 Coming up on DTNS, the CES advance announcements continue new stuff from Samsung, also why people don't want Verizon to turn off 3G and why the ability to draw a radish in a tutu is a legitimately big AI offense. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 6th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. From the Frogpants Studios in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang with Shoe's Producer. We were just talking about donuts and coffee on Good Day Internet because we were trying to avoid the rest of the world. Suffice to say, I decided not to wear my Electoral College sweatshirt today because it wasn't as funny anymore. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Android Police reported back in December that some Pixel 5 phones were playing System Audio at the highest possible volume, despite users saying, no, don't play it at this level. Google has rolled out a fix now for the issue as part of the Pixel's January update, which also improves the Pixel 4A, 4A 5G, and 5's auto brightness and some lighting conditions. Also fixes an issue that was causing some speaker noise on the Pixel 4A, 5G, and squashes a bug affecting Pixel 3 devices and newer devices that made certain apps intermittently restart. WhatsApp finally did it, updated its terms of service and privacy policy so that now it says information collected by WhatsApp can be used by other Facebook companies and you don't have a way to opt out. Other Facebook companies will be able to access account registration and phone number, transaction data, service-related information, interaction information, mobile device information, and IP address. They could get it before, but you had to say it was OK. Now they're just going to take it if you use WhatsApp. Among other things the data will be used for is to target you with ads. The new policy goes into effect February 8th and is required to continue using WhatsApp services. I cannot imagine anyone will be upset about that. No, not at all. Pioneer and Onkyo are both showing off some pretty cool new AV receivers. Maybe you're in the market for one. These support HDMI 2.1 compatibility, 8K video, gaming features such as VRR, and offering Dolby Atmos and DTSX. Supported streaming protocols include Apple AirPlay 2, Chromecast, works with Sonos, and DTS PlayFi. The receivers will allow voice control through both Google and Amazon's assistance and offer two-way Bluetooth communication for streaming from phones or listening on headphones. Intel launched RealSense ID, which combines depth sensors and machine learning to add on-device depth perception capabilities for facial work ignition like face unlock. Intel says it adapts to changes like your hairstyle and your glasses, works in various lighting conditions, and a range of heights and complexions. They're saying they tried this on more than white men. It's got some anti-spoofing tech, has one in one million, false acceptance rate, that's what they claim. RealSense ID will cost $99, launching Q1 2021 for manufacturers, and that's something you can buy off the shelf. So you expect it to show up in things like smart locks, ATMs, access control systems and stuff like that. Samsung is revealing more C-Lab experiment products at this year's virtual CES, including EZCal, not a calendar app. It's actually an app that automatically calibrates your TV's picture quality. Reuters include Scan and Dive, which is an IoT scanner that can help identify fabric and recommend care options. Maybe you're like, is this a cashmere sweater? Food in Somalia uses AI to pair food and wine for your home-cooked meals. An air pocket is a portable oxygen storage device you can wear on your face mask. All right. Let's talk a little bit more about Alibaba. Alibaba, one of the biggest tech companies in China, is not having a good time. Reuters reports it plans to raise at least $5 billion in U.S. dollar-denominated bonds this month as a test. Alibaba is facing serious antitrust investigations in China, not only about it, but also about Ant Group. Remember, Ant Group halted its IPO last month as a result of investigations. Ant Group is the fintech arm of Alibaba. Jack Ma has pretty much disappeared from public view while he sits out these investigations. And so a bond sale could be used to test investor sentiment. How upset are you about the withdrawal of the IPO about the antitrust investigations, et cetera? But the trouble doesn't end there. Alibaba faces the president of the United States naming Alipay among eight Chinese apps in an executive order similar to the orders against TikTok and WeChat. The order would prohibit companies from engaging in transactions. The implication being that apps like Alipay would need to be removed from app stores. The other apps named are Cam Scanner. By the way, first app that has ever been named in one of these executive orders that I actually have on my phone haven't used it in a while, but it's the thing I've used. Cam Scanner, Share It, Tencent QQ, V-Mate, all would be under this ban. In fact, V-Mate is