 Coming up on DTNS Google limits political ads a way to launch drones from a moving truck and a robot to explore Antarctica and then the moon This is the Daily Tech news for Thursday November 21st 2019 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 reminiscing on good day internet about Ferris Bueller's day off and and what we loved about it And and how we experienced it as young people also yesterday on good day internet after the show We we kind of went over some breaking news and acquisitions and had some extra thoughts about that It's an expanded show folks and the way you get it is going to patreon.com slash DTNS Let's start with a few tech things you should know Microsoft announced that it's forthcoming at $250 surface earbuds won't ship until spring of 2020 and didn't provide a specific date Now the company's original plan was to have at least the white version of the headphones shipping by holiday season with a gray model Perhaps coming later surf or surface hardware chief Panas Panay tweeted that the delay is due to some software tweaks One would assume probably some manufacturing delays as well Google began rolling out updates to G suite to add in AI features Google Docs adds AI grammar checker and smarter spell checking with spelling autocorrect coming soon Google Calendar will now use Google Assistant to read out appointments as well as create reschedule and delete appointments by voice and Google also announced a beta for the smart compose in G suite which will Which will add suggested text to complete sentences that is already of course in use in Gmail Google announced it will now pay up to 1.5 million dollars for hacks of its pixel line of Android phones Specifically Google said in a blog post it'll pay a million dollars for a full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M Secure element on pixel devices and how do we get to 1.5 million Google will also pay $500,000 for exploits that exfiltrate data out of a pixel or bypass its lock screen So if you do both of those you get 1.5 million dollars Google will offer a 50% bonus to any of its rewards if the exploit works on a specific developer preview version of Android so all of that trying to get on top of these bugs before the hackers the bad hackers do the attackers Valve announced details about its virtual reality game half-life Alex Players will play as Alex and use gravity gloves to grab things otherwise out of reach The game is set between half-life and half-life 2 but valve recommends players should play all the way through half-life 2 episode 2 half-life Alex arrives in March of 2020 for $60 or it's free for owners of valves index VR headsets And alphabets loon has signed a commercial agreement with telephonica owned internet para todos to provide internet connectivity to about 200,000 people in the remote parts of the amazon rainforest in the loretto region of peru Starting in 2020 this will be the balloon based internet providers first commercial deployment over a sustained period loon worked with telephonic To provide emergency internet in peru after an earthquake back in may loon also has commercial contracts with telecom Kenya and a canadian company called telecast for coordination with low earth orbit satellites All right google duplex. Justin. What's new? Well, i'd be glad to tell you tom google officially launched google duplex as google assistant in chrome With the ability to help purchase movie tickets You can start by asking assistant on android for movie show times or search from the google app You'll then get a list of ticket providers with google quote buy tickets button next to each Tapping that button brings up the provider's interface But also with a google assistant window over top Where users input as many tickets as they need as well as other details providing a consistent experience across apps Users can dismiss the assistant window at any time And directly interact with the ticketing apps at launch more than 70 theater chains and ticketing companies are supported including amc Fandango mjr theaters and movie tickets dot com in the u.s And odion in the uk using duplex for restaurant reservations Also rolled out widely and car rentals is the next the next task for duplex to master so First of all my wife works for fandango. So of course, I tried this out using fandango, which I am a regular user of and It was kind of cool like I went into the google app on my android phone and I uh, I said, uh Search show times for joker even though i've already seen joker, but it's what i know is playing Yeah, uh, and it said oh here you go Joker is playing uh at the following places and you can buy tickets from these services And it showed me movie tickets fandango and I think one other uh, and it had little buy tickets thing like you said I tap on that it just opened the fandango website And then asked me how many tickets do you want? I'm like two Then I could see it filling in two in the interface on fandango and then getting to the map what fandango would have Also asked you exactly. It's like, okay I will give google credit their interface for doing this was a little nicer than the one on fandango But it really wasn't saving me time and then at the end Of course, we have a fandango loyalty program account I wasn't logged in and it didn't give me an easy way for me to log in it was going to check me out as a guest account So i'm like, ah, I don't know. I don't know if this is actually saving me any time Uh spoiler alert, it's not and it's kind of a well I mean look it could if they could find different ways that they can enter into your experience with the phone Before you would want to go to an app or during an experience where it is it's perfect Then yes, that's where having the os side Uh, you know shepherd Helps but it this is kind of a new trend where it's got the same philosophy that Apple has with their apple tv thing that you don't need to go into these apps Look, we can aggregate and have a smart way where you can know Throughout