 Coming up on DTNS, Google launches a subscription app service, the state of world robotics, and what you probably shouldn't should not get excited about regarding Google and Quantum Supremacy. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 23rd, 2019, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking a lot about dog breeds and the technology. No, just about dog breeds, a lot about dog breeds, though. If you're interested in dog breeds, today's Good Day Internet episode is for you. Come hang out with us and learn more about the world we live in at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. On Friday, we mentioned that some Tivo users were seeing ads played before the recorded shows. Tivo has since confirmed this is not just a test. And a spokesperson told Light Reading dot com, quote, DVR advertising is going to be a permanent part of the service. We expect to be fully rolled out to all eligible retail devices within 90 days. Friday afternoon, YouTube announced it was changing its verification policy to leave all existing verifications in place. It also decided to continue to let channels pay for verification when they are apply, not pay, apply for verification. That would be a really bad misunderstanding. Apply for verification when they reach 100,000 subscribers. YouTube will make sure channels are authentic before verifying them and may still remove verification in cases where it was applied mistakenly. YouTube will also make the change from a check mark or music note to a gray background for verified channels, but that will now happen next year instead of October. So our whole conversation on Friday apparently did the trick and they changed everything. Thanks, YouTube. You're the best man. Samsung's Galaxy Fold is finally arriving in the United States later this week in two variants, an AT&T version that will be in retail stores, also online and through Best Buy and an unlocked version available in select Best Buy stores and also online. It's not available from T-Mobile or Samsung's own online store. The Galaxy Fold will launch in the U.S. with Samsung's premier service, which includes device and accessory support for the Galaxy Bud's headphones, Samsung's custom air and mid-fiber cover for the Fold, etc. And pricing still starts at $1,980. In a response to an inquiry from German legislators, Facebook revealed details about the currencies used to back up the Libra cryptocurrency stablecoin. Libra's reserve is planned to be made up of 50% U.S. dollars, 18% euros, 14% yen, 11% British pounds, and 7% Singapore dollars. The actual assets used in the reserve will be a combination of a pool of cash and very short-term government securities in those currencies' denominations, if you're curious. The Consumer Technology Association released the official display definition for 8K sets, which includes a minimum 7,680 x 4,320 resolution, support for 24, 30, and 60 frames per second, production of 10-bit color, support for key HDR functions, and HGCP 2.2 level content protection, and the ability to upscale any video to 8K. Devices can start using the logo representing these specs on January 1, 2020. AMD decided high demand and the need to build up sufficient stock for the launch as reasons for the delay. AMD also announced that the next generation threadripper processors will come to market in November 2. Those chips will start at 24 cores, although no other product details on that are announced. Let's talk a little bit about Google Assistant. Let's do it. So Google announced that users can now opt in to let people potentially view transcriptions of Google Assistant recordings. Existing Assistant users will have to confirm the new voice and audio activity setting before any human review might occur, and only .2% of snippets are reviewed, so a very small percentage. Google will also release a Google Assistant hot-word sensitivity setting, which lets you balance accidental activation versus the ease of being heard in a noisy environment. And Google says it will be more stringent about excluding accidental activation from human review even when the user has opted in. Yeah, I like the sensitivity thing. It kind of helps us wrap our heads around the idea that, hey, accidental activation happens because it's trying to make sure that it hears you. So you may not be heard as often if you make it less sensitive, but you'll have fewer accidental activation. So putting the control in the consumer's hand, I like that. Overall, this story is one, and we had Facebook last week saying, we will be sure to ask people, do you want to have your recordings reviewed? Not all recordings are reviewed. Mind you, keep that in mind. Only 0.2% of the people who opt in get reviewed. But this is not going to change anything. What's going to happen is something like this is going to happen again, and people are going to have to throw a fit because companies just don't want you to opt in. They want you to opt out because that means they don't have to think about it, and you're going to have to force them to do opt-ins like this sadly. Well, and there's enough of that creep factor that consumers have gotten wind of where companies have to offer this option. Okay, let us know if we can do this. If so, that's super helpful for us, and we make your product better. But it's very hard to spin the, let us just make your product better. We're not trying to be creepy. We want to get as much of your voices as possible. We promise we won't do anything wrong. That doesn't really fly these days. