 Coming up on DTNS, driverless taxis are here. No, really, for real. Also augmented reality for dogs and Frank Ippolito helps us understand the tech that goes into props, costumes and more. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, October 9th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawn from Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shank. And joining us, founder of Finger G, Frank Ippolito, thank you for joining us, Frank. It's great to have you. Hey, thanks for having me too. We were just talking with Frank mostly about sandwiches on good day internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Security researcher Sam Curry led a team that found 55 vulnerabilities in Apple's corporate network, 11 of which are critical. The vulnerabilities, if exploited, would have allowed an attacker to copy private email, iCloud data and more. Curry reported them over a three month period and Apple fixed them all promptly, often within hours. Apple's still processing, but the bug bounties, which so far total $288,500, but could reach as high as $500,000 for their abouts. Curry's team also included Brett Bearhouse, Ben Sagapur, Samuel Herb and Tanner Barnes. Microsoft announced its Edge browser will get a price comparison tool as part of its collections bookmarking service. Edge is also getting the general availability of its collections and Pinterest integration, a screenshot tool for capturing web content, improved PDF support and an update to its teleparty extension for streaming TV shows for people wanting to have watch parties. Free video meetings can be started within Edge through an integration with Microsoft's Meet Now service. The Wall Street Journal sources say AMD is in talks to buy the chip maker Xilinx. The detail, the deal could be reportedly be finalized by next week. Xilinx is a maker of FPGAs, which are reprogrammable chips, currently used in early 5G rollout, also military communications, radar systems and increasingly in specific machine learning applications. France's Devilet introduced its first new product in two years, a pair of wireless earbuds called Gemini. Devilet claims market leading noise cancellation in the headphones, eight hours of battery life and a replaceable charging case battery. Gemini earbuds will be available for pre-order October 10th for $299, shipping November 25th in China, France, Germany, the UK and the US. Comcast announced a successful trial of symmetrical 1.25 gigabit per second internet over its cable network. That means 1.25 gigabit per second up as well as down. Cable ISPs generally provide much lower upload speeds because of legacy DOCSIS standards. An upgrade to DOCSIS in 2017 made symmetrical service possible. So Comcast's test was conducted at a home in Jacksonville, Florida successfully, although no word on when Comcast might roll this out to customers. Twitter will put a speed bump on retweets to try to slow down the spread of misinformation. So starting Friday when a user retweets without comment, they may see a prompt encouraging them to add some commentary. The feature will be rolled out to all by October 20th. Twitter will also add directions to credible information if someone tries to retweet a post labeled as misleading. And Twitter will label tweets falsely claiming a candidate's victory as well as remove tweets that encourage violence or election interference. Well, we've got some bad news for TikTok. The U.S. Department of Justice has appealed a judge's decision that stopped an executive order that would have blocked TikTok downloads in the U.S. It's not clear when the appeal will be heard or what's happening with the deal for Oracle to buy a stake in TikTok. Meanwhile, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority banned TikTok in the country for circulation of videos at deemed immoral and indecent. Belgian telecoms Orange and Proximus have dropped Huawei and chosen Nokia and Ericsson instead to supply equipment for 5G networks. They are among the first in Europe to drop Huawei. Nokia will supply radio access network or ran equipment and Ericsson will supply core network equipment. Roku announced that its free ad support and streaming service, the Roku channel is now available on Amazon's Fire TV devices in the U.S. This includes the Fire TV streaming devices, smart TVs, and soundbars. Just like the launch of the Roku channel on mobile, the service won't require an account to stream content. And I couldn't resist putting this in here. It's so weird. A company possibly owned by China's Qi Hu 360 has released a web browser in China called Tuber. Its logo is very similar to YouTube, but it lets Chinese users access otherwise blocked websites such as YouTube, of course, but also Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and more. To register for the browser, you need a Chinese phone number and any searches in your browser for some keywords, like Xi Jinping, for instance, return no results. So there's some censorship going on here, but you can get some of the stuff that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise. The terms of service, say a user's account will be suspended and their details shared with authorities if they quote, actively watch or share illegal content by using the browser. All right, let's talk a little more about what Microsoft's doing with gaming, Sarah. Let's do it. Business Insiders sources say that Microsoft's Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, told employees at an all-hands meeting, quote, we