renaming that makes sense. Yeah, PS5 is separate from this. All of the gaming software services that they offer, that's separate from this as well. Something that is included is TVs, any of the audio kind of technological information that they have out there like headphones or like audio players, those are going to be included under the electronics corporation. So it does sound like it's everything that they offer consumers at Best Buy except for video games, gaming. Yeah, and there's been an activist investor pushing Sony to do similar things to this. I imagine that giving the downward guidance that all electronics companies are facing going into the end of the year, it may have forced their hand a little bit. Daniel Laib, Loeb, LOEB has been trying to get Sony to make these kinds of changes. So I don't know if it's a result of the virus in the disruption, but it certainly could have been. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously released a note predicting that ARM-based Macs could arrive as early as Q4 of 2020, that's this year. A new note from Qo predicts that Apple will adopt a, quote, aggressive processor replacement strategy throughout 2021, including desktops. Qo predicts the CPU switch could save Apple 40 to 60% on the component cost. Other changes caused by this would be the need to source a USB controller, since Apple uses the one integrated in Intel chips currently. Qo believes that Apple might go with AS Media's USB controller in ARM models, and the note also predicts that Apple will adopt USB4 in Macs by 2022. I mean, Qo, like you said, he previously was talking about ARM coming to Macs. This is just more of the plan. He seems to have found some more sources to tell him a little more of what Apple's thinking. Apple's thinking probably has evolved since he first talked about this, and it does make sense that Apple would want to do this if they feel like these ARM-based Macs are powerful enough, and just kind of slowly work their way up the power chain as they develop these chips themselves. A lot of questions about whether they will be powerful enough, whether there will be bugs and things like that, but ARM increasingly is a perfectly reliable chipset for laptops. I don't see Apple putting this in, say, the iMac or even the Mac Pro, probably the Mac Pro for sure, maybe not even the iMac, but for laptops ARM-based, my question is, will you get a powerful enough Pro laptop model out of this on ARM? And I guess we'll see. And is it too much of a pipe dream to hope that saving on the component cost could pass savings along to the consumer as well? Oh, Sarah. I just want to know. What? I mean, what a lovely thought. All right, pipe dream it is. I don't know if it's a pipe dream or not. I am curious if, same thing, if the laptops are going to be powerful enough, I for one know a lot of YouTubers who do their own editing on Apple laptops, everything from regular errors all the way up to pros. And I'm not as familiar with ARM processing on laptop machines other than a Chrome bug, basically, as I would like to be. And I am not familiar with any of them being able to run something like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Premiere Pro in a way that is useful enough that somebody could still edit in 4K, for example. I still feel like in a lot of cases, you still need a desktop for that kind of machinery or you need something that is very pro, pro line, like top of the line laptop. So I don't know. It's going to be interesting seeing them switch over to ARM if this does happen in Q4 of 2020, like they're saying. Well, I don't think they're going to move their entire product line immediately over to ARM. But that's not what he's saying. He said that they would slowly change it over the course of 2022. Right, starting as early as that. Yeah, so they'll probably just test the waters and then go for the course of 2021. Yeah, aggressive processor replacement strategy throughout 2021. He does say including desktop. So I guess that includes iMac. And before we get off the story, the other thing, Sarah, that you were mentioning is people complaining like, oh, this is going to be just as bad as when they switch to Intel and we're going to have incompatibilities and all that stuff again. Yeah, and I have seen some. Again, it's a little hard to say. Somebody who has PTSD from going to x86 back in the day, there are definitely going to be certain programs that, I don't know, but there might be some incompatibility issues as switchovers make sense. I'm excited about the USB 4 stuff. Right up about it a little bit this morning. I mean, Apple's not the only company that is going to be able to take advantage of this. And obviously it depends a lot on how components are built that would daisy chain all sorts of things. But it's the future and it's going to be backwards compatible. A lot of stuff I already have. Yay. And they could go USB 4 if they stayed on Intel. That's a part of this. I think Quo mentioned that if they do use AS Media, they'd start with current USB controller, but adopt USB 4 by 2022. So that kind of just puts it on the roadmap. All right, let's do a roundup of some of the things that tech is doing to help fight COVID-19. We talk a lot about the effects of it. I'm sure you hear a lot about what the effects may or may not be in all kinds of arenas, but on this show, we kind of want to focus on the fact that there are also efforts to help stop it, to help cure it, to help ease it, to help slow it. Apple, for instance, has launched a COVID-19 screening site and app in the United States in cooperation with the US CDC and FEMA. It provides tips and advice. So basically, you go in and you can ask questions, you can self-diagnose and see if you need to contact a healthcare professional. It's just an informational resource. It's not a diagnostic app, per se. Alphabet's verily health technology, however, has more than 1,000 volunteers from across Alphabet companies, including Google, working