 Coming up on DTNS, Google makes ads look more like search results. A direct TV satellite is about to explode one way or another. And an Egyptian priest speaks 3000 years after his death, thanks to a 3D printer. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 23 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the shows producer. We were just talking about frozen iguanas and chili and all kinds of good stuff on patreon.com slash DTNS is good day internet. That's where you get it folks. Good day internet patreon.com slash DTNS join that wider conversation. We dig deeper into the tech stories. We talk about other things. It's a lot of fun. All right, let's start with a few tech things you should know. XTA developers reports on a new APK for Quickshare, which is a Samsung alternative to Apple's AirDrop. Nearby Samsung phone users will be able to share pictures, videos and files with discovery set to either all users or contacts only. Quickshare will also let users up upload content to Samsung cloud, which can be streamed to Samsung smart things devices to download at a later date. Users can upload up to one gigabyte files with a two gigabyte per day limit. Looking at the APK appears that the service is set to come to all Samsung devices running one UI 2.1 or later. After a electronic arts announced that it was removing its Tetris games from the Android and iOS stores, the Tetris company announced that its version developed by the game company network is now a free download on both platforms. The game has just one mode and five different skins and an online leaderboard is coming soon. Yeah, mystery solved. Looks like Germany and the UK are leaning against a ban on Huawei networking equipment. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos regarding 5G rollouts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, I don't think I make myself particularly secure if I completely eliminate providers in their entirety and then don't know how they develop. So it sounds like she's going for let's have a lot of options. Maybe Huawei is going to be one of them. US Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin has said he will meet with the British Finance Minister on Sunday to discuss Britain's position on Huawei. Reuters sources are saying UK officials plan to propose barring Huawei equipment from core networks and restricted government systems, but not proposing a total ban in the UK. Waymo announced it will begin testing autonomous trucks in minivans in Texas and New Mexico this week. Testing will include the modified Chrysler Pacifica's used in its Waymo One service as well as long haul semis and focus on promising commercials commercial routes. Twitter announced that it's rolling out the ability to leave emoji reactions to direct messages on iOS, Android and the web. Users will be able to choose any of the emojis available on Twitter as reaction and users not using the latest Twitter apps will receive the reaction as a separate message. Reactions can also be removed from conversations at any time. Google's information security engineering team have detailed security issues in Safari's anti tracking system, the intelligent tracking prevention or ITP function. ITP has meant to restrict cookies, but Google found that the way web content was treated differently by ITP could then be used to figure out where you were going on the web. Apple fixed some of the issues in its December security update, but Google says the fixes don't address the underlying problem. ITP uses an on device algorithm to collect details about sites visited and Google detailed five attacks that could discover that information. Alright, let's talk a little bit about dating Justin. Oh, yeah, Tom. Match Group announced that it has invested in and partnered with Noon Light and will roll out Noon Light safety features to match Tinder, OKCupid, plenty of fish and its other dating apps. Tinder will be the first to roll out new user safety features starting on January 28 including a photo verification system. Verification requires users take a selfie in real time, emulating a pose by a model it has provided in a sample shot. This will be compared to users profile pics and provide a blue checkmark to indicate verification. Tinder is also introducing a system to detect offensive messages and then ask daters if it bothered them. The company plans to use the information to create an undo feature that lets users unsend messages flagged as offensive. Tinder will also provide a free access to Noon Lights on call emergency service assistance. Features like these will roll out to other match group apps in the months ahead. Yeah, the whole kind of match a photo with something to verify that it's you. That's helpful. Anybody who's hung out on dating apps as long as I have knows that there are a lot of people, you know, upload photos and you're like, I don't know something seems fishy. We meet somebody and it's not the same person or maybe as an outdated photo or whatever. So that is a little bit of a, okay, you got the checkmark, you're verified, you know, you're you're you're you're somewhat vetted a little bit more than the huge Tinder pool in general. And of course, I'm talking about these other apps too, although Tinder is match groups biggest app by far, at least right now. What I think is more interesting is this kind of panic button feature that I believe that match group, it was sort of under duress to to add something like this because there were pressure from there were a lot of news reports and you know, there are sexual predators on these networks and these people aren't getting vetted. And this