 Coming up on DTNS, Australian Intelligence accidentally scoops up data from a COVID tracing app. The New York Times and Washington Post showed different paths forward for newspapers online and Twitter wants you to judge its new check mark verification. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 24, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chambers. The show's pretty simple. Joining us is tech journalist Peter Wells. Welcome back to the show, Pete. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you for having me on the show. Oh, it's a pleasure to have you back. We were just chatting about all kinds of things, including glasses, both smart and otherwise. If you'd like that wider conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A California grand jury has indicted Apple's head of global security, Thomas Moyer, on charges that he tried to bribe Santa Clara County officials with 200 iPads in exchange for four concealed firearms licenses, known as CCW, for Apple employees. The charges followed a two-year investigation. The iPads were reportedly never delivered because Moyer and Santa Clara's undersheriff Rick Sung learned in 2019 that the district attorney was executing a search warrant for the sheriff department's CCW records. I mean, they asked him for the bribe. He didn't have to give it, though. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan confirmed that the PlayStation 5 is completely sold out during an interview with Russian news agency TASS. He said the supply shortage likely would have happened without COVID-19, but that launching in the middle of a pandemic was a challenge he, quote, wouldn't recommend. Ryan says due to travel and other restrictions, quote, we had to do all the manufacturing preparation by camera remotely. I mean, just imagine that for a precision device like the PlayStation 5. Twitter will now warn users who try to like a post that has been labeled as potentially misleading. Twitter said warnings on, quote, tweets of labeled posts decreased sharing by 29 percent. So obviously the company thinks it's working. Twitter has said the warnings on, quote, tweets would be in place until at least the end of the election week in the U.S., but they remain in place today. Oh, they're never going away. Korean publication Aju News is reporting the Galaxy Z Fold 3 will be the new Samsung IT phone in 2021 and pour a little out, folks, because they're saying the sources are telling them Samsung will discontinue its Galaxy Note product line. Samsung hasn't commented, but according to analytics firm Counterpoint Research, the Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra were only fourth and eighth in the top 10 smartphone sales for the first week of September behind the iPhone 11 line last year. Pre-Taylor Junes. Junpei Spinoff has received a Luxembourg electronic money institution license to operate in Europe. Junpei will let Europeans send and receive money instantly for free. Junpei will also let you send money to any email address or phone number, whether or not the recipient uses Junpei or not, and connect to any existing debit, credit card, or bank account. Junpei has opened a waitlist for its beta app on Android and iOS and will compete with TransferWire, PaySend, and PayPal, among others. All right, let's talk a little bit about drones and robots living together. Let's do it. Israel's Percepto makes unmanned aerial vehicles for remote work, inspection, and monitoring. Basically, they fly over empty work sites to collect data and look for issues. It's one of the few drone companies that makes the whole stack of software and hardware, including computer vision, navigation, analytics. It develops most of its own hardware, but it does acquire chips from Nvidia. But Percepto is partnering up with a robot. And you might have seen it around the internet, if not in person. Percepto's Spiro drones will integrate with Boston Dynamics spot robots. Spot is that famous four-legged robot that you might see frightening people in YouTube videos, or maybe you, depending on where you live. In the real world, it can handle rugged terrain and recover from falls and stumbles. But for some reason, it freaks people out. The partnership will see spot robots handle high-resolution imaging and thermal vision on the ground to see things that the Sparrow drones can't see. Spot is expected to find things like hot spots on machines, or electrical conductors, water and steam links around plants, and equipment with degraded performance. Yeah, so these are usually not abandoned work sites, but work sites that need to be left unoccupied for certain periods of time. So this is both security, but also just maintenance. If a leak springs and there's no one around to see it, you benefit from one of these drones spotting it so you can send somebody out there to fix it, or any of these other things that you mentioned. Having spot involved is interesting because it can see some things on the ground that a drone can't. And potentially, although this isn't part of the immediate plans, you could maybe fix it up to do some minor maintenance itself. Maybe plug a leak or turn off a lever or something like that. So I think this is interesting, especially because Percepto has gotten within the industrial IoT space a lot of credit for the Apple model where they have the whole stack. But it shows that they're still willing to partner outside of their expertise. Their expertise is in the air and they're partnering with Boston Dynamics on the ground. Yeah, I mean, the idea that something could happen at a plant that isn't heavily manned by humans. And at least, even if the humans have to eventually come in and fix whatever is broken, to just get more information about what are we dealing with here? Is there hazardous materials? What are we getting ourselves into? It makes a ton of sense. And I don't know why people don't like