It's my pleasure to now introduce Anup Malani, who is the Lee and Brina Freeman Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine. Anup conducts research in law and economics, health economics and development economics, and his law and economics research focuses on models of judicial behavior and measuring the welfare impact of laws, and he's presented numerous times on really creative approaches to considering many of the things that we deal with, and I'm very much looking forward to his assessment of disclosures and disclosures of conflicts of interest, so Anup, welcome. I'm out of pacing when I talk, so it's very hard to stay behind the podium. All right, I want to talk to you today about some research that I've been working on for the past few years, looking into the value of requiring physicians, actually researchers, to disclose the conflicts of interest in medical journal articles. So I want to give you a little bit about the background here. So I think the consensus view, or at least the conventional view in research, in medical research, is that financial ties, that is to say, either funding from a drug company to a medical researcher or some other financial ties, like a consulting relationship or an expert speaking relationship or even honor area, tend to bias researchers, and the evidence that we have for that, I think some of the strongest evidence, comes from folks like Beckham and Leigh and Gross and Cismondo, where they've shown that research that is funded by the industry tends to find more positive effects of drugs produced by the industry. And on that basis, there have been calls to address this problem of financial ties between the industry and researchers. One solution that is pretty commonsensical is actually to bar these relationships. And there are examples of efforts to try to do just that. For example, Negem and Lancet, for a period of time, actually barred authors of review articles from writing reviews, if the authors had conflicts of interest, if they had financial ties with industry. Now the problem was that they pulled back on this policy because they had difficulty finding what they thought were adequately qualified reviewers to actually write their views, which raises the possibility that in fact financial ties and funding from the industry actually has value. To some extent this should be pretty obvious. We know that half of medical research in the United States is funded by industry, so at least there's half of the research that's going on, but that kind of ratio underestimates the actual impact on clinical trials. The ratio of clinical trials funded by industry to clinical trials not funded by industry is six to one. So particularly in clinical research, industry funding is really important. So an alternative solution I think that has been widespread, and not just in medicine but outside medicine as well, is the idea of disclosures. So the idea is that individuals who have conflicts, financial conflicts should disclose that information. It's a policy that's been in medical journals for quite some time. Even in the 1980s there started to be policies that required disclosure funding, but over time you've seen a ratcheting up of what type of financial ties or a broadening of the definition of what type of financial ties count and must be disclosed, and now financial ties of a wide variety are actually required to be disclosed by medical journals. And the idea behind disclosure is, look, we want the ties, but we want readers to be able to appropriately discount articles where the authors have financial ties. The thought is, hey, if I see a researcher and they have financial ties, I can down weight their conclusions to account for potential bias induced by those ties. Now I just want to think logically about whether or not mandatory disclosures are a good idea. In order for mandatory disclosures to be a good idea, a necessary condition is that it must be that the audience discounts the value of articles, the information from that article, if there are in fact conflicts disclosed. If that were not the case, for example, let's suppose that people made positive inferences from the disclosure, it seems fanciful, but I'm going to get to that point a little bit more in a second, but if they make positive inferences from disclosure, then you would never need mandatory disclosure. So mandatory disclosure would be enough, as an author would want to disclose a conflict because people would view me more positively if I had that conflict. So it must be the case, sorry, mandatory disclosure is only helpful if in fact we think people make negative inferences from disclosure, and that's why people are not disclosing. But it turns out the evidence on this is ambiguous. So there's certainly some evidence that suggests that people view articles more negatively if the authors disclose conflicts. So the evidence that I like to point to is Kesselheim's paper, Kesselheim and co-authors back in 2012. But there are other indicators that go the opposite way. So for example, in surveys done by folks like Lowenstein, that suggests that doctors think it's fine to accept gifts. You also have research from SA at all suggesting that when doctors make disclosures, patients actually trust them a little bit more as if, hey, you revealed the bad things about you. Now I feel like I can trust you. And so they actually rely on those doctors a little bit more. So the evidence is not entirely clear. So here's what we did. So this is a joint work with two collaborators, both of them at Booth, Christian Loitz and Jacob Laszlo. So when I say we, I mean the three of us, what we did is we gathered data. Well, first of all, our idea was to say, look, let's see what happens when medical researchers disclose conflicts in journal articles. And we're going to look at how, not just how anybody responds, but how other medical researchers respond. And in particular, how they respond in their citation patterns. So we're going to look at the impact of disclosing a conflict in a medical journal article on citations to that article. And the reason we think it's important is because I think researchers probably are in a good position to understand the impact that funding has on their research and their colleagues' research. It's also the case that citations are just an important measure. Not only is it a measure of the influence of an article, but it's actually really important for the promotion and career advancement of researchers themselves. So it's important for the labor force of researchers. So here's what we did. We gathered data from about over a quarter of all articles published in seven journals listed above, including places like Nejim and Lancet, BMJ and JAMA. We gathered a quarter of all articles in a 25-year period. So this was a long process. The period was 1986, all the way to 1907 to 2006. For each of these articles, we went through and picked out and coded up the financial disclosures in these articles. We also then, for each of these articles, we obtained from Thomson Reuters citations by other authors to these articles. So we measured three-year citations. We also got from Thomson Reuters and scraped from PubMed a whole range of information about covariates on these articles, the authors, and the journals, so things like the impact factor of the journal, for the article level we look at beyond citations, we look at the length of the article. For example, the subject matter of the article, whether or not the article, what type of study it was conducting or reporting on, whether it was a clinical trial and observational study, men analysis, things like that, kind of just a clinical record. And we also looked at features of the author, where was the author working at a top medical school, what is the average number of citations that that author had over the past three years, things like that. So a whole range of things. So we assembled this data set and we looked at it. We said, what is the relationship between disclosure of conflicts and citations? So our treatment group