 Coming up on DTNs, Intel releases its 11th Gen desktop chips, China's plan to get around Apple's third-party tracking restrictions. Google wants to watch you sleep without a camera. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 16, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, freelance journalist Peter Wells is back. Welcome back, Pete. Thank you, Tom. We were just talking about Pi and Justice League and all kinds of stuff on Good Day Internet. If you want a wider conversation from all of us, get that expanded show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Instagram now bans adults from messaging teenagers who don't follow them. The Apple now show safety prompts to teens messaged by adults, exhibiting potentially suspicious behavior, offering options to report or block the users. Multiple reports, including a test from TechCrunch, show the Signal messaging app no longer works in China. Signal's website appears to have been blocked as of March 15. The app was still available for download on Apple's Chinese App Store as of the morning of March 16, but was not functioning without using a VPN. Google will cut the percentage it takes for in-app purchases in the Google Play Store in South Korea from 30% to 15% for developers with less than $1 million in annual sales. Google still requires that developers use its payment systems for all in-app purchases. And I think that's applying beyond South Korea. I think it broke in South Korea, now it applies beyond that. Nvidia removed a recent beta driver release for the RTX 3060 graphics card because it accidentally included internal code that removed the hash rate limiter for crypto mining. Oops. Nvidia announced the hash rate limiting earlier this month. We talked about it on DTNS. The company is introducing dedicated crypto mining cards for those who want to do that. Dropbox will open its Dropbox password manager for free Dropbox basic accounts in April, although it will be limited to 50 passwords. Free users will be able to sync passwords across three devices with access through browser extensions, desktop, and mobile apps. All right, let's talk a little bit about Google watching us sleep. Yeah, Google announced the second gen Nest Hub, and it is sort of sleep focused. The smart display still doesn't include a camera, but it can watch you sleep, but not with a camera. The new Nest Hub has a seven inch screen, faster on-device machine learning processing, 50% more bass in the speaker, and three far field microphones. So, you know, they've souped it up a bit. For smart home users, it also has a thread ship. But the new Nest Hub also includes the motion detecting solely radar chip in the upper right corner of the display. The same silly chip in the Pixel 4. For those of you pixel users who say, oh, I know silly, use for motion detection that was not included in the Pixel 5. It is in the Nest Hub. In the Nest Hub solely supports play, pause controls by tapping the air, wave to snooze, opt-in sleep tracking as well. That's important. Basically, the Sully motion sensor can tell you how much you toss and turn without having to take video of you while you are asleep, but can give you data after you wake up. In addition to motion and breathing rate, it can detect coughing, snoring, light fluctuations, also temperature changes. All of that is processed locally with only high level events like coughing and storm and it's stored in the cloud, and it can also sync with Google Fit. Sleep tracking will be available as a free preview in 2021, but will eventually cost you something you gotta pay for. The second gen Nest Hub is available for pre-order now for $99 in white, black, pink or blue and shipping on March 30th. So, I already see people in the chat room saying this sounds creepy. I mean, if sleep tracking is creepy on its own, then yeah, but this is a pretty good way to do this, which is you're not taking video of someone, you're not making them wear anything. You're just using radar, essentially, and it's on device. The only thing it does is if you want it to, it can store some stuff in the cloud for you to refer later, but you can also delete that stuff from the cloud. Like, I don't think this is a privacy invading thing. What do you think, Peter? Yeah, I mean, that all sounds fine to me. I've tried the Wibings withings sleep tracker thing, which you actually slide under your mattress. And the benefit of those things, obviously, is that you don't have to think about it. It's not like I've done sleep tracking on my Apple Watch, and that is such a pain because you do have to charge throughout the day if you're going to do that. So, yeah, anything that makes it easier is probably good because it's not something that is going to be as important to most people as fitness tracking or something else. So, as much as you can make it fall into the background, you don't want to be thinking about stuff like technology when you're going to bed. So, yeah, I think this is great. I mean, as somebody who wears a Fitbit sleep tracker, well, it's not a sleep tracker. It's the Versa 2, so it does lots of things. But I wear it to bed at night. One of my favorite things in the world when I wake up is be like, okay, let's see how I slept. And doesn't really matter how I slept. I mean, I'm awake and I have to deal with whether I'm sleepier or not sleepier based on the data. But there have been times in the past, because I know Tom and I, you've talked about this, where you're like, I don't want to wear my Apple Watch to bed. That's not comfortable for me. It doesn't really bother