 Coming up on DTNS, how to share data for analysis without decrypting it, organ printing gets faster, and Mobile World Congress is happening in person in June. Are we ready for that? This is the Daily Tech News from Monday, March 8th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, joining us this week, we're very happy to have technology editor from Bloomberg, host of the text message podcast, Nate Langson. Nate, welcome back. It's been so long, and I'm so happy to be here. And there's not a bit of exaggeration there. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you very much for joining us. I messaged Nate at the last minute this morning, saying, hey, you wrote a story. We're going to talk about it on the show. You want to be on? And he said, yes. So here we are now. Sure did. We did get Nate's take on the Oprah interview, as well as many other things, pandemic related and otherwise on Good Day Internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Dish announced it intends to acquire the MVNO Republic Wireless, which currently licenses network access from T-Mobile. Dish says the roughly 200,000 Republic customers won't see any immediate changes to plans or have to take actions on their accounts. Apple confirmed it will no longer sell the iMac Pro after the current stock sells out. The Apple Store currently has one $5,000 configuration of the iMac Pro listed. It has a 10 core Intel Xeon W processor, 32 gigabytes of memory, and one terabyte solid state drive. We don't know how many of them they have, but if you want one, you better hurry. I was going to buy one back in the day. Now I am perhaps glad I did not. OnePlus will announce its OnePlus 9 series devices on March 23rd at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. The company confirmed the camera system was developed in partnership with DJI subsidiary Hasselblad, which will use the Sony IMX789 sensor, support 12-bit raw photos, and offer advanced color calibration with 4K, 120 frames per second, and 8K video modes. Google TV began rolling out support for profiles for children in the United States. That means you can either link a child's existing Google account or create one on the device with just the child's name and age. You don't have to have a Google account for them. Adults can then share selected purchased Google Play content with kid profiles, set watch limits, bed times, and block specific apps. The European Commission approved Microsoft's plan $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax, saying it found no competition concerns. The proposed deal was announced in September and will be Microsoft's largest gaming acquisition. All right, let's talk about Google's latest change of things. Google, no stranger to discontinuing services. Sometimes they replace them with similar functionality like they did with Google Play Music and YouTube Music. Company is now in the process of phasing out Google Play and will replace it with Google Pay. Let's explain. Back in 2018, Google rebranded all of its payment services, Google Wallet, Checkout, Android Pay, all as Google Pay. As of April 5th, that's going away. The new Google Pay operates differently. The new Google Pay will require you to download a new app and create a new account for peer-to-peer payments. If you want to send money to friends and family and such, you'll need a new account. It doesn't just use your Google account. The Google Pay website will stop functioning after April 5th. Oh, and balance transfers to debit cards are no longer free. They now carry a fee of 1.5% or 31 cents. Of course, this is only for sending money to and from other people. The new Google Pay will still use a Google account for paying by NFC, if you're like paying at a cash register. Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica points out that this is a global adoption of Google's India-focused payment system, previously known as Google Tez. It is now being rebranded as Google Pay as well. This uses SMS identification as the basis for money transfer, which is good in places without pervasive internet connections, but also carries some limitations. SMS identification limits your sign-in to a single device at a time. It's unclear how Google Pay will be supported on platforms like Wear OS in that case. It's also tied to paid phone services, meaning you lose access to Google Pay if you don't pay your phone bill. Google tried a similar SMS-based approach with its now discontinued Aloe messaging service, which, as I just mentioned, is now discontinued. Oh boy. Google notoriously had it rebranding things, even if the services themselves are good. And there are often several services that people say, what's the one that I'm supposed to be using that Google has many? And this is no exception. Besides the fact of, okay, if I was a previous customer, the app doesn't work, got to sign up again. But okay, if I'm committed to using it, not the end of the world. But not being able to have free transfers, not good. You know, the fee isn't huge, but still it's a step in the wrong direction as a customer. I don't know. I mean, I guess Google has its reasons for the consolidation of what it's doing to go in this direction, but it is yet again a confusing move on Google's part. Nader, are you confused? No, because I don't use almost any Google services at all. So I never run into this problem. But I do, historically, having observed Google for some time, I have basically fell out of favor of it when it killed Google Reader. And everything after that has been pretty much down in my estimation. So