 Coming up on DTNS, Apple's opening up its doors again, but what will it mean for the remote workers? Google says Canada's Bill C-10 is worrisome for both creators and users, and the Supreme Court narrows the scope on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May 3rd, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. Most in Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Before the show, we were talking about Justin's new bird, how birds' beaks get to the beautiful shape that they're in, and dogs, cats, and birds sometimes getting along, and sometimes not. You never know what you're gonna get on good day internet if you wanna be part of that wider conversation. Do so by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter launched its subscription plan called Twitter Blue, which provides the ability to undo a just sent tweet and access new themes and bookmarks with additional features coming alongside the US rollout. That's right, it's not available in the US right now. It is available in Canada for $3.49 Canadian a month and Australia for $4.49 Australian and will be released in the United States later this year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp head Will Kathcart confirmed in an interview with WABetaInfo.com that WhatsApp will support multiple devices starting with an upcoming public beta so users can access their accounts from up to four linked devices. New features include view once, which will let users send content that disappears after it's been viewed, and disappearing mode, which will let users turn on disappearing messages across all chat threads. Amazon's camera unit Ring announced in a blog post, it will make requests from public safety agencies such as police and fire departments for users video footage more transparent. Request for material must now be posted publicly in Ring's neighbors app. The request for assistance feature in the neighbors app will roll out starting next week, requiring user approval for requests from verified agency profiles with request history logged online so users can see how their police force is using the posts. The American Heart Association says that devices with Apple's MagSafe technology can cause interference when they're placed near cardiac devices such as pacemakers. The researchers from the AHA say that their findings highlight the importance of public awareness regarding an interaction between cardiac implantable electronic devices, or CID, and a recently released model with magnetic charging capabilities. And Google announced an email to Play Store developers that later this year it will cut off access to advertising IDs that track users who've opted out of receiving personalized ads. After user ops out, developers will simply see a string of zeros in its place. Google has also updated its support page for advertising IDs with the announcement. All right, Justin, sounds like everyone's going back to the office, or at least they are at one company. Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out an email to employees asking them to partially return to their main campus starting on September. Tim Cook said most people will be expected to come in on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at a minimum with the option to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays. Teams that need to work in person will return four to five days a week. Cook said employees can also work remotely for up to two weeks a year to be closer to family and loved ones, find a change of scenery, manage unexpected travel, or a different reason all your own. Though managers need to approve these remote work requests. Wow, so, okay, I think we were all wondering at what point do some of the companies who have been, I don't wanna say they've been very lax about remote work because what choice did really anybody have this time last year? But yeah, for the Googles and the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Apples, and these are large, of course naming companies in Silicon Valley, but companies that made very public. Hey, everyone's gonna be remote and maybe for the foreseeable future when some of that was going to start to reverse course. And I think in Apple's case, it's interesting because just built that beautiful new campus. We've seen it in Apple's remote announcements of various products because they haven't been doing in-person events, but otherwise, yeah, I kinda wondered when was this going to start happening? And I guess the time is now. I mean, I would say for people who work down there that you would wanna go in now before the traffic gets bad. It's actually like a 20 minute drive from the East Bay or San Francisco down to that campus when it will almost certainly be the hour and a half that it normally is eventually. This is a lot of follow the leader, like you pointed out, Sarah. Everybody is going to eventually sort of cascade in these announcements. I wouldn't be shocked if they look a lot like what Apple said, but what I'm more interested in is how he mentioned the floating two week work from home totally idea. Because what I had not considered is some of these companies taking the pattern interruption that COVID was and trying to be a little bit more progressive about overall work agreements. Now, this is the same kind of way that a lot of the tech companies started offering unlimited vacation as opposed to what we had traditionally understood of you getting two weeks a year or five days a year, blah, blah, blah that you would save up over time. And then when you left, you'd either have to use them or you would get the commensurate pay for that amount of money. I think that this to me, the