the spot robots. I think they're really cute. It's the Uncanny Valley thing. It's the way that they move just freaks people out because you perceive that they're not real, that they move so much like an organic being. But yeah, I think that this is great timing as well because there are so many construction projects that have been put off due to our current circumstances. And so, yeah, there's going to be a great need for this. Yeah, for sure. And I think there's obviously the reaction of I fear this taking my job. I fear robots and drones teaming up together to be too smart. But this is the future. And in my perspective, what this does is it makes it more efficient to run these complex situations, whether they're construction sites or whether they're industrial installations, which leaves more money to apply to safety. It leaves more money to apply to customer service. The cynics will say, but they won't do that. They'll cash it out. And in some companies cases, you may be right. But the smart companies will use that money to improve their business because in the long run, that's what's going to make those companies better. So overall, I think this is an interesting development in an ongoing slow and maybe less covered revolution that's happening. Been a lot of concern over the future of newspapers too, speaking of a slow concerning disruption, including efforts in Australia and Europe that would force Google and Facebook to participate in plans to pay news outlets for the privilege of linking to their stories. But Axios's sources show two outlets in the US, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have been faring well of late. Both outlets have tripled their digital subscribers since 2016, three million for the post and six million for the Times. Axios says the post growth is credited to its back end technology. The post has developed its own advertising and publishing software. That itself brings in revenue because they can license that out to other companies. It makes for a more user friendly online experience because they are working on that interface. And it's developing a single sign on feature for the more than 100 sites that use its ad software, a lot of local news sites among that. A post engineering team is focused on paywall and metering applications, making them work better, optimizing them, that boost sign ups, which it also licenses out. It also licenses out that technology. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and it shows a lot of like build a platform for your own use and then make money off of it by letting other people use it. Now the New York Times on the other hand is focused on brand awareness, hiring recognizable names with big followings like Cara Swisher. There's been a growth in opinion based content because that grabs eyeballs and brings people in. It's also focusing on daily habits like cooking and crossword apps. Axios notes that research shows flashy things like hot talent or discounts to get people in the door and functionality and breadth of content keep people. So both these companies are doing parts of that and that explains their success. The Times is going for buzzy talent and an emphasis on editorial while the Post seems focused on platform engineering and optimization. It's almost as if one is owned by an engineer and the other is owned by a newspaper family, which is in fact the case. Peter, you work in this industry. You're very close to the idea of like, hey, can newspapers survive? What do you make of this? Yeah, I think Axios is, I don't know, idea here is, first of all, I think that they're right that both companies are doing an amazing job and doing much better than a lot of other newspaper companies, including my own, in terms of understanding what digital means and how to bring in people. The New York Times is focused so heavily on podcasting, for instance, which is something that they were one of the first newspapers to really stake a claim in the podcasting space. And I also think, though, that I'm actually a subscriber to both The New York Times and The Washington Post, even though I live in Australia, because the last couple of years, your politics has been quite interesting, Tom. So it's been something that I've wanted to pay attention to. Yeah. And yeah, that probably lends to some of the numbers that we're seeing. Not that you couldn't read it on paper, but in the digital world we're in when there's a lot of news that people say, all right, the subscriptions, it might be worth my money. Yeah, I think that's important to note because not every newspaper outlet has benefited. So yes, you get that surge, but how do you make it work for you, essentially? Yeah. And I feel that with those two papers specifically, it was so many stories I was reading that they sourced the original story from The Washington Post and The New York Times. So at a certain point, it became, it felt like, well, I may as well support the places that are actually breaking the stories rather than just the people who are rereporting the stories. But yeah, I think this shows, I really hope that some of the papers around the world, especially in our market, we seem to be very slow at adopting new technology. And I would really love that some of my bosses would have a look at the strategies of both companies because, yeah, it really shows that newspapers don't need to be a thing of the past. Yeah, and I think it will also be interesting to see what affects these different approaches have. I don't subscribe to either one of these, I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, but I do that because I find the content valuable, right? So I kind of like the New York Times approach here of being content. But to get people in the door, you have to have buzzy content which pushes you towards opinion, which may push your outlet to kind of skew in a certain direction because that's what brings