 Coming up on DTNS, just how big is the PlayStation five drones monitor your social distancing and how to podcast for hours when your power and even your internet is out. This is the Daily Tech news for Friday, June 12, 2020 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane draw on the top. Cleveland. From the top tech from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. And I am Rob Dunwood from Columbus, Ohio. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. We were just talking a lot about Jerry Springer for some reason. A lot of Ohio celebrities were part of Good Day Internet's discussion today. If you want to get that wider conversation, become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bloomberg reports that Google has countersued Sonos claiming that the smart speaker company infringed on its patents. Sonos originally sued Google back in January for alleged patent infringement claiming that Google used information about its technology while the two companies were collaborating to develop its own smart speaker line saying Google basically told took our stuff and and ran with it. Google now says Sonos made false claims about the shared work and alleged that Sonos is using Google search software networking audio processing and other technology without paying a license fee. Zoom says it suspended meetings and Zoom accounts of three users because it did not have the ability to block participants in meetings based on country. Zoom had suspended the accounts of two US users and one in Hong Kong after China complained its citizens were participating in illegal meetings. Zoom says it will develop the ability to block participants by country and will not let Chinese request affect non Chinese users in the future. A Reddit user posted that YouTube videos can be watched in a web browser without ads if you add a period after the dot com in the YouTube link. That will remove pre-roll and mid-roll ads apparently. The Verge notes that by the time you've copied pasted and altered the video URL it might not be the world's biggest time saver but you won't see the ad. Man, I wish I had that yesterday because it will be patched soon. Back in March Computext pushed its annual Taiwan trade show back from June to late September due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That rescheduled show is now rescheduled again for June 1 through 5 of 2021. Twitter says it removed 32,242 accounts tied to the governments of China, Russia and Turkey for violating its policy on information manipulation. 23,750 Chinese accounts were spreading misinformation about Hong Kong, Taiwan, COVID-19 and an exiled Chinese billionaire. 7,340 accounts were attempting to support a political party of the president and 1,152 Russian accounts were promoting its president's party and attacking dissidents. Twitch will start automatically scanning clips of live streams for copyrighted music. This follows that recent wave of DMCA takedown requests against clips. Twitter says that clips will be automatically deleted and won't result in strikes or penalties for creators. So they'll be safe from that, but there's also no opportunity to appeal a takedown. Twitch will also add an option to just delete all your clips from a channel at once to help those dealing with the backlog. According to the Intercept sources, at an internal meeting on Wednesday at Facebook, the company showed off a new content moderation feature for workplace that lets admins remove and block certain trending topics among employees. Facebook used the word unionize as an example in the slide deck. Facebook told the next web the example was poorly chosen and has pulled any plans to roll out the moderation feature. Warner Media is simplifying HBO branding. It will get rid of HBO Go since most customers who use it can use the new HBO Max instead. The HBO Now app will remain available, but will be renamed HBO. And HBO Max will become the main app, though it is not available on Roku, Fire TV at this time. Those users can only use the HBO app. I guess that's technically simpler. Technically. I guess that's how complicated it was to begin with. Finally, OpenAI launched its API in beta, its first commercial offering. It can do things like translate between languages, write news stories, poems, answer everyday questions. OpenAI expects it to be used for things like customer service chat, educational products, maybe some games. The API is available only to qualified customers. And even those qualified customers could have their access cut off if OpenAI determines it's being used for harm. All right. Just after the show yesterday, Sony unveiled the hardware, not just games, but the hardware, at least what it looks like for the PlayStation 5. What do we got, Rob? So Sony revealed the design of the black and white PlayStation 5, which will come in two versions, one with a 4K Blu-ray drive and a pure digital edition. The console will sit vertically on its side, includes USB-A and C ports on the front with a heat vent at the top of the vertical position. Sony also revealed accessories for the PS5, including a dual-sense charging station for two controllers, a new HD camera with dual 1080p lenses, a Pulse 3D wireless headset with 3D audio, and a media remote with a microphone. Pricing and release dates of the console and accessories were not announced. Yeah. And we've had most of the specs about this. We've talked about that before on the show. So this really was just a reveal of the look. And, oh boy, did the internet have fun with what this thing looks like? A polarizing look. I mean, I don't know how the rest of you feel. It seems to me, and I don't know, when I first saw it, I was like, ooh, I don't know about that. Like, okay, you can go horizontal or vertical, but I'm like, in this day and age, don't we just want to hide all this stuff? Like, I don't want to see this. It does look like a cross between an envelope and a giant cable modem that you would get from your cable company. But it looks like that for the time that you're putting it under something where it's not going to be seen by anyone. So I really think that, although the internet is enraged over the design of this, no one's going to really care once they