 Coming up on DTNS, Patrick Norton helps us understand the importance of the subwoofer plus 3D printing nuclear parts and why Nevada wants to let tech companies be governments. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 5th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. They're on the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And the host of AVXL Patrick Norton is back on the show. How's it going, Patrick? I'm sitting in a Penske truck about to drive to St. Louis. Woo! Woo! Indeed. Very nice. We were just talking with Patrick about the joys of discovering the technical difficulties of doing fun things with your friends. Something that your children are learning right now. If you want that conversation and more, get 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. Xiaomi's latest concept phone has a quad-curved waterfall display, meaning deep 88-degree waterfall curves on all four sides, not just the left and right, with no ports or buttons. Because where would you put them? Xiaomi says this will enable a true port-free unibody design, although promotional imagery shows that the phone's corners are still blank with small rounded cutouts. As Xiaomi Rep tells the Verge, this concept phone actually does exist and they've used it themselves. Google de-listed and will proactively disable the popular Chrome extension. The great suspender, we were just talking about it in an email earlier this week. Version 7.1.8 contains an exploit that could let remote code run without a user's knowledge. Google also released an update to Chrome 88. Chrome 88's update has a fix for a heap overflow memory corruption bug being exploited in the wild. The timing and nature of the bug have led many to assume this was the exploit used by a North Korean group to attack security researchers. All users are advised to update Chrome immediately. Ford's committed to invest an additional $7 billion on autonomous vehicles and $15 billion on electric vehicle development through 2025, building off an existing $7 billion spent on electric vehicles since 2016. Ford said the majority of vehicles it plans to produce will be battery electric, but will make some hybrid and plug-in hybrid models too. Google has launched Google News Showcase in Australia. News Showcase pays participating news outlets a set monthly fee to feature their content prominently in Google News. Gives them a lot of whistles and bells and it's very beneficial for everybody. It's available in Google News for Android, iOS, the web and the Discover app on iOS. Google is probably using this paid service as leverage as you know the company has threatened to stop operating altogether in Australia if a law on paying for all links to news is passed and so the drama continues. Rohit Konsal, principal secretary of the Jammu and Kashmir government in India, said Friday that 4G internet services were being restored in the entire region. This comes 18 months after a blackout was imposed to curb the spread of potential backlash over New Delhi's decision to revoke Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in August of 2019. It has been a while. Jammu and Kashmir are home to more than 13 million people. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about transparency when you buy a laptop. Oh yes, NVIDIA now requires any company selling a laptop with an RTX 30 chip inside to disclose specific clock speed stats and total graphics power on product pages. Companies will no longer need to mention Max-Q, that's sometimes used as a shortcut for performance. Specs are on top again. NVIDIA says that Max-Q is now solely used to communicate efficiency features like whisper mode 2, dynamic boost 2 and advanced optimus and is therefore optional. Patrick, does this surprise and delight you? At this point, I reserve judgment until seeing how irritating it all gets in the end. How's that for a non? Well, yeah, answered. In theory, you want more information. I mean, that's what it sounds like this is going for and that's good for the consumer. It's always good to have more information. Everybody I want information from won't make it easy for me to get it and everybody who I don't want to give information to seems to be working on ways to make it harder for me to keep it out of their hands, but doing it with language that expresses it in a way that it makes it sound like they're preserving my privacy while they're beginning more invasive. Mostly I'm just really bitter and angry about all this right now. Well, I think this is overall a good thing because instead of having to go like, does it say Max-Q? Well, I guess if it says Max-Q, it must have at least this much performance. Just give me the performance. Just tell me like, here's the clock speed and Nvidia kind of pushing the laptop makers to say, put this on your online product pages. I don't see a downside to that. No, I don't know. It's also, I also, I'd like to apologize to everyone listening to DTNS right now because I had to extract myself from a political conversation that I didn't want to be in just before the show. So I'm a little distracted. I think I'm just, I'm frustrated by the laptops right now have been such a hot mess in the last two or three years. Literally because you have, I literally had $3,000 premium laptops with top-to-line processors that were underperforming machines that cost a third as much because the cooling was so messed up. So yes, I think they do need to disclose stats, need to disclose drivers. I've been incredibly frustrated lately with laptop manufacturers and all-in-one manufacturers doing a single driver release and then having things like my personal favorite. If you update to any of the newer drivers from Nvidia or anybody else, you end up having your entire system glitch every two seconds and hiccup. I spent three weeks helping somebody diagnose that. I'm really frustrated with