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, this is an example of companies should be looking at any time they use your data and specifically delineating how they do it, at minimum, transparent in how they do it. That was to me, the biggest fault here was that they weren't laying out the fact that they were doing this. And I think it's a double thing. It was partly because they just didn't anticipate that people would care that much. It's a very small amount of data and it's being used by the company. The company already has all your data anywhere. They weren't sending it out to advertisers or anything like that in this case. But also, I think they just, you know, they didn't realize how much people would mind not being asked. And I'm always saying if you just ask people to opt in, you avoid these problems, because right from the get go, they've agreed to it. But I don't expect things to change. It's also interesting to me how much the idea that, oh, a human person, a human like me might be listening to something that I said, however innocuous it is to my smart speaker, the AI robot hearing it, not really the issue. The issue, the underlying issue is, oh, another person might have heard what I'm saying. I am bothered by that. And then they'll tell two friends. Exactly. So I wanted her to turn her lights down at 9 p.m. last night. Tom added chocolate chips to a shopping list. Did you hear that? That's the latest. Google announced that Google Play Pass will launch soon, giving Android users access to more than 350 apps, including games. So not just games. This is different than Apple Arcade. It's $4.99 a month, though. So it's got the same price as Apple Arcade. But unlike Apple Arcade, Google is not funding the apps. These are all apps that already exist on the Play Store. If you subscribe and already have an app, Google Play Pass will then upgrade your app to remove ads or unlock all the in-app purchases. Among the non-games in Google Play Pass are things like AccuWeather or Haikyu Recorder, which is a very popular one. Play Pass subscriptions can be shared to up to five family members. Google will pay developers based on screen time and openings of apps. There's an algorithm that's going to pay them. We'll see how much developers like that. Google is going to do some specials too, 10 days free, first year $1.99 a month if you pay for it all at once. Coming to the US this week and other countries soon. Well, somebody who doesn't play a lot of games. I mean, I don't have an Android device, so I'm not in the Google Play Store. But if I think about, okay, well, the store that I do have access to, would $5 a month for non-game apps be worth it to me? There are certain apps that I pay for. Tweetbot is a great example, although that's usually a one-time fee when they upgrade their app, which is once every couple of years. I can't really... I'm struggling to find a five-app situation where I'm like, yeah, $5 a month makes sense to me as an ongoing payment fee. This is about games. I mean, this is not for you. This, even if you had an Android device, this would not be for you. This is for somebody who's like, I spent about $5 a month on games anyway. So give me this. And I get weather apps for free without being bugged constantly to upgrade to the premium version. I'm in for that. So it's an interesting approach to say, we know mostly people are going to use this for games, but why limit it? Let's throw in some other stuff too. Whereas Apple takes the approach of we're very focused. We want people to know exactly what they're going to get. We want to fund the games directly to make them happen. That's another reason it's just games. So I'll be interesting to see how much uptake this gets. Certainly, Android developers always looking for more efforts to monetize. So they may be willing to do this, even if it's a little opaque, how they're getting paid through the algorithm. We'll see, though. Yeah, I would be interested to hear from a developer on if the idea of screen time and how long an app is open feels fair based on the work that got put into it ahead of time. I'll tell you how they're going to determine that, that first check. If they get a check, they're like, wow, we made a lot more than we usually do. This feels fair. The Wall Street Journal reports that its sources claim that Snap has documented Facebook's alleged anti-competitive moves in a collection of files that Snap has named Project Voldemort. Offenses reportedly include preventing people from linking to Snapchat profiles from within Facebook properties and intentionally suppressing Snapchat-related content. Also reportedly, Snap management said that Instagram was blocking searches for Snapchat-related content, including the hashtag Snapchat, that actual hashtag and also filters related to it. I think I know what to make of this story. I've been working on this one in my head for a while, because the conclusion you might be tempted to draw is that Snapchat was compiling this as part of the FTC investigation into Facebook, which maybe the FTC went to Facebook's competitor and said, hey, can you compile a bunch of dirty things about them? But I doubt that. I really do. It's possible. The other thing would be if Snapchat decided to do this as a public relations campaign against Facebook to show how they'd been mistreated, but that would be public. And this is something where it's Wall Street Journal sources. I think Snap knows that if they produced this, they wouldn't get the reaction they want, because people would immediately go, oh, you're trying to smear Facebook. Whereas if it looks like they were compiling it, maybe for a legal reason, and then it leaked out to the Wall Street Journal, who does this leak benefit? Justin Robert Young is always quick to ask. This leak benefits Snap. So my guess is, Snap just, I don't know, maybe decided to leak this to the Wall Street Journal as a way to get the press bump and public relations bump out of it without the blowback of, oh, but you're smearing your competitor. Well, and also, I mean, Project Voldemort, I mean, who's going to know about that unless somebody at Snap was like, hey, Wall Street Journal, just to put the IC on the cake that