actually get these things plugged them in and start playing the games. Man, I was going to pick up my cable modem and put two white envelopes on each side because it really doesn't look like that. But my cord won't reach. I would take myself off the internet if I tried. The thing is, like, it does look a little weird. People are going to get used to it and no one's going to be worried about it in the future. It might be a little awkward to put in an entertainment center, right? Because it's got the weird curve to it, but I'm sure you can set it on its side if you have to and it'll work just fine. I don't know. I think it's fun to talk about how odd this is, but in the end, I don't think that's really going to affect anybody's purchase decisions. Man, I just feel like we're getting to the point where it's, like, AK capable. Very cool. Do I want to see it? Nope, I don't. Like, why do you have to see the thing that's offering you all this great, you know, this content? And I might be wrong, but I feel like less is more. And this is big. This thing is huge. It is. If you scale it based on the USB ports, right? And people are doing all kinds of mock-ups on the Internet of how it's it. It's the biggest console in memory. I just want it to be quiet and not overheat. If I forget to open a glass up on the entertainment system, that's all. Just be quiet and don't overheat easily. Well, and the way it looks, the vents, it could be louder. They might not be, though. We don't know. We don't know the price. There's so much more to know. We really just got to look at it. And the accessories look fine. The UK competition and markets authority began an investigation into Facebook's acquisition of Giffy, and will accept comments on the case from third parties until July 3rd. The investigation will specifically look at how and if the deal will lessen competition in the two companies' respective markets. During the investigation, Facebook can't continue with any actions related to the acquisition without written consent from the CMA. And Facebook also announced in May that it planned to buy Giffy and integrate it into the Instagram team. So this has been a bit of a long time coming, but yet when it comes to a very popular Giff app, it might be antitrust. It was exactly a month ago when I was last on the show when we first heard that this was going to happen. And a month later, it's about the time when the UK is going to sue the organization is doing something this big. These companies can't make moves without getting sued by the UK seemingly. And for good reason, it's not like they're just innocent bystanders and stuff that they do. But this one, competition amongst Giffy-type companies. I don't know that that's a real problem, but maybe it is, maybe they should really look into it. The UK, unlike the EU, has actually looked into a lot of these kinds of acquisitions like WhatsApp when Facebook looked at WhatsApp and let them go. They've been pretty soft on it. So they may be trying to toughen up by even looking at things like Giffy, but I can't imagine they'll not allow this. I mean, Giffy makes no money yet. It's not probably going to make money. I don't know that you can demonstrate that this will undermine our ability to find alternate sources for animated GIFs on the Internet as popular as Giffy is. Not sure this one's going to count as antitrust. I doubt it. Yeah. Here's something else that Facebook is up to. Facebook announced the results of its deep fake detection challenge, an effort to find algorithms that can detect when videos have been manipulated by artificial intelligence. There were 2,114 participants. Together they submitted around 25,000 algorithms and were trained on clips created by Facebook that some had been manipulated and some weren't. They gave participants that data set to train. On the test set, accuracy rates reached as high as 82.56%. However, for the challenge, the algorithms had to detect deep fakes in never-before-seen footage. So they got to train on this data set, but then they gave them a black box and like, okay, we'll see how well your algorithm works with stuff it couldn't have seen before, stuff outside of the data set. The winning algorithm had an accuracy of 65.18%. Those winning algorithms, including that one, will be released as open source so that other companies can use them. And Facebook CTO Mike Schruppfer said that these results set a benchmark to guide future work. Yeah, I mean, that isn't a great percentage. However, if there are going to be yet more deep fakes all the time and there has to be AI to determine what might be a deep fake, we're getting there. But, you know, you got to start somewhere. Yeah, I'm just glad that they are doing this. I mean, I think it was last summer, the end of last summer when they actually kicked this campaign off. And the fact that they actually are trying to go out and find this stuff is a good thing because it's not like the people who are making deep fakes are going to get less sophisticated as time goes by. So the fact that they're trying to counteract that to me is a good thing, even if it's only 65% accurate on stuff that they don't know potentially could be a deep fake. I think it's a good start. Yeah, because right now, despite all of the worry when deep fakes sort of first appeared on the scene, they're generally used for adult videos. They're not being used to fool people yet. That doesn't mean that won't be at some point that we won't have a deep fake that people won't be able to identify that causes trouble. And so you want people working on how to identify them now before they become a problem. This is an example of the technology industry getting ahead of a problem for once rather than waiting for it to become a big problem. So that's good. I'd like to see more of these kinds of programs beyond just this one from Facebook. This is a good start though. Yeah, and it's a great example of like, okay, well, you can't just let the humans go away and go to lunch and let the AI do everything because it's not there yet. Humans and learning in conjunction together will get that percentage up a lot better in the future based on what is being flagged and what is maybe confusing the robot. Yeah, that's