 and how to find the mysterious Utah monolith using Google Earth. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 25, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, way north of the monolith, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were talking a little bit about that monolith just now, as well as the mysterious smoker on Sarah's property. If you want to unravel both mysteries, go get that wider show. Good day, Internet. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The US FCC rejected ZTE's petition to remove its designation as a national security threat. This means that the FCC's Universal Service Fund can't be used to buy equipment and services from ZTE. That fund is used to subsidize building telecommunications infrastructure in underserved areas. Companies are allowed to spend their own money to buy ZTE equipment, however. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts better than expected demand for the iPhone 12 Pro models offsetting some weaker than expected demand for the 12 and 12 mini. Kuo also sees evidence that Apple will redesign the form factors, the look different for the Apple Watch and MacBooks in the second half of 2021. Kuo also estimates AirPods sales will fall 5 to 10% in the next six months and that the next version of the AirPods will be delayed a little until the April-June quarter. You know, I find a lot of people say that they like the mini. I guess they're still in the minority. Square announced that it's buying Credit Karma's tax unit for $50 million in cash. Credit Karma tax provides a free do-it-yourself tax filing service and will be incorporated into Square's cash app unit. This follows the Justice Department requiring that into it to sell Credit Karma's tax business in order to clear into its purchase of Credit Karma for $7.1 billion. Google is planning a fiber optic connection called Blue Rahman from India to Europe that would directly connect Saudi Arabia and Israel for the first time. Oman telecommunications and telecom Italia are reportedly helping to finance the route. Google still needs approval from the Saudi government, among other regulatory sign-offs, but it's more likely than ever because the U.S. has brokered some historic recognition of Israel by UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, and Israel's Prime Minister apparently met with the Saudi Crown Prince Sunday, at least according to two Saudi government advisers. The Wall Street Journal sources say that Salesforce has been in recent talks to buy Slack technologies. Slack is currently valued at $17 billion, and this could represent Salesforce's largest acquisition ever, still in talks. All right, let's talk a little more about why you're always picking up your cell phones. Scott, some scientists did some studies. That's good because I've been wondering what the heck I'm doing. A study of smartphone use by the London School of Economics and Political Science found that 89% of phone interactions were unprompted while the remaining 11% were because of notifications. So some people just picking up the phone to look at it. 37%, sorry, 37 participants in the study in the U.K., Germany, and France wore cameras to record their phone interactions. Users spent less time on their phone when they were home with other people, and the most time when in public transport trains, that sort of stuff. The study indicates more research is needed about why people interact with their phones and how. That's fascinating. The common sense is that it's all those notifications. You get barraged with your notifications. Just turn off your notifications and it'll reduce your screen time, apparently not. To me, this entire thing mimics my COVID lockdown time. My time from March until now has been marked with these moments of me going, why am I looking at my phone again? What am I doing here? I don't need to be in here and not because of some notification. I still get those, but it's usually maybe you on Slack or it's somebody out of my mom trying to get a hold of me or something like that, and I'll respond to those. But most of the time, it's just me going, the world's weird. I'm kind of tired. And I think TikTok will take my mind off of it. And it's a lot of those interactions, way more than before March for me. So more study is needed, obviously, but I'm really curious about how this all pans out if they talk to more people around the world. I'm a minimal notification person. In fact, there are lots of apps that will send me a notification every once in a while. Or I'm like, what? How did I not turn that off in settings already? And I go in and, no, you don't need to ping me about this sort of thing. I will come to you if I want to. But I have found, and we've talked about this on the show before, because, you know, the whole smartphone, mobile phone, you know, mobile device, anything that is easy on the go is just not something I need all that often. I mean, sure, if I'm at the dog park, I might look at my phone and just make sure I'm not missing anything, but I don't really go anywhere. So when I'm at home, the phone's always near me, you know, and it's what rings, but then, you know, my laptop