 Coming up on DTNS, what Microsoft has planned for Bethesda Lines plan to fact check without weakening encryption and monitoring your heart with a smart speaker. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the place where there's a soon to be father to I'm Patrick Beja. I'm the soon to be father of two. And I'm already a father of two. I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. That place is Finland, Finland soon to be the place where there is finally a father of two. Patrick Beja, congratulations on the number two government man. Well, they're not here yet, but soon. We were just talking about names for Sonos products based on former Roman Empire capitals and a lot of other fun stuff. Get that wider conversation by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung announced to follow up to its 970 EVO solid state drive called the 980. The drive is an MVME M2 PCIe 3.0 drive and cost between $50 for the 250 bite 250 gigabyte model to $130 for the one terabyte version. This is Samsung's first DRAM less MVME SSD. It takes advantage of the host memory buffer feature in the NVME specification instead, which also brings the price down. Samsung says the 980 can achieve speeds of up to six times that of a SATA based SSD. CBS News reports the Twitter is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in federal court following an investigation the Attorney General launched into Twitter after it banned former President Trump. Twitter alleges the Attorney General is violating the first amendment by trying to punish the social network for exercising free speech rights over the content it hosts. Chrome OS is 10 years old and in celebration Google announced new tools coming to the platform. A feature called Phone Hub will let you find an Android phone from a Chrome OS device tether with one click and check your phone's battery life. Wi-Fi sync lets you automatically connect to Wi-Fi networks that your Android phone trusts. Nearby share lets you easily share files between Chrome OS and Android devices without needing an internet connection. Chrome OS screen reader is getting improved controls and the clipboard can now store up to five things. Apple released iOS 14.1, an important security update to address a WebKit vulnerability. That update aims to prevent arbitrary code execution in Safari and third-party browsers, so go do that right away. Apple also released a preliminary update from its women's health study team at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. The study of 10,000 participants in the research app found that menstrual cycle symptoms included some that are less commonly known or discussed, such as gastric issues and sleep changes. This kind of data can help researchers better understand various health conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, infertility, and menopause. Amazon is expanding its Amazon One technology which lets customers pay inside a store by scanning their poms to identify themselves, expanding to more stores in the greater Seattle area. It's now available in Amazon's four star store in Linwood and in the coming weeks in Amazon Books Store in Bellevue and its four star and pop-up stores in Southlake Union. Amazon says 12 of its physical stores will soon feature the technology. I will give you a dollar if you take a picture of yourself with a palm pilot trying to use it to log in at one of those stores. All right, let's talk a little more about what's going on with the European Union. Okay, the European Union has pledged more than $150 billion to develop next generation tech industries as part of its two trillion economic recovery package. The plan sets a goal for Europe to produce at least 20% of the world semiconductors by value to 20 by value by 2030. So got a little under 10 years to double it. Last year Europe produced 10%. The biggest European chip companies are Infineon and NXP, which make chips for automotive and industrial customers. ASML and the Netherlands makes equipment used for chip making plants. Taiwan and the U.S. are leaders in the space with companies like TSMC and Intel. Europe has had success encouraging domestic industry before with Airbus and GSM technology, but domestic tech self-reliance is becoming a trend. Last month, the U.S. launched a review of supply chain disruptions with references to encouraging domestic production. China built chip making self-reliance into its latest five-year plan as well. Well, Patrick, I mean, you're in Europe. What do you think about self-reliance? I, well, I think it's not only interesting but kind of mandatory now as we've learned. And to be honest, I didn't realize that Europe was producing 10% of the world's semiconductors. Obviously, we're talking about value here, so it might not be huge volume, but it's still not insignificant. You know, we have this image that in order to start this kind of, to or restart this kind of industry, we need know-how that we don't have in the West. And if you're producing 10% of the world's value or value of semiconductors, you at least have some of the knowledge, some of the know-how. So I think that going from 10 to 20 over a period of 10 years, if there's a consensus over the entire union, it doesn't seem impossible. And it would help a lot, not only in, of course, you know, independence and self-reliance, but also in having more of a say in the trade negotiations or economic discussions that you will have with your partners. It seems like, I don't want to say, you know, it's, it's, there's a, maybe there's a silver lining out of the pandemic in that area for us. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize, if you're building a chip factory, it doesn't matter if it's in India, Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, you are likely to be buying from ASML in the Netherlands. They are, they are considered the leader in the equipment needed to make chips. So there's some secret hits in Europe. My gut is a little concerned at this idea of everybody wanting to be self-reliant. I'm not that worried because I don't think it's achievable, but I think it would be bad if every country tried to be like, we're going to make all our own chips ourselves, which is not what Europe's trying to do. They're only trying to go from 10 to 20 percent. So, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to panic, but we, I think hopefully what the good outcome of all of this is we have a wider distribution of manufacturing capacity so that if one country gets targeted or one country goes down, whether it's because of governmental problems or, or weather or a pandemic, it doesn't affect the global supply chain as much as when it's all concentrated in one region. So I think the, the way we look at it in Europe is not so much, let's make sure, you know, things can keep running for the world. And more, let's say we have a rush on some components, well, we need to make sure that we have at least enough here to keep the essential infrastructure and things that we need running, running. So maybe you're not going to have all the latest technology or maybe you're not going to have enough to, you know, you're not going to start making iPhones if you have a global drought or not drought, but, you know, a global shortage on those kinds of components. It's not to make sure that you can make enough iPhones for everyone in Europe, it's more, let's make sure we can keep building, I don't know, submarines and. Or cars, I mean. Or car, yeah, yeah. Important stuff. Automotive chips are having a shortage and that's one of the areas that Europe has good capacity and so that they're feeling it more, I think that makes sense. I mean, we were talking about Airbus, the, the aviation industry is also in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Issues, so. All right, let's talk about nothing. Well, won't we? Yes, we will. Carl Pay, co-founder of OnePlus and now head of his own new company called Nothing, which will never get old, unless it does, tweeted a picture of concept one, the precursor to its first product, wireless earbuds expected to come out this summer. The earbuds are semi-transparent and shaped a bit like a tobacco pipe. Pay also made a blog post about the company's design principles, writing no screens, no dedicated devices, just barely noticeable technology that empowers us to be more human. Well, first of all, I think that the design is kind of neat. I mean, it looked like earbuds. There is some transparency. The tobacco pipe part of it and, and Pay specifically said it's like a grandmother's tobacco pipe and the blog post announcing the design, which I'm like, okay, sure, there's grandmother's smoking tobacco pipes here and there, but it's not the first thing I might think of when I'm putting something in my ear, but it's kind of cool. I guess promising no dedicated devices, no screens and wireless earbuds and future products that just work. I mean, they got to do something. They said they were going to do this and now they're doing it. I don't know. I just want to make a McGree joke at this point because it really does not look like, it looks more like a snail shell to me than a pipe, but the important thing to note here is that Carl Pay is a master at getting the technology world to talk about his new company and he doesn't even have a product yet. You know, this flowery design language has a lot of people out there very excited, like, oh, I love their approach and everything. All we've seen is this concept that's not even the actual product yet. I'm not saying the products will be bad. It's a master at work. Yeah, it's really annoying to me because he's so good and everyone is kind of foiling for it. You know, there's really, even the name is clever and annoying because there's really nothing to talk about and everyone's talking about nothing. It's so annoying that it works and the product is, I mean, there's no product. There's, again, nothing. The design, honestly, is not that interesting. It's a lot of, oh, what could it be? What could it end? OPPO is a great brand. Is it OPPO? Am I hallucinating? OnePlus, sorry. OnePlus is a great brand, but what they did was make stuff that was really cool and expensive, really cool and less expensive. Maybe Carl Pei is a design genius and he's going to make interesting new stuff and that's the way he's presenting his 2B products, but he doesn't