in the money. Whereas The Washington Post is taking a more engineering approach, which is going to be a little more editorially independent, but it also might run out of steam if there's not this continued surge of interest, right? It's one thing to build a great mill on the river that takes advantage of the flow, but if the river dries up, it doesn't matter how good your mill is. So I think those are both interesting. It'll be interesting to watch both these approaches and see how they fare now. Yeah, and I know that for us that we produce the show every day, there's probably more tabs open from different news outlets than perhaps the average person, but you also have all of the big names in the newspaper industry now trying to push towards digital. They know they can't pay while you completely. Some do, but mostly it's like, okay, you have like a few articles per month, and then you can get around that by opening a new browser or using a VPN, and they know that too. And I just wonder how many folks are like, I don't need to pay. I mean, some people are paying, but how many people are just not that's always been the question. How many people are paying? And it looks like quite a few because these are subscriber numbers. These are people paying. Yeah. Well, Microsoft's Phil Spencer told the Verge that an Xbox app is likely to appear on smart TV is sometime in the next 12 months. Spencer previously told a strategy that he thought you might see project cloud streaming sticks and at it at the time, quote, you could imagine us even having something that we just included the Game Pass subscription that gave you an ability to stream X cloud games to your television and buying the controller that could be easy with a smart TV app connected to a Bluetooth controller. Perhaps Microsoft also announced a partnership with Samsung in February that would certainly include phones, but might also include TVs. We're seeing a trend here. He also told the Verge he has no plans to abandon consoles, no plans to abandon hardware advocating, quote, a hybrid environment of the cloud and the local compute compatibility. The Verge speculates this could mean being able to try a game in the cloud on an Xbox console, say, before deciding to buy and download it. I love this. I also love how Phil Spencer just goes around like leaking things to interviews. It's quite entertaining to watch. But I love this idea of saying like, look, we're not going to stop making Xboxes anytime soon because of course, he's not he can't say that he would he would anger the Xbox loyalist out there, right? But he's also saying we could also make it so all you need to do is buy a controller and then launch an app on your smart TV and start playing Xbox games through Project X cloud. And and while that may not be good enough for everyone, the fact that you can still buy a console, if it's not good enough, I think is I think it means they're like, yeah, we're taking that Azure led approach that Microsoft said, which is we'll put Microsoft Office apps on Android and iOS. Because what we want is people to use our cloud service here Phil Spencer saying we don't care what device they're using as long as they're using the Xbox to play some games. Yeah, you stole my idea completely there, Tom. It feels exactly like the DNA of modern Microsoft that you don't necessarily need our hardware. We just want you to play wherever you wherever you are, we will bring the games to you. But I can also see this being, you know, really handy in a family setting where you might have the one great TV that the Xbox is normally plugged into. But then you've got the other TV for the kids. And if they want to play again, they can just go in and and with a controller jump on on a TV and still get that experience of playing on the TV. But yeah, they don't need a second Xbox in the house and and all everything that, you know, just before this this new console era started, I was so I so thought that the PlayStation five would dominate and the Xbox had no nothing to compete with. But all of these great little ideas that they're coming up with, you know, the I really think that they've shown that software is so much part of the game, and that they're leading in a lot of ways in software and integration and play anywhere and apps. And it's just fascinating to watch. Yeah, yeah. Playing to the Microsoft advantage, playing to the internal expertise. And as you say, software is the game. The game is software, literally in this case. Thanks, everybody who participates in our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at Daily Tech News Show dot Reddit dot com. A report published Monday by the Australian government's Inspector General for the intelligence community. That's an oversight agency of the government's intelligence agencies, their spy and eavesdropping agencies. That oversight agency says it's discovered that some intelligence agencies were quote incidentally collecting data from Australia's COVID safe contact tracing app during the first six months after its launch. The collection happened in the course of a lawful collection of other data that was allowed to be collected under the Privacy Act. Now that collection is considered incidental because it wasn't possible to collect the data they were allowed to collect by warrant without inadvertently collecting the COVID safe data somehow. The watchdog group said that there was no evidence that any agency decrypted accessed or used any COVID app data. The reports that the agencies were taking active steps to ensure compliance with the law and prevent future collection and that collected data would be deleted as soon as practicable. Practicable. Now the COVID safe app uses Bluetooth to allow proximity, not location data. So this wasn't going to have your GPS coordinates in it. But the app did require a user to upload some personal info like name, age, postal code and