in some sense were articles that disclosed conflicts, control group was articles that did not disclose conflicts, and the outcome variable was three year citations. And we found something really surprising and super persistent articles that disclosed conflicts had more citations. Not a little more citations, a lot more citations. So you see a slight difference early on in our sample, you know maybe 10 or 15%, but if you look starting in say 1995 and afterwards, you're finding massive, massive differences, nearly double the number of citations to articles that disclose a conflict. Now that was a bit of a puzzle. And by the way, I do want to point out that this is very robust. We can, this is raw citations that you're seeing, but we can get rid of self citations. We can actually do things like down weight citations from journals that have lower prestige as measured by impact factor, all those sorts of things. And no matter how we slice and dice the data, you will get this as the dominant result, okay? Now, we make two possible, when looking for solutions or explanations, we came up with two. One possibility is that what the industry is trying to do, well what the industry is doing is funding certain types of research that just inherently get cited more. So for example, if industry funds trials, but not observational studies, and trials just generally get cited more, it's possible that just coincidentally, the industry's funding things get cited more, okay? That's one possibility. Another possibility which seems entirely reasonable is that the industry is actually seeking out better researchers, which makes sense. If I am trying to convince you that in fact my drug is good, I'd rather hire somebody that's actually a good quality researcher so when that person actually concludes that my drug is good, you're more likely to believe it. I'm more likely to subject myself to more rigorous analysis by more higher quality researchers because that makes the result, if it's positive, even more compelling. Does that make sense? So there's two possibilities. And by the way, it's not necessarily the case that this evidence proves that there's no bias also. It just means that we have to account for the possibility of these two types of selection that goes on. So what we spent the bulk of our effort doing is trying to see if in fact we can met out these sorts of effects where the industry is selecting out more citable studies or they're selecting out higher quality researchers and see if it's still the case that people make negative inferences even beyond that. So the first thing we do is we just control for features of the article and features of the author. Features of the article, for example, are things that make it more citable. For example, like study type, things like that. Things, features of the author are things like, are you in a top 50, teaching in a top 50 medical college? What is your past three citations? What are the three year citations? What are your past three year citations of the, amongst other, of the institution that you're at? Things like that. So we tried that. We just did a simple regression. Left hand side is log citations. So you interpret these as percentages in some sense. Adjusted citations, I think, is what you're seeing here. And then the right hand side, beyond the disclosure of a conflict by any of the authors of the article, are these other controls, these article and journal controls. And the key result is that no matter how much information you had, how many covariates you had, it is still the case that there's a positive gradient on disclosures, meaning disclosures are associated with higher citations, not fewer citations. And I highlighted the top right box, which is the specification that has the most controls, our efforts to beat out that selection effect that I was talking about, the positive selection effect. And we still find that there's a positive association. It's pretty persistent. Okay, now one possibility is it's still there because maybe citations aren't the best measure of how readers view an article. Maybe we ought to look at, for example, experts and see what experts think. Another possibility is maybe our author and article controls are not good enough controls for quality. So we're gonna tackle those two problems in the next two slides. So here's one thing we did. We first, to address this issue of whether or not citations are a good measure, we changed out the dependent variable. Instead of looking at what impact disclosures have on citations, instead we looked to expert recommendations of a particular type. So the University of Chicago's Department of Family Medicine runs a program called the Priority Updates from Research Literature, which you might be aware of. And what they do is when physicians recommend articles as particularly useful articles, they screen them on various measures of quality and pick out certain ones as recommended articles to be read by their readership. These are called pearls, nice enough. And so we thought, okay, given that you're nominated, what is the probability that you're gonna be a pearl and how does that differ based upon whether or not you disclose a conflict or not? So we just changed the outcome. So here now we find something that's a little bit more consistent with conventional wisdom, which is that when you now disclose a conflict, you are less likely, we observe that you're less likely to actually be recommended as a pearl, okay? The effect is about 10%. Now here's the one problem with this. This doesn't end the debate. And the reason is because it's not obvious that experts are the right measure to use. And it's not obvious that this particular set of experts, I think they're fantastic because I've got home country bias here, but I think they're fantastic, but the difficulty is they might be more sensitive. It's quite possible that they believe the literature or have the conventional view that there's bias associated with this. And so they put that into their decision-making. It could be that other people don't, that other readers, other researchers don't. So we wanna be a little bit careful about this and end the discussion just at this point, okay? So it might be that citations are important. So what we do is we return to citations and we try another effort to actually get rid of this possibility that there might be selection. Funding doesn't just go to anybody, it goes to high quality researchers. But the problem with controlling for quality is you might not observe all elements of a physician or a researcher's quality. So we tried something different. We said what if people could be their own control, okay? So we asked ourselves the following hypothetical. What happens if I'm somebody that discloses a conflict, what happens to citations to other articles that I've written in the past, okay? Now I've written both sets of articles. So in some sense the quality is the same of the authors. The question is are readers making a negative inference? Now it might be a little surprising that they do that because it's not a negative inference about the article where I disclosed, it's a negative inference about other articles that I've disclosed that. So it requires that extra step that you assume I was also conflicted on that other article, it just didn't reveal it, okay? So we looked at this. So first thing we did is we expanded the sample to include all medical journals. Then we defined a pre-period which is a period 1999 to 2001, a post-period which is 2002 to 2004. We did that because in around 2001 we had a big surge of reforms by the way amongst medical journals in terms of what disclosures were required. But that's what we defined as a pre and post-period. We defined control group as authors who publish an article in the pre-period without disclosing a conflict and then publish an article in the post-period and even in that other article they don't disclose a conflict. The treatment group however is a group of people that publish an article in the pre-period, don't disclose a conflict but in