 Coming up on DTNS, it's Science Week, Aaron Carson from CNET helps us understand the tech will need to terraform Mars, plus Quibi is launching, and New Tech Company efforts to fight COVID-19. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 6, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And on the show is producer Roger Chang. Ah, thank you once again to staff reporter for CNET, Aaron Carson for joining us. Welcome back to the show. Good to have you again, Aaron. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to talking about Mars with Aaron. We were just all talking about what's going on in our neighborhoods. One of us had a bluegrass concert happened in their neighborhoods. Some of us have coyotes. You can get that conversation and more on our wider show, Good Day Internet, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft announced it updated Skype to allow people to join cross-platform video conferences and download Skype without an account. Microsoft also published a webpage to allow anyone to start a free Skype meeting from any device from a browser. Foursquare announced it plans to merge with the location data company Factual. The merged company will keep the Foursquare name and Foursquare CEO David Shim will stay as CEO. Post merger the company will have location data sets, including 500 million devices and 105 million points of interest across 190 countries. After announcing at CES that it was entering the mobile market, TCL has unveiled the sub 500 TCL 10 Pro, the 10L and the 10 5G, all of them going to be sub $500, all set for release in Q2 of this year. The 6.53 inch LCD display TCL 10 5G is powered by a Snapdragon 765G processor. First the new one Qualcomm's first chipset with an integrated 5G modem. The TCL 10 Pro, technically the flagship in the lineup has a 6.47 inch curved OLED display and an end display fingerprint sensor that only has a Snapdragon 675 processor. The entry level 10L has a 6.53 inch LCD display, Snapdragon 665 processor and a rear fingerprint sensor. GameIndustry.biz reports that the Entertainment Software Association has notified partners that a reimagined E3 2021 will be held next year in 2021, June 15th to 17th. They canceled this year's event. At the time of the canceling, the ESA said it was exploring options with the members to coordinate an online experience to showcase industry announcements in June 2020, but we don't have any official plans on that yet. 25 privacy experts from seven research institutions across Europe have published a white paper proposing a protocol for Bluetooth based COVID-19 tracking called Decentralized Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing or DPPPT. The design uses local on-device processing of contact tracing and ephemeral Bluetooth identifiers. IDs would not be centralized reducing the privacy risks. It would also be easy to dismantle once the crisis has passed. That's one of the key points with all of this kind of stuff is how easy is it to get rid of when we don't need it anymore. Work from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence notes that lithium mines from Australia to Chile are having a hard time getting their shipments out. They're mining the lithium, but they can't get vessels and containers due to COVID-19 restrictions. Less lithium shipments mean fewer batteries can be made for electronics devices, though demand for such devices is also low right now, so it's hard to tell what effect this will have. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that some non-China based users had calls mistakenly routed through China, citing a failure to implement geofencing best practices as the company added server capacity to handle increased usage. That is an understatement. He didn't say how many users were affected, however. All right, Sarah, let's talk a little more about Quibi. Oh, let's. Yes. The premium short form mobile-only video service Quibi launched Monday. That's today, April 6th, offering 50 shows at launch with hundreds promised by the end of the year. Quibi offers a 90-day free trial for either the ad-supported version, which will cost $4.99 per month after the trial period is over, or you can go for the ad-free version, which is also part of the three-month trial. So I'm not really sure why you wouldn't choose that, but it is $7.99 per month afterward. So if you're one of those people who forgets, then you'd be paying more. Episodes are five to 10 minutes in length, and Quibi's turnstile feature lets two video streams optimized for landscape and portraits send to you at one time so you can switch back and forth between them pretty seamlessly. Quibi reviews very mixed, a lack of multi-users accounts, limitation to one stream at a time so you couldn't really share an account with anybody unless you guys were really good about sharing your time. The inability to stream, to share to a larger screen, additional bandwidth usage for those two video streams on the turnstile feature, and no screen-shotting allowed or some of the gripes out of the gate. Yeah, people seem to like turnstile, and they seem to like the content well enough. It's just all those other things that are problems. Quick clarification, it's free for the ad-supported version. It's free for the un-ad-supported version. No, when I signed up, it said you can do $4.99 a month for nothing, or if you choose ad-free, you have to pay now. Oh, yeah, I don't know why I have a different version than you do. So you got the ad-free version for 90 days for free? Correct, I pay $7.99 per month starting in June if I don't quit beforehand. I wasn't allowed to choose that version. Interesting. Okay, so, well, breaking news right there, I don't know what that's about. And it's funny, because that's why I thought a couple of the reviewers, I was like, well, they got that wrong, they just weren't looking hard enough. I wonder why that is. We'll investigate that further, it's probably user error on my part. But