 Coming up on DTNS, China's Big Tech Crackdown continues, Google kills killing APIs, and what's in an Amazon Echo name anyway? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, July 26th, 2021, at Studio Redwood, I'm Sara Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. And on the show is producer Roger Shane. Before the show on GDI, we were just talking about all sorts of things, like living in the Midwest and the Great Lakes and lots of different museums that you might visit when you visit any of those areas. If you want that wider conversation, do so by becoming a member at patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Spotify announced a What's New panel, which will display new releases from bands, musicians, and podcasts you follow. The feature will roll out across iOS and Android in the coming weeks. Last month, Judge James E. Boesberg dismissed an FTC antitrust lawsuit against Facebook saying it failed to provide enough facts to back its claims, but gives the agency 30 more days to refile. The FTC now has asked for a three-week extension through August 19th to amend the lawsuit. A new partnership with Samsung and the South Korean movie and TV show producer CJENM will see the studio use Samsung's massive micro LED the wall display at the studio's virtual production facility in Paju later this year. The oval main display will be 20 meters in diameter and at least 7 meters tall. The studio already has a deal with Epic Games to use its Unreal Engine game engine to generate digital backdrops for future projects. Motorola will hold an event in China on August 5th at 7.30 a.m. Eastern time with a Waibo post saying that the event will focus on the cutting edge. A teaser image of the camera lens shows 108 megapixel branding and based on Chinese regulatory findings, the Motorola Edge 20 series could be announced at the event as well. The European Commission and EU Consumer Authorities ruled Google has two months to improve search results for Google flights and Google hotels or face possible sanctions. Google must explain how it ranks results as well as clearly identify reference prices with promotional discounts from final prices with taxes and fees included. All right, let's talk a little bit more about what is going on in China as it pertains to payments over the weekend into early Monday morning. China continued its tech crackdown with new regulations aimed at ed tech, food delivery and music streaming. China's State Administration for Market Regulation ordered 10 cents to end its exclusive music licensing rights within 30 days as well as end requirements for copyright holders to give the company better treatment than rivals. The regulator also fined 10 cents, 500,000 yuan, which is about 77,000 US dollars for violations around its 2016 acquisition of China music. 10 cents will be required to submit annual compliance reports to the regulator for the next three years. China's State Administration for Market Regulation and six other agencies also released new guidelines for online food platforms including ensuring workers earn the local minimum income. Firms are now also required to appropriately relax delivery time limits and guide their drivers to follow road safety rules. This comes after China launched an antitrust investigation into the delivery giant METWON back in April and China's State Council also announced new regulation impacting its booming education tech sector. So companies that teach school curriculum as now go non-profit cannot pursue IPOs and cannot have existing shares held by foreign firms. Online tutoring for children below six is also forbidden, with the country planning to make state-run online education services free. Yeah, a really big, you know, I was putting together daily tech headlines this morning and I was kind of just shocked by the amount of stuff. Obviously the big tech crackdown that's been going on in China has been going on pretty much this whole year, probably even longer than that. And we've seen some moves like, you know, a crackdown on foreign IPOs in the right of the DD and light of the DD IPO and kind of making sure there's getting state approval for that. The big one that stuck out to me, you know, we've seen 10 cents. This was kind of had been reported, I think by Bloomberg a little while ago that this was kind of coming down the pike. But the ed tech stuff to me is really interesting because this is a continuing area of a lot of investment both in China and from foreign firms and to kind of just say we're not doing that anymore. You know, everything needs to be a non-profit. Foreign firms, you know, as you said, Sarah, they need to sell out of anything that existing that they have probably not at an opportune time when values are going to be great on that. And, you know, outside of the tech regulation, you know, kind of saying we need to put a clamp down on people hiring these, you know, third party services and stuff like that. So that is a really big swing from, OK, we need to, you know, with the delivery stuff, you know, I think, you know, earning a local minimum income, you know, I don't think that is out of completely out of left field. This, the education stuff really struck me hard. Yeah, I was also struck by that as well. I'm not living in China, you know, all of this. It's like, OK, well, here's what we're going to do, you know, in the music sector. Here's what we're going to do for the food delivery sector. Here's what we're going to do in the education sector. None of this strikes me as bad moves. However, you know, I don't live in China. I wish that I had a little bit more understanding of how this may be posturing or otherwise not the greatest idea for the folks who live there. It's hard to say. Yeah, and the other the other thing is these are all relatively speaking kind of consumer facing firms that they're putting a lot of these regulations on. I've heard some thoughts that, you know, we're not necessarily hearing, you know, a lot of like more backend stuff kind of hitting this same regulation in the same way, specifically talking about