 Coming up on DTNS Twitch and Reddit, showing the clamp down on speech. Do you care if Apple stops giving you a charger and face swapping gets even better? Yay. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 29th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, cohost of the Star Wars show, Anthony Carboni. Welcome back. It's good to have you, man. Hello. Thanks. Good to be here. How are things? We were just talking with Anthony about pie and also turmeric and lots of other stuff. Turmeric. Yeah. If you want to get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon announced it eliminated all single use plastic packaging in its fulfillment centers in India and said Amazon now uses paper cushions and 100% plastic free biodegradable paper tapes, as well as plastics that are 100% recyclable through locally available channels. Amazon also trying to fight against some warehouse workers that have started strikes in the German cities of Liebsig, Bad Herschfeld, Rheinberg, Verne and Koblenz, with the German labor union Verdi, claiming that Amazon is endangering the lives of coworkers with COVID-19. The union claims a warehouse in Bad Herschfeld saw infections of 30 to 40 workers. Amazon denies the charge with a spokesperson pointing to the $4 billion in COVID related initiatives and approval of measures taken by German health authorities and government officials. Over the weekend, more companies joined the decision to stop advertising on Facebook and other social media. Coca Cola, Hershey, PepsiCo, Starbucks and Denny's all announced they will pause advertising either on Facebook, properties or all social media for at least 30 dates, as have Levi's, Eileen Fisher, Honda and liquor producer Diageo. That's just over the weekend. In an eight one ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a lower court ruling that Uber drivers can have labor issues resolved through the Ontario courts. The ruling opens up the court to hear a pending class action lawsuit, which aims to provide a minimum wage, vacation pay and other such protections under Ontario's Employment Standards Act to Ontario Uber drivers. Microsoft released Windows File Recovery, a command line tool to recover deleted files on local hard drives, USB drives and SD cards. By default, the tools work with Microsoft's NTFS system to locate files using the master file table. But signature mode can also be used to recover files in FAT, XFAT and ReFS file systems. Universal Studios Japan announced it would indefinitely delay opening the Super Nintendo World Expansion at its Osaka amusement park. I know it's because of COVID-19 concerns. Universal Studios Japan reopened June 8th. So it's open with limited capacity and strict safely guidelines, but they were afraid the anticipated attraction would be a health risk because everybody wanted to go. India's Ministry of Electronics and IT announced it banned 59 apps from Chinese firms over public concerns that they, quote, engage in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India and security of state and public order. End quotes. Apps blocked include the by dance owned TikTok. Perhaps you've heard of it. And Hilo, the game clash of Kings, Xiaomi's Mi video call app, UC browser and and club factory. India's largest, third largest e-commerce firm. I'm sure that those bans will stay firm. No one will challenge them at all. And finally, the New York Times announced it exited its partnership with Apple News, with time stories no longer appearing in the Apple News feed. According to Times, C.O.O. Meredith Levin, the publication is reexamining, quote, all of our relationships with the big platforms. All right, let's talk a little more about what Singapore is doing for contact tracing. Oh, let's. Singapore started handing out Bluetooth enabled contact tracing devices that you can clip onto a belt or perhaps drop into a bag that you might be wearing. These are for people who don't use phones. The devices have a nine month battery life. And since there aren't notifications on the device, a contact tracing officer will contact the user if they've been in contact with somebody diagnosed with COVID-19. Data on the clip on devices is encrypted and kept for 25 days if the devices have no internet connection. And then initial device distribution will focus on older people who have little or no family support or perhaps have mobility problems as well. Yeah. So no, these have no internet connection. I honestly think I know they're targeted for people who can't afford phones or like they say, the older population that I just don't want to use phones. But I imagine people who are privacy focused might like this, too. Like all the data is kept on the device, my phone is never connected to the internet. If I don't hand it over to the health officer, nobody gets the data. And it's not that much data anyway, but could be good at convincing people about that. Plus, it's great for geocaching. You can throw like a Pokemon on it and then people would really love it. And like it grows up the more you walk like these are all great ideas, I think. Tamagotchi is coming back. Yeah, the problem here is that Singapore only has a couple million people have downloaded its actual app. It's not nearly enough to really provide the benefits that an app would provide to contact tracing. I know this this move is meant to help fill in some of those gaps. But if you can't get the majority of the population that have phones to download the contact tracing app, that's not going to help because those people won't get counted even when they're near the people with this little Bluetooth device. I guess my question about it is with no internet connection, you know, it's obviously it's obviously taken GPS data and kind of like not GPS. That's