the post-period publish another article where they do disclose a conflict. And what we track is the citations over time to the article published in the pre-period for both groups, right? And these guys go along, by the way, we match them meaning we compare articles that are like similar to each other on a range of outcomes which I'll explain in just a second. And then we check to see if at some point when the treatment group article in another author in another article discloses a conflict does that affect the citations to the pre-period article of the treatment author? That's our identification strategy. That's our design, research design strategy. And what's amazing is that we actually find, not amazing, but was interesting to us was that we actually found a reduction in citations to the pre-period article amongst the treatment group authors. That means that if you disclose a conflict your citations to a prior article fall by 12 to 13% per year, okay? And that is pretty robust to however you match. You can match articles among the treatment group who patrol group on study type, on study type publication year, study type impact factor of the journal you published in, some combination of all these, it still persists. It's a very robust result. All right, so that gives you a sense of what information we have. So what is it that I conclude? Or what is it that we conclude? The first one we conclude is that there, you cannot deny that there is a positive selection by the industry for either articles that are more likely, more citable, more likely to be cited, just because the subject matter or something like that. Or that there is positive selection by industry for quality authors. The industry tends to fund or create financial ties with higher quality researchers. That's really hard to deny. That's in the raw data. However, if you're able to control that and filter that out, there is still a negative effect of conflict disclosures on people's assessments of the quality of an article. I think it's possible to have both. I read an article, I see disclosure, I infer that the person must be pretty high quality, but I also kind of realize that there could be some bias. I make two adjustments, okay? And we find evidence of both types of adjustments. And we find that readers actually are remarkably sensitive about it because there are these spillover effects, which we found to be a surprising result. Okay, so what does that mean? That means that it is probably the case that mandatory disclosures have some purpose, they have some value. For you guys, that might seem pretty obvious, but to me it wasn't obvious from the data that was the case. However, it's also important to recognize that financial ties have value. Drug companies still do seem to seek out higher quality, or at least there's evidence that they seek out higher quality researchers and fund them. And it's possible that they make those studies actually better. So there's a good and a bad, which I think is in hindsight not surprising, but I think that we have good evidence for that now, Mark. I see Lainey going up to the... Okay, Susan Toll, Oregon. In thinking about how much attention comes to an article that's published, there is a lot that can happen with one's media department, with paying for open access, with paying for distribution to the media more broadly, that people can put a machine behind your article and increase the odds that it will receive substantial attention, which may lead to greater citation. Oh, totally possible. In fact, that might be one of the reasons why you see the positive gradient. But the flip side is that then it should be even harder to see the negative gradient too, but we're able to separate out those two things. So I'm not entirely convinced that that's the only thing that's going on, I guess. Yeah, but it's possible, sure. Hi, Melanie Sir. There was actually an abstract at the recent American College of Surgeons meeting that looked at the rate of basically compared self-reported disclosures to the open payments data, and basically showed that we're not self-reporting appropriately most of the time. This is obviously based on self-reported disclosures. Yeah, for sure. So a few things there. One of the reasons we chose the data period that we did is because we'd done a prior paper, where we showed that when journals ratcheted up, there was a requirement. There was actually more self-reporting, not perfect self-reporting by any stretch. We can't even prove that, and the evidence that you presented suggests otherwise, but there's a greater propensity to report. And so that's one of the reasons why we looked at that pre-period and post-period because we expected reporting to actually increase, and so you would expect this negative inference to occur. So that's part of the identification strategy. That said, we can report more, sorry, that we can increase sanctions to increase the reporting. It's just important for us to remember that there are still positive effects, as well as negative effects, but there's no particular reason to oppose the mandatory disclosure, I think. I think it serves some purpose. Hi, Laney Ross, University of Chicago. So how do you correct for the fact that funding by industry and research has increased so much over that 20-year period that you're looking at? The funding has increased dramatically? Or is it that disclosure is a funding? No, that funding by industry has increased so dramatically. How do you use that? I mean, because the fact that we're seeing so many more articles being published with industry disclosures and that they're just funding the research itself, right? I mean, NIH dollars have been relatively flat and industry is now more than 50% of all clinical trials. Yeah, so I mean, there could be many reasons for that one possibility is that the returns to funding have increased. It could be the returns, particularly increase, because public funding has declined. It's also possible that we're just diminishing returns, so given any level of research results, we need to spend a little bit more effort. Could be that the more publications that the returns to publications are a little bit higher in the eyes of the FDA, and so it's more likely to get to drug approval. There are lots of possible explanations. I think that's a great question and it warrants a lot of research, for sure. I'm just not sure that it necessarily changes this particular result. So that I don't see just yet. One thing I will tell you is in separate paper that we wrote, one of the things that we found really remarkable and very consistent with this result, the policy impacts, the policy changes had an impact was that there's been a dramatic increase in the disclosure rate, which is different than and higher than the funding rate increase. And it doesn't just happen just before and after a policy change. It tends to persist throughout the first decade of this century and that we don't have an answer to either. It just seems like there's this massive increase in the rate of disclosures. Do you have an explanation to why there was the negative impact on earlier papers for disclosure in this paper? Yeah, I have to tell you, I was surprised. I mean, when we came up with this, we, our biggest debate was, is it worth the data gathering? I mean, do we really think it's possible that people make negative inferences about other articles and we were doubtful, but we have trouble killing this result. I mean, and we tried really hard, so it's there. Now, one possibility is, look, you know, in my own field, which is law and is economics, you know, if I found out that one author, for example, had fudged data in one article, I would suddenly start distrusting all other articles. Or conversely, if I find somebody won an award, right, I would suddenly be more inclined to read all the other papers that she'd written. And so it's not entirely surprising, I guess, but again, I want to be careful about this. In hindsight, this doesn't seem entirely surprising. We thought that this was a long shot. Yeah.