things like chip fabrication and stuff like that, where there's a little bit more of a, I guess, a national national security imperative or, you know, that's more of a lifeline to an industry, as opposed to streaming music or even ed tech to a certain degree. There is a school of thought currently going that there's three reasons why China is kind of cracking down on tech right now. One is, of course, the government wants to be in control and having a company, especially something like Tencent really grow into such an influential force, may not sit well with the government because then that that that in some way chips away at their control. But with the ed tech, some of the scuttlebutt is that because a lot of the education in China you have to pay for, right? It's not like you get public education that's covered by the government until you finish high school. And so parents are spending a lot of money and there's a there's a fear that that might imbalance the economic flow in the in the country if people are spending so much money on educating their children that they have smaller disposable incomes to prop up the consumer economy elsewhere. And so it's more of like we want to make sure that people aren't being spent out of out of their homes in education that might have dubious quality. And so, you know, they try and they're trying to kind of reach stability as well as an economic equilibrium with with consumers. So, you know, you're not having all these people in debt or you're having people spend everything in education, not enough in other areas like, you know, technology or entertainment, stuff like that. Well, Google abruptly killing apps, services and APIs isn't exactly anything new. In fact, it's become something of a meme. Just go on over to killedbygoogle.com to see the trail of canned projects all the way back to Google deskbar and up to currently to Android things. While sunsetting services like Google Reader may cause a lot of headaches for consumers, this reputation might also influence business decisions on whether to build around Google APIs long term. Clearly, Google Cloud the Google Cloud team has heard this feedback. In response, Google has announced it will now designate a subset of APIs across the company as Google Enterprise APIs, which will be subject to strict guidelines about any change of them that would impact consumer software built around them. This will include APIs from Google Workspace, Google Maps, and a majority of Google Cloud. According to Google Cloud VP, Kripa Krishnan, the program is built on the principle that no feature may be removed or changed in a way that's backwards and incompatible as long as customers are actively using it. This is a big change for Google. And, you know, Google keeps making a lot of noise that they're very serious about the cloud. But, I mean, does, you know, Sarah... Is this a big change, Rich? Like, please convince me. In a former life, I used to report for like an enterprise IT news site. And so on background on a lot of talks that you would have, like Google Cloud was recognized as its third place in the public cloud race in the US at least, but there was always this open question of, OK, it's great for your AI projects. It's great for your machine learning. Is it something you're going to build your business around? Because as fickle as Google, I mean, there was a report last year, I believe, that Google was kind of looking at, is this worth it for us? Should we sell out of this at a certain point? And now coming about and saying, hey, listen, we understand what the enterprise wants more than anything. They don't want things to move fast. They want those seven nines of reliability. They want uptime and they want to make sure that if you build an app, it's not going, you know, they want some legacy support and Google has a new service and in third place needs to kind of give that assurance. It still isn't bringing back Google Reader, which does make me extraordinarily sad, but, you know, we can't we can't have all we can't have all good things, Sarah. I mean, I guess, you know, when you think of for anybody who was sort of like Google Cloud APIs, how does this relate to me? I mean, Google Maps is probably the most obvious, like, oh, OK, that's that's extremely important and, you know, used in an everyday way by a lot of folks. I this feels to me, you know, and again, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. It feels to me like Google shuffling around some stuff internally. It doesn't really seem like anything is happening. This may be Google not changing a single thing and just putting a name on a policy that they've had for the last three years for the enterprise, but it still means a lot to enterprise customers and especially when like Microsoft is really hitting on the gas with Azure, AWS is, you know, just the behemoth in the room that everyone's competing against, you know, for Google Cloud to keep growing and to kind of gain beyond kind of that AI ML comfort zone that they're in with a lot of their customer base, they need these kind of assurances, even if this is even a new internal policy for the company, it's a big deal for them to announce it and maybe change the optics around killed by Google.com. Well, also, perhaps a big deal, depending on what kind of devices you have in your home, Amazon added support for the wake word Ziggy for Echo devices as well as support for a new masculine sounding voice, the voice and wake where it can be independently set of each other, meaning that you can assign the new voice, but still keep the old wake word for convenience, you have options folks or vice versa. Echo devices have supported a number of different wake words, including Amazon, Echo or computer or, you know, the other one. But this is the first time that a second name has been added to the lineup. Amazon has also previously supported buying celebrity voices to use for Echo devices. Samuel L. Jackson is one, for example, but these voices didn't replace all system functions. You know, they were kind of fun, but it was a bit of a novelty