important. Yes, so it's not tracking. So it's just if you are near somebody else, right? That OK, an ID gets exchanged. Gosh, so how many times, though? How do I get my data back regularly to the government to let them know that I've been near somebody? Right. So when someone is infected goes in and has their device or app uploaded because they're like, yep, you're definitely infected, they'll find the numbers and say, like, all right, which devices which devices had those numbers? And then it'll either give you a notification on your app or in the case of the devices, get on the phone, I guess, or take a bike over. OK, I got it. Yeah. I mean, that seems I mean, obviously, it's not as it's not as detailed and all encompassing is like true, like app enabled contact tracing. But it's man, that's way better than I think you'd even be able to get most people in America to agree to. Yeah, possibly. Speaking of getting people in America to agree to things, Twitch has suspended the official Trump for President campaign channel for showing what Twitch calls hateful content. The streams in question showed the president's kickoff rally from 2016 and comments from his recent rally in Tulsa. Twitch notes that it does not make exceptions for political or newsworthy content, which Twitter and Facebook do. And not long after Twitch made this decision, Reddit took its first action as a result of a new content policy, which states communities and people that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned. Under that new policy, Reddit has now banned around 2,000 subreddits, including the Donald, which was devoted to fans of the president. That subreddit had previously been placed behind a warning screen for violent content. It had been restricted from having posts show up on the Reddit front page, but it has now been shut down entirely. Frankly, a lot of people had left it already, but it's now gone. CEO Steve Huffman said the community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule breaking content than an average. Antagonized us and other communities and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations when explaining why they got rid of the Donald. Reddit also removed Chapo Trap House, a spin-off of the podcast of the same name and noted that most of the rest of the subreddits that were were suspended or made inactive were already inactive. Only about 200 of the 2,000 had more than 10 daily users. Steve Huffman, go on Chapo. Yeah, explain why he got rid of Chapo Trap House's subreddit. Yeah, I just I I really like seeing a platform, even though it's it's a little late, it took a little time to watch them enforcing their own rules, especially, especially Twitch. It seems like over the last few weeks, its platforms are like, oh, right. People are noticing that we're not doing the things that we say that we're supposed to be doing. Well, and it's a sea change because remember when Ellen Powell was CEO of subreddit or of subreddit, she tried to get subreddits punished for offline behavior and she got wrecked. She got wrecked and she was driven away. And now they're doing a lot of the things that she was trying to implement back then. But it's, you know, for some reason, it's working now. Yeah. Oh, man. Reddit. Why can't imagine how the world's changed that would have made Reddit realize those rules. Well, that's the thing, right? Is is in a relatively short period of time, the world has changed to the point where the company has to deal with stuff like this. And, you know, people are like, this is wrong. You know, the company says, OK, well, based on, you know, our terms and conditions, is this wrong? OK, it is based on what we've said are our terms and conditions. And so, you know, they go forth. Yeah. Good to see. You love to see it back in April, Google announced it was changing its shopping tab in the US to show products from all merchants for free rather than all those merchants who paid for placement. Now, Google announced those free listings will show up in the main Google searches as well. Unpaid shopping results will appear in the Knowledge panel under our product. Paid shopping ads will still appear at the top under the search results page. The change will roll out first to mobile, then to desktop in the US. And Google also plans to expand free listings beyond the US later this year. Since adding its free listings, Google says it's seen a 70 percent increase in clicks across free and paid links. Man, one of the things that I have been disappointed with with Google has not been how they treat Android or or or or things like that. But the fact that their shopping used to be open and useful and then they made it paid and it was not useful anymore. And they finally they're saying it's because of the lockdown and they wanted to be able to provide people more opportunities. It also may be because of all that cash money that Amazon's making during the lockdown. Yeah, piece of I was going to say that's that's such a transformation. When I started, I stopped looking for things on Google that I was shopping for because Amazon would show me the relevant thing. Right. And it happened over a couple of years. I was like, what happened and Amazon was had a more limited set to come from because there was just people selling on Amazon, but it was still more useful because Google restricted to even fewer people because it was only people who would pay for listings and Google's big advantage back in the frugal remember frugal the product was that you could find everything every every listing that was available was out there. And what Google is finally coming back to understanding is rising tide in this case does lift all boats. And if you have more people using your shopping listings, more of them will click on