 Coming up on DTNS online cow sharing I didn't say car wrong cow the coming AI knitting revolution and why cloud flared doesn't want to have to cut off customers This is the Daily Tech news for Monday August 5th 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio feline I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang We were just talking about Heather Locklear's garlic restaurants On good day internet among with along with my solar installation that I'll be doing You get so much more folks when you subscribe to good day internet as a member at patreon.com Slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know Amazon updated its assistant smartphone app to now give users the option to remove their recordings from being eligible for analysis from Amazon Employees and contractors human review of recordings was not previously stated in Amazon's privacy policy The app now includes the language quote with the setting on your voice recordings may be used to develop new features and manually reviewed To help improve our services only an extremely small fraction of voice recordings are manually reviewed Thank you for doing exactly what I suggested these companies should do Amazon well done Chinese ride hailing giant DD Xu Xing announced that it spun off its autonomous driving unit into an independent company The unit was created in 2016 has more than 200 employees in California and China And has the approval to test self-driving vehicles in California. The CEO of the new company is Zhang Bo the CTO of DD He's now the CEO of the new company Fossil announced its gen 5 smartwatches at the Carlisle HR and Juliana HR both 44 millimeter watches with around 1.28 inch OLED displays they run where OS on Qualcomm snapdragon wears 3100 with 1 gigabyte of RAM and 8 gigabytes of storage There's also a speaker for Google assistant responses and phone calls both models start at $295 and are available now, but it's not the only watch announcement today In fact, it isn't Tom Samsung also announced the watch active to it's been six months since Samsung launched the original watch active Okay, we've got another model six months later The watch active to adds a touch strip to simulate software controls that require an actual rotating bezel the active to also adds ECG capability although won't be active at launch But could be activated later on it runs Samsung's ties and OS and works with Android and iOS as well It supports offline play of Spotify playlists and YouTube video playback The active tool will come in 40 and 44 millimeter sizes with LTE versions available as well And it goes on sale September 27th starting at $279. Yeah, so both these stories together Illuminate a couple of trends one is that ties and OS doing well as the Samsung smartwatch And in fact, it's generally a little bit better reviewed than the wear OS wear OS is criticized for being a little slow to add features So ECG coming to the watch active to is a good example of that All these watches seem to be hovering around the $300 price point And they all talk about their heart rate monitoring and heart monitoring We didn't we didn't talk about all the features that fossil and Samsung announced in that that realm But but it seems like fitness and health are the two things that are driving Smartwatch adoption and you're seeing that in both these announcements today. Yeah I mean listen you're wearing something on your body Fitness and health is is going to be a big part of it But besides obviously telling time and being able to set timers for yourself. What's interesting to me is the watch active first gen Got some criticism for for for not having For not having that rotating bezel and for being you know a little lackluster on features The active to solve some of that but the but the original active has not gone away This is now just another product in the same marketplace. Yeah, I wonder about that because It you know the bezel is in the other Samsung watches that run ties in and the ties and OS is kind of built around that bezel So it was a bit awkward trying to do double taps and weird things on the watch active So it's nice that they fixed that by giving you the touch strip even if they didn't build in a bezel I get that the active needs to be a more affordable Version of the watch so you're not gonna get that full-motion bezel like you would in a more expensive watch But Why keep the original watch active around? Inventory is it they just have a probably yeah. Yeah, I mean if you Got a million units left. I don't know see see how much you can drop the price and get rid of them I suppose But it's somewhat unusual because the time frame six months is you know, it's pretty quick that Samsung has has Put together the watch that probably a lot of people who got the watch active in the first place wanted almost feels like They wanted to just do a minor upgrade to the watch active and then realized that they could do a Major upgrade to the watch active right faster than you might normally think and just decided, you know what? Let's do that. We'll just swap it into the supply chain So so maybe maybe the supply chain still kicking out the original watch active Which is why you're keeping it around as a less expensive version You got a couple of skews there All right, let's talk about cows I African notes that an app called my farm book from livestock wealth Which lets users buy shares in cows from a mobile device has grown from 26 cows in 2015 they could buy a share in to more than 2,000 cows livestock wealth reports generating three million dollars in profit 90% of its investors come from within South Africa, so it's very popular there shares cost as little as 576 Rand which works out to around 40 bucks us groups of investors can buy a whole cow So you can get on the app and group up and buy a whole cow or if you're an individual and you're like I just want to buy one or two shares You can buy shares Individually in a pregnant cow or young calf which