many apps how to deal with this kind of stuff. I don't know really where it goes ultimately and sometimes it works better than others, but I don't know It just sort of to me seems like a war on filling things out and so we're going to have you fill things out Well, it's yeah, it especially because you can you can you can uh dump yourself out at any time You're really just going through the steps that the website would have you go through or the mobile site would have you go through Anyway, movie tickets seems like a good place to start car rentals Okay, then that gets a little bit more interesting right car rental sites Not necessarily known for having a streamlined experience when you're trying to get something that's a good price so if you if you like the Google duplex interface and tom said It was kind of a little bit nicer than what it would have been otherwise And you just know as more services are added down the road that it's always going to kind of act the same way I can see where this becomes a really good tool. It's just there there aren't enough partners at this point Yeah, I guess it takes some pressure off your designers You're like, yeah, just let google assist and do it for people. Yeah I also I do wonder whether or not there is a kickback there like an affiliate thing with some of these Oh, i'm sure there is yeah Bloomberg's mark gurman reports that apple will change the way that it internally tests its operating systems to avoid The flurry of patches that have accompanied ios 13 and mac os catalina Software flags would let apple developers turn changes in the ios in ios on and off to better isolate code problems And the like google and microsoft have done similar systems for years So it's apple catching up. I suppose but some developers are pretty excited about this Yeah, I mean i actually end users are probably the most excited like is this mean fewer patches next time great I i'm all for it. I met an apple developer at a party a few weeks ago And uh, I was like, oh man, how are you doing? He's like, well Do you have ios 13? I watched the light go out of his eyes as hello darkness my old friends started playing That had been his entire job. It's just squash bugs. So, uh, they don't want that feeling next time amazon Oh, sorry amazon announced the dash smart shelf Which uses a built-in scale to automatically reorder office supplies The smart shelf comes in three sizes seven by seven inches 12 by 10 inches 18 by 13 inches And is designed to place under a single office supply stock So you keep your tape dispenser replacements in a box that has a scale in it when the scale detects the weight falling below a set limit It can either reorder the supply automatically or send a notification to someone in the office Which in all the offices i've ever worked in you would want the notification because people would go mess with it To see if they could accidentally get a bunch of tape measure things said anyway The dash smart shelf uses wi-fi can be plugged in or run off for triple a batteries amazon is trialing the device with select small businesses with plans to open up to general availability to all amazon business customers next year The scale is similar to a service called bottomless which automatically reorders your coffee when it senses the beans getting low Same kind of deal has a scale I think that this is kind of cool and kind of awful number one awful about it Because it might as well be the snitch shelf Comes to i mean look we've all been at an office right we're next thing you know you're like Well, look i could buy my own tape or i could just take as a perk of working here You know maybe a little tape some pens a little white out maybe like you take that home That's that's a little gift next thing you know old snitch shelf over here is just uh letting everybody know Hey, i'm light Yeah, exactly No, this is a great This is a great allegory for data collection right the point is to just tell when you're low on tape But the data could tell you exactly when each roll of tape was taken Uh, huh exactly exactly So the cool thing i think here is that look if you are in a busy office that relies on key supplies This gives you another tool to do it, but tom You are a little dismissive of the smart shelf I mean, I don't know. It's just it's just a scale. I mean it's it's I i'm not saying it's wrong It's probably super helpful But there's all kinds of ways it can go wrong, especially if you're using batteries as gardener Gardner vn pointed out in the chat room Does it order its own batteries with the batteries run low then then you got something? Yeah, i don't know I don't know uh when you mentioned bottomless and reordering coffee when the beans get low I was like, well, I mean i'm not running a coffee shop or anything But that's actually something that I deal with in my household all the time So I can see where this works with certain products really well, whether it's food or Yeah, paper for the printer or that sort of thing, but it's It's I I can't think of anybody really who's like we've been clamoring for this product Yes, it's perfectly fine. It's a great thing and I can see in certain office situations that this will be very helpful Uh, I see people making a huge deal out of it today as amazon moving dash to business I'm like, this is the kind of innovation that shouldn't get as much attention as maybe I will say this in before The office managers start emailing this podcast and letting you know that their entire job is counting up these Uh tape refills and it will be a lot easier if they can just do it from their phone Yeah, if as long as this is accurate Okay, that's that's that's where you go you go you go. Yes, if the technology works And now we just no no, I mean if people don't mess with it, right People don't go like take stuff out put stuff back in make it reorder automatically, etc. All right Who knew this would tear the podcast apart? We maybe we can all come back to a chord with our next story. This