 Coming up on DTNS should you take a break from the real world and animal crossing or virtual reality? Why not both plus a new iPhone has entered the game and algorithms that let wearable users know if they're sick This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday April 15th 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I am Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson And I'm the shows producer Roger Chang We were talking a lot about fruit and fruit trees and orchards. Did you ever live near an orchard? Did you ever cut through an orchard and get shot out with rock salt? Well, then you'll have someone to identify with on good day internet become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know Amazon has chosen to close its warehouses in France after a French court ordered it to limit its deliveries to food and medical Supplies until can assure better safety measures for its workers the closure will start April 16th and last until at least April 20th Employees will be paid during the shutdown through the state partial unemployment scheme Amazon employs about 10,000 people at six French warehouses US Department of Defense's inspector general announced It could find no evidence to suggest the White House intervened in the awarding of the Jedi short for joint enterprise defense Infrastructure cloud contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon the inspector general added that they could not review the matter fully as some information Was unavailable under presidential communications privilege the Jedi contract will modernize IT operations at the Pentagon for a cost of up to 10 billion dollars over 10 years Microsoft got the contract on October 25th and Amazon filed a lawsuit over the decision in November Google emailed users of nest cameras telling them it's lowering the video quality of the cams to help limit how much bandwidth They use users will get a notification from the nest app when the quality is adjusted Users can reset the resolution to a higher setting if they wish which is weird because my nest cams turn off when I'm home So they shouldn't be sending anything but there you Google's also rolling out a new kids section for the US Google Play Store for apps that are deemed teacher Approved by high teacher radians along with reasons why teachers like the app age Appropriateness and what the app is hoping to teach children Google says it was already planning the launch But they moved it up because so many kids are home right now or at least in front of screens The company also expects to launch the kids section internationally in the coming months epic game says it will extend the current season of Fortnite Fortnite fans rejoice season 3 was expected to arrive in two weeks new features will be added to the current season instead And Apple began taking orders for its magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro the keyboard connects magnetically to an iPad Pro with the ability to adjust the viewing angle up to 130 degrees Remember, it's the floating thing magic keyboard costs $299 if you're getting it for the 11-inch iPad Pro and $349 if you won the one that fits the 12.9 inch iPad Pro both of those shipping next week And Apple had another big announcement today in data did Tom Apple announced the iPhone SE has a 4.7-inch screen and home button with touch ID similar to the iPhone 8 However, it also has a 12 megapixel camera lens on the back and the same a 13 bionic chip that's inside the iPhone 11 So it's nice. Oh, it's a little powerhouse It supports 4k video at 60 frames per second and it supports 18 watt fast charging Wi-Fi 6 gigabit LTE and dual sims one slot one eSIM the 64 gig iPhone SE cost $399 the 128 gig version cost $449 and the 256 gigabyte version for $549 and they're all available in black white or red pre-orders begin Friday April 17th with shipping starting on April 24th So basically this is an upgraded iPhone 8 not 8 plus but 8 it's that size of a phone It's got a slightly better camera. Definitely a way better processor Probably You know slightly, I don't know battery life might be around the same to be honest But better specs right with all the video capabilities and Wi-Fi 6 and and the whatnot and at $399 That is a mid-range phone. That is an affordable phone Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know what the I mean I don't know if they shared these numbers in particular when they were giving their quarter leads or whatever But I don't know how the original SE did that one was based on a much smaller screen This is a larger screen It seems like if you were an SE buyer and you've been waiting this long and it's been a while since there was a new SE phone Seems like maybe the time to upgrade that price is really good. I've seen some people see that price I go, who who spends $400 for a phone and I think a lot of people forget you all People who want to pay half the price of lots of other phones I was gonna say who spends $400 a phone. I always spend more Expect that that sentence to finish. I mean, yes There are cheaper phones and lots of people buy them and it's a smart buy to find a cheaper phone if you get good specs But certainly for Apple and and for most phones. This is I mean you're getting the same processor as the iPhone 11 For $399 granted it's different form factor But I think that's important to note that this is mostly a form factor difference here The specs are very good. I was not as good I was under the impression and I don't know why I thought this but I kind of thought Apple was going to completely move away and Be done with touch ID that we were seeing the the