the lack of, yeah, I mean it's, I think it's good and I think people need to specify and I think also laptop manufacturers in many cases need to do a better job with support after they've sold you the laptop. But yeah, I'll stop. This doesn't solve all of Patrick's problems, but you know, at least it's one step. Ah, one of America's greatest resources are proposals to amend section 230 of the CDA. If we could somehow mine them for power generation, we would solve the climate problem. CDA section 230, aka Safe Harbor, is complicated. In fact, we have an entire episode of Know a Little More about this. If you want the details, I also interviewed a couple of experts about this recently, including Mike Maznick from TechDirt. But the short version is it prevents any website, including your own website, from being sued because of what someone posted in your comments. It's become a political football of late, with repealing it seen as a way to somehow punish only Facebook and Twitter and such. There are already exceptions to section 230. Some of them were written in at the beginning. Some of them were added over time. There's an exception for intellectual property. More recently, Cesta Fosta, an exception for advertising sex work. Three U.S. senators have submitted a new set of exceptions called the Safe Tech Bill. Under this bill, any site, including yours, would no longer be immune from liability for comments posted by users if they are alleged violations of federal or state civil rights laws, antitrust laws, cyberstocking laws, human rights laws, or civil actions regarding a wrongful death. So you would have to police the comments from your users about those things. The bill would also eliminate immunity for liability for any comments that are paid for. So think marketplace listings or promoted tweets is kind of what they're targeting there. It also would amend the main section of 230 to change the word information to the word speech. That would narrow liability protection for all sites, including yours, to only be protected from content considered speech, not the broader term information. So for example, if a user were to post information about an illegal drugs or a gun sale, you as the site operator would be liable for that, not the person who posted it. This bill is no more likely than others to become law, but it will certainly contribute to the conversation as it attempts to shift the focus onto human rights violations. Oh boy, a lot of backlash. You mentioned Mike Maznick from TechDirt. He wrote something today about 230 calling it a dumpster fire of cluelessness. That sounds like Mike. That effectively wipes out protections for the entire internet while pretending it's just a minor change. So yeah, people have all sorts of different feelings about who should be liable in the sense. And I think Tom pointing out that, sure, I don't run Facebook. I don't work at Twitter. How much does this really affect me? They'll figure it out. They got a legal team, right? Well, what about my own site? What if somebody comments on something that I blogged about, like not even that recently, and it gets found and I'm not super up on going into my CMS and checking things out every minute and I get into hot water or some sort of advertisement where I'm just, you know, there's just a space on a site, any kind of site that is rotating series of ads. And you don't know what ad is going to show up there. I mean, you might be able to give, you know, a Google ad or some sort of similar ad supplier a little bit of information about what kind of content that you put out there so that it's somewhat related. But you have no control over that. It gets really messy really fast. I'm just looking forward to Facebook policing everything on Facebook. I think that's such a manageable thing and will completely change. At the risk of getting dangerously close to a political statement, it is interesting that many of the people who refuse to believe the internet could be successful if it was regulated through the evils of net neutrality are now basically saying, we need to regulate the speeches with the 230. And I'm thinking of a particular family member who was explaining how the internet works to me recently. This is just, this is, know what, I don't think anyone's thinking smart. I think, you know, dumpster fire that will kill the internet is, I don't quite get that quote right, but I like the quote you had, Sarah. Honestly, I think it's probably not likely to kill the internet mostly because I don't think it'll become a law. We're a little far away from having consensus about what the reform should actually look like. And that may keep any reform from happening. At least that's my hope. But I do look at this and I'm like, okay, but yeah, you know who benefits from this? Actually Facebook and Twitter, because they have lawyers who can, they can afford to pay to defend them when they get it wrong. They have enough money to at least try to do the moderation, the extra moderation that this would require. But I've already, because of GDPR and other things, just turned off comments at DailyTechNewsShow.com because I just don't want to bother having to try to police the requirements that are made on me. Now granted, most people don't run a website. Most people just comment on Facebook and Twitter. So this doesn't affect most people. But I imagine there's more people in our audience than the normal audience that do have a domain name and run a blog on their own domain name out there. And it does affect you too. If you miss the comments or you miss another feature that gets turned off because of the way regulation has changed, congratulations, you're being impacted by this, even if you're not running a business. But I agree with you. Facebook will use weasel words and lawyers and staggering amounts of cash to do whatever it is they feel like doing for as