Facebook is the meanie here, that's what we're calling this internally. Right. You don't collect a bunch of evidence for the FTC and be like, and we got it, Project Voldemort, how cool is that FTC? And Harry Potter, whatever. It could have been any of the characters. Seems unlikely to be. So, yeah. I mean, so the question now is, okay, well, I mean, can Facebook via Instagram block something like a search for hashtag Snapchat and not be anti-competitive? I would think they can, but that there might be something to argue there. That just makes me think this even more is a battle for public opinion where Snap wants to be like, yeah, you should keep investigating them and keep being mad at them, but not us and maybe come use us because we're being mistreated by them too. Kind of feels like the story there. Hey, the International Federation of Robotics released its report on 2018. I know it's September 2019, but it takes a while for them to really comb through the numbers and it's good news for robotics in general. 422,000 robots shipped worldwide in 2018 up 6% year over year. First time the number was above 400,000. Now, for a lot of reasons, shipments are expected to fall in 2019 once they come over this year's number, but they do expect a rebound to happen after that with an expected 12% a year growth in shipping of robots from 2020 to 2022. Logistic systems like those used in autonomous vehicles represent about 41% of all units sold, followed by inspection and maintenance robots at 39%. Service robots aimed at consumers was a smaller amount, but was up 15%. Asia remains the largest market with growth in with Japanese installation rising a lot, offsetting declines in China and Korea. Overall growth in robotics installations in Asia was 1%. A couple of other interesting numbers here. The number two market for robotics is Europe. Europe grew 14% and the number three is the Americas, which grew 20%. The top five markets for robotics installations in the world representing 74% of the installations in the world. 74% of the installations go to China, number one, Japan, number two, Korea, number three, then the United States and Germany. Automotive remains the top industry for robots. That's been that way for decades. 30% of the total supply in 2018, 2% increase in installations there. Electronics is number two, but declined 14%. Electronics robots really got hit by trade restrictions because a lot of the parts come from China to the United States. Metal and machinery is the third largest industry for robots. If I were to make you guess which country metal and machinery robotics was happening in, I bet you'd get it wrong. Here are the top four. Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium. Now I know the Finland, Swedish, Swiss and Belgian robotics metal people in the audience got it right, but everybody else I bet got it right. Patrick Beja, who I'm sure is listening right now, even though it's quite late where he is, is like Finland, we all knew that. But yeah, that was actually news to me. Yeah, I thought that was interesting that the metal and machinery industry so strong in those countries, which I did not realize as well. So always some interesting stuff in here and I think it shows that robotics still very industrial. It's making some headway in consumer robots, but that's still a very small if growing segment and very strong in Asia unless you're in metal and machinery and then very strong in Scandinavia, northern Europe. Does it surprise you that from well up until 2018, which is just about a year ago now, that the robotics shipped worldwide number had only grown 6% to me that sounds low considering how I grew 6% from 2017 to 2018? Right, an increase of 6%. To me that I don't know, I guess I just would have expected it to be more. You're used to smartphone number, consumer devices tend to just skyrocket because you have a lot more customers when you're talking robotics because it's mostly industrial. You're talking about a smaller number of customers paying a lot more per robot to a lot more per installation. The US trade representative confirmed that regulators have approved exemptions for the December 15th tariffs on partial circuit boards and graphics cards among other parts. Among the exemptions are 10 of 15 components used to build Apple's new Mac Pro. Apple confirmed Monday that the new Mac Pro will continue to be assembled in Austin, Texas, USA. This is an interesting story. It's pretty straightforward. Apple didn't want to have to raise the price on the Mac Pro, so they got the exemptions for the components and in exchange they promised to keep building them in Austin is what it looks like to me. They were building them in Austin. There's some talk about maybe building them in China, but a lot of the talk about building them in China had to do with the fact that the way the tariffs were structured, it might have made it cheaper to buy the components and ship the completed product from China versus have to pay a tariff on each individual component. Because they were able to get the tariffs exemptions on 10 of the components, it made it make sense to continue to make them in Austin. There you go. There you go. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe right now to dailytechheadlines.com. Let's get into quantum computing. I know a lot of you already know this, but in case you're like, wait a minute, what is it again? Quantum computing uses qubits instead of bits. The simple explanation is that bits can be a one or a zero, but qubits can be both at the same time. That allows computers to process large amounts of information in parallel because you have multiple states happening in your bits at once versus classical computers that have to do it sequentially. Now, trying to understand how superposition bits work and how qubits work is a whole separate show, but that's the big deal is quantum computing can do a lot at once, whereas computers that we are using have to do it sequentially. Now, the reason that quantum computers haven't just blown away classical computers is that qubit is very susceptible to interference. You have to do a lot of error correction to make sure that the qubit hasn't accidentally been collapsed into from its superposition or had its values changed somehow, and that slowed down the number of qubits that could be used and has reduced the practicality of quantum computers up till now. One of the milestones that they've been looking at as they develop quantum computing is something called quantum supremacy. That's the development of the ability for a quantum computer to solve a problem that a classical computer practically could not. It doesn't mean it would be impossible, but the classical computer might take the heat death age of the universe to finish it, and the quantum computer could do it in less than a year. That's quantum supremacy. Now, that's different from quantum advantage, which is the milestone of a quantum computer performing something much faster than a classical computer. So that's where a classical computer would take a month to do it, but the quantum computer could do it in a day. It's generally defined as a super polynomial speedup, if that means something to you. Last week, the reason we're talking about all this, the Financial Times found a draft of a paper on the NASA website that had been written by a team led by Google's John Martinez. The draft has since been removed. Google and NASA aren't commenting about it at all. However, everybody got their hands on the paper before it was removed, and it claimed that Google had achieved quantum supremacy. The paper was written about a program run on Google's Sycamore quantum computer, which uses 53 cubits. Now, according to the paper, Google's quantum computer solved a calculation to prove the randomness of a number generator, and it was able to do the proof in 200 seconds. That same calculation on the world's fastest supercomputer, which is the summit, is estimated to take 10,000 years. So not a practical use of a classical computer, 200 seconds blows it away as a quantum computer. Now, if indeed, Google's quantum computer achieved this, it would be a credible demonstration of quantum supremacy, certainly quantum advantage, but also quantum supremacy. How are the luminaries in the field reacting? Well, IBM's head of research, Dario Gill, told the Financial Times that Google's system was a specialized piece of hardware built specifically to solve that calculation to demonstrate quantum supremacy. He thinks Google would have to have a general purpose computer do something like that. Gill told the MIT Technology Review, quantum computers will never reign supreme over classical ones, but will work in concert with them. So his position is quantum computers are never going to be generally good. They'll be good at things that they're built for. So he's saying this would be in advance in that, but it's not quantum supremacy. Now, the director of quantum hardware at Intel, Jim Clark, called it a notable mile marker anyway. He's like, if this is true, he's like, this is a big step in the road for us. Scientists and USC's Daniel Lidar praised the Google system for how it reduced crosstalk to reduce interference between the qubits, as we mentioned, that's a huge problem. MIT's Will Oliver said, if this turns out to be right, it's kind of like Kitty Hawk in that Kitty Hawk meant that we could fly and spurred a lot more research into flying to develop the field faster. It wasn't like everyone that went out and started, you know, flying around at a Wright Brothers plane. So I think that's the takeaway here, Sarah, is if this is true, if Google and NASA finally come out and say, yes, okay, here's the final paper. It's peer reviewed now. We definitely achieve quantum supremacy in our opinion. This will be a very important for quantum computer scientists. It will be a milestone that people can go, wait, it's possible. All right, well, I'm going to, I'm going to spend more time and money on research, but it will do nothing to bring quantum computing into any of our lives anytime soon. Well, and it sounds like a lot of that is because quantum computing is so susceptible to interference. You know, my first question, the layman's question is like, okay, well, can't some research be done to make sure that it feels a little bit more solid in that capacity so that we can actually call it something like quantum supremacy? Because right now, the supremacy doesn't sound quite right. Yeah, quantum supremacy is, I mean, I think what you're asking is, well, it doesn't sound like you can get quantum supremacy and actually some scientists agree with you. If it's, if it's, if it's vulnerable to interference, you know, to the point where it's like, okay, for a lot of things, even though the process could be sped up a thousand fold, it still doesn't really work. And here's why it's like, okay, we know why can we fix it? Well, no, it's so to achieve quantum supremacy, you have to get rid of the uncertainty, you have to get rid of the errors. And so what Google is saying, and actually what Daniel Leiter from USC is saying is, wow, they reduced that interference, they were able to do what you're saying they should be able to do, right? They, they reduced that problem. They took measures that eliminated it. What Dario Gill is saying is, I agree with Sarah, they did it for a specific thing. I don't think anybody's ever going to be able to do it for a general purpose computer. Well, Google obviously being, and Nessa as well, being slightly cagey about this. But I mean, I have to, you know, I have to have faith that somebody behind the scenes is doing work on this that, you know, will eventually affect our lives directly. Yeah, I'm curious