 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon launches a Kindle for Kids. Will you want to rent your music speakers? And Ariel Waldman tells us about pagers and parties while studying extremophiles in Antarctica. This is the Daily Tech News from Monday, October 7th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Very excited to have Ariel Waldman, a NASA advisor and author of What It's Like in Space Stories from Astronauts who've been there on the show today. Welcome. How's it going? Yeah, good. How are you? Good. So you got back from Antarctica a year ago, almost a year ago now, right? Yes. And now the show has been put out on YouTube over the summer and is being put out as a podcast, right? So I don't think I have a podcast version of my Antarctic expedition, but I do have it all on my YouTube channel. Excellent. Well, we'll give you more information on where you can find that. We're going to talk to Ariel about some of the technology they use down there and her experience there. We also talked about what they eat there on Good Day Internet. If you want that wider conversation, you got to get Good Day Internet by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple has reversed its decision to reject the HK map app from the App Store. The app takes reports from Telegram and shows where law enforcement is located in Hong Kong, as well as reports of tear gas use. Apple rejected the app Wednesday, October 2nd, because it allowed users to evade law enforcement. The app was resubmitted later that day and Friday was accepted. Hulu launched the ability to download shows for offline viewing. Users can download up to 25 titles across five devices, keep them there for 30 days. Although once you start watching a title, it expires two days after you start playing it back. If you're on the commercial free plan, you can download the majority of Hulu's catalog using Hulu's iOS app. Hulu says it will bring that function to Android soon, but caveat, if you have the cheaper plan, the one with commercials, you don't get the offline viewing plan. You got to pay for the top one. Right around the time we were doing DTNS last Friday, PayPal announced it is withdrawing from the Libre Association. The company said it supported Libre's aspirations and continues to partner with Facebook on the future, but will focus on its mission to, quote, democratize access to financial services for undeserved populations. PayPal was one of the originally announced 28 members of the Libre Association. You know, that's the pressure, the public pressure is getting to him. AMD announced the Radeon RX 5500 and RX 5500M cards based on seven nanometer RDNA architecture meant for 1080p gaming. Both cards offer 1408 stream processors, 22 compute units with the RX 5500 available with up to eight gigabytes of GDDR6 RAM and capable of 5.2 teraflops. The laptop focused RX 5500M comes with four gigabytes of GDDR6 RAM and hit up to 4.6 teraflops. Both cards will connect over PCIe 4.0 and offer Radeon image sharpening and Radeon anti-lag features. Same ones found in the RX 5700 line. No pricing or specific availability yet. The first laptop with the RX 5500M will be the MSI Alpha 15 offering a Ryzen 7 3750H CPU and a 1080p 144 Hertz FreeSync display. Expect that laptop to show up at the end of October. Waymo will begin operating three autonomous cars in downtown Los Angeles in the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles. The cars will be manually driven while creating maps for the area after which they will operate in autonomous mode with safety drivers of course. Waymo has no plans to offer passenger service in LA at this time. But a significant new region for the testing. Certainly not first, but something to pay attention to. Amazon launched a kids edition of the Kindle eReader that includes a case, a two year free replacement guarantee and a year of Amazon's free time service for kids. That's something that costs you around $5 a month depending on whether you have Prime or not. But you get it for free if you get the Amazon Kids Edition Kindle. The Kindle Kids Edition is available for pre-order for $110 shipping October 30th. Amazon also launched free time for Fire TV starting with the Fire TV stick and then coming to Fire TV devices and eventually Fire TV Edition TVs. Free time, if you're like, wait a minute, I get this with the Kindle, I get it with my Fire TV now, what is it again? Free time lets parents set content restrictions as well as age and time limits. If you pay for free time unlimited, you get ad free access to a bunch of kids movies and TV shows as well. New free time features include reading badges that kids can earn for how often they read or the types of books they read and more, some gamification kind of stuff. And a new feature also puts a quick definition of challenging words available between the lines of the book. You can turn that on or off. There's a few other dictionary related features in there for helping kids understand words. But first time that Amazon has targeted an e-reader, particularly at kids. I love this idea. As a kid, I read prolifically. I often, there was a challenging word where it was like, mom, what is this word mean? She say, use it in a sentence and we'd figure it out amongst ourselves. And it would have been nice to have a little bit of like a some sort of a something that echoes my smartwatch where it says like, you've read a really good amount, keep going, get smarter. That kind of thing. I think that that is really motivating certainly for certain kids. And I'd be interested to see if this could be integrated into schools a little bit more so that teachers could help you know, check in kids along. Roger, I'm curious if that free time