What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here. Today I am back with a tiny little bit of new info regarding Anthem, the 2019 planned Looter Shooter by EA and Bioware. But hey people if you guys are excited for Anthem and want to see more coverage from me just hit that like button, the support really does help me and my channel out. Okay so as we know at E3 2017 we got our favourite look at Anthem and the world was stunned since then information has been short. We have had relatively no new info on the game besides our death reply to a ready question. We are still almost a year later waiting for more gameplay or solid information about the game. We do know now though that it has been, while EA say not delayed, but it has been pushed back from its original release window of fall 2018 to quarter one 2019. Many people were disappointed by this news but in my opinion it's not all bad news. Let's face it we have seen the effects of rushed games in the past, most recently Destiny 2 which is basically the biggest fail of recent years in my opinion, so much hype, so much disappointment. But to be honest it's opened up the dance floor for games such as Anthem, games which should have and would have been a competitor of Destiny, but that won't ever be the case in my opinion now. But yeah we are still waiting on new Anthem info and today I bring you a little bit of info on when we will actually see some more gameplay and actually get hands on with the game itself. This info comes straight from VG247 which I will link within the video description quoting VG right here. Electronic Arts have announced that when it will host its EA Play 2018 event and you can expect to get a look at Anthem and the next Battlefield game. EA will host its off-site E3 2018 event at the Hollywood Palladium June 9th to the 11th. Those who attend the event will be able to get hands on time with the next Battlefield game all upcoming EA Sports Games and get an inside look at Anthem. The company promises the 3D event will include more EA brands, more hands on stations and more entertainment than ever before. There will be hundreds of game stations, demos and lots of experiences for attendees. Those who can't make it to the event will be able to watch everything unfold on the official EA website. Tickets to EA Play 2018 which are free will be available in the spring alongside a new ticking system to give players better hands on access to games. Electronic Arts announced in January by the way as Anthem will release in Quarter 1 2019 to make room for the new Battlefield game during Fall 2018. The company denied during its financial call the 2019 release was a delay despite Anthem being announced for Fall 2018 at E3 2017. EA plans on releasing a new Battlefield game in October which I'm actually super excited for and felt moving Anthem into the first part of 2019 would provide the new IP and open release window instead of putting it in the middle of a busy Fall release season. So at the EA Play event at the Hollywood Palladium this year we will get a new look at Anthem which I cannot wait for and it should be great. Expect to see plenty of new gameplay and much more info into the world of Anthem and let's hope it delivers on our expectations because let's face it seeing as the gameplay trailer we got last year at E3 is the only footage of the game we have seen so far many things could have changed plus the fact of actually we don't know much about the game itself there are thousands of questions we have regarding the game in all aspects the core mechanics of the game the loot system the weapon system the worlds and planets the enemies the story multiplayer the depths of which we can explore these worlds the social space the missions the side missions the quests there are countless questions we have hopefully within these events and news approaching and coming out of these events we get more details of what we can expect with this upcoming looter shooter known as Anthem so yeah guys this year's a big one for all us Anthem fans any more details that come I will have you guys covered here on my channel I hope you guys enjoyed the video sorry I couldn't bring you more details as at the moment things are pretty low but as soon as news does come I will have you guys covered here on my channel so stay tuned thanks for stopping by as always leaving a like really helps me and my channel out and hopefully people I will see you on that next one


Coming up on DTNS is the Polly Hacker, really a white hat. Shannon Morse has a theory, plus Samsung's using AI to design chips and the secret WhatsApp Mango supply chain. DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for August Friday the 13th. It's 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In Colorado Studio 2.0, I'm Shannon Morse. Welcome to Top Tech Stories in Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is produced. We were just talking about baseball mascots on Good Day Internet and admiring Shannon's new studio. If you would like that conversation, become a member and get Good Day Internet. Patreon.com slash DTNS where you can join our top patrons like Norm Physikus, Chris Allen and Mark Gibson. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Reuters sources say the European Commission will present legislation next month to establish a common charger for mobile phones. Apple, Samsung, Huawei and Nokia previously signed a voluntary memorandum of understanding in 2011 to harmonize chargers on new phones coming to market. Any use study found that in 2018, 29% of chargers sold with phones used USB micro-B connectors. 29% had USB-C and 21% had a lightning connector. AKA they were from Apple. The Microsoft Windows print spooler is going to end up being the most secure element in all of Windows when all of this is said and done. Microsoft has released an out-of-band security advisory acknowledging yet another print spooler vulnerability. This is CVE 2021-36958, which appears to be a local privilege escalation vulnerability that needs user interaction to be exploited. Microsoft has not released a fix, but it appears if you restrict the device to only install printers from authorized servers in a group policy, as long as the server isn't compromised, you'll be able to use print spooler. How many more print spooler vulnerabilities could there be, kids? In an interview, Xbox head Phil Spencer said that Microsoft was open to discussions to bring Xbox Game Pass to other console platforms, although currently there's no interest from other parties to do so. Spencer said Microsoft will continue to focus on open platforms like the web, PC and mobile, so no Nintendo for now. Facebook is adding voice and video calls to its, quote, secret conversation option that lets you use end-to-end encryption to voice and video calls in Messenger. Messenger text got end-to-end encryption in 2016 with the secret conversation option. Facebook also is adding some more time options to set text messages to disappear so you can now choose from between 5 seconds and 24 hours. And Facebook is conducting some beta tests as well. Some users will get an option for end-to-end encrypted group chats and to convert an existing chat thread to be end-to-end encrypted as well. And some Instagram users will also get an option for end-to-end encryption of Instagram direct messages. I am looking forward to that part. And Disney Plus subscribers increased more than 100% on the air in Q3 to 116 million paid subscribers, beating analyst estimates. Disney's on a roll. ESPN Plus subscribers were up 75% to 14.9 million and Total Hulu subscribers grew 21% up to 42.8 million. All right, let's talk about Samsung again, but not foldable phones this time. Samsung confirmed it is using software called DSO.ai from the company Synopsys to design its Exynos chips. They told the wired, yep, we're doing that. Although it's not clear if these have gone into production or if they are going to go into production or what products they might show up in. Synopsys software is trained by reinforcement learning on years of chip design. So basically reinforcement learning means when it creates a design that works or improves on a chip, it learns from that and makes more like that. It can automatically draw up the basics of a design, including the placement of components and how to wire them together. Synopsys works with dozens of companies, not just Samsung. And Synopsys says its clients generally see performance gains of up to 15% when it uses the AI designs instead of doing it by hand. Samsung and Synopsys aren't the only ones doing this. Google has published a paper about using algorithms to arrange components in its tensor chips. NVIDIA and IBM are exploring software aided design. And Synopsys has a competitor called Cadence that is developing tools to help with mapping out chip blueprints. Software like this only helps set out the designs. You still need