 Coming up on DTNS, Adobe brings Photoshop and Illustrator to the iPad. Microsoft sets a launch date for the new Chromium-based edged browser and has some new jobs for Cortana and using Glass for long-term data storage. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 4th, 2019. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from the brand new Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. So you have a new, are you trying this out or is that the name of your new Studio? I don't know. I didn't even really know what I was going to say until I said it. And you can't see any Redwoods because I'm in my own garage. But I assure you there are many right around me. And yeah, I feel like that's appropriate. I think we're going to go with Studio Redwood. Studio Redwood. All right. I like it. Yeah. Well, folks, if you want to find out a little more about what's going on in Sarah's garage, definitely get Good Day Internet. I also had some updates on my thoughts on the AirPods Pro and Firefox 70 to get Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Russia's sovereign Internet law went to effect on Friday. The law requires all ISPs to route traffic through state-controlled infrastructure and sets up a framework for national system of domain names. The Kremlin has said that the sovereign Internet law was designed as a security measure to allow Russia to operate internal networks without access to the worldwide web in the event of an emergency or a cyber attack. Sure. That's all it's for. The research firms, Canalus and Strategy Analytics both report that global smartphone shipments increased in Q3. Estimates of a one or 2% increase respectively. This represents the first quarterly increase in two years. Samsung and Huawei took the top two spots, growing shipments eight and 29% respectively. So not bad for Huawei. That's according to Strategy Analytics, Apple, Xiaomi and Oppo rounded out the top five, but all saw declining shipments on the air. By dance, parent company of TikTok. Perhaps you've heard of it. Launched its first phone called the Smartisan Django Pro 3. With the TikTok app conveniently accessed from the lock screen. So it's pretty, you know, part of the whole deal. Back in January, ByteDance acquired a number of patents from Smartisan, which is a Chinese phone maker. And halfway through the year, Rimmer started buzzing about a Smartisan ByteDance phone, which now officially exists, but only in China. Do you remember how crazy people got about the idea of a Facebook phone several years back? Yeah. Yeah. And now TikTok. Right. So how would it be, you know, but like Facebook, you know, as part of the whole infrastructure, like that's crazy. TikTok just takes a few months of rumors and boom, they've got one. That's right. That's how you do it. All right. Let's talk a little more about Airbnb. Yeah. So the crazy story on Halloween last week, a house party at a house that was rented on Airbnb resulted in a shooting and the death of five people. This was in the Bay Area. On Saturday, Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky tweeted that the company is banning house parties and taking steps to quote, combat unauthorized parties and get rid of abusive hosts and guest conduct and quote, Airbnb will expand screening of high risk reservations and create a dedicated house party rapid response team. Now, real quickly, I am not the kind of person that says, why didn't you do this earlier? Because sometimes you just do it when it's necessary. However, the fact that they are announcing this after deaths bothers me. It really bothers me. This should have been something that Airbnb was saying, we had a policy in place and the failure of that policy led us to revise the policy and look at it. Not, we're going to start finally cracking down on this. People have been complaining about Airbnb rentals being used as house party locations for years. This is not new. And it shouldn't have taken this to cause them to take extra action in my opinion. You know, what's very interesting about the timing of this story is, so where I am, where I live now, I am in, I am in my own space. I'm in my own garage. I got an apartment, but on the same property is an Airbnb location. My landlords will be here, here and there, but for the most part, it is a money making operation. And, you know, I'm kind of part of that whole thing. You know, I'm going to sort of be, you know, on the ground helping people, you know, if they, you know, need to find keys or whatever, you know, once they're here. So this is, this is something that I am embracing at the same time. We've had a lot of conversations, you know, my landlord and I and, you know, a couple other people kind of involved been like, what is our party policy? You know, I don't want people partying on the, you know, grounds just because I don't want, you know, noise because I'm an old lady. But at the same time, it's like, you have to think of safety stuff. Like