yes, Quibi's here and you can watch it, have a ball. I tried it, watched a few episodes. Of course, I watched the amazing Fresh Daily from Rotten Tomatoes, where my wife works, that was awesome. It really was, actually, I really liked it. But a lot of the stuff I still felt like was kind of slow, even though I knew it wasn't more than 10 minutes. I would get partway through like the Liam Hensworth, Kristoff Waltz, great cast. I was just like, I don't know if I could finish this, even though it's short. Well, you know, in the age of YouTube stars and all the other platforms that have changed the way that a lot of people consume content, particularly on mobile or on the go, 10 minutes is a really long time. We're constantly, you know, let's make everything snackable kind of thing. My biggest gripe with Quibi, and it's not really a gripe because it's absolutely not the company's fault. You know, they've had this roadmap for some time at CES. We knew that this was going to launch in April. That hasn't changed. They didn't push it out due to the fact that everybody's kind of stuck at home. But man, could the timing be worse? Something that is mobile only, specifically mobile only, almost to the point of kind of gimmicky mobile where it's like, this is how you do it. You can do landscape or portrait. That part is really seamless and very slick. You know, even when there's graphics, they all kind of change when you go back and forth. How many times are you going back and forth between landscape and portrait within a single video? You're either going to be like, I want to watch it this way or I want to watch it this way. And you're not going to be, you know, the novelty of going back and forth throughout something that you're actually paying attention to. No one's going to do that. But the bigger issue is to not have something that can air play or Chromecast or in any other way be part of a big screen, even on the web, even some sort of a desktop version with a with a bigger screen right now when nobody wants to be stuck on a smaller device as possible. And even people who prefer smaller smartphones, you know, you just you just prefer the smaller smartphone and you might like your content watched on a larger screen. Then, you know, you kind of get cut out of the coolness factor of this as well. So I really wonder how much of the backlash because I've seen I've seen a lot of well, I've seen a little bit of backlash from some very loud people who say this is the wrong idea. Equibi's going to change the direction really quickly. I wonder how much of that just has to do with the short term situation that we're all in and how much of that is just very bad planning. Equibi suggests you could, you know, use it when you're taking a break. It's important to take breaks, even when you're working from home. I suppose you could use it when you're waiting in line to get into the grocery store. Erin, has any of this convinced you to try Equibi? I haven't tried to just yet, but yeah, I mean, to basically echo you guys. I think it's an interesting proposition right now that if these short videos are the kinds of things that maybe you would watch on the bus to work or on your lunch break, and and there's not really a whole lot of that happening right now. And I think for a lot of people have more time on their hands than than just like 10 minutes. Yeah, well, they've got 90 days. Maybe maybe hopefully things will have to lose it up by then and we'll see more people trying it. Who knows? They need a hit. That's what everybody says. They need a hit. They need their Game of Thrones or whatever to really bring people in. Well, we'll see if they get one. Let's keep you up to date on some of the things that technology companies are doing to try to help COVID-19. Tesla posted a video of its ventilator designed from Tesla Model 3 car parts. It's using the infotainment touch screen from the Model 3 as the interface and that infotainment devices motherboard to drive valves and control gas flow. The device is not yet ready for approval in manufacture, though. Meanwhile, a team of biomedical engineering experts from UK's Cranfield University, Georgia Tech and Emory University have developed a way to use bag valve masks. Those are the plastic masks that are usually hand pumped. Emergency services, first responders usually use those. They've developed a way to use those when ventilators aren't available as sort of a fill-in ventilator. Not the first team to work on this, but their design uses stock sheet metal, plastic gears, and works with common power adapters, including 12-volt car batteries. So this would be good in rural areas, less developed areas, to be able to squeeze these bags automatically and ventilate two patients at a time, freeing up the more complicated and sophisticated ventilators for the people who really, really do need them. And Apple has sourced 20 million masks from its supply chain for health care workers. That's up from the 10 million they reported last week. And shipped an Apple-designed face shield, or several of them, to a hospital in Santa Clara Valley last week and saying they hope to be able to ship a million of these by the end of this week to various health care outlets and be able to continually ship these face shields at a million a week. Finally, Creative Destruction Lab, which is an accelerator. It aims to accelerate research by academics and startups across multiple sciences, has added a new area separate from its health sciences area called CDL Recovery. The area will work with twice the pace of its normal areas to turn science and research into scalable products and services to address the consequences of COVID-19. So they're already focusing on not just beating the disease, but helping with the fallout from both the health and economics standpoint after we've started to get a handle on it. Lots of good stuff going on here, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, we have talked about