 Coming up on DTNS machine learning for training dogs, how politics is routing around Google and Facebook's bands on political ads and our video games, the future of movie theaters. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 11th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from the seven acres. Wood in Austin, California, Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm the show's producer, Roger. Justin's got one foot in each state. He's on the move. Yeah, we were just talking about Justin moving to Austin, Texas. He's he's got nine degree weather coming. So he's getting out of there. If you want that wider conversation, get good day internet. We even brought up the new Nvidia cards. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Mastercard plans to support select cryptocurrencies on its payment network later this year. Criteria for supported cryptocurrencies include offering the same level of security people have come to expect in their credit cards, supporting strict compliance measures and adhering to local laws and regulations. So maybe none of the current cryptocurrencies. I'm not sure that describes any current cryptocurrencies, but all right. We mentioned earlier this week that hackers infiltrated the system at a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida or at hackers. I don't like saying hackers when it's just when it's people who are malicious. These these are attackers. Tackers infiltrated the system at a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida last week and tried to change chemical levels that were not successful. A cybersecurity advisory from Massachusetts now says the Scott a control system was accessed by team viewer where all the connected computers shared the same password and had no firewall protection installed. So any current or former employee could log in and adjust the entire town's water supply from anywhere. According to the Wall Street Journal, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gueltieri said the plant stopped using team viewer six months ago. They just forgot to uninstall it. Yep, attackers didn't really need much attacking know how with that kind of setup. Microsoft will release the surface duo in the UK in France in Germany and Canada on February 18. The US price for the device is also dropping to $999 priced at 1349 British pounds in the UK and 1549 euros elsewhere. Slack confirmed that it sent emails to a subset of Android users to reset their passwords after it discovered the app was accidentally logging credentials in plain text. Ouch. Slack said users who received the emails should clear out the app's data on device to fully clear out the logs reset their password and then everything should be fine. Sudo make me a patch. I know full of jokes today. Apple fixed the critical vulnerability affecting the pseudo application on Mac OS devices. Sudo is used by administrators to grant route access to other users, but a vulnerability which is now fixed allowed a low privilege user to gain root level access either by injecting malware or carrying out a brute force attack. All right, let's talk about machine learning Justin. Indeed, Tom. Listen, we know that the Ramanijan machine from Technic Technic non Technion in Israel in Google in Tel Aviv is super impressive. Its software system developed to make conjectures about original mathematical formulas has already come up with a few more efficient formulas for universal constants like Catalan's number. But it doesn't. My friends involve dogs. Colorado State University computer scientist Jason Stock and Tom Casey on the other end have published a paper on a machine learning system that can reward dogs for successfully responding to commands. They use the Nvidia Jetson Edge platform and train the algorithm on 20,000 labeled images from the stand for dogs data set to identify if dog is sitting, standing or lying down. Training of the model ran on two 24 gigabyte Nvidia RTX 6000 GPUs. They then installed the model on Nvidia's Jetson Nano hardware kind of a raspberry pi for AI and set it up to dispense a treat when it detected that a dog is responding properly to commands. You have to be in the room with the dog to give the command, but everything else is between the computer and the pup. I mean, honestly, Sarah, as dog owners ourselves, I don't see this as terribly practical necessarily, but it's like I'm in the room. Yeah, I can drop the treat myself. The computer saying the dog needs to treat. I'm like, I know, I just got him to sit. But it's an interesting proof of concept. And I don't know, maybe because it's not coming out of your hand, it helps reinforcement with the dog a little better. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think it's how far off is it from it being a thing you could do server side and therefore you could port to your television and you just need a peripheral that would spit out treats. I mean, there are systems already with webcams where you can have a treat thing that you can remotely trigger yourself. This is just cutting out the middleman to say like, oh, okay, now I can I can still say over my webcam like stop barking. But I don't have to press the button. If it notices it stopped barking, the dog stopped barking, then it'll it'll dispense the treat that this is a proof of concept. This is not a practical product. But I still think it's valuable because it's showing that you can monitor in very limited situation so far, what a pet is doing and be able to respond to that. And the applications of that are more than just what they're doing here. It's like, okay, now that we've made it happen, let's see what else we can do with that functionality. Yeah, I mean, you