 Coming up on DTNS, Apple might make a car after all, Microsoft Flight Simulator goes VR and electric rays that can power their own ocean floor maps. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 22, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Ah, we're very excited to have Blair Bazderich, cohost of This Week in Science, back on the show. Blair, welcome back. Hello, thanks so much. Happy to be here. Yeah, it's good to have you. We were just talking about what we all eat for breakfast, among other things, on Good Day Internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Xiaomi confirmed its Mi 11 and Mi 11 Pro phones will launch at an event in China on December 28. The phones will be the first to ship with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 processor. Microsoft is active in a couple of security efforts to tell you about. First of all, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, VMware, and the Internet Association all filed amicus briefs in Facebook's lawsuit against NSO Group over NSO exploiting a bug in WhatsApp. And Microsoft, McAfee, and 17 other organizations announced plans Monday to form a ransomware task force. The RTF will identify gaps in current solutions and work on a roadmap to address issues and develop a standardized framework to help the industry deal with ransomware attacks. Technology and media holding company IAC says it will spin off Vimeo into a standalone public company in the second quarter of 2021. Vimeo says it has 200 million users. Last month CEO Anjali Sood said, quote, In the last seven months we welcomed over 30 million new members, seen over 60 million new videos, created, uploaded, and powered millions of live events that went digital for the first time more than the prior three years combined. The Wall Street Journal reports that according to an unredacted draft of that lawsuit filed by Texas and other states against Google, Google and Facebook agreed to cooperate and assist each other in responding to any antitrust action regarding their advertising agreements. Google says that such agreements over antitrust threats are extremely common and that both companies still say there is nothing illegal about their advertising agreements. The Washington Post sources say Facebook offered to license its code and users' relationships to a competing social network in order to avoid an antitrust suit. However, investigators investigating Facebook declined that offer. Earlier this month, FTC led the filing of two suits against Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. Alright, let's talk about that Apple car. Reuters sources, two sources say Apple plans to introduce an autonomous passenger vehicle for consumers. At 2024 at the earliest, though they might get delayed because 2020, the car would operate using a battery designed by Apple to reduce cost and increase range. Supposedly that battery design eliminates some of the internal structure. They called it a monocel in the Reuters story, holding battery materials together, leaving room for more active materials, so smaller and more energy efficient is the promise. And Apple may be using lithium-iron phosphate for its battery instead of lithium-ion. Lithium-ion is what you have in most of your phones out there. Lithium-iron phosphate is less likely to overheat. The sources said they expect Apple to rely on a manufacturing partner to build the car, and it may just end up with Apple integrating their system into a car made by a traditional automaker rather than an Apple branded car. Apple would supposedly use multiple LiDAR sensors, some of them from Apple and others sourced from partners. Apple's head of AI, John, John Andrea, took over the car project earlier this month. And again, these are just sources, but that project's been on and off according to sources over the year. It looks like it's back on again. Oh my gosh, the Apple car rumor has been, you know, what are we, five years strong now? Although we're talking about 2024, so there's certainly some work yet to be done. Like you mentioned, Tom, 2020 has stalled a lot of projects. So who knows, this could be, I don't know, farther in the future. But I like the idea that Apple might have a technology for a battery that it could license out to all sorts of manufacturers. It could be the Apple car or something that Apple has partnered with, you know, a GM or Ford or whoever, you know, any number of the large auto conglomerates around the world to be able to produce something that's a passenger vehicle that can rival what Waymo is doing, for example. But if they can get certain things right by using different materials, what we may see as the automotive industry and what goes into cars five to 10 years from now could be drastically different. Yeah, I think the key to remember here is that Apple probably hasn't exactly decided how they're going to go about this, whether they're going to say partner with Hyundai or somebody like that to make the car and it'll be a Hyundai Apple version. That I think is on one end of the spectrum. The other is that they contract with someone out there to build the car for them. Some automakers already do that. Some automakers don't even build their own cars already. So it gets complicated when you look at the supply chain. But the fact of the matter is, if this ends up panning out in 2024, maybe 2025, you'll be able to go somewhere and buy a car that has got Apple technology in it. Blair, does that sound like the kind of autonomous car you would want to get yourself? I mean, I'm laughing over here because when I think about my iPhone, I think about how an update might get pushed onto my phone and then it suddenly doesn't work for a day until the new update comes out. And I get very concerned about an interface on a car deciding not to break because the latest update was buggy. Yeah, thankfully, we have a lot of experience with firmware on cars. Not that there haven't been problems over the