the final legs of it with just legacy eights being available You fell for it They they pulled a magic trick and kind of without ever saying that sort of subtly implied But face ID is really the future but And obviously there's probably a cost difference and I don't actually know that but but it's a good way of doing it It's fine. My life. My wife loves touch ID. She's not sure she's ready for face ID She still uses an eight for that reason so her next upgrade may end up being the se Given that it kind of takes her down that same path But gives her other spec upgrades that will be meaningful for her in the next little while I mean, I know I'm a minority, but I'm with your wife. I prefer touch ID I always have I know it takes up screen real estate and I know we've got other options now You know in-screen fingerprint readers and all that good stuff, but touch ID just worked better than face ID If you're wearing a cloth mask that's you it takes a lot to work around Or if you're just like, you know, you're trying to wake up your phone and it's not their hair. Yeah, it's good point Amazon sent a notice to affiliates that it will adjust referral commission rates Starting in April 21st. So just about a week from now or so not even that Amazon Regularly adjust referral rates and many businesses, especially web publishers rely on the referrals for income Referrals for furniture and home improvement products go from 8% down to 3% Grocery referrals go from 5% to 1% Rates were also lowered on baby products health and personal care sports and more no rates were raised in any of this Yeah, so people are freaking out about this and I'm not trying to defend Amazon when I say this But this is a regular occurrence for Amazon referrals to readjust the rates The reason they readjust the rates is that the referrals are meant to stimulate sales in areas that need it So they give higher percentages to areas of their business that they want to build up Furniture was not as big of a seller for Amazon. So they had a very high referral rate for it You would expect that as Amazon furniture became better selling they would bring that percentage down So if you look at this and realize well, Amazon not only has been in the furniture selling business for a while now But also is De-prioritizing shipping furniture they may look at that and say, you know what? We don't want to increase the sales of furniture right at this moment It's not something we can deliver on and and so we shouldn't be stimulating that also Groceries they don't need any help getting people interested in so it makes perfect sense to reduce that referral rate from five down To one to be like, hey, we don't need to be spending money goosing grocery sales right now So in absentia, this is the department that's in charge of this looking at the numbers They probably have an algorithm that it estimates this and says these are what the optimal percentage rates are and they adjust them Given the times we're living in those adjustments all go down right now and that makes sense It is a little tone-deaf of Amazon to do this I think but the the numbers if you're just looking at the numbers are all rational Yeah, the math of this makes sense. You're totally right about that like if I was just looking at this purely from the angle of when when a dynamic things happen in the economy They have to adjust to them up or down. Yeah, because this is essentially advertising This is how much they're paying to to get people to get other people to buy stuff. It's another for you exactly It's another form of that in fact It's one of the few forms that stuck around for small You know blog runners and podcasters and people who are looking for a little additional income in a way that isn't well And big ones to look at the wire cutter. They make a large percentage One of the best examples of very successful affiliate link based site I mean their information is great, but that's where you know, they're they're getting a lot of affiliate revenue and and Larger publishers, you know the New York Times does product reviews and they've got Amazon affiliate links I'm not sure how many I assume the DTNS audience understands what we're talking about but Most sites will disclose the sort of thing like hey if you click through us we got a little little kickback We really appreciate da da da they don't always you can tell on the URL, you know And you hover over something but um just goes to show you I mean that Amazon's not gonna sit around and say well Hold on we don't want to hurt the little guy, you know the mark over there Who has that really nice pet product website with all those affiliate links might be hurt by this? Amazon is not thinking about that. They're thinking of moving their own merchandise in the best way possible for Amazon So it's one of those situations where you go gosh, you know if it were me In fact, I interviewed somebody recently who just started a podcast and it's all based on products And it's very Amazon affiliate link oriented in a very clever way And I it's like well if that were me I'd be super bummed right now But then that's kind of what you get when you base something off of a company like Amazon or a company like Facebook or you know Large companies where you go is kind of a neat little situation that I've gotten myself in But you're completely at their mercy If this were normal times, I probably wouldn't have much more to say about this But in a time where Amazon is trying to look like they're helping This is not looking like they're helping. Yeah To be a corporate citizen that is trying to help they would say look We know so many small businesses