 Coming up on DTNS Thoughts on the Xbox One Series X, do you mind robots writing your election coverage? And Blair from This Week in Science tells us about Hippo Drones. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, December 13, Friday the 13th, my lucky day, 2019, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. We'll draw on the top tech stories from Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And of course, as I mentioned, Blair Basderich co-host of This Week in Science, joining us, welcome back, Blair. Thanks so much. So happy to be back. If you have been following Blair's vegan bagel dog adventures, either on previous Good Day Internets or Twitter, you'll want to get today's Good Day Internet to find out the latest updates, that and more, including us talking about YouTube streams, counting for billboard charts, all at patreon.com slash DTNS. Just choose Good Day Internet. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Cancel the folding party, everybody. Samsung Electronics President Young Son told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin that Samsung had sold 1 million units for the Galaxy Fold. However, unfortunately, a Samsung spokesperson told Yonhap News that Son confused 1 million actual sales with Samsung's sales target. So no, Samsung has not yet sold 1 million Galaxy Folds. Not yet. So you're saying there's a chance. Amazon's Echo Speakers and other enabled devices for their voice services now work with Apple Podcasts in the United States with the option to make Apple Podcast the default service. Users can ask Alexa to play a show and continue listening from where they left off on another device. Al can also fast forward through an episode or skip to the next one. Microsoft has updated its Windows logo and the icons for many of the company's apps with new colors and materials and finishes. John Friedman, Corporate Vice President of Design and Research at Microsoft said, quote, we needed to signal innovation and change while maintaining familiarity for customers. We also had to develop a flexible and open design system to span a range of contexts while still being true to Microsoft. I don't know if I like it, but I know it's art. CNBC reports that several bugs in Apple's iOS 13.3 exploits a new feature called Communication Limits that adds new parental controls supposed to let parents block their children from connecting or contacting anyone who isn't in their address book and preventing kids from adding new contacts unless a parent enters a pin they set up ahead of time. HP's latest elite book, The Dragonfly is a two-in-one convertible which is part of HP's business line. Prices start at $1,629 for a base configuration. The model the Verge has been testing is $2,169. To note, The Dragonfly has a dark blue color with a matte finish. The Verge liked it. HP also covered the surface of it with an oleophobic coating helping to repel fingerprints and also grease. It starts at 2.2 pounds with a two-cell battery with an optional four-cell battery that bumps up the weight to 2.5 pounds if you want to go that route. Inside, The Dragonfly has an eighth gen Intel core processor up to 16 gigs of RAM and up to two terabytes of internal storage. All right, let's talk a little bit about Apple making an interesting acquisition today. Yeah, Bloomberg noticed public filings indicating that Apple acquired Spectral Edge. That's a UK company that uses machine learning to blend photos from a standard smartphone image sensor with infrared photos to improve picture quality and color accuracy. Spectral Edge has said that this could be implemented in software and also hardware. Potential apps could be low-light photography and improving grainy images. Yeah, so essentially this means the next round of iPhones probably going to have improved low-light photography and some fancier AI tricks, right? Which is funny because the iPhone 11 folks would, I don't have one. I'm behind a couple of years on the iPhone train, but they say, oh, the low-light photos are so great in the new iPhone. So, I mean, if this improves it even that much more, I assume that the photo heads will be excited. I mean, my Pixel 4 can take a picture of the night sky in Los Angeles, though. So, there's room for improvement still. And this might be the kind of thing that can do that. Maybe not the night sky with infrared, but do you take a lot of pictures with your phone, Blair? Yes, because I work with animals for sure. I take a lot of pictures. I think I was just thinking about this actually recently how I used to bring a digital camera with me everywhere. I found my digital camera recently and it has less resolution than my phone does now. So, I definitely am better off just using my phone, but even so I feel like each version of my phone that I've had, towards the end of my time having that phone, I start to get frustrated by the quality because there's something else that's better. I feel very spoiled in how good the zoom is and, yeah, the low-light photos in particular, they get kind of grainy sometimes. Yeah, nocturnal animals. You got to be able to take their pictures too. Yeah, and you can't use flash. Right. Little eyeballs, so. Good point. At