 Mike Farrell has supported independent tech news directly for just about one day. Want to be like Mike? Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 20th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From the shores of Lake Merritt. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. It does make me wish I lived on Lake Young. It would be nice. Yeah, nice symmetry. Yeah. We are going to talk about how children are growing horns in the back of their head, and it's a cell phone's fault. That's a legitimate interpretation of a headline from a news story that we were plaguing. Already rising. Let's start. However, with a few techniques you should know. Apple issued a voluntary recall of its 15-inch Retina MacBook pro batteries due to potential overheating and safety risks for models sold between September of 2015 and February of 2017. Users who may qualify for replacement can enter their serial number at a page that Apple has set up or locally through their OS 10 Finder. Apple estimates the repairs may take one to two weeks to process and then send back. IKEA confirmed that it is testing a home food delivery service in Paris, including salads, salmon, beets, and cabbage to residents from a centrally located store. If successful, IKEA plans to bring the program to Spain and other European markets. IKEA didn't say if the food was delivered, if it was ready to eat or frozen items for later. With its existing in-store food service, IKEA claims to be the world's sixth largest food chain. Toast some lingonberry juice. Pour them on my meatballs, please. I like flat food. Apple said in an online filing Thursday that a possible extension of tariffs on goods from China would reduce Apple's competitiveness and reduce the contribution it could make to the US Treasury. Reuters notes that Apple is now the largest US corporate taxpayer to the US Treasury. They passed up Exxon and Mobile a while back. The filing was part of hearings for US manufacturers on the proposed tariff extension. Dell, HP, Walmart, Keurig, Dr. Pepper Dollar Tree also made filings objecting to the tariffs. The UK's age check rules meant to stop people under the age of 18 from seeing pornographic content were supposed to go into effect in April. They were then delayed to July 15th, but they've now been delayed again. The UK culture secretary Jeremy Wright says that the UK failed to inform the European Union about certain aspects of these rules. The notification process could take up to six months from this point. The UK was due to leave the European Union March 29th, but that has also been delayed twice and now has a deadline of October 31st. The good news is they're at least down to four possible replacements to eventually then debate another thing. Anyway. I think it's down to two now. They just had another one. Sorry, I didn't catch the latest update. It's Hun Johnson, Hun Johnson. Fair fisted it. I DVR'd the last episode, so I have to be eliminated. Spoiler. Business Insider and Computer World, both report Google has thought production of two unreleased tablet devices and will focus future products not on laptop form factor. Chrome OS will continue to support tablets, including the Pixel Slate. It's just that Google won't be making tablets itself anymore. Well, okay then, I guess that's fine. All right, let's talk a little bit about another controversy surrounding Google, probably more of a controversy. Tell us about it, Justin. Google has fixed an issue with its Nest cameras that failed to connect to wink access to Nest cams when the cameras were deregistered from Nest. A user in the wink Facebook group discovered that they could still access their old Nest cams through wink, even though they'd sold them and deregistered them. Wirecutter then verified the issue with a Nest cam indoor. Wink was part of the works with Nest system, which Google plans to discontinue. Yeah, so this does not seem to be malicious in any way. It sounds like Google in the complex situation where they're winding down works with Nest, dropped the ball and missed the fact that when you deregistered, they weren't deregistering one of the third party connections. So if you don't understand what's going on, you buy a Nest cam, you set it up, and you say, oh, my wink stuff is part of works with Nest. Let me use my wink system to be able to access the camera because I use all this wink stuff and works with Nest allowed you to do that. Then you say, you know, I'm gonna sell this Nest cam. I deregister it from Nest and assume, now that I've deregistered it, that that severed all connections. But what people found out was it didn't sever the wink connection. And so after you sold it, you could go into wink and still see the camera that was set up by the new person who used it. Yeah. Okay, considering that the company is like, hey, sorry, we'll fix this, we didn't realize what's going on, does anyone think that there was anything else going on? No, I really don't. It was a mistake. It was probably a coding error. If I had to guess, they were going through and changing things to wind down works with Nest, which they plan to do in August and left some bracket unended or something that let this happen. This is kind of a modern problem though, right? That you need to make sure that it's, we are buying more and more use tech because more and more we are buying stuff. We are buying gadgets. We are then looking to recoup whatever money we can if we get a new gadget or don't think that it's for our life. So this is very interesting that these things happen. I wasn't able to see this in the Verge article that we linked for this but was anything fixed if you just factory reset it? Is that maybe just a general thing