the idea of, listen, companies that have got warehouse, they've got workers, they've got infrastructure, they have manufacturing parts, they have manufacturing equipment. The job that they want to be doing, well, that's not happening right now. How do we spend this around and get some good stuff going for the world? Whether it is, yeah, the real fancy stuff or something that's a little bit more, I don't know, homebrewed. And the more stories that we hear about this, the better I feel that a company that has the infrastructure to do good, we hear more and more stories of that very thing happening. Erin, what do you think about these developments and so many others that we've been seeing? I'm always just kind of reminded of the phrase that necessity is the mother of invention. So it's kind of an interesting moment to have all these companies having this very real and kind of emergency situation kind of opportunity to put into practice their mantras of moving fast and being innovative. Yeah, it's good to see. And the efforts that we're talking about on this show, anyway, are not people doing back of the envelope calculations. They are working with regulatory agencies. They're working with healthcare experts. They're working with people who know how ventilators work, who are medical experts who know how this stuff works. There are lots of efforts out there that are just kind of trying stuff and throwing it at the wall too that we don't even talk about that could lead to something. And that's actually kind of what the accelerator is hoping is like, all right, let's take academics, let's get them the mentorship from the people who know how this stuff is supposed to work so that they're working on something that can actually turn into a viable product that can pass regulatory approval, that is HIPAA compliant, that is useful in a clinical situation, and then get them to be able to make that product viable from a market standpoint, that it can be made, that somebody can ship it and all of that sort of thing. It's complex, but with so many minds working on it, we're seeing a lot of progress here. As a result of many instances of unwanted people accessing Zoom calls without permission, some folks have dubbed the practice Zoom bombing. Several school districts, including New York City Department of Education and Clark County Public Schools in Nevada have banned teachers from using Zoom, and others are reassessing its use and updating security practices. The US Department of Justice's website warns that federal, state and local law enforcement will pursue charges for Zoom bombing, including for a quote, disrupting a public meeting, computer intrusion, using a computer to commit a crime, hate crimes, fraud, or transmitting threatening communications, end quote. Zoom announced that as of April 5th, it requires passwords to enter calls by meeting ID and turn on virtual waiting rooms by default, which requires hosts to manually add call participants in an effort to lock down anybody getting into the Zoom call that wasn't invited. Yeah, I mean, this is the fallout from more than a week of a constant drumbeat of privacy issues, security issues. As we mentioned, Zoom did the right thing near the end of last week and said, okay, we're gonna stop working on features that are not essential and really focus on clamping down on these problems, and I commended them for that. That's the right thing to do, but this is the result of not having got to that earlier is you're gonna see a lot of organizations decide, you know what? We're not gonna wait for these things to be fixed. We're just going to use something else in the meantime. And as we mentioned, there are other options out there. We were talking about on good day internet about Webex and we talked on the top of the show here about Skype. Erin, what do you find yourself using most often or are you into many of these kinds of meetings? It kinda depends on the situation. I've used Zoom, you know, with some of my friends were kind of more into like Google Hangouts and that kind of thing, Skype with my parents. So I try and be like platforming now. Which is depends on what I, you know, like I'm with you. I'm using whatever people are using for the most part. I mean, we use Skype for this show because it works well with Streamlabs OBS, which is what we use to stream it live on Twitch. But if someone wants to meet on Zoom, I don't have a philosophical objection to that. But I could see where schools would say, you know what? Yes, we know you fixed this supposedly but you've lost our trust and we're just gonna go elsewhere for the time being. I have not, gosh, I've only really been on a Zoom call or two since the usage skyrocketed as much as it has for the company. But I have heard reports more than a couple of what it feels like to be Zoom bombed. And it's not just someone being like, hi guys, look at me, I got in, it's bad stuff. So yeah, if you're a teacher, your school system, you just go, uh-uh, we're not taking chances, we're gonna do something else until you can guarantee that that never happens again. All right, let's talk about something Uber's doing, announcing the addition of a work hub section to adapt for drivers in the United States. This is, if you're a driver, this is the screens you see when you're picking up fares. The work hub section will list job openings in the United States in delivery, food production, the grocery industry, et cetera. Uber will not take a commission for these listings, they're just trying to help find some work for their drivers who are not getting fares right now because nobody is going anywhere. Uber is working with the UPS, FedEx, Pepsi, Walgreens, McDonald's and more to provide these listings. And Uber said it will also reach out to more than 240,000 drivers with commercial licenses to try to connect them with opportunities in logistics companies. Commercial licenses allow you to drive a few different kinds of vehicles that a regular