 Coming up on DTNS, teaching self-driving cars to understand humans better for better driving. How likely it is China can become a chip powerhouse and preparing for Valve to give you a new Half-Life in VR. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 19th, 2019. That's a lot of 19s in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In, oh, Sarah's not here from the Finnish countryside and forest. I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. That's right. Sarah Lane had a little power outage there up in Northern California. It's something their power company up there just likes to do sometimes. But she had some stuff she had to deal with there. So apologies, but she will not be with us today, should be back tomorrow. If, however, you want to hear Patrick and I talking about all the new streaming services and our thoughts on that and how well we think Apple TV Plus is doing with streaming, you got to get good day internet. Go check it out, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Spotify launched its your daily podcast playlist, giving listeners a daily automated list of podcasts they might like. After testing your daily podcast is rolling out to users in the UK, Germany, the United States, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Spotify's algorithm mixes podcasts that people already follow along with a few of its own recommendations. Berlin based Enway raised 6 million euros in seed funding to continue to develop autonomous cleaning vehicles. The autonomous streets and ground cleaners are initially targeted for use on private grounds like warehouses, industrial facilities and private parking lots. That seems like a fairly good place for autonomy to be implemented. Germany's Haan Air announced it issued the first airline tickets to be handled using a blockchain from open source travel distribution platform Winding Tree. So Haan shot out some blockchain tickets first. Three passengers, employees of Haan Air and Winding Tree flew on the blockchain issued tickets from Dusseldorf to Luxembourg. The Winding Tree blockchain is able to list inventory, manage reservation requests and receive payment in cash or credit card and even take the Lyft and Ether tokens. Winding Tree also working with Air Canada, Air France KLM, Lufthansa and Swissport and with some hotels Nordic Choice Hotels, Citizen M Hotel Chain and the Airport Hotel Basil. Amazon announced the Fire TV Blaster, another Haan shot first reference. And I are Blaster to control your other TV hardware using Amazon voice services through a Fire TV. The Fire TV Blaster is a small box that connects to other Fire TV products by Wi-Fi. It's available for pre-order shipping December 11 for $35 to bundled with a Fire TV 4K streaming stick and Echo Dot for $80. So in other words, 15 separate remotes are nothing compared to a good Blaster. Microsoft made a blog post Monday announcing plans to support encrypted domain name system queries. Windows Core Networking will first support DNS over HTTPS with Microsoft saying it's open to supporting DNS over TLS in the future as well. Microsoft did not say when the first implementations will arrive but they will show up first for Windows insiders. Amazon extended the free ad-supported version of its streaming service to Android, iOS, Fire TV and the web in Germany, the UK and the US. The service has about two million songs and free users can start stations based on a song or access playlists like all hits or holidays favorites. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about letters. They got letters. The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has released the answers they received from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in response to an antitrust investigation. Google denied favoring its own services over competitors specifically saying YouTube results are not weighted above others and that Google Docs is designed to work well in all browsers. I have to say, I think Google Docs works better than Firefox and it does in Chrome. Facebook acknowledged cutting off third-party apps that replicated its core functionalities even citing Vine as an example. Apple probably had the least controversy of these from all reports. They answered questions about the browser, Safari browser and App Store Commissions, but nothing that you probably wouldn't have already heard of out in the public. And Amazon denied using merchant data to launch source or price its own private label products. Something people are convinced Amazon does. They say they don't. US Senators Chris Coons and Josh Holly also in a related story sent a letter to Facebook today asking the company how exactly it tracks user location even when location access and location history are disabled by users. That's a reference to Facebook admitting in a blog post recently that quote, it may still understand your location using things like check-ins, events and information about your internet connection. Facebook has until December 12th to respond to that. This is interesting because Facebook saying, well, if you check in and tell us where you are, then of course we know where you are. Okay, that makes sense. If you say, I went to this event and we know where the event is, of course, we're probably going to know where you are there. So those two make sense. But the other one about internet connection has to do with IP addresses. And what I'm guessing Facebook hopes you think they mean is if someone buys an ad on Facebook and says, target it at Helsinki, Facebook will go and look up all the IP addresses associated with Helsinki. And then when an IP address requests a page from Facebook, it'll