humans. Human experts are needed for some of the more complex tasks to finish the design. But still, even just those basic designs can take weeks to months for humans to make. And the software can get the basics down in a few days, letting designers experiment with more ideas than they would have time for otherwise. Wired quotes MIT professor Song Han who notes that these advancements raise the possibility of having algorithms develop not only the hardware, but software optimized to run on it at the same time. Professor Han said AI powered co-design of software and hardware is a rapidly growing direction. I am so interested in this because I've been following the Pixel 6 line and we've heard about those tensor chips. However, Google has not publicly stated whether or not those are going to have the same kind of technology built into them as they have in their overall tensor product. That they have been using to develop AI on these chips. So I'm really curious to see in the next couple of years if we're going to see a lot more of these AI platforms built into consumer products like cell phones. Yeah, the first thing that this made me think was if you've got reinforcement learning in this case, developing chips. That means they're developing chips faster, which means that you can, like we said, try out more ideas, which means all of this talk about like, well, Moore's law, we're probably at the end of Moore's law. Well, maybe this is the thing that extends it. If suddenly you can design, you know, may find more optimized designs within the space because the thought on Moore's law recently has been like, we're reaching the nanometer threshold. You just can't get much smaller. Yeah. But what if that's not the end if we can optimize better because of this? I also wonder if, thanks to this kind of technology, if we're going to see faster implementations of new technology in chips that could help with things like these chip shortages that we have been experiencing. I know a lot of that has to do with materials, but maybe with AI developing these processes faster to get these components out. I wonder if this would help in any way so that we wouldn't experience those kind of shortages in the future. That's really interesting because I know one of the problems is making older components that people don't even bother developing anymore. If suddenly you could say, well, let's spend a few days seeing if the reinforcement learning algorithm can come up with a faster way to build that display chip for the car. Exactly. Whereas before, they're like, well, we're not going to spend months sinking our time into that. That's an interesting thought because if you could use the same capacity to build twice the chip, suddenly that helps ease the shortage. Absolutely. Well, if they haven't done it already, then they can take my idea and go with it and make millions. Are you open sourcing that? I'll open source that idea. Generous of you. No, there's a lot of interesting things here. And it is a trend to be aware of that there is some what they call AI generally, which is a huge basket. But in this case, reinforcement learning and machine learning systems for designing chips, which could speed up chip design. That's important. Well, moving on, we have some information from Apple. They have definitely been in the news this week. Well, the Apple SVP of software, Craig Federighi, talked to the Wall Street Journal about the company's recent announcement and their plans to scan photos uploaded to iCloud for CSAM. And a separate program to scan messages on child accounts for sexually suggestive images. Now Federighi said, quote, we who consider ourselves absolutely leading on privacy, see what we are doing here as an advancement of the state of the art in privacy as enabling a more private world. Interesting. Now Federighi also provided a few more details on the plans. He said the threshold of matches needed on uploaded photos before photos are unlocked for that manual review is something on the order of 30. Interesting. He also noticed that the database he emphasized that the database of hashes for known CSAM will be constructed by multiple organizations and verified by an independent auditor. Reuters sources say an Apple Slack channel had more than 800 messages about the new policies with some employees expressing concern that the feature could be exploited for censorship. Now those employees were mainly outside of lead security and privacy roles, but some defended their company's policy and said that it was a reasonable response. And Federighi admitted Apple maybe should not have announced both the photos and the messages plans at the same time. And he said, I quote, again, by releasing them at the same time, people technically connected them and got very scared. What's happening with my messages? The answer is nothing is happening with your messages. And that's true for almost everyone, right? Unless your account identifies you as 13 years old or younger, nothing is happening with your messages. Shannon, what has been your take? I've talked a lot about my evolving take on this, but how have you reacted to these plans? I'm glad you asked, Tom. I'm glad you asked. I did my own story about this on Threatwire and I'm very much a privacy advocate. So this is concerning to me with the idea that these concepts could be used in the future for some kind of other response, not just for a CCM. Now, I also mentioned that I have nieces myself and I want to protect them in any way that I possibly can. That's incredibly important to me, but also my security when I'm using an iPhone is very important to me as well. And I don't want Apple to make some kind of mistake if I took a picture of my niece at the pool, for example. I made the example of with the messages, if a whole bunch of parents were having a pool party for their kid during a birthday or something like that. How do we know that their construction, their hash algorithm is going to correctly verify that the photos that parents are sharing amongst themselves or the kids are sharing even are totally normal and, you know, not something to be worried about? How are they going to make sure that those are not matched up to some kind of hash? Now, they did say that over the course of a year, I think there was like a very, very teeny, tiny minor chance that they would get one incorrect. And if that was the case, you could reinstate your account because they would lock it down. But even with that said, there's still that potential and there is the potential of something happening in the future, even though Apple said that they would not relegate this technology to anything that governments asked for. I also disagree with what Federighi said when he said that people were connecting messages to the photo scanning. I don't think that that's entirely true when I read it and when I read the PDFs and everything about this new technology and the plans that they have. I did not read it as such in any way possible. I read these as two completely different pieces of information that they're implementing to fight the same problem, but there's still two completely separate technologies. Yeah, I think he's right that they shouldn't have announced both of these at the same time because I do see other people confusing them. And it's forcing us to have two separate conversations at the same time. So, you know, I don't know what good it does for him to say we shouldn't have done it that way. But yeah, sure, maybe maybe it would have been better if you did these one at a time so we could focus on each. Because at first I was more concerned about the messages because of the leaking of information from what is otherwise end and encrypted. Over the course of reading a lot of people's thinking about this and security experts, it seems like security experts in general aren't as concerned about the messages thing, because it only notifies and the images are only saved when the end user opens them, which means that they would have been available for parental review anyway. No matter what they were, it's just that there's a notification saying, hey, make sure to review that one. So the more I think about it, the more I'm like, I don't love it. But maybe the other one is the bigger problem, which is I'm not so concerned about accidental hashes. I think they've done a very good job of saying these hashes are come from known images. The only way they could be accidentally matched is because they're trying to do partial images. They're trying to be able to say like even if it's been cropped, that hasn't been independently tested. That's where it could go wrong. But the fact that they have now we know up to 30 of these have to be mismatched. It does seem unlikely that if you have that many mismatched that you aren't up to something and then even then they have human manual review. So I'm fairly comfortable with the idea that like it's going to be really hard for an accidental match on the photos side to happen. I think I just one last thing. I think the problem with is the security people that like Alex Stamos have pointed out is Apple just ran in and ended the balancing argument.  