is very dangerous. And it's on match group to do something about it. And as somebody who is an end user of you know, whether if I open up a dating app right now, you know, and I'm swiping through people and you know, maybe I see somebody that seems kind of cool. Well, they could be a sexual predator and so could somebody that I run into at the local library. You know, there's there's a vetting process that doesn't really happen in normal life. And I'm not saying that this is a bad idea. I am saying that if I am vetted along with a lot of other people, and some of this has to do with allowing the app to know your location where you otherwise would not give it access to that. Again, it's supposed to be about your safety but it's also tracking you or to know who you are meeting up with. That means that the app and possibly third party apps in the future might know who I saw and when you know, it turns into a privacy issue versus a security issue and what is more important to you. And boy does not make dating fun. Well, yeah, I think that the biggest issue here is that dating is a vulnerable process and beyond the excitement of people meeting each other, you do have an element of being sort of out there in the breeze. And if these safeguards can help you feel more secure in connecting to people, then that is a step forward. But there's always the unintended consequence. And I agree with you that that specifically if this does then lead into a direction of either more targeted advertising or more targeted ways that make you feel, you know, intruded upon in this vulnerable scenario, then that is a net negative. Yeah, I mean, this, this is an example of why we really need better approaches that consider all the applications, not just let's manage our apps by who's loudly complaining about them, right? Because the complaints are stop collecting data about us and companies are resistant, like, okay, we're not going to collect any data because people get really upset match did that to their detriment to the point where people are like, wait, you're not collecting enough data about the people on your platform. And they're like, Oh, okay, we'll start collecting data and we'll start doing these things. And I'm not saying any of the things they're doing are wrong or bad. But we're probably going to have a backlash against some of these things at some point if they didn't think them through, you've got to come up with a holistic approach to this sort of thing, whether it's a dating app, a search engine, a smart speaker, whatever, that says, very clearly, this is what needs to happen. And the public needs to be like us and think about it and go, okay, where is the line supposed to be? Let's let's not just manage by shouting. I also think, you know, the idea of the panic button is that you know, the premise is, if I'm somewhere, I all of a sudden go, this isn't good, you know, I'm kind of alone. I don't like this. I am able to get help. My first reaction was, what do we call it 911? Every time you're like, this date sucks. Well, no, it actually the way that the company has laid it out is, you will first contact our team, we will figure out if you're actually in enough danger that we then we would contact the authorities and I'm just thinking to myself, and this is all supposed to happen like in a clandestine way, like under the table at a wine bar, like, you know, there's a lot of the the the idea behind it, I do not hate the execution is is in question. Well, and noon lights just a service for doing that. You can you can download noon light right now and put it on your phone for any reason, right? So it match and integrating it into their dating apps is just making it easier to access. Totally. Oh, let's talk about UI and design, shall we? And Google has changed how it differentiates paid search results from organic search results on the desktop. Paid results now look pretty identical to other results other than a small black and white ad icon that resembles icons used to indicate sources. Until 2013 paid results had a different background color, you might recall, it's kind of a yellow color really at least in the desktop version of Google that I was using. After that it used unique colors to distinguish ads as well. So they were pretty obviously ads up at the top. Google Sunday of Jane says that the changes have reduced the number of colors on the page and brought more harmony to the layout. Digi Day reports that one digital marketing agency has noticed increased clickthrough on ads since the change. Yeah, up in that ad revenue brings harmony to the layout team, I'm sure. And when I say that, I definitely on paper, I'm agreeing with the Verge and others that say, well, this obviously is meant to increase ad revenue at the detriment of you clearly being able to know what's an ad and what isn't. That said, I feel like these pop out to me better now. And I wonder if that's just because I always look for that little fave icon that tells me the publisher that they put up in new search results. Like, okay, is that the Verge? Is that a company I've never heard of? What is that? So I'm training myself to look there. And since they made this change, I'm like, oh, that's an ad. That's an ad. That's an ad because I'm already looking in that corner. I doubt that everybody works that way. But for me, this change has actually made me more aware of which of these are ads because I don't have to think about colors. I am fascinated by the Kremlin analogy of any time that Google makes any kind of decision about advertising because this is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Everybody