 Coming up on DTNS, a whole bundle of new gaming and creator laptops using the new Intel 10th Gen processors and new Nvidia GPUs. Zoom tries to clean up its security act and why it's Activision's First Amendment right to put a Humvee in call of duty. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 2nd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. And Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about our experiences obtaining food in the current world. Plus plus a little little kicking around of the Netflix series, The Crown. If you want that and more, gotta become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS and get good day internet. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Content delivery networks and cloud providers, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Akamai, Netflix and others have signed onto the mutually agreed norms for routing security or the Manners Group. The Manners Group pushes four main approaches filtering anti spoofing coordination and validation. South by Southwest Film Festival will show some of its festival films for free in front of the paywall for Amazon Prime Video filmmakers who participate will be paid a screening fee for making their film available over a 10 day period. The information sources say YouTube is working on a new social media platform called Shorts, which would live inside the YouTube mobile app. This is April 2nd, folks, not April Fool's Day. The potential TikTok competitor would let creators use YouTube's existing catalog of licensed music as a background soundtrack. Sources say YouTube plans to release Shorts by the end of 2020. Facebook launched a standalone messenger app for the desktop on Windows and Mac OS, which includes limited and free group video calls. The Apple sync across mobile devices also and supports notifications, dark mode and GIFs. It's available in the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store beginning today. Amazon started testing employee temperatures using non contact forehead thermometers at work site entrances, sending anyone over 100.4 Fahrenheit home. Temperature scans began this week at facilities in Seattle in New York City and will expand to more sites. All warehouse locations will have surgical masks available by next week and the company will use machine learning to monitor safe distances during shifts. Incga Group, which was founded by the same person who founded Ikea, primary franchiser of Ikea and owns Ikea.com has acquired Geomagical Labs. The AI imaging startup lets users scan a room with a smartphone and render a 3D panoramic image that you can then add or subtract virtual items to scale and help choose Ikea products. Ikea previously developed its own AR based visualization tool, but now they've got an in-house group. Incga Group previously acquired TaskRabbit and has made some other investments under the Ikea brand. Yeah, TaskRabbit. Governments across Africa are using social media tools to fight misinformation about Coronavirus. South Africa has launched an information service about Coronavirus on WhatsApp. Nigerian health officials are partnering with WhatsApp to send push notifications to users with advice on symptoms and how to avoid infection. The Nigeria Center for Disease Control is also receiving free ad space on Facebook for outreach about the pandemic. And that's also available to public health authorities in 11 other African countries, also around the world. Twitter's latest algorithm also seeks to elevate medical information from authoritative sources in 70 countries, five of which are in Africa. A support video uploaded to Apple's YouTube account about how to erase your iPhone showed a screenshot of the find my iPhone screen with its setting enabled or a setting called enable offline finding with the description offline finding enables this device and air tags to be found when not connected to Wi-Fi or cellular. Everyone assumed air tags were coming, but of course this is Apple's confirmation that they have at least worked on an interface options for the product. And a new feature in the Google Arts and Culture app called Art Transfer uses some machine learning to convert your pictures into the style of famous painters like Frida Kahlo or Van Gogh. The system does not overlay brushstrokes but rebuilds images in the art style chosen. The conversion also happens on the device, not in the cloud. Alright, we haven't talked about Zoom in two minutes. Let's do that now, Justin. Hey, Zoom, welcome to the show. Zoom CEO Eric Yan announced that the company is freezing feature updates for 90 days with all development focused now on security and privacy issues, including a review of third party integrations. He also committed to enhancing Zoom's bug bounty program, releasing a transparency report listing requests from law enforcement and governments for data and will hold a weekly webinar to discuss privacy and security updates. The Verge reports that Zoom has already removed its controversial pre installation, which included a misleading prompt so that all users must now click through the installer and give explicit permission to install Zoom. I like all of this. This is basically Zoom doing the laundry list of things that security researchers have been calling on them to do for the most part and also much faster than anyone expected. Fixing that pre installation work around wasn't exactly illegal, but it's the same kind of thing that malware does to try to trick you into installing it. And so it just was shady and and and say what you will about Zoom in the past and its practices in the past. Now that it is under the big scrutiny, the, you know, Google Apple Facebook level scrutiny, it seems to be trying at least to clean up its act right away. I mean, a lot of people were saying this morning before this