on its drive-through COVID-19 screening and testing for at-risk people. Testing locations are up and running in California, in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Riverside, and Sacramento counties. More test sites will open based on where the state says they are most needed. C3.AI and Microsoft are launching the C3.AI Digital Transformation Institute, dedicated to funding collective research efforts on AI to help government, businesses, and society use them to best advantage. It's a generalized AI initiative, but the first call is for research proposals to fight COVID-19 and tackle other possible future pandemics. The Institute will be jointly managed by the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Proposals should be submitted by May 1st, and selections will be announced June 1st. A team at Singapore's Nanobiolab, at the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research, have developed a test that can tell if a person has COVID-19 in 5 to 10 minutes based on a swab collection. So they swab probably your throat, and they can turn this around in 5 to 10 minutes. Faster testing is very important in being able to test more people, obviously, and the team has conducted clinical validation and hopes to be able to submit it for approval in Singapore in a month. Yeah, I mean, I only have heard about testing process because I have not been tested myself, but it was a lot longer than 5 to 10 minutes. In some cases, several hours, and that's not even accounting for who might be in front of you type thing. Exactly, exactly. The UK's Dyson has designed a ventilator. It calls CoVent using Dyson's current digital motor technology. This design was specifically for patients who have COVID-19. The United Kingdom's NHS has ordered 10,000 units from Dyson pending regulatory approval. Dyson also plans to donate 5,000 ventilators to organizations around the world. A lot of good technology going on in the ventilator category. Good on you, Dyson. Sky reports the UK's National Health Service is also preparing a platform to track movements of critical staff and materials. This was developed by the US company Palantir. The platform will track accident and emergency capacity, calls to NHS's 111, the number and location of open beds, ventilators, and active NHS staff. UK tech firms have created COVID-19 Tech Response, an organization at code for the number four, code for COVID.org to coordinate available talent with the ability to solve problems that need solving. Coalition is working closely with the Coronavirus Tech Handbook and initiative by Political Technology College Newspeak House as well as COVIDMutualAid.org. This is similar to one we talked about earlier this week that is happening in the US that says, hey, if you guys are product managers, engineers, developers, we've got problems we need you to solve. Let's put you together with the people that need those problems solved. Similarly, 400 volunteers from 40 countries have joined the COVID-19 CTI League. CTI stands for Cyber Threat Intelligence. The top priority of this organization is to help defend medical facilities, health organizations, and other frontline responders from cyber attacks. It will also work to defend communications networks, leverage contacts in the internet infrastructure to combat phishing and other financial crime that's taking advantage of COVID-19 fears. The four coordinators of the group include Mark Rogers. He's a Brit who lives in the US and also the head of DEFCON. There's also an Israeli and two people from the US running this, but it's basically Shannon trying to get people who are in the cyber defense industry to help defend healthcare. Yeah, and honestly, I've seen a ton of hackers and white hats on places like I'm a part of that community, like on Twitter, talking about ways that they can help. So I've seen a huge initiative from the hacker industry in ways to do this. And Mark Rogers, who again, he's the head of DEFCON security, being all the people that run the security at the convention. It's smart that he's getting into this because he's one of the people that already knows how to coordinate a large group of hackers. So he understands what needs to go into that and what kind of goals and how they can plan it over the course of several weeks probably, but also across several different timelines and several different nations. So this is something that he's familiar with working with that convention for a very long time. And I know that having him in charge as well as the other three people is definitely an initiative that we need right now. So I'm really excited to see hackers coming together in doing this because I think a lot of people don't give hackers credit and we are a very tight knit community that has a lot of empathy. And it's really nice to see us, you know, pulling for this to happen. Hey, folks, if you get all the tech headlines in about five minutes, it must mean you're subscribed to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, folks, as we know, video conference usage is soaring for both business and just cocktail purposes, all kinds of purposes. According to Aptopia's estimates, downloads of House Party, the one that lets you have eight people together, has some gaming stuff in it, that's gone from 24,795 downloads per day on February 15th to 651,694 downloads March 25th. Discord also fly in there, 219,585 downloads February 15th, up to 443,480 on March 25th. Marco Polo, a friend of mine back in Greenville, introduced me to this one. It has gone from 12,674 downloads on February 15th to 73,395 downloads March 25th. Marco Polo could let you do a live stream, but also leave video messages for each other, kind of interesting. But dwarfing them all is Zoom. Downloads of Zoom have risen from 171,574 on February 15th to 2,410,171 on March 25th, just skyrocketing. And it seems like every celebrity you hear of, every business you hear of, they're all using Zoom to do their conferencing. But