the Game Awards, Microsoft revealed its next generation console kind of a surprise. They just walked out Phil Spencer and he said, we're going to call it the Xbox Series X. The design is very PC-inspired. It's a big black rectangular box with a slot-loading disk drive. They show it in the pictures, mostly standing vertically, but you can stand it horizontally. It's still pretty big to slip into a home entertainment center. According to Xbox Chief Phil Spencer, the Xbox Series X will include an NVMe solid-state drive. It'll get four times the processing power of the Xbox One X using a custom AMD Zen 2 CPU. Twice the power of the original Xbox One X, which had six teraflops for graphics. So that works out to 12 teraflops. I didn't say it exactly that way, but 12 teraflops of GPU performance from the Radeon RDNA. It supports 8K gaming, 120 frames per second in games, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and variable refresh rates. The Xbox One Series X also features auto-low latency mode, dynamic latency input to increase responsiveness and allow for better game streaming performance. Microsoft also revealed the new Xbox Wireless Controller. It's a little smaller than the last generation. It has a share button for making clips and screenshots. The controller will work with your existing Xbox One console and your Windows 10 PC. None of this has a price yet, and we're not gonna see it for sale until holiday 2020, but it was a nice little surprise, Roger. Yeah, I mean, they kind of threw everything in it that they could, and what's very interesting is that the series aspect of the name implies that there will be different model ranges for different price points, and it kind of just shows how much that Microsoft is approaching video gaming or at least this segment of entertainment in the same way that traditionally Apple and Google have approached apps in their platforms like the Chromebook or Tablets or Android or whatever. And I mean, it's great. I mean, this is kind of gaming as a service as it slowly develops. Instead of having, okay, it's gonna be this specific platform. Everyone has to pay the same amount. We can now have different models that can reach different market segments but still play the same game, albeit with maybe less resolution on the lower end to accommodate the lower price point. Yeah, and to be fair, they didn't announce anything of that, but we know Project Lockhart has been rumored to be a separate Xbox. So that would fit into that series model you're talking about. And of course they've kind of been doing that with multiple versions of the consoles previously. So this might just make that a more standard part of the offering. But I think what you're saying is right. We're probably, this is Project Scarlet. This is the top of the line. This is an almost PC for your living room, but with an easier interface than Windows. And you will be able to access an immediate library of games. They're Game Pass and XCloud. So it's probably gonna be too expensive for a lot of people, but that's where the series part of it comes in, where they're like, well, if you don't wanna pay that, we've got lower resolution. We've got one that doesn't have a slot for your physical media, and those will be lower priced. Well, that was gonna be my question. Roger, you mentioned the seems like it's pretty much got all the form factor that you would want in a gaming device. What would be the top price you would pay for something like this? I know the company hasn't announced it, but what would you think is fair? I would say five, 600 bucks. Like if they really throw everything in it, and it's 4K, like 60 frames per second, 4K, does Dolby at most. But it's 8K, 120 frames. 8K, but I mean, like it can do, if it can do solid 4K 60 frames per second, people would be willing to pay 500 bucks. And if it can do, if it can lock in at 8K at a full 60 frames per second, people will pay an additional 200 bucks on top of that. So I think if it, you know, from paper to actual performance for someone plays it and it does exactly what the tin says, I mean, 600 bucks is not out of the question. And again, these consoles are loss leaders. So it's interesting to see Microsoft go from the traditional console was a little bit underpowered, but could play all the games and that that's how they got you to, you know what, we're gonna power this close to a PC, but we'll see what they price it, but maybe they price it less than equivalent PC to get you into the subscription so that you pay for XCloud Game Pass, et cetera. And that's where they make their money up. Yeah. And if you bought this as a PC, it's easily a thousand plus. So even at a $600 price point, it's still cheaper. During the election in the UK on Thursday, the BBC used an automated system to generate 689 election stories for each of the UK's constituencies. 