service, you know, I don't know that you have a bunch of these Amazon devices. So maybe that's a non-starter right there. But is it attractive to you and your two daughters? Potentially, but I don't like you said, I don't actually have a lot of AMD or AMD, Amazon devices. I can see it being more useful as my daughter gets older, but she's still at the the stage where she wants to watch very erratic stuff. So it's she doesn't have the attention span, I guess, to sit through anything more educational than five minutes. What about other educational situations? I mean, like you said, Sarah, there's there's all kinds of ways that I could see teachers taking advantage of this, maybe, you know, having some reading time for folks seems like a really it's got some possibilities. However, I don't know if there's an educational version of free time or if it's really it seems to be really targeted appearance right now. Yeah, in fact, I don't think that there is one. I think that it would be a great idea for Amazon to figure out how this could be integrated into schools because, you know, oftentimes the teachers are the ones that are encouraging kids to read and do more educational things on on tablets anyway. Amazon also updated the Fire HD 10 tablet. The device now comes with a 10.1 inch 1080p touchscreen and updated eight core processor, two gigs of RAM, 32 or 64 gigabytes of internal storage with micro SD card expansion and a USB C port. Battery life is rated at 12 hours up to two hours from the outgoing HD 10 and charges for it two full in four hours. So that's a nice short time. The HD 10 runs Fire OS on Android P and includes a picture in picture feature for some video apps including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, not surprisingly. There's also a kids edition HD 10 similar to the Kindle with a two year replacement battery, a silicon tablet case and a free year of free time unlimited. Both devices are available for pre-order today, shipping October 30th. The HD 10 starts at $149 and the HD 10 kids edition starts at $199. Two year replacement warranty, not battery, although if your battery breaks, you get it replaced two years. So it works either way. And that's that's really important when selling these kids editions that the fire tablet was the first one to kind of pioneer this idea of having a kid friendly version of the device. So I'm not surprised to see them kind of updating that along with bringing it out to the Kindle. The new Fire HD 10 tablet certainly seems like it's it's well specced, but people seem most excited about the fact that it has a USB C port on it. Like people have gone from complaining about things with USB C ports to like cheering when a USB C port arises. I have so many of them anyway like now thank you just get on board. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed two bills into law last week regulating the distribution of deep fake videos. Bill AB 730 now our law AB 730 makes it illegal to distribute manipulated videos aimed at deceiving voters or discrediting candidates within 60 days of an election. I guess if it's 61 days before an election you can distribute all you want. AB 602 gives people in California the right to do to sue someone for creating pornographic deep fakes using their likeness without consent and a study released Monday from Dutch security company Deep Trace found that 96% of the more than 14,000 deep fake videos identified online were pornographic in nature. Now they're not necessarily revenge porn or something like that but that seems to be what it's used most for. So AB 602 making it easier to sue someone for creating deep fakes using their likeness seems like it is called for since that's the majority use of this. AB 730 which is the one about not distributing manipulated videos aimed at deceiving voters I mean why limit it to 60 days is my question. Yeah you mentioned if it's 61 days are we in the clear here? Are you okay? Yeah it seems like if it's a rule that is designed to confuse and you know and perhaps unfairly manipulate something like an election it should just be a rule 100% of the time. I suppose there's reasons to say well we're limiting speech too much if we do that so just around elections we want to dampen down but if you're limiting speech you're limiting speech whether it's around election or not. Ariel I'm curious if you have a take on that particular part of this that idea of saying you can't distribute something meant to deceive voters and who gets to decide that too? Yeah well and also how is it enforceable so if something's created at 60 you know at 70 days but then it doesn't really pick up until within the 60 day frame and it's someone else who disseminates it from someone who's like I don't know it's just it seems very strange I'd be very curious where that came from and a little bit dismayed if it just came from well the 60 days leading up to the election is when you can really distort voters we've found or something I don't know it's I don't know it's almost like they created it to be shot down it seems very I don't know strange. I wonder if someone is going to challenge that in court especially that what you mentioned is a really interesting scenario of like I have a bunch of things up that are that could be considered deceptive and then at 60 days do I have to take them all down for 60 days until the election's over and then I can put them back up yeah or if somebody you know retweets them or or something similar which would be distributing does it come back to me somehow yeah is it twitter is it you yeah now it's uh it's interesting but we'll see how this ends up being enforced and and if it gets taken into court yeah I also wonder if it's really about individuals