 Coming up on DTNS, a 124-year-old movie gets upscaled to 4K. What Microsoft's reorg will mean for you and why you should check what chip is in your IoT gear. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 5, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Otis's grandma's house, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just having a conversation about how you should refer to people, spokesperson, spokeswoman, spokesman, also talking about other things of interest to your daily life. It's a good day, internet. Go become a member at patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Checkpoint software discovered a vulnerability in Phillips Hue light bulbs that would upload a malicious over-the-air update to affect color and brightness of the bulb. If the owner reset and then re-added the bulb to the network, the exploit could then trigger a buffer overflow to take control of the hub. Checkpoint notes that the vulnerability takes advantage of the ZigBee communications protocol and therefore could be replicable in other products that use ZigBee. Phillips has issued a patch. Turn on those automatic updates, folks. Sorry, my mic went mute. That was weird. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner announced he's stepping down after 11 years and will become executive chairman in June. His replacement will be Ryan Roslansky, rather, a senior vice president of product at the company and first person that Weiner ever hired. Tomer Cohen, another VP of product will move into Roslansky's role. A WhatsApp flaw discovered by researcher Gal Weisman at Perimeter X showed how an attacker could use cross-site scripting attacks to read the files on the macOS or Windows versions of the app by using a specially crafted text message and then get contents of the files from the computer. WhatsApp's desktop was implemented using the Electron software framework which allows developers to create cross-platform applications based on web and browser tech but relies on developers to deploy secure apps. Google announced that based on research from 45,000 worldwide consumers, ad blocking changes in Chrome set to be applied later this year will include blocking long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds appearing before a video that can't be skipped within the first five seconds. Mid-roll ads of any length are included as well. Image and text ads that appear at the top of the playing video or in the middle, one-third of the video player window or cover more than 20% of the video content also included. Chrome enforcement begins on August 5, 2020 and we'll see the browsers quote stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads. Yeah and that'll cascade down to everybody's browsing whether you're using Chrome or not. All right let's talk a little bit about Disney. Their earnings were good but we're not here to talk about parks or even movies. We're here to talk about streaming Scott. What's the scoop there? Well Disney announced that it's Disney plus streaming service you know where you all got your Mandalorian and loved it. Has reached 26.5 million paid subscribers. Analysts had predicted 20 million or more so that's up 50% signed up directly and 20% through Verizon doesn't really get into maybe other places. I signed up through Apple for example so I don't know if it counts that but anyway Disney plus is expanding to Western Europe in March and will launch in India March 29th through streaming service whole star hot star rather ESPN plus subscribers reached 6.6 million and Hulu reached 30.7 million another owned Disney product. Disney also announced its intention to expand Hulu internationally in 2021. Yeah and the other big news of course is that the Mandalorian officially coming back in October we're getting the Falcon and Winter Soldier series in August and Wandavision in December so interesting too because Disney plus has continually been putting out new shows but they're not the high profile shows like Star Wars or Marvel so towards the end of this year we'll start to get a bigger rolling release schedule for Disney plus but they don't seem to care. They're saying that even after the Mandalorian stopped they didn't see a ton of people cancel. Yeah what's nice I think is well for one thing there you know where there were a lot of trials that worked out well and people stuck with it and they stuck through the end of something like the Mandalorian but also in my case even though there's not something I need to just jump on over there at Disney plus at the moment the price for admission is so low that I don't feel that motivated to worry about whether it's canceled for the month or not. It's worth the extra five dollars you might pay for nothing to not have to worry about it. Is that what you're saying? Yeah like if we're around on a Friday night going well we what have we not seen or what are we in the mood for and somebody goes why don't we watch a Disney movie or something. It's the perfect opportunity to do it and it's going to cost us less than us any other way trying to get that Disney movie assuming it's not streaming somewhere else so that five bucks a month six bucks a month just isn't that big a deal and I think they were smart to I hope stay there but also launch there at that price because I think a lot of people are just hanging around because that's not that big a deal. Well and Disney plus is going to be in that category the same with Netflix or HBO or that caliber of network where people are sort of like oh there's a show I want to watch but then that show is I don't know on hiatus or ends or something but it's not that expensive I'm just going to keep it around and I think Disney plus especially with the Mandalorian out of the gate got so much attention that yeah you're not seeing a lot of people you know bailing out of the network at this point. I do cancel HBO between big shows I care about because that's 15 bucks right like it's a significantly more cost advantage to either keep it or get rid of it so in my case that one's an easy one to kind of keep track of and restart when I want it and so on but with Disney they're giving me something that costs less than say CBS all access and the only reason I'm getting that is for Star Trek while it's on