and large businesses depend on these affiliate programs We would have changed these or we are going to roll back the changes for the time being because we're making bank We can afford to do that and and we reserve the right to change these percentages again in the future But you know for the time being we're not that would be Amazon trying to look like somebody who's Who's going the extra mile to help small businesses? Instead they look like the same Amazon that has existed for for years and that they're doing what's in their own best interest Sure, I hope it works out I hope I hope what happens is Amazon maybe even has a little change of heart and all of this and maybe it is more algorithmic than people and I don't know. There's an opportunity for them here. Then they could use a little bit of good PR at the moment Ecobee launched a home monitoring platform called Haven for its smart home devices Ecobee probably most famous for making thermostats, but they make a bunch of other stuff Haven has a feature called autopilot that brings data from any ecobee device Thermostat smart sensor, etc and adjust settings based on your behaviors So that could include arming and disarming a security alarm Adjusting the temperature on a thermostat turning security cameras on or off based on whether you're home or not Haven works with Amazon voice services and Apple's home kit and will add smart things from Samsung and Google Assistant support later on Ecobee also released an Amazon compatible smart camera for a hundred seventy nine dollars and Smart sensors that are compatible with Amazon for seventy nine dollars for a pack of two The Haven platform itself costs five dollars a month for one device or ten dollars a month for unlimited devices If you really wanted to go whole hog that ten dollars a month for unlimited is the right way to go I The ecobee thermostat, I'm pretty familiar with the house next door has one which is a little you know property management thing that I'm taking helping take care of so I I do kind of I'm pretty intimately familiar with that. It's very nice It does a lot of the same things that the nest thermostat does but but it's but it's its own layout The whole kind of let's get smarter. Let's know your habits. Let's know, you know Who your trusted neighbors are, you know, if Scott comes over rings the doorbell, you know, Ecobee being like trusted neighbor Trusted visitor rather than like this is suspicious. This is weird all that stuff Especially over time as it gets more and more data from you is is all good It does sound like if you're gonna go the Haven route, you know, you're you are committing to ecobee for You know in perpetuity because that's the whole point of it rather than using a variety of smart devices around your house They're similar to what nest does to be honest You pay a monthly fee to get access to recordings and extra features like that So it's it's they're not the first to do it. That's that's a common thing I would just throw in my hat and say I That it's been one of my favorite smart devices that we put in the house We have an ecobee. It was less expensive than nest alternative at the time We're just talking thermostat here but this device was was great when we had that earthquake and as that resulted in loss of Proper gas pressure for our our furnace this thing notified me and said, you know, there's something up There's something going on down there. You want to go look at this told me on my phone Now I know a lot of devices will do that but they kind of earned my my loyalty then And I'm kind of all in on ecobee as a as a brand or certainly as an alternative to a nest and other, you know, pricier alternatives Stamford medicine researchers are developing algorithms that want to spot coronavirus symptoms in data collected by wearable devices The algorithms will have the ability to sort through hundreds of thousands of measurements They get logged every day and no changes in things like heart rate or temperature That might indicate the body is fighting an infection and then have the device send the user an alert letting them know Hey, you might want to Take your temperature or something like that Stanford will collect data from five different wearable devices that will shape each algorithm Including smart rings a range of smart watches Although in the smart watch category fitbit is donating 1,000 smart watches to the cause and will recruit research Participants from its 30 million plus users. So it doesn't mean that that happens to fitbit users They would have to agree to do it But this is something that Fibu wants to do to help science and scientists from biomedical institute scripts research will help fitbit track How the infection spreads through a community Yeah, so this is just getting started. Uh, but that's scripts research you mentioned They put out a paper in january Describing how you could do a similar thing to identify flu symptoms before you get the symptoms I mean, it's once you get the body aches and the fever and all of that You probably don't need anyone to tell you you're sick So the idea here is to use machine learning to identify the patterns that say When we start seeing this combination of signals from all the signals that these wearables send us It indicates you might be sick and that's the time to call your doctor and say Hold on getting this reading from the fitbit and the doctor can say, okay, great Take some extra precautions lay down get some fluids self isolate even more, uh, if it's if it's a covid 19 Sort of situation and and this could be incredibly helpful Because with covid 19 in particular asymptomatic people people