say, oh, okay, here's the ad they bought. It matches the Helsinki address will display it for that person. And these senators are saying, could you just make sure to explain exactly is that what you mean by tracking someone by their internet connection, even if they've turned off location services? So two questions, will Facebook actually respond with something unexpected to say, wow, we also do this other thing? Or will it just be that? And will that be controversial? It seems like that would be very unlikely to be controversial if it's just that. And if it isn't, though, if there's something else, and they essentially tried to obfuscate it here with this response, I think that might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. You know, we keep saying that though, right? Yeah, but yeah, come on, how many more times can that camel hold up? And this is specifically a conversation that they're having with representatives of the people, right? It's already working with a branch of government. If they try to fudge things with them in this context, I mean, the real problem, I think, isn't necessarily that they would be, you know, the camel's back would be breaking. It's what do we do once it has broken? What could representatives do to express their displeasure towards Facebook? I mean, they could do a million things, but... Well, they're doing it. They're doing an antitrust investigation. And, you know, the logical outcome would be if they found some kind of anti-competitive behavior, obviously, they could take action under laws related to the antitrust. But I don't know that this is antitrust. This is privacy. And then it would be whether they have actually broken a law in doing that, or if it's just, you know, making it transparent to people, in which case, I don't think just making it to transparent people seems to have any effect on Facebook's user base. Sadly, people keep finding justifications for why, yeah, I know I don't like Facebook, but I have to use it because... which is usually a genuine justification. It's just that in this case here, and I don't think they tried to fudge it, I think this is actually just an IP address thing. So, well, if it's more than just an IP address targeting advertisements, it will be we actually collected the IP addresses and stored information associated with people who visited from those IP addresses, or if it was somehow correlated with a user account. We should talk about some Microsoft news. Microsoft announced its Teams communication app and Slack competitor now has more than 20 million daily active users up from 13 million in July. So, quite a significant increase there. Microsoft offers Teams as a free add-on for Office 365 users. In October, Slack said the app, their app had 12 million daily active users. Also in October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said more than 350 organizations have at least 10,000 people using Teams. Yeah, so I'm not calling for the death of Slack here, but definitely shows that Slack's first mover advantage has been used up, and Microsoft is passing them. So, now Slack needs to keep innovating to stay in the game. And the interesting thing is that Slack makes money on paid users and paid users are rare because it's very expensive, and that's good for Slack, or at least it was. I'm wondering if they aren't going to start hunting for less wealthy users and companies, maybe by chasing users like us who use it for semi-professional but smaller structures. We wouldn't necessarily have enough money to pay for it for premium accounts for Slack at the price they are today, but maybe if there was a package, we might shell out a little bit more money. I don't know if it scales. I think the bigger problem is not the price they charge. It's that the price that Microsoft charges is bundled into Office 365 where you get so much more. Right, but structures like ours don't have Office 365, and we might be willing to pay something for something like Slack to get premium features. So, I don't know, maybe. Ours, Tectica reports on work published in PNAS from scientists at MIT and Delft University of Technology to help autonomous vehicles understand the intentions of other motorists. You know, like when you can tell that person keeps inching up and you're like, you know what, they're going to go, I'm just going to go slow because I bet they're going to cut in front of me and they do. Autonomous vehicles aren't good at that sort of stuff. So, the scientists used four categories of social values, altruists who are drivers who maximize other drivers' enjoyment. They sort of, they're sometimes known as defensive drivers, prosocial who try to benefit all other drivers like, oh yeah, no, I'll make sure to let you in and merge because I want to make it good for everybody or maybe I'll even speed up to get away so that I leave enough room for people behind me. Then there's individuals, those who just maximize their own benefit, they don't worry about what's happening with other people, and the competitive driver who wants to win, who wants to have a better experience than all the other drivers, even if it's at their own expense. The AI was then trained how to recognize which of the four types of driving a driver seemed to be having and seemed to be and then project what that kind of driver would do next with that system in place. Autonomous vehicles were more accurate at predicting merging behavior with errors dropping by 25%. This is a really important development. There's still, you know, very early research, but I think what we're hearing, at least as non-experts, is always that AI is really good at navigating streets now, but the real