that you should absolutely do whenever you buy any kind of old tech? I don't think so. I think it was Wink looking for a hard-coded IP address. Okay. I could be wrong about that. And or there isn't a way to factory reset a Nest cam which I also don't know. If anybody knows, send it feedback at dailytechnewshow.com but to your point, every internet of things device should have a factory reset that just wipes out everything and says whatever this was connected to before won't be able to find it now. The problem is that's complicated and more costly to maintain. Yeah. And I guess IoT devices just aren't on the same level of a laptop or a computer or a cell phone or something like that where it's more common that these things are being sold to the aftermarket. It's all right. If you don't like your Nest cam, then I don't know. Throw it in the trash, buy a new one. But yeah, you should be able to just factory reset, wipe all settings on anything you're selling and not have to worry about it after that. 100%. Yeah. In the case, then I don't know. That is bad. Slack opened as a public company under the ticker symbol WORK work at $35.50 on the New York Stock Exchange which is up more than 50% from its $26 reference price on its first day of trading, valuing the company at more than $20 billion. Good day for Slack. However, because Slack pursued a direct listing rather than an IPO, the reference price isn't really what the stock started trading at and also doesn't determine the company's public valuation. Rather, it represents the volume that weighted average prices the stock has traded at on private markets. A direct listing means that existing investors are allowed to sell their existing shares on the exchange with no new shares created. Also means that the company doesn't raise additional capital from selling new shares to pre-approved new investors in an IPO. Yeah, so the usual thing is I wanna put my stock out. I wanna make a bunch of money on the issuance. So I gather a bunch of investors together that are brought to me through some banks and I privately agree to sell to them first at a particular price. That's usually called the strike price. But a direct listing means nobody gets in on it. Everybody who's invested privately in the company up to now will be able to sell their stock if they want to at whatever price the market wants. So that reference price is just a guess, basically. Well, and very publicly also, Spotify did this earlier this year, or was it actually 2018? I can't actually remember when Spotify went public at this point, but there were a lot of headlines of sort of like, Slack is doing something very unusual. It's been done before. Yeah, it's still unusual. It's not, it's becoming more common than it used to, but it's still pretty rare because you don't get the money out of it. Hey, thanks to Russell, by the way, for sending us a picture of the big Slack first day at the New York Stock Exchange. Appreciate that. Thanks, Russell. A couple of developments in autonomous cars of interest. Waymo, Renault and Nissan have partnered to research how commercial autonomous vehicles would work for passengers in cargo, like packages in Japan and France. Fiat Chrysler recently pulled out of an alliance with Renault and Nissan and partnered with a car startup called Aurora. They left Renault Nissan, Renault Nissan is now with Waymo, Fiat Chrysler is now with Aurora, which VW just left. They got out of a deal with Aurora. Now they have hooked up with Ford-backed Argo AI, or at least they're in negotiations anyway. And over in California, Chinese companies AutoX and Pony AI have become the third and second operations to receive a permit to test autonomous car services that carry passengers. A lot of testing going on without passengers there, but only one company called Zoex was testing with passengers in California, at least up till now, now there's three. Waymo has a similar permit in Arizona. So lots of alliances being made, lots of testing going on and as we slowly roll forward with autonomous vehicle. Geez, this is like catching up with people's relationships at a high school reunion. Stevie isn't busy with Megan anymore, but Megan's now with Jake and Jake left Susie, but Susie wound up remarrying. Look, I think that this is, where would you say in terms of these partnerships that you compared to where you thought the autonomous car movement would be three years ago, where do you think that it is now? I think it's pretty close to where I thought, which is testing with passengers, but no real services. Yeah, Waymo has something you can pay for, but it's really restricted. It's a test group, all of that, it's very limited. California, I'm actually surprised that they have three that can carry passengers at this point. It is interesting that they're not any of the big names though. None of those are willing to risk this to get the permit, but California will issue a permit under certain situations. So I don't think we're far off and I think we're still a ways off from any of us being able to use this regularly. Yeah, I agree. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Minnesota have developed a technique to control a robot arm with a human mind without surgery or otherwise invasive procedures that have been necessary as of late. The robot can track a computer cursor as it moves across the screen, which could help people with paralysis or other disorders. Brain computer interface or BCIs, it's known, used to depend on systems that incorporate brain implants, which is expensive and also long-term impact was not widely understood. The research team plans to start clinical trials on this new procedure soon. Yeah, big step, being able to just hook something up to the outside because that's easier and less invasive, less risky and all of that and brings us to this kind of thing becoming just a normal situation. It was pretty impressive to see that robot arm being controlled by someone just tracking a cursor moving on the screen. I know that doesn't seem eminently practical, but that is a hard thing to be able to do. All right, question then. What will happen first? A commercially available BCI-controlled robot arm or either through a ride-sharing service or purchase riding in an autonomous car without a human at the wheel the way that they have it now? BCI, hands down. Commercially available through at a high cost with insurance in a medical situation, yep, totally gonna happen before we can just hop in an autonomous car that has no safety driver behind it. I would bet that too. I mean, I think that would probably be the safe bet just because it doesn't have to go, it has to go through a different level of federal oversight or governmental oversight, but in general, if it's not invasive and you don't have to have surgery for it, then it's gonna have a lower hurdle to clear then here. Put on this computer-guided missile onto the streets of our city or state. I also wonder, I mean, the BCI technology is, everything we're hearing about is like, it is really moving in a great direction for accessibility, people who need this. And we often talk about on the show like, well, okay, could I just have a robot arm that's like better than my current arm? I wonder how much people will try to leverage the technology for ways that will make them feel, I don't know, superhuman or bionic. Yeah, it's an interesting thought. It strikes me that we're all a little blasé about mind-controlled robot arm. We're like, oh yeah, someone would think that'll hit the market. Has it helped me? And I know this is good for people who actually need it, but can I use it too? Because I just know it'd be kind of cool. That is the world we're living in now. And that will become an ethical situation. I think you're absolutely right, Sarah, that a company will easily get approval to sell this to somebody who is missing an arm or paralyzed, will they be allowed to sell it to you and I just for kicks? Biocat thinks it'll become a toy. And I could see, we've had some kind of generalized mind-oriented games. The technology could certainly be used in other situations. I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Yeah, I'm waiting for version two. I don't wanna pay for the privilege of being able to play that there. Scientists at the University of Washington published in The Nature journal, Digital Medicine, that they have developed software for a smart speaker or a smart phone that can listen for sounds of a heart attack and alert people, or if there aren't any other people around, call emergency services. The software was trained on sounds from 162 actual 911 calls gathered between 2009 and 2017. And then captured, so they got those sounds from emergency services of a person having what's called agonal breathing, which is indicative of a heart attack. They recorded those sounds onto other devices like an Amazon Echo, an iPhone 5S, a Samsung Galaxy S4, then played those sounds from varying distances and included interfering sounds. Of cars going by and dogs barking, cats meowing. They also trained the software on 83 hours of normal sleep sounds. So they wanted it to learn like this is snoring, this is sleep apnea, this is agonal breathing. The software was able to detect agonal breathing 97% of the time from up to six meters away. It incorrectly identified something as agonal breathing 0.14% of the time, which is pretty good, but they wanted it to be never making a mistake. So they required two successful detections 10 seconds apart and that dropped the rate of false positives to indistinguishable from zero. The team now wants to use 911 calls from outside the Seattle area to train up the software, improve the accuracy and ensure generalization across a larger population. You know, as somebody who has never had a heart attack, thank God, you know, everybody knock on wood here. I don't totally know what that feels like, but I do know in several instances, people thinking that they had one when they were actually having a panic attack, an anxiety attack, something that was, it felt very scary, but it was not a heart attack. And if they had had the measures for something to say, okay, what you're experiencing is not insignificant, but it's not a heart attack, that would be really helpful. Yeah, I have had those kinds of anxiety attacks more than once. And one of the things you have to do to cognitively guide yourself through them is reassure yourself you're not having a heart attack, that it's just an anxiety attack and you need to ride it out. It would be certainly helpful to be able to ask a voice assistant that you trusted, hey, do you think I'm having a heart attack and have it go, nope, you're fine? Or, yeah, you know what? Maybe you should call 911. Sure, yeah, because in those moments, I mean, there's so much anxiety involved. It's like, you're not necessarily thinking clearly. It's really helpful. And this has meant more for people who are asleep, maybe in a nursing home or a hospital situation, nurses and around to be able to detect it faster, because the faster they're able to apply CPR to someone with a heart attack, the better the survival rate. This is obviously a tech done good story and also sort of a sign of like, hey, always on microphones, sometimes can be at our benefit. Having a device that is always interconnected is to our benefit. It's just a tool like anything else. And although we can