who don't have symptoms yet Can transmit the disease? So if this gives you the heads up like you might be infected that can help limit transmission Yeah, hopefully it doesn't do a lot of I hesitate to use the word false positive because this isn't meant to be Well, that's why they're testing it right right now They're trying to figure out if they can make it work reliably enough exactly because that's a big concern Yeah, because if they can do that and it is reliable, but not so You know, oh no, you might have a thing and then everybody's kind of conclusions That'd be good But i'm all for this and we've seen it over the last few years wearable companies apple included with the apple watch Fitbit and others our focus so much more and fit that always has been but so much more in health functionality That this makes perfect sense to me and the and the sensors are just going to get better and the abilities The watches will have will get better. I keep hearing about potential Patent applications floating around for being able to test people's blood sugar with their watch it will require piercing skin So obviously that's tied up in a lot of red tape right now And you can't necessarily just expect that to pass approval right away But I love it. I love this kind of thing at the more those devices can be Be there for more than just tell me the time and how many steps I took today the the better I think that's right. You blood pressure doesn't require piercing skin. So you're talking about like some something else No, no, no. I said blood. Sorry blood sugar. I say blood sugar. Okay, gotcha. Yeah I think uh, you know as somebody who's I'm constantly looking at the heart rate Because I mean just kind of for fun more than anything But like it does spike in ways that I I'm I know what my Pretty normal resting heart rate is and like the other night there was a sound in my house And I kind of jumped and I quickly there was nothing it was you know Something that startled me and I looked and I was like, oh look it did spike a little bit Okay. Well, I knew what was going on in that moment But that sort of situation would be something where you know, you'd have to like you said Scott like not be like Well, I must have the flu, you know, my device just told me, you know, maybe, you know But the thing is is like It's it's knowing that those sorts of things are a natural part of you know Everyone's day and your heart rate goes up and down and yeah and point of machine learning is not like Let's just look at every time you're at heart rate spikes and go you might be sick Right. The whole point of machine learning is let's look at patterns that even humans couldn't see Sure and figure out like when is it just a spike because you got scared When is it a spike that doesn't go with any other symptoms and when is it like oh no this combination of events We've seen this so many times now. Yeah, that yeah, it's even more complicated than that But but basically saying this time of day potential history, etc All points to like hey, you might and even then even if this is reliable I think what they're going to say is you might Be coming down with something call your doctor and then you go from there with a medical profile And how many times have we all heard well, you know, you're you're the most contagious before even knew you had the So the more the way you can get ahead of this, you know, and it might take a while But you know, we're all going in the right direction here Hey folks, if you want to go in the right direction to a quicker look at the headlines You got to get daily tech headlines available each day for five minutes or so Subscribe right now at daily tech headlines.com Animal Crossing New Horizons launched March 20th. It was delayed And so it serendipitously launched in the middle of a global pandemic Causing switch sales to hit records and in fact have short shortages They sold 1.88 million packaged copies of Animal Crossing in Japan in three days. That's just in Japan That's just physical copies not digital downloads. That's more than Super Smash Brothers sold in its first two weeks Now they have more than 3 million domestic sales again physical copies Nintendo says it it sold more than 390,000 switch units just in japan the week Animal Crossing New Horizons came out And then 280,000 the next week it's selling faster at launch right now Or it's selling faster right now than it did at launch And the reason they can make switches at all is that they're made in vietnam It didn't run into the chinese supply chain problems But there still are supply chain problems getting people enough of these things installs of Animal Crossing pocket camp. That's not even the new one That's the old one that was on the phone have grown seven times over the past month according to sensor tower So a lot of people are either getting sucked into the whole universe or don't have a switch Or like I want to do something with Animal Crossing. I'll download it on my phone In fact, my wife's company has an Animal Crossing slack channel for trading tips and in-game items She was very excited that someone had magazines that she could get to build out something She wanted to craft in Animal Crossing. So Scott, I know you're you're playing this too There is something about Animal Crossing that is calming everyone says that is an escape It's little animals that move to your deserted island and just want to be good citizens And you build things and decorate your house and fish and find fossils and it's what do you think it is That's causing people to flock to it. So well, okay So as a lifelong player of the game ever since its first