gets paid. Everybody the world moves because of Google ads. They revolutionize the market. They have not only dominated online along with Facebook, they have dominated ad sales writ large. When you see major networks go out and talk to advertisers for their big rollouts, they are making explicit pleas that you should advertise with us. And this is the reason why it's better than digital advertising. So with that being said, I wonder whether or not this is a troubling sign that they want to goose their ad revenue a little bit because if Google ads are flagging, if Google feels like they need to to keep this going and refresh it and make it look slightly more like a native search result, then what does that say for advertising full stop? You know, that is a very fair point. The other side of it is Google has probably reached saturation and also needs to show growth. And one way to goose that number to show growth when you're nearing saturation is to change the rules of the game so that what you have already works better. And that's exactly what this does. I mean, from a purely designed perspective, when I look at the new layout, I go, yeah, that looks better. It does. It just does. At the same time, because I've been looking at Google search results over the years, you know, in prep for the story. And yeah, back in 2013, it's kind of ugly, but it was pretty front and center. The ads were very obvious. I also have never thought, if only my Google search results were more designed forward, that is something that the company is making a change not because the public outcry demanded it. It's because the ads need to be clicked on. All right, Microsoft's making developer tools available for the dual screen Microsoft Duo. That's the one that runs Android. It's not a foldable. Remember, it's two screens. By default, apps will occupy a single one of those screens. And then users can choose to span it across both. That's by default. However, developers can change that to another treatment. And we've got some ideas from Microsoft in this SDK. Microsoft suggests master in detail where the second screen relates to the first. So you have like main information here and maybe some supplemental information over here to page. That's most obviously in a Word document where you have one page here, second page here, like a book for side by side comparison. There also is running two instances of an app side by side with drag and drop capability between them saying don't just have, you know, the one app span the two screens have two instances of the app and allow your users to drag things between them. There's also dual view with a different view on each screen and a companion pane, which like might be good for Photoshop or something like that where you offer controls on one screen, main view on the other. Microsoft also suggests optimizing apps for note taking so that they work in landscape mode. They say usually flat is when people want to do note taking. There's also things like making sure dialogue boxes are on one screen or another so that the gap between the two screens doesn't interrupt them and for images spread across that gap, developers can either mask it, meaning it looks like it goes under the gap or cut it so that it stops and then picks up on the other side of the app or the gap. There's an Android emulator out today. If you want to test your duo apps and a preview SDK and emulator for Windows 10 X based Neo, the other dual screen device is also on the way. Microsoft also made some web standard proposals public for dual screen devices for showing HTML on dual screen devices. This is one of those situations where I kind of go, yeah, I just need that one, you know, the duo version of an app running side by side where I go, oh yeah, all of a sudden it's twice as good. I think that anybody who let's say, I mean, right now I've got two desktops in my little office environment right now didn't used to don't don't need them, but having them so much better. And you figure out a workflow that works better for you once you have that option, particularly if the two screens talk to each other. And I think that that's key. Yeah, it's like dual monitors, but smaller and in one device, I guess. But yeah, Microsoft's hoping the same thing as you, Sarah, they want to see some app developers show off some cool uses for this. AT&T's Direct TV has asked the US FCC for rule for rules waiver to quote conduct emergency operations to deorbit the spaceway one satellite and quote, spaceway one suffered damage to its batteries. And right now it's operating off solar power, but an upcoming eclipse would apparently cause an unavoidable use of the damaged battery that could cause the battery to burst. So Direct TV wants to fully deorbit and decommission the satellite before the eclipse season begins on February 25th. The waiver is needed because there isn't time to use up or expel all the propellant on the satellite. The reason the FCC requires all the fuel to be expelled is to avoid an explosion. But Direct TV points out that if they don't bring the satellite out of orbit before the eclipse starts, you also have the risk of an explosion. So which explosion do you want to risk FCC? Yeah, the filing is also a little bit confusing because they keep saying deorbit, which usually means disposal orbit. That means bring it down to where it burns up in the atmosphere. And you don't really have anything cluttering up the orbits. You don't have anything clearing up the ground too much. But the filing according to ours Technica here says the new orbit would be 300 kilometers above the geostationary arc, which would make it