Let's let's nail it down. Let's all agree where the balance should be. They said the balance is here. And I think a lot of security researchers are saying, well, I'm okay with there being a balance between combating CSAM and privacy, but let's talk about it first. You don't get to just wait in and decide. Yes, 100%. I do agree.  So something on the order of 30 makes a lot more sense to me. I think that with consumers, we do have to value our privacy and our security when it comes to our own devices. And I think there's a there's more privacy held there than when you're putting things up in a cloud, which many clouds are already doing this kind of scanning as we already know. So there is that that point to make. But yeah, I am glad that they did tell us how many before they're going to like shut down my account because they think my niece is something bad. Yeah, yeah. And I feel pretty comfortable about that. I really agree with Stamos. Apple should hold off implementing this and just and engage with the security community and come to an understanding of where that balance should be so that everybody can get behind. Because I do think what Apple's trying to do is the right thing. They just may not be going about it. They should do an open forum at Hackert convention, which is so not Apple, but they should not Apple, but they they should do that. We would love to have those talks with them and have those transparent conversations because I really think that they could grow this. And I think we all agree that it needs to be done, but it needs to be implemented properly. And it could become an industry standard where you could pressure others that are doing cloud scanning to not do it that way necessarily anymore. Yeah. All right. Car and driver did some tests on the level two driver assistance systems for multiple car makers. Level two means the car can automate some driving tests like steering, acceleration and braking. But human attention is still always required. This is often called advanced driver assistance systems, Cadillac supercruise, Tesla autopilot. There's a couple examples of level two. Tesla gets all the breathless attention with the dramatic headlines blurring the Tesla self driving system can be fooled to be used even when the driver isn't in the seat. But car and drivers tests found not only is that true, but all 17 level two systems that it tested. It was true about not just Tesla. None of the cars use seat detection in the driver seat, even though it's in the passenger seat to detect for airbag detection. You put a heavy bag of groceries in your passenger seat, it'll know something's sitting there, but not in the driver's seat. So you just need to trick the detection system if you want to use it without being in the driver's seat. Tesla system relies on checking for torque on the steering wheel. That's just a little bit of resistance that comes when your hand is on the wheel. Doesn't have to be a lot. That's defeated easily by putting a small weight on the wheel like an ankle weight that fooled all but three of the cars in the car and driver test. The BMW and Mercedes systems use touch sensors, not torque. So to fool those, a person would have to sit in another seat and then reach over and touch the wheel. But it could be done. And then the GM Super Cruise actually allows hands free driving and works only on approved stretches of highway. So it won't work if you're on a test track, for instance. They had to shut down a highway to go test it. So to make sure you're paying attention, GM Super Cruise uses a camera to look and see if you're paying attention. If your face is there and looking forward. Except car and driver was able to fool that system with a pair of novelty glasses with eyeballs printed on them. So terrible. That said, Shannon, in all of these cases, car and driver had to do something intentional. They either had to attach a weight or they had to like not sit in the seat but still reach out. Or they had to like wear novelty glasses. None of these things are things you'd accidentally do, right? I would hope not. I would hope that you're responsibly driving your vehicle on a public road. If you are not, then there's some natural selection going on here and I would feel very, very bad for you. I've even seen similar things in my Hyundai. We have a Tucson and if you don't keep your hands on the wheel, even though it has the lane detection and it'll keep you in the lane. It'll yell at you if you don't keep your hands on the wheel, but it's only looking for a touch. You don't have to like move it. There's no torque involved. You just have to touch the wheel. So who's to say that I couldn't sit in the passenger seat and just touch the wheel and use lane detection and stick it in cruise control. I would never do that because that would be really scary, but there's a thing there.  Like part of me says like it's good to know that these are the weaknesses in the systems, but car and driver Angelopnik both were very adamant that these are unsafe systems. I think they're not foolproof systems, but I don't know if they shouldn't be allowed. Although the argument goes when they can drive 80% of the time, it lures you into a false sense of security. So I think I think that's a fair thing to make sure people are aware of. I think the advertising that that companies have been using and maybe not necessarily companies, but fans of those companies have used saying like automated driving and things like maybe have given people the wrong perception of how these vehicles should be used. And I don't think that really helps people be responsible on the road likely should be. Yeah. Well, folks, let us know what you think feedback at daily tech news show.com. If you need a little deeper explanation on big tech topics like this, we've got a show for you. We just had an episode about DNS in the feed. We've got an episode about HDMI 2.1 in the feed. It's no a little more 10, 15 minutes to explain a topic in depth. You can get it either in the Patreon feed or by becoming a subscriber at know a little more.com. The Poly Network confirmed it offered a $500,000 bug bounty to Mr. White Hat, the party that recently used a security exploit in digital contracts to take $611 million in crypto assets from its network before subsequently returning the funds. In statements exchanged on the blockchain, Poly said, we believe your action is White Hat behavior.  Also, we assure you that you will not be accountable for this incident. In a statement, Poly said, we have also come to a more complete understanding regarding how the situation unfolded as well as Mr. White Hat's original intention. Okay, I love that they call him Mr. White Hat. I know. So funny. That's too good. We talked about this in depth earlier this week about how it was done. And we talked a little bit at that point. They had given about half the money back. Looks like they've given almost all of it back. It sounds like Poly Network has convinced that this was not malicious, that it was helpful that they've been able to plug the vulnerability because of it and no harm done. Which seems weird when you had $611 million go missing for a moment. But hey, if it's coming back, I guess no harm, no foul in the end. The stance of Mr. White Hat is what is so fascinating to me because it's unconfirmable. It's just, you know, you could write anything on the blockchain that you want as a comment. But it seems to be that whoever did this is trying to convince us that like, no, no, no, I found the vulnerability and I wanted to make sure that these coins didn't go missing. So I protected them and now I'm giving them back. Shannon, do you have an inkling what might be really going on here? So there has been a rumor mill, I will call it on Twitter. When this first started, a lot of folks in the information security and hacker industry and community made the assumption that maybe the Poly Network is behind this hack. And they are playing it off as being hacked by a third party so that they could write off this vulnerability and be able to keep the money, even though it went quote unquote missing for a short period of time. It's definitely a conspiracy theory, but there's kind of a back channel that makes sense here. When you look at what's going on and how strange this entire thing is, the name Mr. White Hat does not make sense with how this is playing out. Because this is much more of a gray hat scenario of somebody who finds a vulnerability, attacks that vulnerability without a contract signed with the company, without any kind of responsible disclosure, without a 60 day withholding of public statements or anything like that in order to give the