Technology - Google News

GameStop is discounting video games, preowned consoles, and more today only - The Verge
Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google - TechCrunch
You don't have to spend $1,000 on a phone anymore - USA TODAY

GameStop is discounting video games, preowned consoles, and more today only - The Verge

Posted: 18 Apr 2020 07:18 AM PDT

Welcome to the weekend. GameStop is hosting a one-day deal on video games, consoles, accessories, and more. If you've had a few titles, a spare controller, or anything else on your wishlist, it's worth checking out some of the deals.

Since GameStop's physical stores are closed due to the pandemic, you'll be able to shop all of these deals online and have them delivered straight to your residence.

Here are a few stand-out offers. (Note: if games aren't your bag, there are more deals below on iPhone SE 2 preorders and the Pixel 4.)

In case you missed it, the iPhone SE 2 is now available for preorder. It officially releases on April 24th, next Friday, and you can place an order right now at Apple. Alternatively, Best Buy is offering a $50 gift card if you plan to upgrade your line or activate a new one via Verizon, Sprint, or AT&T. If you don't want to roll with a carrier, the retailer is selling unlocked versions of the phone as well. As far as delivery goes, you can pick up orders curbside at one of its stores, or you can just have it delivered to home.

Walmart is offering a deal on the iPhone SE 2 during the preorder phase, too, so long as you plan to purchase the phone with a device payment plan through AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint. The retailer says it will take $200 off the total cost of the phone, so the 64GB version would cost just $199, plus activation fees and taxes paid upfront, paid each month for 24 months or 30 months, depending on the carrier you elect to join or upgrade on.

Lastly, for a deal on a phone that is currently available, the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL are each $300 off their usual respective prices. Each size of Pixel 4 and each storage configuration is 37 percent off at the Google Store, Best Buy, and Amazon. For your reference, the Pixel 4 originally sells for $799 outside of a deal like this. So if you've been waiting for a big price drop, now seems like a good chance to explore getting Google's latest flagship phone.

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Europe’s PEPP-PT COVID-19 contacts tracing standard push could be squaring up for a fight with Apple and Google - TechCrunch

Posted: 17 Apr 2020 11:06 AM PDT

A coalition of EU scientists and technologists that's developing what's billed as a "privacy-preserving" standard for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking, as a proxy for COVID-19 infection risk, wants Apple and Google to make changes to an API they're developing for the same overarching purpose.

The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) uncloaked on April 1, calling for developers of contact tracing apps to get behind a standardized approach to processing smartphone users' data to coordinate digital interventions across borders and shrink the risk of overly intrusive location-tracking tools gaining momentum as a result of the pandemic.

PEPP-PT said today it has seven governments signed up to apply its approach to national apps, with a claimed pipeline of a further 40 in discussions about joining.

"We now have a lot of governments interacting," said PEPP-PT's Hans-Christian Boos, speaking during a webinar for journalists. "Some governments are publicly declaring that their local applications will be built on top of the principles of PEPP-PT and also the various protocols supplied inside this initiative.

"We know of seven countries that have already committed to do this — and we're currently in conversation with 40 countries that are in various states of onboarding."

Boos said a list of the governments would be shared with journalists, though at the time of writing we haven't seen it. But we've asked PEPP-PT's PR firm for the info and will update this report when we get it.

"The pan-European approach has worked," he added. "Governments have decided at a speed previously unknown. But with 40 more countries in the queue of onboarding we definitely have outgrown just the European focus — and to us this shows that privacy as a model and as a discussion point… is a statement and it is something that we can export because we're credible on it."

Paolo de Rosa, the CTO at the Ministry of Innovation Technology and Digital Transformation for the Italian government, was also on the webinar — and confirmed its national app will be built on top of PEPP-PT.

"We will have an app soon and obviously it will be based on this model," he said, offering no further details.

PEPP-PT's core "privacy-preserving" claim rests on the use of system architectures that do not require location data to be collected. Rather devices that come near each other would share pseudonymized IDs — which could later be used to send notifications to an individual if the system calculates an infection risk has occurred. An infected individual's contacts would be uploaded at the point of diagnosis — allowing notifications to be sent to other devices with which had come into contact.

Boos, a spokesman for and coordinator of PEPP-PT, told TechCrunch earlier this month the project will support both centralized and decentralized approaches. The former meaning IDs are uploaded to a trusted server, such as one controlled by a health authority; the latter meaning IDs are held locally on devices, where the infection risk is also calculated — a backend server is only in the loop to relay info to devices.