years, but thankfully, usually cars don't break down for a day because of firmware updates. And hopefully Apple would be able to carry that on. This feels like something that'll be cache, right? Like somebody will be like, ooh, I want the Apple car because it's got the whole Apple system in it. The other side could be that Apple becomes, like Apple and Tesla would be my guess, would be the first to offer autonomous cars to people for them to buy themselves. From the Reuters story anyway, it doesn't sound like they're really targeting fleets or industrial uses, but consumer uses. Yeah, that was the thing about the idea of Apple having a manufacturing partner when you think of the iPhone, right? For one of the best examples, it's like, well, different companies put those iPhones together physically, but it's an Apple product. Would Apple be able to move that much merch on something that would clearly be a designer car? I mean, Tesla's, even the cheapest models of Tesla's are mostly outside of anybody's budget. And I can't imagine Apple would be going into the low-cost car market. It doesn't sell like a bargain car. No. It doesn't. And it's, I mean, listen, I want to see this thing. Trust me, I wanted to exist. But how many would you really be selling? Yeah. Well, in the Reuters article, they say they have to make at least 100,000 a year to start with. And Tesla took a long time to get to profitability. That's why it sounds like maybe they're better off partnering with an automaker that can already kind of move them into the supply chain. Yeah. This is one we won't know anything for sure for years. And it may even evaporate and go away again. But it's interesting to think about. Indeed it is. Also interesting to think about is flying and VR. Microsoft Flight Simulator is officially in VR. A Sobo Studio, that's the company that developed the 2020 version of the app, has now added support for open XR compatible headsets, which include Windows Mixed Reality headsets. That includes the HP Reverb G2, also the Valve Index, HCC Vive, the Oculus Rift, and even the Oculus Quest, if you're using a link cable to connect to a PC. Microsoft originally said that the VR feature would first arrive on the HP Reverb G2, so that's not untrue, but there are other platforms also available now. The beta test, which ran in October, does require a computer with an i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 1500X paired with a GTX 1080. These are not things I have. So I can't try this yet, but I really want to. I mean, I am not somebody who's involved in the Flight Simulator community. It's a whole community, and people are very enthusiastic. And I know just from looking at them, and it makes sense to be that the idea of doing this in VR is kind of ideal. There's a whole hobbyist community built around making your cockpit to have your Flight Simulator in. But even then, you have to design it on one particular plane or try to kind of design it towards a few of them. And it's not going to change. Whereas in VR, you're put inside the cockpit of whatever plane you're flying in VR. And it adapts so you really do feel like you're flying. Yeah. You know, you look left, right? You're in the cockpit. Again, this is not something that I've tried personally and no idea how to fly a plane. I was always horrible at Flight Simulator. All I did was crash. Blair, I don't know if you ever played any iterations of this app growing up. But what do you make of VR and flying planes? I think it would be so fun because it's something I would never have the guts to do in real life. I also wonder with all these kind of very specialized rigs for VR, if this is going to be the resurgence of arcades in our culture, you know, kind of after COVID, obviously. But I could totally see VR arcades where you'd have all these special setups for different opportunities that I would not buy VR equipment. That seems like way too heavy of an investment. But I would love to go pay for a session at a VR studio. Yeah. There were a few of those getting off the ground. And the question was, would things like the Quest making it cheaper to do VR at home mean you wouldn't want to go to a place and then of course we all locked down and nobody could go any places. So it'll be interesting to see if that bounces back. Hey, we mentioned some of the technology the US Stimulus Bill will fund on Monday's show, but also included in the 5,593 page bill, if that explains why we didn't get to everything yesterday, are some penalties against copyright infringement that you might want to be aware of. For instance, one provision of the bill makes it a felony, not a misdemeanor, a felony to quote willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service of unauthorized media and it carries penalties of up to three years, five if the person should have known that the work was being prepared for commercial or public performance and 10 years for multiple offenses. You're talking about 10 years in jail. Yes, penalties of up to three years in prison, five years in prison or 10 years in prison. It does not apply to users of a service and the public knowledge believes it won't impact streamers who include unlicensed works as part of their stream. So it's targeted at I'm taking the NFL network and rebroadcasting it on my own service. That's who they're going after. It's hard to tell from the language how it might be applied though, because, remember, copyright trolls will try to take what you wrote and doesn't matter why you wrote it and try to apply it to their own ends. The bill also includes the case act, which creates a copyright claims board to be part of the U.S. Copyright Office. That claims board would rule on copyright claims and order payments of up to $30,000. Now, it's being compared to a small claims court, but it's not a court. It'll consist of claims officers, not judges. If a claim is filed against you, you must respond in a specific manner outlined in the law within a