Zoom has a checkered history when it comes to security and privacy. There was a vulnerability which led an attacker remove attendees from meetings, spoof messages from users and hijacked shared screens. Last year it was found that websites could use Zoom to activate a max webcam without asking permission. And all of those have been fixed. And of course, every tool is going to have a history of vulnerabilities. But some people feel like Zoom hasn't always taken these seriously and doesn't look to fix them until they're already waved in front of their face. For instance, Motherboard did some analysis indicating Zoom's iOS app uses the Facebook Graph API to notify Facebook of app opens, device details, model, carrier, time zone, city, even if the Zoom user doesn't have a Facebook account. Now, Facebook lets you do this as part of the API, but Facebook says it requires a developer to be transparent with users about the data their apps send to Facebook. In fact, the terms say if you use our pixels or SDKs, you further represent and warrant that you have provided robust and sufficiently prominent notice to users regarding the customer data collection, sharing and usage. However, the Zoom privacy policy does not mention the Facebook API by name. It just talks about using third party tools in rather vague language. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out that there are also other privacy issues that you may not be aware of. They're transparent, they're known, but the end user might not know that the host of a Zoom call can monitor the activities of the attendees while screen sharing. You can see if your window is active or not to tell if you're not paying attention. Administrators can see detailed dashboards of users activity, including a ranking system of users based on total number of meeting minutes. If a user records a call, the administrator can access the contents of that recording that you made on your side. And during any meeting that has occurred or is in progress, administrators can see operating system IP address, location, data, device information, etc. In a corporate situation, this may all be expected, but a lot of situations are not the normal right now. So, Shannon, how much do we need to worry about using Zoom given its history and these current privacy policy issues? So folks might disagree with me a little bit when I say this, but honestly, these are very similar issues that you see with a lot of these platforms that are used for work environments so that people can collaborate, they can talk, they can converse. In that sense, I would say that you don't necessarily have to worry about what is being shared with Zoom or with the company that you are working for, especially if you're in that kind of corporate environment, like you said, Tom, where it's expected and it might even be a part of your employee handbook already. So that's something that you should be aware of and make the assumption that anything that is happening on a Zoom call or any other platform is going to be publicized. And that's kind of a rule is trust no one, just assume that whatever you're putting out there, whatever you're saying or whatever is being shown behind you is going to be publicized in some way, not just to the people that are in the same conversation with you on that conference call, but also maybe to Zoom if they have the ability to do that, but also to anybody else who might inadvertently get access to that call, even if it's screen recorded and uploaded to YouTube as a unlisted video, you never know who's going to get access to that. There are some ways that you can circumvent what Zoom is doing. They do have security issues, so you can turn off your computer and mic during calls whenever you're not the one talking or you're not the active user, you're just listening in. You can totally do that as long as the company that you're working with is comfortable with you doing that and allows you to do so. Again, you have that issue with a corporate environment. You can also just need to be aware of what's in your background image. Make sure that you're not recording against a whiteboard that has usernames and passwords written on it. I've definitely seen that before in my own environments. And be aware of what is behind you, whether it's just a bookshelf like this with nothing in particular back there or if it's a whiteboard with stuff written on it. You want to make sure that it's not something that you're sharing that should be secure. Use unique email addresses for Zoom. Check other accounts and make sure that you're using, if you are checking separate accounts, make sure you're using a different device like your phone. So if you are in that corporate environment, your boss doesn't necessarily know that you're checking your email at the same time because if you want to avoid triggering attention trackers, that might be a way around it. Not saying that you should, but it's a way. And make sure that you're opting out or blocking any kind of trackers or cookies that Zoom might be initiating on your computer as well. But of course, Zoom might not be the best option for everybody, especially if you are in a environment that shares proprietary information, for example. So you might want to use a alternative. So luckily, there are a couple of different alternatives. My favorite is Signal, which I absolutely love. I use it every single day for years and years. They have disappearing messages that you can set to different times just for texts, encrypted end-to-end signal conversations with other signal users. So your friends or family or colleagues need to use Signal as well. Video calls are also encrypted, and you can verify who you're talking to if it's just over text with something called a safety number. I won't go into the details, but Signal is free. And the only con I would say with that is that it's one-on-one calls with people. The other one is conference calls with wire, which the pro is it's open