Roger pointed out in the pre-show is is kind of like buying futures Beef futures livestock wealth plans to expand into produce as well They've got a vegetable growing system that they want to make this isn't new Chicago Board of Trade and hog futures and and and all that sort of stuff has existed for a long time And there's there's equivalence in all all kinds of countries about buying But that's been at the at the magnitude that the individual investor would not be able to afford this democratizes funding of agriculture investments And it plays into something that that according to iAfrican and Reuters both The idea of owning livestock is kind of has some cachet in in places like Africa so, okay, so If I can ask some very obvious questions for anyone who might be like owning a share in a cow What in the heck you're owning a share in the beef that the cow is going to produce for you eventually Right not about cows milk. That's how it pays off, right? That would be amazing if they'd like to get milk dividends. Yeah, no, this is about beef. You're right. You're right Yeah, yeah So so so I so I kind of understand that but it's interesting because if you think of it is like, okay I own a share in something that's going to produce money. Well a share of certain companies is a share a share Is a share is a share cow, you know, cow could get sick a cow could You know be have better meats than another cow. There there are a lot of variables here and I wonder if Owning in something like this again, probably not visiting the farm many miles away Sometimes a continent away type of thing. How much that factors into what kind of a good investment this is? Yeah No, those are those are all the kind of questions that you want to ask before you jump into my farmbook And start dropping around on some cows, right? Because if you're doing an institutional investing you're investing in hundreds of thousands of cows at a time So you're more concerned with the practice of the farm than you are with the individual cow But in in this situation if you're buying a single share in a calf. Oh man, yeah, if that calf gets sick You're you're out your investment. So it is risky. It's it's not we it's not without risk like any other investment, right? It's interesting where we live in But yeah, if anyone's investing in cows, let us know Please daily take new show.com China's Global Times reports that Huawei is testing a smartphone Running its in-house Hongmeng OS sources tell the Global Times that the device will sell for 201, which is about 286 US dollars Huawei previously described that want the Hongmeng OS as meant for Internet of Things and the first major device To run it would be Huawei's Honor TVs Not smartphones during its earnings announcement last week Huawei chairman Ling Hua said that the company prefers to use Android on It's mobile devices. So are they changing their tune? Yeah, I think you actually said 200 yawn. It's 2000 if everybody's like that that kind of conversion Yes, thank you 300 bucks or less US is the point interesting this is almost a Kind of a detective story, right because Huawei like you said has made all these noises about no, this isn't for phones We want to use Android and then Global Times, which is a state-owned operation suddenly leaks that Maybe they'll have that smartphone running Hongmeng OS by the end of the year Right when the trade war discussions are heating up again. It feels like maybe that is a well-placed leak That Huawei has not commented on this to Reuters, which is running this story I haven't seen why we commenting on it anywhere else. So curious if this is a real Huawei leak Or if this is just some politics being played Yeah, I don't know I don't think any of us know for the people at the Global Times, but I would find it interesting if Huawei decided to call Bluff and put out a phone with the Hongmeng OS because that's risky if that thing doesn't work up to snuff so well and and Realistically, I mean the company could have been testing and Internet of Things OS You know, it's been talking about the fact that it's building an OS For for what a lot of us didn't know and kind of thought like this thing has legs Maybe, you know, let's test it in some mobile devices. So that you know, could have changed internally as I would I would characterize it more Is they have an OS meant for Internet of Things and when the trade war disputes started to happen Somebody said well, we could put it on a phone, I guess Yeah, trying to figure that out. Why not? Yeah, timing's great You thought we couldn't get through the show without a Facebook story and you were right Facebook confirmed It will rebrand Instagram and WhatsApp to Instagram from Facebook and what's up from Facebook? The move follows similar rebrands for workplace and Oculus The new names will appear on Google Play and in the app store for iOS as well as the bottom of settings pages But we'll keep the previous shorter names on installed app icons according to a Facebook spokesperson We want to be clear about the products and services that are part of Facebook I got two theories on this one is most people are not going to notice this because your icon Still going to say Instagram when you go to the app store You're not going to read Instagram from Facebook and freak out or anything You're going to see the word Instagram if you're trying to install it and you're going to install it but if they are fighting some kind of antitrust situation and they One of their defenses is we haven't been trying to hide that these these are all part of one company This could be the kind of maneuver you make to be like we try to be very clear In fact recently we just added Facebook to all these apps So it was clear to people Right my other thought is a little less solid ground Which is what if they want to improve the perception of Facebook by attaching the name to Instagram and WhatsApp Which are generously thought of or generally thought of I guess generously