or about the social networks themselves so who are they trying to hold to account is it you know is it the conspiracy theorist or is it you know Jack Dorsey I don't know well it's the distributor so my guess is it's going to it's targeted at the platforms because they are the distributor of things they're also the companies that will pay out more money one suit oh my yes this is perhaps in a lighter note sonos launched a test of a subscription service for its hardware called sonos flex 500 homes in the netherlands can now choose from three different plans 15 euros per month gets you two sonos one smart speakers which is equivalent to buying after just more than 2.5 years or 25 euros per month gets you a sonos beam soundbar and two sonos one speakers about three years if you were to buy them outright and for 50 euros per month you get a play bar you get a subwoofer and you get two sonos one speakers which is equivalent to about three years five months ish however the speakers will be automatically replaced with new models as they're released which is a perk at least of the subscription model you also get free delivery and you can cancel anytime and if you're in amsterdam apparently they'll do free installation but that's only because you're near sonos headquarters so i'm not sure if that one would carry out to other areas uh i'm i'm curious i feel like this is a really good test case to see how far the subscription culture goes uh most of us subscribe to music or tv services of one kind of or another many of us subscribe to things that are that are a little more tangible maybe we subscribe to a coffee shipment club or something like that there are even services out there to subscribe to your furniture uh where you can just have the furniture in your home on subscription so if you if you move you don't you don't have to keep it yeah and you can keep swapping it out that's one of the other big benefits sure a lot of people do that with phones too where they they paid up for a plan that gives them the newest phone every year speakers on the other hand not something i mean i've had my sonos speakers for an embarrassingly long time probably like seven years uh so not something that i swap out but maybe that's more important to somebody else well and sonos is and i have some of those old uh sonos speakers as well tom but i also have a couple of sonos ones i've been looking at the beam but i've been holding off because it's actually quite expensive sonos is a premium audio brand you know if you if you're into it and you can afford it it works great but it is priced out of a lot of people's um hands and so the idea that you can get into something at a lower price which you know as any lease option works as anybody knows who has a car um that you you will end up paying more over time but this is a subscription model that people are getting more and more familiar with on the hardware side it's a little interesting to me that sonos is doing this but again it's like i don't know look at creative cloud look at you know so many subscription services people kind of go like yeah well but then you you know you get free updates everything's kind of all part of the deal you just pay once a month and you get all that stuff what i think is somewhat strange about this is it's almost as if sonos is selling this as if to say but you get all the new stuff automatically they're not releasing a new speaker like every few months it's more like once every year or two so that has to be something that you have to take into consideration you know if you think you're getting the latest and greatest it's not like some sort of like a ios update no but i mean ios only updates once a year so if sonos were updating once a year maybe that would make sense i think they're updating much less frequently than that and and almost to the point of like it's just barely the same as the amount of time that you said it you know this would be even if you had bought it yourself like every couple years so yeah it's i don't know i'm ariel would you uh would you subscribe to speakers i mean i personally wouldn't but you know it to me this all brings up like if people are going to have ways to manage like what you subscribe to because there are so many subscription services but also i'm someone who has my own subscription service i have patreon you have patreon like you know and people subscribe to that and that's meant for you know people who are fans of your work and just want to support it and equally i i guess this sounds a little bit like the the apple program of if you want the latest greatest and you're a fan you know then this is a way to go for it and maybe maybe they just launch this as sort of low hanging fruit and maybe they're not expecting it to be something you know like netflix that takes over uh i i don't think it's for me but what i've heard of people who do have these speakers a lot of them are like super fans of sonos so you know maybe it's just meant for their super fans i'm not really sure well it's it is a test so maybe sonos isn't really sure either well we'll see how it goes in the netherlands uh speaking of apple apple released mac os catalina to the public downloadable from the mac app store for free the itunes app gone if you get catalina replaced by standalone music podcasts and tv apps that are mimics of the ones you find on ios and tv os ios device management now goes through the finder instead of itunes so if you want to sync your phone still or an ipod touch that's where you'll find it apple id management as part of the new profile setting and system preferences and a lot of folks are really excited about sidecar that lets you turn an ipad into a secondary display for your mac with