license doesn't. Uber's also using its Uber Works staffing platform in Chicago, Dallas and Miami to fill in staffing gaps for temp workers partnering with places like Domino's or Target's shipped service to hire out work drivers and encouraging drivers to sign up for Uber Eats if they haven't because then they can keep driving by delivering food to people and they have seen significant growth in Uber Eats since mid-March. Whatever you feel about Uber, I'm not suggesting that this would like forgive all the ills that it may have caused over the years, but don't you feel like this is a pretty solid way of trying to, if they're certainly not gonna solve the problem of their workers being out of work, but helping them to find another job. Now, I think you could make the argument that they should also maybe be providing healthcare and they've been doing things like that as well. But to the extent that this goes, it's a good thing, right? I would say so, yeah, I mean, if you've got a commercial license, you can work for some of the other companies. Maybe you wanted to and they're just, I don't know, weren't enough job openings. Well, and there's a surgeon, at least temporary, we hope job openings for this very COVID-19 reason, that's a great service to provide. Yes, you make a good point, Tom, that some of the things that people complain about when it comes to Uber has to do with treating your workers better all around, even when times are a little bit rosier, but this is great. I think if anybody has better access to be able to work in sectors that need the work and for people who need the money and have the free time, that's a win-win. All right, folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, you can get them subscribed to dailytechheadlines.com. It's Science Week here at DTNS. All our discussion topics all week long are gonna revolve around where science and technology intersect. We've got special guests all week to help us talk about them. Erin edited a series about Mars colonization for CNET. And Erin, you have focused specifically, you not only edited, but you wrote the article on terraforming Mars. First of all, for those who don't already know and haven't read all the science fiction books about it, what is terraforming? Yeah, so very broadly speaking, terraforming is this idea of essentially engineering a planet like Mars to make it a little bit more like Earth, a little bit more suitable for humans in terms of things like temperature and atmospheric pressure, being able to breathe, which is a good thing. Yes, and then why would you terraform instead of just putting up a dome or coming up with another way to deal with the atmosphere? Why go to that trouble of trying to change an entire planet? Sure, so this is where it's a bit of like a philosophical proposition. If we have this goal as like the human race to not only get to Mars, but stay, we eventually are, you know, one scientist I talked to kind of put it like this, we don't just want like a trailer park there with a bunch of park spaceships and domes. Like we want this to be a place where eventually we could go outside without a pressurized suit, breathe the air, not immediately fly from radiation, and maybe one day very far off, even have agriculture or, you know, set up economies where the planet itself could be self-reliant. And so you'll need to take some pretty drastic steps before you can get to that point. Yeah, it sounds like it would be very hard to supply Mars. It's a long way, it costs a lot to get there. It'd be so much easier if once you're there, you can create resources. Like you say, agricultural resources, mining operations, that's all easier if you don't have to also set up a dome for all of that stuff that you're talking about. That makes perfect sense. I know in your article you talked about plans that involve giant mirrors or just like flipping the script and saying, no, we want factories to pump CO2 in the atmosphere because that'll warm up Mars. What kinds of things are practical? What kinds of things are being considered to be able to make terraforming a reality? Yeah, so there's a lot of different theories about how to do it. One pretty notable one that you guys might be familiar with is Elon Musk's slogan of nuke Mars. And the idea there is that if you use nuclear bombs, you could essentially melt the polar ice caps and theoretically release all the greenhouse gases that are stored in the ice in order to build up an atmosphere that eventually could retain heat and warm up the planet and all that. The giant space mirrors work in a similar way. You would be directing the sunlight to the planet. You can to raise the temperature. It's about negative 81 degrees Fahrenheit on average. So as you might imagine, there's no liquid on the surface. And yeah, and there's things like this idea of building factories whose sole purpose would just be to pump out greenhouse gases. So if it's that cold, and as I understand it, there's not a lot of water, how long would it take to get enough CO2 into the atmosphere to actually make a difference to warm it up? Right, so the scale of this kind of entire project is sort of like a two-fold kind of situation. So in 2018, NASA put out this study that essentially said like, we don't have the technology right now to do any of this. And so you're looking at a chunk of time where humans get tech savvy enough to actually start to terraform the planet. From there, we're potentially looking at thousands of years before we might have this kind of idealistic like verdant lush Mars that I think, some folks, the big thinkers in the industry would like to see, but this is like by no means something that's gonna happen like with any of our lifetime. So bad news, sorry. Well, but if we just nuke the ice caps, wouldn't that speed things up? So one kind of interesting thing about that theory, NASA says that it actually doesn't think that there is enough greenhouse gas stored in the polar ice