problem is to determine what the other drivers' intentions are. And if this manages to maybe not solve, but at least helps solve that issue, it seems like it would improve the effectiveness of autonomous driving significantly. Yeah, I mean, there are other issues as well. It's not just trying to predict what the drivers do. There's also, you know, weird intersections and changing weather conditions and all that, right? But this is one of the problems. And in fact, part of this Ars Technica article noted that more than 50% of the autonomous vehicle accidents in California turned out to be rear-ending because the human driver behind didn't understand what the autonomous vehicle was going to do. So part of this study could help the autonomous vehicle display these kinds of behaviors so that people understand, oh, he really isn't going to move or he is going to turn. Turns are definitely where most of the vehicle deaths happen, because somebody is turning into traffic and they think the person is going to slow down and they don't or that person doesn't see them, etc. So this would be a huge advance if they can make this work in practice. Right now it's still at the theoretical scale, it's still at the software testing scale, but it would be super important. It seems like it would be a more significant step than maybe other things that can be improved, but I actually don't know what I'm talking about. So we should talk about dating instead. Yeah, because we both know about that, right? Yeah, absolutely. Dating app The League, which uses LinkedIn to verify users, is launching a feature called League Live. Users who opt-in will get automatically paired with three people for two-minute video dates, quote-unquote, in the app that takes place Sundays at 9 p.m. The sessions start with a nice breaker question. If both people heart, quote-unquote, each other, they are officially matched by the service to pursue an in-person date. The beta starts in beta tests. The service was liked best by people between 35 and 40 years old and outside most populated areas. League Live starts December 1st. It's an interesting approach and I'm very curious, those of you in the audience who are into dating, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, tell us what you think of this idea. It's not the only service that offers video dating. Bumble offers video dates, but they have no time limit. So this is more like speed dating where you are pressed for time. And like they say, let's say you live, I don't know, an hour plus outside of a major city and you get matched with somebody in the city, you're not going to want to drive an hour to meet this person or maybe even a half hour to meet this person. If you're not sure, this gives you a chance to meet them and say, okay, that might be worth driving a half hour to go see. So I can see this being helpful in rural situations, people who live outside of cities, and just people who are pressed for time. And like, you know what, I don't want to spend a lot of time on dates without vetting people first. I know it sounds so critical. It seems like, I think to me, I see this as an addition to chatting rather than taking the data out of the equation. Like it makes the chatting portion of the matching more successful because you can obviously actually see and talk with the person. And to me, this is on this side of the border of the date. And then so bottom line, I think this is really awesome. Had I been dating still, I would have loved doing that because, yeah, I mean, it's just beyond the explanations of why and how and when it just seems cool and like it would be so much more efficient than any other system, including chat or actual dates when you've never seen or talked to the person. And I want to mention the two minutes limit is perfect. Because even if you're not having fun, even if it's a little bit uncomfortable, at the end, you're like, yeah, thanks so much. It was great. Thank you. Bye. And then you never speak to that person again, if you didn't enjoy them. Although they're going to be like, why didn't they heart me? Why aren't you hearting me? Why haven't you hearted me yet? And then you're like, I definitely do not want to date this person. The BBC has a report on efforts in China to become self-sufficient in chip production. A lot of people are jumping to the conclusion that, oh, with the trade restriction on, China's going to double down and just start producing their own chips. This is a really good article to kind of gauge how much of this is a reaction to the trade restriction, how much of it is just China wanting to be more self-reliant and how far they have to go. China produces 16% of the semiconductors that its own companies use. But the government has set targets of reaching 40% by 2020 and 70% by 2025. The government could set all the targets at once, but that does tend to push people at least toward those numbers. The plan dates back to meetings in May 2018. So before the Huawei fight, before the tariff restrictions really started to go into place, but right after the US restricted trade with ZTE, a restriction that has since been lifted. But it was sort of the first salvo in this dispute between China and the US. In October of this year, so this is after the tariffs are fully in place, after Huawei has been restricted, the Chinese government created a $29 billion fund to support its semiconductor industry. So these incidents have definitely moved China along on a path that seems like it wanted to go on anyway, but maybe it has encouraged things to move a little faster. Chinese companies also need to produce products that sell outside of China. AI researcher and tech