40 of them were in Welsh. Journalists wrote templates for various types of stories using BBC styles and the machine selected appropriate phases to fit the data. Each article was checked by a human editor before it got published. And in some articles, human written analysis was also added. Yes, this is interesting. It's sort of using the journalist's style to set the template, letting the machine write the story and then putting a human in at the other end to say, okay, is this all correct? Were there any errors in here before we publish it? It's like a self-driving car. Yeah, with a safety driver, right? Yeah. Do we care? Does this bother you if this is your local election coverage and it gets you the results, you know, super fast? I don't know, Blair. What do you think about this? On the surface, this doesn't really bother me. Again, it has to be accurate, but I would say the same thing about a human. I think putting the word election in there makes it scarier for the general public. And I think that it would be easy to say, like, okay, we're pumping out news so fast because of the internet. It would be great to have some help and be able to synthesize some of this data we're getting in and be able to pump out news fast and effectively. But with election, since we know there's so much misinformation and intentional misinformation going around the world, I think that does make it kind of scarier and an interesting place to start with this. Yeah, I mean, that's why the BBC used humans to write the templates and not just let the machine learning figure it out from scratch because they have a very, they think a lot about how to phrase things at the BBC. So they want to make sure it's phrased that way. And then they put a human at the end because they want this to just be an assistant rather than the writer, right? This is someone prepping the story for you to look at and check off like, all right, is that, do these numbers match? Does this all make sense? Does this sound like it's right? But if you're going for speed, sometimes that can lead to errors. And I think that's where the nervousness comes in, right? Yeah, but if you think about it, we use spell check on our computers, but then you still have an editor look over your stuff if you're publishing. So there's still, there's helpfulness in having a little bit of automated assistance as long as you still have the human element double-checking thing. Yeah, well, and that's the thing. This isn't out on the internet being published immediately. This isn't being done in front of you. This is a tool they're using in the newsroom. I think that makes all the difference. Last month, engineers at Slack released a distributed VPN mesh tool called Nebula as free and open-source software under the MIT license. Arstutnik has a great write-up on it. If this sounds interesting to you, you should definitely go check out that link. We'll have it in the show notes. Nebula runs on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. They're going to develop mobile versions, but that's where it is right now. It encrypts data using the noise protocol. That's the same one that they use in Signal. And then Nebula selects the most efficient path out of available nodes on the network you set up to make things work super fast. It's a little bit DIY right now. So it's not a turnkey solution for everyone, but if you're comfortable getting binaries from GitHub and tweaking a config file a little bit, you might want to take a look at it. One downside is that Nebula operates over UDP. So if you're thinking, oh, I could get through my corporate firewall. No, you probably won't. And in fact, that's the way wire guard gets blocked a lot of the time. So if wire guard doesn't work in your current situation, Nebula probably won't either. It also sticks out a bit, even if it is allowed as UDP traffic. But the best advantage seems to be that efficiency of picking good paths. So this could be a good do it yourself for your own VPN situation. It could also be technology that other VPN providers adopt to make their services work better. Do we think this is something that Slack will? I don't think this has much to do with Slack as a company. These are just engineers who worked at Slack, who worked on this in their free time, their extra time and released it as an open source project. So I wouldn't read too much into Slack being involved. Yeah, I wouldn't be necessarily built into the Slack platform. I mean, they might take advantage of it somehow. It certainly makes sense with the engineers in the building. That's a good point. Do you use any VPNs, Blair? No. Well, you should if you ever use public Wi-Fi. But so yeah, this is something what's interesting to me is this is probably less important for someone purely looking for security other than the fact that it can be run on your own. But with that UDP protocol, that makes it kind of iffy. But if you were wanting to watch your videos from your home machine over VPN, that might be pretty good. Yeah, actually, when I lived abroad, there was a bunch of content I couldn't get to when I was out of the country because of all of the various networks and the different firewalls that existed. And so that was actually kind of frustrating. It felt like I had to catch up on a lot of content when I got back from moving abroad. Vice reports how Intel recently took several BIOS drivers for a number of unsupported motherboards off of its website, saying that the firmware has reached end of life until he used a lot of words to explain this device. But