 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Eric Holm, Carmine Bailey and Vince Power. Coming up on DTNS, computer vision comes for the baseball empires, what ocean thermal energy conversion can do for island power, and Microsoft brings blue check marks to everyone! This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 31st, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And coming from your barbecue backyard, big Chris Ashley. And in for Roger Chang, technical producer Amos. Hey, Roger finally got some time off, well deserved. Enjoy it Roger, good to have you Chris. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon sent an email to customers advising it will end support for its cloud cam security camera on December 2nd. Amazon will provide a free blink mini camera as a replacement with cloud cam key addition that lets customers get a free fourth gen echo to connect to smart locks. BT and Ericsson have partnered to offer private 5G networks to businesses in the UK. They've already installed private networks across 35 acres of port facilities in Belfast Harbor in Northern Ireland. So this is going to be expanding this to the rest of the UK. These networks will limit connectivity to designated devices in specific spaces. This is an enterprise thing, so it has uses for healthcare, manufacturing, transport and logistics, and shopping centers even. GamesIndustry.biz and Tweakers.net both say they've learned that Blizzard will not release its free to play Diablo Immortal in Belgium or the Netherlands as both countries have laws against loot boxes. Diablo Immortal offers legendary crests in the game for free, but also for purchase. The crests offer items with random attributes. If you come for the king of supercomputers, you best have a lot of AMD processors apparently. The Frontier supercomputer is the new number one, topping 1.102 exoflops, making it the first officially recognized exascale computer and putting it right at the top of the latest official top 500 list. Frontier is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee using 74 HPE Cray EX cabinets, 9472 AMD EPIC CPUs and 37888 AMD GPUs. AMD doing well on supercomputers right now. Five of the top 10 supercomputers in the world use AMD chips. Japan's Fugaki is now number two and Finland's Lumie is now number three. Foxconn told investors at its annual shareholder meeting that is quite confident in the stability of its supply chain in the second half of this year. Foxconn also says it believes it can become the first electric vehicle maker not short on material supplies. That is a statement. Foxconn will boost its EV chip capacity and it also warned that revenue in its electronics business will slip this quarter due to inflation, COVID-19 lockdowns in China and declining demand. I'm a big fan of the Albuquerque isotopes minor league baseball team because they're called the Albuquerque isotopes. And their hat looks like it's straight out of a Simpsons episode, but we have more technology baseball news, Sarah. Yeah, we do. And it's not every day I can explain baseball to anybody who doesn't really understand the game. But here we go. Baseball is testing automated calling of balls and strikes at its highest minor league level. So this isn't the major leagues. It's minor leagues. If you're not familiar with baseball, a human umpire stands behind the batter and the catcher and says whether a ball was hittable or not. If it was hittable and it wasn't hit, it's a strike. If it wasn't hittable, it's a ball. Three strikes and you're out. Four balls in, you get to go to first base. Balls and strikes are defined by the width of home plate and the area between the batter's knees and their belly. So this is the sort of thing you might say right for automation. But baseball is pretty traditional. They've been doing stuff the same way for quite some time. In fact, Ulysses S. Grant was president back in 1876 when the current national league was founded. Not a whole lot has changed some things, but not everything. So it resists change in general. Hence the long road of testing in minor leagues to see how this technology might affect games before even considering adding it to the majors. How does it work? Well, the automated ball strike system or ABS requires about eight high speed cameras and hundreds of receivers to be installed in the park. Optimal tracking software called Hawkeye, which is also used in tennis for line judging, triangulates the position of the ball from the multiple cameras. Each batter's height must be entered into the system for it to work on individual players. But there are also humans involved and ABS operator sits in the stands to monitor performance. Actual calls are automatically sent to a human umpires earpiece where they make the typical call baseball fans are used to. The Pacific Coast League began testing it on May 17th. So we have automated umpires in the minor leagues, not the major leagues, but you won't notice unless you know what's happening because you still got a human umpire sitting back there. And I think this is an excellent example, even if you don't like sports at all of how to use algorithms, machine learning, computer vision in this case in order to assist rather than replace. So the human is the redundant system here. If