 Coming up on D T N S Darren kitchen is here to explain how to get top bandwidth out of your van and a whole lot more plus Intel might buy global foundries and whether it's ethical to use software to replicate a dead man's voice for your documentary D T N S starts now this is the Daily Tech News for Friday July 16 2021 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer Roger. Joining us the founder of hack 5.org Darren kitchen is back. Welcome back Darren. I'm Sarah Roger. Oh my gosh. It's so good to see you guys again. Thank you for having me on. I've missed you. We've missed you too. But you have been traveling around in the van. You're going to tell us all about the tech that was in it. If you want to know even more about what's going on in Darren's van get the wider conversation on good day Internet which you can get by becoming a member at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. New research from Canada shows that Xiaomi replaced Apple as the second largest smartphone maker in the second quarter with 17% market share of global shipments behind Samsung which was at 19% in regional growth Xiaomi shipments in Latin America grew 50% year on year and grew 50% in Western Europe with overall shipment growth of 83% versus 15% for Samsung and just 1% for Apple. Twitter is rolling out captions for voice tweets voice tweets first launched back in June last year still only available in the iOS app though you can hear them on the web and captions will be automatically generated for several languages. English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian and Italian. Another vulnerability around Microsoft's print spooler unspooled on Thursday Microsoft issued an advisory for a new vulnerability unrelated to the partially patched print nightmare. Dragos researcher Jacob Baines discovered the privilege escalation vulnerability and Microsoft advises admins to stop and disable print spooler service. Again, Square CEO Jack Dorsey who is also CEO of Twitter you may know tweeted yesterday that the company Square was focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non custodial permissionless and decentralized get to the point Jack financial services what he said the new business is called TBD which could be the official name or could mean it hasn't been named but this is the cryptocurrency thing Jack Dorsey has been going on about. Keeping you up to speed on the government digital currency progress China says more than 20.8 million individuals have opened a virtual wallet to store its digital one and have made more than 70.7 million transactions for a value of 5.3 billion. The People's Bank of China considers the R&D stage done and will further expand the scope of the trials and foreign residents temporarily traveling to China can now open an ECNY wallet to meet daily payment needs without having to open a Chinese bank account. All right let's talk about that big Intel buzz the Wall Street Journal sources say Intel is interested in buying global foundries if you don't know them global foundries is a major maker of chips for other companies think TSMC but sadly for global foundries stockholders quite a bit smaller global foundries is owned by the investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi and has been considering an IPO when contacted by the Wall Street Journal's executives told them they're not in discussions with Intel themselves so if these talks are going on the talks are happening at the investor level just directly with the with the owners TSMC of course dominates the space but global foundries has about 7% of the foundry market by revenue that's numbers according to trend force AMD spun out global foundries back in 2008 used to be most of his business not so much anymore but it does remain one of its biggest customers with a $1.6 billion multi-year supply deal going in place earlier this year global foundries has been expanding capacity they just announced they're going to spend $4 billion to build a fab in Singapore meanwhile Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger had said back in March that Intel wants to expand its role as a company that makes chips not just for itself but for other companies as well they want to act as a fab they see that as a alternate way to get revenue Intel plans to spend $20 billion on new factories in the US we talked about the Arizona site before so getting global foundries would give it a bunch of factories and accelerate Intel's plans to become bigger in the fab space analyst Patrick Borhead told TechCrunch that global foundries would bring with it tech that would give them processes for making chips for 5G RF IoT automotive which would help Intel become a full stack provider making it a little more compelling Darren I know you have to source chips for stuff that you make do you have a perspective on the idea of Intel getting global foundries based on that I'm curious how it's going to impact us it has been a nightmare lately some of the vendors are asking you know hey what are your 2023 orders because you need to get those in now and so I don't see this is something impacting me on some of the smaller chip stuff especially on the RF side but I do see this is like okay well this is a big player consolidating and getting bigger is that a good thing for the industry does this hold back potential innovation and I know Intel has been a big company that has been getting smaller not that they've gotten small but they have been worried that their growth is slowing so I see why Intel wants global foundries absolutely they want the capacity they want to enter the fab market and start making chips for other companies and if they buy global foundries their capacity to do that accelerates by 3 years or more global foundries may or may not want Intel to get them but it might help them get a leg up in competition against TSMC I mean it's it's one of the things that global foundries which is it's been talked about a couple of years ago but AMD was basically leveraging all their new processes onto TSMC because they have the experience and the capacity to do it and as you said global foundries only accounts for 7% of the of the global