version showed up in the states on the GameCube It was actually a conversion of the n64 title Uh, I got hooked right away and I was never quite sure why I was so hooked Um, I've been playing it always as an adult male and I'm not saying this thing is made for kids But it's aesthetic is definitely aimed at certain age groups yet. It doesn't matter. It presents this crazily addictive loop of like you said Farming for your fruit and finding fossils turning those into the guy at the at the museum and having blathers say Hey, this is great. Check out the museum We've got a full t-rex now and then going out and catching butterflies and making big money on those things And then there's the whole turnip thing which if you're into the stock market Boy, if I got good news for you, the freaking turnip market is is up S-t-a-l-k market, you mean? That's right So it's this game This game that is is weirdly about ordinary Workaday Things It's got it's, you know Share of fantastical stuff things that wouldn't happen in real life, but for the most part your job in the game Is to do a bunch of menial stuff. It's to dig up trees to chop down wood It's to build something with your crafting table and sell it to somebody else or give a gift to your neighbor It's a it's weirdly Provincial and small and quiet and and and and not a high tension Twitch gameplay sort of experience at all And it just so happens that that experience which many players on the ds The like I mentioned the game cube the 3ds had a very popular version even that free phone version and now this They they've they've got something that just takes them away From all the stress and puts them in a place where things are simple And they're clean and you know what you got to do and how you got to do it And the loop is super addicting. I've got mine right here with me just in case I ever need it Tom's playing right right now It's just it's got soothing music like I don't know there's yeah, there's there's something about it Of course animal crossing is just one way people are escaping reality through tech author reef larson in the new york time Suggest taking a trip in google street view. He describes Narrating a family vacation. They had to cancel like a dungeon master So instead of going to south carolina, they use google street view and they pretended to go to south carolina And he had them stop and get food and and go to a museum and all this stuff Major telecommunications companies in korea including skt and lg u plus are offering virtual reality services that include travel content skt reported a 41.7 percent increase in vr travel content usage Between march and january soul rogers over at forbes is writing about vr experiences to take you away from your home Games like moss where you play as a mouse on an adventure to solve puzzles First steps, which is a free orientation thing. That's apparently really beautiful Job simulator so you can pretend you're actually still going into an office if you want bait to just have that relaxing fishing experience Sarah lane is is testing the oculus The oculus quest right Yes, live with it right now Have you tried any of these or do you have a a particular favorite to take you away from reality? Well, you know you mentioned first steps, which is it's kind of oculus is where I've been like here's how everything works Okay, you're probably very disoriented right now We're gonna literally walk you through your first steps and I had that feeling where and I knew I was gonna feel this way I knew that I was going to Get a good headset put it on get something going and be like wow this really is amazing like everybody says But it took that moment for me to really get it And you do feel like I mean it's it's almost unnerving how quickly you forget where you are you are somewhere else In fact in that particular particular simulation, you're kind of in like a It's a much cooler living room than you know the garage that I was in and I was like wow That's a really nice room. I like this room. I feel good in here It's I mean it's there's nothing about it that's real at all, but it feels very real And so I as as much as You know I hear folks, especially, you know You have kids or you live in an apartment or some sort of small space or you don't feel super safe going outside I'm you know, I'm not going to be like VR is the answer for you But it sure will open up a world in ways that I think are going to help a lot of people who feel like The cabin fever is really getting to them in negative ways. Yeah, just wanting to see something different That's why those travel VRs are so popular Because people are like, you know what I just I even if I'm going around the block and going outside Even if I'm driving around the corner I'm not I'm not exposing myself to different things and that's It's not good for your mental health to to be seeing the same things all the time Granted we haven't been doing this long enough for it to cause serious problems But it's certainly going to help you do the right thing and stay inside more often If you can vary up your view with virtual reality Yeah, I was talking to my sister my my psychology sister she's a psychologist practicing one and We were talking about this this whole idea this whole notion, especially that d&d case Having a virtual d&d game with his family This is a way and we have the technology now that we should really to be taking advantage of the best we can depending on whose circumstances or whatever, but We are creatures as we heard and I were talking about we are creatures that need to be Out and around and we need to vary up our environment. We need to see something