rings too on FaceTime. I'm using my laptop almost exclusively, even something like TikTok. I look at my For You page on my laptop, because I'm like, there's just more area, and it's easier to type, and all my messages are there anyway, and there are very few things that I can't do on my laptop that I feel like I want to do on a regular basis. And I don't think that that's just, oh, because I, you know, I don't leave the house anymore. I am now just so less used to being on the go, being in transit, for example. You know, someone is standing on the subway for 45 minutes, yeah, you're gonna be looking at your phone. I'm now, I'm so not used to it, that now I'm sort of like, eh, eh, I don't look at that. It's just a smaller version of my computer. I don't do notifications. I very much limit notifications myself, but I still use my phone a lot. So I think what the study is showing is that people don't realize when they're picking up their phone. They're picking it up absentmindedly. In fact, a few study participants were kind of shocked when they looked at the video and like, I don't remember doing that. I don't remember picking up the phone. I don't remember why I did it. There's been some other studies that show that psychologically when the phone is in the room with you, even if you're not looking at it, you think about it. It reduces your attention level on other things because it's kind of pulling at you. So this is another study in those planks of what effects phones are having on our mental state. The word addiction gets thrown around a lot and I'm not sure if it's exactly appropriate or not because it carries a whole lot of clinical meanings that are complex, but there's certainly a pull to having that phone there. And this is another study that shows that. France has decided not to wait for a worldwide agreement on tax treatment of tech companies and will proceed unilaterally. Tech companies legally record income in parts of Europe where they have headquarters with lower tax burdens, such as Ireland. France wants to take a cut of that revenue by imposing a 3% tax based on where sales are made rather than where revenue is recorded. French tax authorities have started to send tax bills to collect the new digital services tax. This is starting a dispute with the United States. Essentially, the United States has been saying, all right, we get your concern, but let's figure this out. And France is saying, we can't wait anymore. And I don't know exactly why President Macron is saying we can't wait anymore. Obviously there's a financial crunch on all countries right now and maybe that's all it is. He's like, we just need the money. We can't wait around. It could also be a way to try to push some leverage to get the global deal done faster. We'll see if that's the case or not. But if you don't understand what's going on, it's essentially a way to get tax people for what's happening in their country. I mean, that's what Sarah just said, but to put it in another way, if I operate in France, but I had my headquarters in Ireland, I could take all the money I make from selling things to people in France and transfer it to my Ireland division and then I'd pay tax under Ireland and say, well, I didn't make any money in France. I transferred it all to Ireland and that's legal. That's not illegal. That is the way Europe set up the tax code. They're following the law. A lot of people start to treat this as if they're doing something illegal. They're not. They're doing something that is absolutely within the design and what France is trying to say is, well, let's change the design. I want to put a tax on sales made in my country. Whether you transfer the revenue or not, let's change the law. That's what you should do when you think a law isn't working, right? Just change the law. Let's tax the sale in the country. The problem is the US companies are most likely to be affected by that. So the US is objected and say, hold on, before you just started punishing our companies, let's figure out a way to make this fair for everybody. And France agreed to put it off for a while, but I guess their patience ran out. It's easy for... I mean, I barely understand her own tax code, so I don't have a lot to add here, but I did want to say this. It's easy for us to want to say, well, there's a big transition coming to the US government this January and we're about to get a new president. Do you think that has any effect on when other countries decide to go ahead and pull stuff like this? Not pull stuff like this. Obviously, it's taken into consideration for sure. Yeah, I'm not sure what effect they think that will have, whether they want to put some pressure on the Biden in the coming Biden administration, whether they think they could get a last-minute deal out of the Trump administration. I don't know. Yeah, that's, again, very unknowledgeable in this area, but it does feel like every time anything happens on a big world stage, I'm like, wow, it's because of this election, you know, but I'm sure I'm not right. It's always more complex than just that, but you're not wrong that it's part of it. Sure. Let's talk about underwater scooters. What? Web. Yes. The