 Coming up on DTNS, a step toward a decentralized web, blockchain helps track vaccines and approval for autonomous drones. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 19th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chain. Sarah Lane was called away. She'll be back with us tomorrow, which left us talking about bass fishing a lot on good day internet. If you wanna hear about competitive bass fishing, get that expanded show. Good day internet, patreon.com slash DTNS. It is time to tell you about a few tech things you should know. Samsung announced the 870 Evo, its latest SATA SSD designed for consumers, 560 megabyte per second read, 530 megabyte per second write. Samsung promises roughly 38% better random speeds and 38% improvement in sustained performance plus a five-year warranty. 870 Evo packs 250 gigabytes for 50 bucks, 500 gigabytes for 80 bucks, terabyte for 140 bucks, two terabytes for 270 bucks and four terabytes for 530 bucks. Parler updated its website with a message from CEO, John Matz, pledging to welcome back its users soon. The platform was suspended from Amazon web services earlier this month. A who is search shows that the domain is hosted or registered by Epic, the domain registrar for GAB and HN. However, a spokesperson for Epic said it isn't providing the hosting for Parler. If you look up the IP address, that points to a domain owned by DDoS Guard, a Scottish company with contact phone numbers in the Netherlands and Russia. Netflix added 8.51 million paid subscribers, beating its estimate of 6 million to reach 203.7 million worldwide and gained 36.6 million streaming customers on the year. Netflix also reported $6.64 billion in earnings for $1.19 per share, although that missed estimates. Acer announced new Chromebooks aimed at the education mark that meet Mill Standard 810H military durability standards including spill resistant keyboards. The Acer Spin 512 and Spin 511 are convertible Chromebooks. The 12 has a 12 inch screen, the 11 has 11 inch screen. They offer Intel N4500 and 5100 processors coming to Europe in March and North America in April. The 512 starts at 430 bucks and the 511 at 400 bucks. The Chromebook 511 and Chromebook 311 are 11 inch arm powered Chromebooks from Acer. The 511 uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7C and includes an LTE modem, while the 311 uses a MediaTek MT8183 SOC. Both claim a 20 hour battery life, the 311 launched in January in North America for 300 bucks. 511 come in in April for 400 bucks. And Microsoft is investing $2 billion in GM self-driving vehicle subsidiary Cruise. As part of that deal, Cruise will use Microsoft Azure to help scale up its operations, makes sense. Microsoft has offered a connected vehicle platform as part of Azure for several years and already has partnerships with Volkswagen, Renault Nissan, LG Electronics, and the automotive suppliers, Fareesha and TomTom. All right, let's talk a little more about that blockchain, Rob. Okay, so you read a lot, so I wanna do a little for you here. Thank you. Blockchain is most famous for powering the Bitcoin network, but it's also often touted as a way to keep track of supplies. Two UK hospitals are using distributed ledger to keep track of COVID-19 vaccines, chemotherapy drugs, and monitor refrigerators used to store them. The ledger is run by Hedera, a Texas based company owned in part by IBM and Alphabet. Everywhere, which operates monitoring for the NHS, says the system makes sure that data can be recorded in real time and is not changed or tampered with by mistake or design. Everything the ledger does could be done by hand, but it would be slower and more prone to mistakes. Yeah, so the idea here is the ledger is encrypted, so it's a little more secure. The way these blockchain ledgers work, once you put something on there, you can't really remove it. It's a permanent record. And so the idea is you can scan in stuff to say the vaccine arrived and I put it in, boom. Now, somebody could do that wrong, but if you're doing paper records, they could do that wrong too. And the advantage here is instead of a paper record that took a little longer because you didn't scan it in, this is a little more foolproof. And when you go to consult it, you don't have to go look up a paper record. You've got the blockchain that gives you instant access to the entire history. It's even better than doing say a spreadsheet or a database where it's a little slower to look up and maybe the relationships to things aren't as natural as they are in a blockchain. So I've been waiting for some really good examples of this being used outside of fintech and this is one of the best I've seen. Yeah, this is a dream for accountants inside of procurement companies or in the procurement space because when you think about like this vaccine, it's not just the hospital is using it. It's got to go from the company that made it, then it's got to go to someone like UPS or someone to transport it, then it's got to get on a plane, then it's got to get back in a truck, then it's got to get into the hospital and then it's got to get to nurses and doctors or put in people's arms. And blockchain can just make keeping track of all of that so much easier than all of the decentralized systems that people would have to normally do and do this by paper. Yeah, that's a good part of it too is that this is now one, even though it's blockchain has also