what, what are we really willing to allow? And I think that in many cases, the money making aspect of Airbnb, and it's not just Airbnb, it could be VRBO or HomeAway or, you know, there are other services, but Airbnb is kind of the big one at this point. There are lots of policies in place that a landlord might have, which you're supposed to adhere to, but if they're not around, you kind of do what you want. And that's why we're getting into these situations like this. Not that anybody should be shooting each other on any premises ever. That's obviously horrible, but, but just saying, hey, you can't have seven people over. Like that's not cool. Is there someone there to make sure that you're not doing that? Well, vacation rentals aren't new. And I've done, I've done vacation rentals not through Airbnb in places like I've done them through VRBO in Hawaii. I've done vacation rentals through Airbnb in Palm Springs. And when they are managed responsibly, it's very clear to you. Palm Springs particularly is very clear about this because they're near the Coachella thing. Sure, sure, yeah. That you are not allowed to do certain things and they make it upfront, super clear. They make you sign a separate contract. The problem here is Airbnb hasn't done enough for the casual people who are like, oh, I guess I can just rent out my house. Cool. To, to do things to protect against abuse of the policies. And I'm glad to see that they are now, but. Yeah, it's, it's, it, you're right. It should have been done earlier and it is, you know, horrible situation that, that, that happened at this particular residence. But, but yeah, it, it's on Airbnb. You know, it's, they, this is a company that makes so much money off of people trying to make a little, you know, a little cash off of, you know, being away from home and, and letting other people in there have to have a policy for things like this. We'll get to more on the Microsoft Ignite stories in a minute, but here's one of the less practical, more far-reaching ones. Microsoft and Warner Brothers announced storing the movie Superman, the original movie from the 80s, on a square glass disc that is 7.5 centimeters on a side and about two millimeters thick about the size of a typical coaster. The new storage medium is the result of Project Silica. That's a partnership between Microsoft and the University of Southampton Opto Electronics Research Center to create durable, long-term cold storage. Cold storage is when you need to have your bits saved somewhere that you don't have to access through the cloud. You don't have to access them all the time, but you don't want them to degrade. You don't want to have to go back and, you know, make sure that they don't fall apart. So with this new disc, a laser burns small geometric shapes called voxels into the glass with multiple bits in each voxel in 74 or more layers within the glass. 74 layers for Superman. They say they can have more. To read the data, light is shined through the glass on a microscope like readers, which use machine learning to interpret the data. The glass is very durable. That's not easily shattered and it holds up over time and they microwaved it and froze it and did all kinds of stuff to make sure it's durable. Microsoft still needs to unify, read and write into a single device for this and increase the storage capacity. I think it's still less than a terabyte before it becomes a viable product, but this is a great demo. This is a great concept piece. Hey, man. I mean, in the age of everything being in the cloud to have a physical storage medium that is better than what we've had in the past, it's still really cool. Yeah. And especially for long-term storage, which is, you know, oftentimes used on tape or this variety article about this talks about preserving film and how they have to do humidity, temperature control to make sure that films going all the way back to the 1920s in Warner Brothers case don't degrade and are still able to be used to be scanned in and make new versions of. This glass medium makes that a lot easier. It's not going to be perfect for everything. You know, you're not going to store your film stuff on that because you want the original film prints if they were shot in film, but video games, 4K stuff, you might want to have alternate ways of storing it. And this is a great example of that. The Internet Archive wants to make it easier for Wikipedia readers to look up citations of books. Their organization is working to provide a two-page preview when clicking on a book title or a citation as long as it has a page number. Users will be able to check out the digital book for up to two weeks if it isn't already checked out. The finite books. That's right. Roughly 130,000 citations across languages have been linked to 50,000 books as part of the project so far. So has some work to do, but still, you know, it's moving in the right direction. Yeah, one of the things that archive.org has going