cap at the moment to like accomplish thickening the atmosphere. And so the fear there is that if you did nuke the ice caps, all of that gas, which is immediately like double mate, the second it was kind of exposed. So, and something that's kind of interesting about this too is that you have all of these theories. And if you talk to some of the scientists who deal on this idea of terraforming, there's this idea that theoretically it's doable, practically it's not. And then you have this whole vast amount of unknowns, the things that are gonna go wrong, kind of in between us starting a terraforming project and actually being able to kick up the temperature a few degrees. Now, but let's say it's gonna take a long time for us to get the technology that could reliably and safely increase the temperature from negative 81 Fahrenheit up to something even marginally livable. Or you mentioned a smaller scale project. Tell me about aerogels and how would those be used in the meantime? Sure, so I spoke with some researchers who are working on this idea of using aerogel, which is this really kind of interesting, it's one of the lightest solids that exists. It's kind of brittle. If you've ever seen it or held it on this, it looks like you have a cloud and cube shape on your hand. But so then this very preliminary kind of experimentation about this idea of, if you could build a structure, something like a greenhouse on the Martian surface, the aerogel could actually help warm the surface. And so the idea here is that, it might be a lot more reasonable, a lot more doable to work on this smaller scale and be working with like plots of land and kind of smaller areas, using something like aerogel to specifically seat somewhere than actually just kind of going all in and be like, yeah, let's warm up the whole planet. So a little bit more than a dome because you're trying to create a localized terraforming, essentially, but just going piece by piece rather than trying to do the whole planet at once, it sounds like. Basically, yeah, essentially. All right, well, I'm ready to go. Let's hop that rocket to Mars, give me some aerogel, I'll start building my greenhouse. You've convinced me, I'm in. Tell us how it is, Dom. I will. No, you guys are all gonna go, I'll just be on Earth, being like, oh, it's fun. Better out there. The Skype lag will be a little longer, but I'm sure we can still make it work. Of course, you know, we are experts, we're good at this. Everybody also good at what you do are all the people who join in our conversation on Discord every day. If you're not already in there and you'd like to be part of the conversation joined by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's check out the mail bag. Mike in sunny Florida had kind of a funny response to our conversation on Friday about, you know, that the overall sort of good mood that it seems like a lot of people are in, not because we're having a hard time globally, but just this idea of people kind of sticking their neck out for each other a little bit more, being more positive, that 1999 style positivity. Mike says, you could kind of look at it in the sense of positive people being like protons. They're the people that provide services and make things first responders, very good protons. Then you've got your ordinary people, they're neutrons, they're just, you know, they're there. They're not doing anything right or wrong. Then you've got negative people, those are the electrons. Those are the people who often are very vocal on the internet. You might call them trolls at times. Mike says, yeah, exactly. They're zoom bombing, exactly. That's an electron. And normal life says, Mike, the protons and the neutrons make up the core of life, the electrons buzz around doing what they do. But these past couple of weeks we've had the introduction of a wildcard particle, antimatter. When the wildcard particle is in wide distribution, you have to get out of the particle stream and take shelter, circle the wagons, get the protons and neutrons safely together. Right now, the protection we have from that is at home. That interferes with the electrons in the basement. Now, you know, I've seen a lot of really nice basements in my day, but we get your point, Mike. Mike says the electrons and the trolls are now outnumbered. That's a crazy analogy, but I think I get it. And what I'm gonna pull out of it is that the, the protons and the neutrons in his analogy always outnumbered the electrons. It just took the current situation maybe for us to realize it. Yes, yes. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. You're all protons, but you already knew that, including Paul Reese, Steve, Aya Darula and Mark Gibson. Also thanks to Aaron Carson kicking off our Science Week. Aaron, so nice to have you. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Yeah, I'm over at CNAD.com and you can also find me on Twitter at AaronCarson. Don't forget, folks, that you can support all kinds of people right now. If you've got a little extra time, and we know not everybody's got extra money, but if you have a little extra money too, support artists. One artist you can support is Tandagosa, creating drawings, illustrations and art streams. Check out his Flash Arrow, Flash Arrow mashup art, for instance. You can find Tandagosa at patreon.com slash T-O-N-D-A-G-O-S-S-A, that's patreon.com slash Tandagosa. And of course, thank you to everybody who's been covering for the folks who are having a hard time by stepping up their patronage at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. If you've got feedback for us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you'd like to join us live, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, that's 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Science Week march is on with Dr. Kiki joining us. Patrick Basch will be here too. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program. He he he he he he he he he.