 Coming up on DTNS Pac-Man is 30 and has been reinvented from scratch by an AI Why the cops don't have the right to look at your lock screen without a warrant and you've been pronouncing that one tech term Wrong, but we'll tell you the right way This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 22nd 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane from Studio Denver. I'm Shannon Morse drawing the top tech stories in Cleveland, Ohio I'm Len Peralta I'm the show's producer and I'm the show's producer Roger J We were just having a wonderful discussion of Cemetery's and being mistaken for the wrong nationality on good day internet become a member get the stories patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know In video reported earnings of $1.80 per share and revenue of 3.08 billion dollars on Thursday Which beat expectations working from home learning at home and gaming drove demand according to a letter from Nvidia's CFO Gaming rose 25 percent and chip for data centers rose 80 percent passing one billion dollars for the first time IBM is not providing details related to location Departments or number of employees involved in its impeding layoffs, which it is confirming Bloomberg is reporting that today's number is actually in the thousands The latest beta app of WhatsApp lets you add contacts by scanning a QR code So you don't have to go in there and create a new contact in your address book Of course, it only works if you're near someone really but a QR code can be revoked if it gets shared with someone You don't want no word on when this feature would come out of beta This story broke after our show yesterday, but business insider and the information are both reporting that Magic Leap has received 350 million dollars a month after cutting 1,000 jobs and dropping plans for a consumer business We talked about that on the show in the past Magic Leap has now withdrawn its layoff notice Reportedly meaning that those job losses might not happen after all and a note to staff CEO Tony Abavit said quote we're making very good progress in our healthcare enterprise and defense deals 30 years ago on May 22nd 1990 Microsoft Solitaire arrived on Windows 3.0 under the name Windows Solitaire It was hoped it would help people learn how to drag and drop items on their computer screens with the mouse Because not everybody do how to use a mouse Microsoft says 35 million people still play Solitaire every month That's so cute Facebook announced its workplace communication platform now has 5 million paid users up 2 million as of the end of March the company also announced that messenger rooms is available on workplace letting users quickly start up group Video calls as well as support for inviting non workplace or Facebook users to join by URL Facebook also added work groups, which lets workplace users create smaller chat groups outside of their larger social circle The company also added live producer mode letting video call hosts start polls Share their screens and run Q&A's and video calls now support automatic captions in English Spanish Portuguese French Italian and German In a little more Facebook news. What do we got there Sarah? Oh, it's a new trend Everyone Facebook announced Thursday will make most of its US jobs open for remote hires and let existing employees request permanent work from home Status this is significant because Facebook employs a lot of people It also follows Twitter coinbase Shopify and other companies implementing similar policies Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said US staff approved to work remotely will have until January 1st 2021 to update the company on where they will be based Also an interesting detail since it might mean it is going to affect what they will be paid Salaries will be adjusted based on the typical pay for their position in that region Facebook will hold campus on sites to build camaraderie Among remote and in-office workers and also means that Facebook will be making its employees use the new collaboration Technologies that it itself develops. It's so perfect The Wall Street Journal reports that LinkedIn recorded a 28% increase in remote job postings and a 42% increase in searches Using the terms remote or work from home. So I think we have an official Trend everyone. Yeah, you know just the caveats here not every single Facebook employee gets to work from home Even if their job would allow it they they in an interview with the Verge Mark Zuckerberg talked a lot about the need for in-person training They they're going to learn as they go They're gonna start by approving, you know, people who've worked there for a long time have good performance records to work from home And they'll take what they learn from that and may approve more people all the time But that said Sarah, you're right like this Twitter Shopify Coinbase others Are me leaning into this in a way. We were wondering a couple months ago You're like hey after people have worked from home for a couple of months. Will it stick well with these companies? It sounds like it is I Think in a lot of ways like this is definitely a trend for the year And they're going to be they're realizing that they're going to be saving a lot of money By not having to rent like big office spaces in the middle of these really big cities right next to For example a train station where you know these companies would usually look for these places so that their employees could easily get there But on the other hand since they're moving to more work from home for people They're definitely going to have to maybe transition that money that they're saving in renting spaces or purchasing land into security for their work from home users and making sure that everybody has You know compatible internet and has the ability to be able to work from home in a technological sense and the training right to Train them to be secure from home when they're when they don't have all the safeguards around That's a that's a really really