a really good point because even at 65%, you still have us looking at things and going, well, wait a minute, that may look real, but I know it can't be because of this fact that I know. So if you're cutting down the number of those that you have to deal with, that's a good start and hopefully will only get better. Yeah, like so I think it's, you know, this is definitely a good start. It's only going to get better as deep fakes also get better. And I'm just glad that they're going in this direction because I can just imagine the time we're not far from it. You know, three, four years from now, you're going to be able to make a deep fake on your phone that you simply unless you just know that the person that is in the video was sitting right next to you while the video was being made. You know, you're not going to be able to tell. So I'm glad that they are working on this. Yeah, you're right. It's going to be an arms race. The US National Science Foundation announced the security and privacy in the life cycle of innovative things of consumer environments or splice that is a mouthful right there. So we're going to refer to this as splice forever more splice project led by Dartmouth University to increase IOT security. And splice will start with research into fields like privacy interface divine design mobile computing embedded systems wireless networks and more splice wants to create a toolkit which understands how their smart devices work. It wants to encourage a privacy model that doesn't require a sophisticated user to figure out splice will develop a prototype of products and will create an advisory council to recommend best practices splice is scheduled to launch on October 1. Oh man, this is this is definitely necessary because just on the on the question of privacy and I know splice is going to be dealing with more than just that but just on the question of privacy. Having some technical sophistication myself I would like to think sometimes it's a hunt to figure out what your options are and how to lock them down and that's not the way it should be for if people are going to generally be using them in their life. A lot of people are not going to want to do that even if they could they're not going to want to do it and a lot of people just will be like I can't figure this out. So having a system that you if you can get the IOT industry on board to say protect privacy out of the box make it easy. I think that's really important. I know when I get that blender that somehow has internet connectivity on it I'm not configuring it. I'm going to plug it in and hit a button and then the button is going to turn blue and then it's working. That's generally all that I'm willing to do and I'm a technology type person. So I can just see and you know I always refer you know back to my mother-in-law my mother they're not going to you know even if they know to look for settings and make this thing more secure. That's just not what they're going to do whatever comes out of the box is how they're going to use the device so the fact that they're trying to make this easier for people like that I applaud this effort. I don't like the name is way too long though. Spice you know it rolls off your tongue nicely. The acronym is fine but yeah. I'm not I'm not sure what splicing has to do with protecting my privacy and security but I'm not going to question that too too much. The other aspect of this beyond the privacy is the security you may need to make that default easy to that I think that's an easier one to fix which is like complex passwords not simple passwords passwords at all that are set by default. Making it you know easy to manage things that that's that's part of this. So there is a lot of work for this foundation to do and I'm glad that that it's created to keep an eye on what comes out of it of course but it's it's a good effort or good intentions I should say. Well let's talk about drones shall we airspace systems known as making unmanned aerial vehicles that can capture other unmanned aerial vehicles. Said Thursday it announced that it had made software to monitor social distancing and at face mask wearing from the air. You can see what you're doing from up here the software can analyze video from the air or surface cameras to detect whether face masks are being worn or not. And how often people stand too close together doesn't use any kind of facial recognition doesn't store images of people. But it does generate tables of data with percentages of compliance to mask wearing and social distancing and can be used to generate alerts. Airspace intends to sell its software to cities and police Lisa starts. Yeah this this is a story that's that's rife with potential for misunderstanding and requires you to trust airspace systems and the entities that use the software a little bit too. But I do want to emphasize that they don't record any video. You know obviously we need to audit this make sure they're doing what they say but if we take them at their word they're not using facial recognition they're not even storing video they're creating a table. They're monitoring a live stream of video and saying OK we think 20% of this audience was this group was not wearing masks. And I think the idea if I have it right is that you could deploy this when there's a music festival going on or or at a mall and send alerts to people the area that says hey don't forget to wear your mask. If it detects a threshold of people above a certain amount that aren't wearing them or not social distancing or whatever. Yeah it's it's funny there's a couple instances of sort of drone weirdness around where I live. The other day I was running my dog around it was just me and my dog. There was no one else around that I knew of but there was a drone flying overhead and eventually a guy kind of like pulls up in a truck and was like is that your drone. And I'm like my drone. I don't know whose drone that is goes. Okay well that's it's flying over my mother's house. That's not cool. And I was like I agree it's not my drone. I mean you can look in my trunk if you want you know kind of thing. It was like people get very weirded out about this stuff especially when they don't understand why it's