know, all kidding aside, you know, some dogs are in, you know, rigorous training, maybe they're puppies were there, you know, some behavioral issues that you got to deal with. And this couldn't be really helpful with being a little bit more consistent with is the dog doing the thing that the dog's supposed to do, you know, reward the dog for good behavior type of a thing. I was, I got a haircut yesterday and I left my dog at home and the whole time I was like, I hope nothing terrible happens. You know, if I if I had a, you know, like a little spy cam in my house, which I don't, I could have checked in on him. But stuff like this, I can see becoming practical now that we've got the basics down. Yeah, I see this going into products where, you know, the thing that keeps coming to my mind as I know they didn't train it for barking in this particular instance, because it's a little more complicated. But a system that when your dog barks at the door when you're gone, you could train it not to train it to be like, Oh, if you stop barking, you go get you get a treat, or maybe even in my case, in my case, what I would like to do is when it hears the mail when the machine learning system hears the mail being dropped, if the dog doesn't bark a treat drops, I mean, there's more to it to training a dog than that, but that can be totally useful. I think that that there is an idea here of like, you're at home, the dogs at home, is there some kind of AI generated or assisted work that you can do behaviorally with your dog when you're not with them? I think that that is that is something fairly powerful. Yeah, it's like that. Was that $5,000 or something dog door from CES where it could it would notice that it was sitting in front of the dog door before it would open. You know, you could you could increase the features on something like that too. Lots of ways to go with this. I like it. The largest cinema company in South Korea CGV has been renting theaters for up to four people maximum at a time to play video games on the huge screen. The fee is the equivalent of $90 US for two hours before 6pm or $135 in one for two hours after 6pm. You have to bring your own gear, your own consoles, your controllers, etc. But then you're playing on a 20 foot long screen or longer, depending on the theater. This doesn't replace the money from a normal movie theater, even at the current half capacity restrictions that they have in South Korea, 100 seat theater with 50 people in it, for example, would bring in $600 not the 135 they're getting maxed, but it's been popular and it fills theaters that would otherwise right now be empty because there just aren't enough movies out. CGV calls it Ajit X a play on the Korean word for hideout Ajit. So Ajit X, you know, it's like put an X in front of anything and it's cool. Check out my book Pilot X. CGV is also offering it. It's food for delivery. If you miss the popcorn nachos and corn dogs, you don't want to go rent one of the theaters. You can have it delivered. And they're not the only ones doing this. Malco theaters in the Southern US has been renting theaters for private screenings or games. A lot of them are doing private screenings. But Malco is also doing games $100 for two hours $150 for three hours. They have a maximum of 20 people. These are expensive novelty games and movie theater rental. I mean, I guess the novelty is exactly what it is. Someone be like, it was fun. We said we'd do it. And then we did it. Just having four people in a big old theater. I guess you feel, I don't know, like you've got all the room in the world. But there aren't movies to fill up the theaters. And you know, they got to get creative. This is a pretty creative idea. It's a special occasion. It's a novel thing. God knows exactly where it where it can stretch beyond this. I do think that the idea of live entertainment is something that people are going to take a lot of swings at as we become more and more on the other side of the worst of our current pandemic situation. But I don't know how much this particular layout has a future beyond a desperate need to not even just use the screens. This is a play to keep your employees employed, right? Like because you get you can turn the screens down and just have less people come to work. This is I think a good opportunity to make a little bit of money and keep the business going, keep your employees working and go from there. But this is I would imagine barely covering the cost to even run the theater when you just have four people in there. Now, I don't know what the concession stand prices are like at CGVs. But if I'm at home, and I'm like, boy, I want some popcorn, you know, like how I get in the theater, I am not buying popcorn from a theater. I am making my own. Just the way that I smuggle my own food into a theater, or at least I did in the past. You want to know what I would love, though, is if they have popcorn like an ice cream man, like because I don't know if I want to order it and have them have it get cold by the way by the time that it gets to me. But if there was just a movie theater style dude with a gigantic popcorn thing that I could just get a bucket of popcorn for $8 right there outside my house, I might I might go with it. I think that the food delivery thing is interesting because it betrays what your food experience is how you react to it. Obviously, it's something that they think they can make work in Korea. So I'm guessing CGV concessions are better than AMC theater concessions. There's also another theater chain in the UK that's doing the same thing. I could see maybe some people from Alamo Draft House saying, yeah, but I do like that thing from Alamo Draft House or their popcorn is