to more positively than Facebook itself Well and Part of me is like oh come on everybody knows that you know Instagram is owned by Facebook, but that's not true In fact, we've talked about on on recent episodes Many people polled have no idea what the parent company of some of their favorite apps are whether it be Facebook brand adapts Or or other companies so there is definitely by Facebook doing this there There's going to be some overall understanding by the public that didn't really understand who owned what That Facebook owns these products. I just don't I just don't see I don't know Facebook is Facebook has such an image issue these days And it's not the only company that does but it but it and it gets thrown in under the bus You know as kind of the poster child for image issues, but but it does and to attach yourself to Some of your really really successful Brands I just it just looks Look bad to me I mean if this were an effective campaign then yes Maybe my theory of they're trying to improve themselves by association or maybe you're worried that this could actually Cause damage to the brands of Instagram and WhatsApp would be valid But they're not putting this up front and center They're bearing the ratings page and they're putting in the app store Which makes me go back to my original thought which is this is some kind of legal defense or something They can point out later that they did it because it's not done in a way That's really most people are gonna notice. I don't know Computer scientists from MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory aka sea sail led by Alexander Casper Released two new papers describing software to create knitting patterns and designs to be used by a knitting machine Inverse knit uses a deep neural network trained on knitting patterns to create patterns from photos You show it a photo it creates a knitting pattern based on that photo It's 94 accurate when being shown actual knitting But can only use acrylic yarn it can only make designs with acrylic yarn So they want to work on that to expand it to other kinds of yarn The other one is called CAD knit CAD KNIT Promising to let people with no previous experience Customized templates to create knitting patterns Casper imagines knitting as a service Where consumers could use CAD knit to order customized garments And then somebody who has a bunch of these knitting machines have them make the garments and send them out It could also make the prototyping and manufacturing process for knitted items more efficient And of course existing knitters may want to hack the system to do a bunch of crazy new things that they couldn't If they didn't have these new tools So i'll be interested to see what the knitting fans in the audience think about this and what they might use it for But a revolution in knitting coming thanks to knitting machines like 3d printers for knitting And some pretty cool sounding software You know, I I am not a knitter I know how to knit but not well enough to make anybody anything my grandmother was a great knitter And what what you know, she would say is okay I'm going to make a new sweater a new blanket or whatever You know, it would be like a birthday present or something And I would get a book and I would look through the knitting book and I would choose a pattern Because there are only so many patterns that you know that that was the way that she knew how to knit what I wanted her to knit So it was a finite kind of you know book of of of of knitting patterns The fact that I could be like oh cool that Lovely person on instagram looks great in her sweater I'm going to go ahead and take a photo of that and be able to replicate it with a knitting machine is awesome But that also introduces some Issues yeah, I think right now you can't copyright certain things in in the in the design world for clothing And and so it doesn't have the same problem that that that say patterns right? Yeah, unless it was like a picture of somebody But you're certainly not going to have any shortage of people getting up getting their nose bent out of shape out of it If they create an amazing pattern and then suddenly that pattern can be turned into a script Because of cad knit or because of inverse knit The there will be that side of this too There's also the folks like your grandmother who would be able to say like I've always wondered if I could make a design Do this, but I never had the time to really work it out So they got this tool that they could be like oh boom boom boom Because I know what I'm doing and make something really cool. I'm I don't know I'm loving the idea that we will change knit one purl two to knit one purl script Um, there's yeah, there's you know, there's the acrylic yarn That's gonna that that fine with me, but some people would be like now. I wouldn't want to you know Wear my sock that acrylic yarn not me, but uh, but yeah In the way the 3d printing There are certain uses for 3d printing where I'm like, well, that would be cool If I had to you know, 3d print a part for my broken washing machine or you know, that sort of thing that always uh spoke to me a little bit more than The artistic nature of it. This is perfect. I mean, this is you know, you uh, especially in colder climates This is this is clothing that could be that could be made in mass Yeah Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, don't forget you can subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com Let's get back into it with some context on Cloudflare and 8chan cloudflare decided yesterday After originally thinking they wouldn't do this to stop Providing its services to the message board 8chan as of midnight Sunday night monday morning that left 8chan open to denial of service attacks If you don't know what cloudflare is it's a service that does a lot of things but among its main Claim to fame is prevent sites from going down due to denial of service attacks. So They withdrew that and 8chan went down