DTNS WEEKLY TECH UPDATE 05/17/2018

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Alternatom and his do gooder twin Tom are enjoying the opposite season in Australia this week so it’ll be me, Roger, and my pithy observations. 

ROGER’S OBSERVATIONS OF THE WEEK

Google’s Duplex was supposed to be the next thing in real-world AI application. Now critics are worried that the system can be used to eavesdrop on people and worse yet rumors circulate that the Duplex demo at I/O was in fact staged. If Google wants to remain in the good graces of the public they might need a little less show and a little more go (work everything out first) in their products. 

Wi-Fi Alliance new Wireless mesh standard so multiple brands of routers can interoperate if they conform to the standard. All I have to say is what took so long? 

PGP and S/MIME vulnerability known as “Efail” discovered by a professor of computer security. Everything has a flaw so be sure you always have more than solution to particular usage scenario. 

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon can provide your real-time location info to third-parties. So not surprised. Its why I turn off location tracking on my Galaxy S6 and if unless i need to Google Maps myself somewhere. Oh wait it uses cell towers to triangulate my position? So yeah keep your phone off or on airplane until you need it.

NEWS

Google Duplex impressed many people both positively and negatively with its ability to mimic human speech patterns in phone calls with a restaurant and hair salon. Thursday Google clarified that the company is "designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we'll make sure the system is appropriately identified." Initially, The Verge said that a Google rep told them Duplex would not be available in states where the law requires all parties of a conversation to be aware they are being recorded. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/11/17340894/google-duplex-all-party-consent-state-eavesdropping 

Steam released its VR hardware survey numbers for April. Oculus Rift is number one, though dropping from 50.62% to 49.33% of usage. The Vive rose from 44.06% to 45.14%. Windows Mixed Reality dropped from 5.32% to 5.04%. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ 

The US Court of appeals for the 4th circuit ruled Wednesday that forensic searches of electronics devices by border agents without suspicion of a crime are unconstitutional. This is the first federal appellate case since the Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that certain border device searches require suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal wrongdoing. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/fourth-circuit-rules-suspicionless-forensic-searches-electronic-devices-border-are 

TiVo’s DVRs are getting Alexa support. The assistant will be able to change the channel, skip commercials, jump back or forward, and launch apps like Netflix. Last year Dish became the first U.S. pay TV provider to integrate with Amazon's assistant, and DirecTV and Verizon have integration as well. https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/tivo-adds-alexa-voice-control-to-its-dvrs/ 

Wi-Fi Alliance is introducing a new Wireless standard called Wi-Fi Certified EasyMesh allowing customers use different brand routers that conform to the standard in a Mesh Network instead of buying an entire system from one vendor as the situation is now. EasyMesh will also be future compatible meaning routers that currently support EasyMesh will work with future EasyMesh compatible routers. To support the standard routers will need at least 802.11n capable. https://gizmodo.com/the-wi-fi-alliance-wants-to-make-building-a-mesh-networ-1826008588 

PGP and S/MIME, both email encryption tools—are vulnerable to hacks that can reveal the plaintext of encrypted messages. Sebastian Schinzel, a professor of computer security at Münster University of Applied Sciences wrote on Twitter Sunday that there are no reliable fixes and says anyone who uses either encryption standard should disable them when sending sensitive information. Both Schinzel and a blog post by the Electronic Frontier Foundation referred those affected to instructions for disabling plugins in Thunderbird, macOS Mail, and Outlook. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/critical-pgp-and-smime-bugs-can-reveal-encrypted-e-mails-uninstall-now/?comments=1 

Google announced new consumer storage plans under a new name Google One, including a new $2.99/month tier for 200 GB of storage. The 2 TB plan drops from $19.99/month to $9.99/month. Users can also share thier storage quota with up to five family members and get 24x7 access to Google Experts, The existing free quota of 15 GB wiill remain an option as well. The rollout starts in the US over the next few months. https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/say-hello-to-google-one/ 

Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab plans to open a data center in Switzerland by the end of 2019 to alleviate Western government concerns that Russian intelligence uses its anti-virus software to spy on customers. The facility would be based in Zurich, and Kaspersky says it chose Switzerland for its "policy of neutrality" and strong data protection laws. Reuters first reported the impending move back in March. Last year the US lordered civilian government agencies to remove Kaspersky software from their networks, although Kaspersky has denied accusations and filed a lawsuit against the U.S. ban. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/15/kaspersky-lab-to-open-swiss-data-center-to-combat-spying-allegations.html 