source, encrypted end-to-end. You do get conference calls. The cons is it does require a pro subscription. So it is like four bucks. Yeah. So if it's worth paying for your privacy, I guess wire would be the one for you. If you only need to do one-on-one, Signal.org. Good alternatives. Thanks, Shannon. No problem. A lot of security and privacy conversations happen all the time in our Discord, and you should join. And you can do it by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. We're going to call this person Stealth. Stealth is from two damn sunny Los Angeles, used to be anyway. And this is why. Full disclosure, Stealth is on the technology team at Disney Television Animation, says I don't speak for them, but writing in anyway. Deadline, deadline.com, had a story on how while traditional video production is shutting down due to coronavirus concerns, animation production is adapting to a new remote work reality. The article talks about the challenges of moving artists and animators from a high bandwidth office to home internet connections. And just today I was part of a 40 plus person Zoom call. That sounds fun. And this is, thank you, Stealth. The article goes into some detail on just stuff that the production world, which has largely been affected. I mean, any of your late night shows, they're either not doing anything or they're streaming from home. But you know, folks in the voiceover industry, the stuff that can be done remotely that just doesn't require some of the big studio setups and large crew that that that other productions have had to just just not be able to accomplish is really interesting. So thank you for that. Yeah. So in other words, about four to five months from now, all of our new television shows will be animated. Got it. Because everything else is top down. Yeah. Anybody has voiceover work for me? Just send it on over. Yeah. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Andrew Bradley, Justin Zellers and Tim deputy. Len Peralta, what have you been drawing today? Well, you know, I too have jumped on the zoom track and done some not meetings, but recordings as well. And I'm always afraid of that. I've been using Google Meet for my stuff. And, you know, privacy is a thing of the past, folks. And I know one of the things is I feel that this image is it all comes down to the Zuck, right? Because the Zuck is going to get any sort of information, you know, and I seem to draw I draw Mark Zuckerberg a lot as this sort of like tentacled creature like alien guy. And this image is it shows that Zuck's tentacles can go into all kinds of places, including where you are zooming from. So just as a as a cautionary tale, just be careful what you're sharing. Know what you're going into and know that privacy is a thing of the past. This image is available right now at patreon.com slash Len. And I also want to mention that if you have, you know, there are birthdays, there are anniversaries, there are, you know, things happening in the next couple months that would need greeting cards. And I have a special at my shop right now. It's a custom drawn quarantine greeting card. You can you can go ahead, you can order one, and you can send a special meeting, a special message to someone who is on lockdown or quarantine right now. And if they can't, you know, have a birthday party that they want, at least you can give them something that is that is different and new and interesting by me. So go to lennproutstore.com. Excellent. Thank you, Len. Good stuff today. Also, thanks to Shannon Morse for being with us from her brand new studio. Shannon, what's been going on with you and how can people keep up with your work? Well, I've moved in, I'm building my new studio as you mentioned. So youtube.com slash Shannon Morse is where you will see all my newest videos from Colorado. Excellent. Hey, folks, we've been taking this portion of the show to kind of spread the love around to other people who are creators who you can support can give you some fun stuff to look at to enjoy. And we got an email from one of the listeners who's trying to do something to help teachers. Not every student can read printed materials the same way. Some students need large text or audio versions or braille versions and other kinds of versions and with teachers relying more on printed material for distance learning right now, this risks letting some students go without the needed information while teachers are waiting for services to convert materials or trying to, you know, struggle through creating them themselves. So Scribe for Education is a program from Numa Solutions developed to help teachers across the globe provide accessible documents with a couple of clicks. DTNS listener Mike Calvo is the founder and CEO of Numa Solutions. They are making Scribe for Education free for teachers and school districts worldwide. This is not a paid announcement. Mike just told me about this and I'm passing along because I think it's great. So if you're a teacher or school district and you're interested, go to NumaSolutions, P-N-E-U-M-A solutions dot com and look for the link in our show notes or you can even call 305-720-3639. We'll have that phone number in the show notes as well. You can always support our show at any level. Thanks for everybody who's been stepping up. Just got another email. I think this one was from Soren who said, you know what, I'm going to step up and increase my pledge a little bit to cover those people who are getting furloughed and getting laid off. Super appreciate that. Patreon dot com slash DTNS. You might be wondering, gosh, I wish I could just give some feedback to the folks at DTNS. I have good news you can. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send an email. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Monday is the 15th anniversary of the launch of CNET's Buzz Out Loud and coincidentally Molly Wood will be here on Daily Tech News Show. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com.