If you don't know what 8chan is 8chan was created in 2013 by frederick brennan as an alternative to 4chan with less moderation In 2015 brennan gave up ownership and 8chan is now owned and run by jim watkins a former u.s. Army veteran Cloudflare previously terminated support for the daily stormer in 2017 Which also moved to a different cloudflare like service, which is what 8chan did as well We'll get into why 8chan is being banned by cloudflare in a second if you don't already know but The daily stormer and 8chan to You know, sum it up are problematic because of some content posted there now 8chan moved to bitmitigate Bitmitigate promises it will not stop service to any of its clients unless by final court order however Infrastructure as a service provider voxility which rented the machines that bitmitigate used to provide its service Shut off its service to bitmitigate After after bitmitigate brought 8chan back online So 8chan went back down as did the daily stormer and a few other sites that mitigate bitmitigate provided services to Now let's get into the rationalization of why cloudflare would remove the service in the first place Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince initially said cloudflare would remain neutral Sticking to only removing protections from sites as it is required to do so by law prince removed protection for the daily stormer Because after a lot of thinking about it and posted that he didn't want to do this again He didn't think that cloudflare should be in the position to decide What sites get to be on the internet or not and it's not like cloudflare is hosting the sites cloudflare Is just protecting them from denial of service. But when that protection is removed It essentially causes controversial sites in particular to go down until they find another way to protect themselves In this case, it was going to be bitmitigate, but now bitmitigate lost its ability to host its service CEO Matthew Prince cited postings by shooters in El Paso And previously Christchurch, New Zealand and Poe, California on 8chan as the reasons for doing this again I'm going to read a couple of quotes from his blog We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible But we draw the line of platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design So he's calling 8chan lawless by design He says even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law and refusing to moderate their hate filled community They have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit So he thinks 8chan is full of hate and he thinks that it is violating the law in spirit He did also say it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted They turn to hate in taking this action. We've solved our own problem But we haven't solved the internets and this is the interesting thing about prince prince Doesn't wait into this saying well, we have to do this Because it's bad for pr if we don't or because We feel it is it is our job to do it prince wades into this saying Yeah, we've got a problem because we're hosting the site and we don't feel comfortable doing that because of what the site is So we're he's very thoughtful in his explanation and says we're going to remove that protection But I want to make a point of saying this doesn't solve the problem and I think he's he's Much in a much better way saying what I've been saying about facebook for a long time Which is you need to understand what the problem is to be able to fix it and a lot of times I think maybe what I was missing was a lot of the problems we blame on facebook don't start on facebook They start in other places on the internet And this is one of those places where they oftentimes started now granted han was able to move to bit mitigate Although it does seem like bit mitigate is now not going to be able to provide protection to han If that stays that way the people who want to post a han will go somewhere else and and for example A lot of folks who wanted to post In support of of other kinds of terrorism Like isis for example So I've started posting on telegram where they can't be found as easily and they can't be shut down as easily because telegram says We don't know what the conversations are because they're encrypted So there is always going to be a place on the internet for these Folks to go I'm not saying that that doesn't mean cloud flare isn't right to do this I'm not saying that that doesn't mean there maybe shouldn't be some debate about what should be allowed On on unmoderated sites and what shouldn't but I think it goes to prince's point of There's a much more complex and deeper discussion to be to be had around why this is happening at all Absolutely And to take the the content of of the sites in question out of out of out of the equation just for a second Something like cloud flare saying, okay This is this is not something that we're going to be associated with and han saying, okay We'll go to bit mitigate. They provide a similar service to you and that's what we'll do and and they have They they're going to accept something that you're not accepting But then a company like foxility shouting off at service to bit mitigate, you know, there's a supply chain thing going on here and then, you know Bit mitigate itself, uh, nicolas slim selling bit mitigate to you know, another owner who might have Or owners who who might have their own feelings about this this, you know It's a little bit of a kind of a whack-a-mole situation of okay. Who are we dealing with? What does everybody think? Even if you go to a company that supposedly can keep things rolling They often require another company to agree with that company and that isn't always the case Especially when you get into very very sensitive situations like the one that we're talking about now Yeah, and I think we're where I agree with prince and a bunch of folks are saying in the chat room Just because there will always be a place doesn't mean one company has to provide