me. But there were a couple of times last summer, it was really hot. And I was like, yeah, I can't. I just can't do this. And I really missed the data later on. And I have gotten used to the fact that, well, you just got to wear it, where you don't get the data at all. Something that's right next to the bed. And of course, your bedrooms may vary, makes a lot of sense to me. And I think, for me, it's like, did I get eight hours of sleep? Not that often. But when I get close, I just feel good about myself kind of thing. It's just fun data to have. But if there are underlying issues that can also detect something that you might want to look into to help you sleep better in a more sleep apnea way, etc., then something like this makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I've got two underlying issues. They're both children. And there are days where I wake up and I'm so tired that being able to look down and go, oh, okay, so you woke up three times or you woke me up three times throughout the night. That explains it. I'm going to be a little bit more kind to myself today is really handy. Yeah, that said, while Google worked with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine on the science, they do some good training to be able to make sure this is accurate. They did say it's not intended to diagnose, cure, mitigate, prevent, or treat any disease or condition. There's a lot of debate about how useful this data actually is. But I think, Sarah, you're right. If it tips you off like, huh, that's weird. That's been happening a lot. Let me ask my doctor. You're not diagnosing anything. It's just helping you look into it. Maybe it's nothing, but you might not have thought that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a sleep expert of any kind, but I'm like, huh, weird. At 3 AM every morning for the last two weeks, something has been triggering me to kind of wake up and, you know, I want more water or whatever it is. These are all sorts of patterns that can be really helpful going forward. Yeah. I mean, and if you wake all the way up, obviously you are going to know you woke up, you don't need a sleep tracker to tell you that. It's for the stuff where you don't realize it, right? That's, it's a whole different thing. Much has been made of Apple's new privacy rules that will require apps to get consent from users before allowing third party tracking. And while Facebook has taken to running full page ads and newspapers and putting out press releases to complain about the practice, the China Advertising Association or CAA has taken its own approach developing a system called the CAA ID that is being tested by ByteDance and Tencent. Right now, Apple provides a tracking ID called the IDFA or the IDFA to advertisers. And under the new system that Apple's putting in place in June, Apple will not provide the IDFA to an app unless the user approves, unless you get consent from the user saying, yes, I will allow third party tracking from this app. But apps like ByteDance, like ByteDance's TikTok, for instance, could access the CAA ID number and track people across any other app that also uses that. And there are about 2,000 members of the China Advertising Association. So it could be quite a few people. However, that probably sounds to you like it does to me like it would violate Apple's terms of service. And if it did, Apple could block apps that use the CAA ID from the App Store, which would lead to an interesting standoff if every Chinese app uses CAA ID. Would Apple block every Chinese app from the App Store? Even if it's just 2,000, if it's not every app, that's a lot of apps, especially if every big tech company and the Chinese government support the use of CAA ID. And we're not just talking about Apple in Australia or the United States or Europe. We're talking about Apple in China. What about companies from outside China, though? Ars Tactica says a French gaming company has been encouraged to apply to use the CAA ID. So there may be a way to save face. The CAA says that its solution does not violate Apple's policies because it does not uniquely identify each user. And they may be using something similar to what Google is going to do with Google Chrome, where you are identified as part of a group or a cohort rather than individually. That might get Apple the wiggle room to turn a blind eye to this. And the CAA says it's talking to Apple about the implementation. Peter? So, yeah, Peter. Yeah, I mean, this is something that a lot of large US tech companies do in similar ways as well, that Facebook and Twitter both create iOS analytics apps or plugins for other people's apps that you can use to see how often your app crashes, things like that. But a lot of that time, that data is going back to Facebook. And that's one of the reasons why Facebook is so worried about the changes coming to iOS and is taking out those full page ads, like you said. So, yeah, I can see this being something that is going to be an issue on many fronts. It's not just going to be the CAAID here. It's fascinating, though, because, of course, this code, this trust is all going to run on the server that Apple probably won't have huge visibility into. So, I reckon that'll be the sticking point. Well, it's a policy thing. Apple can say, we don't have to see it. We know you're doing it, and it's not allowed. You're out of the app store. But will they do that if there's, thousands and thousands of apps? I mean, that's the whole thing with Apple's push into privacy first. We're not going to let apps do this and having public fights