thing rather than an actual functional thing. The name, the new name probably won't cause as much confusion as the initial wake word name, which was the 60th most popular girl's name in the US when the Echo came out in 2013. Remember, we talked about this on DTNS where maybe it was GDI, it was one of the shows, Ziggy never been in the top 1000 names in the US ever. So we're starting in a good place, I suppose. Rich, what do you think? I mean, unless you're a fan of single panel comics with a kind of a round protagonist that you're constantly referencing. This seems like, you know, a very good name. It does also, it kind of sparked me as like, is this a reference to like Ziggy or something like that? When I first saw this, I was like, is this them like being like IoT? It's not. No, I feel like it. I feel like somebody whoever was in charge of this looked and said, this name is not popular enough to get a bunch of people sending email complaints to us, let's do this and everybody else gets another option. It is surprising to see that just even not that you need, you know, like a masculine voice or something like that. But the fact that this is this product is, you know, well established 2013, you know, a long time ago that they're just adding to the to the repertoire, I guess I'm sure they have localized voices, you know, depending on what country and kind of like Siri does. But the fact that you just have the one option, a little surprising considering Amazon was kind of the one of the first people to kind of be aggressive in this virtual assistant space feels almost like a little bit of ketchup from that particular angle, obviously. And like we're, you know, recognition and stuff like that. They're on par with just about anyone else. But surprising it took them this long to really come up with that. You know, I'm, you know, along with a lot of other people, I'm like, what, you know, just just just wake me when I can. Ha ha, wake me when I can just choose the wake word of, you know, whatever I want. And, you know, the device is smart enough to learn that from me. And then that's how I wake the, you know, the the platform going forward. We're not there yet. I do have a friend who has a cat named Ziggy. And when I let her know about this news just a couple of hours ago, she was like, are you kidding? Like, why, why do they do that to me? And I was like, I mean, you're the only one I know who would be adversely affected by this. And or you could also think of it as like, you know, oh, look, you know, they knew after my cat kind of thing. You can't please everybody all the time. I'm I I welcome the new option. I'll probably try it out. I, you know, I have a lot of Amazon assistant devices. So why not? And that's all we have to say about that. Hey, did you know that people read at 10 percent slower from a screen than from paper? It's true. If you want to learn faster, listen to Noticias de Tecnolahia Express and you'll get the most important headlines of the week in about five minutes. Noticias de Tecnolahia Express available every Friday. Well, re-releasing movies at higher quality has been standard practice for a couple of decades now at this point with the march from VHS to DVDs and blueberries and, you know, getting into streaming now. But video game remasters for higher resolution consoles have also caught on in recent years. Still, not every game or movie is even worthy of such a re-release. Movies get stuck on older media, things like that. So what are fans of these properties supposed to do if they want things like higher resolution and frame rates? Let's try Sean Hollister at The Verge recently profiled how YouTube channel Upscale is recreating classic video game cutscenes at higher resolution. The channel does this using Topaz video Enhanced AI, which offers several generative adversarial network algorithms to help upscale the video, often with impressive results. While Topaz provides a set of tools to do this upscaling, the process is far from fast or even automatic. Joel Hruska at Xtreme Tech has a long running series looking at the challenges of upscaling a much longer form of content like cutscenes maybe range from, I don't know, two to 10 minutes, looking at the challenges of upscaling an entire series like Star Trek at Deep Space Nine. His work shows that a lot of the limits of this type of upscaling, with early seasons of the show poorly transferred to DVD, resulting in just less overall detail that can be processed by the algorithms to artifacts cropping up when frames are over sharpened and just a lot of uncanny valley moments when it comes to human actors in motion rather than something like animation, which you're kind of already crossing that boundary anyway. Time is also a big factor with each episode taking seven to eight hours to process in Topaz using an RTX 2080 GPU. It gets into dozens of hours when you're using even a high end CPU and taking up to 350 gigabytes of storage. This has been kind of something that's been going on for a little while now with this whole kind of upscaling trend. I mean, both on the commercial side where, hey, it makes a lot of money to re-release a game for the PS1 on more modern consoles or something like that. But it's interesting to have this consumer level to like Topaz has a couple hundred bucks, not cheap, certainly, but it is not a, you know, it's not unattainable if you are really into this. You know, Sarah, have you checked out any of the work on this? And I mean, the video game stuff is truly impressive to me. Have you seen anything that's kind of blown you away with this kind of upscaling? Well, not really. But at the same time, as we were talking in our pre-show meeting, you mentioned Star Trek and said, yeah, you know, this is something that I've been I've been following closely. I feel like there are precious few movies and or series where people care enough about one or the other in order to say, yes, re-release this to me and make it look better. I love the idea of this. I love the technology. I love, you know, the idea that that upscaling is possible