next web has a write-up of the Genino S2 underwater scooter. It's a backpack-sized device with two propellers. So sort of a half quadcopter, except the propellers are one on each side of the main body and instead of being pointed down like in a quadcopter, they're pointed backwards. So they propel you forward. You hold on to the device with one hand on each of the posts to connect the main body with the propeller. You got the propellers to the right or left of your hand and then you kind of get propelled through the water. It can keep you going for up to 45 minutes on a charge and cost $399. Now, the S2 is the more consumer-friendly version of the S1 model. It's also been refined and the battery made more efficient, et cetera, and it includes a Bluetooth connection for remote control, which I think will make it more family-friendly if your children are using it. You could make it surface or something. CTO, Dr. Wang Shengwei, has told the next web they came up with the idea when someone had taken one of Genino's underwater drones, which was built for exploration and started tooling around in the water with it. Now, that's a pretty good idea. Maybe we should make one that does that on purpose. They originally built the S1 for marine professionals, serious divers doing exploratory work either for industrial or science uses, but they decided to widen the market when they made the S2. So this one is for more recreational uses, still probably diving uses, but the company says they do plan to make another version for the swimming pool use. So if you're just in a big old pool of your own, I assume, not a crowded one, you could tool around in the deep end. I mean, if I had a pool, I would totally do this. It makes pretty good sense. And that price isn't too bad. Basically, we're describing a thing as a kid that I would have thought was science fiction we'd never get to be able to do outside of some really expensive scenario out in the middle of the ocean. And what you're telling me is I can have a submarine in my own pool. I mean, what's not to like about this? We're just going really fast, right? In the past, it was like, I don't know. I had to be a mermaid or wear like really great fins to be able to go faster than I could swim. And even then, it's like, how much faster are you really going? This would be quite a bit faster. I wonder if you're in a small pool, you sort of like in circles, but is a pool where I live now pretty big pool? I think people could have a lot of fun. And you're not going far enough that you can't come up for air every once in a while. You know, the whole idea of like being able to go under the water for 45 minutes, well, you need air under there with you unless you're doing some sort of like a hybrid snorkel type thing, which I guess is possible as well. But, but yeah, people are going to have some fun with this. I think there's like a, there's a small piece of all of us who had to, you know, grow up on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday watching Jacques Cousteau do something on TV. And we all thought, oh, that guy's cool. We should do this one day. There's a little taste of that, you know? And if you're somebody who has to have all those kinds of toys, you got a couple of ATVs, maybe a jet ski in the garage. What's a extra flotation underwater device going to cost? No big deal. There's a technical achievement here too that we should note. They had to really experiment with the power versus efficiency of the battery and the propellers. They wanted it to make it fast enough that it was worth doing that you'd be like, okay, I'm going faster than I could swim on my own, but not so fast that it ate up the battery in two minutes. So they did a lot of work to kind of balance that out, make the motors efficient, make the propellers efficient. And so they could make this be a backpack-sized device. Battery is small enough that you can bring it on a plane. It's like a laptop-sized battery, so it's not huge. Hey, folks, if you want to join in the conversation in our Discord, you could start sharing your tips on underwater scooter use right there. Join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D-T-O-M-S. The Verge's Tom Warren notes that despite the Xbox Series X having more powerful hardware, the PS5 has been outperforming it, particularly in frame rate. This is according to benchmarks from Digital Foundry. In Devil May Cry 5, high frame rate modes above 40 frames per second ran better on PS5. Assassin's Creed Valhalla showed screen tearing and regular dips below 60 frames per second on the Series X, ran smoother on the PS5. For Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, the Xbox falls behind in 120 frames per second mode, although it does hold at 60 FPS in some scenes with ray tracing where the PS5 fell to 40 FPS. On Dirt 5, the PS5 showed better texture filtering and little higher average resolution overall and performance mode dipped below 120 frames per second more often on Xbox. Codemaster promised to fix already for this with indications this is a software problem and therefore a fixable problem. In fact, Digital Foundry editor Richard Ledbetter suspects an API