absolutely will end up on iOS with Game Pass, end quote. Spencer said a direct browser-based solution was planned for 2021. Microsoft said back in August, quote, we do not have a path to bring our vision of cloud gaming with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to gamers on iOS via the Apple App Store. The verges sources say that Spencer also said that Game Pass will come to Windows 10 PCs next year. I'm very excited about this for two reasons. One is that you would be able to get this service on iOS, which I know a lot of people are excited about. Even if I won't use it, I'm excited for them. But the other is that he just says direct browser-based solution, but the only direct browser-based solution that's going to work on iOS is a progressive web app. That is the same solution that Amazon used to make its Luna game streaming service available on iOS. It made sense to me that Microsoft would be pursuing that, that maybe they hadn't started pursuing it until they saw Amazon's, and that's why it's going to take till 2021. And the reason I'm excited about that is a progressive web app from Amazon and now Microsoft could make progressive web apps more popular, make more people make them, which would give us more options on iOS outside of the Apple App Store. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm so excited about the Apple announcement next week just because I'm ripe for a new iPhone and with some speeds that can obviously take advantage of being able to play some of these games. It seems like very good timing for Microsoft. Frank, I don't know. Do you do any gaming, do any of these game streaming services appeal to you? I don't know about the streaming services. I'm a PlayStation fella, so I'm excited about the new PlayStation. Sure. I was playing the American dad game on my phone earlier today. Yeah. I'm curious where Sony, who bought Geico a long time ago, wouldn't bring their own streaming service eventually, but I don't know, maybe they'll bring the Xbox streaming. Yeah, I don't understand the streaming, like through my Apple TV, like what kind of games, like I don't understand that. Maybe I'm not the right demographic. The idea with this project and the ones like it, like Luna, are you can just have all your games on any device. The device wouldn't have to have all the power to play the game because it's all done through the cloud. Well, the idea of a fully public driverless taxi service may be more exciting. It used to capture people's imagination, and today Waymo launched a fully driverless commercial taxi service in a 50 square mile area in the Phoenix suburbs of Chandler, Tempe, and Mesa. The service is available to Waymo One customers and will add more people over the next several weeks until the entire public, at least in those three suburbs, can request a ride. There will be no human driver in the car. Let me repeat. This is an actual public service that will have no driver in the car. Remote staff, however, will monitor multiple rides at a time and they may intervene with high level instructions though they won't steer the cars directly. They said if it comes to a reported construction area and it's not sure if it says it doesn't look like it's under construction to me, that's when they might intervene and go yes, no, you need to route around that. So one would think the conversation would now shift from capability to practicality and economic feasibility. Waymo has been losing tens of millions of dollars a quarter on this service and they're going to need to expand beyond three Phoenix suburbs if they're going to ever make money on this. The process to expand into new areas is to build detailed maps of an area, drive routes with safety drivers on board until performance is good enough for the driverless operations. But here we are, like it doesn't seem like people, this would have been like the top story of the day in previous years but I think 2020 just subsumed it. Yeah, I mean, for anybody who uses car services at all in general and it depends on where you live of course, we've been talking about the driverless inevitability for years, five years. And to the point where, I mean, obviously we talk about how innovation happens on this show but it just was sort of like they were small tasks, they were in places that I never was. You know, would I ever get no driverless car? I don't know. I mean, they're not really ready for that yet and it kind of seemed for a while like is this even going to happen? It's, you know, we're, everything seemed to lag for such a long time. We are finally there. Waymo is doing this and I mean, listen, Waymo's got, they got the maps, they got the data. They, you know, it's certainly a company that is at the forefront of this whole wave of driverless cars. I just wonder how many people will say, well, okay, I mean, and this is me included. Yeah, I'm not sure I want to get in the back of an Uber if I don't know somebody and you're in close quarters in a car with, you know, somebody. So taking that out of the equation, you might get people say, well, I may not have wanted to be in a driverless car in the past, but this actually feels safer to me, but there's so many public safety measures that have to be put into place just to make this work. Will the cars sanitize themselves between people then? Well, that's a good question. Yeah, no, we were wondering the same thing. Like on the one hand, it's safer because there's not a human driver in there exhaling all the time, right? So