and there's no way I'm keeping that around after that because what else are they going to give me Disney's got just enough over there to say well look at this giant backlog we're adding to it all the time and their documentary stuff is really good and you know sometimes there's a nice surprise over there and at the very least all my Marvel Star Wars and and animation Disney and Pixar stuff is going to be taken care of there so I just think they have they they they came out strong we knew they probably would but what's keeping people there is low price combined with a pretty good back catalog that'll keep them around until their next you know their next Mandalorian fix well and there's lots of room to grow here this is less than half of the domestic US subscribers of the US obviously Disney plus rolling out worldwide so the subscribers going to go up as it reaches new markets we're far from having seen the peak of Disney plus at this point and Hulu reaching 30.7 million is just getting close to half of Netflix's numbers making it a very solid subscription service that that has always been sort of an also ran of like oh Hulu also has stuff and some people like it and again Disney plans to make that international as well so we'll see those numbers go up in in addition. Speaking of numbers Spotify reported 271 million worldwide subscribers up 31 percent over a year ago paying users rose 29 percent podcast also grew to 200 percent and 16 percent of Spotify's monthly active users also listened to podcasts revenue rose 24 percent with a loss per share of 1.14 euros both of which missed expectations so there's growth but not necessarily the growth that some people wanted to see Spotify blamed the loss on payroll taxes related to stock compensation as its stock price rose the company announced it will also acquire Bill Simmons sports podcast company ringer ringer also gave us binge mode so they're just the best people ever Spotify faces increasing competition in the music streaming market including India's Ghana which has 152 million monthly active users yeah I like that we throw those those things in there because a lot of people think oh it's Spotify and Apple music not in India it's not in India it's Ghana and a bunch of other things so so this this is a this is a good report for Spotify it's pretty wonky the whole thing about payroll taxes but the simplified version is they have to pay tax on the stock that they issue to their employees and some of their employees get bonus stocks and the amount they pay is based on the value of the stock and Spotify's stock been doing well so it did better than they expected and they had to pay more taxes they say if you if you like normalize that to the tax they were paying last quarter that they wouldn't have missed expectations on that that's probably true and it also shows that you know Spotify is definitely looking at podcasts as being an important part of its future it's not going to stop being a music streaming service and certainly that that is its biggest way forward but getting people in the door for podcasts it's spending a lot of money on it also didn't make as much money because they did a lot of aggressive free trials out there a lot of three month free trials we'll see if that pays off as those people three months down the road and start turning that into paid customers yeah on the podcast front oh sorry Scott go ahead go ahead on the podcast front it's funny because i i had sent the story over to to somebody i know who also likes some of the ringard content and he was like oh what do they do pull it off of apple music and i'm like no that's that's not that's not the point that's not what Spotify is doing they also own gimlet media and i don't actually have a Spotify account i can listen to all that stuff but they are being aggressive with super popular podcasts not necessarily a network itself that's popular but they both of those networks have extremely popular podcasts on the network and i you know i i see this it is a there there's something going on here and i'm not exactly sure what that's going to be i don't think it would be who've Spotify to to make podcasts exclusive because all it would do is bring down their numbers significantly but i would like to see where this strategy is going and you know in five years what does it look like oh i i have a guess at that i mean my my my guess is that what spotify is doing here is going using these podcasts as a revenue generator just selling ads straight into it using that as an ability to sell ads to other podcasts that are on the spotify platform trying to make spotify be the preeminent place where people go well i use spotify for my podcast because it's so good and creating some exclusive podcasts that are sort of like bonus content not not the leader not the one that everybody wants but the one you're like oh they also have that oh but i can only get that on spotify uh those are the areas i see them moving into well starting march 5th twitter or old pals uh i shouldn't say that not really anyone's pal anyway they may label faked images video and other media that have been significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated that's a quote as manipulated media and link to twitter moment sections that gives more context if media or manipulated media is presented as truth and is quote likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm unquote it may be removed when making a decision twitter will look at the accompanying text and account information users can appeal decisions which goes a long way to kind of my question about fake positives and there are false positives that sort of thing but anyway along with faked images and video twitter will also consider modifying modifying subtitles or voiceover as manipulation as well yeah so if the subtitles have been changed or if someone has manipulated the voiceover to make it sound like it's saying something different than it did before uh that counts under these rules and uh i i you know this is a hard line to walk because you don't want memes to be outlawed right that's that's everybody's fear like wait so i can't you know fake a meme no that's not what twitter's saying they're like if you're trying to deceive someone we're going to label