that place I don't think we want companies like cloud flare or foxility to have to be in the position to do this Unfortunately, they are Because there there isn't any law that applies directly and that's true of so many things on the internet our laws are not appropriate to the task because this is all so new relatively speaking Compared to the long history of human experience. So I think prince is bringing up a big point Which is saying hey, it's not about what I do today at cloud flare. Let's not leave it there Let's come up with a solution that means cloud flare doesn't have to play judge and jury The cloud flare can Reasonably go back to saying we just provide a service to anyone who legally can operate Because what's happening now? We're seeing this a couple times particularly with cloud flare but also with foxility is companies saying yeah, it would be legal But i'm not sure I think it should be legal. In fact, that's exactly what prince is saying So let's have that conversation rather than again two years later have cloud flare have to go through the same thing again I think you know and and again, I don't have all the answers and this is such a sensitive topic in general, but Right now what you're describing would be cloud flare turning a blind eye to content that it finds Objectionable to the point that it it should not exist. Cloud flare should be able to provide a blind eye Right cloud flare should be but that would that would change my denial of service protection I'm not expert in deciding what content should or shouldn't exist online There should be Another situation for that. I should they they shouldn't have to do that Any more than the people who go and string lines for your phone should be like well You should pull the the line down to the Right. Yeah, like I I get that we're in that position where they have to and therefore as of today You can rightly say well, maybe you should But couldn't we have the conversation that gets us to the point where they don't have to be in that position? That's what i'm saying. Well, we're having the conversation now, but what's the solution? Well, it it it's not easy and that's that's the problem I think that's why prince is is found so exasperated in his blog post which is it requires government and and the populace and businesses To come up with something new to decide okay if someone creates a website online What are the parameters that are allowed before the government can come in and shut it down? The reason isis got pushed into telegram wasn't because cloud flare went in and stopped them It's because the federal bureau of investigation and several other government agencies around the world went in and seized their websites and seized their equipment because there were very clear rules about terrorist operations And what you could do to them there aren't clear rules about this kind of situation well, the story will be unfolding and Thanks to everybody who participates in our sub reddit because unsurprisingly it was a big story over the weekend in our subreddit because We're all of like minds Submit stories and vote on others at daily tech news show reddit.com We're also on facebook join our group if you haven't already facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Jason rodin from he says a seasonable hot and human Williamsport, pennsylvania home of the little league baseball world series Little league baseball world series. Tom. Have you ever been there? No, I want to go someday though. Sounds good. Yeah, I know. Let's let's uh, we'll do a road trip one of these days Jason writes on friday show the talk of netflix blinking out of existence was discussed again I don't think that'll happen anytime soon for quite a few reasons original content international deals, etc But one thing that's not talked about at all is comedy specials When you see interviews done with standard comics They always talk about the early years and what they had to do to get mega stardom back in the 80s and 90s It was getting a comedy special on hbo or cinemax or showtime in the 2000s through about 2013 or 14 It was getting a comedy special on comedy central from 2013 to 2014 to today It's getting a comedy special on netflix the only place to find new and classic stand-up comedy specials Is netflix not necessarily true, but that is the that is the place where a lot of this is going So if anyone is saving grace for netflix for now, it would be comedy. Let's face it anymore We all just need to laugh you'd be surprised how much better you feel afterwards. Keep up the excellent work That's a great point jason and uh, I'll be honest I don't think it's that nobody talks about this. I I definitely see other other outlets talking about it But we didn't bring it up on friday You're right and comedy is another one of those things that netflix is doing to say like, you know We know a chunk of the audience is going to come here for that And so we're going to try to be the best at that They're not trying to be the best at every single thing But they are trying to be the best at a lot of different things to keep a lot of different kinds of people Satisfied so good insight. Thank you jason. Thank you jason and thank you to our patrons Yes, thank you to everybody who supports the show at patreon.com slash dtns We are only able to have these kinds of discussions openly and without any thought To what a sponsor is going to say or what our owner is going to say because you are our boss You are the people we're accountable to so please If you want to keep that going and you haven't already become a member join us at patreon.com slash dtns If you've got feedback for us. Well, we're all ears feedback at daily tech news show.com is our email address We are also live monday through friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc And you can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live tomorrow with shannon morse 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