particularly good at this particular theater. So it's just it just depends on whether the theater had a good food game. And I think what this points to when people come back to the theater in great numbers, hopefully later this year, that theaters will now realize they've got a few more options to supplement their income with. I don't think this changes the theater business, but it gives them some other things that they can do with theaters that would in sometimes otherwise be dark, maybe even still delivering concessions if they've got really high quality food. So yeah, this is fascinating to me. One last thing before we move on to the next thing is that there is a culture of public video game playing in Korea as there is in Japan in a way that is not quite the same in America. So I do wonder how it would translate stateside. NASA announced a pilot program to provide Fitbits to 1000 employees, including 150 astronauts to help detect early symptoms of COVID-19. The pilot program will supplement existing prevention efforts and provide access to a daily check and app to log potential symptoms, body temperatures, and other health metrics. It also tracks changes in heart rate and respiratory rate. The app combines all that data to make recommendations about whether person wearing the Fitbit should go to work, stay home or even get a COVID test. A recent study from Mount Sinai researchers published in the Journal of Medicinal Internet Research found that wearable hardware could predict COVID-19 up to a week before a preliminary chain reaction or PCR test would actually detect it. Fitbit is engaged in similar studies, which are not part of the NASA implementation just yet. So I'm fascinated by this idea. We've long talked about the idea of the quantifiable self, the getting metrics and stuff. All right, we're great at gathering it. What is the worth of it? And this is a great example of the worth of it, both the idea that we saw earlier about the Apple Watch being able to tell, or the sign I think about the Apple being able to tell the COVID stuff, and also this NASA thing. But I think the difference is there's a line between you having a technological solution to making yourself healthier and better, and your employer giving it to you and the lines that they might have to not only the data, but also just any kind of information that they could use at any point for anything. Yeah, I mean, it's all in the implementation, right? Even if Fitbit doesn't get to that point where Mount Sinai got with the Apple Watches of being able to predict accurately whether you have COVID or not ahead of a PCR test, it's still helpful to be like, Hey, you've got the kind of symptoms that you know, maybe you should just stay home, you've got the kind of system symptoms worth getting a test, you might not have it, you might, even if it's less accurate, that's helpful for you. It's helpful as long as it's your data stored under your control, your employer doesn't get to see it, and that there's no policy at your place of employment. I'm not saying NASA does it this way. But if any other place of employment got this, you wouldn't want them saying, Well, your Fitbit told you to stay home and you came into work. And so now you're in trouble. Like you want to right, you want to have some balance there. You also don't want people to be wildly of, you know, avoiding if they're using the Mount Sinai research, and say, And I don't care, I want to endanger my employees. So there needs to be some rules about that. Also, you know, I've got a Fitbit Versa two, I wear it all the time. For the most part, it works great. Every so often, it kind of gets stuck. You know, where I look at my mic, I've been sitting quietly for 30 minutes, like typing, my heart rate is not above 100 right now, that kind of thing. So a little grand assault when you're talking about devices that mostly give you really interesting information sometimes can signal, Hey, there might be something wrong here, which most people would want to know. But yeah, an employer kind of saying, Well, you totally chose the wrong thing, because you're endangering people might be a bit of a false positive that happens. Yeah, and you don't want false positives when you're talking about your health. Hey, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? You want to let us know? Subreddit subreddit, the daily tech news show about Reddit.com get in there and submit a story. Or if you're like, I don't have time to submit stories, just look at the stories everybody else submitted and vote on a couple of them saying, Oh, yeah, that one looks interesting. It always helps us put together our lineup. That's daily tech news show dot Reddit.com. Google and Facebook have had varying levels of restrictions on political ads in the US since before Election Day last November. This has pushed political parties to find other ways to reach their potential donors, especially those large number of small amount donors that have become so important. One technology not under the complete control of Google and Facebook is email. Email lists have continued to be important in politics. Of course, for forever, they haven't gone away, but they have risen in importance during the ad bands. And that means email lists are valuable, leading to more swapping, renting and flat out buying of email lists from each other. There are some downsides with more campaigns using email lists, often with overlapping data, people are getting more emails, which leads to less attention, and more often getting caught in spam filters. So they can become less effective if everybody starts using them. Digital strategist Tim Tegaris told Politico that campaigns are getting creative