I'm basically the worst person to get an opinion on this from. I think that Google wanting to make it tied to SMS to send peer-to-peer payments means that they're focusing on this as a service for places like India. They don't assume that they're going to capture a lot of market share from other places, which is why they're leaving the Google account tied to NFC because most people in places like the United States and Europe don't use Google Pay for sending money to each other. They use it for paying at the cash register. So I feel like Google is making a very data-driven decision that is likely to just make everyone upset. And I think that's the key thing about Google, actually, is that Google has, you know, it famously makes very database decisions. Anything it kills, it kills because the data doesn't support it. So if it's killing something, it's probably because either nobody used it or it looked like there was a downward trend that suggests nobody was going to use it before too long. I imagine that's always the case with Google. I don't think they make any decisions based on anything other than analysis. That's kind of what Google is. All right, let's talk about saving power. Let's do it. So when the power goes out, having a battery in your house, such as a Tesla power wall, would help get the lights on until the power comes back on. You might say, that sounds great. I want one of those. What if you could have done that for all of Texas recently? There was, you know, obviously a lot of storms, people without power for days on end, weeks, really. Well, Bloomberg reports that Tesla subsidiary Gambit Energy Storage LLC is building a 100-megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, which is south of Houston. So it's way down there. That's enough to power 20,000 homes for a day in mid-summer, because again, a lot of AC being used. It's hot down there. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the project has a proposed commercial operation date of June 1st. And according to ERCOT, the battery will provide wholesale electricity and grid balancing services. Tesla previously built a 100-megawatt battery project in South Australia to store surplus energy generated by a wind farm. Smaller Tesla battery packs are also in use in California. And Tesla isn't the only one adding battery storage to Texas. About 2,100 megawatts of battery storage and 37,000 megawatts of solar and wind are in advanced stages of connecting to ERCOT's grid as well. And this, of course, a direct result of Elon Musk now moving to Texas, wanting to focus on building a business in Texas. So he wants to improve the place that he hopes to be in the future, which is why he's doing this. I think this is something we'll see more often around the world, not just from Tesla and not just in places like Australia or Texas. Nate, do you want to get a powerwall in your house? I'd like my oven to not kill all the power in our house when it reaches its optimum temperature every day, and I have to reset it at the wall, which is a common thing. I mean, Tesla, basically, it's going to be a battery company that makes cars. That's the ultimate long-term vision, is my assumption here. Is that the way you guys see it? I think Elon Musk is one of those people who will kind of go where the wind blows, and so it'll change over time. But right now, I think he sees being a power company as a long-term profitable enterprise for Tesla, where cars are a more medium-term enterprise. That's kind of the way I'm looking at it. The timing of this is also, well, I don't know if it's perfect, but for Elon Musk and somebody who has a lot of influence with next-gen technology, the timing of this is perfect, because you've had a lot of folks who have been like, yeah, I want that thing that's going to keep me out of the dark and freezing as I did during this last storm. I live on a property right now where the power goes out somewhat often when there's a storm. I live in the woods like you, Nate, and there's a generator. Well, the generator isn't really up to snuff. There are a lot of things that go wrong with the generator, and so it's sort of expensive and useless. To have an option that is less expensive and more useful is a really good thing for a lot of folks. One of the great things about encrypted data is that it protects your personal data. One of the downsides of encrypted data is it has to be decrypted if you want to do anything with it, which exposes it to misuse, leaks, attacks, all that kind of stuff. Let's say that a scientist, a legitimate scientist, wants to analyze a large data set of medical records to find out, I don't know, the frequency of conditions related to coffee consumption. Access to that data might be greatly delayed by regulations. It might be risky for the scientist to try to handle it because what if there's a data leak and they're liable, might even just be illegal under medical privacy laws to get the information that scientist wants. But the scientist doesn't need to know who has what conditions. The scientists just need some numbers to be calculated. What if they could just get the calculations done without ever having to look at the underlying data? That's what is called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. It can analyze data without having to know the contents. Now, this seemingly counterintuitive feat can be done with some complex math, but it's really slow. A process that would take less than a second to do on a decrypted data takes weeks to do with FHE. So it can be done. It's not real practical. That's why