for it is that it is in fact a licensed library, unlike Google. I don't know, Google might have gotten that now, but they are a library. They have a large enough organization and they've been doing this long enough that they can say, what we're doing is fair use. You can complain all you want. Come at us if you want, I guess. But we'd rather you didn't. We're not trying to undermine your sales or your marketplace. We're trying to make information accessible. As far as a Wikipedia user goes, a lot of times when you see a book citation, you're just sort of like, yeah, I guess I could go try to find that book in a library somewhere, but I'm not. Awesome. You know, as a person who I use Wikipedia for fact checking with a grain of salt, but for the most part, it's pretty robust. This allows me to have that much more sort of, I don't know, satisfaction that there is an infrastructure behind it that makes sense. Yeah, and people make a lot of fun jokes about Wikipedia because it's editable by anybody and all of that. But the fact of the matter is a lot of studies have found that Wikipedia is generally as accurate or in a lot of cases more accurate than traditional encyclopedias and similar kinds of sources because it has a really strong moderation policy. That's right. And yes, you get a little bad action in Wikipedia, but for the most part, you don't. For the most part, it's pretty good stuff. The bad actor activity gets all the headlines, right? And so there's a representation of misinformation whereas it's way less misinformation of Wikipedia than there is on Twitter or Facebook. I'll say well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com We're going to talk about Microsoft Ignite. We're going to talk about Adobe Max. Let's take a look at some of the big announcements coming out of Ignite first. Microsoft announced that the new version of its Edge browser built on the Chromium engine will launch on January 15th. That's going to be on Windows 7, 8, and 10 and Mac OS. Microsoft put out a release candidate of Edge today. You could get a beta before and now you can get the total RC. Microsoft also unveiled a new logo for Edge. So Goodbye Blue E. Doesn't look like Internet Explorer anymore. Looks more like a circular wave. That seems like the right move. Different browser. Different life. I mean, it's not radically different, but it's different enough that it won't give you the shakes if you have IE 10, IE 6 problems still in your veins. Along with the expected features like password sync and tracking protection, the Edge release candidate has Microsoft search in Bing built in so you can find intranet searches. Things like coworkers, office locations, right from the address bar. Edge is definitely being positioned towards the workplace. Uh-huh. Yeah. In fact, when I read the sort of feature list, I was sort of like, okay, I mean, you know, how does this change sort of the average user? It doesn't really seem to change the average user all that much, but in the workplace it would be it's much more handy. Microsoft released an Office app for Android and iOS that combines Word, Excel and PowerPoint into one app with the ability to create new documents by scanning text or tables from your phone along with all the other things that all three separate apps could do before. The app is also smaller than the three separate apps combined because there's some efficiency there. Office for iOS is launching in public preview and only for phones. No tablet support yet. Gotta love this. Anything that is, well, I mean, it depends on how it works for me, which I haven't really tried out too much, but anything that is a suite of apps that I know I'm going to use in conjunction a lot together within one app that is mobile focused I am into rather than switching between all of those apps all the time. I've never had a big problem with Word, Excel on my tablet, mostly being separate. Also, this is only for the phone, so I'm probably not going to really use it. Oh, install it. Microsoft is adding Cortana to Outlook for iOS in the US with Android set to get it in spring. Among the features you can ask Cortana to play my emails and then you can tell Cortana to archive an email or flag an email. You can also have Cortana read your calendar invites. You'll need to wear headphones in order to take advantage of these features. Cortana also comes with a mail sounding voice option now along with upgrades to make both the female and the male voices sound more natural. Cortana will also create a daily email that summarizes meetings and important documents. That's an email. It's not something it's going to read to you. It's just going to, the agent will send it to you. And a new scheduler feature lets you CC Cortana into an email thread and tell Cortana to set a meeting at the location time and duration you want or even just say find a time when all of us on this thread can meet. You know, Microsoft sort of downgrading Cortana