it's a little safer than a current taxi ride or a current Uber ride or Lyft ride might be, but then you don't know who was in there before and what they were sneezing on or anything like that. So I wonder what the in-between rider sanitation procedure would be. Would you try one of these if you lived in Phoenix? I don't know. I'm into it. Like I've been looking at getting a Tesla as my next car, just because of the autopilot and stuff like that, but I don't know about not having anybody there yet. I mean, there's a remote monitor, but that's not quite the same. It isn't, yeah. I feel like if I was in the area and I was able to try it out, I would, maybe a short distance just to say that I did. But yeah, if something were to go wrong, what a panic moment, where you're like, do I bail out the backs? Do I bail out the trunk? Or do I got to get out of this car if something's going wrong? Arguably, you might have more effect being able to stop an autonomous car by hitting an emergency button or something that you would convincing some crazy driver. That's a very good point. Yeah, like there might be, yeah, like to hit the red button if you're feeling really weird with the vaccine and then we'll figure it out. Yeah, but hitting an E-stop inside, like moving traffic might be even more dangerous. Yeah, it depends on how it's implemented for sure. Still lots of questions, but yeah, if anyone's in the area, if you're trying it out, do let us know how it works for you. We are so curious. All right, moving on. A firm called Command Site, managed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, has demonstrated augmented reality goggles that let dogs receive orders at a distance. Military dogs are often used to detect explosives and other hazards. Handlers direct them with hand signals, sometimes laser pointers. The goggles would let handlers keep the dog safe, but also increase the distance in which the dogs can operate. Military dogs already wear protective goggles. That's a thing already. The AR system is added to these goggles and then fitted for each dog. Then the dog see a visual indicator in the goggles and then are trained to follow that indicator for directions. Handlers see what the dog sees through a remote video feed so they can pay attention. The project is in the beginning research stage using a wired long leash and Command Site is developing a wireless version as well. Yeah, this has got to be wireless before it becomes super practical. But yeah, right now, I've done search and rescue in the past and I know how this works with the laser pointer or the hand signals. The dog has to be able to see the handler. It limits the range. The handler has to move with the dog. This would allow for a much wider range because the dog could be out of line of sight. These dogs are already doing dangerous stuff. This doesn't seem to make it more dangerous. It's already dangerous. I don't think it makes it safer, but if these dogs are properly trained and the system works, it could be done for more life-saving sort of situations. Frank, what do you make of this? I just want to know when these things are going to be implemented in the workplace for employers and employees. So wireless goggles on B that tell me where to go. Well, I'll think of it. You go to like a subway and you point at stuff through the glass, but now if the subway employees wearing the wireless goggles, you could say, no, no, no, more of this one. You just say what's just the way you want. You wouldn't even have to enter the store. You can just see what they're doing. Right. Just much fewer arm use point to it. It's rude anyway. I wonder, and this is, I know that dogs, their sense of smell, their sense of hearing, very, very keen, very cute sense of sight, not their strongest, although most dogs can see. I wonder how AR implementation works with something that is designed for a canine and not a person. Yeah. And I don't know the answer, but I would assume it would be, you've got to keep things real simple and real straight and narrow. Yeah, because it's a good- A picture of a snack over there. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it should not just be visual, but also smell. Right? Like the treats over that way and just- Smell vision? A little. Yeah. Yeah. Because the handlers use visual cues, like the laser pointers in the hand signal. So some kind of visual cue would work, but I wonder how that, how you design that to manifest so the dog can tell, oh, that means go left, that means go straight ahead. Yeah. And not be so complicated that it might confuse them. Well, folks. The dogs. Yeah, dogs are smarter than we are. Aren't you? Yeah. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Yeah, all you folks talking about practical effects is the low-tech alternative to special effects. But props and costumes and makeup use a lot of tech too, and that's why we invited Frank on to give us some insight into the real-world technology that turns these imaginative movie ideas into physical reality. Frank, let's start with what pieces of technology do you regularly use to build stuff? Well, pretty much anything you could think of we use. We have stuff that's relatively new tech like saw stop table saw. Where if you touch it, the blade automatically retracts. That's like pretty low-level tech, but we have things all the way up to laser scanners and 3D printers and CNC mills. So anything that you could use to build a thing, we sort of have those toys. So when do you decide to build