the United States DARPA started the Data Protection in Virtual Environments Program, or D-PRIVE, get it? D-PRIVE, you have seen the data, to look at ways to improve FHE. Intel has signed on to D-PRIVE to develop an application-specific integrated circuit, aka an ASIC. That's a chip meant to speed up FHE. Intel's going to make this test how well it works in cooperation with Microsoft's cloud services, including both Azure and Jedi. This could be a boon for machine learning, where having large datasets means better models, but also bigger privacy concerns if the datasets are decrypted. You could also offer personalized services without ever having to access unencrypted personal information, meaning you could keep your personal data encrypted under your control and still get the personalization you enjoy. IBM, by the way, is also working on FHE. They released a toolkit last year for iOS, macOS, and Linux. This is hard to wrap your head around. You just kind of have to trust that the math works, and it's in its earliest days, so it's not practical yet, but I kind of love the idea of a system that says, yeah, yeah, no, your data is safe and encrypted, but you can still share it without having to share what's in it and get some of the good stuff out of it. I massively hate the idea of all of this, to throw a spanner into the works, because the fact is that often, if you want to encrypt something and you want to keep something private, then you don't want, there's a reason that you encrypted it in the first place or the person who was responsible for that data encrypted it in the first place. So the idea of the being kind of, it's a backdoor by any other name. It's a hack. It makes me feel that as legitimate as I'm sure many of the applications will be, it will end up being used as the weak link that allows for data that we didn't want to have access to be accessed. Not trying to be paranoid about this, but it reminds me a great deal of when the FBI and Apple were having a very, very public spat about iPhone data that was encrypted as part of the criminal investigation, and the FBI ultimately dropped its case because it managed to get a way of brute forcing its way into the iPhone. But a tool like this in my head, theoretically, it could be used for something like that because it doesn't need to decrypt the data. It just needs time to process the structure of the data that's on it and then pass what it has managed to extract. And if that is possible, I see that as being kind of a gateway to this being used for a whole range of things that we probably don't want. So impressive, not in favor of it. I mean, people way smarter than me apparently say there is a concern that you might be able to deduce a few things, but it's not as good as what you're talking about where you can figure out underlying structures. But I think your point is well taken, which is if you can get any information out of encrypted data, then there is some information that is not protected, even if it's a small amount of information. It's like the data in an encrypted messaging service, it's often not necessarily the content of a message that is the thing that's going to expose you to scrutiny, but it's the metadata surrounding that message. And I sort of feel that this is a much more advanced, much more far in the future facing problem version of that same issue, I'm guessing. To put it in another way, from what I can tell, this is similar to your private key. You can put your public key out there and use it to decrypt things without giving up your private key. FHE is basically saying we can allow some results of data to be out there like a public key, but without having to reveal the private key. I mean, if that's the case, and certainly I'm speaking from a position of relative ignorance, having not read much into this specific model, but if that's the way it does work, then that does sound much more balanced in terms of risk, but I would still remain skeptical until proven otherwise. Well, folks, what is your private key? Please do not share it in our Discord, but talk about private keys and public keys and encryption in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Plans are firming up for an in-person Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this June 2021 with a possible 45,000 to 50,000 attendees. That would be just about half of the over 100,000 who attended back in 2019. So still a large number. 17,000 people attended Mobile World Congress Shanghai back in February. Attendees will have to show a negative COVID-19 test to access the main venue with repeat testing every 72 hours. They're taking it seriously. Rapid testing centers will be available on site and may also be available at hotels. Mobile World Congress will also require an app for badge entry to the show that also doubles as contact tracing. Mobile World Congress will also require temperature checks at all access points, and the conference center will have a new ventilation system and on-site medical personnel if they are needed. If all goes well, Web Summit hopes to take place in Lisbon in November with more than 70,000 people. Nate, what do you think? We are not ready. So this is a story I was writing today for Bloomberg. And when I actually got a call from the organizers of MWC, so that the GSMA last late Sunday night to say, we need to have a chat about something, and I expected them at the time to tell me that they were actually going to cancel this year again, or at the very least push it back to later in the year. Maybe say something like, we're encouraged by the