 Coming up on DTNS will Apple support low Earth orbit satellites on the iPhone while you might have zoom dysmorphia and the new industry of renting out your likeness for AI deepfakes. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, August 30th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Lovely Cleveland, I'm Rich Strapolino. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Denwood. That is Roger Chang, the show's producer. Yeah, Sarah Lane has the day off today. But if you follow her on Twitter, she thanks you for all of the heartwarming messages folks have been sending. If you'd like to get the wider conversation on our expanded show, we were just talking about old tech, five inch TVs and shortwave radios. Good day. Internet has that become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS where you can join our top patrons like Daniel Dorado, John Atwood, and Pat Sheeran. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bike Dance acquired the VR headset maker Pico in an undisclosed deal. Now you may not have heard of Pico. They make standalone VR headsets for businesses and enterprises, but IDC estimates Pico was the third largest virtual reality headset maker globally in Q1 2021 with shipments up 44.7% on the year. The operators of Ragnarok ransomware organization closed shop and released its universal decryption key. Ragnarok had been active since 2019 using the Ragnar locker ransomware to target IT networks, collecting more than $4.5 million in documented ransom payments. The operators did not announce why they were shutting down. Fossil announced it's Gen 6 smartwatches, which include Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Wear 4100 plus SOC. These come in 42 millimeter and 44 millimeter case sizes, but regardless of which case size you get, you get a 1.28 inch round AMOLED screen and it offers new health features like continuous heart rate tracking, a new blood oxygenation sensor, and a new built-in wellness app. These watches will support Wear OS 3 with an updated expected in 2022. The watches start at $299 and are available for pre-order. China's National Press and Publication Administration issued a notice that the country will limit miners, those younger than 18, to three hours of online gaming most weeks, three hours a week. Previous rules limited miners to one and a half hours per day and in extensions on holidays, not anymore. Miners will only be able to play online between 8 and 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends, and public holidays. And Nissan partnered with Mitsubishi to launch a mini EV for the Japanese market that's coming in 2022. The vehicle will seat four, be bigger than a smart car, but smaller than a Nissan Leaf, and offer a 20 kilowatt hour battery capacity, so kind of a city driver. Expected to start at around $2 million, that's about $18,200 US dollars before subsidies. All right, let's talk a little more about a reliable iPhone leak slash rumor. Rob, what do we got? Well, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo expects the next-gen iPhone will use a customized version of the Qualcomm X60 with support for communications over satellite. Kuo says this will let the phone feature a low earth orbit LEO satellite communication mode, letting users make calls and send messages when outside of standard cell reception. There's a lot we don't know about how this all could actually work. It could be used to support communication over Apple services like iMessage and FaceTime, or it could be a fallback for emergency communications. There's also the question of whether Apple will charge to use this feature or offer it as a free service, like access to GPS satellites. Kuo also expects LEO satellite communication to be supported in reportedly upcoming Apple product categories like an AR headset and Apple car and IoT devices. My first reaction to this with Kuo saying it's also going to be used in other products is that Apple has decided to use a little bit of that cash to invest in some kind of service that they can share out among their devices. I'm going to guess it's probably emergency service related, although it might be allowed to be used for non-emergency things like when you're out hiking or something and you can't get other service to let you communicate with your other hiking partners or something like that. I can't decide whether they'll charge for it or not. I could absolutely see them including it in a bundle because they're so subscription oriented right now, but I don't see them making it a solo money making opportunity if I'm right about the emergency part. Yeah, I could see this being what Apple satellite and Apple satellite plus where you get the you know you get the emergency you know you can call the 9-1-1. The basic emergency no matter what yeah yeah yeah and then and then if you want to as part of some sort of tier. I mean my question is though you know this is kind of glossed I'm not glossed over but like you know a customized version of a Qualcomm x60 that hides I think a lot of I don't I don't know what kind of radios are going to be needed for this kind of satellite communication but the fact that you're talking about FaceTime iMessage which you know could be transporting media I mean this is not in substantial voice and text my guess is the Qualcomm x60 x60 can support communication with the low-earth orbit satellites and those are only voice and text it's very minimal stuff you're not getting any data over that okay yeah my thought was it just makes it look like a Star Trek I mean everything will just be networked and works everywhere on the planet no matter what so I'm looking forward to it you know guys I don't really use Apple so Samsung needs to steal this yeah I mean that's the