good point and of course, you know Shannon when you move somewhere That's not the Bay Area. It gets cheaper and we were wondering Previously whether they would cash in on that and if we talked about this with Justin rubber young on good day internet yesterday It'll be interesting to see how employees react to that if they say well You know what I still just want to live somewhere cheaper even if I have to take less money Will they fight back against that? That'll be interesting to watch. Yeah, you know also Facebook is just one of a few examples Google is another really big one in the Bay Area in particular where you have this sort of culture of people who want to live in a cool City, but then have to take this huge shuttle bus an hour each way every day You know in order to go to the campus, but they're not living next to the campus because that doesn't really make sense for them You know I know somebody who works at Facebook who was like if I never have to get back on that bus. It's like it's just the best thing It's not even working from home necessarily It's just Reimagining what my job entailed in the past and it was a little bit of a golden hank of situation because it was a great job District Judge John Covenour of the US District Court in Seattle ruled that powering on a phone to view the lock screen by law enforcement requires a search warrant before you scoff Listen through the legal reasoning here the ruling came in a case involving a May 2019 arrest in Washington state Where a police officer pressed the power button to bring up the phone's lock screen during the course of the arrest and Then a second instance later in February 2020 when the FBI Turned on the phone intentionally to take a picture of the lock screen Which displayed the name Streezy on it So that was evidence that they could use in building their case The judge ruled that each instance was a separate issue He said yes police may conduct searches without a warrant under special circumstances like taking inventory of personal effects So the judge ordered let's clarify whether this police search fell within those bounds Maybe it did like he's sending it back to say you need you didn't give me the evidence to tell one way or another So you know figure that out we can guess it probably did but he also ruled the FBI Physically intruded on a constitutionally protected area when they went Later and grabbed the phone and powered it up without a warrant and that because accessing the phone at all was the intrusion It was unnecessary to consider an expectation of privacy on a lock screen as a result The FBI had argued like hey nobody has an expectation of privacy to your lock screen and the judge said that may be But we don't even need to go there because you shouldn't have been able to do this without a warrant You shouldn't have been able to go to the phone in the first place to power it up without a warrant You needed the warrant to do that in the first place It wasn't like he was holding it in his hand and you saw it which would be a whole separate issue So I don't know I I feel like on the face of this It sounds like it's ridiculous to say like what it's illegal to look at our lock screen Come on like our law enforcement officials need to have that power, but that's not exactly what the judge is saying Yeah, this is so fascinating to me I love this court ruling in in the sense that for example I've reviewed five different phones in the past two months and The differences that you see in between each one in how they set up security for a lock screen some of them Automatically enable notifications on the lock screen and you have to go into the settings and turn that off some of them allow you to set like a if lost Notification on your lock screen and that could give Government or law enforcement offer Offers officers some kind of information that you may not necessarily want them to have so there's a lot of Stipulations around lock screens that vary Diversely depending on what device you're actually using from what manufacturer so hearing that they've actually detailed Okay, it's it's fine if they're like putting this into Inventory or whatever, but if they're physically unlocking it and looking at it to find some kind of evidence That requires a warrant and that's very very important for a lot of these cases Yeah, and remember it requires a warrant doesn't mean they can't do it Also, this is different than self-incrimination where they can make you use your thumbprint to unlock it But they can't make you give the passcode. That's a fifth amendment thing. This is a fourth amendment thing Those are different situations Yeah, I had to check myself a little bit this morning because my first reaction I read this article from Ars Technica was like wait what like who would put incriminating information on their lock screens makes no sense and it was like no Sarah think about it if you were Unfairly targeted as you know Somebody who had done something wrong, right and somebody looks at your lock screen matter. What's on it? It means it's wrong You can't do that without a warrant without you know, justifiable cause to come into my life and and and and and snoop through stuff So in that sense It seems like the right call Well, we have some more snoopy news Some more privacy news. This one is from North and South Dakota So privacy software maker jumbo analyzed the North and South Dakota Contact tracing app called Care 19 for iOS Finding that it sent location a unique phone ID and the app's unique citizen code to Foursquare in violation of Care 19's privacy policy So Foursquare uses the information to return a recognizable place name like a store or a restaurant Proud crowd the developer of the Care 19 app says the data is not used for commercial purposes The Android version of Care 19. There's also an Android version. This one obscures the data sent to Foursquare So a Foursquare a Foursquare spokesperson said that the company promptly discards the data and proud