roll out of vaccines, but actually on reflection, we're not going to do it. So when I spoke to them this morning for this story, I was very surprised that actually the announcement was, hey, look, in a few hours time, we're going to announce that we're going to do this, and here are all the provisions we're putting in place that you just summarized. And I mean, it's a very, very brave move, but the background to this is that the GSMA is kind of the world's mobile industry lobbying body, and about 80% of all the money that it generates every year to fund all of its activities around the world comes from Mobile World Congress Barcelona. Last year when it took MWC off the calendar, it essentially scrapped 80% of its revenue that it could make for that whole year. It has about 1,000 employees or had about 1,000 employees. I reported that they cut about 20% of those in part as a result of this. They slashed some pay for others and did a bunch of other things. It's really desperate. It really, really needs this to go ahead. So I kind of feel that they've made a calculated risk that they've taken advice from health authorities, they've taken advice from the Catalonian government and health officials, and the venue that they're doing it in is a relatively modern venue. They've been able to equip it with some new air conditioning, as you mentioned. So I sort of feel that they've weighed up the pros and cons and they've said, well, if everybody gets these negative tests and proves they've got the negative tests and they can keep confirming it and they are limiting with social distancing that we are keeping everything clean, then the data suggests this could be fine and could go ahead. And I believe it probably can. They did it in Shanghai a couple of weeks ago. They had 17,000 people there. And I asked them this morning very, very directly, did you have any confirmed cases of COVID-19 at that event? And they said, no. I think that's bolstered their support for this argument. But it is all off the back of the fact that a lot of money is on the line if they don't do this show. And it may well be that they couldn't risk not doing the show for another year. It strikes me that just about a year ago we were having the same conversation in reverse, right? Mobile World Congress was about to happen. COVID-19 lockdown started on March 12th. The Barcelona local medical professionals said it was safe to conduct Mobile World Congress until right before it was no longer safe. Now, granted, we know a lot more about COVID a year later than we did last year. So I'm not trying to throw the local health officials under the bus. I think they know more what they're talking about now. But China is in a different situation. China has essentially locked down its country and there is very little community transmission of COVID-19. That is not true in Spain. On the balance of that, by June vaccinations, hopefully are more widespread. And this trend keeps going down and down and down. I think if all goes the way it looks right now, this probably will be OK. They're taking all the precautions that medical professionals think you should take. We'll have fewer people transmitting it by June. The only hitch in the works is if something unexpected happens between now and June, I think. And I think that's right. I think it is a calculated risk. It is very risky. But I would agree that I think if everybody follows the rules, and I do believe that anyone who does go to something like this is so conscious of the situation that they will be sticking to those rules as rigidly as possible. And I think if they do that, it will be OK. But for everyone, certainly for me, as someone who's been to MWC for many, many years, many times, I won't be going because I don't think that what I need to get out of that conference, given that they're going to be streaming so much of it online, I don't think it is worth the risk for me personally to go. But the show is also huge for industry people, people who buy technology, who need to make those in-person meetings happen. They're the ones that are going to be going. And I just think another year down the line, I can see myself being back there, but not this year. I'm kind of curious if they get 45,000 people. I think they probably will. Actually, I really do think they will. It's such an important show in the calendar, and so much has been disrupted that there's almost, I think in the minds of many executives, certainly there's this feeling that you can almost get a competitive advantage by attending something like this because you can do things faster. You can get to the front of the conversational queue by being there. You've got far less competition. Taking the risk for great reward later, potentially, type of. It's game stunk, but with attendees at a conference. People are taking that risk. All right. Well, I would be willing to bet a very small synthetic hand that it will all go well, and it will only take me 19 minutes to print it. Thank to scientists at the University of Buffalo who have developed a technique for printing organs that is 10 to 50 times 50, not 15, 10 to 50 times faster than current methods. The process cures hydrogels as they are printed so that you don't have to stop down and cure. It lets you do nonstop growth of the thing you're printing. Of course, right now, the system does have some limits. It can only do centimeter-sized models. Those models do include built-in blood vessel networks and everything you would need in an artificial organ. It's just really small. A very small synthetic hand would normally