other thing I have to you know is this going to be we've already seen obviously there's a lot of activity with low-earth orbit you know internet delivery and that kind of stuff with this presumably if this comes to pass and this is in the next gen iPhone if this will start you know obviously I believe Apple's obviously just gonna be leasing time or some sort of you know business arrangement with existing low-earth orbit satellites if we will see that kind of push and how quickly that could become kind of a standard emergency feature on devices which would be great because I mean you know so I was I've been driving around quite a bit in Ohio and even on the highways turns out cell reception dicey sometimes once you get out of a major metro news to everybody I know but I know I know I want to walk I want to walk back a little bit by saying no data because I can already hear the clattering keyboards you can do data over these satellites but it's such a low bandwidth rate with what we're talking about probably depends on what they're going with but what I'm guessing is it's very low bandwidth so the data they would push out would be very very low bandwidth I don't think it would support FaceTime video is really all I should have said well yeah and I would imagine if you know we're already talking about an at basically an add-on modem that Apple is using so I would also think the concern here would be with battery life the you know these 5g modems are you know notoriously not super power efficient especially when they're not integrated you know into the main chipset so I have to imagine that if Apple is going to be adding this on like Tom like you were saying that this is something that already supports and they're integrating some sort of software or firmware or something like that yeah yeah so it's not I mean despite the fact that they consistently sue each other all the time call CommonApple do work together on you know adapting the products regularly so that part of it doesn't make it sound it would be easy to look at that and go oh they're adapting it what are they doing my guess is like it's a very standard adaptation just to include the satellite service and that that's interesting yeah and the idea of adding this to the car or you know IOT devices also you know kind of like that kind of emergency services like yeah kind of unstarish if we in a car setting in a weird way yeah but I could definitely see that being a major you know kind of Apple satellite network selling point of it however they're gonna brand and part of the of the find my network right yeah you'd be able to increase the range of all that kind of stuff that should be kind of cool yeah all right well next up upgrade support for Windows 11 has generated not a insignificant amount of confusion with some mixed messaging around what CPUs will actually be supported but this has all been limited to upgrades from Windows 10 we're having this discussion about that not manually installing the OS on an older machine now Microsoft confirmed it won't block users installing Windows 11 on older PCs manually using ISO or ISO files these were the requirements to get the OS running using a manual install are pretty straightforward 64 bit 1 gigahertz processor with two or more cores 4 gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes of storage however the company told the Verge that manual installs on the OS may not be entitled to get Windows updates even security ones and is mainly meant to be used by businesses evaluating the OS Microsoft won't guarantee driver compatibility or system reliability for those installs Microsoft also announced the systems with Intel's core X series Xeon W series and the core 7820 HQ found in the Surface Studio 2 specifically are supported in Windows 11 but there would be no support for AMD Zen one base CPUs though the workaround we just mentioned would apply to those manually installing it the company plans to update its PC health check app to include the updated CPU support information and provide clarity why your system might not be able to upgrade Rob I know for businesses you know this kind of manual install question you know for in terms of validating Windows 11 and kind of testing it to get it up and running is important so a good confirmation for Microsoft on that regard right absolutely because enterprises they still physically go to machines now they're not necessarily walking a cart to a machine and upgrading it right there but they're doing it with some type of back office and they're not necessarily doing that upgrade over the internet and you're going to still see a lot of companies do this because they build their PC with an image that has all the software and all the stuff that they want to run on that machine so they're going to continue to do that for the foreseeable future the other thing I know about Microsoft is that what they said to the Virgin that they may actually not support some of this stuff well they that's just giving them an out for the oldest of the old that someone has figured out how to get this to run on Microsoft knows that they're going to try to support everything they can realistically run on this platform because earth still kind of standardized on Windows I know that you know Apple is doing an awesome job with you know their platform but business still runs on these Windows machines business still runs on Linux so they've got to get that figured out and I don't think that they're going to you know just you were able to get it installed we're just going to leave you out there in the cold they're probably going to go back and I say that because they've always done that they always stick things around a little bit longer than what they say they're going to so I think