something by hand versus the CNC or 3D printed method that you described? That that's kind of like a case-by-case basis. Like some projects it calls for using traditional methods and that might be because of the speed or the budget or like what kind of art needs to go into it. Like if I was doing a super ornate helmet, sometimes it might, it's easier to do that as a sculpture versus doing a 3D model and printing it. Like every project's different. So it's one of those. There's no like one tool in the toolbox that just you use for everything. It's the right tool for the right job. Is there a class of things that you think, oh yeah, these are now 3D printer. I used to do this by hand, but now the 3D printers are here. That's what I do it with. Well like right now we're working on a prop that's for a sci-fi project and everything needs to be really smooth and symmetrical and very precise where in the past somebody might have built it out of MDF or something like that and done it out of wood. Now we're printing it. So when things need to be precise that's for sure something that we've kind of moved into the digital world on. Do you find that 3D printers they're pretty precise these days or do you still need to do some after work on them? It depends which printers. Some printers have higher resolutions than others and some it depends. There's that like speed cost trifecta thing. What would be the third one? Speed cost detail. So you know some like one printer we have is super fast but the resolution is low. So we can make really big shapes. We just have to do more post-processing to it. And then you know some of our 3D printers are really high detail. They just take a little bit longer and they can't do the volume as some of our other machines so. When you've been making props like this for a while I assume you get a really good habit about how to do things and then some technology comes along and promises like hey we can do this for you. How do you decide whether it's worth trying to change how you do something to put in a new piece of technology and how do you learn about that stuff? Well we I wouldn't say that we were like super early on in the like 3D printer realms and stuff like that. I think that it was maybe around 2000 2015 maybe that I got my first printer. So there was definitely a lot of people that were you know printing and doing 3D stuff before us. So I I guess being kind of late to the game you know that was my hesitancy to do it. But now you know like our printer room we have 14 printers you know and I have three CNC's in the building so you know in the past five years we've adapted pretty quickly. I don't know there's always going to be some sort of tech that promises fancy results and I'm always going to be sort of skeptical about it until there's like a real application for it. So you wait and see if other people are making something good at it before you jump in. Not necessarily. I mean like that's I guess different cases for each thing. Sometimes I see something and I want to try and figure out how to you know integrate that into what I'm doing and sometimes you know I'm skeptical about it. So I it's all over the place. So I was so so let's say you know you're making this symmetrical helmet and you've got you know the client and they they they have a vision and you are executing and probably especially now everybody's remote how how does your workflow kind of look you know where you're like okay I I think this is what you want is this what you want before we go through a lot of you know the process of of getting that to you because if it isn't let's reiterate before we we get too far down the down the path. Well a lot of times you know working remotely versus in person it's sort of doesn't make a huge difference because in the past and also currently we'll get a design sometimes that's just an illustration from from a show and then we have to interpret that into 3D so sharing you know screenshots and and turnarounds and stuff like that doesn't really change for us and we always are going to have to interpret whatever the designer or the production designer or costume designer you know you never know what is actually in their heads so we have to try and interpret that so that's always going to be a kind of a disconnect but the more you work with people the more you understand what they like and what their tendencies go towards so I don't know that answer your question I think so yeah yeah no it's it right it probably yeah it makes a lot of sense to to get a really good sense of what their style is you know they ask for one thing but you kind of get a bigger sense of what their overall style is and then you can give them something that maybe they didn't even they wanted specifically well a lot of times those those things have to be interpreted to to what can actually be built or what will actually work in real life like somebody could draw this crazy space helmet but if it's you know too big and unwieldy you have to make it so that actually fits on a person or maybe they make it too small and you can't actually fit ahead in there like how do you get in and out of it so you always have to you know interpret what a designer comes up with to something that could actually be built sometimes do you feel like the increased amount of connectivity we all have with with social networks and Instagram and email and text messages does that make your work easier does it help you get clients or is it the same well it's it's kind of double-edged