one's cool The jet propulsion laboratory is developing the buoyant rover for under ice exploration Also known as brewery the robot is kind of the shape of a cover board really with oversized wheels It's meant to float under ice and then use the wheels to maneuver around Uh and not kind of go underside It can also stay in one place and maintain position even when it's shut down Brewery will now go to australia's casey station in Antarctica for extended deployment tests It's scientific instruments some of which look for signs of life will be tested for accuracy and precision there Yeah, so a lot of the the moon missions that are happening now to various moons around jupiter and saturn Do involve rovers, but they have to go on the surface And if they go under water at all they would just sink to the bottom So this is a way to say we're going to make it float But with wheels so that it can roll around on the underside of the ice. You're right, sarah This has brought me back Uh to to loving technology again. We're we're all saved. Uh, this this is great And and of course we just had ariel walden on talking about an arctica. So it felt Kind of like oh, yeah, we kind of know about what's going on down there So this this will be one of those projects that that are going on into arctica like she was talking about Yeah, you know if it works and you don't have a narwhal in there messing up the Messing up the robot. We're trying to bring us back together justice. I'm sorry. I'm too petty No, this is this is really cool. This is uh, this is a good example of robotics Being used in but you know, I mean this couldn't actually be used into Antarctica They've actually tested it in alaska and and the arctic circle as well. Uh, so it spaces its Target application, but there could be as with space programs all the time side applications that will help as well Let's not stop there with the robotics scientists at caltech university and nasa's jet propulsion laboratory again in the news today have created a drone launching system called streamlined quick unfolding investigation drone or squid for short That's a background if I ever saw one the quad copter folds up roughly into the shape of a us football That's 27 centimeters long and weighs 530 grams. I imagine the people at the jpl would say no It's supposed to be the shape of a squid head. That's why we called it squid But that's what it looked like to me has four spring-loaded rotor arms that will unfold into place in less than a tenth of a second After being launched The system uses a modified pneumatic baseball pitching machine to fire the folded up quad copter at about 35 miles per hour The machine unfolds and rotors start turning around 200 milliseconds after launch. That's super fast So it's stable and hovering in less than a second Uh, the system could also launch a quad copter from a moving vehicle with one demonstrating firing it from a truck going 50 miles per hour The squid designers will now work on larger prototypes and mission specific versions for mars and titan So there's a space application here, but there's also first responder applications for search and rescue You can launch this things into places that maybe it would take too long To get to if you if you were launching it from the ground outside of the area There's military applications as well This this is Very interesting and very impressive that they're able to get that kind of stability out of this when it's It's being launched at such a high rate and unfolding all at the same time Uh, yeah, yeah, I think this is amazing I just is the idea that you can get something up and running like that that fast and especially with the You know the moving base, right? Like shooting it out of a car. It's going 50 miles an hour. It's insane Yeah, it seems like I don't know disaster zones, uh or Um, as you mentioned tom, you know military applications and especially yes the idea that it would be Compact enough to be easily transported and then launched out of a moving vehicle I don't know how how fast the vehicle can be going before it stops being precise But but that all seems like that's sort of the sweet spot here because Before the show we were all kind of scratching our heads going this sounds so cool When will it be necessary? Yeah, what are the biggest use cases and and I think roger nailed it As we were racking our brains range and and speed So so when you would when it would take too long to get something there I you know, let's say you just run out of battery by the time it got there being able to launch it at 35 miles an hour Uh big big advantage because that speed can get you To a place faster and and save that battery life Um, but I'm sure I'm sure we're missing it. I'm I'm sure there's there's other Uses for this that somebody out there is saying this would solve a problem for me in in the Occupation or the industry that I work in So let us know feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We want to hear from you if this solves a problem Well, there's all kinds of reasons why this won't solve a problem That's that's kind of easy to do but but let us know if you're if you're thinking this is going to solve a problem for you If nothing else being able to Go on a space mission and be able to launch from a rover means the rover doesn't have to spend its limited energy Getting the quadcopter over to a particular place It can just launch it over using this kind of system. So It's not new. They've been able to launch drones before but always fixed wing ray the on had one that was a fixed wing Aircraft that they would launch as a drone, but this one's a quadcopter So so pretty nifty especially because it folds up If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com Google's vice president of product management and advertising scott spencer wrote a post today about new limits for political advertisers on google Targeting of ads that are political in nature will be limited in specificity to age gender and zip code Political