this is just giving themselves a realistic out that only may not support this but we probably will no I think you're absolutely right I mean if you're on an enterprise contract Microsoft's not going to screw you right they want to they want to keep those dollars coming in so this is meant for the person you know that the yahoo like me who went and stuck Windows 11 on my you know 15 year old HP and then they're Microsoft's going to be like that's great if it goes wrong it's not we're not supporting that that's that's all you you have you have fun with that so the messaging on this really has become quite confusing but honestly I think the majority of people who have a Windows machine are going to be able to upgrade to Windows 11 just fine there may be other problems with Windows 11 but yeah the path to upgrade will be there it's only hobbyists and people who are you know really trying to eke out all the life out of a machine as possible that are even going to run into these scenarios and it looks like Microsoft's trying to bend over backwards to be like look we can't afford to support you know and write drivers and everything for this stuff but we'll at least let you do it we're going to we're going to try not to actively get in your way yeah and the nice thing about this for just regular Windows users is that they're going to put into Windows update a you know just a screen that's going to tell you whether or not your specific machine can be upgraded or not and it's probably going to be in the form of hey you can upgrade to Windows 11 click here to get all the new benefits so as you said Tom the overwhelming majority of Windows users are going to be just fine with Windows 11 and it's important to just kind of remind everybody that also like when Windows 11 comes out Windows 10 does not exit support in fact Microsoft has had a timeline out that gives multiple years of Windows 10 so if you are not able to upgrade it's not like you know the OS is you know unsupported or kaput or anything like that after that point right so now is the time to upgrade your Windows 7 machines to Windows 10 is that what you're saying it's finally safe all right we've talked about the impact of remote work from a lot of different tech angles over the last year and a half or so pressures on supply chains for webcams the importance of available home broadband and what happens to you if you don't have that wired has a report on a new survey from Harvard published in the international journal of women's dermatology identifying how the explosion of videoconferencing is impacting how people see themselves it's a disorder and the reason why it's in the journal of women's dermatology called zoom dysmorphia the idea that apps cause body image disorders is not the new part in fact if you remember the term snapchat dysmorphia has been around for a while since 2015 that refers to patients going to places like plastic surgeons and trying to achieve the look of a snapchat filter in real life the difference with zoom dysmorphia is that while snapchat filters are a conscious effort to look like snapchat with you know like put some sparkles on me or whatever videoconferencing is causing an effect people want to avoid not imitate the wide angle of a webcam its close proximity can exaggerate the size of your nose and make your eyes look smaller combine that with an unflattering low angle that you may not realize is causing a perception change your board meeting expression which is different than the relaxed expression you have when you look at yourself in the mirror all of that is having doctors seeing people change their self perception and request more cosmetic procedures the study found 71 percent of 7000 respondents were stressed out about returning to in person activities 30 percent of them planned to invest in changing their appearance as a way to cope with going back out in the real world in fact among 18 to 24 year olds those using filters on videoconferencing were most likely to have accessed mental health services dermatologist shadi karush told wire the best way to fight zoom dysmorphia is through awareness know that you're not the only one who thinks you have something wrong with your appearance because of the way you look on zoom and know that zoom is distorting how you look and that's that's not really what other people see well and the other big thing that I feel like for this effect is also and this is like another documented kind of effect is the mirror image result where you're the only way you've ever seen yourself is in a mirror right so you you think your hair parts a certain way and stuff like that and in every pretty much every videoconferencing thing it gives you how you're appearing to other people and that in itself can have almost like a disorienting effect at least short term and adds in you know to all these other things it's kind of funny you know like like wide angle lenses are considered like the least ideal when you're talking about portrait photographer for all of these effects you know it takes everything that that like everything falls away and makes the thing that's closest have like the most prominent in the image if that's your nose or you know something that you're you know not necessarily wanting to be the most prominent thing in the image can definitely like have that effect and sure staring but this has been we've had videoconferencing for a while but this is different than oh a half hour call once a week to all of a sudden spending you know multiple hours every single day on zoom and having you know one of these more knock on effects that we're seeing from kind of this is switched to more hybrid work yeah you make a great point about the mirror image because you're actually seeing yourself different