limited period of time, or you will be stuck with whatever penalty has been decided on, and this will make it easier to file cases. Again, the reason they're saying they want this law is to help smaller artists fight back against copyright infringement, but it does seem to favor companies with large amounts of lawyers as defendants. In fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that this could increase copyright trolling, the practice of filing a lawsuit against someone without the resources to fight it, so that you can either stick them with a penalty or get them to settle out of court, because they can't afford to fight it. When this sort of got broken down in the first article that I read late last night, I was like, hmm, there are times when someone's like, hey, want to watch this movie? I have it, and I'm like, yeah, sure. I'm like, am I going to jail for three years, even if I can argue that I didn't really know what I was doing type thing? That does not sound like what's going on here. It's like you mentioned, Tom, if I am carrying an NFL stream willfully with the knowledge that I shouldn't do it and offering it to the public on some level and keeping money out of the hands of the original broadcaster, that is different. But it is ambiguous enough that I know a lot of people were kind of freaked out because there are lots of ways that people get information. The copyright stuff sounds like a mess, honestly. It sounds like just a total mess. And I mean, we on DTNS have copyright infringement issues on putting stuff up on YouTube every so often, and sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't, and a lot of people have it worse. And this doesn't seem to lay out anything that makes more sense to me, and it seems like it will hurt smaller creators rather than help them. Well, yeah, there's so much going on here and to boil it down and make it simple. These were not necessary to be part of a stimulus bill. They were forced into the bill before people could have enough time to really read it and understand it. And when the major downside of this kind of thing is that, if even if you assume the best of intentions, let's just pretend they had the best of intentions. If you don't have enough eyes on it looking at how it could be misinterpreted and misused, it will be misinterpreted and misused. And this is going to be signed into law. This is going to be a lot. It does have a sunset provision, I think of 2023. So it may not stay law, but Tom Tillis, Senator Tom Tillis, who was behind these provisions, has a whole DMCA revision that he wants to push forward now as well. So we're going to get more of the same coming down the line. And I mean, Blair, you're somebody who's streaming online as well. This impacts you too. Yeah, it's very frustrating to hear about how this has all progressed and just how needless things have been tacked on when really just people needed a lifeline. That's all this is about. Yeah, the bill was supposed to be about helping people get through COVID, and get through COVID restrictions, recover from economic disruption. We'll float you a little money, but if you stream something, boy, you are really screwed. And I know that channel works. Are you trying to make money by streaming now in addition to your normal day job? Well, let me make it harder for you. Yeah, and again, it's all about the misinterpretation. I'm fine with like, oh, they want to stop these industrialized people who re-broadcast streams of television networks. Fine, I guess I don't have a problem with that. They want to make it easier for a small artist to be able to protect the copyright for their songs and movies and independence, doing something for small artists. I'm all for that. I'm not sure that these are properly secured and targeted and vetted to be able to do that. And I guess we'll find out, because the folks who want to take advantage of this kind of system will not wait around very long once it's signed into law to take advantage of it. Hey, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Well, the ocean's a big place, a vast ocean floor. And as much as we've learned about the ocean, it's not as well mapped as we would like it to be. If you want to find resources like minerals or fuel or fish or other marine wildlife, we're going to need better maps. Blair, who can help us here? Oh, just electric rays and stingrays. So yeah, these rays, these cartilaginous fish related to sharks, they are benthic animals, which means that they move around on the very bottom of the ocean floor. And Ryken Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan have completed a feasibility study seeing if these little sharks or these little rays can actually be equipped with pingers and cameras to help us explore the bottom of the ocean. So they used pinger technology, which, you know, it's just it emits ultrasonic sound and when the sound is picked up by a receiver, the position of the receivers at the time is detected and then they can calculate a position. And so they use that along with cameras to figure out if this was even possible. If they could put these little backpacks on these rays, I'm sure they're not backpacks. They're much smaller than that, but I like to imagine that they're backpacks. And going to camp down into the ocean and do this job for them. Less invasive, as you might imagine, than bringing down ROVs, remotely operated vehicles or other technology, just send those animals on their merry way. So they started with a water tank. They used cameras in three places, front, side, and top so that they could verify the position of them while they were using these pingers. They allowed, they did 3D reconstruction of movements over time. And then based on that and the pingers, they found that it was very effective. So then they plopped them into the ocean. They found a part of the ocean that was pretty flat and was well plotted already so that they could verify it. And it was all about 