sword it is easier like I remember back working on Pirates of the Caribbean you know I had just a little flip phone that took really crappy pictures and we would have to send updates to you know to the people on set of what we were doing and it was these really pixelated photos that like if I looked at it now you know you're like what am I even looking at but you flash forward and now and you know designers want updates like all the time and they and they start to get really nitpicky because this is really good information they're really good photos and so sometimes it's good because you can move a lot faster sometimes it's bad because now you have somebody pretty much sitting on your shoulder asking for an an update every five minutes but I think with with that connectivity like ultimately it makes things better having you know places like Instagram where we could share pictures of our work and the behind the scenes and what actually goes into things it helps inform and educate other clients and you know there's been people that have found us just off of Instagram or off of our website so nice yeah it's a little bit everything so in the costume prop industry in general you know you mentioned 3D printing it's not always the solution but it often is the solution for some things that it used to be totally by hand has that been able to open up the industry to people who are artistic super talented but but maybe didn't have a a way in otherwise yeah absolutely like if I guess the the best example that would be the the cosplay hobby cosplayers have really actually raised the bar for us as builders because they could build the things that that we make for movies and TV so good and every you know like now we're expected to make things even better but you know cosplayers might have like six months to build a costume where we have to build it in two days or two weeks or you know like we we did a commercial about a couple months ago in the middle of like in the middle of this pandemic we did a commercial where we had to build a space suit in five days you know helmet armor like all this stuff and it was insane where if this was you know a hobbyist they would they would have all the time in the world to do it so but anyway back to accessibility they can use pretty much all the same tools that we use like the the 3d printers like our go-to like high resolution printer is called a phenom it's from a company called Piappoli and like it's a great printer it prints like amazing resolution and it's and it's relatively affordably priced I think it's only a couple grand but that's exact that's the exact printer that we we have four of them in the other room and you know hobbyists can get those they're not unobtainable right it's the price of a MacBook Pro right yeah exactly you know we have four where hobbyists might only have one but it doesn't matter they have all the time right yeah this isn't like some special thing that you know a casual person would never have access to if they if wanted to they could and there's there's bigger SLA printers like what's that company called Envision Tech has ones that are that are much bigger and there are hundreds of thousands of dollars but I rarely find the need that I need to you know send a file out to a a print company that has Envision Tech or any of these bigger printers like I just you know I'm totally happy with these like you know prosumer I guess level printers so Led and I have a mutual friend Bill Durand who started as making cosplay costumes right and he has now grown into you know a prop maker is that do you see that happening a lot do you see hobbyists starting to compete with you as far as I'm aware Bill is still a content creator right because I've called him before a couple of times asking if you wanted to you know build some stuff for shows that we're on and he's just so busy making built content like to take on commissions it seems like that's not his jam so I mean there are people that are hobbyists that have that have transitioned into being a business there's there's a funny kind of disconnect between perception when it comes to productions like if if it's a big show and a big client a lot of times like I've had clients specifically say like please don't use cosplayers because and it's because that they are building things on their own terms and their own schedules and unfortunately for some of them it's given a bad name for you know the quality and the delivery and you know they can't I'm not saying that they can't typically like we move so much faster because we have bigger infrastructure and more crews and typically we have a different sort of sub knowledge of how these things need to be used on set like we're we're a union shop and so we deal a lot with the onset customers and so knowing exactly how they want things where the closures are or where you know how things need to be handled it's just it's a different skill set not that they can't transition but it's it's different it's just it's it's I mean it's different for me making a podcast that I just want to make for the heck of it versus doing one that's meant to succeed right like that so I can I can totally identify with that well like yeah Len and I made a podcast that that we do just for funsies and um I don't know it's great it's great it's consistent with what your guys's podcast is so I totally get that before we before we wrap this up are you going to get the the cuckoo robot seven access robot arm you know I've been eyeballing these cuckoos