chip market TSMC that has 55-54% and so being able to at least partner with someone who could line up a lot of work for them as well as you know for Intel I mean trying to get trying to start a new fab and then have it start pumping out chips is like a two-year process or longer it's not like you know you built something in 6 months and you have product at the end of the year and so it does help Intel and it could potentially help global foundries because AMD is no longer wedded to them in the same way as it used to be and the TSMC really does have a leg up on all the competition with their with their new process Samsung comes into the close second. Yeah granted AMD has been moving a lot of their business to TSMC over the years but you know we we all had a good chuckle at Intel saying like hey we want to be a fab Apple will make the M1 for you no problem we don't mind be even weirder if Intel was making AMD's chips for them through global foundries but yeah this is still a ways off this is obviously talks the executives of global foundries are not even involved so we'll we'll we'll see where that goes. Or they say so anyway. Hard to know. Podcast at Pocketcast was sold to NPR back in 2018 but in January the public media board decided to put it up for sale NPR reportedly lost eight hundred thousand dollars on the app in 2020. Well they have found a buyer and that buyer is Automatic. Those are the folks who run WordPress also but Tumblr. Automatic announced it has acquired Pocketcast co-founders Russell Ivanovich and Philip Simpson will remain in charge of the Pocketcast team and Automatic said that the company will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocketcasts making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts. WordPress partnered in February with Spotify owned anchor on a feature to turn written blog posts into content audio content using text-to-speech so one more step ahead for Automatic and podcast podcasting folks. I wonder how much there I don't know that the star bloggers who who need a place to be featured could be featured somewhere like Pocketcast which is a very popular podcast. Yeah definitely soft spot in the heart when it comes to the likes of WordPress or RSS and podcasts and that whole open nature of the web 2.0 era that it was before all the walled gardens and the Spotify's and the subscription fees so happy to see it in a home that I know can do right by it for sure. Yeah listen I was an intern at National Public Radio back in 1993 so I'm not here to trash NPR but I was never comfortable with NPR owning Pocketcast it just didn't fit for me and I love Pocketcast so I use Pocketcast that's my go-to so them ending up with Automatic feels right to me it feels like they're with someone who understands their business will help them improve their business NPR was not making money as you mentioned Sarah and I feel like if there's money to be made on Pocketcast Automatic can figure out how to do that because they have done that with WordPress which is a free open source blogging platform right like you know they know how to do this. True and and how they will make money I mean I'd love to know I know that Pocketcast has a premium model so there was money to be made NPR couldn't figure out how to grow that you know they were obviously putting in more than they were getting back and Pocketcast is also pretty beloved because it's just a good app but you know if you want the free version of Pocketcast you can do most things that people want to do can do it that way so yeah I there's a premium model model here obviously that WordPress and Automatic is is they are scheming up I just don't see it yet. Well I'll tell you what I would pay Pocketcast for and that would be on the creator side for for creator tools or insights or data or something like that on the consumer side I mean maybe I'd pay for something I don't know but right now I haven't seen it so you know maybe there's there's something they can do both ways because that's that's how WordPress works you don't you don't make your money automatic charging the consumers of the blogs you make your money helping the people who create the blogs. We've talked before on DTNS about companies that offer algorithms that can recreate a person's voice for use in video games fixing dialogue in movies stuff like that that's becoming more and more possible more and more common filmmaker Morgan Neville told the New Yorker that he used algorithms to recreate the voice of the late Anthony Bourdain in his upcoming documentary Road Runner. Neville has Bourdain's friend David Cho reading aloud an email he got from Bourdain and then it fades into Bourdain's own voice reading the email. The New Yorkers Helen Rossner heard this when she was previewing the documentary and so asked Neville where did you get that clip of Bourdain reading his own email and Neville told Rossner he had three lines of dialogue not just that one that he wanted in Bourdain's voice but he could not find existing audio to approximate it so he gave a dozen hours of recordings of Bourdain's voice to a software company to train a model that could replicate Bourdain's voice. He didn't name the company in the New Yorker article and he also didn't identify what the other two software created lines in the documentary are in fact Neville told Rossner if you watch the film other than that line you mentioned you probably don't know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI and you're not going to know we can have a documentary ethics panel talk about it later. We're going to have a little ethics talk about it right now but before we do let's hear this is from the trailer for the documentary Roadrunner but this is part of that line that was created by the algorithm. You were successful and I am successful and I'm wondering are you happy? Okay. All right so first of all I don't think that sounds enough like Anthony Bourdain to I mean it's kind of fool some people but now that I know and I'm listening for it I'm like yeah that's not quite right it's close enough though to obviously supposed to pass as him and I think my initial question and I'd love to know what everybody