60 to 120 feet deep. So still close enough that they could check in on everything periodically. And they found that the positions of the rays were very accurate. They were about 10 centimeters within the public map at most when they were recording all of the stuff. So all of these feasibility studies tell us that this is something that could be done. So the next test would be to throw them into a spot that is more varied, is less flat to double check the efficacy as it gets more complex. But one of the things that I absolutely love about this is they were actually able to use the electric rays to charge the pingers themselves because they're electric. That is insane. Yeah. So they have enough charge in the electric rays that they could charge a battery. And I get it that these are just the pinger that's getting charged, right? Not the camera. So it probably draws very little current. Totally. Yeah. And so that's just part of their, they have their own little electric current that runs through their body. Yeah. Yeah. So they can use that to power the device. But then also in the normal sting rays, they were able to use little batteries. Do you need an adapter when you want to use electric ray to power your pinger? Yeah. Yeah. So a pretty good adapter if you wanted to charge your phone off of an electric ray. But yeah, no, they were able to use the electric field effectively so that there wasn't much adaptation of the technology necessary. So they think that it could work for a pretty long-term monitoring because of that, because the rays charge it themselves as they go. So Blair, I know that, you know, a lot of the sort of mystery of the sea is because there is so much life so far down that, yes, like an ROV, you can get, you can get close, but it's pretty taxing. It's hard to do. And there's a lot of wildlife that doesn't come back to the surface in any way. So you got to go down to even know what's happening. Our electric rays and sting rays known to be able to be on the surface, get a camera attached, all good. And then go down more than, you know, any other, I don't know, somebody that lives in the sea. Yeah, yeah. So these guys aren't abyssal. So they're not going back down where like the blob fish lives. If you think about that fish that looks normal and then you take it up to normal atmospheric pressure and it looks like a giant blob and a sad face. So they're not going that deep, but they are going pretty far down several hundred feet down for sure. And so it's a good start. If there's other things that we could potentially do with this technology, if you kind of, if this proved really effective, you could start to adapt it to try to use it on marine mammals, things like sea lions or elephant seals that go miles and miles and miles below the ocean. If you could find a way to make it work for you for this use. But I think the thing that makes the rays so special here is that they really do just comb the bottom of the ocean. They are stuck flat to the bottom. And so the pings are really similar to the actual sea surface. So I think that's kind of the difference is they'd have to adapt it to be able to deal with the fact that an animal wasn't going flat against the sea bed. Right. Because that challenge is, is how do you bring a benthic animal? How do you bring an abyssal animal up to atmospheric pressure? So do you then, do you send ROVs down with little packs, little backpacks and attach them while they're down there? Yeah, that's definitely five steps down the line, but interesting. Yeah, yeah. But if people don't realize it, we have not mapped the ocean floor very well. I don't know what the exact comparison is, but what we know about the ocean is usually compared to what we know about the moon, which we've been to a couple of times. We're on top of the ocean all the time. We just don't go down to the bottom of it very often or in all the places that we would need to have a really good map. Yeah. Yeah, I think some people, depending, it depends how you measure it, of course, right? But I think some people like to say that we know more about our own solar system than we know about the ocean. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the kind of comparison you make, right? It's not like we know way more about land. We're so land-centric and most of our planet is water. Yeah. I think also it turns out we're a lot better at making things for zero gravity than extreme atmospheric pressure, which is what happens underwater. All right, real quickly, law enforcement agencies from the U.S., Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands have seized the web domains and server infrastructure across five countries, VPN services, insorg.org, safe-inet.com and safe-inet.net. The three are believed to be operated by the same individual or group and widely advertised on both Russian and English-speaking forums. The U.S. Department of Justice in Europol claim the three companies' servers masked the identities of ransomware gangs, web skimmers, fissures and hackers involved in account takeovers. Europol said it plans to analyze the collected information and begin to take action against some of the services users. Not something that's going to really impact your daily life. These aren't VPNs that you're likely to have been subscribed to or using. They are very specifically used by people who want to engage in illicit activity and keep it hidden. They are so-called bulletproof VPNs that means the operators will change customers' IP addresses or move the servers so that when they're asked to cooperate with law enforcement, they don't cooperate with law enforcement. So there you go. That's going to make it harder for criminals to hide on the Internet. Not impossible. They'll find other places, but worth noting. Well, also worth noting, and boy did I have fun with this this morning. A team from Databots has used a recurrent neural network, or RNN, to create a YouTube stream featuring a base solo that