always thought of as decentralized, this is one ledger, right? You don't have the shipping company has a ledger that they keep in their database and that's separate from the ledger that's kept by the hospital, which is kept separate. Like everybody just scans, it goes right on the ledger and then it's there, it's permanent, right? It's not like, oh, the database got corrupted. I mean, I guess anything could get corrupted but it's just a lot simpler, right? Absolutely, and like I said, accounting people are gonna probably love this and I think you're just gonna see more and more companies that are gonna start moving to this technology in the future. Yeah, I mean, MiraVina points out if somebody in admin doesn't enter the credentials properly, that's a problem but that's already a problem for any system. So it hasn't fixed the human element of the chain but it's fixed a lot of the other stuff. Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 870 system on a chip for mid-range sub-$800 devices. The 870 offers the same Cryo 585 CPU and Adreno 650 GPU as last year's flagship, the 865. Remember the 865 got replaced by the 888? Instead of just making the 865 available, they took what would normally be an 865 and clocked it up 10% at 3.2 gigahertz. So it's got a little bit better performance than last year's flagship. It does not come with an integrated 5G modem but the 865 didn't either. So it's in most ways identical to the 865 and 865 plus but if you're using the 870 in your mid-range phone, you can claim you have a brand new chip that was just released in 2021. Your spec sheet isn't gonna show a 2019 release like it would if you use the original 865. First phones with the chip will ship later in Q1 from Motorola, iCUE, OnePlus, Oppo and Xiaomi. I like that they're doing this because for the mid-range phones, you can feel like you've gotten a newer phone than you otherwise would have gotten. I mean, your phone's gonna be a little bit faster. So even though it's mid-range, you feel like, maybe before I got the mid of the mid-range, now I'm getting the top of the mid-range because there is this 10% increase in speed. Yeah, and mid-range phones have become big sellers so it makes sense for Qualcomm to say, well, let's take some work we already have with the 865, tweak it a little so we can call it new and it literally is better and then sell it into an ever-expanding market here. I mean, when you look at the folks using it, no, you're not seeing Samsung hopping on board. That's because they're gonna use their own Exynosa chips. You're not seeing an iPhone, Apple to hop on board because Apple makes their own chips. But everybody else is like, yeah, we got some mid-range phones, we got some Sub 800 stuff and they're gonna pop an 870 in there so they can call it a brand new phone, brand new chip. Which it makes sense. And like I said, as you said, there are many people who just aren't willing to spend $1,000, $1,200, $1,300 on the phone, especially when you have kids who seem to be getting phones younger and younger, that you can get them a mid-range device and it's probably gonna last them for several years, more than just two years and get a new one. This is a phone that probably is gonna last someone three, maybe four years before you have to worry about buying your child a brand new piece of hardware. Yeah, cause the other option is just buy a year old phone, which would have an 865 in it potentially, right? This way you might have some other improvements in that phone and still pay a more affordable price. Friday WhatsApp announced it would delay its new privacy policy from going into effect February 8th. It'll instead be enforced starting May 15th. If you remember that new policy has no opt out. And what it does is lets businesses that you chat with on WhatsApp, store the metadata it collects from your chats. So this only applies if you're chatting with a business that does this, but if you are, that data can be stored on Facebook servers, which it can then use to create personalized Facebook ads. Originally, myself and a lot of people thought this was applying to all chats. It's just to businesses that take advantage of this feature. The new policy does not affect personal chats. It does not affect user profiles. The delay is meant to give WhatsApp more time to explain that to people because it was very confusing when they first did the pop-up about this and they want to give users more time to realize what's really going on. We'll see if that works. Meanwhile, India's IT ministry sent an email to WhatsApp head Will Kafka calling on the app to withdraw the change. The ministry wants clarification on how the update impacts data sharing with Facebook and third parties even within that business area where you're targeting ads. And they wanna know why the European Union is exempt from this policy change and India is not. That would likely be because India doesn't have a rule against it yet. Europe does, the GDPR. However, India's parliament is debating a personal data protection bill, which if passed could change how WhatsApp is allowed to treat data. So Rob, India's basically saying like, not only why are you letting Europe out of this, but why aren't you waiting to see what we do with our law? To me, this is a case that is probably going to be talked about in business classes and marketing classes for years to come because Facebook, for all practical