for a while there's a there's a company called um robotic solutions it's it's in Wisconsin that sell them already outfitted with you know the the milling packages and stuff like that so that way I can you know build bigger things I just I just gotta find the right job to be able to like run that into a budget somewhere yeah it's what is it a hundred thousand bucks something like that yeah I think you can get into I've I've heard you can get into one for a little under a hundred I've seen them I've I saw one for about 30 grand on sale some guys trying to get rid of it are but it's I'm with any of the milling attachments and stuff so I probably still need to put all kinds of money into it but yeah like 100 grand 120 is probably what that's going to cost so one of these days yeah yeah chump change yeah uh well if you want to join the conversation in our discord and lots of folks are talking about what Frank is doing for a job and all sorts of other things you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns let's check out the mailbag real quick let's do it Brandon wanted to add his two cents about Samsung's earnings we were mentioning you know kind of kind of better than usual he writes on yesterday's show you talk about Samsung's higher profit especially because of appliances I work for a smaller furniture and appliance company and during this pandemic a lot of appliance manufacturers have seen significant delays and trouble getting parts Samsung however is one of the only manufacturers that we're able to get products from and they're typically a higher price and have higher margins on them compared to a whirlpool or a Maytag or a GT appliance GE appliance just a little anecdote from a small furniture and appliance salesman that is interesting so yeah I mean Sam obviously people are buying appliances more right now across the board but Samsung's going to make even more off of that if they're able to provide that kind of service to the sellers who are able then to say like well I don't have the whirlpool you were looking for but I do have a Samsung I'm kind of interested in that yeah make sense I love my Samsung fridge just saying shout out to patrons that are master and grand master levels including Tim deputy Paul Reese and Ragnold Varmadol let's check in with Len Peralta who has been drawing today's show Len what have you drawn for us you know first off let me just say I'm so excited for Frank to be here it's a reunion of sorts from our Creature Geek podcast and I also am so happy that he's here to wrap up Creator Week here at DTNS and of course this was the piece of art I did where Frank I you know I love drawing I haven't drawn you in a while and here is an opportunity to not only draw you but also talk about a great shop Thinker Geek and Creator Week and put it all together in one awesome little piece of little image here so it's been I've been looking for this looking forward to this show for a real long time and just glad you're here to wrap it up with us this week this piece of course is available at my Patreon if you're a Patreon subscriber you'll get this right now over at Patreon.com forward slash Len or if you want to you know purchase this too you can go to my store at LenPrawlToStore.com Yeah if you're listening to audio you just you need to see how Frank wields a chainsaw Well I guess I'm gonna have to go sign up to your Patreon so I can go buy that one I'll send it over to you after the show Well Frank a Pulido thank you so much for being with us today it was such a fun conversation and you know so many of us admire the kind of work you do and nice to get a sense of how you actually do your work so how can people follow your work Well we have a website thingergyink.com and then we have Instagram like most people do it's Instagram it's a thingergy underscore ink and then I also have my personal Instagram which is just at Frank at Pulido so yeah that's and then the Twitter's too I guess we're on that same things Go check it out well I've linked all of this in our show notes at dailytechnewshow.com as well and folks we hope you enjoyed Creator Week you made it possible patrons of the show made it possible so give yourself a round of applause because if you aren't supporting the show directly we wouldn't have the resources to be able to do it but part of that resource is being able to pay Roger Chang who did all the hard work behind the scenes take a bow Roger well done y'all don't know the amount of work that he puts into booking the guest and talking to him ahead of time and making sure that it all goes smoothly so thank you Roger yeah thanks thanks for reminding me 8,000 times to do this I know that I'm kind of scatterbrained sometimes so I appreciate it I like to think of them as gentle reminders so folks keep supporting us and we'll do more like this dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon and if you have feedback on Creator Week or anything in general please do write us because we'd love to see it feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send them we're also live Monday through Friday join us if you can for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC and find out more tell a friend dailytechnewshow.com slash live quick programming no show Monday for the U.S. holiday we'll see you Tuesday for the big iOS announcement the Snobo S folks and Patrick Bejo will be here too this show is part of the Frog Pants Network get more at frogpants.com time and club hopes you have enjoyed this brover