else thinks is okay so this is an email that Anthony Bourdain sent to someone else and that person says yes this is legit right shares it with the documentary and documentarian says I'd be so great if I had audio of that because he did say it it was just in written form but is this something that he would have said out loud ever to anyone you know speaking on a show speaking one-on-one to somebody there are two different forms of communication so then you say okay well kind of a gray area was the permission given and apparently according to Anthony Bourdain's widow she says no he's claiming that we said it was cool but we never said that no I've never I've never given the go ahead on this particular thing so that's where this gets tricky it's like creative license sure I see where you'd you'd love to have this piece of media in the form that you want but you've changed it enough that you've created a scenario that never happened and that's where a lot of people have their feathers ruffled over this yeah I can see the the ethical problems in that and then I can also see how while on the one hand this could be great for revolutionizing ADR where then you don't have to you know as long as you've got the actors permission you don't have to get them into a sound booth and all of the added expense of that but at the same time you know you've you've got a missed opportunity for creativity I think about the the scene in what's upon a time in Mexico a wonderful Robert Rodriguez film that had Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek in this scene where they had to cut to all of these bits of V-roll to cover up the the lines because nothing was matching right and so had they been able to get them back in to re-record the lines and match them up it would have been no big deal but instead what we ended up with was a beautiful piece of cinematography that we would have never otherwise had that actually was one of the standout scenes in the movie for just being so I don't know just artsy and cool so it could also be used as a crutch and I don't like that I call that the 140 character argument right the 140 character limit on Twitter in the early days was not a limit they had to keep you know once they moved beyond SMS but they kept it because it forced creativity you know they felt it shaped the conversation and I get what you're saying there I think there's all kinds of ways you can go with this I don't think it's wrong to use an algorithm to create to create even of a dead person to create their voice again I think think creatively that's great to be able to hear that person you know imagine the historical stuff if you could recreate the voice of Lincoln reading the Gettysburg address because we have a few snippets of Lincoln's actual voice out there you know if we could if we could do stuff like that I think I think there's there's excellent opportunities to do that there's a legal morass we could go down a rabbit hole talking about like well who has the rights to the estate and who has the rights to a voice and all of that and and that's a whole situation to be discussed in the Bourdain case though you you are so close to the end of his life now that I think ethically let's forget legally ethically you need his family's permission and I know that he's saying I got their permission and she's saying they didn't so he said she said situation but you need the family's permission to do this and and without that I don't think it's ethical to do it I also don't love that he's like I'm not going to tell you which ones were there it's fine to make it obscure to say like I'd rather you don't know before you watch the movie because then you're going to hear it when maybe you wouldn't have otherwise but put it at the credits you know put it put it somewhere so that it's clear like no he didn't actually say this we did recreate that I don't have a problem with the recreation I just want a little transparency around it and I want approval yeah it's I I do not know Morgan Neville the filmmaker it does it sounds as though his somewhat flippant remarks about why that why this was done and why he doesn't want to talk more about it is is part of the reason that the story has gotten so much attention it feels to me it's I mean it's fairly it's like it's it's almost not a big deal except that now it's a big deal because everyone's like well we just don't you never know and this is a this is deep fate coming to life and and people shouldn't shouldn't be able to do something like this especially with somebody who's no longer with us and yeah it's a it's an uncomfortable thing and it's certainly not the last time that we're gonna have to have a conversation about it but I really do think it this all lands with it's the context of okay that thing was said but it was in written form and you know you're you've recreated something that sounds a lot like that person but you've taken away their right to say it the way that they want to say it because it was private conversation between two people yeah we're gonna have to work on that email yeah we're gonna have to create a whole new set of rules about this stuff is what it amounts what it comes down to well in episode 3 of our mini podcast series seniors in tech science correspondent doctor Nikki Ackerman's is gonna chat with former high school French teacher Sandra Foster who taught herself how to operate and fix max and then ended up for her friends and family above us know how that feels seniors in tech episode 3 hits the dts feed Saturday July 17th alright Darren has made the road his home with a van all customized and things you would expect for tables a bed cooking equipment some hot sauce but when you're hacking across America you need a lot of tech in that van too and we would expect nothing less from you Darren so let's start with security how does the creator of the wi-fi pineapple keep his van nice and safe well you know it starts with good operational security so of course I tell everyone where I am at any given point in time I try to just not be the lowest hanging fruit the place that I'm most concerned about security is actually not when I'm in the van boondocking