announcement, what Zoom, I think Ben Thompson at Stratechery said, what Zoom needs to do is freeze feature updates for 30 days and just fix all this stuff. And Eric, you on didn't too better than that freeze and updates for 90 days to say, you know what? We're just we have too many people using this. We need to get this cleaned up. It's a great example of a company that I mean Zoom. We mentioned on the show yesterday, it's been around since 2011. It had plenty of users, but not at this scale. You know, for for, I would say, the majority of people who are looking for video conferencing solutions never heard of Zoom until at least, you know, just a couple of months ago at the very most. So a company who had flown under the radar, not that the company was sitting there saying, hey, we're getting away with all these security holes, you know, giving them the benefit of the doubt just goes to show you what a mass spike in users will lead to not only just keeping your networks stable, but realizing that there are some things that have to be fixed under the hood. Yeah. Let me just say, good announcement. Let's wait and see. Yep. Let's wait and see. Right. Exactly. After 90 days, might be a different story. Yeah, you know, I was just saying, go ahead and keep an eye on all Zoom. Axios and Reuters obtained a memo from Google to advertisers saying that it's going to change some of its rules on ads around sensitive events. The policy has prevented ads related to COVID-19 from running. Starting this week, Google will allow paid ads to reference COVID-19 if they are from government entities, hospitals, medical providers and NGOs. Google is also planning to allow references to COVID-19 by other organizations, including political organizations. It'll evaluate whether to allow references by brands and private companies. So Google has a policy that that goes into place with any disaster. Hurricane earthquake saying, you know what, we don't want people profiteering off this, causing confusion. You can't buy ads that reference Hurricane Justin right after it happened, right? And so that's what they were applying to COVID-19 and what they're finding now is this is not a temporary thing. This is not a thing that is going to wind up soon. This is an ongoing situation and they've decided to adapt. Now part of that is so that in addition to free public service announcements that Google is running, that NGOs and organizations and government agencies that want to can pay to have a wider message spread. And that's a good thing. Political organizations starts to get a little more interesting and obviously allowing brands and private companies to say like, our miracle wipes clean up COVID-19 is a whole other issue. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of decisions they make there. I think that it makes sense to allow some of the brand stuff. I mean COVID-19 is not going to be a thing that comes and goes in the way that a hurricane will. I mean past hurricane damage or tornado damage or earthquake damage, yeah you're going to have some level of of a conversation but like you know there's still you want to hire a contractor that is rated for being able to build something that is earthquake resistant in San Francisco. This is now an international thing that people are going to want assurances on their products and they will buy products based on the idea and hopefully they are scientifically sound that they prevent or help disinfect from COVID-19 and that will be a thing for the next two years at the very least. Yeah I think the worry is it's easy to say if we're only allowing hospitals and medical providers and NGOs we're not likely to get somebody passing along and misinformation or defrauding people. If you open it up to brands and private companies as we all know the scale at which advertising comes makes it more difficult to police that kind of stuff and I think that's why they're being extra cautious there. I get it. I get why. I just don't know whether or not by putting this particular hurdle in front of people that that you're not going to create more misinformation because they're going to find other loopholes in ways that they can try to describe the same thing without saying the same thing. Well that's the political argument too right is that if you if you can't as a non-governmental person take an ad out about how you think the elected officials are handling COVID-19 then you've silenced one half of that conversation. Yeah and that's another thing that's another big part of it is that you know you are now effectively saying that Google will take your money if you would like to you know give yourself credit or trash the person that is currently handling these situations that goes not only for the presidency but also for Congress and Senate and everything else. That earthquake analogy that you made is a really interesting one because after an earthquake uh Google wouldn't let people say like oh the San Andreas earthquake in their ads because of this policy but they would let you say I'm earthquake rated I can fix earthquake damage right because that's an ongoing thing and that's kind of what they're doing here is saying well COVID-19 is you know for a while just going to be a thing people have to deal with so if you need to be able to say like I I have COVID-19 sterile uh situations that might be an important thing to be able to reference. Humvee maker AM General sued Activision in 2017 claiming the use of Humvees in Call of Duty quote deceived people into believing that AM General licenses the game or somehow connected with or involved in the creation of the games. Ars Technicus Kyle Orlin points out the game makers often arranged licenses for things like in game guns up until 2013 but district judge George B. Daniels dismissed AM General's claim citing a 1989 case that artistic