It's just such a decentralized contacts tracing system that Apple and Google are collaborating on supporting — fast-following PEPP-PT last week by announcing a plan for cross-platform COVID-19 contacts tracing via a forthcoming API and then a system-wide (opt-in) for Bluetooth-based proximity tracking.

That intervention, by the only two smartphone platforms that matter when the ambition is mainstream adoption, is a major development — putting momentum behind decentralized contacts tracing for responding digitally to the coronavirus crisis in the Western world, certainly at the platform level.

In a resolution passed today the European parliament also called for a decentralized approach to COVID-19 proximity tracking.

MEPs are pushing for the Commission and Member States to be "fully transparent on the functioning of contact tracing apps, so that people can verify both the underlying protocol for security and privacy and check the code itself to see whether the application functions as the authorities are claiming." (The Commission has previously signaled a preference for decentralization too.)

However, backers of PEPP-PT, which include at least seven governments (and the claim of many more), aren't giving up on the option of a "privacy-preserving" centralized option — which some in their camp are dubbing "pseudo-decentralized" — with Boos claiming today that discussions are ongoing with Apple and Google about making changes to their approach.

As it stands, contacts tracing apps that don't use a decentralized infrastructure won't be able to carry out Bluetooth tracking in the background on Android or iOS — as the platforms limit how general apps can access Bluetooth. This means users of such apps would have to have the app open and active all the time for proximity tracking to function, with associated (negative) impacts on battery life and device usability.

There are also (intentional) restrictions on how contacts tracing data could be centralized, as a result of the relay server model being deployed in the joint Apple-Google model.

"We very much appreciate that Google and Apple are stepping up to making the operating system layer available — or putting what should be the OS actually there, which is the Bluetooth measurement and the handling of crypto and the background running of such tasks which have to keep running resiliently all the time — if you look at their protocols and if you look at whom they are provided by, the two dominant players in the mobile ecosystem, then I think that from a government perspective especially, or from lots of government perspectives, there are many open points to discuss," said Boos today.

"From a PEPP-PT perspective there are a few points to discuss because we want choice and implementing choice in terms of model — decentralized or centralized on top of their protocol creates actually the worst of both worlds — so there are many points to discuss. But contrary to the behavior that many of us who work with tech companies are used to Google and Apple are very open in these discussions and there's no point in getting up in arms yet because these discussions are ongoing and it looks like agreement can be reached with them."

It wasn't clear what specific changes PEPP-PT wants from Apple and Google — we asked for more detail during the webinar but didn't get a response. But the group and its government backers may be hoping to dilute the tech giants' stance to make it easier to create centralized graphs of Bluetooth contacts to feed national coronavirus responses.

As it stands, Apple and Google's API is designed to block contact matching on a server — though there might still be ways for governments (and others) to partially work around the restrictions and centralize some data.

We reached out to Apple and Google with questions about the claimed discussions with PEPP-PT. At the time of writing, neither had responded.

As well as Italy, the German and French governments are among those that have indicated they're backing PEPP-PT for national apps — which suggests powerful EU Member States could be squaring up for a fight with the tech giants, along the lines of Apple versus the FBI, if pressure to tweak the API fails.

Another key strand to this story is that PEPP-PT continues to face strident criticism from privacy and security experts in its own backyard — including after it removed a reference to a decentralized protocol for COVID-19 contacts tracing that's being developed by another European coalition, comprised of privacy and security experts, called DP-3T.

Coindesk reported on the silent edit to PEPP-PT's website yesterday.

Backers of DP-3T have also repeatedly queried why PEPP-PT hasn't published code or protocols for review to-date — and even gone so far as to dub the effort a "trojan horse."

#DP3T entered as a candidate to so-called PEPP-PT in good faith, but it is now clear that powerful actors pushing centralised databases of Bluetooth contact tracing do not, and will not, act in good faith.

PEPP-PT is a Trojan horse.

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) April 16, 2020

ETH Zürich's Dr. Kenneth Paterson, who is both a part of the PEPP-PT effort and a designer of DP-3T, couldn't shed any light on the exact changes the coalition is hoping to extract from "Gapple" when we asked.

"They've still not said exactly how their system would work, so I can't say what they would need [in terms of changes to Apple and Google's system]," he told us in an email exchange.

Today Boos couched the removal of the reference to DP-3T on PEPP-PT's website as a mistake — which he blamed on "bad communication." He also claimed the coalition is still interested in including the former's decentralized protocol within its bundle of standardized technologies. So the already sometimes fuzzy lines between the camps continue to be redrawn. (It's also interesting to note that press emails to Boos are now being triaged by Hering Schuppener, a communications firm that sells publicity services, including crisis PR.)