going on and and and you know for what reason. That was kind of a one off. I also went to a restaurant yesterday. I met a friend the restaurant is is officially open as long as you sit outside which we did all of the you know the the tables were were pretty far away from each other. Although the place was pretty packed but you know it felt safe. But I thought to myself the entire time if there was a drone over us how much would people lose their minds because you know there's like there's just a lot of uncertainty about like what is right are we doing the right thing or we're being cool. Are we you know we following protocol are we endangering our our our peers and you know so something like this is it's a very delicate time to introduce this technology. Yeah I was thinking the same thing. I don't like drones flying above me not taking pictures. So clearly this they're not recording this video they're just you know using this for the software that you know to determine how many people has mask one as compared to how many don't. But it's just going to make me uncomfortable to see those drones flying above me especially when you hear things about you know that that you know the data is going to be turned over to potentially like the police is like. How what is the stretch that maybe they can tell who was there based on that you know that can that software look at my eyes and tell if it's me or tell if it's the guy next to me you know can it can do those kind of things. This software doesn't do that. But those questions are going to kind of come up and it's going to give general people just an uncomfortability with being monitored and I'm doing the air quotes right now. Yeah. But it's it's it's it's cool software. I just don't think people are going to like it. It's a that's why I mentioned the auditing like you got to you got to make sure that this thing is doing what they're saying it's going to do. I'm thrum walled in our Twitch chat was like so you can't use it for enforcement. I'm like no it's not meant for enforcement. He's like but I thought they were selling it to law enforcement. I'm like yeah they are. He's like really confused like actually sometimes the police are just doing crowd control. And what they want is the ability to tell you know maybe even just over a loudspeaker like hey everybody maintain social distancing and this would let them know like hey you've got a problem. So you need to remind people more to do this to kind of get compliance but not to actually go after individuals whether you think that's useful or not that's a whole different conversation but I think that's kind of the intention. 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. I was listening to the SMR podcast this week Rob and enjoying it as always until you and then then you made the magic reveal towards the end that you had been recording and you guys record live you stream live the entire show without power or internet. Now you obviously had internet somehow because you were you're able to stream so let us know what happened and how are you able to pull off this magical feat. So yes I live in here in the in the Midwest we get these ridiculous thunderstorms thunderstorms and my power went out on Wednesday it went out probably an hour before we record the show. So I'm like how am I going to do the show or are we going to have to cancel it move it to another night which is not a thing for us we move the show around all the time to accommodate schedules. But I'm like wait a minute I got a lot of batteries in the house maybe maybe we can maybe we can figure something out. So normally I do the show I've got a little you know just a little all in one PC that I you know only use for podcasting so that's not going to work because I don't have any power for that. So fortunately I had Skype installed on a laptop so I said OK well we've got Skype installed. And I hope that battery on that laptop is charged up because I don't just think let me make sure that my you know batteries in my laptop are charged up all the time. And I said well if the battery in the laptop is not going to get me through the entire show I've got to have a backup so I have got you know just a plethora of these little anchor power cores. I've got an anchor core power was an anchor power core 5000. You know each one of my daughters and my wife has one I've got an anchor core. You know to which is 20,000 milliamps and I've actually got the core 26,800 as well. So that ample power as long as I can just find the devices that will accept it and charge up. So fortunately my laptop had probably 65% 70% you know charge on us that's going to get me at least an hour. You know it's an older laptop so that battery doesn't last very long and if I need to I can switch over to using one of my tablets or using my phone or something like that. Just testing this out only had about an hour I was like okay wait a minute what about my mic how am I going to you know how I'm going to power that you know fortunately I did have a in you know an older usb mic that I was able to use so I didn't have to worry about trying to power a mixer and all this kind of stuff that I normally do. So I was able to use a usb mic. Various assortment of batteries to power my cell phone which is what I use to get internet access so I just use my cell phone as a hotspot gave that you know internet access to my laptop which had about an hour of battery life on it and then also my tablet. Which charged off of the third power cord that I had in my assortment of batteries. And we were able to get through pretty much the entire show and at the end you know time when you found out that I actually did it was at the end when I said I'll turn the camera on and let's see and we want to turn the camera on you all you saw were teeth and eyes because it was you know it's pretty dark. You know I do the show down in my basement and there was literally zero light down there so I had like just a light off of my off of my devices and a little flashlight. So I didn't have enough light to actually do the video so I didn't throw video for most of the show. But everything else worked pretty flawlessly and I was actually even able to switch from my laptop because my