works could make reference to outside trademarks as long as the usage was relevant to the work which it was Call of Duty was about war where Humvees are used and did not quote explicitly mislead as to the source of the content or work and Call of Duty was not specifically saying like Humvee loves Call of Duty. The judge also cited a 2011 decision calling the use of a Louis Vuitton bag in the movie The Hangover saying that movie goers were sophisticated enough to know that the mere presence of a brand name in a film especially one that is briefly and intermittently shown does not indicate the brand sponsored the movie. Well I feel like a lot of people see that product placement but that's the way that 2011 decision went and so he was able to cite that. I know AM General brought in a survey that said look 16% of the people we surveyed thought Humvee somehow approved of Humvees being in Call of Duty and the judge said that sounds like a very small amount of people to me 16% anything below 20% doesn't seem that significant. I mean I guess you know my initial reaction is well couldn't the game have just made it slightly more generic of a vehicle that was meant to represent this and then you wouldn't have had any problem but that aside I guess it's true I mean it's the judge saying listen this game is supposed to be realistic this is about as real as it gets and nobody thought that you were sponsoring or or otherwise you know giving your blessing to the game. I guess that's the right outcome I mean it's it's almost funny how long this is dragged on. Look this is AM General looking for a check and if they're not going to get a check from Activision then they're going to find an injunction and they're going to force Activision to give them a check. I don't think that it's realistic to say that they believe that their reputation was damaged by the game by the game including a Humphie and I'm glad that the judge ruled that that you know now we don't have to see like like Sarah mentioned we don't we don't have to see like the Homer Simpson car instead of a Humphie in war games. The dumb V yeah because you're right Sarah I mean that would be the solution if if AM General one but what the judge was saying is like yeah they should they shouldn't have to do that. They should be able to make a realistic game and it's not like Humvees aren't in war they are so they're just reflecting reality and art should be allowed to reflect reality so yeah. Amazon's first original game a science fiction shooter called Crucible will launch in May also in May Amazon will launch an MMO called New World that takes advantage of Amazon's cloud infrastructure and of course games that let you play along with a Twitch streamer are also still in development. A cloud gaming platform codename project Tempo is in development to compete with Microsoft's project cloud and Google's Stadia. Yeah the Amazon was talking to the New York Times and kind of trying to pump up a lot of this stuff but I think people have been waiting for Amazon's game plans to come to fruition and it looks like they're going to come to fruition in May not in time for you to use them during your shelter in place in April but it's probably might still be going on in May so you'll be able to play with it then and it is a significant event for Amazon to enter this space the way they have entered book publishing the way they've entered video making they're now entering the video game space. That makes perfect sense I in fact kind of funny when I read the story this morning I was like oh yeah that's true they don't really have a significant place in the gaming space but Amazon originals certainly you know TV and movies I mean I've been really pleased with all of that so especially given the companies that they've acquired over the last few years it's the next frontier the next vertical. I mean look these are all the server merchants right Google, Microsoft, Amazon they sell their servers this is what they're doing it's it's not unlike you know when HughesNet got into satellite radio because we got to do something with these satellites we got to show how cool these satellites are so we'll try to get into this business. I think that this is as much of a demonstration of the reliability of AWS as it is a major product for Amazon going forward I'm curious to see when all three of them are out for them to start measuring the products a little bit and saying you know where's latency where does AWS compete where Google has not or Azure doesn't for Microsoft. Apple announced it established a program for premium subscription video entertainment providers letting them use the payment system tied to their existing subscription rather than Apple's which takes a 30% cut this change lets Amazon Prime video Canal plus and Altus one offer purchases in their iOS and Apple TV apps the program also brings integration with the Apple TV app Airplay to support TV OS apps universal search Siri support and single or zero sign-on. Yeah this is really interesting because Apple has held a very firm line to say we treat everyone the same and for the first time they're saying we don't treat everyone the same if you want to be in the TV app which we really want you to be in the TV app and and Amazon Prime video was already in the TV app but they're basically saying we will promote you push you make you part of our loving embrace of everyone who's using an Apple device and in exchange Amazon said great we want that let us make it easy for people to buy and rent movies through our app and Apple caved and said okay fine and and I think the way they caved is interesting they're not allowing a third-party purchasing system what they're saying is someone already has an account that's tied to a purchase method will let them use that in the app you you can you already have an Amazon