on any level. I just don't know how many companies out there are going to thrive on saying, hey, you want, you know, you want to you want to upscale this this this series of yours that, you know, folks have been loving for many years, but only remember it in a certain way. I do see it seem I feel like there's a there's a limited market here. That's all. I agree. And like Star Trek is there's one of the examples at least like next generation. You know, there was a big multi-year rollout of the blue rays for the seasons of that show and, you know, so there was that fan base to kind of, you know, oh, I want the highest quality and I want this. But I think this is really valuable in a lot of ways for, you know, media is sticking around longer and longer. But you to get it to a younger generation or to newer consumers even. Let's just put it that way. It's tough to say, hey, watch this, you know, standard definitions show that uses four percent of the pixels that your 4K TV can display and squint and it'll look really good. And, you know, by having this kind of upscaling, it kind of helps bridge that gap in a lot of ways. The interesting question and Joel gets into this in his extreme tech piece is, you know, he's kind of hesitant to even call it like 4K or an HD upscaling because he's saying this isn't creating any new information. The the the network that the neural network that's processing is using its best guess to put that out there and it does a really good job. But he's still going through and making individual PNGs of every single frame of every single episode to kind of be able to do every single frame. Yeah, he said it works. It works the best if you make an individual image file of every single frame of the show. And so like that's right now, that's the level of effort that you need to go to. But the fact is this has only been around for a limited number of years. We're already at the point where, you know, kind of the ultra enthusiast can take on this kind of project for an entire TV series. You know, as as GPUs get faster, as the as the algorithms get better. And Joel even said Topaz AI got better during the year or so that he was kind of working on this, the different algorithms. So it's a rapidly advancing pace. I wonder if it'll, you know, get to that, you know, kind of like live streaming. Hey, plug in this YouTube URL and it'll upscale it for you. I'm sure for licensed property, it'll cause all sorts of intellectual property. It's an interesting conundrum, I guess, that some people have anyway, where it's like you might get a fancy new television. I mean, I don't my television is not a 4K television. Everything 4K, I'm like, yeah, yeah, we'll get there eventually. But like not happening in my living room, everybody. But but that's because, you know, got a TV, it works, it's it's it's fine. We'll get there eventually. But you get and especially I've been, you know, hearing this a lot with people watching a lot of Olympics content, you know, where it's like, oh, there's, you know, fancy stuff that's available in a certain resolution, you know, and there's, you know, sort of the bells and whistles that come along with that, but not everyone is actually ready to to to be able to enjoy that. It just depends on what kind of hardware you have at home. The the interesting thing coming out of this will be we'll see kind of the moral, not moral even, but like the conundrum of like colorizing black and white photos causes sometimes people to say, those aren't the colors that were, you know, that's not the light that was gathered onto that film. Or even when you go into black and white, that wasn't the intention of the director or the cinematographer or something like that. When we get away from more of these fan made, if we see like a business application of this, of this AI upscaling, if we will see that same kind of, I guess, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Let's talk about EVs. Why not? Well, batteries for electric vehicles have improved quite a bit over the over the years. Range anxiety, still a thing. Finding a charger remains a concern for a lot of folks. The Indiana Department of Transportation or INDOT and Purdue University are testing one possible way to get around this issue. Magnetizable concrete called Magment. Magment is made from cement and also recycled magnetic particles, hence the name Magment, offering acclaimed wireless transmission efficiency up to 95 percent while not being any more expensive to install compared to standard concrete. OK, sounds pretty good so far. Research on using Magment will take place over three phases. The first two will focus on running pavement testing, analysis, optimization research. A third phase will build a 400 meter long Magment Highway to test charging on heavy trucks operating at 200 kilowatts or more. If all these phases are successful, my N D O T or INDOT will build it out in a segment of interstate highway within Indiana. Rich, can't be too far from you. You excited? I am. If I had an electric car, I would be looking forward to these phases getting done in an undisclosed area of Indiana Highway. This to me is really important because in terms of like building out EV stuff because it's always been a chicken and egg problem of building out this kind of infrastructure in terms of building out a charging network or something like that. And this to me, when you're doing this kind of research, looking to possibly install a bit of highway in Indiana, that to me says, OK, we've we've we've kind of reached a point where there are enough cars on the road to justify this research and eventual infrastructure investment in this kind of charging network, you know, EVs like every car company is making EVs. EVs are obviously going to be a thing. But like this is a really interesting way to kind of run it especially for long haul truckers where they want to with more automation, they're able to stand the road a lot longer if they're able to not have to stop in charge that could even increase efficiency even more for our Robo truck future. Very exciting. Yeah, I