limitation that's on the Xbox side. Microsoft started taking submissions for Series X certification back in June after an update to its game developers kit and developers had access to PS5 dev kits a lot earlier than that. So that might factor into this bit. Microsoft also says it's actively working with its partners to identify and resolve the issues to ensure an optimal experience. Well, as you may wonder or guess, I spent a lot of time thinking about what this might mean. So I ended up getting my hands on an Xbox Series X. PlayStation 5's have been a little more elusive given less stock availability, but also Xboxes are hard to get to for that matter. And I've had a really impressive experience so far with the Xbox, but the more I've thought about it in light of this news, most of that has been first-party stuff. So really super-enhanced versions of Gears 5, for example. I'm not sure I've seen a better-looking video game in my life. It's unbelievably beautiful, performs really well, but it's first-party. Third-party engine, though, and Unreal, which leads me to think this API thing is probably indeed the problem. And thankfully, that's a thing that you can fix with software. But this is interesting. Microsoft's come into this generation with all guns blazing and a really strong value proposition for players, and it basically said, look, we've all been asking when's Netflix for video games coming? Well, we think we have it now. So come pay us $15 a month, have access to all of this stuff, or even just buy your console that way and pay us $25 a month. Pay it off over two years and pay no interest. And I've got all these ideas to make the experience a more valuable per-dollar sort of experience for players. Whereas Sony's kind of holding the line saying, well, we're gonna do what we always do. Lots of good exclusives. But games are gonna be 79 bucks, and that's up from the 59 they used to be, and this sort of thing, or 69 for average ones. Anyway, the point is of all this discussion, Microsoft's had a bunch of wins in a row, and Sony has had limited stock. They've had some problems with some bricked consoles, although, you know, who knows? That always happens. You're always gonna have some trouble at first. But some notable problems they've had with some notable people out there. And so my thinking was, oh, no, this isn't looking good for Sony. They're already kind of having to fight against this new business model that Microsoft's presenting. And now this has flipped a little bit. It's now, you know, we're having to reckon with this idea that the Xbox, which was reportedly more powerful, and it is by the numbers, isn't producing with those same third-party games the way the PlayStation is. So even if you can fix it, the hearts and minds of gamers matter in this very competitive space. So I don't know how quickly they can do it or what they should do, but Microsoft really should get on that and get that fixed ASAP, because this kind of stuff, even if it's minor or temporary, tends to permeate the game sphere. And before you know it, players are picking sides and painting their faces and deciding who's gonna kill Piggy. So you gotta be careful. Yeah, if people don't realize, the Xbox Series X is capable of 12 teraflops of GPU performance. And the PS5 does 10.28 teraflops. So by the numbers, the Xbox is more powerful. Maybe not that much more powerful. It all depends on how it's used. And that's the point here. And I think Scott, the fact that you're having a good experience with Microsoft's first-party games shows that, hey, those folks inside the company that may have had a little earlier access to the dev kits did better than the folks who didn't get it till June and are still trying to work through bugs and issues. That's just the way anybody out there in software development knows. That's just the way it works. The more time you have to quash bugs, the better performance you'll get. And this really does seem to be an API or some kind of software issue, which means it's fixable, which means by next summer, we might not even be talking about this. We may have forgotten all about it. Yeah, maybe even sooner. The other thing too is this is basically the exact same conversation that many of us were having back in 2005 and six when the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 were the new consoles in town and the conversation was flipped. People were having better development and technical experiences on the 360 at the time, especially at launch. This evened out later in the generation, but PlayStation 3, not so much. They had a really difficult program for custom chip architecture. There were other factors at play, but some of the same results. You get the exact same third-party game and it just ran better on the 360 despite the fact that Sony's claims and actual technical specs looked like it should run better over there, but it just didn't. And some of that stuff just had to be worked out over time. This might even be faster because we're just talking about custom PCs here, basically the architecture. So I think it will be sooner than later that this sort of thing gets figured out. But what a crazy... I love