floating two weeks work from home sounds a lot like that. And I'd be curious on whether or not eventually we get back to a five day a week work week with maybe a floating bank where you could always take Fridays off if that's what you wanted to do with it. Or you could save it and say, well, I'm gonna work half the year from somewhere else. Yeah, it seems like this is like the opposite side of the coin of what Microsoft has kind of been hinting at what they're gonna be doing, at least in a lot of like their surveys about the future of hybrid work and stuff like that where it's more of the, okay, you can kind of work from either there are gonna be some days you're gonna be required to come in and actually be in the office. I also wonder if Apple's kind of, I know it's not a unique position, but they're very much still a product company. Services certainly play a large part of it, but physically making products is still the bedrock of their business. And I do think that there is something that you can only do in an office to a certain degree. Obviously they've been able to very successfully continue product development over the past 16 months. But I do wonder if that puts them, puts a little bit more of an emphasis in going back into the office. I mean, because all of these giant tech companies have extensive campuses and real estate holdings and stuff like that, that would incentivize them to theoretically use that. But we're not necessarily seeing a rush to it, not even a rush to it, but a call to it like Apple has just put out. Yeah, I think to the mandatory, okay, let's all rethink how we do our days. Rethink childcare, rethink where you sit at your desk at home because you didn't have an office before. All of those things were done in a rushed way. And so I think this is, I mean, certainly Apple, but a lot of other companies will be watching closely because Apple wouldn't do this unless the company was thinking to itself, okay, we've gotten through a certain period. We're doing okay, but this will make things that much better. And once this does go into effect in September, then there's gonna be another period of time where it's like, okay, is it actually better? We thought it was going to be. Because when I look at this, I'm like, it's kind of a complicated week. It's like, what days am I working from home? What days am I going to the office? Sure, you get on a schedule and maybe that's great. Maybe the flexibility works, but it almost adds in, at least on paper, a layer of complexity that I'm just not sure anyone knows how that's gonna play out just yet. Also, can you imagine if Apple, Facebook, and Google all told everybody that they could work from home on Wednesday, it totally eliminate traffic to the south there? It would be a marvel. Yeah. Well, in a blog post, Google voiced some concerns about negative effects of Canada's Bill C-10 and the impact it may have on creators and also Canadian viewers of videos on YouTube. Bill C-10 would let the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission, or the CRTC, set discoverability requirements for Canadian creators so that a certain amount of Canadian content will appear in users' recommended videos. Google writes, quote, if someone is searching for Canadian content, we will show them Canadian content. But if a student is researching American history or someone is looking for the best way to fix a flat tire, we wanna make sure they have access to the most relevant content for their needs. Google argues that C-10 won't let Canadian see video suggestions based on their personal preferences, but instead what the government decides is Canadian. This is fascinating, and it's something that is not new to do Canadian law in terms of mandating certain amounts of Canadian-made content, right, Roger? This is correct. So the whole idea behind Bill C-10 is to update Canada's Broadcasting Act, which in its formulation was designed to promote Canadian content as part of the regulatory, the CRTC, which is like the FCC here in the US, to mandate certain percentage of Canadian content. For example, broadcast stations currently require at least 60% of the content per year is of Canadian origin, and 50% of programming from 6 p.m. to midnight must be Canadian origin. And so the idea is to broaden out that remit to cover online streaming platforms like YouTube, like Netflix, like your Hulu's. And a lot of the pushback comes back because the opponents of the way that Bill is currently written say that those rules were written when broadcast spectrum was scarce and not available there. Not everyone could start their own TV station. Not everyone could start their own radio station. As opposed to YouTube, which is a platform, anyone can start a channel and they can do whatever kind of content they want. Really, I think the crux of the issue is that the way it is currently written is very broad and gives the CRTC a lot of leeway in deciding what rules apply, what rules don't apply. And so what the opponents are saying is that you just kind of have to take it on good faith that this government agency will do quote unquote the right thing when it comes to this content. And they're worried that if you do put in strict mandatory content rating or quotas, that could potentially, for example, if Netflix needs to have 30% of the content to be Canadian origin, are they gonna expand the amount of Canadian production or are they just gonna shrink the library down so that they meet that weighted measure? And so there's a lot of vagaries and a lot of vagueness to it that they wanna see a little more basically to have something a little more explicit in guarantees of protecting content creators