the paid ones too. It's just advert the advertising model and it works really well for shopping. Nothing Google is not going to get in trouble for some kind of gaming of the system at some point. Sure, but but this is definitely them going in the right way to say shopping should have all listings that are there. The knowledge panel should have all the listings and all the stores and then people can pay to show up in the ads so that when you're shopping for this, you'll get an ad that says hey, we also have this too and that works. That actually is how Amazon does it within a smaller subset. So it's weird how becoming a worthless search engine means nobody uses your search engine strange. Right. You think they would have figured that out because they drove out all the other search engines doing exactly that by being the better search engine. A new note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Cuo says Apple will not include a power adapter with the next generation iPhone. Now, Cuo doesn't know this for sure, but Cuo is usually pretty good about these things. So it seems likely Cuo already had predicted that Apple wouldn't include wired earbuds this time around. Cuo thinks the reduction in accessories will offset the increased cost of 5G networking components and allow for smaller packaging, which would reduce Apple's freight cost, meaning that the price will probably stay about the same. He also predicts Apple will introduce a 20 watt charger to buy separately so that you can get a little more oomph when you do charge. Oh, man, people are mad. People are mad about this. It's not even a real announcement and people are very angry. People are very angry about the thing they all hate. No, everyone hates this charger and everyone's mad that it won't be there. But like, can I tell you something? I think about this and I really, when you sent me this story, I was like, let me think about this. Let me actually put myself in the real space of this. I have so many USB chargers that I just I'm in the process of moving and like I had to just a bag like a like a gallon bag of these USB chargers and I was like, I hate how much these things pile up. But if I ever buy something and I open up the box because camera manufacturers started doing this a couple of years ago where they don't include the brick, if I open something up and it doesn't have the brick, I go, these cheap. I can't believe like I don't need it. I don't want it. I'm going to be throwing it away. I just don't like that they cheaped out on me. And that's so irrational, but I get it. You know, it's it's it's funny. I was sort of fighting with some friends earlier today when we were all kicking around the story. You know, they were like, that's unreasonable that you wouldn't, you know, allow a power charger for a phone. And I was like, but I mean, do you have an iPhone? Like how many power chargers do you have? Like USB C is kind of, you know, it's it's the norm. Yeah. And it was like, no, that's not the point. They should give us a power charger. And I was like, I don't need one. When I get a new iPhone, I have, I don't know, like 10 of them scattered around my house. However, if you were to be, I don't know, getting an iPhone for the first time and there was no power charger, that would be, that would be sucky. And the fact that you have to like buy something, you know, that's separate for $50 or whatever it's going to be, that would also suck. So I get that. I just feel like those people are fewer and farther between. Yeah. Yeah. And also what Apple's after here, and this relates to the earbuds too, is wireless. They don't want any ports eventually. I believe those reports that that Apple's ideal phone would have would have no breaks in the surface. It would just be a perfect slab. And they want you to wirelessly charge it, which is getting close to being acceptable. And they want you to use wireless earphones, which are better than they've ever been. So I don't think they'll get rid of the port this time, but that's where they're going with this. It's not so much about these other ancillary costs. I'm sure they that close right about them, but they really just want you to be using wireless stuff and not plugging in wires at all, which honestly, if it works great, I'd be all for. I don't want to have to have a bunch of wires. Do you think this is going to be the reemergence or resurgence of the whatever the Apple charging thing was going to be? Maybe not the same product. But do you think a first party wireless charger is back? Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And and it'll have a new name and it'll have it won't work exactly the same because they couldn't figure out the heating issue. But yeah, I I expect that to be announced with the iPhone this autumn. Let's move to chicken McNuggets. Shall we please McDonald's announced a partnership with the electric vehicle charging network InstaVolt to install car chargers in its parking lots in the UK. The chargers will offer 125 kilowatts of power, letting vehicles get to 80% charge in 20 minutes. Rollout will begin and drive through restaurants were feasible and be built out to new locations as standard at the COP 26 climate summit this year. The UK Prime Minister said the countries would ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035. I love this. I love this. I think one of the one of my biggest issues is I borrowed a buddy's Tesla and I went on a road trip. Tom and I were talking about this and one of the things that bugged me is just there are three places where you can stop. You have to stop for 45 minutes. There's no like it's this is the thing that's keeping electric vehicles from from real adoption. I think as people who are afraid that they can't do long distance driving