a graveyard orbit. So that would be a way to avoid the the explosion say, Well, we can't get rid of the propellant. So we'll put it up in a graveyard orbit. And then if the battery explodes, it won't hurt anything because it'll be away from everything. Our's Technica asked AT&T for a clarification on that point. And as far as I'm looking right now, they haven't heard back from it. But one way or another, you've got a satellite that is the backup satellite for serving television to Alaska, they say they have plans in place to provide other backups for Alaska that it's not usually used anyway. So they don't expect any interruption in service. They just don't want the thing to explode. Well, so this is a question that I'm sure a lot of people are asking. Let's say it does explode. And we know that there is, you know, a satellite itself would burn up in the atmosphere and not actually reach land. Is there a danger to any of us if this does happen? Probably not. It's probably not going to land on you. The chance, I mean, the planet's mostly water. And we make up a very small percentage of the landmass. But you know, it's good to control these sorts of things. But it's different than saying, the planet's mostly ocean, it probably won't land on you. And it won't because it's going to burn up before it ever got close enough to earth itself. Yeah, I mean, but that's the thing. It's like, if you if you properly handle it, there's almost zero chance it caused any problems for anybody, whether it's another satellite in orbit, whether it falls in a populated area. If you let it explode on its own, there's no telling what it'll do. Well, let's move on to brains, shall we? Scientists from Google and the Genelia Research Campus in Virginia have published the largest ever high resolution 3D map of brain connectivity from roughly 25,000 neurons in a fruit fly using the technique calling connectomics connect connect connectomics. Yes, the latest connectome, which is what that particular map entails, covers roughly one third of a particular fruit flies brain. Previously, the roundworm C elegans had its brain completely mapped in this way fruit fly a little bit more complex, though, the scientists sliced sections of the fruit flies brain into 20 micron thick pieces that's very, very small, streamed electrons from a scanning micro-soft into the micron pieces of micro microscope rather and then process some 50 trillion 3D pixels they're known as voxels with an algorithm that traces the pathways of each cell. No fruit flies, you might wonder why the heck a fruit fly they work well for connectomics because they have very small and relatively simple brains, but they happen to display complex behaviors such as courtship dances between fruit flies. This is something I didn't know until today. The data from the project is available for anybody to download if you are curious. Oh man, we actually studied the little fruit fly wiggles in a science class that I took one time with the mating dances and stuff fruit flies. They display a lot of very complex behavior. So they're good for lots of studies in genetics and makes them good candidates for something like this. The controversy is among scientists who say, you know, we've been doing connectomics for almost 15 years now. And what have we got out of it? The answer is, well, we haven't really done enough mapping yet. It takes 15 years for for this kind of stuff to start divulging the kind of data that's useful. But there is a question right now of like, okay, now we've got this this data available. Anybody can get in it. Will there be anything come out of it? Will will we have any developments that use it? But even so I just think, you know, the idea of doing this kind of 3D mapping and scanning is is fascinating, even if it's just for a genetic anatomics for mapping those synapses. I really don't know where to go from here, except to say that I've spent the better part of a week and a half doing my best to kill as many fruit flies as possible in my kitchen, because they have become such a nuisance. But I do think that obviously they are this this entire process is something that hopefully we get something out of. But I can understand the idea that, hey, look, maybe we're pushing this rock up the hill for no reason, because we haven't really gotten a whole lot out of it up till this point. I mean, you know, it works taking research money from something else. That's, you know, more pressing. I mean, I think that that's probably what researchers would complain about because nobody's going to complain like, you're doing something cool. That's lame. It's more of like, well, we could maybe be mapping the brain in a way that helps, you know, somebody who's paraplegic walk again type thing. If this is if this isn't that, then, you know, that's one thing, but it is cool. I love the idea of a Sarah Lane curated science journal. You're doing something cool dot dot dot lame exclamation point. I think personally, my gut tells me that you need to keep doing this because even if the fruit fly map doesn't come up with any great developments, eventually we're going to want to know how the synapses connect. And that's going to be useful in an understanding the human brain. And you just, you know, we had C elegans that's very simple. Now we got a fruit fly. I feel like this is this is the kind of, you know, non practical research that you just need to grind through, because knowing a map usually ends up showing you something. Scientists from Royal Holloway, the University of London, the University of York and Leeds Museum used 3D printers to replicate the voice of an