apple pencil to turn the ipad into a drawing tablet when using apps like photoshop and illustrator on the mac duet might be better for those sort of situations but it's now built in they've sure locked that's that feature to some extent so we both upgraded our max uh to to catalina i upgraded my laptop because i'm a coward not my production machine that i'm streaming on right now but sarah you you are braver than me you went right you're using catalina to stream right now yeah i live uh life on the edge and i did i i upgraded at about 10 a.m knowing this might take a while 10 a.m pacific knowing that this might take a while and it's still kind of barely finished by the time show time started however uh it was fairly seamless uh didn't have any hiccups and boy and again these are these are you know knee jerk reactions because i've had a very short amount of time to live with this but as somebody who hated the itunes app more than life itself particularly on us 10 the fact that music and podcasts and the new tv app are all separated makes my life so much better music in particular because i've subscribed to apple music for a couple of years now i love it use it all the time um the experience within itunes on os 10 was you could get there but it was just convoluted and made no sense now it mirrors exactly what it looks like on ios i mean besides the fact that you have a little bit more screen real estate on os 10 depending on your display and you know but for the most part it it makes more sense than it ever did man i just uh lot while you were describing that i launched sidecar uh and connected to the ipad that i used to launch the sounds on dts connected like that it was it was pretty fast pretty impressive so there you go yeah folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com all right let's talk about antarctica first of all how are you able to make this happen i won't even ask you why because i think antarctica is the answer to that but like how are you able to get this all together uh yeah so i yeah i got really obsessed with the idea of going to antarctica but because i don't have a formal background in science i didn't really know what my best pathway there would be um but i discovered that the national science foundation has a grant called the Antarctic artists and writers grant so they send every year they send down a couple artists and writers to antarctica to um you know do interesting creative work that communicates a certain aspect of antarctica so i thought that was a good pathway um unbeknownst to me it ended up taking me four applications over five years to this grant to end up getting there so it was a long haul but um but last year yeah i finally got the go ahead from from this program to go down there so i spent five weeks down there in total and you were you were studying and writing about extremophiles particularly i know right yeah so i went down to film uh all of the microscopic extremophiles that live beneath the ice in different locations so beneath the sea ice or beneath glaciers things of that nature and i wanted to film them using microscopes because a ton of biologists get sent down to antarctica to tell us like what species are down there and their distribution but they don't really take many photographs typically or they maybe take one or two photographs and they end up in a scientific paper and you never see it so no one really knows that antarctica is actually full of life and no one really knows what that life looks like so that that was my whole project yeah the storytelling aspect of it um i would think is is was very needed do you feel like the you know the science community that you were hanging out with for five weeks uh was was was happy to have you there and kind of understood the the the general idea yeah that was the most surprising in a in a good way uh to uh aspect to me so i do a lot of work in science but um it's not all the time that i go to a community and get introduced as an artist even though that's my background um so i was a little bit nervous that people were going to think that i didn't really know that much or not be that interested or be just a little bit snarky towards me and it totally wasn't that way everyone there was so friendly i think there's so much of like a camaraderie of like you made it to antarctica who cares what you do or how you made it here like we're all here together like let's be like you know awesome friends together or something so people were really fascinated no one um no one treated me like i didn't you know know my stuff about the science that i was there to do um and everyone was actually really just uh interested because if anything going down to antarctica as an artist everyone's like wow like that's the cool job that i want like you know forget doing you know being in the lab all day or or uh being in the galley serving food all day like getting to go to antarctica as an artist is a pretty special thing and it is a pretty special program well one of the things i enjoyed about your series was it kind of busts some of the stereotypes people might have of like you know two or three lonely people bundled up in the arctic wind like there's a full on halloween party going on with people in costume uh and and you were able to use your your normal technology there there's some there's some antiquated technology going on too like i know you were issued a pager what what's the balance between the 1990s era stuff that still persists because it works and and what you were able to bring and use on your own yeah i mean so you can bring for for me i brought down my microscopes and i brought down you know most of my um series that i put on youtube was filmed with my iphone most of that's