the ABS falls out, doesn't work, you still got an umpire looking at things. The umpire is also making other calls, whether there was catchers interference or whether a batter attempted to swing because if you swing, that's also a strike. Those kinds of things still require human interaction, but you've got this very static strike zone that computer vision has gotten good enough to be at least as good as human umpires at. Why not use that so it's consistent? The only complaint I've seen about this is players saying, you know, the strike zone used to vary from umpire to umpire and you'd kind of get used to that and I missed that. It's like, but really, if it always started standard, you probably want it to be standard. Pretty objective. Yeah. You know, the one thing that baseball has added, and I don't exactly remember what year this was added, but when, you know, the pitcher throws the ball, you see the ball, you know, they've got the little trail going into the strike zone. So it's pretty obvious when something, you know, if you're, I don't know, unless you're, you have a really great trained eye, pretty obvious when you go like, was that a ball or a strike? It's pretty obvious, but still the umpire is calling that whether or not the rest of us think, you know, it was pretty obvious that is still, you know, it goes back to the human. But it kind of, it feels like this is probably the right call. Ha ha. No pun intended just to say, let's try this in the minor leagues. Let's see how it goes. You know, are there weird repercussions that nobody had thought of before? Do umpires really need to be there forever? Because for now, yeah, I'm sure you got the umpire, but I would think in the future, you know, especially Tom, you mentioned, you know, little issues that only an umpire might be able to see. You know, cameras can see that probably better in the future, but you know, we're not quite there yet. Yeah, I mean, there are there are things that are judgment calls that I think are less likely to be replaced, right? Um, was there catcher's interference is not an example. The catcher's interference could be caught by a computer because it's whether the catcher's glove got in the way of a bat, whether a batsman was hit or not. It goes to to video review all the time to determine like, okay, was he really hit or not? Let's look and computer vision could happen with could do that. Whether a batter went around or not, whether they attempted to swing kind of a it's kind of a judgment call. There isn't like an objective way to determine this. Yeah, there was a camera like on home plate that, you know, was looking up to see. Even then, though, it's a threshold that the umpires are often judging intention as much as where and that's something I don't know that a computer would ever really be able to do. I like the fact that they did keep the catcher, um, the umpire, excuse me, in place as a means to kind of smooth out the transition into using the system. I think that was very smart. The other part of it is just that, you know, at first I wanted to hate on it. But the reality is like, you know, we're testing exoskeleton systems for our military so they can carry heavy heavier objects or even in the warehouse. So to me, it's much of the same thing, right? It's just it's a system designed to help you do your job better. As long as it's fast enough to not interfere with the game. Honestly, you should reduce the amount of fights, I guess, when you think about it, because no one's going to come kick the umpire when the ball of strike is called like it. You can just point at the system like, hey, I'm going to go run up in the stands and kick the servers. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You're going to see the future equivalent of Billy Martin throwing servers down onto the field because they're angry at balls and strikes. Now imagine the sports betting world being able to hack the system. Oh my God. I mean, that would be awesome. That is the next concern, right? Like can this thing be hacked? It is not necessary for this to be online, but I imagine it is so that it can feed out its data elsewhere, you know, for analysis and all that sort of thing. And so as soon as you put something online, it's hackable. And that would be interesting. But again, that's why it's good that you still have that human umpire because if suddenly it's calling everything strikes and the umpire is like, hold on a minute, that definitely was not a strike. Well, let me, let me, you know, there should be a system for that for the umpire to say, I think something's up with the system. Can we double check it? Unless that umpire is the weatherman and he reads what he hears. I mean, I don't like the idea of a game not being fair, but I would like to see the game where like, I don't know, a batter gets hit and it's like strike. You're like, hmm, something's wrong with this computer system. Has it been hacked? Yeah. Right. And I also love that as an observer, as Kelly 2909 pointing out, even the automated zone isn't 100%. You're, you as a viewer might have some, some different opinions on stuff. And so with the umpire making the calls, you're never really going to know it's there. Like it'll just look the same as any other game. I'll tell you the one thing