 Coming up on DTNS Robots to Clean Our Sewers is wireless charging at a distance finally here and Samsung's plan for personalized photo filters. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, January 29th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Los Angeles area, I'm Lamar Wilson. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. We were just talking about gambling both on the stock market and in Las Vegas on Good Day Internet. If you'd like that wider conversation become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Acting CISA director Brandon Whales said of the organizations hacked by the group behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack 30% had no direct connection to SolarWinds. Whales also said Microsoft was the only known cloud software target of the group with SolarWinds remaining the only known organization so broadly compromised. For those of you tired of the story, sorry, there's still a little Robin Hood news. Here's all of it in one compact delivery. Robin Hood, following behind TD Ameritrade Schwab M1 Webull in public resumed limited trading of stocks on Friday, saying they were seeing increasing unusual activity. So they had to put restrictions in place to slow trading that was building up debt obligations that traders might not have had collateral to cover. There were also some issues with trade settlers like Apex and Citadel securities being able to obtain the level of stock being bought at profitable prices because with options and margins, sometimes people were able to buy more stock than existed. Robin Hood had to tap credit lines of $500 to $600 million and then also raise a billion dollars from investors to cover its debt and regulatory obligations. But Robin Hood says it was automatically selling some stock options where investors did not have collateral to cover possible losses. The US SEC has warned investors and issuers to stay in compliance through this whole thing. The US Senate and the House of Representatives have indicated they will investigate the situation. And Robin Hood turned off instant buying of cryptocurrencies as of Friday because of the price of Dogecoin spiked. So spiked. Customers could still use settled funds for crypto transactions just couldn't do margins or options. Signals latest version for iOS that's version 5.3.1 and Android 5.3.7 include some new mainstream features like chat wallpapers, animated stickers, and a new about section for user profiles. The iOS app in particular now handles data more efficiently including settings to lower data usage during calls, automatically pause attachment downloads during calls, and improved image compression. AutoX has become the first driverless robo taxi service in China offering public rides and autonomous vehicles without safety drivers. Those interested have to sign up for a pilot program in Shenzhen and use membership credits, then ride in a modified Chrysler Pacifica equipped with LiDAR and blind spot sensing from point A to point B. Riders can talk to customer support reps if they have questions or need help. Google Project Zero security researcher Samuel Gross found a new security system in iOS 14 called Blast Door to protect users against attacks in iMessage itself. Gross says it's a basic sandbox executing code only in the iMessage app where anything malicious hidden inside a message can't interact with the rest of the OS or retrieve user data. I just want to call out special points. You guys can't see this, but Sarah Lane spelled Samuel's last name with that German letter and just, you know, extra points for that. I am a global citizen. Exactly. Exactly. Citizen of the world, Sarah Lane. All right. Let's talk a little more about that wireless charging. Xiaomi announced Mi Air Charge technology. It's a wireless power charging system. Here we go again. That uses a phase control array to send up to five watts of power to multiple devices using beam formed millimeter wide waves within a radius of several meters. So to oversimplify, it sends millimeter wave power through the air over a couple of meters to charge all your devices in the room. Now devices would need to have a miniaturized antenna array with a beacon antenna to broadcast position information to the charging system so it knew where the phone or the watch or whatever was and a 14 antenna array to convert the millimeter wave signal into electric energy using a rectifier circuit. So you need a special thing in the room. You need to be within a couple of meters of the thing and your thing needs to have a special antenna array and converter to do the charging. Xiaomi says it should be able to charge phones, watches, fitness bracelets, speakers, lamps, smart home devices. It's the usual thing of like once this is up and running, you won't need to plug in anything. You just have batteries on stuff. But here's the rub. Xiaomi says no products will ship with this technology this year and gave no timetable for availability. Oh, yeah. Well, this is the first time. This is the first time this has happened. So like this is promising, right? Like no one has ever come up with wireless charging before. I mean, if you don't count the past five companies to promise this over the past seven years or so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing of Xiaomi and Xiaomi has a good track record with wireless charging. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, it's the only wireless 80 watt charger on the market. That's the proximity charging. We have to set it. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, they're good with that. Yeah. The company's certainly looking into how this develops over time, looking way ahead into the future. I mean, I love that idea of like, hey, all those dangling cords, donate them anymore, because all my good stuff is getting charged by this hub somewhere in the corner of the room and everything's a lot cleaner. Or maybe you have sort of nested hubs so that if something's more than a couple meters away, then you're charging your whole house and everything is more simplified and it's wire free. Sounds great. But Xiaomi's saying, hey, look, we've figured out this thing, but there are any products that can make use of this thing yet, certainly not this year. And we don't even really have any partners or a timeline to tell you is kind of that CES promise that you get year after year, where you're like, wouldn't this be cool? And then it isn't something that anybody can use in daily practice. Yeah. Because they describe, and all the companies that have done this before do this, they describe the technology and the physics of how it would work. And that that is all valid. This isn't, you know, snake oil. It's like, hey, if we can do this, this will happen. And then we'd be able to do that. And that all checks out. And that's why Xiaomi's making this announcement to say, okay, folks, we've got a better system than you've seen before. Check our system out. And it's like, oh, yeah, this one's a little more, more power efficient. This one's got a few, few less demands. But it's all about practicality. It's all about can you make this fit into the devices? Can you build it at scale? Can you build it at cost efficiency? That always makes it stumble, which is why they're not giving us a timetable, because they haven't got answers to all those questions yet. Well, let's move on, because I want answers to that. Let's just, no, we're not moving on until they give us answers. It's going to be a while. Exactly. 17 tech organizations and news publishers have combined to form global privacy control or GPC, a proposed specification to let users have a standard way to indicate privacy preferences. Now, the California Privacy Rights Act gives Californians the right to opt out of a third party tracking. So GPC will be built into browsers to indicate an opt out preference to every site the browser visits. Now, browsers from Brave and DuckDuckGo now send an opt out by default. DuckDuckGo is plugins for Firefox and Chrome do also. Plugins from Privacy Badger, Abine, is that pretty pronounced, Abine? And disconnect.me will add it as well. But here's the kicker, will sites honor it? Well, so far the New York Times, The Washington Post, Meredith Digital, and Automatic, the company that runs WordPress have all agreed to honor it. Mozilla supports the effort, but it's not yet implemented it. Now, the GPC has been submitted to the W3C as a web standard. If the California Attorney General rules that this counts as opt-in, more sites will need to respect it at that point. Now, Europe's GPDR, that's data right here. Thank you. I knew I knew I screwed something. GPR may also apply, but that would likely be proven in courts. So yeah, I think that was my question when I was going through this. It sounds great, all for privacy, but who's going to be the sheriff to tell these companies you have to do this? Right now it seems like honor system, right? We had Do Not Track, which Mozilla was behind, which didn't do exactly the same thing, but it was a way to protect privacy and tracking, and that failed because you just couldn't get uptake for it. The difference this time is that California angle. If you can get the Attorney General to rule that this counts, then any site operating in California has to honor GPC. Of course, you need the state to say GPC is effectively the same thing as giving you an indication that I want to opt out. So until they do that, this leverage doesn't really exist yet, but once the Attorney General does that, then that could cause a bunch of websites to say, well, now we have to honor GPC, and then once they honor GPC in California, then they honor GPC other places. They can then move on to the courts in Europe and try to say, well, this should apply to GDPR as well. This should be valid as a way to request that I not be third-party tracked. It doesn't stop first-party tracking. The