in Canada. So they're not necessarily seen as broadcasters and then subject to those same types of rules. Yeah, I mean, I can absolutely understand why Google's like, well, this is totally gonna screw up our algorithm. We're just trying to give the people what they want, not necessarily the weight it to be Canadian versus the information from everywhere else. And if that is something that YouTube is gonna have to provide in Canada, what does it mean for other areas of the world? And yeah, so I see why both are arguing for what they want. And where I think there's a lot of confusion on this is that initially there was in the bill an exemption for user-generated content which was subsequently taken out. And so the line on this has always been, listen, this is really for impacting large platforms. But again, Roger, getting back to the vagueness of how this will be implemented and getting into the fact that just defining what counts as a Canadian production has this very complicated, there's a point system. Like your director, if you're a Canadian director, you get two points screenwriter, two points. It gets very nitty gritty. And I wonder, even if you're a large YouTube creator, I wonder how they kind of quantify that in a way that can be enforced and useful to users. And ultimately, I mean, a lot of the messaging on this has been kind of been also very incredibly vague. For example, the heritage minister, Steven, oh, I'm gonna mispronounce his name. Steven Cubault, I hope I pronounced it correctly, is basically said in an interview that it would not apply to individual content users unless they reach a certain threshold of subscribers, which can mean like, is it a million? Is it 500,000? Is it three, you know, again, there's a lot of vagueness to it. And a lot of people are like, well, can you just make it a little more explicit? Can you say that, you know, content creators on YouTube or Twitch or TikTok aren't subjected to this. So if I make a super awesome TikTok video that goes viral and I get like 10 million subscribers, suddenly I'm not a broadcaster and subject to these rules. All right, well, Roger and Justin and Sarah, do you like finding free stuff online, but don't wanna sign up as part of a social network to do it? I know I do. Well, Nextdoor just launched a new feature called free finds that might be what you're looking for, sort of. It's a feed of local giveaways and it's available to browse without signing up for a Nextdoor account if you wanna contact a seller about picking upset item, then you do need to go through with the account sign up. You can be able to verify your location. If your cell billing address is the same as your physical address, you can do it by text and it's pretty instantaneous that way. Otherwise you have to go through Nextdoor's mail and system. Odds are your free thing will be gone at that point. Free and buy nothing groups are kind of all over Facebook and other social media groups. And Nextdoor has also seen its own finds marketplace listings up 80% since the start of 2020 with 25% of those listings free items. Kind of an interesting way, I think, to kind of grow their user base kind of with this explosion of, we've seen a face marketplace kind of increasingly popular and kind of leveraging this in the same way. I guess the only reason I think this will work is for people who have heard enough terrible things about other Nextdoor users and they say, I don't wanna be part of that. Just a bunch of people tattling on each other, right? Yeah, Nextdoor, it's for the neighborhood, busy bodies and nosy folks and people not being very neighborly. I am part of my local Nextdoor community. I don't look at it every day, but I'm in there enough. I know in general what's going on and free things or stuff for sale is a big part of that. And I guess if I was like, gosh, I hate Nextdoor, what a crappy place to gossip about my neighbors but I wish I could find some free dining chairs. This would at least give me an entry in. Otherwise it kind of seems like something that Nextdoor already offers. It's pretty simplified. I think the idea is that you have more people that are looking at it by making a free version of it and everybody can complain about Nextdoor until there's a loud noise and you wanna see whether or not somebody saw the transformer explode. There is a reality there that I think this is huge. To be honest, this has been such a gigantic part of our existence personally, moving where we gave away a lot of stuff and now we've kept our eye out on our own new neighborhood to find stuff to fill in the gaps of the new place that I'm kind of surprised that we have not gotten a full on dedicated social network to this aside from the fact that nobody can monetize it because the whole point of it is that you're giving things to each other peer to peer for free. Yeah. The one thing I'll say is this is like, still walled gardens, but Nextdoor is just installing a really big window into one room and I could see them doing the same thing with like events and that kind of stuff which is a huge draw for Facebook, same thing with Facebook Marketplace. I could see them being like, hey, you can view these community events that are happening going on. If you want to RSVP, you need to sign up and get you in. I could see that being an effective way for them to grow their user base. Amazon. One second, one second, Justin. Before you get to that, just wanna remind folks, if you want us to talk about anything in particular, something that's come across your desk, you might let us know by submitting that story to our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Amazon, like I was saying before I