mean, I I have more friends than ever that have electric vehicles. I am not one of them, but I'm thinking about it. You know, I might I might be next next year. But a lot of that has to do with where do I plug it in? Are we good at home? But then, you know, what about when I'm out and about? And how realistic is that? And everyone's situation is different. And this just gets gets the convert almost like gets the conversation to a point where we're having less of a conversation because everyone feels just a little bit more, you know, we're we're cool, we're cool. You know, I'm not I'm not going to run out of battery on this highway. There are lots of options for me. So I love it. Also, what I love this one is interesting. Russian artist, Alessa Churneskaya has developed a realist.glitch.me. It's a website that changes every time you blink your eyes. I mean, you have to load it first and be looking at it and also make sure that your computer's the cameras on all of those things have to work. But then it works like a charm. She uses it as a sort of a PSA about generative adversarial networks, GAN in art. Churneskaya is also known for open source APIs to create works of art, many that access a user's webcam for customization. So this is something that she's she's been doing for some time. This particular site notes that 75 percent of the people who work on computers affected by computer vision syndrome are affected. It causes eye fatigue, dry eyes, burning eyes and other problems. The solution blink more frequently. Here you go. What I love about this is it, you know, there are there are other sites that show that what GANs can do for generating imagery like this face does not exist and sites like that. But I love the fact that it's like literally every time you kind of change your gaze even slightly on this website, like something minor will change over time. Like that, if you if you want to show like how quick that can be like, I mean, as proverbial and a blink of an eye is kind of an interesting way. And a good kind of also kind of a showcase for like, you know, accessibility tech in a browser, too, in a weird way. Absolutely. Yeah, I I I loaded this up earlier and I went through it. There are only several pages that that it that it goes through before you kind of start at the beginning again. But it does work like a charm. Anybody who's like, I'm not giving some website access to my camera. Yeah, well, this wouldn't apply to you. But I get what she's going for here. And I was even struck by how. How easily it worked. It really did, you know, just just a little blank. And then sometimes I blanked not even on purpose. And I was like, oh, no, I was reading the other page. Go back, go back. Can't go back. No. All right. Well, before we blink away to this show, let's check out in the mail bag. We have a fantastic email from John, the lonely English dude in Russia. He wrote in writing in reference to our comments on kitchen full. It might have been a few shows ago, and he says the internet can be slow there. I'm sorry, lonely and slow on your internet in Russia. But he was basically saying referencing Sarah saying all of the points of the all of this points to a future where robot concierge plans, your meals and orders, your groceries and robot packs it all up, delivery sends it to your door. And Tom said that sounded amazing. His question does it and he's questioning what the end game here that we fetch up that we fetch up confined to a sofa with social media piped directly into our brains as a robot massages our feet and pumps low calorie high protein chocolate into us. Oh, John wrote and he said, I'd like I'd like to think about what I feel like eating depends on my mood. Kind of like what's repackaged these days as mindful, then wandered down into the local store, something you would say, exercise, bumping into people. I know on the way, a surreptitious or real world social interaction or gives an algorithm for that or a anagram for that and choose the groceries. I like the look of while stumbling over a language I'm learning in a heroic attempt to flirt with the woman manning the scales. Now that sounds amazing. I'm not I mean, I'm in accord with you, John. I I enjoy going to the grocery store as well. I enjoy all of the things that you've you've laid out as as as as great. But wouldn't it be nice to say, hmm, I'd like to go to the grocery store and flirt with the woman over in the other aisle and squeeze the tomatoes and all of those good things. But if for any reason I can't or don't want to, I've got the robot to do it all for me. I mean, I don't necessarily mind that. I will say as a as a parent where your time for for dinner time is is limited, the tyranny of choice can be overwhelming at times. So every I like the ability to hand that off, at least for like a meal service to be like, give me three choices. I just want to cook three things at times. I will say that. Also, John, we're sorry you're lonely. Thanks for hanging out with us. Hopefully we make you less lonely. And yeah, you know, keep keep fighting the good fight in Russia. If you have any feedback for anything that we talk about on a previous show, what we might talk about on a future show, anything in between, do send it our way. We really appreciate your feedback. Feedback at daily technewshow.com is where to send that email. We also like to shout out patrons on our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Justin Zellers, Eric Holm and Carmine Bailey. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Stefan Pole, Stefan just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Stefan. And by the way, thank you to all of our patrons. Patreon.com slash D T N S where you can find out more about becoming a patron. If you're not already couldn't do it without you. Thank you so much. We're live on this show Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. Tell a friend, tune in if you can, love to see you live. We'll be back tomorrow with Tom and Nate Langston joining us as well. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.