account you've created it that's how you get Prime video in the first place so if someone's in the app and says yes use that existing information that you have on the back end fine we they Apple has decided that that doesn't threaten Apple's own ecosystem or Apple pay because they're not operating the payment system they never that's always that that hasn't been okay before and it's not okay for Kindle it's not okay and anything else but but video and I think that's because they really want the TV app to work really well and so they're focused on making it easy for people to use it for any kind of video and making it attractive for these partners to stay involved with it the great transition of Apple as a company is going from a hardware company to a services company and it means that you they have to start making capitulations where they wouldn't otherwise because they own the hardware they always kept a hard line on this and yet here we are with Tim Cook holding an Apple hi-fi above his head in front of Netflix's room but instead of Peter Gabriel it's new exciting terms of service they want Netflix they want Amazon they want HBO and all these different peacock all of it they want this in the TV app because they're not going to make Apple TV its own network they're going to build the network of networks for which Apple TV and their original programming is going to have prominent placement yes he's playing in your app how many people are like we don't know what you're saying right now ask your parents I've got the majority of DTNOS audience does hey folks we know the majority of you also know that science and technology intersects quite often and they do quite often right here on the show so we're going to highlight that with Science Week starting Monday April 6th featuring a science guest each episode of DTNOS next week we'll be talking about things like Mars colonization tech and archaeology tech used in paleontology join us and enjoy next week for Science Week starting April 6th all right lots of specs to throw at you Intel release new H series 10th generation notebook CPUs they mentioned these at CES they're now here built on the 14 nanometer Comet Lake architecture all the new chips support DDR4-2933 come in Core i5 i7 and i9 ranges with between four and eight cores the top end Core i9-10980HK has eight cores and 16 threads base clock at 2.4 gigahertz but don't pay attention to that what Intel wants you to focus on is that turbo up to 5.3 gigahertz and an unlocked multiplier for overclocking the i7 and i9 processors also include thermal velocity boost which can boost your clock speed by 200 megahertz if the CPU temperature is below 65 degrees Celsius 65C Nvidia announced RTX 2080 Super and 2070 Super mobile GPUs Max-Q configurations are on both of them and offer double the power efficiency as dynamic boost distributes power between the GPU and the CPU there's also GDDR6 memory upgraded voltage regulators and Nvidia's new deep learning super sampling to help render pixels along with both these announcements are a bunch of new creator and gaming laptops these are big heavy laptops meant to be portable but not really mobile in other words you can you can throw them in a bag and carry them around but they're gonna be heavy for instance the 2020 Razer Blade 15 which by the way they moved the up key it was kind of annoying before the Razer Blade 15 fixed that that's coming in May for $1,599 with a 1070H and a 1660 Ti but the advanced models the ones got the new step in it 10th gen i7 10875H 8-core CPU and either that 2070 or 2080 Nvidia Super Max-Q Gigabytes Aero 15 and Aero 17 incorporate the 2080 Max-Q and a core i7 and video says the Aero can reach 167 frames per second in a combination of control Wolfenstein Youngblood and deliver us the moon with ray tracing off Aero 15 starts at $1,599 configurable up to $1,899 that's coming April 15th Gigabyte also has five new Aero systems for gaming and a bunch of new Aero notebooks Acer has the Triton 500 that's a 15.6 inch 300 hertz IPS display per key RGB lighting optional 300 hertz display that's optional I should point that out and up to an Intel Core i7 1075H CPU and the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super GPU there's also the Acer Nitro 5 that's got a 15.6 inch 120 hertz screen starts at $900 although again that's with the lower CPUs not with these brand new ones both of those available starting in May ASUS has got new ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 a 14 inch ROG screen pad plus and optional upgrades including up to an i9 10980HK CPU and the Nvidia RTX 2080 Super Zephyrus S17 is a 17.3 inch 300 hertz display with three millisecond response time and Pantone certified color accuracy and there's also two new SCAR models the SCAR 15 and the SCAR 17 optional 300 megahertz on those as well the Lenovo rebranding has made the Legion 5i that starts at $1,000 and the 7i starting at $1,200 with the new Nvidia chips in those as well bunch of new stuff from MSI with 300 hertz displays 99.9 watt hour battery in the GS66 stealth the MSI says its laptops will be some of the first to market with sales going live as early as April 15th they also have some creator models as well bunch of nice looking screens powered by powerful Nvidia graphics and Intel processors and Roger I know we were talking earlier today about the fact that even though Intel isn't on 14 or on 7 nanometer it is competitive in the gigahertz obviously we're going to have to wait for testing to really see how this bears out but based on what we see from the specs how do you feel about these it's definitely Intel is very worried about AMD and the thing about the the thing Intel really pushed the gigahertz the thing is gigahertz really works out for you on single threaded applications on multi-threaded applications there's