published by Alibaba Group Subsidi or UCWeb. So that's another bad news for Alibaba. The Beijing Kingsoft Office Software's WPS Office also on there. US alleges the apps could be, quote, used to track the locations of federal employees and contractors and build dossiers of personal information as the justification for the order. Interesting. Do they think the, well, I guess I can't speak for them or wonder they're not going to answer me, but I'm trying to understand how something like Alipay would threaten a federal employee or contractor unless they were already into Alipay. Theoretically, it gets tricky, right? But if you're using, Alipay is mostly used by Chinese tourists. So it's just going to hurt your tourist dollars not to have Alipay available. But let's say a federal employee was using Alipay to pay for something. Theoretically, that company now knows what they spent their money on, where they spent it, just like Square or PayPal or Apple Pay could as well. It's a matter of whether you trust the company to treat that data with the discretion that you believe it should be treated with. And what this executive order is accusing is that no, they don't. Alipay, the implication is, shares this with the Chinese government. Yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see if, like you said, if this sort of thing gets repealed immediately under a new president or if this stuff sits for a while, if it stews, if it's more across the aisle, then I think it is that everybody's a little bit more worried about Chinese apps than the current administration. And we'll have to wait and see. They're saying they'll enforce this before January 20th. We'll see if it ends up getting hung up in court like TikTok and WeChat, though, and then we'll see what the next president does. Well, speaking of getting hung up on, that's a phone service story. Verizon 3G network will seemingly get another stay of execution. Verizon initially said its 3G network would be shut down at the end of 2019. That's now been a while ago. Later delaying it to the end of 2020 in response to inquiries from light reading, a Verizon spokesperson said, quote, our 3G network is operational and we don't have a plan to shut it down at this time, unquote, although clarifying later that they did intend to shutter the network as soon as it was possible. The carrier stopped activating 3G devices in July of 2018. AT&T has announced that they have plans to shut down 3G in early 2022, with T-Mobile saying a shutdown would come over the next several years. 3G is used by some users, especially in areas not covered by 4G, but it's also widely used by companies for internet of things and other services and devices you might have. Toyota has warned customers that it's safety connect services in North America, including collision notification and roadside assistance will stop working after November 1st, 2022, due to this 3G network shutdown. Meanwhile, Kenya's SafariCon, Com, rather, announced Tuesday that it would suspend deployment of its 5G network, which it has been building using Huawei technology. CEO Peter Ngenwa said that SafariCon would focus on converting existing customers from 2G and 3G to a 4G service. Yeah, so, Sarah, this affects you directly, right? It does, yeah, I'm a Verizon customer. I have been for years and I wasn't seeing 3G all that often until I moved to where I live currently. At my house, I use Wi-Fi calling, so it doesn't really ever factor in or I'm on my Wi-Fi network in general, but around where I live, if I walk 100 yards outside of my yard, I'm on 3G if I'm lucky. That's the only thing that I'm getting. LTE is dead and there are just some dead spots when you live in the woods, so 3G not being available at all would actually impact me pretty negatively because it saved me a few times when I'm trying to get a hold of somebody. However, I understand that the companies are saying, we'd like to wind this down, we're trying to get everybody upgraded, but yeah, Verizon's saying, we're gonna do this at the end of 2019 and it's like, that's not happening. End of 2020, not happening. We are not yet ready and sounds like some of the other providers are saying, yeah, we need a little bit more time, but I think the Internet of Things devices, the things that you don't even think about, you think about them being internet connected, but what are they being connected on type stuff? Maybe there's not a lot of bandwidth that's needed. Those devices needing to be, I don't know, upgraded or rendered obsolete, that'll be a little bit more interesting. Yeah, one thing I did want to say about it is I do have a very strong memory of the 3G rollout period. All the talk was that so many new devices will be able to use this service. So many new things will be able to happen. I remember roaming kits for doing broadcasting with a little backpack on your back. People would walk around with those and say, yeah, it's 3G connected. And it's not only until later that I started to realize, well, wait a minute, that means all that stuff either had to