historian Piero Scorufi estimates that China may be up to 10 years behind companies like TSMC. So even if they can make a chip, even if they can make a chip that's useful in China, it might not be competitive outside of China because companies like TSMC have such a huge lead. Now China lacks the industry and experience and the equipment, the precision equipment that a lot of these other companies have to manufacture high-end chips. However, they're not bad in chip design. Huawei has very competitive chip design. Huawei doesn't make its own chips, but it can design its own chips. University engineer in Hong Kong, Patrick Yue, whose work is partly funded by Huawei, believes that Huawei is doing this because they're trying to replicate the success of Samsung or Apple in making the chips that they use in their own devices. And Samsung may be a very good parallel here because Samsung makes some of the chips it uses, but sometimes even though it makes a chip, it may buy a chip from a third-party vendor because that chip is just better for its design. Huawei handset business president Li Chengzhu told the BBC that Huawei has no problem using other vendors for chip sets, saying, we use the best chip sets to satisfy our customers. And Scarufi, the historian I mentioned earlier, believes that China's advantage isn't in creating technology, it's in implementing it anyway. So it sounds like China has a tall order to try to produce their own chips, but design coming up with useful things, implementations like WeChat and Huawei's smartphone models, that's where they'll probably see most of their success. The interesting thing to me here is the government intent of self-sufficiency, which is something that a lot of people are talking about, including, I guess, us in Europe, and because for us we're dependent on China and on the US for many, many of the services and goods that we use in the tech sector. So the question of essentially we have very little of those that we are, that we can, that we have a hand on, a handle on. So that self-sufficiency is something that is concerning for everyone. And maybe it should be for even more people than everyone. That doesn't make sense. But yeah, the article sort of points me to the idea that mercantilism, that old-fashioned practice of saying we will just take everything and make it ourselves and sell to other people, but we won't buy to anybody else. It doesn't work any better now than it did back in the 17 and 18. And I will add, small note, there's a reason why Micron is still in the memory business is because a lot of government military contracts require a lot of those key components to be produced in the US. But the problem is there's never enough of that to support an entire industry. So it's kind of picking and choosing where you can make the most benefit. Hey, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadline.com. This Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific, Valve will announce Half-Life Alyx. Well, they've already announced the title, but they're going to give you all the details on Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific. It is a flagship VR game. The verges, Sean Hollister notes the announcement comes two years and nine months after Valve promised three full-length VR games and more than a decade after the last new Half-Life game. To prepare for this momentous day in VR, Gaming Patrick is going to bring us up to speed a little bit on the significance of Half-Life and what this may or may not mean for VR. The thing is a lot of people might not know this in the tech sector, but Half-Life is a hallowed name in the gaming industry. Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, and it was one of the most successful games in the history of gaming, and its sequel that has been semi-promised for a while by Valve and hasn't emerged and has kind of been forgotten, Half-Life 3, is probably the most well-known meme of the gaming industry. Half-Life 3 is the thing that we know we will never see and yet keep hoping for and quote-unquote confirm any time we see a three in anything anywhere. It's the new Duke Nukem Forever, right? Duke Nukem Forever was actually announced and in development for a very long time. Half-Life 3 has never been announced or anything. Right, there that is a difference. Yeah, and so that is kind of setting the stage for the importance of anything Half-Life announced by Valve. So then putting Half-Life Alyx as the main title for their doing for VR is significant because it's something Half-Life. Obviously it's not Half-Life 3, but it's significant in that way. It's also important to note that Half-Life 2 is the game that launched Steam and essentially made digital game distribution out of thin air because it was so highly anticipated that people were willing to install that strange launcher program that didn't work very well in order to play it. So using Half-Life 2 launch things is not unheard of. It's also interesting on the VR side because VR hardware has been a little bit lacking since launch. It's getting better and better every revision and we're getting to a point where it's really not bad at all but maybe not perfect yet and on the software side we've seen many good games but no awesome great game. Basically no killer app. There hasn't been a VR killer app for gaming yet. So the question is, is Half-Life Alyx going to be the game that finally gets a lot of gamers more than has been in the past to at least desire a VR headset because let's be honest, the majority of gamers look at this as an interesting little doohickey but they don't really want to shed out the money for it. Maybe Half-Life Alyx is