purposes, they created an issue that they didn't have to create. Basically, their flaw was just not explaining this as well as they possibly could up front. It's almost as though they intentionally left it vague so they could add stuff or remove stuff to it later. And now they're paying for it because Earth has reacted, oh, no, no, we don't like this. And we've seen the signal went down because of how many people have moved over to it. Telegram is growing like wildfire. So this is a case where if you really understand what Facebook is saying they're going to do with this data is not that big of a deal, but the way they didn't explain it up front and first is wreaking havoc with them. And they're delaying three months. I wouldn't bet on that. I would not be shocked if this gets delayed again just because of just how the Earth has reacted to this. Yeah, I wouldn't be shocked either. It's difficult to explain this sort of thing. And in the heady days of the 2010s, he could just update that privacy policy, push out a pop-up that says new privacy policy, click OK to agree and get away with it. So credit to WhatsApp for trying to provide a little more transparency than sneaking it in under the wire like folks used to. But it's too complex to explain in a pop-up. I think that's what Bidham is like. It gets really complex to say like, we're going to start sharing data on servers. Well, we have to admit it's Facebook servers, but it's not all the data. It's businesses. A lot of you probably don't even shop on WhatsApp or chat with businesses. But if you do, you should know that we're trying to do that. It's just too complex to explain easily. I'm not sure how they do this the right way. I know they could have done it better, but I don't know what the perfect way would have been. Not sure, but I think we could agree that the way they did it probably wasn't the way to go. Yeah, that wasn't that. At the end of the day, they're going to recover from this and WhatsApp will be okay, but they definitely did some telegram and signal are both saying thank you Facebook. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, I just, I actually am okay with businesses saying, hey, we have a relationship with you. So we would like to be able to show you ads when you're on Facebook because you like our stuff, right? Imagine a place you like to shop at and you'd want to know when they have new stuff out, right? That would be okay. I think the problem is fundamental to how this all works is that nobody trusts that. They're like, well, sure, you say it's just gonna be that, but what else is gonna be? If we had a system where we felt more in control, I don't think this becomes as big of a deal. Hey folks, what do you wanna hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. So American Robotics says that it's the first company to get FAA approval to operate unmanned aerial vehicles, AKA drones, without needing a human observer near the aircraft. Humans will still need to be near in order to run the checklist, to do some in-flight checks, but they don't need to physically be where the drones are. So other than that, the drone called Scout can autonomously fly its mission. It has an acoustic detection system to sense and avoid other aircraft. The base station can sense aircraft up to more than two miles away and force the drone to land if necessary. The FAA has only approved the operation for this drone in the specific locations owned by American Robotics in Kansas, Massachusetts, and Nevada. Scout will be marketed to companies who want aerial inspections of their property. The FAA will use this to collect data for evaluating wider use of beyond visual line of sight or BVLOS operations. Yeah, it's a big step. American Robotics already had a waiver to do beyond visual line of sight, but they had to have a human at the base station. So imagine you've got, I don't know, like a 100-acre property that you want this drone to monitor. You could put the base station down that the drone takes off from and autonomously surveys the area. That could go out of sight, but you had to have a human sitting there at that base station. What this license lets them do, and again, only at their own locations for now, is have the base stations just sitting out there and the drones can take off, do their surveillance run, and come back. The human has to remotely be able to check in and be like, everything looking all right, okay, great. And that I think is going to be a nice proof of concept for big industrial layouts, right? Where you have a huge property that you just want to see. I want to do a maintenance check from the air. Let's see if I notice any problems. Yeah, I can see this being used for like wind farms or like high power lines to where right now you've got to send somebody, you got to send people out on helicopters to look at stuff. And it's like, okay, now this drone can do it. And when I initially looked at this story, it kind of made me think, it's like, man, I don't know if I want drones falling off the sky at me, but it's interesting because I'm not really concerned about autonomous cars or autonomous semis. It can do significantly more damage than what a drone is going to do in an empty field. So I think this is just the next wave. It's like, whenever we look at future Rixit TV shows that are 20, 30 years out, you see these things flying around everywhere. I think that