it and we're going to try to give people a twitter moments link i'm not sure how useful that is but a twitter moments link to figure out what's really going on if we think it's significantly going to impact public safety or if it's going to cause serious harm then we reserve the right to remove it uh this is all in twitter's judgment though and that's where the rubber meets the road yeah it would be interesting to see how that all pans out just because false positives are a thing and they aren't going to do these manually so i have a lot of questions about how good it's going to be but let's see how it goes z-nets mary joe foley reports microsoft announced internally a reorganization in its experiences and devices unit uh one of the experiences is windows and the devices are surface and well they're going to merge those two together the windows experience client team will combine with the hardware team under hardware chief panos panai starting february 25th windows experience head joe balfiora will continue to lead the essential products inclusive community or epic team that's the one that includes mobile apps but starting this autumn after a sabbatical belfiori will co-lead the office experience group with alex holichag uh so alex will do the engineering i think and or vice versa uh and joe belfiori will do the product uh as co-leads of office experience this does not move the core os of windows at all the actual kernel the underpinnings the how it works the core os is under the azure engineering organization however the move does further formalize microsoft's process of aiming to design surface the windows experience and office so that they all work well together that that while windows is usable on multiple devices uh that it works really well on the hardware that microsoft makes so that's good for you as a user right because if you buy a surface then then everything seems to make sense it may not be great for third party manufacturers microsoft's lineup till now has been we're just making hardware to show how you can move into new categories but the hardware sales of surface have been good enough that people are wondering if microsoft might go well but even after that category is established we might want to continue to make some money off of it i mean my you and i talked about this pre-show so i feel i've thought about it more and i now feel confident in saying this it feels like as a regular windows user and as a regular mac os user that os is in general but but in particular windows feels more like these days that there are about nine or ten teams contributing to it and by that i mean it just feels a little patchworky um everything from sudden updates that you didn't know were coming that happened whether you want them to or not that's a whole diff that's more of a process thing but the actual ux the actual usability of windows how it functions the fact that the the control panel is like three different control panels now with they're just different skins on the same control panel like a lot of leftover stuff new stuff covering up the old stuff never know what stuff you're going to be forced to look at and update sometimes change that just more than ever i feel like windows is in this weird place and i wish there was a cohesive design plan that would bring it more closely to what i've always or i should say usually expect from mac os but even that in the last few years has experienced some of these sorts of things um i don't know you know that's sort of apropos of nothing here uh but it but it is when you when this came up on the notes it reminded me of that and just got me to thinking about how how much more i think windows could i don't know be great right now it's okay and it gets the job done and it's dominant so they don't have to do anything really to really truly push that dominance but it doesn't feel like anybody in particular or any one group has control over that design and well it they did it was joe bel fiori and now it won't be it'll be panos but nice team uh there there was a the in fact the whole point of this story is that there's a windows experience team devoted to fixing all of these things and think back to windows 8 wasn't it worse i mean it was but at least it was like and what has happened is as they try to pick up the pieces from windows 8 you still see those pieces there but i think personally it's been getting better because they've been trying to integrate office surface windows experiences all into one and we just haven't got to the end of that cleanup process yet yeah i think that's probably that's probably fair i mean the problem with 8 wasn't so much that but the one thing i liked about it is it did seem like okay brand new vision here's the focus boom here it is not everybody liked it it had its problems there's no question about all of that but now it just feels seven felt more focused than this 10 just feels yes lap dash and all this other stuff i could go on for days but i i think you're reacting to problems in windows 8 that have made it harder for windows 10 to be as focused it also may be reacting a little bit to the fact that that microsoft is no longer doing these five-year plans but doing constant updates so windows 10 has been windows 10 for years now and will continue to be which which means you don't get that fresh new like okay i'm going from xp to 7 because i skipped vista you don't get that anymore you're just on windows 10 from here on out i thank you for skipping vista russian security researcher vladislav yamak published details of a vulnerability in firmware for chips from huawei owned high silicon high silicon is a fully owned subsidiary of huawei the chips are often used by other manufacturers in security cameras network video recorders dvrs yamak said the exploit combines four security bugs that have previously been reported march 2013 march 2017 july 2017 and september 2017 these are known vulnerabilities in high silicon just hasn't patched them the vulnerability would let an attacker access telnet and log in and gain root access yamak did not report the vulnerability to high silicon claiming he doesn't trust the company to fix the issues since they have left these previously known vulnerabilities unpatched so he thought it was safer to