in them. And if it means that like a corporation has to like take up the mantle where infrastructure won't. I'm fine with that. I'll buy your cheeky nugs while I charge my car. I think that's great. I'll have a milkshake. I'll charge my car. I love you McDonald's. I think it's wonderful. Yeah, I mean the more this happens the better especially because McDonald's tends to be on the motorway. So it's a long whatever drive you're taking in the UK. And so if it will now suddenly make more charging stops available of course that means that you're definitely going to be more likely to go in and spend some money at McDonald's. So that makes sense that they would want to do this. And I think once they start proving that point you'll see other chains and maybe even local restaurants and services providing this sort of thing. In fact, I mean gas stations you think like oh gas stations are going to go to about a business if there's no more gas cars but they all have convenience stores and restaurants in them anyway. They just need to put some some chargers in the car park there by the gas station and slowly phase out the tanks they'd be fine. Yeah. Now do they say that this these will be free charging stations or is this going to be like McDonald's Wi-Fi where it's like go in buy a burger charge your car for free as long as you buy something made clear. Good question. Yeah. Yeah. If they're smart it will be free but you know or at least free with purchase right free with free to customers right in other words you have to be in the restaurant hanging out eating buying something. Yeah, I think that's probably the way that they will do it. Hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Alright folks, scientists from Disney Research and ETH Zurich. Yes, I said Disney Research and ETH Zurich published a paper on a neural network based method for swapping faces in photos and videos. That's not new. Now I'm sorry Tom you did say Disney Research right? Yes. Okay, I'll be back in three minutes. Disney Research and ETH Zurich published a paper on a neural network based method for swapping faces in photos and videos and at HD resolution so that it could be used in film and TV. The researchers intended it to be used for things like changing the age of an actor replacing the face of a stunt double or portraying a dead actor. The that's the purpose of this also the improvement of this over existing is not only do they say it's better at what it does but it can be done at HD resolution. They can be done at a higher definition resolution that can be used in TV and film. It's also something where any face can be swapped with any other. So once it's in the data set and it's been trained on a face you can just swap it with anything and it includes a compositing step that accounts for contrast and lighting and they attribute the improved effect to that they're able to make sure that it looks like it's in the same location as the place the face that they're swapping it for. Example videos are from a small sample set so it remains to be seen how well this will work in practice especially since all the people in the demo video are white so we don't know if they have faces surprising so well. It's just easy facial wreck all facial recognition. They always showed it's like a hundred identical white dudes. It's like look at our facial recognition. Look how good we are at this. Oh shoot. Data set really bad at this notoriously biased because of the data set that they're chosen. So we don't know that they don't have a more diverse data set. They just didn't show it to us in their demo video. Sure. However when put side by side with deep fakes deep face lab and nerken three big open source models out there the older models did look obviously fake like I remember when that deep fake algorithm came out and everybody's like oh my gosh this is going to ruin everything you can't tell it's fake put it next to this one and suddenly you're like oh that looks so fake right and that's always the way as soon as you get the new thing the old things you start to more obviously see our fake and of course there is always the questions of you know how it's going to be used outside of its intended use case. They wanted to be used in movies and TV but it could also be used to fabricate things that didn't happen etc etc. Of course I mean but that's that's the thing right as Adobe showed something a couple years ago where you they were able to take anything you record and turn it to anybody else's voice as long as they had voice samples and that sort of thing has been used in movies and games and stuff like that before too. The trick is like I think the trick long term is like do we try to hamper the technology because it's going to happen or do we see the technology coming and try to build like some smart common sense regulations against it because I'll say this in in in argument for this technology corridor digital has been doing a lot of face swap stuff and deep fake stuff and one of the things they did was they go they went back to like the Scorpion King you remember the Scorpion King with the rock notoriously bad compositing notoriously bad CG. They did a deep fake over it and it looked a hundred times better and they were able to do it quickly with a single computer and so I get why this is good for the entertainment industry like I understand it you think about all the de-aging and face swapping they've been doing and things like Marvel movies and stuff. I get it. I'm terrified. I get it. Well and anybody who watched the Irishman knows that face swapping isn't the end of it right. It's you can have the best face swapping in the world and granted if Marty Scorsese had access to this maybe the Irishman would have been easier to make. But the problems there