crowd said that it will Stop sharing the unique citizen code and revise its privacy policy to disclose the relation with Foursquare This is mostly Whoever wrote their privacy policy needs to be Reprimanded or possibly fired Because Foursquare very uncontroversially provides Location labeling that they've done this for years one of the greatest services almost any app you use where the dropdown says hey You're near the McDonald's, you know is using the Foursquare database. So that's not controversial What was controversial is they didn't disclose that in the privacy policy They absolutely shouldn't they're fixing that and the other thing was using the unique citizen code and the phone ID I Can maybe see an argument for needing one of those just to keep the request straight in the database as they all flood in But there are ways to obfuscate that that they used in Android I'm curious why they aren't able to do that in iOS and you certainly didn't need both So there was a little bit of over-engineering there And I think just the fact that it's Foursquare that's involved with this story is kind of a fear factor You see that social platform kind of a social service and this is going to really deter Of the potential popularity of these contact tracing apps, which will help the health industry with tracing any kind of COVID-19 Pandemic outbreaks that happen in a community. So this this is definitely a negative for contact tracing Techno technology in itself But I hope that then changing the privacy policy and getting this news out there early will help with the engagement Yeah, sadly, you're right Like the bad PR may cause a lot of people to not use this that would have otherwise and you need people to use these things for them to Be effective Well Particularly positive point, especially if you like things that are downloaded quickly researchers at Australia's Monash Swinburne and RMIT published an article in nature communications describing a new internet speed record of 44.2 terabits per second know if you're like, I don't know that sounds fast But how fast is it you could download more than 50 100 gigabyte 4k movies in a second with the speeds The researchers placed a microcomb within the cables fibers to make data transfer more efficient also more compact Otherwise the setup used standard optical fiber and a single integrated chip source meaning that it's possible It could be implemented on existing fiber Infrastructure and don't ask me why you need it you do Cloud service providers like cloud backups and stuff that could be so so useful And this you know, this is in the in the the research lab. It's it's not out in the field yet It was in the field and further paper and the purposes of that, but it's not something you can go by It's gonna be a while before that and I'll probably be used for what you're saying at the beginning Shannon some some backhaul But just I don't know blistering blistering speeds like this are always It's also, you know, there was a time where you know the idea of a terabyte. Oh, yeah Was just like what that's so much day I it's crazy like nobody can download that much stuff, but you did hear, you know Oh so-and-so scientists at this research facility have proven it might be possible in this very limited test case So, you know, I look forward to our new 44.2 terabyte for second future. Thank you First of all, happy 40th birthday Pac-Man 40 years ago Pac-Man hit the arcades in Japan. They changed it to Pac-Man because puck was too close to tuck or something like it Generative adversarial networks or GANs are a type of AI system that trains by playing on off playing off itself Now, why am I telling you this? Hold on. You'll find out in a moment To oversimplify how GANs work one network will generate attempts to do the thing like make a cat picture That's called the generator and the other will decide if it's a picture of a cat or not That's called the discriminator the adversarial nature mean these networks play off each other and get better faster and Vidya has posted about its game GAN Which they have trained to make a video game engine from scratch and bring it it all back for its first trick Game GAN was trained on 50,000 hours of Pac-Man game play They did the thing that has been done a lot trained an AI to play Pac-Man, but they didn't stop there We've trained a lot of AIs to play games. They also trained an AI to create Pac-Man Just by watching the gameplay So it would see the gameplay and go, okay Let me put together a game engine that can do what that thing is doing Pac-Man speed movement abilities inability to go through walls ghost movement patterns power pellets Ghost touching the Pac-Man supercharger otherwise it was able to replicate all of that just by watching Three neural networks ran memory a dynamics engine and a rendering engine to make the code and the upshot is they created a GAN That can learn the rules of a game by observing it That could be useful in creating new content like new levels in Pac-Man could be created by this GAN and Theoretically other games could benefit from that in game design where you wouldn't have to have the designers make all the levels You could have the the GAN make them now They don't quite hit the maximum standard here the gameplay max is out at 128 by 128 pixel resolution and 50 frames per second So it's got a way to go before it can be used in your favorite 3d shooter And Nvidia says it will make a playable version of Game Gans Pac-Man available this summer on Nvidia's AI playground so you'll get a chance to see how well they did But this isn't also just about games the paper published on github sets the problem as creating a simulation By watching an agent interact with an environment And of course in this case the simulation was Pac-Man and the agent interacting with the environment was Pac-Man playing the game But it could also be watching recorded videos say from drivers in order to train an Autonomous car again something can be really useful