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon can provide your real-time location info to third-parties. The story starts with Securus, is a service that allows police officers to facilitate calls made to inmates, but also pinpoint the location of a cell phone. Securus gets this location info from the carrier, but appears to use a middle-man called "LocationSmart." which can pinpoint real-time location in about 15 seconds. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act prevents carriers from sharing user location to the United States government, but there aren't any restrictions in place on other companies. The FCC's been asked to investigate the matter by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. https://www.androidcentral.com/all-major-us-carriers-give-your-real-time-location-info-third-parties 

A Guardian investigation in conjunction with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation reports that Facebook allows advertisers to target users it thinks are interested in subjects such as sexual preference, Islam, or liberalism, although religion, sexuality and political beliefs explicitly are marked as sensitive information under new data protection laws ,and with GDPR going into effect on 25 May, sensitive categories will require special conditions around how they can be collected and processed. Those include “preventive or occupational medicine”, “to protect the vital interests of the data subject”, or “the data subject has given explicit consent to the processing of those personal data for one or more specified purposes”. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/16/facebook-lets-advertisers-target-users-based-on-sensitive-interests 

Apple wants about $1 billion from Samsung in damages from a long-running patent-infringement dispute where Samsung was already found to have infringed on 3 of Apple’s smartphone design patents and 2 utility patents. In a retrial to determine what Samsung actually owes Apple, Samsung asked jurors to limit the amount to $28 million. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-15/apple-wants-1-billion-from-samsung-at-smartphone-retrial?cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-tech 

Whole Foods launched a loyalty program that offers special discounts to Amazon Prime customers, including 10% off hundreds of sale items and rotating weekly specials Those discounts are available now in Florida and will roll out to all other stores starting this summer. Amazon previously announced free two-hour delivery from Whole Foods stores for Prime members. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-whole-foods/amazon-cuts-whole-foods-prices-for-prime-members-in-new-grocery-showdown-idUSKCN1IH0BM 

The US Senate voted Wednesday to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, by approving a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would reverse the FCC's vote to deregulate the broadband industry back in December. If the CRA is approved by the House and signed by President Trump, ISPs would have to comply,. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has scheduled his repeal to take effect on June 11 if Congress doesn't act. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/senate-votes-to-overturn-ajit-pais-net-neutrality-repeal/

YouTube is splitting up YouTube Red into two services and renaming everything. Recode repprts YouTube wil launch a revamped music service next Tuesday called... YouTube Music. It'll cost $10 a month after a trial period, same price as before to strip out ads, download music for offline listening, and play music in the background... but YouTube will now charge $2 more to watch original content previously on YouTube Red, and that will be called YouTube Premium Existing YouTube Red subscribers will stay at the $10/month tier. YouTube Music will also replace Google Play Music, eventually. https://www.recode.net/2018/5/16/17363334/youtube-music-launches-youtube-red-youtube-premium-extra-charge-cobra-kai 

Intel’s long delayed 10nm processor design will ship this year in the Lenovo Ideapad 330 according to Computerbase.de on the Chinese e-commerce site JD.com. Originally planned for 2015 the “Core i3-8121U” processor is based on the Cannon Lake architecture, and offers two cores and four threads at 2.2 to 3.2 GHz, 4 megabytes of smart cache, supports up to 32 gigabytes of low power DDR4 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 41.6 Gigabytes per second. No mention of integrated graphics is made and the Lenovo Ideapad 330 will come with an AMD RX540 GPU. https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-details-first-10nm-cannon-lake-chip-coming-first-to-lenovo-ideapad-330/ 

Google's AI-powered voice assistant Duplex that the company showed off at I/O, is raising a few quesitons. Namely, was the live demo which demonstrated Duplex calling a business to schedule an appointment really a live demo, or something pre-recorded or otherwise staged? Axios asked Google for the business name used in the demo which was not disclosed at the time, and Google spokesperson declined. https://www.axios.com/google-ai-demo-questions-9a57afad-9854-41da-b6e2-5e55b619283e.html