still a lot of assumptions that AMD's 4800 mobile enthusiasm is going to be the premiere performance to beat so it will remain to be seen once we get until we actually get hard benchmarks and not just company company managed benchmarks the other thing that's very interesting is a lot of this technology that they're shoving into laptops used to be desktop only the high-end GPUs the high-end desktop or not desktop but the high performance CPUs but also the things like displays a high refresh rates true tone you know true color matching on screens and that really kind of points to the way that a lot of creators are using laptops in lieu of a desktop machine to do a lot of these things and I think it's great because you know for a while there I mean to get into some of the stuff you needed like what I have a tower PC an oversized monitor and a lot of space that some people don't have or don't want to give up instead they want to have something that's smaller more portable but you know it's definitely a space to be seen because you know the deep the desktop space is kind of maxed out in terms of what you can throw at and what people will buy but laptops still seem to have a lot of legs with the consumer base yeah that's good stuff there's going to be more specs of these rolling out we'll try to keep on top of how they do so keep in touch with us also keep in touch with us on our subreddit you can submit stories you can also vote on other stories that you think are important and should be read by this team at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com all right let's check out the mailbag oh let's Scott is a network engineer for a medium-sized ISP and had some thoughts on our conversation yesterday about data caps and whether or not they need to happen at all Scott says just this year we instituted data caps after years of trying to avoid it the reason was the typical one a bad apple spoils the whole bunch we saw that the top 1% of our users were accounting for 50% of our total data usage on our network some users were hitting 15 terabytes of data usage each month it was causing internal network links and core routers to be maxed out on interface utilization if you have a 10 gig interface you can't push 11 gigs through it we kept throwing hardware and larger bandwidth interfaces at the problem but each time it was increased the usage just expanded to match so we broke down and instituted very high data caps the monetary hit caused the higher use customers to use less and freed up resources on our network and improve the service for everybody I'll admit we made a lot of money but we put that money back into our network and offered high-speed services and offer high-speed services to more customers now you are correct that the internet doesn't work this way the network gets overtaxed the network does get overtaxed yeah now it's good points Scott and I've heard there are other ways of dealing with this and most of the studies say that the caps really don't help with congestion but it sounds like you've got a boots on the ground situation where you're like well it worked in this case and so I'm interested to hear what other ISP folks out there think of Scott because as what he said makes sense certainly and there may be those edge cases where it does have an effect for sure shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Martin James Bjorn Andre and Tim Ashman also thanks to Justin Robert Young Justin where the heck are you online? Oh man you know I'm all over the place Sara but you can find me on twitch twitch.tv slash Justin our young you can listen to me on the politics podcast at politicspoliticspolitics.com or anywhere that you find podcasts but I do want to go off script here just to give a shout out to one of my oldest and dearest friends Andrew Main who just released his new book The Girl Beneath the Sea currently the number one book on Kindle full stop number one out of all of them I'm so proud of what he's done here so go check it out it's a fantastic thriller about a police detective who does diving rescue in Florida but go check it out I just wanted to give Andrew a little shout out here that's fantastic yeah a big congrats to Andrew on that that's amazing and I say that not just because sometimes my book shows up as I also related to this book but even if it wasn't for that like still it's great great job man hey uh thanks to uh we've been taking this space at the end of the show to kind of pass along some some props to interesting resources out there creators who you might want to check out in these times when when you need entertainment and they need people to support them and thanks to Halska for pointing out arts for Illinois a collaboration between the state of Illinois the city of Chicago and the broader philanthropic community it's an online platform featuring performers filmmakers singers poets painters writers and more from all across the state of Illinois who have made their works available for the public while you're at home so they're funding the artists to do this sort of thing and you get the benefit of it you can browse for things to enjoy you can apply for funding if you're in the state of Illinois and you can donate all of that is available at artsforillinois.org and also shout out to Roger Chang who did a great column on keeping your workspace clean cleaning up your your work from home space so check that out at dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon you got feedback for us well i've got good news we have an email address and that is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're also live Monday through Friday join us if you can that's 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live I'm looking forward to Friday Chris Ashley is going to be here and Len Peralta will be drawing talk to you then