just tell the public rather than wait around uh to see if they were going to patch them yamak has made proof of concept code available on github for users to test whether the devices are vulnerable and you can either stop using the devices if you find one that has high silicon in it or he says if you just can't afford to replace it uh he recommends restricting network access to these devices so only trusted users can access them especially on ports 23 tcp 95 30 tcp and 95 27 uh because those ports can be exploited in attacks this is not huawei's networking gear i want to make that very clear it this you can't just jump and say see this wholly owned subsidiary is doing something bad and therefore i can't trust this other thing that's unrelated to it but it is a good example of what huawei has come into criticism for uh itself which is just not doing a good job patching stuff this this is not a good way to be a spy to leave like known vulnerabilities because everybody knows they're there uh they're this is not a good backdoor if you really want to spy on somebody it's just incompetence how many people oh go ahead it's also if the last exploit that that yamak was able to to to pinpoint was in 2017 and says i don't trust the company to fix this why are we hearing about it now because he's saying uh these exploits were out everybody let people know about him and then he's like i went back to check and see like i patch them no they didn't in fact four vulnerabilities can be used together to do this even cooler thing if you're a hacker uh or even more dangerous thing if you're somebody who has the device how many do you give any indication of how many devices this is i mean we're talking about like that i sell guns in a ton of devices so uh you probably just want to if you're really concerned you either want to check your products to see if you can figure out what chips in them or use this github tool to just running on your network and see if it detects any of this stuff there you go hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com one of the starboard pieces of film history is a 52nd silent movie of a train pulling into a station it's it's famous you've probably seen it it's the one that is often shown along with apocryphal scenes of people ducking as they mistake the train for real nobody knows if that really happened but that's the story is that no one had seen a movie before and so everybody like flinched uh when a train kept started rolling down the screen the historic film was made by the lumiere brothers in 1896 using a cinematograph camera on 35 millimeter film now that's not very high-risk right it's 35 mil but it's old denis shuriyev has used the dain dain and topaz labs gigapixel ai enhancement programs do different programs to transform the film into a 4k 60 frame per second clip dain very cool i know right uh dain creates extra frames to smooth out the motion uh this is a case where motion smoothing is good uh not left on by mistake after you buy a tv so it it fills in the frames in a way that that smooths things out it's very jerky in the original 35 millimeter and then gigapixel ai's algorithm is trained to recognize details and complete an image using bilinear and bicubic interpolation so a little bit of sharpening uh a little bit of accuracy uh for instance bilinear interpolation will fill in pixels so you if you're if you're taking a low res image and you're making it 4k you're gonna have a lot of space where there aren't pixels that's why it looks kind of blurry if you just blow it up so what this bilinear interpolation does is fills in the pixels by creating a gradient between the two nearest pixels so that makes it sharper because you don't have gaps but it's less color accurate by cubic samples from the 16 nearest pixels to the gap which improves the color but that can actually make it blurry still so using both is what gigapixel ai does and that helps correct for each other and cause the sharpness uh this is this is cool looking uh it's it's super sharp compared to the original and uh after they posted this on youtube they added a link to the deoldify youtube channel uh deoldify is a neural network that was used to make a 1080p colorized version of this so you could actually see kind of a natural color version of train arriving in the station this is so cool and it makes me think there's enough granularity in the process that the application is far and wide it's like do we need to take some old thing let's say the hindenburg going down and we need it to not only restore it but let's make multiple versions of it let's see it in color let's see it in 60 frame 4k let's see it with some you know uh with frame you know this frame smoothing or adding frames adding pixels where they're now missing or whatever and just not to say hey now this is the new official thing we we love having the archive but just to be able to look at it in a different way see it in a new light that's fascinating to me this isn't just like the colorization fad of the 1990s uh with ted turner this feels like something else and i really like it i think it's awesome somebody asked what the uh what the resolution of the original 35 millimeter is i don't know exactly for this one but most 35 millimeter film is about 87 megapixels or 320 by 320 so looking at yeah no looking at the um the original video versus the 4k versus the colorized they're all i mean they all feel very rich to me and maybe it's because yes i have seen this original video i don't know over the years and whatever capacity i've seen it in but uh but it's it's sort of like it doesn't necessarily make it better but it does create a richness and another layer that yeah just wasn't there before and that's what's so cool to me it feels people look real instead of looking like yeah that's it exactly it feels modern even though they're all dressed in old timey 1896 clothing uh you they look like real people rather than that a period appropriate versions of people yeah you know in a way it like demythe mythologically eyes them takes them out of myth mythologizes yeah wherever that should go gives them takes away the myth of the 1800s and the herky jerky and the and the all the limitations which are in their own way awesome right and we know no way