okay in in the McMurdo area because you are at sea level so it while it's uh definitely very cold in the summer there it's not um it's not so bad that you have to worry about a lens breaking within like the first 10 minutes whereas if you go to the south pole which is a much higher altitude you do have to worry about like if you take your iphone out of your pocket for more than you know a few minutes like it might break and then you're stuck with a broken iphone for the entire season you're there but yeah they do use very antiquated technologies because um there's very few satellites that are polar orbiting and because of that they have limited internet access um and there's no cell signal so uh the majority of people uh do not have computers at all while they're down there they have shared computers that they can use um you're using ethernet uh all of the time and uh you have no um internet access in the dorms so you have to if you're someone who has an office or a lab you can have your internet access in there um but yeah pagers are are a thing and so everyone uses pagers and office phones and so um it was like getting transported back several decades because if you are agreeing to meet with someone at a certain time and then something comes up and you can't meet them at the time that you said that you were going to meet you have no way of getting a hold of them and I forgot what that was like of like oh crap I'm going to be like 30 minutes late and they're not at their home or office I can't oh no I lost connection uh I thought perhaps as a demonstration maybe yes maybe that was uh Ms. Waldman's way of saying here's how it is kind of like this for instance yeah uh so uh hopefully we'll get her her reconnected here in a second but uh if you want to find out all of this and see the video that Ariel shot go to youtube.com slash Ariel Waldman that's a r i e l w a l d m a n uh and you can actually see her with the pager in use uh all right uh well let's uh let's carry on uh and and thank the folks Sarah let's thank all of our people who participate in our subreddit I mean you might be people you might be emperor penguins I mean we have no judgment if you submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com we will thank you in advance we also have a facebook group facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show all right let's check in with Chris Christensen aka the amateur traveler who has a little news bit on TripAdvisor's bid to end whale and dolphin captivity this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute many of you go to TripAdvisor to try and figure out whether you should stay in that hotel room or to get suggestions for what to do in a particular city they are the most popular travel website in the world and they're trying to use some of that popularity for good as they've just taken down tickets on their website that are for parks that keep whales and dolphins in captivity there's definitely been a push to do a more eco-friendly in experiences with whales and dolphins and that often means just whale watching or some of the dolphin swimming doing it in the wild where the dolphin can opt in it isn't kept in captivity well now TripAdvisor is getting behind that as well and I know many people and I think I would be one of them will take that as a positive step this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler yeah I'm I'm opt in for whales and dolphins along with people I'm always for opt in no matter no matter who it is so that's cool that's interesting too that the TripAdvisor is is is trying to make sure that that's part of the system I like that absolutely shout out to all our patrons at our master and new grand master levels indeed indeed and thank you to Ariel Waldman for coming on I'm sorry that we got cut off like that but again arielwaldman.com twitter.com slash arielwaldman youtube.com slash arielwaldman it's a-r-i-e-l-w-a-l-d-m-a-m and I know she wanted to talk about the science hack day she's the she's kind of the the general advisor of of science hack day in san francisco october 19th and 20th free to attend as Rachel Mets put it on twitter earlier today free baby sitting if you're if your child is in the right age group october 19th 20th they have food there they'll feed you you know experience required child care bursaries available even if you want to attend and and have your your child taken care of I guess that's the child care that that Rachel was talking about but you just got to go to Ariel's twitter and you can find out more details and she's back right in time I am so sorry I think my internet at home literally cut out so I am now using the internet on my phone so hopefully it'll hold out we assumed that was just some kind of like severe demonstration of what it's like in Antarctica it's a little bit yeah yeah all right about that no that's okay we were uh we were just uh wrapping up telling people about science hack day october 19th and 20th uh in san francisco and what's the easiest way to register for that if people want to do that uh science hack day 2019.eventbrite.com excellent or you can go to sf.sciencehackday.org and the registration link is there as well Ariel thank you so much uh for for chatting with us today is a fascinating trip that you took I hope everybody takes some time to take a look at the video that you brought back from there it's really cool yeah absolutely yeah it's all on my youtube channel and again I'm sorry that my internet cut out but uh but the videos will help tell the story better than I did today we're all we're all familiar with video issues happens to us all we do have new patreon rewards as well become a 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