that surprised me is it didn't require sensors on each player, right? Because you would think, you know, a sensor on the knees and then a sensor on the knees would kind of help, you know, rain that. Tighten that up. Yeah. But it also depends on the stance, right? Yeah. Because everyone's got that. Well, yeah, because they're having to put in the height of each batter and then it doesn't matter what the stance is. It's just going based on the, on the height, which is interesting. I imagine future uniforms will have a QR code like dots on them. So it'll be easy to do. A scan, please. Okay. Go ahead. Good luck. Well, moving from baseball to the great oceans. Professor Rosalind Archer of Australia's Griffith University has an article in the conversation, evaluating a way to generate power from the ocean's temperature called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion or OTEC. The idea is to exploit the difference between the depths and the surface of the ocean. Not a new idea, but development is getting refined and it may have uses for island communities. Tom, I know you're a fan of island communities. So how does this work? I would like to live on one someday. Yes. And I have a heat pump, which kind of has a similar way of working. Usually one of these OTEC systems would work by using a liquid with a low boiling point like ammonia, so that you don't have to actually boil water to make it work. You use something like ammonia. The ammonia would run through a closed loop. At one end, warm seawater and a heat exchanger turn the ammonia into vapor, which then spins a turbine to generate electricity. Cold seawater is then brought up from around 600 meters down and a heat exchanger turns that vapor back into the ammonia liquid by cooling it way down and the whole thing keeps cycling through the pipe. Unlike wind or solar, this would always be available because the ocean is always there and even at night the top is a little warmer than down at the bottom. The question is, how practical is this to make? Doesn't sound very practical just yet. So we've got a pilot plant from Mackay Ocean Engineering built back in 2015, generating 100 kilowatts, which is equivalent to one wind turbine. To be useful though, it needs to be 100 megawatts. Yeah, to do that, the pipe is going to have to go a kilometer down into the water about twice as far as it goes now. It would have to be 10 meters in diameter, so a big old pipe. And the plant would have to be a lot bigger than it is now, so it can pump all that seawater through the system. That's expensive to build, especially if you want it to withstand water corrosion. Seawater is very corrosive, hold up during a cyclone when the wind is whipping around and causing the sea to whip around. And you'd need about 12 of those sized plants in order to cover the state of Hawaii's needs. That's going to be expensive. Yeah, and current power is just more expensive on islands. That's just the way it is. Island communities have to ship in diesel for power generation, that sort of thing. So O-TEC plants might be able to compete if they can make this work. Yeah, it might not work for the mainland where power is a little cheaper, but like you said, island power a little more expensive. However, Professor Archer herself, who wrote this article on the conversation, kind of came out at the end of the article and like, I really think geothermal is a better bet because you can do geothermal pretty cheap on islands and that would be an economically better way to generate power on islands. But she pointed out that O-TEC might still prove useful in some cases. There's apparently two resorts in French Polynesia using it for air conditioning. They pump up the cold seawater and use the cold to cool things down. It could also be used to produce hydrogen as an export, which could be a moneymaker for islands. And there are even ways to use cold seawater to raise cold water fish or cool surface waters during a heat wave for warm water fish farming. So there are other reasons to develop the technology that then could lead to maybe practical supplemental electricity generation as well. I'm all for any type of technology that helps to move things forward and get us more to renewable energies and stuff like that. But this one does sound kind of crazy. It's actually not crazy to think, oh, there's a differential in temperature. If we could take advantage of that with the ammonia, like I get that. But then when you get to the point where they're like, yeah, but the difference isn't efficient enough. You waste a lot of the heat and the operation of this thing and that's why you can't quite make it cost effective. Like a farm of these that are reaching down into the ocean to get cold enough and then to bring it back up. I don't know. I haven't a solar. Did you get these guys? You skipped solar? Yeah, and they do solar. You don't want ammonia as a vapor that then goes back into water, Chris. I mean, this is pretty cool. It never leaves the pipe. The ammonia stays in the pipe. Now, granted, there might be a leak and all of that, but there's dangers in any kind of power generation in that respect. What if somebody's cleaning the pipe and accidentally drops some comment in there? No one's going to be able to breathe. Don't clean the