to diminish those but those people suddenly look like i don't know people i'd see at the mall or the way they move is natural their faces are inquisitive and they look at the camera yeah the the movement is less herky jerky you don't think like oh i guess people in 1890s i'll move like this you know because because you're seeing natural motions the the ones that are hurrying for the train just it's like oh man those those folks are booking i think i attributed their speed to the the jerkiness of the frame rate in the past and and that ain't true uh they're they're they're moved they're just booking along like like normal people and then when you add the color that adds another layer of reality to it because suddenly you know and and these aren't perfect there are some artifacts if you look close they they they look better on youtube than they would on a large screen to be honest uh but it's certainly an achievement it's certainly something that that has an effect yeah it's very cool surrealistic in some weird way and i can't really put my finger on why but it it feels like maybe somebody filmed something yesterday in black and white to try to fool me to look like something that was from the 1800s yeah for sure very odd very odd well you know who never fools us the people in our subreddit you can submit stories that you care about and you want us to care about as well and vote on others dailytechnewshow.reddit.com is where to join in the fun also fun our discord you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns let's check out the mailbag oh let's chris alan wrote in um today in fact right before the show and said regarding the iowa voting well he didn't say anything about the kerfuffle but i'll just go ahead and say kerfuffle says writing software can be difficult at the best of times but writing a time sensitive highly concurrent mission critical piece of software that is used every four years sounds like a nightmare given these demands i was shocked to hear that the iowa reporter app wasn't being run at the same time as traditional caucus counting methods when you have to prove trustworthiness running both systems in parallel seems like the only way to go simulations aren't enough at least in my opinion so true so true i i would say that the traditional methods of counting were being run in parallel uh that is why we didn't have any actual problems with the vote they they had paper trail on everything and the vote count is just slow but i think what chris was getting to is not just that they the counting method was running parallel as a backup but that they should have just been telling people like use the app but also call in a phone like let's actually run the whole system as if the app isn't there but use the app to test it out and make sure it works and then you probably would have had a faster count going on and that's that's just good test methodology like like chris says rather than relying on simulations we we don't know if they did simulations or not but even if they did it wouldn't have simulated the amount of load that they experienced and the bugs that they ran into it's also important i or at least in my head to just look at it from the angle of society is has continually tried to move toward a more paperless society a more automated sort of approach to almost everything we do and we constantly step back go that didn't work out very well we got to stick with this oh we got to keep fax machines forever or we got to do whatever and i think this is just another example of that it's just so easy to get all worked up about it given its political nature and i understand that but at the same time yeah they'll probably keep having the backup old ways will probably always be there no matter where this advances to or at least maybe maybe not i mean with your paperless office thing i thought that way five ten years ago like i guess we're not getting a paperless office but now i've rarely print anything like it happened it just didn't happen when we thought it was going to happen because we had to get good at it first right like the first time you have software it's going to break it's going to be buggy that's what people have to realize totally agree hey shout out to our patrons at our master and grand master levels including Brad Schick Paul Boyer and Dustin Campbell also thanks to scott johnson a wonderful hero of all of ours scott what's been going on in your world well i'm very excited to announce uh this week that i launched a brand new comic strip and people are thinking whoa you haven't done that for 15 years and the answer is that's true i haven't um but i've done it and it's uh it's a weird one it's called fred and can it's literally about a guy named fred and a sentient can of expired cream corn if you don't believe me you got to go check it out i put up two of the strips it is a weekly strip for now it may go more of my personal patreon kicks in uh to go to a different level but right now it's a strip a week you can find the first two editions at fredcancomic.com or if you just go to frogfans.com it takes you to a splash page that tells you about that and lets you jump straight to it there's our assess feed you can get it on the instagram you can get it on facebook twitter whatever it's pretty much everywhere you want to be and i'm very excited about it again that's fredcancomic.com let me know what you think send your feedback i would appreciate it oh and you can find me on twitter and yell at me about my dumb comic ideas at scott johnson i'm adding this to my feed lee immediately uh folks we have a new patreon reward merchandise plan in place right now we're in the second month of it but it's not too late anybody who signs up after they've been a patron for three months can get a sticker a poster a shirt or a mug with our special dts six year anniversary logo on it uh get the details at patreon.com slash dts slash merch our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com keep that feedback coming we'd love to know how you're feeling we're also live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m eastern that's 21 30 utc and you can find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live back tomorrow 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