that's ultimately where we're going to be going. You're going to see, you put a base station, you have the ability to remotely monitor the base station and you're going to let the drones do their thing as long as they are away from people. I think it's going to still be a while before these things can get near people. Yeah, everybody, we'll talk later in the show about drone delivery. Everybody wants to talk about drone delivery, right? But honestly, this is one of the more practical applications. It may be a little boring if you're not involved in maintenance or security at a big factory or industrial site or something like that. But I'm curious what else, I bet there's somebody out there that's like, I don't really work in the industrial site aspect of this, but I could use this as well. Sort of the limited geofenced area, autonomous drone pattern. I imagine there's other things that they'll find a use for it. Yeah, I could definitely see ranchers maybe wanting to use this to go see where is the fence broke. Yeah, right. Apply a drone out to go do it. Right now, you've got to have that thing manned. As compared to with this, you can put like so just put a base station, somebody's got to monitor the base station, but the drone can kind of go do its own thing and maybe even do proactive monitoring to where it can see where maybe you're not registering an issue yet, but this sees something that, well, this is going to be an issue. That tree that the lightning struck and is now leaning over the fence. It hasn't actually broken and hit the fence yet, but this is something that you might want to be aware of to go take care of it before you actually have a problem. I can see a lot of uses like that for this. Oh yeah, pair that up with some machine learning that can recognize problems, which we've seen stories about. Yeah, absolutely, I totally see that. All right, finally, Brave has become the first browser to offer native integration of IPFS. IPFS is a decentralized version of HTTPS. You're familiar with HTTPS, that's the one that lets your browser access files on a central server, thus letting you get your webpages. But what if you didn't have the servers all under one company's control? What if it wasn't Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon that controlled all the cloud resources? What if you could just store webpages anywhere where there were computers? IPFS is that. It lets the browser access content on a network of distributed nodes, similar to how BitTorrent works. You don't know if you've got a browser that's operating as a node, you don't know what data you're hosting. You're not liable for it, it's encrypted, but it is a way to pass things along. IPFS points to a content ID, a CID, instead of an IP address, and when you type in an address, and you can use normal names just like you can with HTTPS, IPFS uses a cryptographic hash to find the nodes that are storing the content for each file, grabs that data, assembles it, delivers it to your browser. This means the server is not under any one company's control, but you can still type in a web address like you normally would. That makes content faster because it can be stored closer to you without you needing to have set up a bunch of CDNs around the world so you can keep content close to people. It also can be less costly for the publisher because you don't need to set up servers in data centers. It's also more resilient to failures like DDoS or censorship. Brave has worked on the IPFS standard since 2018, but the new update lets your Brave browser resolve URIs that start with IPFS instead of HTTPS, and Brave users can choose to let their browser act as a node on the network, helping improve overall performance. So I read through this story, and this is really interesting technology. I mean, it's not new, we've heard about it before, but the fact that there is a browser company, albeit small, is actively using it is kind of cool. There are some drawbacks to this though. There are going to be large parts of Earth where the government that controls that part of Earth will not allow this to exist. So there's going to be some limitations, and you're probably going to be good here, you're going to probably be good in the UK for the most part, but this is not going to fly well in China, for say. So I'm really interested in seeing how the technology goes, how we can distribute computing to where I don't need to worry about putting it in data center A or data center B, I'm just going to put it out there and let the network figure out how to load balance this. But like I said, there's going to be some limitations when it comes to where this technology will actually be allowed to work. Yeah, one of the competitive advantages that big tech companies have right now is they have the resources to run large server farms and reach scale because they can afford it. This could be a way for you to be able to reach scale faster and cheaper. And that's what the internet did. The internet allowed us to communicate in ways that before that you had to be a telecommunications company or a major broadcaster, right? Suddenly the internet made all of that cheap. This could be, I'm not saying it will be, this could be that kind of innovation of, oh, now anybody can put high bandwidth items out for serving for cheap because they don't have to buy the servers, they just use the network. Network needs