long as possible until they can hire enough Congress people to write a new law that they like better, just like the telephone companies. Well, here's another non-controversial subject, ad tracking. Yay! So much fun. Everybody loves it. Like going to Disneyland. A few items to tell you about in the world of ad tracking, specifically around Apple's App Tracking Transparency Plan. Apple's plan forces developers to ask the user if they agree to be tracked or not. If a user says no, the identifier for advertisers code or IDFA, you probably see that being written and thrown around quite a bit, it is disabled and that prevents developers from accessing it and then tracking users outside their own app. Most in the advertising industry oppose this plan because they assume most users will choose not to be tracked. If you give them a choice, they say, yeah, I don't want to be tracked and that would lower their ad revenues. Bloomberg sources say Google is working on an alternative to Apple's plan for androids, maybe something similar, maybe a few rules different. Google's plan appears to offer more opt-outs along with less invasive alternatives to some tracking technologies. For instance, on Chrome, Google's phasing out third party tracking cookies but providing advertisers tools that target similar groups of users instead of individuals. We already talked about Facebook taking out full-page ads and threatening to file antitrust lawsuits against Apple. On earnings calls on Thursday, Snap told investors that Apple's plan carries a risk of interruption to demand for ads on Snap. And Unity Software warned it may affect how mobile game developers can acquire new customers and optimize value. Harvard Business Review posted an article earlier this week criticizing Facebook for being misleading in its campaign against Apple app tracking transparency among the critiques are that Facebook's claim of a 60% drop in revenue from ad spends for small businesses has no details and doesn't match randomized controlled trials. So Harvard Business Review saying, okay, Facebook's being very dramatic here. But it does sound like, you know, depending on the developer, Apple does have some fights ahead of it. Yeah, the argument against Apple is people, if you ask people, do they want to be tracked, they'll say no. And to which I say, well, then maybe you shouldn't track them if they don't want to be tracked. I mean, I know that that doesn't give them the answer they want, but we make so much money tracking people. Why would you want to fix that? Why? Well, that's the thing. It's like, yeah, should users have this option? Unless it's specifically your company that now gets fewer data points that you had before, everyone's going to be like, yeah, why wouldn't you give a user that choice? Some of them won't care. But if you care, you should be able to say I'd like to not be tracked, please. And I know it's easy for me to say, because I'm not the one who's losing the money that will happen when people say no to tracking. And I don't want to minimize it. It will have an impact on business. But in the end, does that mean we say, well, let's keep tracking people into agreeing to be tracked when they would otherwise not want to be tracked? Or does it mean we actually have to create a way of delivering advertising that we convince people is worth it? And granted, I know that's a really tall order as well and maybe unfair, but it comes down to like, if I have to choose between should people have the choice to be tracked or not? Or should they be, you know, tricked into being tracked? I'll choose letting them not be tracked if it's a fair choice, which to me, it looks like it is. Hey, folks, join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can do by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Oh, Patrick Norton, we are glad you're here today because if I were to be somebody shopping for a new home, we're always glad to have you, but specifically today, because I'm kind of in the market for what we're about to talk about. When you shop for home theaters, you see a lot of information about subwoofers. You might kind of know what a subwoofer is, but maybe there are a lot of choices and you want to know which way to go. They have different sizes, they have different power. Where do you put them in your house? Is there a right or a wrong way to use a subwoofer? But why do you really need a subwoofer at all if you've got nice, powerful speakers? How do you pick up one? Where do you put it? So Patrick, let's start at the beginning. What is the beauty of the subwoofer and why does it change at theater? Okay, so it works for subwoofers work, not just for home theater, but also for music. I think they became super, super popular, especially in the last year, because so many people, they're not going to movies, they're staying at home, they're improving their home entertainment system, they're improving their home theater. Subwoofers specifically cover subbase and the lower base. So from 20 Hertz or even lower, particularly frighteningly powerful subwoofers, but generally speaking, we think of subbase as like 20 Hertz to 60 Hertz and base goes from like 60 Hertz to 250 Hertz. Now as much as everyone out there is thinking like, my goodness, what a marvelous range of stats. When you think about instruments, the low A on the piano is I want to say 27 Hertz, the low E on a guitar, I always get this one wrong, low E on the guitar is like 31 Hertz, a sub, a base flat tuba is at the lowest note on a B flat tuba is like 31 Hertz. Music kind of, most musical instruments, except for some really, really big organs in Europe, they stop pretty much around 27, 30 Hertz. That's like most of the instruments we listen to. Things change when you get into EDM music and some electronic music, whether they have synthetic sounds that are really big, or if you're into a particular