right now during lockdown when those autonomous cars can't go out into the real world Yeah, that is such a good comparison. You know you think like oh it's Pac-Man. Okay It's a grid, you know you're moving around trying to get away from things and you know trying to you know Cut all the right corners. That is a lot like driving So if you think of that on a larger scale, especially in a town like Phoenix for example where it's relatively flat and Relatively, you know 90 degree corners kind of thing then it gets really interesting. I Love it. I think it's so fascinating that they're able to do this and and you're right like having that comparison to Autonomous vehicles would help that entire industry like two-fold I can see how that could be super super useful in the future And I do want to mention for the gamers out there if you are interested They do plan on releasing this in the summertime sometime, but nobody knows if it's gonna be like on Nvidia's Their their streaming service or if it'll be a downloadable thing, so I guess we'll see well They said on Nvidia's AI playground, but yeah, I don't I don't know exactly What that will entail either hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines calm Our second the Samuel axon in my opinion has done the Lord's work Samuel axon tracked down what the accepted pronunciation of dozens of tech words are now This isn't the gift controversy. He didn't he went well beyond that He's like everyone's battling that one out I'm going to mention Some of the pronunciations he dealt with in his article will have a link in the show notes You should absolutely read the whole thing but I want you all to state your preferred Pronunciation and then we'll talk about what axon discovered in his research and he he went through like 500 message boards It was trying to find like legitimate sources. What do people do in the most part? Do they usually say it this way? Do they usually say it that way? What does the founder say? What does the company say? So we start off With one I didn't realize was even a controversy iOS or IOS I have never heard of IOS Same yeah, I never I just it's never I've never once heard it, but apparently 30% I think of the people he talked to say Ios. Okay, maybe that's overestimating I don't see the 30% number in his article, but there are people who say Ios out there But Apple final word on this one is iOS. Okay, that that that's our warm-up. How about pseudo or Sudo this is the command line thing that says hey, I want to use my administrator password Yes, pseudo make me a sandwich or is it so do make me a sandwich. Oh, man. I've always said pseudo, but I I don't know so Shannon, what do you think so technically it stands for a super user do so it should be so do but Everyone and I say this as somebody who has made like over a hundred videos about the Linux command line Everyone says pseudo. I don't know anybody that says so do And that's just accepted. You have not met the 22.4% of forum user respondents on Linux org who responded to axon survey Saying it should be pronounced. So do I want to believe that those people actually don't say so do in real life We're just they just they know what but the co-inventor Robert Cogshaal says it's meant for super user do you should say so do So in this case axon ruled so do so do is the proper pronunciation. We've just all been saying it wrong Yep. All right wireless power Q I Should be it should it be chi ki or qi? You know, this is this is one that I well I was about to say I know it should be chi Because I know that Tom will correct me when I say it wrong sometimes in our pre You know pre-show medians, but was I right to do that? Well, I don't know Well, but it's one of the ones where I have to think every single time like how do I say this? How do I say this correctly? I want to make sure I get it correctly and I I feel I don't know at least other people have a hard time with this one I Say chi but I used to say I used to mispronounce it every single time I would say it the only reason it changed is because I think it was like a PR rep at Anchors booth at CES or something said, oh, it's chi and I was like what and they told me about the Chinese background of the Actual symbol for it. So now I know and that part like what with the background you're like, oh, okay That makes sense. It would help you remember it. Yeah I blame romanized pinion for the confusion here because why we we spell chi with a q I I don't quite understand but the wireless power consortium does say and they manage the standard That it should be pronounced chi because yes, it is based on the Chinese character. All right SQL and my SQL or sequel and my sequel or some Combination is it sequel and my SQL or SQL and my sequel it's squirrel I I I do remember I don't know I feel like I'm on the wrong side of a lot of these, you know in the past someone saying sequel sequel server, but then I said my sequel and You know kind of trying to explain something they were like no, you don't say it that way you say my sql Well, I'm like, but it's sequel already. Well, but that's different and I remember it was one of the first times where I was like Well, I mean I'm trying to do it, right sequel makes more sense to me It just kind of flows off the tongue better, but that's again how things equal to sequel I have always said sql and my sequel because it's more words with my sequel and it felt easier, but I'm wrong My sql's technical doc says it should be my sql There is no consensus on just sql though and axon finally ruled This one is a beautiful mess and you can generally go where your heart takes you and feel okay about it as long as you don't call it squirrel Okay, well Shannon One last one LIB and BIN are they live and Bine because library and binary is what they stand for or is it lib and bin? Oh man, you know knowing what they stand for of course, you're like it makes sense to call it live and bind I would never say that it's no been been Every single time I've