adoption, needs scale and all that sort of thing. We're not there yet, we may never get there yet, but I've been watching IPFS for a while and it's interesting to see that Brave, granted, not the hugest browser, but it's got an audience jump in on this. Yeah, like I said, it's really cool technology and I can see small startups saving a lot of money in using this, but once again, I just don't see this flying in China. That's just not going to allow this to happen. I'm curious if it could get around blocks or I guess I should put it this way. I'm curious what it would take to block it because there's a way to block it, China will find it, for sure. All right, Pizza Hut Israel is planning a test in June to send drones to drop multiple orders at government approved landing zones. The government approved them, they don't own them. So it's like parking lots, stuff like that where delivery drivers could then collect the orders and take them to customers. The company is partnering with Dragon Tail Systems for the trial. Back in 2016, a Domino's Pizza restaurant in New Zealand delivered two pizzas by drone into one customer's backyard, but there hasn't been much happening in the pizza by drone world since then. We've had burritos, we've had lots of mail and medical supplies, but not pizzas. Israel's Ministry of Transportation is only letting Pizza Hut send pizzas from one restaurant within a designated 50 square mile radius in the north part of the country and the delivery can't be over 5.5 pounds. So that meat lover's going to push here right in terms of the edge. The drones won't drop an order at a landing point until the system recognizes a driver is there, so it's not gonna get hijacked in the parking lot anyway, and the pizzas won't sit there alone and cold. The courier that's gonna drive it has to be there and then the drone comes down, courier, I guess, types in a code or something, gets the pizza and off it goes. I guess the advantage here Rob would be if there were traffic between the pizza place and the parking lot, this could cut out the traffic because the drone can just fly over it and shorten the delivery time theoretically. Yes, and I also think that this is probably what we're gonna see before we actually see that last mile delivery where the drone is actually dropping the pizza off to your house, because the other part of this that when you think about, and we'll keep this to pizza, but pizza delivery drivers, half of their time is driving back to get more pizza. So this could actually eliminate much of that time. So instead of them having to drive eight, nine, 10 miles back to an establishment to pick up more pizzas, then to turn around and drive right back to the neighborhood they were just in, if the drone could drop off six, seven pizzas in a parking lot, they're already there, they pick them up, they get those pizzas delivered to the end user or to the customer much more quickly and much more effectively. They would ultimately be able to, in a single shift, deliver many more pizzas just because they're not spending as much time driving back to pick stuff up. They're just driving to the central hub that is very close to where they are actually making deliveries. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I fought in the pizza wars in the late 80s, early 90s. I drove a delivery truck for Pizza Hut in my day and sometimes you just spend a lot of time sitting, driving an empty truck, back to the pizza place. So I don't know, this seems like a step to, obviously we all want it to be delivered to our door but until regulatory agencies feel comfortable with that this is a less complex way to achieve some of the advantages, if not all of them. Hey, I wanna congratulate our Good Day Internet Folding at Home team. There are 299 active CPUs on that team helping discover folded proteins. I know they're looking for COVID related stuff for folding at home and our team has ranked 175 out of all the teams in the folding at home effort. Great work, everybody. Special shout out to Hano and Meachamist Prime, top two CPUs on the team. If you want to join, go check it out, statsfoldingathome.org slash team slash 261830. We'll have a link in the show notes. Or Amos has a homepage at ritualmiserie.com slash FAH. She can check that out as well. If you would like to email us your thoughts please do feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shout out to the patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Paul Reis, Rognell Varmadal and Jeff Wilkes. And as always, thank you, Rob Dunwood, for joining us, man. Tell folks a little more about what you've got going on. So, folks, you can get to me over at smrpodcast.com. That's why I do my weekly show that generally comes out on Thursdays or Fridays depending on how we're feeling. But once a week, it's three buddies talking about tech like we would talk about football and sports. It's a good time. Go check it out, smrpodcast.com. Also, patrons, did you know your ad-free RSS feed can have just DTNS or just Good Day Internet or both? Check your tier on Patreon. If it says DTNS, GDI or all, that's the tip-off of what's going into your feed. And if you want to change, just change the tier. You don't have to change your URL. Your RSS feed stays your RSS feed, but if you change your tier, what goes into it changes. You can check that all out at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.