ultimately, I came down to not wanting to be responsible for old firmware, which is understandable given all the specter meltdown hell that the company has dealt with up until this point. Another source of old drivers are FTP repositories, but Vice points out this is getting harder too. Chrome will remove FTP supports by version 82. Mozilla is considering removing FTP support as well. And while FTP clients still exist, it's another hurdle for users, especially regarding finding those URLs. Thankfully, archive.org has been trying to collect old drivers and runs a section called the FTP site Boneyard, preserving old FTP contents as well. Cheers to Archive for being around to help. I know there are people in the audience who use old hardware, maintain old hardware, and so this is going to be super important for that. And it's not like those FTP links go away, but if they're no longer supported by Chrome, then that makes it less likely they're going to continue to be indexed. And so the search starts to go away and things just get a little harder and a little harder. So it's good to know that Archive is stepping in and trying to collect as many of those as possible. I get why a company like Intel wouldn't want the liability of having a piece of firmware up there that maybe causes a breach somewhere and then they get sued for providing it. So it's good that there is a third party that is willing to, at your own risk, provide you the firmware so you can do some tinkering. Sorry about running your headlines in the middle there. I just, I felt like this is really important. We need a little extra punch. It certainly didn't leave my elbow. It gave me a boost. Thank you. Hey, 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, you hear a lot about drones being misused around airports or we talk about them being used to fly things like blood samples in Irwanda or burritos in Australia. But the use of a quadcopter is expanding to other areas like studying animals, right Blair? Yes. So drones are already used in a couple ways in animal conservation. The kind of most high-profile one is that they're actually used to help guard rhinos that they fear might be poached. They are also used to help count whales out in the ocean, which is pretty cool. But when it comes to using them on land animals, there's a lot of issues and things that we're still trying to figure out. Mainly that a lot of animals could get spooked if the drone gets too close. As I'm sure any of us could if we were just hanging out and all of a sudden the drone starts to come down towards a, where are you? Where'd you come from? But this is a study looking specifically at hippos. Hippos are a perfect example of a species we could be looking closer at and monitoring populations of that are kind of hard to study for a couple reasons. The main one being that they are so dangerous. The traditional methods are aerial surveys where you're in a helicopter where it's really hard to count, you're very far away or the more hazardous option, land or water surveys. So you're trying to get them close. Especially because you brought up rhinos. I think it bears repeating to people that the rhinos are not as dangerous as the hippos even though the rhinos are the ones everyone thinks might be more dangerous because they've got the big horn, right? Right. So hippos, the reason they're actually a conservation concern is the same reason they're so dangerous. They have ivory just like elephants do, but their ivory creates these huge tusks and that's also why they're so dangerous. They can run over 35 miles an hour. They weigh up to 7,000 pounds. And so all of that together means that that momentum with those ivory tusks is very dangerous. The reason so many people are hurt by hippos about 200 people, more than 200 people a year are killed by hippos. It's a pretty big number considering only about 10 are killed by sharks a year is because they are herbivores. They eat grass, but they're nocturnal. So they go out onto land out of the water during the night. They're grazing. And then as they walk back, they've kind of trampled down the grass and created what looks like a footpath. But people think that's a footpath and then they're in between the hippo and their source of water. And you never want to be in between a hippo and their source of water. They open up that mouth almost 180 degrees and run. And so a lot of people get gored by those tusks. So those tusks, that ivory is actually the main reason they're poached. There are also lots of concerns about climate change and habitat destruction and water pollution that also impacts their populations, but we don't know how, which is why we need better surveying. So all of that to say this study that came out of the University of New South Wales in South Africa actually found that they could use a pretty relatively inexpensive drone to be able to get pretty close to them to see what their population was doing, where they were going, how many of them there were and even how big the individuals were. So that helps them identify is that a male or a female? Are they young or are they an adult? Is this the same hippo we saw last week with that scar on their back? So there's a lot