phone number. This is the oversight working because they caught it and they're looking into it. But Peter, you're someone in Australia that this directly affects. How does this make you feel? Well, I think that it's great that the headlines here have been as sensible as they are because you could easily have made this. COVID safe is lying about the privacy that they promised us all because that was one of the big things. When COVID safe was launched, there was a lot of pushback by the community and because of that, they really took a slow launch and made sure that they had all of their privacy concerns addressed by people like Troy Hunt even. They got in experts outside to look over the code and say, would you trust this on your phone? And the majority of people said, yes, they're doing everything they can possible. So what it sounds like, we don't have the full picture here. But what it sounds like is that there was a warrant already in place on someone that and because of that, they were tracking everything that that phone was doing. And in the case of that, they happened to pick up some of this data. It sounds like because they're saying it only happened in the first six months. I don't know the timing there, whether that means that they realized that they were doing that and now they're no longer doing that. The thing is COVID safe, no one I know is still using COVID safe, unfortunately, because the Australian government chose not to use the Google Apple framework and iPhones basically don't work with COVID safe. And there's a market share of about 60% of iPhone in this country. And so that became common knowledge pretty early on that this app doesn't really work. And so unfortunately, people don't use it anymore. So I mean, I think a contact tracing app that worked would be fantastic in our current situation. But unfortunately, that's not the case. Either way, I think that this is, like you said, it's the system working as it should. It's picking up the issue and hopefully addressing it. Yeah, I mean, my guess is probably they were monitoring someone with a warrant for six months, and then the warrant ended, and then the oversight committee found this and just a guess though, don't really know. Well, Twitter announced it's relaunching its verification process with new guidelines. The new system will roll out in early 2021, but the company is asking its users for feedback on a draft of those guidelines. The proposal would make government accounts, companies, brands, nonprofits, news media accounts, entertainment accounts, sports activists, organizers, and other influential individuals eligible for verification. The blue check mark, as it's known, although it's not always blue depending on how you're accessing Twitter. Most of these accounts are verified by being confirmed on the site of a verified organization like a company or a sports team website. Different kinds of media coverage can also make an account eligible. The criteria for anyone else which would put you in the category of activist, organizer, and other influential individual is as follows. Consistent and rule abiding use of Twitter for six months prior to applying for verification and meeting one requirement for activity and one for notability. Activity requirements involve creating a popular hashtag or being in the top percentile of active accounts. I can hear you chuckling, Pete. Notability can be from Google Trends, a Wikipedia page, news coverage, or reference from an advocacy organization. Verification can be removed if a user changes their display name or bio to mislead people about their identity or for repeat violation of Twitter's terms of service. You can take a survey for the policy by December 8th. If you're really interested in being verified, if you haven't been already, or tweet your thoughts with the hashtag, hashtag verification feedback. After receiving and considering feedback, Twitter will finalize the policy on December 17th. I am now chuckling myself. Twitter also says it plans to offer more ways to identify yourself, such as new account types and labels. And the reason that I'm chuckling is not because they're not, clearly the company is taking this seriously after sort of just abandoning the entire process for some time, but I just don't know who cares that much. Activists apparently. Does it strike anyone that this seems so tailored towards activists? Yeah, I mean, listen, if I was like, hey, listen, this is my whole thing. Twitter's my platform. I want people to take me seriously, and that verification is going to help me be taken more seriously than I would be otherwise. Sure, you'd be like, hey, Twitter, wake up. Help me out here. I'm a legitimate person, or I at least think I am. But yeah, I kind of forgot about it quite honestly. Yeah, look, I think this is almost embarrassing. That's why I was kind of giggling away. It seems to be missing the issue here of what verification should be on Twitter, which is I would love to just see, open up verification for everyone. Just, make it so that if you've given a legitimate phone number, then you are verified as a user rather than a bot or anything like that. I think the idea of having this kind of caste system where some people get the blue ticks, because they're more important. I'll tell you how I got my blue tick. And by the way, my friends all call me a blue tick tosser for having it. They always think it's hilarious. But the reason I got my blue tick was I showed up to a Twitter launch one day in Sydney and they just gave them out to everyone who was in the room. And I guess technically that meant we were important if we were in the room, but we weren't really. There were some losers in that room, including myself. And the whole system is just so silly. I just, yeah. I think they've backed themselves into a corner somehow by letting the check mark become a status symbol. Because I think you're