anywhere it's when I park it at a trailhead and the same would really go for any vehicle but because the van there's the potential for there to be like goodies in it so obviously the stuff that's a value inside the van is locked up and then on the outside there are four night vision cameras that create 360 view of what's going on outside and what's important about those is you just get any old IP camera but make sure that it speaks RTSP on your local area network within your van and then that way without even needing the internet you can locally see all of those video signals using an app on your phone your computer your iPad whatever have you so that's been nice at night to be able to check that and see like oh what was that and you're like oh it's a deer there's LED motion sensing lights there's proximity alarm if I'm not around that'll you know make an audible alert and then I've just got like big morning signs to say like hey you know like this is under surveillance and all that jazz kind of like I think that just makes it seem less enticing to break into lots of little speed bumps basically is what you're talking about alright but the real geeky stuff I feel like is your comms like you have figured out how to set yourself up to only not have to get internet in a place where there just is no internet right what are your communication gear I love finding those places just on the edge of service where you have all of the nature and all of the conveniences of Helman being able to work remotely so having a reliable internet connection is so important and so for that I rely on one of two hacked LTE modems either the MoFive 4500 or the GL Inet Moody M-U-D-I both of those are open W-R-T Linux based routers that you can engage into with root access and make firewall rules to change this thing called IP tables which will mangle the traffic and make it look to the cell carrier as if all of the traffic going through them is coming from just a cell phone by changing this value called a time to live and there's details on the hack 5 podcast about how to do that but essentially it means that the unlimited data is actually unlimited for me even though I'm using it as a hot spot and when I couple that with a set of roof mounted antennas the range that I get is kind of tremendous at first I was going with an off the shelf solution from Wilson's WeBoost brand it's about $500 for this setup that includes an antenna on the outside and antenna on the inside in a repeater that amplifies the signal don't buy that it's $500 that you're thrown away just get the antenna itself and wire the antenna directly into the modem that's 50 bucks so I've actually since then switched to a proxy cast 6 dbi LTE antenna and I'm getting amazing range with that and then I also do like to get to places that don't have any cell service whatsoever so in those cases I rely on a Garmin in reach satellite communicator that's just for sending SMS and then I have an iridium go satellite modem that I've actually hacked to get unlimited data on but don't get excited because this is no Starlink 100 megabit Tom the the bandwidth I get on the iridium go modem is 2400 BOD BOD wow okay so little drips little drips of data yeah it's good for telnet and actually funnily enough it's a fallacy that telnet's not secure there are ways to secure telnet I need to do a segment on hack 5 of this but you can imagine it would take like a day and a half to download a photograph so don't even think it's just really forgetting into a server so when I see putty on your screen I'm like oh you're using iridium got it okay yeah and then on my Mac I use an app called trip mode there are many of these apps that will allow you to application firewall which is so important to saving data because if you've got your operating system in the background using all your data it's such a pain so I like to specify what can be used as far as navigation is concerned huge fan of the eye overlander and seeker apps for finding good glamping sites or good boondocking sites as it were you know airbnb camp and harvest host if I want to pay for something open signal is an amazing app for finding places like what kind of service to expect in places network signal info pro is a great app for finding out where those cell towers are so if you have a directional antenna you know where to point it or if you're just looking somewhere to drive for better service you know what direction to drive for that and then recreationally hey you know gotta love the toys the drone of choice right now for me is a fly woo lr4 with a lithium battery pack which will get you about 25 minutes of awesome first-person view flying action and then yeah this is all van life is all about the all about the recreational activity so you know you get your stand-up paddle boards and your electric mountain bikes and your surfboards all the little stuff to be honest of all of them the one recreational thing that I love the most is is a symbol camco little red campfire it's a propane grill technically but it's a fire pit so especially in in california some of the western states a lot of the thing is like no campfire no charcoal fires no wood fires but propane grills are okay nice comes by you're just grilling marshmallows yeah absolutely for Darren for anybody who who's like this sounds really great but I you know have a nine-to-five job and you know even if I could be on the road and I wanted to go to remote places you know the internet connectivity and just and being being plugged in enough to the world to not be off the grid I mean how pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised have you been being able to sort of push that and and live your life I know you've got you've got your hacks because because you're Darren but you know how much would you be able to say to somebody who's relatively versed in this kind of stuff but but maybe is starting out that they could do the same yeah so Sarah I wanted to spend an entire weekend offline just listening to a lannis morissette and kind of resetting digitally so I was looking for a place with no service so I went to the Alabama hills in the eastern sierras and I drove for miles into