take six hours to print. This can do it in 19 minutes. Scientists, of course, need to scale this up to make it useful, but if they could, hospitals could use it when organ donations are unavailable for transplants because it would print in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah. Let's get to the point where this is practical, if I need a kidney or any sort of organs. Even something that's not life-threatening, like breast implants, the possibilities are endless once it gets to the point where this is something that people can use safely and effectively. I wonder as well with things like face transplants, skin grafts, situations like that where it doesn't need to be a complete limb. It just needs to be a part, but you need to lower the risk that the body will reject tissues for whatever reason. We've seen that happen. I do think that there are going to be applications for something like this as well, and possibly this is separate to this story, but I do also wonder whether we'll see this with rare blood types. People that need emergency blood transfusions, very rare blood types. It can often be very difficult to get blood as quickly as someone needs it, particularly if they have an incredibly uncommon blood type or some other blood condition. Maybe technologies like this has the trickle-down effect, no pun intended with the blood, but you know what I mean? It has that knock on that. Well, what else can we apply this to? Yeah, you want an arterial surge of innovation to come out of this. I can think of so many jokes at the moment, and all of them incredibly inappropriate. Yeah, they're all in the same vein, so we should probably have those. Okay. This is why Tom and I get on so well. This is really cool though. Sure, it's the beginning steps of... The 3D-printed idea has come not so much full circle, but it was like, wow, you can fixture dishwasher with a 3D-printed part, and then it was like, oh, 3D-printed art. All of those things are still possible, but as we get closer to 3D-printed food or organs for humans to keep them alive or any animal, it becomes more and more exciting. All right, speaking of exciting, we've got an email. We do. This one comes from Andrew, and this is in response to a great email that we got last week from somebody who had had accessibility issues and specifically with being able to speak and said some of the stuff that is going to be available that Apple is offering would be really helpful to him. And Andrew says, I might not have damaged vocal cords as our first email did, but after a car accident of my own, I was left with slurred speech and mobility issues. A lot of my apartment is controlled with the Amazon routines because it's cool, but I've had to change my command so it doesn't sound like I'm trying to say something else. That's frustrating. At a different angle, walking with my cane means I can't pull up my phone safely. So I got an Apple Watch to help me check my phone without it leaving my pocket. This isn't a voice issue, but my disability has made it so I've never been able to raise my wrist high enough in order to use voice features for my watch. That too is frustrating. It's my two cents, but my two Canadian cents. So like a bit less than your freedom sense. You round up though, they're almost the same. Yeah, they really are. Those, I love getting these perspectives from people who are like, yeah, Apple Watch helps me a little bit, but here's the tweak for me. Exactly. You need to raise your arm and I can't raise my arm high enough to do a lot of the things. That does reduce the functionality of the Apple Watch quite a bit. I wrote a story a few weeks ago about a smart cane, a walking cane that had sensors in it that allowed people with limited or no vision to move around, but it actually had built-in navigation and traffic directions and things like that. And every single bit of conversation I had with the person who created it was like, wow, this is a whole new world to me. I don't even think of these things as being issues. It's always incredibly eye-opening to hear those sorts of stories. Well, if you have any stories that you think would be eye-opening for us, anything we've talked about on a past show or might talk about on a future show, please do let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Thank you in advance. We'd also like to shout out patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Dr. X17, Paul Rees, and Rognaud Vermedal. And also thanks to our brand new bosses, Greg and Adam. They both just started backing us on Patreon, so thank you to the new bosses. Also, big thanks to Nate Langson. Nate, we're so glad to have you back on the show. It's been too long. Let folks know where they can keep up the rest of your work. It's great because I used to send in promos very regularly for my podcast text message, and then we went on hiatus and then we came back and I forgot to start sending them again. But my podcast text message, uktechshow.com, it's like a British version of DTNS that's once a week instead of daily, and Tom's on it sometimes. So I'd love anyone to check that out. And of course, my work at blueberg.com is where I spend my day. Yeah, you and Ian are my running companions, usually. I listen to it on Sunday afternoon while I'm going for a run. Just running terrified from our horrible opinions about the world. When Tom's running for his life, I need Nate. Yeah, thank you, though. Hey, folks, if you want an ad-free version of Daily Tech News Show, support us on Patreon. 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