certainly black mirror ourselves into plenty of awful situations, we can also prevent things that would have otherwise been fatal. And as long as you get to choose what it's listening for and what it's doing with that information, it can do a lot of good, certainly. Hey, folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, you've been waiting for us to talk about kids growing horns. Well, let me tell you a story. In February, 2018, so a little more than a year ago, David Shahar and Mark G.L. Sayers of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia published a paper in Nature's Scientific Reports Journal called Prominent Exostosis Projecting from the Occipital Squamuff More Substantial and Prevalent in Young Adult Than Older Age Groups. As you may have guessed, it didn't get a lot of press at the time. An exostosis is a bone spur. Ever had a bone spur? It's a bump, right? And so what they were saying was, hey, kind of big-ish bumps on the back of a skull seem to be more prominent in young adults. The paper described an odd finding of the bone spurs on the back of the skull at a higher rate in young adults. And notice that the bone spurs were actually smaller when they did show up in older people. The bumps on the back of the skull are not unusual the older you get, but it was very unusual to see them in young people at all. The paper hypothesized that the occurrence could be linked to bad posture and thought the higher occurrence of bad posture in young people could be because of the continuous use of handheld devices. Surfing the web, sending texts, et cetera, et cetera. Fast forward to last week, June 13th, and BBC Future ran an article on how modern life is transforming the human skeleton. Now, the article introduced the concept that bones change with usage. They mentioned our jaws getting smaller over time, German youths having narrower elbows and bumps on the back of the skull. The article says it's rare for these to themselves to cause a problem, though the amount of hunching that causes these bone spurs might cause other issues. So in other words, the bone spur itself is not a problem, but all that hunching over could be causing other problems. So if you see the bone spur, it's indicative of bad posture and you might wanna look around for other issues. But the bone spur itself is not an issue. Now, take that, let it percolate for a week and go viral on Australian social media. And voila, June 19th, news.co.au has the story under the headline, younger generations are growing horns in the back of their head. Oh my gosh, this is an outrage. And it's because of cell phones. It's because of cell phones. I'm sure it's the radiation in the cell phones. They're growing horns. They're communing with the dark lord. They're hiding their horns that they're growing because of this dark pack that they've made based on the cell phones they're carrying. Dear listeners of the Daily Tech News show, I do not have a hat with me, but please, if you do, I encourage you to take it off your head and throw it on the ground because there has been a hat trick of very, very, very stupid things. A headline like this makes us objectively dumber on health, science, and technology. It is the opposite of what any kind of news should be and specifically what any kind of headline should be. If you want an example of how we can be misled by good science, it can be distorted for the fact that it's going to go viral and everybody's going to assign their own little culture war elements to it, then this is an example. All right, okay. All right, so Justin, if I continue wearing my tinfoil hat and I say, all right, well, you know, bone spurs in the brains of children scares me. What does this mean? Does this actually have, you know, does it give us a sense of what might be a long-term effect of kids at a young age kind of hunching over, looking at a screen too long, then, you know, I might have something to stand on. And I'm sure that if we looked at the different ways that people reacted when they were sitting in cars and not riding horses or when they were migrating versus living in cities, that we would probably have different elements generationally in our skeletons. It is an amazing feat of science that we can understand our bodies to the point in which we can point out these little changes. And yes, is there, is it interesting to say we have worse posture now that various different things? I don't think just cell phones, but also the various ways that we conduct ourselves because of our modern society has led to us to have less of a rigid posture. Sure, it's interesting. It's a good topic to talk about. What doesn't bring us any closer to any kind of illumination or moving forward is that there are horns being grown in the back of the head of our youth because of cell phones. Well, and the problem is, is that, you know, you hear like bones growing abnormally in the brain, that's bad. They're not in the brain. Skull, skull, skull. Does it have skull. Okay, fine. Okay. And you know, around the brain, near the brain, people are gonna be like, is my kid gonna become a monster? There is no evidence to support or deny that. It's, and that's the thing. This is a perfectly natural process. It happens to people normally because posture changes. And as I have mentioned once and was mentioned in the BBC article, there is no actual danger from it itself. It's just an indication like, hey, this person's posture wasn't so good. Having bad posture can cause other issues. And if you see that bump, you might be like, oh yeah, they have that bump. Maybe their posture's bad. Let's check and see if there's any of these other health side effects of bad posture that existed. And so