the desert to hopefully find a place of solace with no service I ended up having to go into airplane mode because I had such excellent 5g so I think that just speaks to just like how prevalent it is and it's only going to get more prevalent with things like starlink so I would say I've just been delightfully surprised how much bandwidth is everywhere well that's excellent if there's one thing you could leave people with as far as like hey I want to know more about this where do they start where would you say is a good place for people to start learning about all that sure there's an app called seeker s e k r it's kind of like a van life social network and even if you don't have a van you just got you know your Jeep or whatever get on that and there's meetups all the time and you just drive in and you make new friends immediately and instantly and they'll show you the ropes and it's really about community it's not even about living inside of a vehicle as much as it's about getting out there and making friends and seeing nature and also high tech tip here bring one of these and to the listeners it's an atlas it's made out of paper and it's wonderful and you never have to reboot it yeah spiral bound easy to use well world emoji day July 17th hope it's on your calendar but if it isn't now it is just ahead of that though the draft list for potential new emoji has been announced now if selected and many of them usually are but you know it's still kind of a question you might soon be able to call up a melting smiley face and x-ray low battery indicator disco ball hands in the shape of a heart three beans a pregnant man and an index finger pointed ahead uncle Sam style so many choices those are just a few new emoji proposals were delayed this year for pandemic reasons they're now set to be finalized by the code consortium in September with final versions rolling out in late 2021 through 2022 who beans or a pregnant right Tom I don't know which one I'm more excited three beans together I'm for the low battery beans emoji from me you know I mean business or just let's go get tacos which one are you hoping for Darren I'm hoping for low battery because I love emoji combinations my favorite of which pineapple sunglasses so I like low battery because it can be used for like brain low battery heart low battery so much you can do with that and some of the low battery mock-up icons obviously every implementation is a little different but some of them look like a half a cup of blood so it would work well with the heart emoji yeah for vampires yeah I like how I said pregnant man and everyone was just like oh you know I really like you know like all those pregnant men that's fine you know listen it's all about choice and you might have your own hope for what the emoji consortium will will will pass through and if you do we want to hear about it we want to hear about pretty much anything you have feedback about from the show feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails and we love to come back from a weekend with lots of emails so get to typing thank you in advance shout out to patrons that are master and grandmaster levels including Brandon Brooks Alexander Nasev and Hector Bones also we have three brand new bosses today we asked for four we only got three but boy were we close and the three that did their part were Brian Paulson Aaron Polkinghorn and Brandon Conkel all just started backing us on Patreon thank you Brian thank you Aaron Brian Aaron and Brandon you did your part we don't blame you but we we'll try again we'll try again for four on Monday we'll see we'll give you a whole weekend folks get on there patreon.com thanks you so much to Darren Kitchen for being with us from your very cool looking life on the road pretty jealous I will be hitting you up for tips when my dog and I hit the road sometime of our own in the future but let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you're up to oh yeah Sarah you've got to do it it's life changing and yeah all the good stuff is at hack5.org or just look at hack5 on YouTube that's HAK the number five but auto complete always kind of gets it these days lots of great new content we've got so many amazing new creators on the channel with excellent shows on cyber security news Shannon Morse obviously you guys are familiar with doing great stuff on Threat Wire we have some beginner kind of intro hacking stuff on Redia and the hack tip and hack bite and you know so just hack5.org and then you see my adventures there hack across America as I as I do a little vloggy vlog action and you know discover some new fun places I was just recently in a cave on the border of California and Oregon where I had to go through some marijuana farms it was a lot of fun it does some fun well thank you for taking the time to come hang out with us and please come back soon we are live on this show Monday through Friday 4 30pm eastern at 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live book market hello friend we'll be back on Monday with Andrew Heaton have a great weekend this week's episodes of daily tech news show were created by the following people host producer and writer Tom Merritt host producer and writer Sarah Lane executive producer and Booker Roger Chang producer writer and host Rich Strafilino video producer and twitch producer Joe Coontz associate producer Anthony Lemos Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos news host writer and producer Jen Cutter science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermann's social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterty our mods Beatmaster W. Scottis one bio cow Captain Kipper Jack Shid Steve Rama Paul Reese and Matthew J. Stevens modern video hosting by Dan Christensen video feed by Sean way music and art provided by Martin Bell Dan Looters Mustafa A. a cast creative arts and Len Peralta a cast ad support from trace gainer patreon support from Stefan Brown contributors for this week's show included Scott Johnson and Justin Robert Young and guests on this week's show included Charlotte Henry Nicole Lee and Darren kitchen thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program.