into something that was, you know, mostly for the workplace and we're going to build it, you know, kind of focus building into windows and all that stuff. These are welcome changes. If you're a Cortana fan, if this is something assistant that you use, these are really welcome changes. It would probably take a little bit of, you know, getting used to the idea of, you know, adding Cortana to an email and then, you know, telling her later to do something or that, but it's cool. These are cool features. I used to use an intelligent assistant to schedule meetings. It worked most of the time. I imagine Microsoft has improved on that. That was like three or four years ago now. And so I think that could be a huge time saver for people. Microsoft also announced Azure Farm Beats in public preview in the Azure Marketplace. Farm Beats takes in data from sensors, satellites, drones and weather stations and uses machine learning to evaluate the data and make recommendations for farmers. You know, normally I'd be like farmers. I don't know any of them, but I'm surrounded by them now at Studio Redwood where we are Farm Central. So I'm going to walk around my neighborhood after the show's over today and be like, hey, y'all, do you like this? Do you like this idea? You got a lot of sensors. I mean, this is really useful if people are having a hard time figuring out how to integrate all this data. A lot of farms are using this kind of data, but they may be looking at it in like seven different places, and if this can easily bring it all together and make more sense of it, that's a potentially very useful thing. A few more things of note out of Ignite Microsoft is also integrating Outlook and Yammer into Teams. Teams is Microsoft's Slack competitor, if you don't know. Also adding private channels and pinned channels coming later this year. The Azure Blockchain Tokens platform was announced. It wants to make building a blockchain with Tokens as easy for a business as plugging in a printer. So if you've got an idea that you know you could do. I don't know if that's a great, you know, parameter, but okay. Before you laugh, there's a lot of companies who are like, I know exactly what I would use Blockchain for. I know what this token is for. It's not about finances, right? It's about, oh, we have this tracking system, we have this logistics system, maybe even an accounting system, and if we had Tokens on a blockchain, we would be able to track that more easily. This is going to make that super simple. So they don't have to go, but where do I start? Who would I hire to make this? They would be able to just say, oh, I'm already an Azure customer. Let me plug that in and suddenly I'm able to use this. This is not about like launching an ICO. If that's what people are thinking. Project Cortex launched in private preview. It uses machine learning to find important information in documents when the algorithm thinks it's relevant, makes those available as hover links in apps like Office Outlook and Teams. General availability of Project Cortex is expected in the first half of 2020. That part of it, I'm sort of like, I don't know what it would highlight, but that sounds great. Kind of along the lines of when Gmail started wanting to auto-correct our sentences, some people were like, I hate it. Horrible. Turn it off. I love it. I love any help I can get. So, you know, I welcome these sort of experiments. If there was an email from someone saying, you know, in the RFP and then there was just a little hover, like, hey, did you want to check the RFP real quick? Like, that's the kind of thing I could see. Exactly. There you go. All right, let's shift gears to Adobe Max. Adobe Max is happening too. Here's a few of the Noble. I think they're very noble, but they're also notable announcements out there. Adobe has launched version 1.0 of Photoshop for the iPad. Woo! It happened! It has been redesigned for the tablets, centers on compositing, retouching and masking. Not all the tools from Photoshop made it in and everybody can find their favorite tool that hasn't made it in and complain about it if they want, but Adobe says this is just the first version. They focused on the most common tasks and they're going to continually add features over time. They're going to have frequent updates, adding features all year long and beyond. It has a toolbox along the left, layers along the right, along with editing tools like brightness, contrast, hue, saturation. There's also panels to make image adjustments with layer mask, gradients and blend modes. It's built from the same code base as desktop Photoshop and it supports the cloud PSD format so your edits can be synced across desktop and tablet versions. Photoshop for iPad is available to Adobe Creative Cloud customers paying for a plan that includes Photoshop and those start at around $9.99 a month. Well, so I pay for a $30 per month Creative Cloud account, which includes Photoshop and a couple of other