grow at the times and figure out a way to upgrade radios if they did or if they didn't, new models had to be made. That probably left a lot of people on the lurch. And now what are you gonna do? They're old Kindles that use 3G to download new books. And it sounds like eventually all that stuff goes. Yeah, I mean, I actually remember when the original Amazon Kindle I had stopped being able to connect, except over wifi, right? Because it had a built-in 2G connection. And I'll be honest, Sarah, I'm a little skeptical that Verizon is putting this off because of use like yours. I think it's probably some corporate contractor who's exerting some contract clause saying, oh, for sure. This contract says you have to keep 3G service around for this long. And so Verizon's looking at that saying, fine, fine, okay, we'll extend it for a little longer, but we've got to resolve this somehow. You either need to do a firmware update or swap out your hardware and companies like Toyota who I don't think Toyota's on Verizon because it's saying like, out of our hands, third party's taking it away. So I guess we're done. It's the problem with building in an internet connection based on a protocol that's not gonna last forever, which is cellular networks are not good. All this stuff, to your point, Scott, that they're saying, oh, 5G, 5G can be built into all this stuff now. It's not gonna last forever either. There's gonna be something replacing it down the road as well. We shall see, yeah, it's pretty weird. I mean, progress is progress, right? We're moving into a new era, so. I mean, theoretically, you should have 4G service in your area, Sarah. The way it should work is by now, 4G has rolled out everywhere and you never need to rely on 3G. Right, and sometimes that is true. It's not always true, though. Trust me, I know. So I've gotten to the point where when I'm on phone calls with people and I'm in my car, I'm like, I'm about to go to a dead area, I'm gonna hang up now, I'll call you back in 10 minutes because otherwise it's gonna get worse. But yes, I don't think that Verizon's like, let's think of the rural folks. It's more of, yeah, what do we have to do? What are we obligated to do? All right, folks, Samsung made a bunch of product announcements ahead of CES. With this extra week, it feels like more CES stuff is trickling out slowly. Samsung soundbars are gonna feature tap-to-pair with your smartphone. So you can pair it with Bluetooth, just with a tap. Also Apple AirPlay 2, as well as wider Dolby Atmos compatibility when in more of the models. Some nifty calibration microphones for setting them up. Some Samsung TVs are gonna get something called Smart Trainer, which will work with Samsung's health app to track you while you work out in front of your TV, track you in the good way of like, making sure you're up to speed and using some AI to see that you're still exercising. You would have to attach a Logitech camera to your Samsung television for that to work. So it's a lot of ifs and buts there. The Frame TV, first seen in 2017, it's the one that looks like a painting when it's not a TV and it comes with like thousands of pieces of art you can put up on it. It's now just 24.9 millimeters thick, about the size of an average art frame, honestly, and available in more sizes between 32 inch and 75 inches. Also Samsung's QLED TVs are now called Neo QLED. That's the Samsung buzzword for CES. That means it includes mini LED based full array local dimming for precise light control and the pixels are 40 times smaller. The LEDs are 40 times smaller. So you can pack in more of them. Samsung also announced a remote with a solar cell. So it keeps charged. They also announced that their TVs are going to support PS5 and Xbox Series X 4K 120 frames per second input and VRR, just like the Ankyo we heard about earlier and Google Duo video chat support as well. So my first thought when I saw this was that's rad. I want one of these TVs. Look how cool that is. It looks like a framed picture. We're going to hang that up. And then I went, oh wait, I plug a lot of things into my TV and where are those going to go? And then my brain went, well, of course you're going to knock the wall out Scott and put them on the other side of some closet. So now I'm like all the way back around going, I don't think I want this beautiful frame TV for anything other than, you know, if you just want to throw at it. Well, I think it's got a breakout box that you hide somewhere else. But then yeah, then you have to deal with the frame and or the wires. Yeah, depending on where you live and how much you can drill into your wall can get complicated. When I saw the new frame TV this morning, I was like, that's dope. I mean, the nuts and bolts are really not that different except that it's thinner than ever. It looks beautiful for something like my living room setup because I need a mounted TV on a swivel just because I have a weirdly shaped house. This doesn't actually make a lot of sense to me because I like to, especially if you're going to put something