going to do the trick to at least make them want it. Yeah, I think that's really well put because as I like to remind people all the time, VR is very successful. AR is very successful in the enterprise. There are lots of great training and field uses and those people who use them scoff when you say there needs to be a killer use case for it but on the consumer side gaming is the best bet for it to be a consumer hit. At least so far nobody's come up with anything else that seems promising and gaming has yet to have that VR hit that everybody talks about and says well you gotta get a VR headset now. I feel like what Disney Plus is doing for streaming video where people who are never into streaming video are suddenly like yeah but now it's Disney, now I'm willing to try it, now I'm willing to learn it. VR needs that. I leave it to you Patrick to tell me if this is the time and of course we can't really say until we see the game itself but Valve has a good history of making really good games. Is that going to translate to VR? That is the big question. Obviously as you said we don't know what that game even is but they're making a big deal out of it and the fact that it's a half-life game is in itself a big deal. I would be surprised if it became the thing that launches VR. I would be very surprised. I don't expect it to but I think it might be the thing that gets a significant chunk of the general gaming population at least interested. The problem then becomes on what headset does it run because most headsets especially Valve's headsets are very expensive. Hopefully they will launch it on any headset including the cheaper but still very capable Windows is it mixed reality headsets and the Oculus ones officially supported. That would be a great move but it's unlikely. Also we keep saying Alex but I think it's probably Alex because isn't he saying that with the character Alex Vance? Obviously yes. Yeah so apologies to all of you who are yelling at your broadcasting players. I was getting so excited about Half-Life. I didn't really remember the pronunciation of her name. That's terrible and I've played through Half-Life too many times so I should know it. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechniqueShow.Reddit.com and there was some folks in the Discord just now wanting to know hey any folks in Atlanta want to do a DTSS meetup in Atlanta. Now I can't necessarily come there but this person just wants to get a bunch of DTSS listeners together in Atlanta so get into our Discord which you can join by linking your Patreon account at Patreon.com slash DTNS. All right let's check out our mailbag on yesterday's Stadia discussion. Mike from uncharacteristically soggy Riyadh. I guess they're getting more rain in Riyadh or getting rain in Riyadh says the fundamental question I still don't know the answer to is who is the person who needs to game so much that they need to be able to do it on literally any screen and are willing to pay $10 a month or as I like to think about it $120 a year but are okay with the slight lag and the few downsides of streaming. I'm a casual gamer who probably spends less than $100 on games and the service intrigued me but it's the constantly accruing costs that turned me off. I hope it succeeds but $10 a month access charge for content I have to purchase seems too steep. Oh my god this is so frustrating. Google did such a horrible job promoting and explaining what Stadia is. It's horrible now. Stadia will launch in 2020 and it will be free to access. Not only that but I suspect that you will have many games that will be available for free as well free to play games and maybe two hour three hour trials for pay games and also I think something that a lot of people are not noticing or I look at it like that. I think Google is wants to provide white label streaming services to other companies and Stadia is a service but it's also proof of concept so yeah many answers there but definitely you won't you won't have to pay for Stadia when it launches for everyone and that's something people should yeah the $10 a month will become a thing you'll pay because you want to get the benefits that are accrue from from paying it's like a premium level but yeah they've done a really bad job of explaining what this is horrible. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master level including Michael Aikens, Ken Hayes and Brad Schick. Thank you for going above and beyond in your support of Daily Tech News Show and thank you Patrick Beja for going above and beyond in your staying up late to be on Daily Tech News Show. It is always such a pleasure and I've missed all of you including Sarah which I'm so sad is not here with me today next week. Yes she told me to tell you that she was very upset that she had to miss today's show. I almost cancelled my appearance because she wasn't here. You would have had to do the show alone with Roger and then you realized you'd have to listen to me do the show alone and you're like okay that's no good. No that can't work but if people want more you know games are happening right now they're hip they're rad and there's a lot of them because it's the holiday season. If you want to know more and understand everything go check out Pixels you open your podcast app you search for Pixels in the little search field and you subscribe and you get a show every couple of weeks and we tell you all you need to know so do that now. And folks don't forget that we have a little holiday gift for you if you sign up or remain a patron between now and November 28th we'll send you a holiday card with some Len Peralta art on it. 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