new all the time Isolation is used as a tactic to destroy people for a reason So these allow us to do it in ways that keep us safe and keep the virus at bay But still give us these feelings these senses these these escapes and all of these things We've talked about today have been so great during this time like in a weird way We live in a time of embarrassing riches when it comes to this opportunity and I and I hope people are taking good advantage of those Like we're all trying to I guess and you know even just I mean I I call it educational but escapist certainly It doesn't have to you know vr doesn't always have to be like and now you're in space or you know You're in this fake land although there is a lot of that, you know and there are games you can play But just the you know the kind of encyclopedia nature of walking through a city You've never been in that you'd really like to go to maybe you were planning to go. Maybe your trip got canceled There's there's so many ways that we already have access to photos and street view walk-throughs and that kind of thing But you know the immersive experience just kind of takes it a little bit farther and can have really cool results Yeah, for sure So send us your favorite ways to use some technology to to escape for a little while feedback at daily tech news show dot com Indeed you could also join in the conversation in our discord Which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns speaking of email. Let's check out the mailbag Okay, amos our very own amos says inspired by patrick norton story He was on the show yesterday of folding during yesterday's pre-show and as suggested in chat by kip 030 I created a good day internet folding team We'll have the link in our show notes. Thank you amos. He says there's stats You can find the team number you can join and let's see how quickly team gdi can get to 1 million points Yeah, so if you want to do folding at home With a bunch of other folks in our audience. Thank you amos for setting this up bit.ly slash gdi folding A different tom not me wrote in with another idea for folding at home He took his old pixel 1xl cleaned off most of the apps side loaded the folding at home app from the website And hooked it up to home wi-fi plugged it in and it's now running protein folding calculations 24-7 He says it isn't a gaming machine with massive ram and a high powered cpu and gpu But there are a lot of old phones out there that can run folding at home Genius tom not tom merit. No Oh And then real quickly that charlie dude wrote in and he's a comcast customer and was not finding peacock He's like apparently I have to get the streaming service called flex to get it Turns out you don't need flex. You need flex or Xfinity x1 one or the other And he didn't want to sign up for flex, but he's like I have x1 They haven't launched it on the x1 yet. It launched on flex today the peacock streaming service But if you have the x1 they say it'll come in the next couple of weeks. So hang in there. You'll still get your free version and I won't Thanks to everybody who gives us feedback. We love getting your emails the mailbag grows Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including dan colbeck urwinster and justin zealors Also, thanks to none other than scott Buster johnson. I don't know your middle name It starts with a b Man good. I don't know where buster came from but it seemed cool What's going on with you besides me butchering your middle name? Well, I have tons of cool things going on I could mention a million of them But the one i'm going to mention is another great distraction from the world we live in at the moment and that is Dungeons and dragons I play a game and host a show for a game that we play every sunday From 4 p.m. To 7 p.m. Mountain time. It's called there will be dungeons, but you can find it there will be dungeons.com It's also on the frog pants site and we put it in podcast form We do it in video archive form on youtube and we do it live every sunday So if you're looking for five goofballs who'd love to play dnd in a very unique world that we play it in Come check it out. That's there will be dungeons.com Is there a creator or or an effort or a charity or something that you think deserves the dts audience Attention send it to us feedback at daily tech news show.com We're using this area at the end of the show to share the wealth and try to spread that love out because so many of you Have been so great about supporting our patreon at even higher levels to help us get through this troubled time While other people cannot uh, we're trying to share that love around for instance check out aque willow a storytelling podcast from author jf2bo and podcaster amy frost about a character named Miriam Dufour a french canadian woman who discovers a strange landscape of subtle magics Bizarre people coffee the occasional demon and baked goods in the town of aque willow go search for it in your favorite podcast app ache w i l l o w And thank you everybody Cannot tell you how much we appreciate the folks who can support us and do at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon I mentioned we like feedback and you got an email address to send it that email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com If you can join us live, we have good news We are live from On monday through friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern and that's 2030 utc And you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash life Justin robber young will be here tomorrow. Talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com I'm in club. Hope you have enjoyed this bro