of things you can do because they can actually get pretty close. They can get about 40 meters above them. And that actually makes these surveys so far about 10% more accurate than people on land counting the hippos. They also don't appear to care about drones at all, which makes sense since even though they're herbivores they don't really have any natural predators when they're full ground. They don't care about anything. No, they're good. Yeah. So they use a DJI Phantom 4, which is about running just under $1,000 these days, which may sound like a lot to you or me, but it's something that in a research budget is probably acceptable or even cheap, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, camera traps can cost $800. So that's definitely a reasonable expense. It's not out of the question, especially since you can use it over and over unlike a camera trap, which you put in one place and if you want to monitor more than one spot you have to get another camera trap. So this being highly mobile and being able to use it over and over to count the same population, different populations in different locations, all of that makes the potential of studying hippo populations really exciting with these guys. Well, if you want to study a hippo without this, like you said, you either have to be way high up, which isn't as accurate because you're far away in a helicopter or you have to risk your life. So this sounds like a fantastic use of technology to achieve a research aim without risking life and limb to do it. And we don't hear enough of those kinds of stories, in my opinion. Yeah. And I think this is especially important to mention that there's two parts to a study to see if this is effective. The first is, is it as effective as the studies we're doing now with our current technology, which it is, if not better. And the second is, are we accidentally impacting the population by our presence? And as I mentioned with hippos, they don't seem to care. There's other studies going on, like there's an ongoing study with elephants where we're not sure yet if the elephants care, if the drones are around, and what the scare distance is for elephants. Because the last thing we want to do is create an elephant stampede that doesn't need to exist. We want them to hang out and do what they need to do. And even less than, even less dramatic than that is if your drones are bothering them, then that's going to affect the behavior that you're studying, right? Absolutely. And on the heels of that, if you know that elephants are moving into a space where poaching is especially bad and you know that the drone does scare them at a certain distance, you could actually use that to help you to push them in the direction where you want them to go where they're less likely to get poached. Yeah, I guess it could help you see the poachers too. Yes, absolutely. Well, I found it fascinating that they were able to not only improve the accuracy but improve the safety by using a good old DJI Phantom 4. I think I shot some videos one time with a DJI Phantom 4. So it's fun to see different uses for this. The other thing I noticed in this study that, or the story you gave us from Eureka Alert, they also found that mornings are not the good time to count the hippos contrary to what they previously thought because they just didn't have quite the accurate data. Yeah, so as I mentioned, they're mostly nocturnal. So the mornings is when they're kind of settling down to a long day's nap. And so you would think that actually would be a really good time to study because they're all kind of calming down. They're not going to move too much. They're all back at home base. But what they found was actually because they're settling in. There's actually a lot of submerging and going back up and submerging and going back up and finding a good position. And it actually makes it really hard to count them. Yeah, I imagine if they're down under the water, and I guess previously you just didn't really know how many of them were underwater. So you didn't know how it was affecting your accuracy. But 40 meters up with a drone, you can tell. Well, and not to mention that in Africa too, temperatures can go so high that if you're a researcher, you also don't want to be out there in the middle of the day doing the counts. So a drone doesn't mind so much. Well, as Beatmaster in our chat room says, it's an interesting hypothesis. Indeed. Hippo stories and others always welcome in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Thanks to everybody who gives us stories every day. Join in in the conversation in our Discord as well. You like to chat? Well, please join our Discord by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. The mailbag's getting very exciting these days. We have people helping people. We do. Neil actually wrote in about our story yesterday, which was also in our mailbag, about the idea of having a projector that you're projecting onto the ceiling above your bed. And if that works, Neil says in your last show, a listener was asking about a projector. He could put in the middle of his bed to watch shows while the baby was sleeping. Neil says, my wife and I have been doing this for