company time to patch that vulnerability. And then they just steal the money and make everybody panic. I mean, there were a ton of people who were victimized by this. And that's not something that a White Hat is supposed to do when it comes to a hack. So this is definitely not something that you would normally see from somebody who is an ethical hacker. The most recent message since we started recording this show was earlier today and said, I am considering taking the limited bounty as one source of the compensation fund for unexpected victims. So that even addresses that, but then says, but it's hard to prove that your loss is my fault, especially when you are already gambling behind your capability. So it's like, you know, give with one hand, take with the other sort of thing. Oh, it's so weird. Yeah. There's an Avengers reference, a Batman reference. So, you know, rides the DC Marvel line well in these comments here. I don't know, I'm absolutely fascinated with the communication around this. Obviously, you can't say that Polly did this. No, that's of course a rumor. The White Hat hacker that they got to do it to play Mr. Whitehead is an excellent writer. Like this does feel like things people write in this kind of situation, but it's not obviously faked. I don't know. I guess in the end, Polly gets their money back. Probably like you say, they get to write it off, you know, any damage that they can attribute to this, including paying $500,000 as a bug bounty. The $500,000 bug bounty, it just makes it even more puzzling to me. It's so weird. Yeah, it's so strange. I'm going to keep following this because I bet. Yeah, let us know. Cryptocurrency company Circle operates a stablecoin called USDC. If you're not aware, stablecoin means the coin's value is pegged to a real currency. So it doesn't rise and fall like Bitcoin. USDC is pegged to the dollar, get it? USDC, US dollar coin. One USDC is always worth $1. Circle has announced it intends to become certified as a fully regulated bank by the US Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the US FDIC. If it does, Circle intends to place all its deposits, the backing for the USDC, $1 for every stablecoin it's issued, directly with the US Central Bank. Each holder of USDC would then be backed by actual money on deposit at the Fed. Interest that the Fed pays on those reserves would go to Circle for its operations, but you'd actually have a deposit at the Fed. Now that's significant because it would effectively make USDC a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. That's the thing we've been talking about on this show, that the Bahamas has, that China is testing out, that every government is basically developing. Buying a USDC stablecoin would, if this all panned out, effectively be buying a deposit at the US Fed. But the Fed may not approve it. A bank called DNB tried to do a similar thing and was denied. It was trying to operate as a bank, though, with the Fed holding all of its deposits, and it was going to split the interest with the holders. Circle wants to do a slightly different thing by having a cryptocurrency backed by the deposits. In TMB's case, the Fed believed it would negatively impact monetary policy, interest rates, the success of other banks, so it denied it. But it's unclear if the difference between offering deposit accounts and operating a cryptocurrency would significantly change the Fed's assessment. Anyway, Circle says that it's willing to do whatever the agency say it needs to do to make this happen, which could be a very free market way to do a CDBC, a central bank, or CBDC. It's very fascinating. I'm really interested to see how this goes, because it could be totally on par with what other countries are doing right now. Well, real quickly, because we did say we would talk about it, Eater.com has a story up called Inside the Secretive Semi-Elicit High Stakes World of WhatsApp Mango Importing. The subtitle says, Customs restrictions, high transport costs at a short shelf life have made the world's greatest mangoes grown in Pakistan difficult to come by in the U.S., but WhatsApp is getting around it. The short version here is that the process that the U.S. has put on mangoes coming from Pakistan that was implemented in 2010 to say, OK, you can import them, but you have to irradiate them in the U.S. to prevent them from becoming spoiled, and they have to be quarantined.  It won't last very long because mangoes have a short growing period and a short shelf life. So folks are using WhatsApp in order to short circuit this. They have WhatsApp groups in Pakistan where they make sure that they can get the mangoes as quickly as possible after the harvest and then get them over to the U.S. where other WhatsApp groups coordinate the shipping information so that you can buy them through WhatsApp, through the WhatsApp shopping carts and everything, show up to the cargo area at the airport, show them the WhatsApp code, and they're like, oh, yeah, these eight boxes of mangoes are yours. Here, take them. And it's a fascinating read just about Pakistani mangoes, why they're better than the mangoes you get on the shelf in the U.S. because they're tastier. The whole thing is really, really interesting to me and delicious. It's the Mango Dark Web, Tom. It's the Mango Dark Web. It really is. The Dark Mango Web. That's amazing. All right, let's check out the mail bag, Shannon. What do we got in there? We got an email from Tim deputy who writes, hi gang, given the recent discussion about how traceable Bitcoin transactions are, I thought you might find this article interesting. It talks about a service that's available on the Dark Web. Oh, ironic, which will check how much your crypto wallet is connected to illegal activity from the BBC article he sent us. It says, quote, we're seeing criminals start to fight back against blockchain analytics. And this service is a first explain Dr. Tom Robinson, who is the chief scientist and founder at analysis provider elliptic who discovered the website. Oh, that's, that's, that's really interesting. So the traceability has been a thing where it's like, maybe we don't know who you are, but we know enough about you from where you move your coins to figure out who you are sometimes. And obviously, that's not going to last forever before somebody figures out how to obfuscate that to make it harder. There you go. Thank you, Tim deputy. Keep those emails coming folks feedback at daily tech news show dot com. A special thanks to Rodrigo Smith Zapato, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Rodrigo for all the years of support. And thank you, Len Peralta for drawing today's show. What have you drawn for us, Len? Well, you know, when I read the story about Mr. White hat, the very first thing I thought of was the Mr. Men series by I've been Ronald or Richard Hargraves. Anyway, the little white books with the blob people. Yes, there's there's also a little miss. There's also that. Well, this is my take. This is Mr. White hat.  Mr. White hat gives back the bitcoins. I know that it weren't bitcoins. It was more just crypto, but it's kind of fun. And it's also fun. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of fun to draw the little bees in his eyes there. So if you're familiar with the Mr. Men series, you may this may be a little bit close to your heart. This is actually right now my patreon. If you're a patreon backer, patreon.com forward slash Len also at my online store at Len Peralta store dot com. So check it out. Mr. White cat, we say oopsie oopsie. I hacked your Polly. Sorry. All right, thank you so much for being with us today. If folks want to find out more of what you got going on, where should they go? YouTube.com slash Shannon Morris where you can follow along with this entire series of me building out this new basement studio and you can see the entire process, including wiring up a whole bunch of cat six Ethernet. That was super fun. Good times. It's a good time. Especially when it's done. Hey, we're live Monday through Friday, 4 30pm Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more about that at daily tech news show dot com slash live. If you're interested, we will be back Monday with Blair Bazderich as our guest. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coons, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterty, our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus One, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Jack Shit, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevenson, J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A. A. Cast, Creative Arts and Len Peralta, live art also performed by Len Peralta, A Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show include Allison Sheridan, Scott Johnson and Shannon Morse. Guests on this week's show include Chris Mancini and Nate Langson and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.