yeah, if the takeaway from this article is, hey, all of this hunching over on cell phones could cause posture related issues, let's help educate people, which is actually what the original scientists from the university said, like, hey, let's help educate people that hunching over all the time, not a good idea. I'm 100% behind that. Your kids are growing horns because of cell phones, not helping, not helping. To your point, Sarah, if somebody is worried that their kids are becoming monsters, well, if you are spreading this story and making some hot take on top of it, then yes, they will be becoming monsters, but you're raising them. The monsters were with us the whole time. Touche, yeah, I mean, and for anybody who's not familiar with bone spurs, very common in feet, and extremely common and not really an invasive surgical procedure, you know? This has been happening in people's bodies for as long as I've been alive, that's for sure. So this whole thing, it sounds very scary, but it's not really, it's not uncommon. And look, this is not me saying that there's not an issue with screen time. There are many, many, many parties in terms of youth and their access to do tablets and televisions. Please refer to that, but my big issue here is just growing horns in the back of the head. If you don't think that this was a headline specifically crafted because of the theological implications of the term horns, because of the tech fears of, oh, these cell phones are rotting a generation of children, then you are kidding yourself. This is why it went viral because of a misleading, stupid headline that makes us all dumber. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. Also, can I just say for the record, what is wrong with horns? More kids with horns, kinda cool. I actually didn't, I didn't actually, I did not associate it with any sort of evil or malignant force. I just thought it was a very interesting, I think the headline is super click baity, but it was- Wait, guys, nobody's concerned about the narrowing elbows among German youth. Actually, actually I am. I'd like to know more about that. Turns out, Courtney, if you read the BBC article, it's because they're not walking enough. Not enough walking. And the elbows, the elbows somehow, I'm back to that. Because you're not swinging the elbow, it's not, the body just doesn't deposit as much to that bone because it doesn't need to keep it as strong. Nordic tracks for everyone in Germany. German youth, keep walking. You got, we need elbows. They are very important. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, also very important. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook. Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. Let's squeeze in a look at the mailbag. Lance Dewitt, Bill from Chicago. He says he's a father of a 17th month old and thought that our YouTube kids story was interesting and said, mostly it works for him. Bill says, I wish there were more tools in the app. There's an auto off timer. You can set the content filter by age and for each child's profile. And you can even filter it to only show videos or channels that you approved. I wish you had a language filter. Bill goes on to say, my kid, we'll see one video of a kid's song in English. The next video is the same, but Spanish or Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Portuguese. There's a lot. The algorithm for him seems to keep the same 10 or so channels circulating, which is good because I know that they're safe and educational. I'm also acting as a curator, looking for good channels or regular YouTube and then playing those for him. I would gladly pay for a curated list. And I think that Google has the potential to make a lot of money as parents are busy. I would rather use a Netflix or Nick Jr. type app that they can set and forget. I know I'll be getting Disney streaming service for this reason alone. Well, there you go. Thank you, Bill, for the perspective. Appreciate that. Absolutely. And thank you to Justin, Robert Young for being with us. Justin, where can people keep up with your work? Well, folks, if you were in the San Francisco Bay Area, then I encourage you to come on out to my live show that is going to be June 29th and not this Saturday, but next Saturday at the Historic Piano Fight Theater. It is during Pride weekend. It's a great weekend to be out in San Francisco. The parade is the next day. So come on out and see me. I'm going to be making fun of all the debates that happened the previous week in Miami, as well as going over some hilarious debate moments in political history before. It's called Can I Finish? And you can get your tickets right now, bit.ly slash PX number three, June again, bit.ly slash PX number three, June Saturday, June 29th at 7 p.m. I know Justin Robert Young. I've worked with Justin Robert Young. If you don't go to this, you're not seeing Justin Robert Young. Look, there's three reasons to come see the show. It's going to be really funny. It's going to be really informative, you know. Oops. What's the third one? That's the, that's the joke. Hey folks, we are paid for, everything we say is bought and paid for by you, you the patron. If you're not a patron, then you don't get to tell us what to say. So become a patron at Patreon.com. It's as simple as that. Leverage your voice, please. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. That's a great way to get ahold of us. Also, we're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more until a friend dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Allison Sheridan back on the show. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Frog Man Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.