Egyptian priest who was mummified 30 years, I'm sorry, 3000 years ago during the reign of Ramsey Steele 11. I would love to know if someone was mummified 30 years ago. It feels like it was 30 years ago, but it was that long 3000 years. Anyway, the vocal tract of Nessia Mun was CT scanned to make a 3D model, which was then printed. They were then able to use the 3D printed version of Nessia Mun's vocal tract, pair it with an artificial larynx to synthesize a vowel sound. Would you like to hear the vowel sound? Yes. Here we go. It's, it's taking a little while to load, of course, even though all the times that I played before the show, it was fine. Basically, the BBC describes it as sounding like a goat bleeding, not bleed, but bleed like a meh kind of sound. We waited 3000 years. I'm sure we can wait another few. There we go. There we go again. That's not me. That's Nessia Mun. Yes, Nessia Mun. Nessia Mun's goat. It's a vowel sound. It's just a test to show that they could do this. It's believed to be the first project of its kind to successfully recreate the voice of a dead person. And they want to use some computer models to attempt to recreate whole sentences that Nessia Mun might have said. He was a priest of Ommon, so they kind of know what the liturgy was. The results of the experiment were published in the journal Scientific Reports. Not, I'm not going to say that this is cool. You know, I mean, who's ever heard a more beautiful bleach? But, you know, if we if we're comparing, you know, slicing the microns of a fruit fly brain to this, I'm going with the flies. Wait, really? No, I totally go with this. I think that this is this is super cool. The 8000 year old voice, you know, even if it's just a guy. I guess I would have wanted it to be less goat like and again, no, no love lost with goats. But but I don't I don't know. I'm struggling to feel like this is something cool. There is an entire I mean, civilizations rise and fall before we had recorded technology, right? And now we take it granted because so much of our lives is photographed and recorded on video, including what we are doing right now. But I would love to know the original sound of, you know, George Washington, right? I would I would love to know how historical figures sounded. I think that that would bring our history to life more than it is now. And yes, this sounds a little silly with our with our Egyptian goat bleeding. But I think that where this can lead is fascinating. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, as Nessie Munn says, subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. If you like mummy stories, well, we've got a subreddit for you. Submit stories that you care about and want us to care about and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our discord, which has happened. You can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Now, a large portion of our email yesterday was about chilly regarding Good Day Internet's discussion, but we did get something DTNS pertaining, didn't we? Yeah, we did. Craig wrote in and said regarding the story about Microsoft Search and Bing, which was adding web results to enterprise wide searches, kind of forcing Bing on on on folks using a Chrome extension. Craig says, at my former employer, that was a supplier of financial software solutions. There were always a number of people who were fooled by internet email phishing scam tests, and they were clicking on fake links. I'm sure we weren't unique. It seems to me that the bad actors could easily take advantage of search and Bing to game those searches and deliver fake search results to targeted corporate domains. For example, XYZ corp VPN client, click here. If only takes one user to fall for it, right? I'd love to know if any sys admins out there are also worried about this. Yeah, Craig, that's a fair question. And I'm certain somebody has thought about that idea and probably trying to implement an execution of that kind of phishing scheme. So it's pretty much if you can think of a phishing scheme, somebody's probably trying it. Whether it's an increased risk above other phishing schemes, the easiest one is just an email, right? That says, Hey, click here and you don't need to target Microsoft search and Bing for that. But you asked the right question, Craig, which is, Hey, any sys admins out there worried about this feedback at daily tech news show.com. Let us know. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Dan Dorado Hankins, John Johnston and Chris Smith. Thank you very much. And thanks to all our patrons. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young. He survived sketch fast. And he's here with us today. And Justin, did you have a good time? What's been going on? Oh, man, you know, barely, barely. Thanks to all the folks who came out to our live show, a piano fight last night. But of course, this is only the beginning of a very busy season. In fact, I'll probably be this might be my last show from my home studio for a little bit, because I'm going to be on the road for the primaries starting next week. You can listen to all of it at politics politics politics.com and help support it at take politics seriously.com. But yeah, thanks to patrons for that. That podcast. I'm off to Iowa. I'm doing the full the full big four first caucuses and primaries, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. It's going to be a real busy month. And I look forward to sharing it all with you guys on the next three show. Listen, folks, I'm a little bit of a political history junkie. I know about the Iowa caucus. 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