Various objections are possible and have been made, plenty have been made. You can sort of map them on to the premises of the core argument. Of course, there are some subsidiary premises now, too, that we've mentioned. So an objection could be made to any of those. And here are some main ways of responding that we've seen so far. You might, first of all, object, and a lot of people in the first years of the discussion that the Hiddness argument did object to the premise, the premise, too, of the core argument which says there is non-resistant, non-belief or that there are non-resistant, non-believers. And there were people who were inclined to say, well, how can we be so sure of that? Peter Renningwagen in a session we were at together, he was putting that point to me and saying, yeah, it looks like we could be resistant without even perhaps being aware of it. There could be hidden resistance. And we're human beings, finite, imperfect beings. We're thinking about a perfect, morally demanding God. Shouldn't we expect that people might be a little reluctant to believe in such a God because of all the moral demands that might come with it, that sort of thing? So there could be hidden resistance. So that's sort of an argument. It doesn't have to claim that we know that everybody who seems to be a non-resistant, non-believer really is a resistant, non-believer. But how can we rule it out? How can we be sure that there are non-resistant, non-believers? And even if all we have to say is that we should be in doubt about that premise, that would already put that premise out of action philosophically speaking. So that's one objection or one kind of objection that could make, the hidden resistance objection, we might call it. A second way of objecting to the argument would be with respect to the idea of openness always. The argument says God would, if loving, always be open to personal relationship with finite creatures. And people sometimes get hung up on that word always and say, well, why should we suppose God would always be open? That seems a little extravagant. What if God were temporarily non-open? Or what if that sort of openness to relationship were postponed until the afterlife or something like that? Why should we think that God is any less good or less perfect, less loving and so on? So that would be another way of responding to the argument. And it's a way that has been used, for example, by the philosopher William Wainwright. And then there's a third way. This is the one that has been used most of all. There are many, many examples of this sort of objection to the hiddenness argument. It's now an objection, again, to the first premise, which says if God exists, God's going to see to it that there are no non-resistant, non-believers. On this objection, even if other things being equal, God would always be open. It is other things being equal and things are not equal. In fact, there are special reasons why God might, for a time, not be open to relationship. And they might have something to do specifically with belief and how belief functions, or non-belief. Something having the result that God would, for some time, not be open to relationship. And so there are various reasons that have been put forward. I'll just mention two. They're really broadly of the same kind, a moral kind. Some of the most interesting reasons that have been put forward have been broadly moral. So somebody might say, and this has been said by Michael Murray, for example, and Richard Swinburne, that people who are to be free, and of course the thing that's being valued now, the reason that's being put forward is to do with moral freedom, the value of moral freedom. People who are morally free have to have at least some impulse to do what is wrong, to do bad things. But if everybody believed in God, a perfect being who is in a very good position to punish you if you do something wrong, or maybe to reward you, you don't have to be so negative and emphasize punishment, maybe to reward you when you do well, when you do good. What incentive would there be to do what is wrong? And even if for some people there would still be that incentive, they'd still have a strong desire to do what's wrong, there might also be some people, and we should expect that there would be some people who are so sensitive, so impressionable as it were, that for them, even if not for others, at least for them, it would be hard to do what is wrong, it would be easy to do what is right. And so there's a kind of freedom that's taken away from them, they are no longer free to do what is wrong. So that's a kind of moral freedom argument. And even if it's only for some people for some time, that's all that's needed in order to put the hiddenness argument out of action, that's the claim. There's another, also an interesting way of using moral considerations to try to resist the hiddenness argument. This is a move that was put forward by Andrew Cullison, and he says that there's something peculiarly admirable about somebody who doesn't believe in God doing something self-sacrificial, for example sacrificing one's life. We all admire this when it happens, somebody who has the courage to sacrifice their life for some great noble cause, or to save the life of somebody else. There's something really noble about somebody who doesn't believe in God and has no thought of any kind of reward for this, no thought of an afterlife, the sacrifice just seems to be more impressive. And that's just taken away if everybody believes in God. This kind of move, I kind of like this move because if it works at all, it would have quite a wide effect. It would be good for lots and lots of people perhaps, not to believe in God if this kind of point has any significant force. So that too is a moral reason that might be used to say even if other things being equal, God would be always open to a relationship with finite persons. There are these special reasons why, at least for some time, God might not be. These are some examples. Okay, so we have those three types of objections. Yeah, I think most objections could be mapped into one of those three types.