on the wall and it's sort of flush and yeah, it looks like art when you're not watching something very cool. As long as you want it to be at that level all the time once you put it on a stand of some kind or mounted then it sort of defeats the purpose. So I'm not actually the target market for this. And it's also a little too rich for my pocket book at this time, but boy does it look nice. Yeah, you wouldn't, you would stop and admire it. But I don't know if I just the practicality isn't sinking in yet for me. Unless again, you're just trying to do or you ever got a new office layout and you really want to make every room pop in the conference room itself would just really benefit from a giant TV that just looked beautiful on that wall and IT worried about where it plugged in and you're just good to go. Like that sounds amazing. And maybe that's who they're even aiming this for, but at home I just can't, for me, I can't see it. I'm a plug and play guy. Samsung sells some invisible wires to go with your Samsung frame TV. I don't know if they bundle any in the box maybe too. How are they invisible? They're clear. They're clear about invisible. It's sort of like clear braces. Not as invisible as you thought. Totally invisible, yeah. Folks joining the conversation in our Discord, you can join that by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, OpenAI released two extensions to the GPT3 deep learning model that are significant advances in getting algorithms to understand how words relate to images. The first extension, contrastive language image pre-training or clip for short identifies what's in an image. It's not new, but what's significant is how it gets trained. Usually models are trained from a dataset of images with labels. Bunch of cat images are labeled cat. Bunch of images of bananas label banana. You get the picture. Now clip was trained on images and captions taken from the internet and it learns by identifying which of the 32,768 captions go with which images and then develops the ability to link objects to names and words that lets it identify objects and images outside of its actual training set. Get smarter and multiple objects, not just bananas or bananas and cats, more objects all together. The second extension is called Dolly. It's kind of written like WALL-E-D-A-L-L-E. Dolly is also trained on text and image pairs taken from the internet but Dolly creates illustrations based on a short natural language phrase. So an example would be a baby daikon radish and a tutu walking a dog. Doesn't happen that often, but it did well on that one. Or an avocado armchair. You wouldn't believe the results. Did not do as well on a snake made of harp. Snail made of harp rather. But snake made of harp would be really weird. Probably wouldn't have done that one either. Yeah, so you can get weird with it with varying results, but sometimes kind of gets it. OpenAI posted 32 Dolly images ranked by clip as best matching the description. Mark Redahl of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia told MIT Technology Review that he thinks Dolly might do well on the Lovelace 2 test, which measures AI on its ability to blend concepts in a creative way. So not just images, but concepts themselves. While these models are milestones, they do have their limits. Dolly isn't consistent if you rephrase a caption with words that mean the same thing. You can only handle so many objects and that kind of starts getting confused. There's also a question of how novel its images actually are and whether those two two wearing daikons are copied from the internet, not actually created from scratch. Oh, that's interesting. That little bit I missed. So as a, I'm glad that this is today because as someone who does about half his living as an illustrator and artist and cartoonist, this is very interesting to me. For a long time, there's been little ripples of fear around that community saying, well, one day what's to stop technology for getting so good that they won't need us anymore. It'll just generate images. And on this show, we've talked before about fantasy D&D characters being created from a database that are a lot like that. This person doesn't exist site and they all look different. They look like paintings and what's a game developer need to hire an artist for anymore. We'll just use this technology. And so this is just like another step in that direction. But I'm happy to report that these are all kind of cool and weird, but terrible. Like they're terrible and they're not gonna work for those kinds of applications. Scott, be nice to the AI. Okay, have you seen the exact same cat on the top as a sketch on the bottom where they give it a photo of a cat and it turns it into a sketch? Yes. And don't get me wrong. They're gonna be uses for this even immediately where when this becomes a more common thing and it's cheaper to either use this or use a service that gives you this versus contracting something with an artist or an agency, people will use it for some tasks. There'll be reasons why that makes