totally scrolled past the plug, it's adding a new feature for Halo, it's fitness tracker, an app called Movement that measures how a person moves and areas of improvement. It offers up curated exercises. Users will have to record themselves performing various exercises using the phone's camera. With that information, the Movement app will offer routines based on user-specific problem areas that will improve exercise form and mobility. There are a total of 35 possible corrective exercises and the program was designed by physical therapist and author Dr. Kelly Starrett. Of CrossFit fame, I believe. This is a really interesting kind of direction for Amazon to take for their fitness work, or kind of their fitness ambitions in general, because at least from the Apple perspective, what they're doing with Apple Watch, or with Apple Fitness Plus, right? That is very much kind of in the Peloton realm of, hey, you're gonna have on your TV screen, there's gonna be people in front of you that are doing this exact same thing that you're doing. You're part of this group that you're all doing this and it's all great and you're getting positive feedback to keep going, keep exercising. And that kind of takes away from the weirdness that you're sitting in front of your Apple TV or your iPad and your living room and doing this by yourself. This is very much in the more personalized healthcare situation, we've seen that taking off a little bit more kind of in the medical field, the kind of personalized healthcare. And Amazon is, I think, is banking on that. I wonder though if, hey, set up your phone and do these stretching exercises by yourself and we're gonna tell you when you do them wrong, certainly useful. I don't know if that's the feeling that people want when they do this now. I haven't used it, so I don't know, maybe there is like a positive reinforcement dynamic that kind of mitigates this. That would be just like, that was just my first thought, like kind of looking at this. Well, as far as I understand it, and I don't have a halo fitness tracker, but Amazon is definitely going with the, we wanna give you data and stats that make sense to you. What's your body mass index? Well, what if we say it a different way so it makes more sense to you, whether your goals or weight loss or improved mobility or strength or your shoulders have better range of motion, all of that stuff. So when you, I think about this all the time because I do a lot of fitness wearing my Oculus Quest. It's like VR working out. And a lot of the time, I kind of look at my Fitbit, which is the fitness tracker that I use after I'm done with the workout. And I go like, okay, I burned 350 calories. That sounds pretty good. But I mean, what if I was squatting improperly the whole time and doing incremental damage to my back every time? And there's a way to have known that ahead of time where I can make adjustments. I'm not saying that Amazon has cracked the code on this. I mean, it's obviously not the same thing as going to a physical therapist. But that kind of data, I think for a lot of people, especially people who are saying, well, I don't really feel good or something kind of hurts or I'm not seeing the results that I was expecting, being able to adjust the way that you're trying to do something correctly can be really helpful. Absolutely. And I think that this is a whole different version of kind of fitness. The idea, there used to be this kiosk at the gym that I was at that would have you do what I presume to be similar ideas here. 10 squats, 10 jumping jacks, stuff like that. It would then map out kind of the joint positions and point out that, okay, you are leaning too much on this side or you are doing things improperly. And so I presume that the next step there would they would try to sell me some plan where I would go forward and correct these things. That's where I think you get the feedback is you do the exercises and then you get your diagnosis. You then get what is essentially, I don't want to say physical therapy, but some sort of set of exercises that would help to correct that. And then you do the 10 jumping jacks again and you're like, oh, wow, look at this. Amazingly better form even if it's incremental. So I think it's an interesting idea and something that gets us a little bit more coherent in our quantifiable self-revolution where we have nothing but information and not a whole lot else to show for it. The US Supreme Court has slashed the scope of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in a six to three decision handed down Thursday. This means federal prosecutors can no longer use this law to charge people who misused databases that they are otherwise entitled to access. Now the central case involved Nathan Van Buren, a police officer in Georgia who searched a license plate database for an acquaintance in exchange for cash and whether he violated US hacking laws by doing so. Van Buren was originally prosecuted on two counts. The first, the first which was thrown out was for accepting money for accessing the database as a serving police officer. The second was for violating the CFAA which was upheld until now. And the legal question wasn't whether or not he had broken the rules, he had broken the rules, but whether or not he had exceeded his authorized access by obtaining the data. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in the majority ruling, quote, the government's interpretation of the statute would attach criminal penalties to a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity. If the exceeds authorized access clause criminalizes every violation of a computer use policy, then millions of otherwise law abiding citizens are criminals. So this was something that civil libertarians had long contended was overreach by the government. It was additional prosecution and often a possible jail time were fines on top of what would be other crimes because you could put this on top of it and then that would give more leeway to prosecutors to do all sorts of prosecutorial things. What's interesting here is the coalition, the 6-3 came from all the liberal justices and all three justices that were appointed by Donald Trump. The three came from the other side of the conservative side of the bench that had not recently been put on. But it does bear at least maybe some sign of optimism that a more coherent view of some of these older laws, specifically as it comes to computer issues might be looked at with maybe little younger eyes, maybe people that have set up their own email accounts. Well, and the thing to keep in mind is also that like accessing these databases that you're authorized to use for unintended or for unauthorized uses or whatever the particulars in this case may be, this may be against the terms of your employment. This may be against the terms of service of that workstation. So you could still lose your job. You could, it's just that you cannot, at least under this ruling be brought up under, this says the president, you can't be brought up under federal charges under the CFAA. Right? Exactly, yeah. That's really what, this is about defining the scope of this law and therefore making it more potent and not something where, in 1986, the concept of this many databases was something really not foreseen by the creators of the law and obviously was kind of used to overstretch their bounds by the prosecutors who were using it. All right, well, hey, we got some cool space news because NASA's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced Thursday the agency will spend $1 billion to send two new robotic missions to Venus by decades end. NASA's first visit to the planet since the early 90s. The DaVinci Plus mission, that stands for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging Plus, very catchy and obvious, will measure noble gases to store out the planet's origins and sniff for sulfur and carbon near the surface for evidence of recent volcanic activity. Meanwhile, the Veritas mission, Venus emissivity, radio science, INSAR, topography, and spectroscopy. Spectroscopy. Yes, we'll use synthetic aperture radar to look through Venus' clouds and recreate its topography, revealing whether volcanoes or variants of tectonic plates are active on its surface. Venus a notoriously inhospitable planet for kind of exploration. So using some cool tech and gonna be gonna be getting some more information on that kind of moody planet. And also when it comes to Venus versus drones, Venus has a winning record. So let's not get too excited about whether or not these are going to, like just don't expect Mars level information and excitement from either of these drones. Venus is way better at playing defense against drones. But think of all that hot, hot water, Justin. You gotta get there and figure it out. It's gonna be great. Yeah, I, you know, when I first saw the story, I was like, oh, that's cool. We've done that before? Yeah, in the 1990s, in fact. It's been a while though. So hopefully we'll learn a lot more about tectonic plates on that hot planet. They don't last long. So it'll be a flash in the pan. Yeah, well, you know, it's, you know, best of luck robots. Rich, did we get an email today? Yes, we did. Maravina sent us an email and said, quick question about the Amazon mesh network. If you have multiple devices, do you have to opt out of all devices or is it an account-wide opt out? Love the show. Take care. Maravina, that's a good question. We were talking about this with Allison Sheridan the other day. It was funny cause Allison was like, I don't even have this option when I look at my Amazon account. Hopefully she has it since then. I was able to, well, I had the option to opt out. I actually did not opt out. I'm okay with the sidewalk network at this point. But yes, good news, Maravina. It is attached to your account. So if you have multiple Amazon accounts that are using for multiple devices, you would have to do it by account. But no, it's a blanket opt out. So that's good news. If you have questions or comments or anything that we talk about on the show, you can send all of those emails. And we hope you do early and often because we love your feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Norm Physicus, Chris Allen, and Mark Gibson. And we'd also like to send an extra special thanks of virtual cupcake to John and Becky Johnston, who are some of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support John and Becky. Yes, thank you. And thank you to Justin, Robert Young, for being on the show today. Justin, you're all over the cyberspace, only accessing lawful databases in authorized ways. Where can people find more of your great stuff if they are so inclined? PoliticsPoliticsPolitics.com or PX3 Podcast, if that's a little easier to remember. We have a great interview with the brand new host of Cheddar's primetime political show, None of the Above, JD Durkin, a friend of the show, joins us to talk about his new program and the latest on infrastructure. Excellent, we're on this show Monday through Friday. In fact, we'll be live at 0.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnusho.com slash live. And guess what? We're back at it tomorrow. We'll have paneling news on the show with blood for all, Ted. Do you mean some drawing, Dr. Lennon? This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.