with other very prominent apps saying, well, this sucks for us. Let's figure out something with enough Chinese companies that would be working under CAAID. At what point does Apple either say, okay, let's come back to the table and figure out how we all play together nicely so that we don't have our users now come back to us, Apple, and say, well, hold on a second. The whole idea was to give privacy power back to the user, and these apps aren't doing this. I don't think Apple can just say, well, you're out of the app store. That makes no sense to me. Yeah, totally. And that's why, sorry, I brought it back to Facebook, is that there have been a couple of times where Facebook has gone right up to the line or stepped over it in terms of Apple's privacy. And that's why they gave Facebook 12 months to prepare for these changes because, like you said, if Apple tomorrow said, all right, Facebook, you've done it too many times, you're out of the store, and suddenly iOS users can't access Facebook, then that's a big deal for iOS users. They've become so big that Apple really need Facebook in the store. Well, moving on, Intel fully unveiled its seventh Gen Core desktop chips, also known as Rocket Lake S. They use the Cypress Cove architecture, which is a 14 nanometer implementation of the Willow Cove architecture, also used in 10 nanometer Tiger Lake chips for laptops. That's important to note, because the top of the line seventh Gen desktop chip, the Core i9-11900K has eight cores and 16 threads, which is two fewer cores and four fewer threads than the previous 10th Gen flagship. The idea is that the more efficient architecture makes up for the drop in cores and threads. But Intel would like you to ignore all of that and pay more attention to instructions per cycle, because those are 19% better now. And that's fair, that's fair, since most games don't use multiple cores anyway. And the new top chip reaches up to 5.3 gigahertz on a single core, Intel touted a 14% improvement on flight simulator at 1080p, even on multi-core functions, Intel claims it's 88% faster than its last Gen at video editing and 35% faster than AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X. So the independent benchmarks will be important. There are other advantages though, potentially the 11th Gen chips also add resizable bar, which gives a frame rate boost to compatible graphics chips from Nvidia and AMD. You also get support for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, Thunderbolt 4, DDR4 3200 RAM, and 20 Gen 4 PCI lanes. New 500 series motherboards are coming, but Rocket Lake S will also work with existing 400 series boards. Overclockers will get a new UI and updated features in Intel's extreme tuning utility. If you're wondering about price, Intel 11th Gen desktop processors are available now from $182 to up to $539. So yeah, this is Intel basically sticking on the 14 nanometer platform and saying, but we're really good at it because we've been doing it for a long time. So look at our performance, don't look at the numbers. Roger, I know you've been paying close attention to this stuff, are you impressed? I mean, what they're doing is basically trying to, and this is weird to say, is trying to keep up with AMD in the price performance category. And it's interesting to note that the most competitive of these chips is in the mid-range, which is right along the AMD 5800 and the 5700. And that they're hoping to at least, if not overtake AMD, at least stay with them, because AMD has made tremendous strides over the past several years in not just performance, but also uptake, not just amongst enthusiasts, but mainstream commodity PC market as well as in the professional space. So this is Intel acknowledging that we need to make some adjustments in the way we do things. But for now, let's put out a product that can be at least price competitive. In some of these cases, you're maybe seeing maybe a $40 to $60 cheaper chip from Intel versus an AMD counterpart. And it also helps that there's kind of a chip shortage. So if Intel's on the shelf and AMD isn't available, they might be able to get some eyeball share that way too. Yeah, it feels like this is good enough to keep someone who was not wanting to have to switch from switching. But I don't know that it's going to get anybody to switch back the other way. Hey, do you get up in the morning and you're like, oh, I saw this story. I hope they talk about it on Daily Tech News Show. Well, let us know in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Australia is considering an online safety bill with six main areas overseen by an e-safety commissioner. Three of the proposed areas are policies, removal of material harmful to children due to bullying, removal of abusive material that would be meant to seriously harm an adult, removal of intimate images shared without consent. And the other three areas are systems. So basic online safety expectations, that way you can hold services accountable, a takedown scheme for how you get the stuff removed, a system for blocking websites that host abhorrent violent material without making them take anything down. But there are a lot of concerns about how this is written. Google, Twitter and Twitch have all raised concerns about the broad definitions in the bill. Electronic Frontiers Australia has criticized the powers given to the e-safety commissioner as to overreaching, and Australian Digital Rights Watch criticized the impact this would have on the adult industry as well as whether it would give the e-safety commissioner access to encrypted