sense. I use that video game reason on purpose because I do think that AI driven creation of a bunch of characters for your big expansive RPG is actually not only gonna save you a ton of money but actually works really well like they looked really good and they were legitimate. But if you're gonna go to somebody and say, look, I wanna make this very custom thing with all these reasons why it needs to say this or do this or show this for an important article I'm putting in Newsweek or whatever, that illustrator will have an advantage for a very long time over an AI that has given a set of instructions. And I always feel it's incumbent to point out that's not why they're doing this. They're not doing this to replace you. What they're doing is advancing what AI could do. And the big advance here is the semantics. It doesn't really have semantics but the appearance of semantics is pretty compelling. And that's why the Lovelace 2 test is really interesting. Like does this look like it's creative? Like avocado chair seems obvious to us but that's a really hard thing for a machine to wrap its head around. And it did it. So the idea that you can just say to to clip and we're talking about Dolly mostly here but to clip to say, hey, just find an object and not have to have trained it on that object to just have it trained on stuff. So it understands what objects are out there. Again, in a limited space, it's not widespread. It has a limited data set that it's trained on but you didn't tell it what objects to learn. It just learned them. Those are huge advances. Right. It's a really neat thing though to see. And again, because it would impact me directly I feel like I have a bias toward it but I'm actually impressed. Like I'm actually impressed with what I could pull off. I still think it looks terrible but I also said that about early Photoshop attempts at changing people's faces or deep fake attempts that have come so far since then. So you could also, I mean, Scott, you obviously illustrate lots of things all the time but it could be something kind of fun where you're like, this is a ridiculous concept. Maybe I need some inspiration and you see some stuff and you're like, eh, I could do better but then you kind of get your creative juices flowing. Yeah, another very quick example of that because I know we're out of time on this story almost but this idea of me being able to say, okay, I need to quickly construct a composition and by composition, I mean generally the mountains are here and generally the building is over here and generally our main character is here in the foreground and they're kind of positioned in a natural sort of a human is drawn to it and their eyes are drawn to it in a very good compositional way. I used to take glasses on this. If there was ways to do that with just very basic objects and say, throw all that out for me so I can just have some inspiration and then work from that, there's something there. There's something to that because the way we do things digitally anyway we're always using reference photos and references anyway. So I have no problem with that kind of stuff in terms of how it might affect me but in the meantime, I don't think anybody should be any hurry to say, well, I'm gonna have my next children's book illustrated by this AI because you're not gonna like the results. That's not what this is about at all. It's not meant to do that, right? And if there's any folks out there who use this kind of stuff, send us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com let us know what this is being used for because there are so many purposes that this can help that people kind of skip on by because they wanna go right to where Scott's talking about of like, is it gonna affect me? Is it gonna replace me? Yeah. The other one final thing, the other cool thing it's a little bit like watching a little kid draw for the first time. So you see a two year old, two and a half year old and they first put crayon to paper and there is this feeling of, oh my gosh, he's gonna do it, he's gonna draw a dog. It's gonna happen right here in front of my eyes. There's a little bit of that happening here. The AI is like a, you know, a toddler and we're getting to see how we can get that toddler to do things we never thought it would be. I mean, the daikon and the tutu ain't bad. I mean, a two year old, I mean, kudos. Two year old can do that. Yeah. There's a couple on there that might, you know, give me a little pause. The tutu and the dog aren't that bad. They're all right. The avocado gives me more pause. I want an avocado chair. I told Tom before the show, my birthday's in October. Yeah, better get crackin' everybody. Yeah. I will sit in that. Well, let's talk about one final thing in the Minecraft world. Hey, Minecraft players, the Minecraft team announced a little bit of sad news. It will soon shut down its AR mobile game, Minecraft Earth. You may remember this was a game that was positioned to compete with the likes of Pokemon Go and other augmented reality games. The team said the