things. I assume that if I had an iPad Pro say, which I don't it's Christmas soon everybody, but if I did that would be a great option. What I wonder is and I use Photoshop, I am not a Photoshop whiz by any sense, but I know how to do a certain amount of things to create a certain result which I use for another line of work that I do. How many people will sign up for Photoshop accounts based on the fact that the iPad is now offered? I feel like this is really a secondary thing for people who already have Creative Cloud accounts. Yeah, this is to keep people happy. This is like to keep people from dropping their subscription because they're like, what I really need is to have it on the tablet. It's to extend Photoshop. For those people who are like, I use Photoshop. I need to use Photoshop. I want to use it on my iPad. Yeah. Adobe also showed off Illustrator for iPad set for release sometime next year. Illustrator will have specific Illustrator will have tablet specific interface and support for Apple Pencil. Adobe also mentioned features like taking a photo with the iPad and then converting it right into vector shapes. Well, I wish I had more to say about Illustrator. It's always been a real mystery to me. But yeah, this is great. I pulled a designer friend of mine this morning and said, okay, we've heard the rumors. A lot of these tools I will not personally use. Do you care? And he was like, this is a big deal, Sarah. Yeah. This is a big deal. And a lot of the stuff we said about needing Photoshop on the iPad, same for Illustrator. The folks who are happy about Photoshop today are hopefully overlapping quite a bit with this crowd. But those who just wanted Illustrator had a little bit of time to wait, but at least they got some hope. Adobe's augmented reality app Aero is out today for free on iOS. You can import files from Dimension, Photoshop, Illustrator, and even non-Adobe apps like Maya and C4D to create interactive augmented reality experiences without having to know how to code them. You can place objects and scale them, add animation triggers, and draw paths for objects to follow. It uses the USDZ file format so your Aero projects can be sent to friends on iMessage and they'll just work. Well, that name Aero has new life in a whole different place. This is a way to expand the number of people using augmented reality stuff, right? It's kind of like the blockchain thing except in a different space to say hey, I've got an idea for augmented reality. I know what it would look like because I'm a designer but I don't want to have to figure out a new code language for this. Exactly. I've got a bunch of photos in Photoshop. Can I just sort of send them to Aero and see what I can do? Yeah, that's the idea. 3D models, all that stuff. Adobe launched a free Photoshop camera app for Android and iOS that uses Adobe's Sensei AI to recognize the subjects in a photo and then suggest filters to apply based on that. Their big example was a mountain range where it suggested filters that would change out the sky into other stuff so you can make cool looking landscapes. Filters can be used while composing a shot or added to a photo that's already been taken so you can do it either way. Manual adjustment tools let you tweak it if you want and you can select from curated lenses. I think who was it? Billy Eilish has one of the curated lenses right now for Adobe, but you can also make your own in Photoshop. That's cool. Yeah, I mean, and I don't know. I mean, there's so many camera apps out there and I think a lot of us, you know, we're sort of stuck in our Instagram life, but you know what? Not your only option. Lots of other options out there and Adobe with any photo filter app is going to be the best of the best. Haven't tried it out yet, but I'm excited to. Yeah, this is for like you want Photoshop level capabilities but you don't want to go into Photoshop or you don't know how to use Photoshop. Exactly. I think I think, you know, myself included Photoshop is you know, arguably Adobe's biggest product. It is very it is it scares people because it's so robust that most of us kind of go like, I want to use Photoshop. I want to use some other little filter app. This is the perfect way for Adobe to win both ways. A few other announcements to note from Adobe Max, the fresco drawing and painting app launched on iPad is now available for Windows as part of Creative Cloud subscription. The Adobe Premiere rush video app is now the first third party app that can publish to TikTok. Well, that's the other part of this news is TikTok will now let you publish videos into it. You don't have to use the TikTok app and Adobe Premiere rush is the first one to do it and design prototyping software Adobe XD introduced a real time co editing feature in beta so that you can collaborate on when you're working on a prototype and Adobe XD. I can't wait for your TikToks to really up tick now that you have different ways to do it. I feel