site can still track you while you're on that site, but it would say you are not allowed to give any information about what you're getting from me here to anyone else outside of your own organization. Yeah. I know we're talking about this pre-show. I always found it fascinating just how much power California has. What happens in California from just labels you have to put on certain things for shipping or the cancer labels? It has a wide fuel efficiency, emissions standards, all that kind of stuff. I just find that always pretty impressive. Yeah. I think they've got a better chance than Do Not Track did. I would like to see Chrome, maybe Safari, jump in on this. I would imagine Chrome will drag its heels because it has a lot of contentious negotiations with advertisers because it's in the advertising business, whereas Apple doesn't seem to mind if the advertisers get their nose bent out of shape. So maybe Safari can jump in on this. I would absolutely love to see Mozilla jump in on this. I'm unclear why it's taking them longer to implement it, but because the more browsers you get to implement this, the more likely it will take off once if you can get some kind of legal backing. It looks like they've got a shot at getting legal backing for it as well. You think Mozilla is just because they had their own and is it like a butthole thing? Yeah, but everybody wins when you... That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. If a standard is agreed on, it's just so much clearer to consumers and the companies. I don't think it would be some kind of temper tantrum on Mozilla's part, but more of, well, we invested a lot of resources on this last time and then they went to waste. Let's hold off and make sure this is going to be real before we invest a lot of resources this time. Well, we've mentioned the global shortage of semiconductors for car makers and some car makers have had to shut down assembly lines because of those chip shortages. Samsung now warns that the shortage could then disrupt orders for memory chips used in smartphones. Chip foundries are prioritizing the rising demand for auto chips. Some are at full capacity limiting new orders, which could slow deliveries of smartphone chips. The automotive chip shortage seems to be caused by faster than expected demand for cars, rising number of chips in cars and U.S. trade restrictions affecting Chinese chip companies like SMIC. Taiwan's TSMC said Thursday it's reallocating capacity to support the automotive industry. Samsung is also considering expanding its foundry capacity. Semiconductors accounted for half of Samsung's operating profits in 2020, so it's a big deal. BMW has taken to using a Honeywell H1 Quantum computer to optimize its supply chain to avoid shortages as much as possible. Not a little bit of fun before the show figuring out why are people buying so many cars? Yeah, what happened? That was a pandemic. You and the automakers both who were like, we would have planned to order more chips if we had known you're going to buy so many darn cars. I mean, it's a good problem to have, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think at the beginning of the year, everyone was like, okay, no one's going anywhere. And we're not going to sell any cars. And so you got a lot of good deals. And I think people had vacation funds, money that was pooled away for something that didn't end up getting used for that thing because a lot of people were in quarantine or otherwise just not doing a lot of traveling. And so all of a sudden it's like, you know, we've been looking at that new car. Maybe this is our year. I also think, and this is maybe a little bit of a stretch, but you've got some of that urban flight going on from some of the major cities, right? New York, San Francisco, two very obvious examples, or other cities where people might say, you know, it might be time for us to go somewhere a little quieter, a little bit more space, a little cheaper, and maybe a city that needs a car a little bit more. So there might have been, you know, pushing some, some merch based on where folks ended up relocating. That's a good point. I didn't think about that. Yeah, the other thing I was thinking is a lot of people put off buying a car in 2020 because they weren't sure if they were going to catch COVID, you know, if they went to the dealership or they just were like, you know what, we don't, we're uncertain about how much money we're going to need later on this year. So let's put that off. So a lot of people who put off buying a car, which is why you saw low car sales in 2020, are now like, we can't put it off any longer. You know, we absolutely need to buy a new car. So I think that's contributing to it as well. It's, it's a lot of different factors contributing to the demand. And then you have a lot of other factors coming from the outside, like new video cards, Xbox, PlayStation five, that's putting pressure on the chip makers to be like, we