years. I've had small portable projectors. They don't really work well due to the awkward angle you're trying to point the projector to. Many times the cables in the back, results in the projector sitting precariously, highly susceptible to falling over. Then we got a Lenovo Yoga Tab Pro 3. It has an integrated projector and JBL speakers, which sound great. We place it on top of the headboard and angle the image to the ceiling. And it can get a decent size image with a good brightness at nighttime. We'll have the link to the Lenovo model in our show notes. Neil says it's running Android so you can use Plex, Netflix, Sling, Disney Plus, YouTube, all of them. The tablet itself is a bit slow. The tech is a few years old, but it's more than capable of handling the task. The link is $312 in Canadian dollars. So probably closer to $230 in the US. So the one he's linking to is 312 Canadian. Yeah. First of all, brilliant solution, Neil. Yeah. Using a projector. It's like a Pico projector, like a tiny projector built into a tablet. That's pretty clever. Second of all, I love that Neil's like, oh yeah, we had the same problem. Right? Because yesterday we were sort of like, wait, what are you trying to do? Does anyone do this? And Neil was like, yep, yep, and I've got a solution. I've been doing this for years. That's fantastic. So how many of us are going to be doing this, projecting onto the ceiling? Raise your hands. If I didn't have a skylight above my bed, I would be. I love the idea. But yeah, no, I mean, the more kind of DIY situations that we hear about, the better. It's awesome. Thanks to Neil for writing in. Also, shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Tony Glass, Ruchan Brantley, and Adam Carr. And let's check in with Len Peralta, who has been illustrating today's show. Len, what have you drawn for us today? Yeah, you know, sometimes, Tom, you throw me a big meatball on these stories, draw themselves. This is an example of that this week. Like, how could I not draw the hippo drone? And, you know, this week, there was also some big announcements, including the Xbox One. So this is, I envision that soon we will see in holiday 2020, a hippo drone available for everyone. And this is what I think it would look like. So there you go. If you wanted the hippo to be the drone, you need to get Len's art. That's going to make your dreams come true. I guess the better way of saying this, if you're very simple-minded like me and you're the hippo drone, there you go, then this is perfect for you. Yes, this is available at my online store right now. Also, I want to mention there's only one more week to get your orders in for my holiday cards, custom-drawn holiday cards. They make a great gift and also a great way to say, Merry Christmas and happy holidays to anybody on your list. So go to lemprosdor.com. Blair, you're the animal expert. Do you approve? I feel like you really captured the essence of a hippo that suddenly found itself in the air and is very confused by it. I love it. Thanks, Len Peralta. Also, thanks to Blair Bazdrich. Blair, let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Absolutely. You can watch twists every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific. We are at www.twis.org. You can go to twist.org slash live for the live show every week. Otherwise, you can find us everywhere. You can find podcasts. You can find me on Twitter at Blair's Menagerie. Or if you want to be shouted at, you can follow at shoutyblair. And also, I'm just going to put a quick plug-in for my art. Nice little artist corner today. We have our 2020, hold on. Skype is blurring it. We have our 2020 Twist Blair's Animal Corner calendar. So I did some kind of stained glass style this year. So those are available at twist.org as well. Just click on the toad in the upper right corner and you can order those. If you order by Monday at 5 p.m. Pacific, we can hopefully guarantee you delivery before Christmas. Nice. The reason I actually ran away, the reason I played the music by accident earlier is because I ran away from the door because someone rang the bell and I thought maybe it was the calendar being delivered and I wanted to have it and it wasn't the calendar and I was very upset. But yeah, I can't wait for mine to arrive. I got the shipping notification that it's on its way. So get over there and join me in calendar wonder. Also, folks, what other show is going to bring you drawings of hippodrones and stories about hippodrones and solutions for using a projector while in bed? You can't buy this kind of coverage, but you can help support it at patreon.com. And in fact, if you stick with us for three months, you're going to get a six-year anniversary DTNS logo merchandise item. Perhaps it's a shirt, a poster, a mug or a sticker. Len was nice enough to create the six-year anniversary logo. So go check out the details. Patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. If you have feedback for us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you'd like to join us live, we're live Monday through Friday. That's 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. See you all Monday. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.