have the pedigree to innovate item thing beyond making stuff really, really cool at a cheaper price. Yeah, he's teaming with teenage engineering to partner on the design. That's a hardware company design company. Not just a bunch of teenagers, that's actually the name of the other company. Man, these names these days. The thing with wireless earbuds, before we move on, just sure you want it to sound as great quality as possible and fit and be comfortable to wear. I mean, I don't know how much you innovate unless I'm really missing something with the future of these things we're all wearing now. Also, it's a dedicated device. So get off my lawn. He says no screens. So he's not making phones. No, that's for sure. That's true. But the earbuds are a dedicated device. What does it mean? No dedicated device. So anyway, rest of world.org, which if you don't follow rest of world.org, go check it out. They do some great work there. Has a write up. Yes, please do. Yeah. Yeah, it's really good. Rest of world.org has a write up on how line partnered with Taiwan Fact Check Center and co-facts to combat misinformation on the line messaging app and then encrypted. So how are you going to combat misinformation when you can't see people's messages? Well, users can forward suspected misinformation to a line fact checker account. The system scans the message, compares it to a database of previously identified misinformation and then responds with an X if it's totally false, an orange triangle if it's partly false, partly true, and a green check mark if it's entirely true, and then links to a report that explains that rating in more detail. If there's no match, the system will try to offer similar topics and may ask the user if they would like the message to be fact checked from the ground up because it doesn't have anything on it, which can take from three to seven days. Lines research shows that about 33% of users in Taiwan are willing to report suspicious content. 25% would forward a fact check to their own contacts once they got it. Line also shows frequently reported fact checking on its homepage and the system lets line track false information being shared on the platform because they otherwise wouldn't see these messages while still using end-to-end encryption. Now, I can't do video or memes yet, but Line says it hopes to launch that part of the feature later this year. Princeton cryptography researcher Anune Kulsretha told Rest of World that the approach is novel but could be easily implemented by others like Signal or WhatsApp. However, Taiwan has a robust system of fact checking already. Line's not paying. Facebook pays its fact checkers. Line's just taking advantage of existing resources. And Taiwan has a culture of combating misinformation that not all countries share. It feels like this is easily replicable technologically speaking, but kind of depends on the region as far as whether it would work or not. Yeah, I think that's exactly the issue. The thing works very cleverly for implementing fact checking and checking period in an end to end cryptographic messaging system. And that I think is the most interesting and novel takeaway from all of this. And it's a very clever way of doing it. And by the way, yes, Rest of World is great because they surface these kinds of things that we have really never heard about. And that article is a great example of that. But beyond that, I think the culture in Taiwan is probably a big part of it because it could be implemented, as you said, technically. I'm not sure how well it would work in situations like the ones we see on Facebook and Twitter and others. What's really interesting to me, though, is that this is a step that users have to take themselves. You have to see a story, think, oh wait, there's something fishy about this and ask if there is indeed something fishy about it. The approach we've had until now in social networks is presenting the validity of the story along with the story itself without people even asking. So I wonder if there isn't a kind of an added benefit of having the end to end encryption having to force the user him or herself having to ask for the check. Yeah, I think for the most part it's hard to get upset about giving users of any messaging app more tools in order to figure out what's true and what isn't. The main problem I see with this is just, yeah, the length that it takes to get your answer. I mean, we're talking about information being shared at warp speed, waiting up to a week to find out if that thing I read is bunk or true. Although that's only if they've never fact checked it before. Most stuff you get immediately. Well, sure. But yeah, but if something is going to take a while, you've probably moved on or decided what you've decided already. Yeah. I think the 33% seems low to have much of an effect as well. But I don't know. I think 33% is, of course, not huge. But there is also a lot of people who wouldn't change their mind anyway. So the 33% is seems like the number of people that you can't actually affect. So the people that matter. That's a good point. It's self selecting, right? The people who wouldn't change their mind anyway aren't going to bother to forward this. So yeah. All right. I'll buy that. Hey, folks. You can fact check each other by submitting some stories to our subreddit. What do you want us to talk about on the show? Let us know. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Oh, yes. That's me. I want to tell you about Zenimax and Microsoft, because on Monday, the European Union approved Microsoft's acquisition of Zenimax, the parent company of Bethesda, which now officially has joined Microsoft. Microsoft announced Tuesday that some new titles in the future will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players, meaning they won't be on PlayStation or Nintendo. Microsoft has previously indicated it would continue to publish Bethesda's games for Nintendo and Sony platforms as well, and said that PS5 exclusives like Ghostwire Tokyo will release only for Sony as planned. Those were deals that were struck before the purchase. If that sounds possibly contradictory, Venture Beats sources say Microsoft will release a video presentation on Thursday, March 11 to explain what the acquisition means, particularly for Game Pass subscribers. So it seems like Thursday we're going to hear everything's going to Game Pass unless it's exclusive to Sony. Immediately. But this idea of Microsoft making some titles exclusive to Xbox and PC has put some people in a sour mood, let's say. Well, this is a really difficult thing to wrap your head around, because Bethesda is a huge developer and publisher, or Zenimax, if you take the parent company, and they have a lot of very beloved IPs, and Microsoft buying them is of course incredibly important because as we've seen in this new age of media and entertainment, content and IPs is what matters. You need to have more than the the opponent, quote unquote. And so do they keep publishing things to all the platforms as it has been before, but they have the company, so they should keep it for themselves. But at the same time, they've been pushing Game Pass, which is a subscription service, which changes the game a little bit and the way you think about it. As they said, some of the games are going to be exclusive, but not all of them. And I don't think they talk just about the games that have already been in a deal to be on other platforms, because think of it this way, if Elder Scrolls 6, Skyrim 2, for those who don't know what Elder Scrolls is, the new Skyrim essentially comes to old platform and costs 70 bucks on Sony's PlayStation. You can turn around and go to the Xbox and get the Xbox Game Pass, which includes that game, and hundreds more for 10 bucks a month. So if you want to give Microsoft your money through Sony, you're welcome to, but you could also get that thing for much cheaper. I think it could make sense. I think that just has people wondering why would anything be exclusive to Xbox then? If Game Pass is the big advantage, why antagonize people by doing that? Well, because they still want to get people in their ecosystem, which is the whole point of exclusives. It really comes down to content. You know, we're entering an age in video games that is analogous to the age we've entered in TV, I don't even want to say TV, but video subscription service. The content, and often the exclusive content, makes all of it, makes everything. And they want to get you into that ecosystem because on the Xbox ecosystem, anytime you spend a buck, you give 30 cents of that buck to Microsoft. So it's a balance to strike. They want to get people into the fold and then milk them on everything they buy on the system. So they do need to get people interested in this platform more than another. The Game Pass does a big part of the job, I think, but it doesn't do the entirety of the job. Scientists at the University of Washington have developed a system that can use an Amazon Echo or Google Home to detect your heartbeat. The system can send inaudible sounds from a smart speaker, which bounce off things in the room, including a person. And if they're within a half meter of the speaker, you can detect the heartbeat. Two algorithms analyze the sound waves that bounce back and detect heartbeats almost as well as a medical grade ECG. The speaker system was at most 30 milliseconds off of that medical grade ECG. One of the algorithms uses beam forming microphones, same one that tell when you say the wake word to find the heartbeats among the other sounds and a second algorithm then measures the time between the beats. The algorithms were trained using self-supervised machine learning. Regular heartbeats are easier to detect, but this system can detect irregular heartbeats as well, which is harder to do and makes it more useful for monitoring people with heart conditions. Current system can be used for spot checks. You sit down and say, hey, check my heartbeat, but they hope to make it work for continuous monitoring as well. I think this is great for anybody who either doesn't want to wear a smart watch or isn't in the market for one right now and may have something where, sure, you have to be close enough for it to be accurate, but maybe there's something on your nightstand that can give you valuable information and it's already a relatively cheap