type of organ music from four organs in Europe, then you might want these incredibly low notes. But generally speaking from music, if you got like 30 Hertz, you know, up to 11,000 Hertz, you have almost all the music we listen to and I'm making this more complicated than it needs to be because people want, do you like the feel of a kick drum when you're listening to a band? Yes. Do you want to feel the explosions when something crazy happens in your action movie? Yes. Do you want the booty shaking bass when somebody's really hammering things out on a dance track? Absolutely. Okay, so that's like a lot of what that is, is a bass and sub bass. And the sub bass is something that doesn't happen a whole lot. I mean, most speakers now, especially smaller speakers like bookshelf speakers, you know, they'll say like 40 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz, which is great, except that what happens actually is it usually starts falling off around 100 Hertz. And it drops, it's a little softer around 80 Hertz, and it gets softer, a lot softer by like 50 Hertz. And you can probably just almost hear the 30 Hertz notes, those really no notes. But what a sub buffer does is it takes over the low end frequencies usually from about 100 Hertz down to as low as the subwoofer will go. And that became a really huge deal in movie or in home theaters, because people like to have the impact of crashes and action movies and stuff. And it became a big deal for people who love listening to music, because you could have smaller speakers that aren't as demanding in terms of location or they don't just dominate your room. I think you and I have talked about the joys of having tower speakers in an apartment where, you know, if you shove them up against the wall, suddenly the bass gets bloated and sounds weird, or there's too much bass. And if you pull them away from the wall, so they sound better, then they're in the middle of the room. And if the dog knocks them over, or either where you want to sit. So by moving the bass frequencies over to a subwoofer, you can actually have the full range of music or have the full range of the soundtrack of the movie or television you're listening to, but without having to have two massive speakers. If that makes sense. Yeah, I, I don't know. I am a, I'm a subwoofer fan myself. I also just, it doesn't matter. I mean, any system where I have the option to crank up bass in my car, you know, my wireless earbuds, all that stuff, I always do. I just think it sounds better. It's richer to me. But yeah, when it comes to a really nice subwoofer in, in a, yeah, home theater environment or something for music, I mean, it makes a huge difference. Not everybody wants it though. And what, what do you think Patrick is the lowest you would spend to get something that's still really high quality? Okay. I have audio issues. The least expensive subwoofers I've seen that are probably worth the money or around a couple hundred bucks. It gets, it's, it's challenging because subwoofers, subwoofer design has gotten a lot better in the last decade. And when I say design, I mean the actual, the engineering and the speakers and using digital signal processing and figuring out better enclosures. Because traditionally, a subwoofer is a really, really, really big box with like a 12 or 15 inch driver in it. And you can see subwoofers that are a small, I think Roger's got one with like an eight inch driver in it. That eight inch driver is probably good down to about 50 Hertz. But there's still a whole lot of sound below that you might want to get. The biggest challenge when you're shopping for one is, is figuring out like where to put it and how to connect it to the system you have if you don't already have a subwoofer. Yeah. Cause it doesn't come in a soundbar unless you buy a soundbar that comes with a subwoofer, right? It's got to be a separate thing. Yeah. Well, so there's, there's, when you look at a, if you have a set of speakers and you're thinking, you know, gosh, I could use more bass from these speakers. Like you have a, you know, set of smaller bookshelf speakers. The first thing you can do is try to move them back towards the wall. And sometimes that'll give them more bass. It'll sort of increase the amount of bass that comes off of it. Sometimes it'll just make the bass sound really bloated. And the worst case of bloated would be like the 16 year old with the beat up car, with the hood, the trunk lid that's rattling every time the bass note hits in the song. That's like, yeah. I mean, it's awesome, but it's terrible. So you don't want bass to sound like that at home. You want a powerful enough amplifier and a big enough speaker to move enough air to get those big low notes. Those are really long frequencies. They require a lot of kind of power to create. The thing is, is you kind of start with your budget, $150 or $200 gets you pretty good entry level subwoofer from Dayton. And that's a company a lot of people probably haven't heard of. They're usually sold through Parts Express. Brent Butterworth, who writes for the Wirecutter, is kind of probably tested more subwoofers than anybody else on the planet. And he's actually a good place to look at when you're looking at subwoofer recommendations. But you kind of have to, you know, the bigger the room, the more subwoofer you need or you need to do add an additional subwoofer. For example, I went from a very, very small upstairs home theater where one little tenant subwoofer was more than enough to kind of energize the room and really feel the impacts and the crashes. Our home theater is now located in a basement that is approximately, you know, four times the size. And the subwoofer I had will no longer actually make us, we can't feel the bass anymore because there's, it can't fill the space with the sound. So subwoofers do the lowest frequencies. You want to