battery did go dead. Rod caught it so he just started talking and waited until I connected back in and I don't think that the audience actually noticed that I did switch mid you know mid broadcast from a laptop to my tablet. And what was cool was that you know my talent has a USBC connector it's you know I use an Android tablet I was actually able to plug one of those little you know little adapters that you get in your phone. You buy a phone to you know take data off of one phone and put it on the other I was able to use that adapter to plug my USB mic into my tablet to still get the same audio. You know from the mic so I think it you know got a little bit crispier because I do use a couple things on the computer to clean my audio up. But that was literally like the last four or five minutes in the show and I don't think anybody noticed. No until you said something I had not noticed as a listener that you had switched over because your audio was was as good almost as good. Like you say once you said it I was like oh maybe there is a little bit of crunch here and there but but for the most part like that that's elegant to be able to just like even keep the mic. Switch it over so I mean granted anybody could look at this and go well if you had a UPS or you know there's all kinds of things you could do it if you want to plan for this. But what I admired was the in the moment like what do I have what do I have around that that I could use to make that happen. It was pretty good. Yeah these these you know I'll do a plug for anchor these power cores are awesome because I know I have not used the big ones the 26800 or the two or the 20,000 I've not used them this year. So I'm going on charges for those things that are from last year last time I probably used them while I was out and about and doing stuff so you know they both had at least 80% charge on them and they definitely got me through the day. Great. Now that's cool. Yeah we'll have links to all the power cores from anchor that he was talking about in the show notes as well so cool and well done again good stuff. Yeah you know we got to make sure the show goes on for America. And the world and the world that is true. If you have other ideas or maybe you agree with what Rob put together join in our conversation at our discord which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mail bag. Oh let's this one came in from Dustin who says the other day you mentioned that open source and portable clouds are the future. I'm a Google Cloud engineer and I'm happy to tell you that this is part of Google Cloud's approach. We have a number of open source products that if our customers are unhappy with the quality of our service they can easily move their workloads to another cloud or even their own data centers. Rob. That's really really cool tech for people who are really really into tech. I just don't know that that's going to be a thing anytime in the foreseeable future foreseeable future meaning like the next year 18 months. I mean who knows what's going to happen in years from now but I don't see clouds just bringing up and you just moving from data center to data center all willing to leave. I just I just don't see that. Not yet. It does seem it seems like if that wasn't messy that'd be great but is it really not messy at this point. I don't know Tom what do you think. Yeah no I'm I'm I'm with you on this like it's a cool thing to have. I'm not I'm not sure how many people take advantage of it. Certainly on the enterprise level right that that's a whole different thing might make make it easier there. I'd like to see more companies doing it more offerings out there. Hey shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Andrew Bradley Paulo Jacob and Scott Hepburn. Let's check in with Len Peralta who has been drawing a lot of our tech thoughts during the show what have you drawn for us today Len. Well I I drew a piece which I like to call engineered to in rage. You know and by the way before I start getting notes about this I I sort of took some liberties with the shape of the PS five here. I know it doesn't look all benty and everything like that and and whatever. But it is sort of interesting and the one thing that I thought of even though I am super excited about it coming out is that this is going to be a hard time fitting into my media center. And so that's the headline here. Good luck fitting this thing into your media center. And this is called PS five engineered to in rage. Yeah should be you know I don't know I took some liberties. So you know whatever you can say about it. I guess this is available at my online store at one brawl store dot com or if you're a patreon backer at patreon dot com forward slash then you can you can get it right now. There you go. Excellent. Also thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today Rob working people keep up with all of your other work. You can definitely find me over at smrpodcast.com and I am at Rob Dunwood on everything so you know definitely reach out to me. Excellent. Go check it out folks good times good stuff good information really really really good show I mean I made a big deal out of the fact that Rob was even able to do the show but it was also a really good kind of show as well I should mention that to go check that out. Also don't forget folks that you can support our show in lots of different ways that the best way in the most direct way is on patreon. That's a way to give us value for the value you get back from the show and we try to give you some perks as well daily tech new show dot com slash patreon. And we have a store and I know not all of you want masks but if you do. We now have cloth masks in the DTNS store who wouldn't want to walk around with the DTNS logo on their face. Go check it out at daily tech news show dot com slash store. If you have feedback for us we'd love to hear it. Our email addresses feedback at daily tech news show dot com. If you'd like to join us live well hey we are live we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash slash. Back on Monday with Adobe's Veronica Belmont. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants dot com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.