game was originally created to encourage free movement and collaborative play to things that become near impossible in the current global situation. The final update to the game reduces the time needed to craft and the cost of materials to let players enjoy the game while staying at home. In-app purchases have been disabled and paid Ruby coins will be converted into mine coins that can be used on a wider Minecraft marketplace. You can use it for actual Minecraft, buying game stuff. Play and download, or sorry, play and downloads of Minecraft Earth will end on June 30th and player data will be deleted promptly on July 1st. So this is, right about time, people start going back outside in the world if everything goes to play. Yeah, you'd mentioned that in pre-show, and I would like to tag on to that this. These are two weird pullouts from Microsoft this year that I didn't expect. This one seemed like it was gaining a little ground. I know some players that were enjoying it. It was coming along. And now that we're getting to a place where we might be out more, come spring and summer and that sort of thing, pulling the plug this early just seems a little, I don't know, premature. It's not like they couldn't keep it going. They've got the money to do it. A lot like pulling mixer, right? Before a massive new console launch. Yeah, mixer wasn't doing great. Minecraft Earth wasn't doing great, but Microsoft can take these experiments further and I sometimes wish they would. So it bums me out a little bit. But hey, Minecraft, generally Minecraft is all good. Sitting there doing what Minecraft does. You just not gonna be able to play this version of it anymore. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it Thor from what he calls finely cooled Oslo Norway. Congratulations Thor. I wanted to add to the conversation we were having about electric cars. We talked about EVs with Tim Stevens on Monday. We talked about it a little bit more yesterday. Thor says in Norway, we have tax incentives to buy electric vehicles and we have generally higher wages. This has allowed Teslas to become quite prevalent in a pretty short amount of time. I used to see Volvo's wherever I went. Now I know there's always a Tesla, at least one, parked somewhere within sight. The increase is interesting and probably makes sense since most, if not all of the electricity in Norway is from hydroelectric plants. But that also means that as Norway gets greener, battery production is probably making other places less green and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Yeah, our tax credits are lowering. We used to have a $7,500 tax credit for an electric vehicle. Now it's down to $37.50 for 2020 and then it's gonna go down. I think it's $18.75 for the latter half. But we see a lot of them around Los Angeles and San Francisco too. So I kind of feel you, Thor. Not as cold though in those places. Oslo, yeah. Well, yeah, well thanks Thor. It's always nice to hear from the ground from where people are in various places in the world. Also, nice to know that we have patrons that are master and grandmaster levels. Today they include Justin Zellers, Miss Music Teacher and Mike McLaughlin. Thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, I don't know how cold it is in the SLC but what have you been up to? Weirdly, it's in the 40s today. It's usually like blow freezing. So I don't know what's going on. Probably a storm coming, but while that's happening and if people are thinking, man, I sure could use an escape from the daily rigors of life with some sort of headphones. Well, then I might recommend a show that's now going on 11 years called Film Sack. We've been doing it that long. It's a show that tackles different movies each week. A lot of stuff in the 80s and 90s, but more recent stuff as well. And we don't just focus on garbage or the great stuff. We do a lot of stuff in between. We're doing Almost Famous this weekend. Last weekend we did Air Force One. And the weekend after that, we're doing Cliffhanger with Arnold, not Aaron Schwarzenegger with Sylvester Stallone, if I can get my action heroes, right? That sounds like fun. It is, four hosts having a blast every week. Go check it out, filmsack.com for details. And for everything else I've got going, you can find me at frogpants.com. Real quickly, Jim Video points out clip could be used to help blind people know what is going on around them. There's stuff that does that, but it could help you get better at that. Yeah, yeah. Nice. Jim Video did that in our Discord, which you can get by being a patron. And you know what else you get by being a patron? An ad-free feed of DTNS. Support us on Patreon. Get your own personal RSS feed supported directly by you, sponsored by you. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We love everybody who watches and listens at their leisure, but we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Put it on your calendar. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Rubber Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.