were the movements of the actors were still the movements of a person of the age of the actor. Yes. So we haven't fixed all the problems. This is only good for some things. Robert Downey Jr. is sitting silently or not even silently but quietly without moving a lot. It's really easy to de-age him. It's it's not as easy to get the movements to work exactly the same. So this doesn't even fix all the problems in movie and TV but it but it is impressive and I can't reiterate enough that it shows that every advanced looks like it's unassailable until the next advanced right. Yeah like this this made the other deep fakes look really bad. Well and we all get used to it too. Like the human mind is like the human brain is so good at like filtering this stuff out where like as soon as we we learn the same way machine learning learns right like we learn by seeing patterns after I saw the first couple of these of these deep fake videos on YouTube and I want to reiterate only on YouTube. That's the only place I ever saw deep fake videos. OK. That's what I check my search history. You'll see. So the only place I after I saw the first couple I was like oh I now know how to tell when one of these is a deep fake. I can see I can tell by the pixels. I have a lot of experience with chopping you know and that's the way it works. Exactly. Also I want to be quick to correct. I said all the people in the demo video are white. Most of the people in the demo video are white. There are a few exceptions. So I want to give them credit for that. But I want to to that point I want to see this in wider application. I want to see that this works on a lot of different situations. A lot of scenarios a lot of different kinds of people a lot of different ages of people and and yet what they've got. It's pretty impressive. So I'll give them credit for that. Speaking of impressive everybody in our Discord has the best stories you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. What do we got in the mailbag Sarah? Oh Tom I'm glad you asked. Paul the systems architect had had some feedback of our story from last week about Tiktok and clipboard monitoring and what it all means. Paul says as a developer my guess is that Tiktok was using clipboard monitoring to detect automation of text input somebody could use copy and paste to speed up making posts. However, probably wasn't that useful thus the quick removal of the feature. If I was spamming I would probably use a quality assurance automation tool to script my posting. So a better way to detect spam would just be to detect the speed of user inputs then you could catch copy and paste and automation tools. Listen tells me so much about Tiktok because I'm going to believe that they weren't trying to store your passwords off of your footboard. I'm not my love Tiktok. There's no reason look there's no reason Tiktok wants your passwords. No they want your metadata so they can track you and serve better advertisements maybe but I believe even if this is exactly what Tiktok says which is we weren't storing any of this information and I feel like Paul's right that this was probably some kind of spammy text input detection. It shows me that Tiktok doesn't have the people who are in charge of public facing effects communicating with their development team and their development teams like yeah this thing doesn't work that great but why what's the harm leave it in you know it doesn't cause an overhead. Sarah is doing a shimmy over there though. Why would you shimmy in about Sarah. Man the more I learned about Tiktok the more I'm like I love it and it is very frightening. I spent so much time on it. I was going to say I think the concern about Tiktok amongst this panel is definitely proportional to the amount of time spent on Tiktok. Oh but Tom there's so many good Tiktoks though. Oh God I don't post Tiktoks but Lord I can sit. Oh yeah two little hot dogs talking about wearing pants. Oh God I had. Listen folks when you get in your 50s you'll understand you just don't have as much time. Yeah he's got whittling projects to do. That's right. Oh man speaking of whittling projects some of our favorite people are our patrons at our master and grand master levels including Degracier Daniels Tony Glass and Steve Ayadarola. Also very big thanks to Anthony Carboni for being with us today. Anthony it's been too long. I know you're very busy and we'd like to know where we can keep up with your work. Sure so I'm on the Star Wars show which is youtube.com slash Star Wars Star Wars dot com. I've got a podcast with Jeff Canada another oldster almost as old as Tom maybe older and that's that we have concerns dot com and then I stream quite a bit at twitch.tv slash Anthony Carboni. I'm getting a text Jeff Canada saying I am not nearly as old as Tom. That's how I know that you're lying is because Jeff cannot know how to text yet. That's how you know you're old. When you start arguing about who's older. Folks yes go check out all those things he just mentioned especially we have concerns this week because I'll be in the anxiety chamber along with Anthony and Jeff that was super fun. I can't wait. Oh my gosh it was great to have you and yeah if you are a if you're a patron you're going to get that episode tomorrow along with a little bonus episode a little bonus interview with Tom so go check that out at patreon dot com slash we have concerns. Well speaking of patron you can support this show at patreon as well daily tech news show dot com slash patreon and if you need a mask but you don't have one or you want another one we've got them and they have a DTS logo on your face so when people start talking to you they'll just be fascinated by the DTS logo and stop and then go away. 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