never ends. CJ Carr and Jack Zukowski from Databots trained the RNN with two hours of base improvisation from YouTuber Adam Neely. There's a lot of base stuff online, you know, you might know them already. Then they limited the dataset to mainly faster licks because the RNN seemed to prefer faster tempos. Just had more fun with them. Databots previously experimented with an endless death metal stream. Now death metal is probably not something that I would stream while preparing for DTNS as I do every morning. But I did turn on the YouTube base, NeverEndy Base stream this morning, and I kept it on for like the whole morning. It's great. That's an AI, just in the core. Right. It reminded me very much of, I mean, it's actually a lot more talented than all the college guys I hung out with who tried to learn guitar. But it kind of reminds you of like that one person in the corner who's just kind of riffing, you know, they're just kind of doing their thing. It's all instrumental. I found it very soothing. I really like this. It reminds me of a NeverEnding Seinfeld episode for just going segway to segway to segway to segway. It's so Seinfeld-esque, yeah. Well, it's the deal with datasets. Yeah. So go check it out, folks. We'll have a link in the show notes so you can just search Infinite Base on YouTube. I think you'll find it. Oh, it's so good. Good work, robots. Getting there. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So we talked to Alison Sheridan about Apple Fitness Plus, which she has tried out. She's the only one of us who had, at least as of yesterday. David from Brisbane, Australia says, when it comes to tracking metrics during fitness, whatever the brand we're using. So it doesn't have to be Apple, any brand. It seems to assume that because we can track it, it must be important. I referee soccer and I attend referee fitness training. I was shocked when the person next to me said his heart rate was 140 BPM. Mine was 190. We were doing the same exercise. So shocked that I went to the doctor to see if something was wrong with me. She ruled her eyes and said, I should stop looking at the metrics on my watch and that my max heart rate is my max heart rate. And if I'm sweating during exercise, I'm doing myself good and I'll be progressing in my fitness. She also pointed to several medications that I'm on. Those would increase my resting heart rate. David says, I love data and the insight it brings and maybe some of the things our devices are tracking are genuinely helpful. But I'm concerned that we're being led to pay too much attention to certain metrics because they're easy to track and feel scientific rather than because they're of any real benefit. I like to see independent research of these fitness programs before I put my money down. Yeah, the data is helpful if you know how to interpret it. The data itself doesn't mean anything on its own, right? That's the key with all of this stuff. And I get what David is saying where people push like, oh, look at all the data it collects, but that's not the end of the story. It's like, OK, now what do you do with that? Do you have a reliable way to interpret it? Is the service you're using to interpret it reliable? Dave, maybe you need to consult with your doctor as David wisely did here. So yeah, that's all important stuff. Yeah, its calorie counting is important too, right? But you can't just have 2,000 calories every day. Every person is different. Also, if you have 2,000 calories of cookies or if you have 2,000 calories of salad and eggs and bread, that's a very different count. But it's the same data. Yeah. I don't think that collecting the data is bad. I just think that David's making a very important... And I don't think David's saying that either. Just a very important point of that's not the end. It's not just I got the data. It's making sure you have a good, reliable way to interpret it. Indeed. Well, if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on any of our shows or stuff that you'd like us to talk about, or questions or comments or cat photos, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. You can also shout out our patrons along with us today. Master Grandmasters include Pat Sheeran, John Atwood, and Daniel Dorado. Thanks to all. Also, thanks to Blair Bazderich for being with us today. Blair, what's been going on in your world since we saw you last? Oh, you know, we're just about to count down to our 10 most important stories of 2020 on This Week in Science. That'll be next Wednesday. And then also, yes, I see Tom has his. We have This Week in Science, Blair's Animal Corner. Yeah. So I realize you probably didn't use your calendar this year at all, but let's hope that we can use them in 2021. And so there's fun animals. Here's a giraffe weevil for May. But yeah, those are available at twist.org. Just click on the picture of the horned frog on the homepage. You can buy one or 10. The white sturgeon I particularly like. I'm looking forward to June. I worked with a white sturgeon named Lenny. He was my inspiration for that one. Well, thank Lenny for me. Hey, folks, we have some stuff for you as well. If you stick around with us, we're offering Patreon loyalty rewards. Patreon has a new ongoing program. It doesn't end after three months anymore. You get something every three months. They have to be at the right level, but you can get a unique sticker, a mug, a t-shirt or a hoodie every three months, as long as you stay a patron. That's not all levels, but if you're at the level that has that, you'll get either a unique piece of art from Len Peralta with the DTNS7, your anniversary logo, or three months after that one with Roger in it, three months after that one with Sarah in it, after that one with me in it. You can get all the details about the levels and the art at patreon.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow. Rollin' right into Christmas week with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.