than what you normally see yourself and it's the same result people who listen to themselves for the first few times on audio you can't stand how you sound you don't sound like yourself that's because you hear yourself through your head as compared to through your ears so this is you know even if that if you weren't using a wide angle lens people probably would still be a bit uncomfortable until they get used to how they appear on camera simply because if you're not looking at a mirror image you're not looking at which you've looked at for decades of your life then add on to that the fact that you're not a professional lighter you're not a professional photographer cinematographer and so a lot of your perceptions may just mean you need better lighting or you need to frame yourself better or move the camera back a little or something and suddenly you'd be like oh i guess i don't look that bad but it may seem obvious to some people out there but a lot of people don't realize that they think oh i point the camera at me and that's reality that that's what i actually look like in this room right the camera doesn't lie well the camera doesn't lie but it definitely distorts the truth and this may be a maybe a subtle benefit or at least a reason to maybe pursue maybe a VR meeting strategy like we've saw with facebook's horizon workspace workplace whatever they're calling it like the idea that you you know you have this avatar so it's okay you're not looking at yourself you're looking at how you want to present yourself aside from all the other benefits of oh okay i can be in i can be in a space and i can be looking around also having being able to kind of distance yourself from your avatar versus you sitting in you know your home office or wherever you're at may be a subtle benefit that we're not even thinking of i'm all for that because i can just go back to not having to iron the top half of my outfit yeah yeah uh so anyway something to keep in mind and maybe it's not going to affect you but it might affect somebody in your friends or family uh who's like man i need to get work done and you can you could sort of tell them like well if you tried to tweak in your lighting first maybe that's all it is hey folks you want an ad-free version of DTNS support us on patreon and get your own personal rss feed supported directly by you no need to have an ad in it you're paying for it find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon rob tell us about this this new ai-generated avatar system going on absolutely so mit technology review profiled hour one a startup that licenses real human likeness for ai-generated videos the company has about 100 ai-generated characters so far that can be used for videos with over 40 clients people don't need any acting chops just a willingness to license their appearance they receive a micro payment every time the client licenses the video with their likeness you don't have a say however in how your likeness is going to be used but hour one has a policy that says it won't use certain industries such as gambling sex and politics anyone can apply but hour one looks for a wide variety of characteristics and age and racial backgrounds there are a few more than 100 people on board 80 percent of which are under 50 years old 70 percent are female and 25 percent are white if you're selected as an actor a 4k camera fills you talking and making different facial expressions in front of a green screen the voice is either produced by text to speech or for a higher fee recorded by pro voice actors the algorithms then turn all that data into a model of the actor that can say whatever customers want in any language this is got sag aftras attention the union for actors because a lot of actors especially actors that aren't you know brad pit supplement their income or even pay the rent by doing appearances for uh an instructional video or or a training video or customer support video those are time consuming and somewhat expensive you know it's expensive as a major motion picture but but they're costly because you have to get everybody in one place you have to do good lighting good photography this cuts out all of that expense and yet it still seems to be supporting the person like in licensing their image it just broadens it you don't have to be an actor you don't have to be able to do anything other than fit the profile of of the variety of types of people they're looking for and then you get passive income uh because i think what i was surprised is that they're not just paying you a flat fee they're they are giving you royalties every time your image is licensed but you don't have to do anything the ai does all the work yeah and in uh in the technology review piece they said you know that's it's not like you're getting like 10 cents per time your video is used they said it was in the dollar range of theoretically you know there were there were clients that they were citing that were producing you know dozens if not hundreds of videos kind of using these avatars so you know if you were picked up by a brand or something that theoretically that might be a not insubstantial passive income for you what is what's interesting to me is this is almost like the the stock photoification of video right where it's you know you can again it's that same kind of passive income i'm gonna let anybody use this i guess you know in terms of gambling sex and politics i guess religion wasn't the third rail in that regard i thought that was this kind of interesting but well it says including are you sure religion is included i have not checked the the ethics policy for hour one which i want to call one hour photo every single time uh but the it it raises some questions but i feel like this isn't the company