advertisers will no longer be allowed to target advertisements based on things like your political affiliation or your public voter record Contextual ads where it says, oh, he's reading about the economy Definitely put this economy oriented candidate ad will still be allowed. So that is not going away Google has run more than 127 million dollars in political ads since june 2018 according to its own transparency report And the changes are going to roll out first in the uk because there's an election there coming up in december And then globally on january 6th Meanwhile, wall street journal sources say facebook is considering limiting micro targeted political ads and has asked political parties for Input on the decision. So they may be taking a cue from google there Justin of course is the host of politics politics politics. Uh, this Cover you this fits right into your coverage Uh, what wait you you follow the political advertising strategies quite a bit, don't you? Oh Without a doubt and by the way, it is not just us in the technological sphere understand that donald trumps 2020 campaign Is going to be run by or is being run by brad par scowl He was the facebook operative for the 2016 campaign So if you want to know how important digital advertising is the current president decided to make that dude his entire campaign or the big boss for his campaign And we've seen some of this in play already tom steyer has spent a ton of money It looks like uh, michael bloomberg is about to roll out a several multi-billion dollar ad spend Uh to target either the causes of his choice or his own candidacy But here's where we get into the weeds beyond the philosophical question of Why Political ads need to be restricted with micro targeting aside from the fact that people are very upset about politics right now Why is this different than trying to sell you a mop? That there's there's a philosophical thing there Uh, and and beyond that I don't know if this really Succeeds in doing anything But selling dumber ads from google and facebook to a market that is ravenous to buy them Therefore incentivizing these campaigns to buy more ads Right because if you're like, huh, man, uh, we're we can only target zip codes and we can't target political affiliation So we're we're wasting a lot of money Putting ads in front of people who hate us and disagree with us I guess we'll have to run more ads to make sure we get in front of all the people that we could persuade Yeah, or they they find different ways to do it Remember that micro targeting is something that has existed since direct mail was a thing that the first real pioneers of this kind of stuff Would buy magazine subscription lists So if they knew that you were uh subscribing to guns and ammo and you were in a very important i or uh, Iowa or ohio district Then they're going to target you based on your zip code and the fact that you are already into this kind of thing by way of The magazine that you subscribe to this is just the far more evolved version of it and Again, we kind of get into the two things philosophical question like I mentioned before but then also there's the enforcement question of Exactly how much are they really going to be able to make sure that these political ads are actually not using the highly micro targeted tools that they are going to ban them from and Will political ads just fundamentally shift as they always have You know when you couldn't spend all the money via candidate Then they went to super PACs and that's what kind of the basis of the citizen united question Is this just the next step to political ads fundamentally looking and sounding different Because they have to get around these restrictions for micro targeting Yeah, I would imagine so right because every time there's a new requirement You see a new weird behavior, you know, uh, I'm Justin rubber young and I approve this message for instance So so I would look for that The upside if there is one here would be to google's policy in particular would be that you will now See ads that maybe you wouldn't have Which will allow you to then Say, oh, I didn't realize that was going on and that that is a that isn't a way of Encouraging transparency like one of the things that people fear is when everybody is just getting the ads that are that are meant for them Suddenly we don't realize what's going on with the the the other side with with the other candidates And I'm not talking about ones you would vote for but like people being aware and saying well, hold on Let me, you know in my personal conversations I can now be aware that that's a message that's being pushed out there Maybe that has some upside because we all become a little more conversant with what the conversation is going on But is that the point? I don't know. No, it's not the point It's definitely not the point and that's that's my one question and I don't Google is allowed to do whatever they want facebook is allowed to do whatever they want with their platform Although there is a little bit of an eye roll from me when it comes to like, oh, okay Well, we're gonna hamper micro targeting when micro targeting is literally the point of your platform It's why they have built these gigantic campuses that they currently reside in is because they have The ability to micro target add sales power both of these companies But why? Give me the philosophical reason why well it's because Everybody knows that political advertising Using this kind of technology not just on the internet, but with this kind of data is a weapon that can be used to win And because of that and because of ignorance about how it's used Part of part of that is just ignorance because people don't understand how it works part of it is ignorance because it's so new And nobody understands what the implications are and how how and what it can do People are afraid and so they press companies to do something And I'm not saying companies shouldn't do something even even before the the The work is in to find out