pipe. Just leave that pipe dirty. Just leave that pipe filthy. Yeah. Solar has its own challenges on islands. Not that you can't use it, but it can be expensive to get out there and set up and all of that. So, you know, the panels are a little more expensive. But yeah, I think it's like any of these things. It's never one solution. You should be doing solar. You should be doing wind where it makes sense. And you should be exploring this and exploring geothermal, like they said, to figure out how to use it. The idea that this might be able to make an island self-sufficient. I love that, yeah. Especially if it was used supplementary to solar and wind and geothermal. That's great, because then you don't have to worry about shipping diesel over there. And it could, even if it's just cost parity, that's great, but it might even bring the cost down. Yeah, for real. Hey, folks, if you have a thought about this, do you live on an island? I know some of you do. And I'm sure you've got thoughts about this. Send it to us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com We have a few Microsoft stories to mention today. First, Microsoft shared mitigation measures for a pretty bad zero-day flaw in Microsoft Office. This is the flaw you might have seen in the Microsoft Windows support diagnostic tool. It's going under the name Felina. It executes arbitrary code when you're previewing Word documents. So there's definitions to keep the kind of malware that takes advantage of it out in Defender. But if you just want to make sure that even if that malware gets on there, I can't take advantage of it, Microsoft recommends disabling the MSDT URL protocol by updating a registry key. We'll have the bleeping computer link that gives you that registry key, or you can just search for F-O-L-L-I-N-A and you can probably get it that way. You can re-enable that key after a patch is issued and Microsoft is working on a patch. Subsecurity researchers also advise disabling the preview pane and Windows Explorer as well, because that might be another way malware can get at you. That's the bad news, though. Chris, what's the good news? Well, a retail listing on Never in Korea showed specs for the forthcoming Surface laptop go-to. It has an 11th gen Intel CPU with pre-order set to open June 2. So we may get an official announcement soon and then there's another thing. Yes, Microsoft was talking to protocol.com about something called Entra Verified ID. Entra is the new Microsoft word for all of their identification products. Verified ID is kind of like blue check marks for the world. It uses a blockchain backend to provide a very difficult to alter record of proof of things like what school did you graduate from and then you could easily add that to a digital wallet. So it's supposed to work like this. Let's say you're going for a job interview company asks you for proof of your education. Instead of having to get a transcript from the school and have it mailed to you and then you mail it to the company, you could just approve a request from that company in your wallet and the wallet would then contact the university which could grant a signed credential backed up by the blockchain which the user could then pass on to the company. The same system could be used to grant a doctor access to health records. For instance, if you're going to a specialist instead of jumping through all the HIPAA hoops, you could approve it as the person who's like, yes, you can see my records. The idea is to make it easy to verify things about you but hard for people to commit fraud and pretend to be you. But Chris, how are you going to get companies on board doing this? Well, Microsoft at least hopes to get organizations to use it along with existing methods. So you wouldn't replace anything with it right away. Just get people used to the easiness of it. The National Health Services is using it for staff to move easily between organizations. Keo University is using it for student enrollments and transcripts. And Clear is a partner as well. What do you think, Sarah? Verified ID for everything is a big promise. I like the idea here. I do too. I think that from what I understand, this is stuff that if I say, hey, I went to San Francisco State University and this is the year I graduated. And that is verifiable. That is just going to give me that sort of blue check mark for the world in certain situations. I don't know what anyone's ever going to ask me about that sort of information. But yeah, if I was going in a job interview for a new job, that might be something that comes up. Certainly something, when you think about the clear airport access aspect to it, I go, oh, okay. Yeah, that makes it a little bit even more sense. Well, and Clear wants to do more than just airports, right? They want to do stadium entry and all kinds of other identification entries. So the mind starts to boggle, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, having your IDs, those situations still pretty important, at least when we were talking about airports. Yeah, I like the idea of this, like, yeah, this is, she's who she says she is. She's verified in these aspects and it's in her records. I love this. I think this is, I hope this takes off quickly and expansively. And I'll give you a couple of examples