right. I think they could do a fairly simple verification procedure that just said, hey, you want to prove who you are? Do this. Granted, that maybe that's too much scale with the size of Twitter's audience to do now. I don't know. Maybe that's part of the problem. And maybe they just need prioritization to say like, well, we need to go to the most famous accounts first. But the fact is people do see the check mark as a notability item. And I think Twitter has decided that, well, we can't change that. So we need to adapt our policy to it. But hey, y'all asked for transparency. So here you go. Let's talk about vinyl records, shall we? It's been a minute. Vinyl Superior Art of Fidelity. You know, vinyl nerds will certainly say that archival longevity compared to things like CDs or tape or MP3s. But the classic knock on the medium is it's vinyl. It can't boot an operating system. It's just what it is. That was true until engineer Joseph Bogan turned a turntable to spin a vinyl recording of a 64 kilobyte bootable read-only ram drive containing a modified free DOS kernel. The bootloader reads the disk image from the record through a cassette modem, which is then loaded into memory and then boots the system. Sure, the sound from the record conjures up memories of the worst AOL dial-up sounds. I don't know. I kind of like them myself, but you might have not. But if you need to run DOS like a hipster or a vinyl collector, you call yourself whatever you like. There's finally a solution for you. Yeah, I just prefer the intimacy and the warmth of running my OS on vinyl. Absolutely, absolutely. I love that this was done. There is no reason for this to be done other than it could be done. And in the spirit of having Peter Wells on the show, I'd like to say that Joseph Bogan is no Bogan. Tushesa. I don't even get it. Because Bogan is an Australian slang for an unrefined person, I suppose. I see. Yeah. Like a hoosier or a hick. Like a hoosier. Right. Yeah, a word that we all use quite often. Hey, I've seen the movie. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good movie. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, this is awesome. This is just one of those things. And of course, Wang Wang is, which will be in our show notes if you want to read a little bit more in the article, is great at uncovering stuff like this. Yeah. I mean, and Tim in our Discord points it out. This is the equivalent of a program on cassette. And back in those days, there were programs put out on vinyl records. So this is fantastic. I love it. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Rob wrote in and said, I recently got a recommendation that was awesome. And I both jumped on and started digging into other possibilities. Here's the scene. There's an echo beside my beds. The alarm is set to play my local NPR station every morning, but I set the volume low to two. Because I only occasionally actually get up at that time. Later in the morning, I turn up the volume for my morning routine. Amazon's assistant offered out of the blue and I was taken aback to set the volume to that low level every morning. So I don't get traumatized by Steven's keep at high volume at five in the morning for that first for that first round. I couldn't say yes fast enough. Rob says, turns out they're turning up possibilities. Get it. And I'm sure the accuracy is hit and miss early on, but I hadn't seen it coming. And that's very clever of them. I wonder if I can tell it to do this. I know. Because I have I have an issue with this as well. Eileen, when she cooks, plays Spotify, but it's too loud. And so she turns it down. But then when I go to listen to my flash briefing of the BBC News in the morning, it then is too low and I have to turn it back up, but she doesn't cook all the time. So we don't do it. It doesn't happen often enough for it to catch on. I'd like, I bet I can't. I bet I could just tell it like, Hey, can you do this? My problem is that I listen. So I've got my flash briefing set up to play NPR and then the BBC and it's all sort of part of my, you know, first I hear the weather, my lights go on and then I get some news. The BBC is extremely low volume. So I start with something where I'm like, ah, you know, down, volume down, volume down. And then I'm like, struggling to hear the BBC stuff. But that's all in one thing. So that's probably a separate issue altogether. But Rob, this is interesting. I love it when my assistant who happens to be Amazon most of the time at this point is like, Hey, do you want me to keep doing this? I'm usually like, Yeah, I do. Thank you for asking. Also, I think we discovered if there's anyone working at BBC podcasting out there, your flash briefing needs to be louder. Turn the volume up, please. I want to hear your stuff. I'm throwing stones because we've had the same problem on Daily Tech Headlines. Yeah, no, it's, it's good content. I just want to hear you. Well, if you've got feedback for us, we want to hear you as well. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. We also want to shout out our patrons that are master and grand master levels, including Scott Hepburn, Dale McKayhee and Allyson Jobby. Also big thanks to Peter Wells. Peter, it's so nice to have you on the show. And where can folks keep up with your work? Yeah, follow me on Twitter. It's Peter Wells over there, and I am silly enough to have also started at Daily Tech News Show at the helpdesk.com.au. Very cool. That is brave of you, my friend. Welcome to my world. Go check it out, folks. It's good, the helpdesk.com.au. If you want an ad-free feed of DTNS, support us on Patreon. You get your own personal RSS feed supported directly by you. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. If you can join us live, we'd love to have you. Find out more. Tell a friend, dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. I hope you have enjoyed this program.