this part of the video game industry. I love talking about it. And I hope people don't get too up in arms about their Coke versus Pepsi kind of arguments because it's actually more fun to see how these companies respond, how they choose to compete, how they choose to answer one another's successes and failures. And this is a chance for Microsoft to say, hey, look, we're on it. We'll fix it. We're good to go. Well, side note, we mentioned yesterday that it might be hard for Scott to get that PS5 because they're out of stock. The official PlayStation account tweeted today, though, our Wednesday, rather. Well, that is today. The more PS5 emittertory will be coming to retailers before the end of the year. Please stay in touch with your local retailers. So the holidays may be saved after all. It's Wednesday for us. We don't know what it is for you. It's true. Yeah. Could be next Wednesday. Don't even ask. Security researchers Montas, Sasnazkas, James Clee, and Rony Carter, working with CyberNews.com, discovered a backdoor vulnerability in routers under the brand JetStream, which is sold by Walmart and WaveLink, sold on Amazon and eBay. Winstar's technology makes these routers. The backdoor can be accessed remotely. It's not a physical access backdoor. This is one that they can get to from the internet and you don't want to keep your router off the internet or else why have a router? So this appears to be actively exploited as well. This is not a theoretical vulnerability. It's being exploited by the Marai Botnet. Who knows what else? And there does not appear to be a firmware fix in the works for it. So if you have a JetStream or WaveLink router or you might want to check and see of any router that you have is made by Winstar's technology, don't use it. Take it off the internet right now because there's no way to safely use it at the moment. Well, this is one of those things where sometimes the cheap model isn't the right model. I hate to say that because I don't want to say that. You get what you pay for situation, right? Yeah. And routers, we think of them as just like, well, it's like getting a fridge. It'll just work. Plug in the fridge. It'll freeze. It'll make things cold. And you're right. But sometimes you realize, oh, wait, there is a hierarchy of quality here and we've gotten on the ground floor. In this case, a very insecure floor and that's unfortunate. Yeah, and your head could go to all kinds of places of like, oh, was this done on purpose? Do they know about it? Sure, maybe. I don't know. More likely, it's just incompetence. It's just a company that's trying to sell things really cheap to make money and therefore they don't spend money developing their product. And that means they end up not having a good firmware pushing system and not having good software bug squashing. So just be careful when you're buying cheap stuff. We're headed into one of the biggest shopping days in the United States here in a couple of days and you're going to see a lot of deals. Make sure you're buying reliable things, especially when you're buying electronics. Spread the word. Yep. Well, how about this one? Bit of a head scratcher. On Tuesday, the Utah Department of Public Safety published a photo of a 10 to 12 foot steel object found on November 18th in an inaccessible canyon in the Utah desert. The department found no obvious indication of how it got there. The location is also so remote. It hasn't been published for fear that someone would get stranded and need to be rescued if they went out there and tried to find it because there's nothing out there. However, Reddit user Tim Slain found satellite images on Google Earth of something in the middle of a small redstone canyon that was casting a tall narrow shadow. The object is visible in Google Earth photos starting in October 2016. So may have been there for the last four years or so. Slain says he used cross-referencing skills he developed by playing the game GeoGuessr. Yeah, GeoGuessr was the part that really hooked me with the story. I mean, yes, 2001 Space Odyssey references also hooked me, but I love that first of all, never tell anyone you can't find something by not publishing the address because Reddit and Google Earth exist and somebody like Tim Slain is gonna find it. And there's a game that he plays called GeoGuessr that trains you to find things based on just what you could see on the photo. Like he's been training his, well, not his whole life, but he's been training for a while for this very moment. Yeah, as someone who's having this happen in his backyard, well, my state's backyard, it's been a real treat just to be involved and be here and have everybody be excited about a thing that's so weird. And I love it, but don't go down there looking for it. I've been in that place. I've been in that area and it's awesome and nature is like a overpowering thing there and you will get lost and have to eat your own foot. So don't go. Oh, gosh, right. I found yesterday in particular, it was crossing all of my, you know, all my feeds, all my circles were like, what do you think it is? And I was like, okay, you know, call me naive. I haven't been to this particular part of