of why. First off, one of the things that I absolutely despise doing is going to my doctors and filling out a packet of information. Can't stand it. So imagine being able to go there and in that process, you can just, you know, they can request a certain amount of information and then you can approve it and all of that relevant information and insurance card, driver's license address, all that stuff, the relevant stuff that they need for their particular interaction is automatically approved to them. You don't got to touch a pen or a piece of paper. Love that. Yeah. And I love that you are the person in control of this, right? Exactly, right. A lot of times when you're like, please send my transcript to this company. You never see the policy again. This way you know, like, okay, it's definitely coming from the university. Definitely giving it to the right person. Definitely only showing them the parts they asked for. You get more control over what they see in this system, which reminds me of Inrupt's solid, which is trying to do the same for just general online identification as well. I like that we're starting to see more examples of let's make a containerized version of verifying your identity that you are in control of. It's not somewhere out in the cloud. It's you managing who gets to see what information. Exactly. I mean, just imagine just from person to person being able to use the system like those two, right? Yeah, sure. You're going to go buy a part or, you know, something on eBay or something and, you know, they're like, oh, I'm right next door to you. I can sell it to you now. And you're like, something doesn't sound right. Let me verify your ID through the system. Oh, yeah, you're not who you say you are. You know what I mean? Things like that where you can just add more trust to these online transactions. Love that idea. You know, the part of the system is an attestation that occurs, which is a verification. You know, attestation is super important in the corporate world as far as IT is concerned because they need to do things like groups and look at groups and say, not only does this group still need to exist, but the members of the group is accurate. So not only does this information need to exist for this particular requestor, but the information is absolutely accurate. I love everything about this. Yeah. I mean, and that's essentially what Microsoft did. They're like, well, we have to do attestation for all this Azure stuff we do. Let's just do it for everybody. Love it. Love it. I hope this blows because, you know, Mary, I, you know, when they announced that Maryland got the driver's license on wallet for Apple, I immediately added to my phone and I tried to add it to the phone during the show and I was just like, uh, uh, uh. Let me just do it after the show. But yeah, obviously there's nowhere for me to use it yet, but I so look forward to not handing over my driver's license or anything physical and only giving people information that they need. You need to know it's me. You don't need to know my address, my date of birth, my weight, you know, you don't need to know all that stuff. You know what I mean? You just need to know I'm me. That's it. Am I old enough to buy that bottle of vodka? That's right. Right. Let's not have a conversation about how young I look today. Appreciate that. Well, I don't talk about baseball on the show very often. I also don't speak French on the show very often, but today's neither of those days. France's L'Académie Francais has officially banned English terms like streamer and cloud gaming. Just for government work is not for everybody, but for government work is official stuff. This is according to Jean's France Press or the AFP. So going forward, terms like joyeux animateur on direct instead of streamer and je video and new age instead of cloud gaming must be used for any official government communication. France's Ministry of Culture told the AFP it's concerned that English terms could become a barrier to understanding for non gamers. France has a history of this. The Ministry of Culture also expressed concern about English jargon and gaming. In 2017 published a lexicon of alternate French terms, none of them really stuck. I mean, when I'm in Paris, I say Wi-Fi instead of Wi-Fi, but otherwise, you know. Not if you're a government worker, you know. Not if you're a government worker, which I'm not, but yeah, this is, you know, the France being France. And if anybody doesn't realize, the Academy of the French language has existed for centuries and its job is to protect the French language from being invaded. That's why they say ordinateur, not computer, officially in France. So it's very French. It's a French thing. And it's one of the reasons that English is the language that gets picked up and used because it's an adaptable language that nobody is in charge of. So you can use it wherever you want. Whereas France tries to keep French under control, which I also respect. I know that this is their job and they're just doing their job. But I don't know. When I see articles like this, what I tend to do is I look at the justification that's put forth as to why they're doing it. And I just can't help every time I read this line, which is, you know, we want to make sure that non-gamers