services. Government has agreed to amend the bill to provide more transparency on how the e-safety commissioner can use their powers and add review mechanisms over the content removal decisions. So it's all good, right Pete? Like everybody's happy now? I'm pretty sure they are. Yeah. Yeah. Like most Australians or possibly most Americans, when government starts heading towards tech to legislator, get a little bit nervous that they might not understand the full complexities of what they're talking about. And that was certainly the case here. But I've got to say that the current person who's drafting the bill who is outside of government seems incredibly switched on and really, really responsive to concerns as they're coming through. So for instance, the thing about the adult industry, the commissioner specifically said, look, I understand those concerns. We're absolutely going to make sure that sex workers are not banned from the internet because of this rule. That's not our concern at all. And for me, I thought that was a really interesting statement because, especially when it comes to something like sex work, you can imagine that a bureaucrat might be, look, no comment, and just move on. But the fact that she had a proper response of like, look, we saw what happened with Craigslist when they removed sex work from the platform and people said that it made the industry a lot more dangerous. We don't want that to happen here. Is to me a sign that they're really kind of thinking through some of this stuff, which is not to say that I trust the politicians in any way once it goes to the house. But there are some actually smart people in this government, well, not in the government, but in the opposition. There are some smart people. Tim Watts is an MP who is saying he's going to bring some amendments to this bill, and he is a very, very clued on, switched on politician as far as politicians go when it comes to technology. So I'm feeling less nervous about this because of, first of all, the way it's being communicated and the fact that there are people in government at the moment who seem to know what they're talking about. Yeah, it seemed like the two main parties were fairly on board with it. And it was the Greens that had the most concerns. Have the even those concerns been addressed? The Greens have said straight out, they're not going to support the bill. And the way our system works, the Greens aren't necessarily, well, sorry, the government doesn't need the Greens' votes to get through the Senate. Yeah, exactly. But they do need the Labor Party on board. And there are three different Labor Party members who have expressed concerns. And so without their concerns being met, then, yeah, this bill won't pass. All right, we got a couple of internet regulation stories coming out of Russia as well. We talked last week on the show about how China takes the approach of putting a firewall around the internet while Russia has taken the tactic of selectively blocking services it has issues with. We talked about Russia slowing down Twitter because Russia says it has failed to remove posts as quickly as the government wanted. Well, Tuesday, the deputy head of Roskomnozor, Vadim Subotin, said Twitter will be blocked entirely in Russia in one month if it doesn't comply. So they got the clocks ticking now. You're slowed down. You got one month to get rid of those last few thousand posts. Twitter has denied it has left any illegal content up. So we'll see about that face off. Meanwhile, a different application of regulations in Russia starts April 1st, a new Russian law requiring the availability of certain apps. Russian Apple users will see a list of government-approved apps to be installed at setup. The list includes browsers, county virus, messaging, email. Users can choose to unselect the apps and not install them. They can also delete them later if they change their mind. But they are selected by default. And Apple had said at one point that they would stop selling their products in Russia rather than do this. But it looks like at this point from what we're seeing in various leaks from operating systems that they're going to make it happen. Yeah, the whole Twitter thing is very, I'm very interested to know what's going on here. Twitter saying this is not what happened. Russia saying, well, no, it did. And for that reason, you are threat of being cut off. It's Twitter. So this, I don't know, it sounds like there's a little bit more to the story going on. But more troubling perhaps is how many Russian users of iOS will be installing stuff that they actually wouldn't want to install had they known a little bit more about it ahead of time. Yeah, I'm really surprised that Apple are agreeing to this. It goes back to that China story you had earlier. I mean, I can understand them capitulating to China because that's a much bigger market. But this is surprising. Well, it's not that Russia is an insignificant market, smaller than China, but they sell a lot of stuff there. So it is interesting to see when we were talking about like, well, Apple doesn't like to blink. When they put a rule in, they like to keep that rule in. This is a case where it does look like they've maybe changed their mind about what it is because maybe because you can unselect them, they're like, okay, well, that's fine. We wouldn't want to be forced to preinstall them, but giving the user the choice, maybe that makes all the difference for them. I don't know. And I guess that they do have to iOS in Europe does have to present a list of search engines when someone logs in for the first time and you have to choose which search engine you're going to use. Although that's a choice. This is, hey, the government wants you to install these apps. Do you want to or not? I mean, I guess you still have a choice to install them or not. Yeah. But if we have any folks out there coming around April 1st, if you set up a new iPhone in Russia, let us know what the experience is like for you. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Indeed. So on the subject of deep fakes, you might say, are they good? Are they too good? What's going on here? Researchers at the University of Buffalo developed an AI system to detect deep fakes by looking at similarities in light reflected on corneas in portrait images, corneas of people. Mostly there are two of them. The researchers were able to achieve 94% accuracy detecting deep fakes taken from the, this person does not exist, image repository, basically saying, okay, that's not, that's not real. That's not real. The way it works is by analyzing the corneas in the photo specifically. Corneas have a mirror-like surface that give up reflective patterns when illuminated by light. When a real face is captured by a camera, the reflection on the two eyes will be similar. I mean, if not almost exactly the same because they're seeing the same thing. Deep fake images synthesized by GANs often exhibit in consistencies like reflecting different geometric shapes or perhaps mismatching locations of the reflections. I love this story because whenever we have the story about someone being fearful of any kind of fakery, right? My first reaction is yes, but we'll get better at being able to tell it's fake. It looks really good now because we've never seen anything so good, but nothing is ever exactly as good as the real thing. And this is an example of how that happens is these deep fake algorithms are not actually creating realistic exteriors, right? So they're just pretending like, well, we know light reflects off corneas kind of like that, but they're not aware of a setting that they're putting a picture in so you can detect that until, of course, the algorithms are trained on this exact situation and get better and start to be able to make those reflections. And then, you know, the war goes on from there, but this is always how it goes, I think. Yeah, and it's just poetic because it shows that the eyes really are the windows to the soul. Yeah, and if that window doesn't look right, there's no soul. Yeah, well said. All right, let's check out the mailbag. We got a good one from Joseph, and this is actually piggybacking off a conversation we had in GDI yesterday about libraries and checking out books. Joseph says my first career was in libraries before moving to education, and I wanted to add on to the conversation from yesterday's episode. Libraries have become wonderful places for borrowers of all types. The libraries in my area, which is the Chicago suburbs, offer video games, comic books, tech devices, hotspots, and more. Libraries have started to cater to the market and the DIY community, offering 3D printers and a tool library for home repairs. Libraries thrive off of traffic and engagement to keep funding going, and engaging with the maker community over the past decade has been super beneficial to my local library, helping the community rethink what a library can offer borrowers. Right on, Joseph. Yeah, amazing. Go libraries. Seriously, I mean, Pete, do you have a local library you go to often? Has it changed much over the years? I have like four libraries that I go to regularly, because like I said, I've got little kids, and libraries have really developed into wonderful spaces to hang out with kids. The ones around us, there's one actually in the city in Melbourne that has a podcast studio that you can book out if you want to start your own show. Yeah, so libraries are doing really cool. I love hanging out in a library. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Hey, all your librarians out there. We appreciate you. Thanks for doing what you do. Thank you, Joseph, for that. Absolutely. And if you have any more feedback of anything we talk about on GDI or DTNS or both, you can always send that feedback to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. They include Dan Colbeck, Chris Benito, and John and Becky Johnston. Also, big thanks to the librarian himself, Peter Wells. So good to have you on the show and let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Follow me on Twitter is the easiest thing, and you can check out our Daily Tech podcast, which is only 10 minutes long at thehelpdesk.com.au. Folks, we are just about a month away from our big crossover episode with this week in science, and we have nothing to talk about because you haven't told us what you want to talk about. No, I mean you. Yeah, maybe some other people have, but have you feedback at dailytechnewshow.com? Send us an email. What would you like to hear me, Sarah, Roger, Dr. Kiki Blair, and Justin from Twists talk about in the biggest, best, baddest tech science crossover episode ever. Email us those ideas, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, and then tune in to hear us talk about them Saturday, April 17th at 4 p.m. Pacific. Folks, we are live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live book market. Put it on your calendar till a friend. We'll also be back tomorrow doing the same thing with different news with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Time in the club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.