also are having trouble keeping up demand for other arenas as well. So it's not easy to throw capacity to the automotive side of things. It's, I don't know, I think the simple way I would look at it is delayed demand from 2020 is now piling up in 2021 in a lot of ways, not just an automotive. It's a good problem to have. Hey folks, if you want to join in the conversation about this, you got your own theories on the automotive chip shortage, go to our discord, you can join it by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Today, the Samsung Galaxy S21 goes on sale. Now, Vice President and Head of Samsung's Mobile Visual Software, R&D, Joshua Sunday, Sunday Cho, sorry, I am terrible with names, talked to Engadget about Samsung's R&D for cameras. Now every year, Samsung spend time with thousands of customers around the world trying to find out what aspects of photos people value so they can deliver that. Now, if you don't like what Samsung does to your photos, well, your tastes are probably not in what it estimates the mainstream to be. So what about the future? Well, Cho says there's theoretically no limit to the number of cameras on a phone, but also AI might make it possible to just have one camera. Cho thinks that it might become possible in year four or five of neural processing unit engines and phones. Now, we're in year three right now. Cho also talked about using AI to customize the photo to you. Now, imagine a system that learns what level of color saturation, brightness, sharpness, etc. that you like and gives each user a different photo experience. How long for that? Well, Cho wouldn't guess, but when and if the Silicon is ready, Cho's team will start by learning from your photo album what pictures you saved, what edits you make, can teach the AI what kind of photos you like. Yeah, I get a lot of people who are very upset or not upset, but they're like, oh, I don't like what the Pixel does to photos. It looks washed out to me or it looks unreal to me, whereas Pixel is one of those phones where they're touting what their AI can do to improve your photos. But I hadn't really thought about it until I read this interview that each phone is really trying to target the largest number of people's tastes as possible, but it's never going to hit them all. Right. I found that very interesting. And just to go back to the things you mentioned to Pixel real quick, was it Pixel two or three who just went down to that one camera and said, well, we don't let the AI take care of the rest? I believe it was the two or three. Now, I find it fascinating that as many cameras as Samsung has now, we could get down to one and let the computer handle it. But I find it fascinating. I used the example we were talking. It's like, I like red, as you can kind of see. So in some of my photos, I like the saturation to be nice and poppy and not too over saturated, but just pop out, make it a little bit more vivid. And it's fascinating to see that if I do that for a few photos, what Joe was saying is that eventually it was just like, oh, you like that. We'll just do it for you. And maybe if enough people do that across an aggregate, then they may up, I guess is what they're saying time they're going to apply this to. Well, it would be customized to the to the user, because you might like red and I might be like, oh, I like all my blues to kind of have more of that blueish. So right. So right now they're doing the wide audience. What they're hoping to do is get it down to a one person. Exactly. Cause everybody's phone right now is tuned to the same thing. You can go in and change the settings, right? But a lot of people don't want to bother with that. So what he's saying is we could like, you could buy a new Samsung phone, import your photo library on there. The onboard AI wouldn't even need to go to the cloud, could just look at your photo library that you imported and go, okay, those are the photos that he saved. These are the ones we can see he edited it. And oh, we could tell he likes red. Let's automatically make the settings so that we add a little more red or, you know, for Sarah, a little more blue or whatever. It's funny. It's so sort of the opposite of how I've been using my, I mean, series of iPhones because I've had an iPhone for however long since the first one. But I have a folder on my iPhone that's like cam apps. And there's like 25 of them in there. You know, I only really use one or two. Mostly I just use the, the, uh, the photo, the photos app inside the phone itself, you know, where I run a filter on Instagram and call it call it done. But I'm so used to being like, whatever I want my eventual masterpiece to be, I have the tools to do it. I just have, I have my canvas, you know, I take the photo and then I can play with it later. Having a lot of that done for me before I start playing would save a lot of time and effort, kind of take out a little bit of creative process and maybe not get it right all the