device that a lot of people have. And maybe some company is going to want to design a dedicated device that will work five meters away or 10 meters away and that doesn't have you needed to be half a meter away and that could be incredible. You just have an ECG in your home all the time and you don't need to worry about wearing your watch, for example. Yeah, just being a yeah, if they can increase that range, then you can just have it on and it'll alert you by talking to you. It'd be like, hey, you should call your doctor. Yeah, it seems like not everyone would need one at home, but certainly people with heart conditions could get a benefit from it. And it could call your doctor for you, actually, now that I'm thinking about it. Oh. I could just ask you would you like me to put through that call? Yeah, true. Incredible. It's really interesting all of these areas of research and I wonder how that, well, it's a wider conversation, but do we just not need to worry about it and the machines and the algorithms will do it for us and tell us what's wrong with us and know everything? It's a standard question, but this is some of it. I want to know that up to a point. Yeah. I think it's mostly good and sense. It's important. Well, all you chess fans out there, this might be impressive to you. Developer Matt round created kilobytes gambit. Get it? Yes. At the site, vol.wtf, which fits a surprisingly competent chess game into 1024 bytes of JavaScript. What? How'd they do it? This is built on Oscar Toledo, G's 1K chess program, which now seems positively bloated at 1.25 kilobytes. The engine looks for moves ahead, then identifies if moves are legal, and then weighs the value of pieces within that code. And it's all wrapped in a Queens gambit themed user interface that would look right at home on an Apple too. I mean, the actual code that runs it is shorter than the launch text of the game, right? You're not counting the images in the launch text and everything. This is just the engine that's calling out all those assets and stuff. So when I first launched it, I was like, wait, the actual JavaScript code itself is shorter than the page that tells me how to play the game and gives me the options to start. This is pretty cool. Yeah. I'm not even good at chess. This program is better. It's incredibly impressive. If you're a coder and you haven't looked at this, go check it out, because it's really it's really a nice piece of work. Good job, Matt Round. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. We got so many good responses from our story recently about voice assistance and being able to understand a lot of different types of speech that might not be as standard as what they have been used thus far. Daniel wrote in and said, I was inspired by hearing from the other listeners about their struggles with voice assistance not recognizing their voices and how improvements could help. I have a moderate intermittent stutter. Sometimes my Google Home understands me just fine. Other times I freeze up and then it won't wait long enough for me to finish speaking and this can lead to awkward results such as when I'm sending a text message. I can't wait for these improvements to come out and have my devices learned to be more patient with me. Love the show. Man, that one story has spawned so many great insights from people who are sort of saying like, hey, it's normal to have problems with these things because of this or that. And it's a different situation every time which shows that long tail that we were talking about in the story where you can adapt to an accent because accents are fairly uniform. It's much harder to adapt to all of the differences that happen for other reasons. So thank you, Daniel, and everybody else that has shared their stories with us. So good. Indeed. Feedback makes our show better. So if you have some, send it our way. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels. Today they include Jeff Wilkes, Bjorn Andre, and Scott Hepburn. Also thanks to our brand new bosses, Mirovina and Robert van Schulenburg. They both just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you both of you. You're our bosses now. Also big thanks to Patrick Beja for being with us today. All the way from Finland. Patrick, what's been going on in your life? You know what? Same old disabled, making children, stuff like that. But also podcasting. I do a few French language shows for tech and gaming news. And also Super Laser Punch. If you like WandaVision and want a French language debrief of every episode, go check out Super Laser Punch. It's really fun. Excellent. Where do they go to find all those? Notpatrick.com. You also find my English language shows over there. Hey patrons. Did you know your ad-free RSS feed can have just DTNS or just Good Day Internet or both? Check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS GDI or all in the name of the tier you're on. And if you want to change, change to the tier that has the name that you want. At DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. We are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. And we'll be back here doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.