understand the word, understand what's meant when you're talking about a streamer. And I'm like, if you're a non-gamer, do you really care what a streamer is in a French language? How are you going to learn, Chris? Well, I guess I'll have to, you know, learn the French term to make sure I reference it properly. Yeah, imagine just a non, I don't know, a technical French person being like streamers, what, like a birthday party? What could you possibly be talking about? You've probably heard the term. Just gonna say. Well, that's a really good point. A French speaker might not know what streamer means as far as birthday party streamers, but would probably know it refers to video game streamers because it's kind of out there. Or they wouldn't have had to remove it from the lexicon, right, if it wasn't used that often. And the other side of that is I guarantee you anybody that's a gamer out and out there knows what a streamer is for sure, because that's one of the biggest rising populations when it comes to gaming, right? You know, you have games like that Bungie puts out. They care as much as about the community, which is built up of the streamers and their particular fans as much as the game itself. Soccer blue. Alright, let's check out the mailbag. Sorry, Patrick Beja. Martin had thoughts on recent story we talked about on Instagram supporting NFTs. Martin said, I'm a developer for a digital agency for the past month. I've been having to get immersed in Web 3 to create point of views for future campaigns and to educate clients. So I've been looking at all this crypto from a corporate creator's perspective. I heard the news about Instagram. There was something that popped out to me. Every transaction is public in a blockchain. The only privacy is that the accounts are some long, weird key, but in order to prove that you own an NFT, a wallet has to be connected and there's nothing blocking the site from saving that address in the profile data and then tracking it later. Forever and at every Ethereum based network, it's essentially a Web 3 super cookie with the added convenience of also telling Instagram how much money they have on that wallet. And where they've spent it. Yeah, it's a fair point, Martin. And it's the kind of thing like an IP address where it's worth doing anyway. So we need to make sure that people don't misuse getting that information the way we have policies against logging IP addresses and all that sort of thing. But you bring up a very good point that it is something we're going to have to think about like an IP address is that the details on public blockchains. I guess not every blockchain is public, but like you said, most of them are. What information is on there? And again, not all information goes to the blockchain but transactions and things like that, proof of ownership, things like that does go on there. Very good thing to be aware of. Well, the interest... So are they doing this because some of these creators are complaining about the theft of their content? So being able to associate digital ownership to this stuff but the theft of the content usually doesn't happen on the blockchain. The theft of the content is someone minting an NFT with your drawing or music or something like that. Yeah, so not the NFT itself, but just the digital content so you can associate an NFT to it to kind of help protect it. Is that right? Yeah, but you can also just mint one that like I'm the owner of this and that this isn't going to necessarily... Yeah, it's not going to help with that. But there are other ways to protect that. It's another reason that you can't just say, oh, because NFT it stops all fraud. They won't. Too bad. Well, you know, we're not going to solve this today but always good to get feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. Thank you, Martin. Good points made. Thanks also to you, Chris Ashley for being with us this fine Tuesday. Sometimes it's Wednesday depending on where you live. Let folks know where you've been busy most. Oh, check your boy out at SMR podcast and barbecue and tech. This season two was up and rolling right now. Man, put my foot in some steaks and some pork chops yesterday for more Memorial Day. Posted some of the pictures. Ridiculous. Come check us out. Come eat with us. I get you're hungry. Put your foot into them. I would think you just eat them. I got to put your foot in it first. He's good. Yeah. See, that's why you're the expert. There's a lot about barbecue. I get hungry every time I walk around listening to barbecue and tech but I cannot stop listening to every single moment of it. It's so good. Having so much fun. Well, folks, thank you. Yes. Thanks. Thanks to Chris for bringing us knowledge and also a lot of barbecue celebrating information. Also, thanks to our brand new boss named Phillip. Phillip just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Phillip. Really appreciate that. Good to have you along for the rides. Yeah. There's also a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. It's available at patreon.com. We roll right into it when DTNS is over. We're live on this here show, though, Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. And we're back doing it all again tomorrow. With Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.