my age when I look at TikTok. Yeah, I got some friends who are like, oh, this is addictive. I could do this all day and I'm like, don't even want to open it. Don't even want to open it. I opened TikTok this morning after the story and what I saw was a woman being asked if she spoke Spanish as she rang someone up at a counter and then the person said something insulting in Spanish walked out of frame and a guy behind him said, I'm not an expert but I think that means he thinks you're beautiful. I'm like, what? And that's probably some meme that we just don't get that like lots of other people are like, haha, I see what you did there. Yeah, I don't know. It's all it's all become world. Sorry. We're just old. Well, I'm going to download Adobe Premiere rush and start my TikTok career. There you go. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories. Sometimes they're about TikTok. Most of the time they're about other things, but we love all of your submissions. Vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join our group in Discord where you can link to at patreon.com. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Jess Galloway wrote in and said, your discussion about landlines. This was from last week being powered even when the power goes out and how they may still not be available. This was on the Thursday and Friday shows was great. Jess says, here in Dallas, Texas AT&T will not provide a landline anymore. They'll only provide voice over IP which does need power to both the home and to AT&T's equipment near the home. It seems to me that AT&T should be made to at least provide backup power to their equipment. It doesn't help me to have a generator or a battery backup if AT&T is down. Same goes for cell towers. Yeah, we've had a lot of people suggest alternatives, landline being one of them, ham radio being another. But in my opinion, while those are all great suggestions, it doesn't it shouldn't shift the responsibility away from the carriers to say you should think of a way to have backup power in your emergency response situations because a lot of people will be using your product. Backup power on landline wasn't designed in. It's sort of a happy accident as I understand it, that the way it runs, there's always a little bit of power in the line and it was like, oh hey this is great. So now your your phone will still work even if the power goes out because there's a little bit of power just in the way the system was designed. Maybe it was a consideration in the building of telephone lines, maybe it wasn't. The point is, you still could have a resilient mobile system that doesn't have to be landlines. Yes, there's sort of a well if you want to take things into your own hands, there are things you can do to protect yourself and that's great. But we shouldn't let that take the pressure off of companies to be like you should have, there is technology to have a way for these systems to be resilient in an emergency and still work. We've seen that in multiple disaster relief situations, Puerto Rico, Hurricane Katrina etc where volunteer organizations will come in and set up networks to get service back and working. So let's think of that ahead of time and build it into the design, that's what I have to say. Well, shout out to our patrons who also have lots of things to say and thank goodness for you. At our master and grandmaster levels especially including Paul Moyer, Dustin Archambel and Andrew Bradley. That's Paul Boyer. Paul Boyer? What did I say? You said Moyer, which was my science teacher when I was growing up, Mr. Moyer. I don't even know Mr. Moyer. Sorry, Paul. Paul Boyer. But thank you to Paul Boyer and thank you to Jerry Moyer who taught me science in 5th and 6th grades. Together you are giant. Yes, exactly. And hey, we have new Patreon rewards. A few people have been asking me where's that cookbook and I say it's on Patreon. If you turned off the email alerts of Patreon then you didn't get an email telling you that the cookbook had been posted there but there's an easy fix. Go to patreon.com. Scroll down to you see the cookbook headline and then you can download it there at patreon.com. That is for people who signed up before October 31st but if you haven't signed up yet there's still lots of cool stuff including the Grandmaster and Masters that we just shouted out also get free shipping at everything at our store at dailytechnewshow.com There's a code for that up on Patreon if you're at the Master and Grandmaster level. Check all this out. It's all available at patreon.com. Your feedback helps us make our show great. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern That's 2130 UTC Just changed. Hope everybody's dealing with the time change in places in the world that had to deal with it. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com Back tomorrow with Patrick Norton. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club Hope you've enjoyed this brover.