"We're really sorry for that," Boos said of the DP-3T excision. "Actually we just wanted to put the various options on the same level that are out there. There are still all these options and we very much appreciate the work that colleagues and others are doing.

"You know there is a hot discussion in the crypto community about this and we actually encourage this discussion because it's always good to improve on protocols. What we must not lose sight of is… that we're not talking about crypto here, we're talking about pandemic management and as long as an underlying transport layer can ensure privacy that's good enough because governments can choose whatever they want."

Boos also said PEPP-PT would finally be publishing some technical documents this afternoon — opting to release information some three weeks after its public unveiling and on a Friday evening (a seven-page 'high level overview' has since been put on their GitHub here [this link has since been deleted – Ed.] — but still a far cry from code for review) — while making a simultaneous plea for journalists to focus on the "bigger picture" of fighting the coronavirus rather than keep obsessing over technical details.

During today's webinar some of the scientists backing PEPP-PT talked about how they're testing the efficacy of Bluetooth as a proxy for tracking infection risk.

"The algorithm that we've been working on looks at the cumulative amount of time that individuals spend in proximity with each other," said Christophe Fraser, professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Senior Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, offering a general primer on using Bluetooth proximity data for tracking viral transmission.

"The aim is to predict the probability of transmission from the phone proximity data. So the ideal system reduces the requested quarantine to those who are the most at risk of being infected and doesn't give the notification — even though some proximity event was recorded — to those people who're not at risk of being infected."

"Obviously that's going to be an imperfect process," he went on. "But the key point is that in this innovative approach that we should be able to audit the extent to which that information and those notifications are correct — so we need to actually be seeing, of the people who have been sent the notification how many of them actually were infected. And of those people who were identified as contacts, how many weren't.

"Auditing can be done in many different ways for each system but that step is crucial."

Evaluating the effectiveness of the digital interventions will be vital, per Fraser — whose presentation could have been interpreted as making a case for public health authorities to have fuller access to contacts graphs. But it's important to note that DP-3T's decentralized protocol makes clear provision for app users to opt-in to voluntarily share data with epidemiologists and research groups to enable them to reconstruct the interaction graph among infected and at risk users (aka to get access to a proximity graph).

"It's really important that if you're going to do an intervention that is going to affect millions of people — in terms of these requests to [quarantine] — that that information be the best possible science or the best possible representation of the evidence at the point at which you give the notification," added Fraser. "And therefore as we progress forwards that evidence — our understanding of the transmission of the virus — is going to improve. And in fact auditing of the app can allow that to improve, and therefore it seems essential that that information be fed back."

None of the PEPP-PT-aligned apps that are currently being used for testing or reference are interfacing with national health authority systems, per Boos — though he cited a test in Italy that's been plugged into a company's health system to run tests.

"We have supplied the application builders with the backend, we have supplied them with sample code, we have supplied them with protocols, we have supplied them with the science of measurement, and so on and so forth. We have a working application that simply has no integration into a country's health system — on Android and on iOS," he noted.

On its website PEPP-PT lists a number of corporate "members" as backing the effort — including the likes of Vodafone — alongside several research institutions including Germany's Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI) which has been reported as leading the effort.

The HHI's executive director, Thomas Wiegand, was also on today's call. Notably, his name initially appeared on the authorship list for the DP-3T's white paper. However, on April 10 he was removed from the README and authorship list, per its GitHub document history. No explanation for the change was given.

During today's press conference Wiegand made an intervention that seems unlikely to endear him to the wider crypto and digital rights community — describing the debate around which cryptography system to use for COVID-19 contacts tracing as a 'side show' and expressing concern that what he called Europe's "open public discussion" might "destroy our ability to get ourselves as Europeans out of this."

"I just wanted to make everyone aware of the difficulty of this problem," he also said. "Cryptography is only one of 12 building blocks in the system. So I really would like to have everybody go back and reconsider what problem we are in here. We have to win against this virus… or we have another lockdown or we have a lot of big problems. I would like to have everybody to consider that and to think about it because we have a chance if we get our act together and really win against the virus."

The press conference had an even more inauspicious start after the Zoom call was disrupted by racist spam in the chat field. Right before that Boos had kicked off the call saying he had heard from "some more technically savvy people that we should not be using Zoom because it's insecure — and for an initiative that wants security and privacy it's the wrong tool."