basically, you either have like an AVR, your home theater receiver usually has an LFR, a low frequency output that'll plug directly into the subwoofer. If you don't, or if you have like a regular stereo amplifier, most subwoofers have the ability to basically, you can run the speaker wire to the subwoofer and then from the subwoofer to the speaker and the subwoofer will basically parts, you know, snatch out the audio frequencies it needs to do the low end of the music. That also gives you some help with frequencies. So real quickly, the Las Vegas Review Journal obtained the draft of Nevada Governor Steve Sysilak's plan for innovation zones meant to attract tech companies in blockchain, autonomous technology, internet of things, robotics, artificial intelligence, wireless technology, biometrics, renewable resource technology, please add other buzzwords I've forgotten. Under the proposal, a company's innovation zone could be given the authority to run government functions like schools, courts, imposing local taxes. To qualify as an innovation zone, a company needs to have 50,000 acres of uninhabited, undeveloped land within a single county, separate from any other governmental agency like a city or a utility district, have $250 million on hand and plan to invest an additional $1 billion over 10 years. Qualified innovation zones could then create a three-member board of supervisors that would carry the same powers as county commissioners, separate from the county, but reporting to the state legislature in exchange, the company's pay an industry-specific tax. Blockchain's LLC owns 67,000 acres of qualifying land in Story County, Nevada, and has been donating heavily to political action committees and was called out by the governor in the proposal. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of states where you'd be like, uh, who's got that much land that isn't inhabited at all? Nevada, one of those states. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of companies wouldn't qualify for this, but interesting idea. Yeah, yeah, indeed. Real quickly, tell us about the 3D printed nuclear part. Okay, scientists at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute have 3D printed a safety valve with sufficient resistance to be usable in a nuclear reactor. The team printed three separate parts and used five-axis CNC machining to create a 30-kilogram faucet with complex internal cooling channels, meeting Class 1 safety specs for withstanding exposure to radiation. The chemical and volume control system is used to relieve core pressure, and there's a shortage of safety critical parts like it. Yeah, 3D printing. Crazy, crazy, crazy cool. People in our Discord, we're talking about this, if you want to chat a little more about that, good, good reason to get in the Discord. All right, let's check out the mailbag. So, Sakane wrote in, we were talking about Amazon drivers yesterday and, you know, should they be surveilled by the company more than they already are? Sakane says, I used to be an Amazon logistic driver. He was also a FedEx and UPS driver, so lots of history there. And Sakane had an insider reaction to Amazon's in-truck surveillance system meant to increase safety. That's what the company says it'll do. He says, this is the problem that the company is trying to correct, but they're doing so by not addressing the root causes, which are negligent lack of proper safety training and a computer-generated schedule that requires drivers to make as many as 30 deliveries per hour. At that pace, the few extra seconds it takes to do things like put on a seat belt, apply a parking brake, or even check to see if the path is clear when backing out of a parking area, all liabilities. Amazon prioritizes the schedule over safety, which is reinforced when you get constant calls every time you're running more than a few minutes behind. Sakane sees this solution as ultimately penalizing the drivers for trying to do their job. Yeah, that's a blessing for the inside. Yeah, it's certainly an issue. If you have some on-hand experience of anything that we talk about, you think we should know a little more, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails, questions, comments, always appreciated. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. Today, they include Steve Aya Derola, Chris Allen, and Mike Akins. Let's see what Len Peralta has been drawing this episode. Len, what you got? I am down with subwoofers. I have not had any sort of a home theater without a subwoofer. If you don't have one, what are you waiting for? It's only like 200 bucks. It gives some really, really great sound. The only thing about it is it scares my animals. It scares my dog. That's where this came from. It's called subwoof. The dog gets really crazy with this subwoofer rumbling and everything else. That's the only problem, but otherwise, go and get your subwoofer. It's a great addition to your system. If you're interested in getting this print, you can do so at my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com where I am doing Valentine's Day images for people. Don't have anything for you, honey? Order those Valentine's, folks. Get them in there. Yep, exactly. Thank you. Len, good stuff as always. Also, thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us today, helping us understand the subwoofer market. Patrick, where can people keep up with the rest of your work? Well, I'll try not to be a grumpy old man. You can check that out at avxcel.com, which is a home theater and audio podcast I host with Robert Herron. Hey, folks, you want DTNS as a video podcast? Easy. Get the video RSS feed. It's at dailytechnewshow.com slash subscribe. We are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Love to have you if you can make it and we'll be back on Monday with Patrick Peja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.