worked in the CLI. I've always said said lib and bin. That's just the way we say it and He found a lot of people Interestingly for the internet willing to entertain live and bind because of the because they've probably made this argument for gift in the past I'm like, huh, but I made that argument that it's graphical and so maybe I should be saying live and bind but Most people do say lib and bin So axon wrote either lib or live is fine So therefore either bin or bind is fine, but technically no one ever says bind no Like he found examples of people saying live for that but he's like I don't think I found any like maybe more than one or two people who said bind For the bin because I always think it's a bin full of things. I forget that it does stand for binaries Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah This wasn't really a one of the things on the list But I will say for the record that I still encounter people on a Pretty regular basis who say me me instead of me. Oh my gosh. I'll just leave it at that Interesting. Yeah, are they wrong? I don't know at this point Roku Mako s10 Linux. They're all there in the arse-tectic article of the link of the show notes Everybody you can join in the conversation in our discord, which you can link to by which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash gtns You can talk about memes and all sorts of other things. Yeah, all the memies on Raku are there. Let's check out the mailbag This one isn't a Jeff But it is from Mank who says here's what I think Here's what I think is the reason for Netflix Defaulting to close inactive user accounts. We talked about this with Justin Marbury on the show yesterday Makes us as you said Netflix is seen genuine competition and streaming So what this will let them do is change the conversation around who their users are they keep almost a hundred percent of their users But they can now say 100% of our users are active users and that shows a stronger brand I don't know how they monetize that information though But I know that there's no shortage of ways to do that So in the eyes of somebody looking to buy user information to advertise to Netflix would now be a much stronger brand They don't do that though, and they've been very clear that they don't want to do that. They don't have any plans to do that So maybe it's just useful internally like it makes argument still holds even if they're not selling it outside Maybe it's just good for convincing producers and stuff Another thought from Kimberly the Texas teacher on this topic at one point last year There was talking Congress of maybe even a bill to require all subscription type services to confirm Customers wanted to continue using it once a year This wouldn't just be internet stuff like Netflix or imperfect fruit But also things like gym memberships. Maybe this was in the pipeline by Netflix as a response to that proposed legislation They maybe they were just getting ahead of it Hey shout out to patrons that are master and grand master levels including Scott Hepburn Dan Colbeck and Irwin Stur Let's check in with Len Peralta. Did you draw an abstract of buying or something else today? I think she was drawing Mimi's I don't know about you guys No, you know, I actually found this very interesting today. Obviously being 40th birthday for Pac-Man I wanted to be sure I celebrated that correctly and what better way really to celebrate Pac-Man's 40th birthday But I'm giving him a weird clone Right Monstrosity weird-looking weirdo clone and that's what this is it's called this image is called pack clone and This is you know Pac-Man and his birthday party getting a weird clone I'm probably gonna have to add This you know this little creature saying all these weird like leave Lib and buying Here I think that'd be a nice little addition on this But yeah, this is available right now if you want to go to my patreon patreon.com for a slash Len or at my online store at Len Peralta store I love how that the ghosts are like, are you okay? Also, thanks to Shannon Morse for being with us today Shannon always a pleasure and let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work Thank you for having me. Yeah over at youtube.com slash Shannon Morse. I just reviewed the TCL phones It's their first time making phones for the US market So I was very intrigued to check out these two little Android phones So you can watch those videos over on my YouTube channel Also, I wanted to remind everybody, please do follow Daily Tech news show over on Twitter and Instagram too Instagram comm slash DTNS pics and Twitter comm slash Daily Tech news SH as in show and you can see all of the happenings over there Yeah, Shannon, you've been doing a wonderful job Putting stuff up on there. Thank you for for doing all of that If you want to keep that coming one of the reasons we're able to do a lot of the stuff that we do is because you support us directly There are ways to do that If you've got some extra cash if you're gainfully employed and you want to support the show directly and get rid of the ads Go to daily tech news show comm slash patreon and if you just want to do something that's free Whether you're supporting us on patreon or not We've been getting wonderful reviews in the Apple podcast store and we thank everybody for doing that It makes our day every time we see one of those come through So even if you're not really an Apple podcast user, it's helpful to get the word out Go leave even if you just leave some stars that helps in podcasts app for iTunes. Thank you for that Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show comm and boy do we love to hear what you have to say So keep it coming. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 20 30 UTC And you can find out more at daily tech news show comm slash live no show on Monday It's Memorial Day holiday here in the US, but we'll see you Tuesday with Patrick Beja talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants comm Enjoy this bro