what actually how this all works But you see stuff like this which is like, eh, we don't know if this is really going to do anything But at least you know, you won't have micro targeting You you won't have something that is we know very effective So if we can blunt the effectiveness of political ads in general, I guess that helps question mark I mean and then we could say we did something the only thing I would say to that is A lot of your listeners like me are old enough to remember the glowing pieces written about how Barack Obama was running the campaign of the future in 2008 Doing exactly this Knowing in in glowing terms. We were talking about how the Obama campaign knew house by house Who was going to support them and which the key houses would be if they could flip this house on a neighborhood Then maybe the whole neighborhood would go so I think that that is look, we have had a very tricky history with this kind of stuff Obviously a lot of this we are we are getting to grips with but It was not always the demon seed that we are pretending that it was Pretending that it is now. Well, and even if you haven't been pretending it's a demon seed There's just a lot of data fud out there like oh wait, you're using data. That's bad, right? I read a headline that said data collection is bad And so anything a company does that reduces data collection makes them feel like they're looking good to people because let's be honest Those political parties all of them Still know that information about which house they can flip To to make something happen. Even if they can't target an ad on google It's not like it takes that information away from them last thing before we wrap up facebook spending alone For the political candidates that are currently running up until the end of october 44.8 million dollars That's how much people spent on facebook Yes, all the candidates all including donald trump who spent 13 point five million So that's less than google had in since june 2018, but over it's a different. It's not really a comparable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not really comparable Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our sub reddit political stories end up there all the time You can submit your own stuff you want us to see and then vote on others at daily tech news show reddit.com Also, if you haven't already join our conversation in discord You can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's in fact We got a video message mark sent in a really nice one for our team and particularly justin robert. Yeah, good day internet Good morning, julia Good night, rob I just wanted to say thank you guys I've been a long time listener since a previous incarnation of the show Where tom somewhat unwisely let becky wordly zap his arm with a laser And I've been following the show ever since I I just wanted to say thank you. It has been a phenomenal journey. It's been a phenomenal show All through while I was working in a tech based job And even now that I am on a working sabbatical and doing a little less direct tech Maybe a little bit more of the the shadow it stuff that I used to complain about There's a story there another day another time and While I had the gear up to record A little demo for the listener feedback show I wanted to record this thank you Because it has been absolutely phenomenal You guys are one of the three podcasts. I love enough to support on patreon Matter of fact, I created a patreon account to support dtns and cord killers the second those were available So tom you're going to get two of these because I'm going to record these for each of the three shows I support And for those wondering politics politics politics is the most recent addition to the Supported by me club So Without dragging this out any further because I'm trying to keep this short Thank you guys I absolutely love it and appreciate it Your longtime supporter Now that was awesome. In fact mark was really nice Nice enough to to send us one for cord killers that we played at the end of the cord killers episode last week So that was that was very sweet. Thank you. Thank you so much mark And let's give a shout out to the patrons at our master and grand master levels including to garcia daniels to garcia a daniels I should say tim deputy and kevin s morgan also. Thanks to justin robert young our px3 mastermind Justin you mentioned before the show. It's been a bit of a busy week for you Indeed it has obviously we have the impeachment hearings that just wrapped up A few minutes ago actually and the debates All of it is covered in the px3s this week We had one yesterday that primarily focused on The impeachment hearings and then we will have another one tomorrow that not only Will feature a little discussion about the fallout from the debates and where we can look forward from here But also an interview about the history Of hollywood in politics and we go All the way back like the studio heads in the pre talky era The ever fluctuating relationship between star power And the elected offices of the of america Fantastic folks go check it out. Don't miss it. And also don't forget that we have holiday cards We want to send you you just need to be a patreon as of november 28th So if you're not a patron already become one And then go to patreon.com slash pledges to check and make sure we have your address Otherwise we don't know where to send the card and then yeah in december You'll get a holiday card with some lend parol to art of sarah and i imagining our most precious holiday wishes that could be in your mailbox patreon.com Slash dtns if you have feedback for us whether it's written video an image all of it We love our feedback feedback at daily tech news show.com is where to send those We're also live monday through friday. That's 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 utc and you can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash slash back tomorrow with trisha Hershberger and lend parol to talk to you then