Utah, but if folks going over in a low-lying helicopter were able to see it, then someone could have gone over in a helicopter in order to drop it in the past. It doesn't have to be an alien. You think someone would see a helicopter carrying a big monolith flying out of the desert, but maybe not and you're right. If you can get there somehow to see it, there obviously has to be a way to get there and put it there. Even if they drove an altering vehicle out there and just covered up their tracks, I mean, it's very clear from the photos Slain found that in August 2015, there were scrub brush there and in October 2016, that brush has all been cleared. So, yeah, somebody was out there and cleared the brush and set up the monolith and took off and you're in the middle of nowhere. So it's easy. Can you imagine, you know, so October 2016, you're like, all right, we did it. Let's see. And the years keep going by and it's like, no one's gonna notice it. No one's ever gonna notice it. And then finally, you know, someone's like, wait a second, what's this big metal thing doing out here? Yeah, the long con on this thing is strong and I have to mass respect for whoever pulled it off. But yeah, it'll be, it's one of those things unless somebody comes forward and says, yeah, that was me. We'll still be talking about it around here anyway for the next couple of years. I highly suspect that the person or persons and it probably took more than one that did this enjoyed that it hadn't been found. They might be disappointed. There might have been like the secret pleasure was like, we put this thing out there and nobody knows. Yeah. Maybe they had bets about how long it would take someone lost. Yeah. Well, we haven't lost because we get your emails and we read them on the show right now. We do. This one comes from Kevin. Kevin says, we've been talking about kind of, you know, smart home life hacks all week. Kevin said, I used to have issues with my Echo being too loud at night and then too quiet in the morning. My solution was to make it part of a routine. So at night, I say, it's time to relax. This triggers a few smart lights to turn off but it also turns the volume down on my living room Echo Dot to two down in the morning. When I say good morning, it turns the volume back up to four. It might not be the best solution, but it's worked for me. Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving. Oh, that's that's clever. I think I kind of knew you could do this, but maybe I'm just lazy. I didn't. I did not know that I could I could set volume as part of a routine because that actually helps me a lot. Oh, big time. I'll total. I'm doing this today. This is fantastic to learn. It makes sense that it seems like basic functionality. I think about it, but I didn't know I did that. Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Keep in coming everybody. If you've got got a life hack for us or a question or a comment or something on your mind, anything, send it to feedback at daily tech news show dot com. And thanks to everybody who sends us emails on the regular. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Paul Thieson, Kevin and Paul Boyer today. Thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us. We missed you Scott last week. Hope you had a nice vacation. What's going on in your world? Well, I was down in the south part of the state, not very far from where the monolith interesting. That's convenient. Yeah, that was weird. And Veronica Belmont was there the week before. So I'm not doing it. I'm just saying, you know, just get that conspiracy out of your heads now. But anyway, it was I did miss you guys. That was one part. I did not like about my Wednesday away. So it's great to be back for now though. I'd like to just point people to my comic strip. I do every week called Fred and can it's about a guy named Fred Lizard, the sentient can of expired cream corn. And they're talking about Thanksgiving, the last couple of issues. I just put one up yesterday and I think people will like it and enjoy it. And truly it is a great example of their relationship. So check it out. Fred and can dot com. And if you're trying to poke me in public, you can find me over it on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Hey patrons, it's that time of year. We're going to be sending out a holiday card again. So you want to make sure you have your mailing address available for us to be able to see you give us permission to send you a thing and then we'll send you a holiday card. So make sure you get in there and do that. There's also all kinds of other benefits to be in a patron. Add free RSS feed. It can have just DTNS or just good day internet or both. Check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS GDI or all. And if you want to change just change tiers at daily tech news show dot com slash Patreon. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 UTC find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. That said we are off Thursday and Friday for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. So we'll see you all back here on Monday. Have a good one. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.