about that, including more text message appeals, ad buys on other ad platforms like Verizon and AT&T that haven't banned political ads. And of course, the now time honored practice of partnering with social media influencers. Yes, right next to their recommended beauty products, your Instagram favorites will now recommend a local candidate for your local Alderman board. Justin, what's the temperature on this? How much of a temporary thing is this? Where do you see this going? Life finds a way, Tom. And so does political advertising. When you are in this game, and you have to make sure that you are getting your cause or campaign over the hump and spending the money that you have raised, then you have to make sure that the message gets out to the people that are your most likely voters. Obviously, Google and Facebook have been a tremendous ad destination. Oh, really, since 2008, Obama really kind of cracked that code. Of course, that was one of the first major elections where Facebook was a player. But since then, they have both come to dominate ad market, the ad market full stop. We'll see where they wind up with these bands. But the idea of selling email lists goes back to you being able to drop the e mailing lists were really like the beginning of any kind of direct reach out in politics. In fact, it was magazine subscriptions that initially was the way that you could reach out to potential voters and donors. You might not know every second amendment voter in a certain zip code in Alabama, but guns and ammo certainly had a list of subscribers in that area. And you were able to buy that list and send the emails that the mail that you would like where I wonder about this particular trend is does Google, which has a sizable email client in Gmail, do they still wind up playing a role of gatekeeper here to ensure that you can either get on a white list or find some other way to get through the spam? Yeah, he who controls the spam filter controls the email world and Gmail controls a spam filter that affects a huge number of email users out there. So even you know, that's an influence thing for Google, not a revenue thing, at least so far, you know, but that that would be a huge story if somebody found that Google was charging to get white listed for Gmail. Oh, sure, sure. And I think that they would have to do something above board, you know, in that capacity, even if it was just maybe pushing it to the the not the spam filter, but maybe the promotions, it's more like a search engine optimization strategy to make sure your mailing list gets through Gmail's algorithms, right? Yeah, as you well know. Indeed. All right, talk to us about the latest touch trends, Justin, that's why you're here. Well, look, man, clubhouse so hot. It's so hot. It got banned in China, just like Daily Tech News show for the record. Older millennial companies clamor for the clubhouse invite. Sorry, older millennials compare the clamor for the clubhouse invite to the early days of Gmail and even Mark Zuckerberg popped in on clubhouse earlier this week to talk about VR and AR. So none of us here at China banned DTNS are surprised that the New York Times sources say that Facebook is indeed building a clubhouse competitor. It's in the earliest days so early that the sources say the secret code name is even subject to change. So what do we think about Facebook? Copy in clubhouse? Or maybe is this the prelude to just buying it? Oh, Facebook, my gosh, I will I will first say I'm not clubhouse's biggest fan. When it was, you know, it's it's had this sort of like, you know, meteoric rise in popularity, even though it's still just on iOS, a lot of people are like, what's clubhouse? I don't even you know, not not not for me yet. But very kind of trendy. Yeah, you got celebs, you know, people like Zuckerberg getting a lot of attention, Elon Musk is in clubhouse all the time. Everyone's you know, flock into his rooms. All of that, whether or not you like the the kind of we're in a room, it's audio based, the audio is kind of mobile phones. So it's not really all that great. But there's a certain amount of discourse that happens. And certainly, whatever the subject of a room you're in, might be better than the next room. It's kind of what you make of it. And Sarah, please describe it as as what you said in our pre show meeting, because it was it, I think of clubhouse as it's for people who really enjoy meetings. They they like to sit around a table and kind of, you know, maybe they're the person who's running the meeting, you know, we've got these agenda items. Okay, everybody. Sarah, what do you think about this? Raise your hand. Okay, you have talking privileges, you talk. Now, it reminds me of meetings. I am not a huge corporate meeting person. I don't really like meetings, unless they're absolutely necessary. So clubhouse is my favorite thing. Now, should clubhouse be part of Facebook? Well, we've already heard that Twitter is exploring something similar. Facebook notoriously tries out pretty much everything that is trendy when it comes to new social networks and what might be sticking, whether it's Facebook itself, or something that gets added to Instagram, there are varying levels of success where that sometimes has worked out for Facebook in the past. You know, Facebook is not the like cool kid place, though. So whatever clubhouse turns into eventually, right now, that's definitely what it is. It's the new hotness. Facebook is not that it is, it is so not that I don't know how they replicate something like this. I also don't think they're going to buy clubhouse. I don't think the clubhouse folks want to sell. Well, and in the current antitrust climate, even if clubhouse did want to sell, I don't know if Facebook could get approved to buy it because that's the whole thing like you just buy up all the competition. So yeah. Right. Faith Clubhouse. It's it's for people who like meetings. That's the defense rest. Love it. And maybe you like meetings, in which case, I have a couple. So look, I will say this, that many, many, many people don't talk on the Internet for hours a day like we do. And for those folks, like having a soapbox to get your get your your opinions off. God bless you. Yeah, that's a very good point. Very good point. Well, I've got really great news for everybody. I know this is just going to make your Thursday or Friday, depending on where you live in the world. Pigs can play video games, everyone. You heard that right. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University said they trained two Ponopinto micro pigs and two Yorkshire pigs to use an arcade style joystick to steer an onscreen cursor into a target that was displayed on a wall in front of the pigs. Now, when the pigs were successful, they learned over time they'd get a food reward. So they were like, OK, we want that. However, the scientists say during testing, the food dispenser broke and the pigs kept playing apparently because they enjoyed the encouragement they were getting from the scientists to keep getting things right. Now, you might say this is amazing. Wow, you know, eSports really is going to change the game of the Yorkshire pigs. Hamlet was better at the game than Omlet. Both struggled at harder levels of the Ponopinto micro pigs. Ebony hit the target 34% of the time. Ivory was a better shot at 76% Pea Pea Sports get that's man. So I'm saying that Ebony is suss. That's right. I know it's like, come on. What's going on? I just love the idea that the pigs are like food. We love food. There's no food, but everyone's still really happy with us when we do it right. Let's keep playing. This is fun. We'll just keep playing. Listen, as Winston Churchill once said, dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, pigs look you right in the eye and challenge you to video games. Yeah, and challenge you to grab your controller. This is great. I love I love that the pigs just kept playing because they're like, it's fun. We get praise. You know, anybody who's we talked about training dogs earlier, praise works just as often as treats, depending on the dog. Maybe Ebony not so praise motivated as some of the other pigs here. Right. Yeah, I mean, I want a pig pets, a pet pig, but very much already. Now I want it that much more. Yeah. And the video game to go with it. Exactly. All right. Yeah. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Josh wrote it and said there was a story on your show the other day about transparent wood. Now I cannot stop thinking about Star Trek for when the crew travels back in time. And Scott, he gives the formula for transparent aluminum to a scientist in San Francisco. It's awesome, leach easy Star Trek, but still worth it. Mm, with the nuclear vessels are. Alameda. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Thank you, Josh, for representing all the people on Twitter and in Discord, who also were like, wait, transparent wood, what about transparent aluminum? Yes, someday we will make that Star Trek dream come true. Thank you, Josh. If anything, we talk about it on the show reminds you of a movie or anything else that you have on your mind, you can send that to feedback at daily tech news show dot com. We want to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. They include Paul Reese, Ragnald Varmadal and Jeff Wilkes. Thanks to Justin Robert Young as well, coming all the way from Austin, Texas. Justin, what's been going on? Well, we are in the process of moving out here to Texas, but that does not mean that the politics has stopped, which means you can still get new episodes of the politics, politics, politics program on the pod catcher of your choice or, you know, politics, politics politics dot com as well. So go ahead and check that out. Last episode, we talked a little bit more about the recall and we're actually in the Friday episode going to update that story a little bit, looking far more likely that the biggest story in politics is going to be a recall election for California governor Gavin Newsom. Man, if you weren't moving to Texas, I'd say you should run. I feel like we are going to see a lot of people, including a lot of names that might get mentioned on DTNS, that will wind up throwing their hat into the into the ring for California governor. One of the one of the editors at Tech TV back in the day got on the ballot back on the in the grade three. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good time. Well, folks, you may not realize it, but Daily Tech News shows corporate overlords, a brilliant LLC, also known as me, has a lot of other podcasts. I do know a little more. I do work in Sanity with Patrick Beja. Ritstrafalino hosts Daily Tech headlines. I co-host it's a thing with Molly Wood and we're adding a new one to the bunch. It is a weekly tech update in Spanish. N-T-X-N-A-T-E-H-E- or X. N-A-T-X is a podcast con la información que necesitas en el tiempo que tienes más tecnología en menos tiempo. Hosted by someone who actually speaks Spanish, Dan Campos, you can go subscribe right now. DailyTechnewshow.com slash N-T-X. Tom, that was great. You never cease to amaze me. De nada. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. I can't say that in Spanish. I would have trust me if I could have. You can find out more at DailyTechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with none other than Shannon Morse. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.