time. But it, it could be a pretty useful tool. Yeah. This is not for those of you out there who are like, no, no, no, I like tweaking the settings to be exactly how I want. This is not for you. This is for the person who doesn't want to mess with the settings, but also maybe doesn't love the way the photos end up. And so occasionally they'll edit them, uh, to, to sort of just make it easy and say, well, we'll make it look like they're just better pictures. All right. Let's talk sewers. What a thick way. I know you're all waiting for me to say that. Sewers are really important. Infrastructure is important. Infrastructure robots can do things like repair roads, survey bridges, inspect water and sewer pipes and more. And Viktor Deucheneuve at the University of Leeds wrote an article for the conversation, which I saw on the next web, about his team working on sewer robots in the UK. The UK is funding a project called pipe bots that makes robots in several different sizes from two and a half centimeters up to 50 centimeters. Pipe bots use computer vision with an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetic field sensor that helps them tell where they are so they can track where they are in a map. Ultrasound and infrared sensors help them navigate so they don't, you know, run into walls or other obstructions. And then acoustic and ultrasound sensors can detect cracks and blockages so they can tell if there's a pipe that might leak or if there's a pipe that's blocked. The issue is how to get them to communicate when they're inside the sewer because Wi-Fi or 5G doesn't go through soil. So the first step is to put some base stations in the sewer that will allow radio broadcasts to propagate throughout the tunnels. Okay, so that helps a little bit. But that signal is still blocked by water. A lot of these pipes have water or at least something liquid in them. So visible light communication or VLC is another option that uses LEDs for transmission. It tends a gigabits per second, so it transfers data really fast, but it only works in line of sight. Sound could be used for data transmission, but speakers and mics are power hungry and data rates are only a few bits per second. So what Dorechanov is thinking is it's probably going to be a combination of methods, radio waves like Wi-Fi when it works and then when it's blocked by water using LED and sound to get around that. Pipe bots, the project is on track for a demonstration by 2024 after which it would go through certifications and compliance and then they would just have robots in the sewers constantly monitoring and letting folks know if there's a problem. So in one division, when he went through the sewers, okay, I'm going to explain. Spoiler. I have no spoiler. I went to the sewer and then, you know, you'll just have to watch. I mean, at first I was like, how about cleaning the sewers? It's genius. I mean, these are tiny little, the pipe bots, even the larger pipe bots are not large robots, right? You know, they have to get into small spaces. They have to identify cracks where people can't go. But right now, from what I understood from Mr. Duetschinov's explanation is you got to break apart concrete in a big swath of above ground road and make a big mess and it's construction, disrupts traffic and the whole thing. When you kind of have an idea of there's something wrong underneath us, but then you got to get under there. And so being able to at least pinpoint much more specific issues, here's the issue, here's exactly where it is, then the humans can do their thing. Yeah. So eventually, maybe robots would be able to fix the pipes. But like you said, just having them be able to tell you that there is a problem and where it is saves a lot of time and money right there. Right. Well, Alabama. Sorry. Go ahead, Omar. No, I'll just, I never thought we'd be, we have a deep discussion about sewers, but yeah. We'll see. You never know what you get to get in 2021. It's a brave new year. This actually kind of lends itself to that too. Alabama based Avom can call its 80 foot long and 18 foot tall Raven X drone world's biggest drone. It can fly itself to a specified altitude, then it can launch a rocket to deliver a payload of small satellites to low earth orbit. Avom announced the Raven X back in December, touting its 70% reusable launch system that it hopes to get to 100% eventually. And it's finally getting some attention outside of the space blogs. In fact, CEO Jay Skylist tells CNET, quote, the first stage can just land, throw another rocket on and then take off again, just like an airliner would at the gate. Test flights are set for later this year. Yeah, we are finally starting to see the acceleration of, of attempts at space travel that are caused by the privatization of space flight. You know, 10 years ago, SpaceX was a crazy thing. Priya, who would spend money on a private rocket? Now that they've shown it can be done, we're seeing other people go, well, how else could we do it? Is there a more cost effective way? Is there a different technology? So yeah, this is interesting. I'm glad you called this one out today. So space from Alabama, huh? Yeah, Huntsville, Alabama, the space center there. I want there as a kid. It's cool. I don't know if I like that. Let's all go. Lamar, road trip? Yeah. I will. Once we can travel again, we're doing a DTNS with Lamar from Huntsville, Alabama. You could not pay me to go to Alabama. I'm sorry. I will. He can and he will. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Dan wrote in, I was talking, we were talking about stacked browser tabs. And I mentioned that I'm one of those people who just like can't close a browser tab because I'm afraid I'll lose my life savings or something. And if I do it, Dan says for all you people and Sarah, I'm talking to you who use tabs to track everything, try the Firefox plug in one tab. It lets you condense all the tabs to a list. I've lost them when I did a cleanup, but there is a way to back them up in the cloud. I ended up, I feel like I've heard of one tab. I don't know. I think it's been around for a while, but I'm actually just back using Firefox pretty regularly since I got my MacBook Air just a couple of months ago. Nice and snappy. It's kind of my browser of choice these days. But I, I installed one tab and at first I was like, well, just like gives me a list. That doesn't really help anything, but it's actually really handy because you can have multiple like groups of tabs and then you can add them back into your horizontal tab list whenever you want. So I could be, I don't know, researching buying a new car, right? And I've got like 40 tabs open and just dump them into one tab and then continue on with my DTNS life and then bring them back when I'm in the mood. It's actually a very handy extension. So thank you, Dan. Yeah. Yeah, there's a few extensions out there that do this. This is one of the better ones, for sure. I, so thanks for sending that, Dan. I think Chromium even has an option that you can turn on that's very similar to what Vivaldi does, but Vivaldi's implementation was just really nice. Yeah, totally. If you have feedback, you have ideas for us. Maybe you have a browser extension. We can't live without. We just don't know it yet. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send those suggestions or really anything that's on your mind. We also shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels every day. And today, they include Justin Zellers, Miss Music Teacher and Mike McLaughlin. Of course, Len Peralta always here on Fridays to draw something representing the big tech story of the week. What have you drawn for us this week, Len? Well, I'm glad you said that, Tom. It is the tech story of the week. I couldn't let this ArtProv Friday go away without drawing something about the Wall Street bets and the GameStop AMC slaying of Wall Street billionaires. This, it didn't really go down like this today. I think people were expecting it to kind of go down like this, but it sort of went like this a little bit this week. The image that I have here is the Wall Street kid, who you've probably seen associated with the Wall Street Beats, slaying the Wall Street billionaires with all the, you know, the GME, AMC, BB and Doge stocks and stuff like that, while the group of Redditors behind him are cheering him on. And if you want to see this, you can probably go straight over to my Patreon, patreon.com. For slash Len, check it out there or at my online store at Len Peralds Store.com. Len, I always love your stuff. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Well, don't be sorry, Lamar. Just tell people where they can keep up with the rest of your work, because I was just about to thank you for being with us. I'm sorry to interrupt you so many times this show. It's okay. It's, you know, it's a group effort. So I am all over the internet making content, short form, long form. And the best place to find me is Lamar Wilson.com. That's Lamar with two hours. And I'm doing all kind of things like eating Lady Gaga Oreos like I did before the show, because why not? Why not? I'm in a bad romance right now. We just found out about those yesterday. You're so on point with your trends. That's amazing. I still don't know what they are, but if they're Oreos, I like them. I mean, if you like Oreos with Lady Gaga was not to love. Hey folks, if you need just the headlines, sometimes, you know, you don't even have 30 minutes to catch up on tech news, check out our related show, Daily Tech Headlines, all the essential tech news in about five minutes at DailyTechHeadlines.com and soon in Espanol. More on that. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. I was going to try to do that in Spanish and realize terrible idea. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. And guess what? We're going to be back on Monday doing the show again. Talk to you then.