"Unfortunately we found out that many of our international colleagues only had this on their corporate PCs so over time either Zoom has to improve — or we need to get better installations out there. It's certainly not our intention to leak the data on this Zoom," he added.

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You don't have to spend $1,000 on a phone anymore - USA TODAY

Posted: 18 Apr 2020 05:44 AM PDT

Jefferson Graham USA TODAY

Published 8:43 AM EDT Apr 18, 2020

Thanks Apple, Samsung, Motorola and Google, you've convinced me.

The $1,000 smartphone era for the mass market is over.

This week, Apple debuted its revived SE model, which has pretty much every feature you'd want in a phone, with exception of a super fancy camera, slicker screen and higher resolution.

But we're talking about a price difference of $600. The SE is $399, while the iPhone 11 Pro starts at $999. (And if you want to throw in extras, like more storage, Apple Care and a case, the bill comes to $1,917.)

Samsung just introduced a new line of budget smartphones starting at a record low $110, while Google has slashed the prices of its flagship Pixel smartphones, with the most expensive model, the Pixel 4 XL, now at $599 (or just a little bit over half the price of the iPhone 11 Pro), down from $899, through May 9th.

And Motorola released two new phones that certainly don't scream budget, despite price tags of $249 for the Moto G Stylus and $299 for the Moto G Power.

There simply isn't any need to reach for the $1,000 to bring a shiny phone home.

Let's begin by critically comparing the SE to the 11 Pro.

Remember the (now discontinued) iPhone 8 from 2017? The new SE is basically the iPhone 8, except with new guts inside. It has the same 4.7 inch screen, but a more powerful A13 processing chip, like on the top of the line 11 Pro. It can shoot video in 4K resolution and use Apple's popular Portrait Mode to pretty up photos.

Sure, the resolution is lower – 1334x750 vs. 1792x828, but do you care? I always thought the 8 looked pretty good, and would argue that the bulk of Apple customers wouldn't notice the difference.

The 11 Pro gives you three cameras – ultra wide angle, regular wide angle and portrait. I like having them, and would pay for them, but would you? If you're on a budget and need to get closer to a subject, use the most economical zoom method there is – your feet. Just take a few steps nearer to the action.

I also like the bigger screen. But for the many folks out of work due to the coronavirus, who are trying to find new ways to save money and pay the rent, the smaller display would probably be just fine. The phone still makes phone calls, sends and receives texts and emails, connects to Netflix and Zoom, hails an Uber and all the other things we expect from a modern smartphone.

Motorola's G Stylus pours on the features, even at under $299, offering three cameras and 128 GB of storage, or twice as much as Apple's SE. You don't get the ability to do wireless charging with the phone, but so what?

Samsung has the most expensive smartphone available today, the Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, starting at $1,399, with a whopping 6.9 inch screen, 128 GB of storage and three cameras that boast of greater zoom capability than any other smartphone. Compare that to the new Samsung A51, which still has a hefty 6.5 inch screen, half the amount of storage (64 GB) and four cameras. And it sells for just $399. Which one sounds better to you?

What happened? How did these manufacturers that were so happy to jack up the prices of phones suddenly in 2020 start inching them way down to affordable pricing?

"The money on phones is being spent on the low end, not the high," says Gene Munster, an analyst and investor with Lpup Ventures. "This is what consumers want."

He says that some 80% of phone sales come from the lower end, while the top of the line models get attention, press acclaim and early adopters.

He adds that companies like Apple and Google realize that it's not just the sale of the phone that makes them money anymore, but software add-ons like extra storage, music subscriptions and the like.

In other tech news this week

Facebook said it would start informing members who have received COVID-19 misinformation. The company will soon be letting users know if they liked, reacted to or commented on posts with harmful misinformation about the virus that was removed by moderators and will direct those who engaged with those posts to information about virus myths debunked by the World Health Organization.

Speaking of Facebook, get ready for a new emoji to represent hugs. The social network and its messaging app Messenger will roll out new reactions to express caring and compassion. The new Facebook reaction is an emoji hugging a heart.

Mevo, the pint-sized alternative to webcams, said a new edition will be in stores next week. The new model, the Mevo Start, sells for $399, and can live stream to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram announced new features for small businesses to drive support for them, including gift cards, online food orders and fundraising stickers.

This week's Talking Tech podcasts

Who's zooming who? A look at the top app charts.

Microsoft and UPS team up to help combat COVID.

Can't get a webcam? How about the Mevo?

Listener edition: how to stream my old MP3s?

Explainer: about those new contract tracker apps

Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham

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