why the draft paper was up there. I mean, in a sense, having a draft paper out for people to review is a good thing, right? It gets more eyes on it. People might be able to see errors before you actually put your stamp on it. The fact that the Financial Times ferreted it out may have just been an unintended consequence of like, oh, we didn't think any journalists were going to poke around this part of the Nessa website. Oh, well, here we go. It's not like it was promoted on the Nessa front page. They had to dig in and find it, right? And so I, I don't know if there, I don't know if I'd call it being cagey more than like, man, y'all weren't supposed to see that. So rather than make the situation worse, we're just not going to say anything until we're ready to. And I think that's fairly responsible to say, when this paper is vetted enough that we can make an official statement about it, we will. Cause you can't believe that Google wouldn't want to tout even a form of quantum supremacy. Sure. Absolutely. We call you a quantum supremacists in some form. I don't know about that segue. Thanks everybody for participating in our subreddits. We think they're supreme. That's right. That's right. You are definitely supreme. You can submit stories. You can also vote on others at Daily Tech News Show. We are also on Facebook. If you haven't joined our group, well, you should Facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show. Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler has back sharing a news bit with us about airlines tracking your alone time. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. According to an article from the carry on that's carry on with a K. There is some new technology being built into Airbus aircrafts that will allow flight attendants to monitor the restrooms to make sure that things are working well. And that includes being able to tell whether things like soap and toilet paper are running low and a camera to see how many people are waiting for it. And they're going to be able to tell which passengers have not fastened their seat belt, which is interesting. But they're also apparently going to be able to tell if you've been spending a long time in the restroom. And that may be just a little weird. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. It's complicated. Yeah. Well, it's like, because it's like, well, yeah, it's like, if the door hasn't opened in a few minutes, someone's in there, right? But like, is that somehow tied to the, the seat that you got out of seven minutes ago? I think my, my, my belief is what's going to happen here is if someone notices, which I've seen happen on a plane where somebody's like, man, that person's been in the bathroom, okay. And then you get the classic movie situation of like, sir, are you okay? And that that can be a very important thing for them to do in case there's a health problem or something like that. This would allow them to verify it's been a long time, right? They could look at it and say, Oh, it's only, it hasn't even been five minutes. It just seemed like they were in there a long time or like, wow, yeah, they've been in there 20 minutes or so, you know, we should probably check on them. So there's a security thing. There's a health thing. And, and like, just, just the general situation of being able to refill stuff. Because man, long international flights, sometimes those bathrooms get to be a mess. They get to be a little bit messy in your run out of things like paper towels and, you know, like once you're there, you know, if you've been there, because it sucks. So not that flight attendants don't have enough to do already. But yeah, I mean, this is a metric that could potentially help everybody. And hopefully if anybody has a hard time in the bathroom, then, you know, after 10 to 12 minutes go by, we'll, we'll help you out. The seatbelt one is funny because I have heard back when you had to turn your phone off, flight attendants say, we have a sensor that tells us if your phone's off or not, which they totally don't. And I knew that. But I was like, well, that's a clever way to try to trick people into, you know, turning the phone off. Now they're going to say, like, you know, we know whether your seatbelt is fastened or not. And I wonder also not not a thing. But no, it will be. That's what Chris said as part of this, they will be able to tell if your seatbelt is fastened or not, because of this, this new system and the sensors. So I mean, I think they just go to that seat and be like, Hey, to see fasten your seatbelt. Yeah. Yeah. It's so easy to do that. I can't imagine that's a widespread problem that someone refuses to fasten their seatbelt. But, you know, you fall asleep or whatever. There are certainly cases where this would come up. I kind of think of it as error correction, you know, going back to the quantum story. They walk through the cabin. They see, you know, visually inspect, see if you got your seatbelts on, ask people to turn their seatbelts on, then they could look at this and find out, like, okay, we're 100%. Great. Don't have to do another walkthrough then. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, thanks everybody. Who is a patron of Daily Tech News Show? We could not do it without you. Absolutely not. And there's just, just about a week left to get in on the last week of the old rewards. If you want to say, I was there before they changed the rewards, this is your chance. Patreon.com slash DTNS will be shipping out the old rewards, business cards, all that stuff for the last time on October 1st. New rewards are coming. If you're excited about that and you just want to see what they are, go to dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. If you have feedback for us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. 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