that's going to do it wrong it's the idea though that seemingly they're limited by uh uh you know wanting to roll out quality quote-unquote characters versus the technology the technology is like clearly there for this to be a business model for them right now okay in my opinion you're going to see a lot of people who aren't going to like this you know it's it's you know i'm thinking like you know i'm from war in ohio lordstown is the biggest plant there and automation is a is a big deal these robots they're now doing the jobs of what people can do it's the same thing here's different but it's you know different industry but clearly it's the same type of thing you're now going to allow machines to do the job that people used to be able to do so i am you know kind of encouraged that they are going to still go to actual people instead of using ai generated faces um you know for this um but it's like said right now they've only got a hundred so there's a there's a lot of growing um that this industry is going to see in the coming coming months coming years yeah i i i almost feel like this is a an example of why it's never as bad as you think because instead of like you said rob instead of having the ai generate people and just throwing all the actors out of work it's shifting from the actors having to spend a lot of time and having a lot of cost to broadening now more people can get paid to do this they probably won't get paid as much that's the rub also it's throwing the photographers and the sound guy and the lighting guy actually the sound guy couldn't get work doing the voiceovers i suppose but the lighting guy and the photographer are not going to get these jobs because they're done in ai so it definitely shifts things around and adds some opportunities while taking others away yeah the the idea that okay if the amount of video made today stays the same and uses the system yes an actor would earn less money however this opens the door to very quickly being able to produce more video and then you would have theoretically need more actors and yes it would you know theoretically maybe there would be a little bit more of a spectrum of of shift in the article burlitz was one of the clients that's using this because they couldn't possibly make all the videos they needed for their foreign language instruction but they can now because they can just use this to do it and it makes something possible that they couldn't have done before at any cost all right well finishing up here xbox user gabriel roland shared on twitter that a gamer pick avatar he acquired back in 2006 was still in use on his xbox account but had not aged well displaying in its native 72 by 72 pixels hey that was good in 2006 but it now had gray borders and was poorly cropped inside of the now default round profile pictures xbox engineering lead in marie replied that she made it her personal mission to fix it she not only helped out gabriel but announced a fix to improve the rendering of all old gamer pick avatars originally purchased for the xbox 360 a fix is rolling out now to the alpha ring of xbox insiders and it now upscales the gamer picks and use a transparency layer to better fit them in those circular icons rest assured your your gamer points that you use to purchase your your gamer picks it's still good they they found a way to keep it alive so who knows if microsoft was thinking about this before this tweet got to someone who could actually do something about it but if the tweet is what moved action on this i'm just i'm just happy that sometimes twitter actually works for good well that was the funny thing is that uh eden said that the bug report quote unquote uh from the twitter post just made her laugh and that made her want to check it out and go into it but then i you know because i was kind of skeptical i was like okay how many people could do this going through the comments to the tweet a lot of people sharing uh some poorly cropped 72 by 72 pixel uh gamer tags that they were still using or whatever gamer picks that they were still using uh so uh maybe helping some people out and uh getting some certainly getting some good will uh along the way for sure so they're supporting gamer pick avatars longer than any of their operating system that is yes that is claire and also that's a long term service right there let me tell you and also discovering that like the the feature itself like back in 2006 supported transparencies which i guess no documentation showed so they're also a journey of discovery for the gamer pick from xbox 360 i mean i if they made it if they're just gifts gifts supported transparency forever so i i guess that makes sense i suppose yeah all right uh we are going to take a quick peek in the mail bag and go wow uh that's a lot of mail thank you uh we got so much good feedback from people about the experiment week shows we did last week one of my favorites was one person who was like you know i didn't really love any of them but i'm really glad you did it i enjoyed sampling them uh like they didn't have to find one they loved to to enjoy like having new stuff to try out and that is the the experiment week spirit to me is like we're we're trying all these things out so if you have listened to the shows from last week but have not let us know what you think keep it coming feedback at daily tech news show dot com we really really do appreciate it and we want to say a big thank you to our brand new bosses tyler glaze nicholas newan jeremy d strickland barry k steve james kevin wheat richard vogel and tyler bill howe who just all started back in us on patreon thank you to tyler nicholas jeremy barry steve kevin and richard yeah we didn't we didn't miss y'all uh we we saw you uh all last week so yeah ah man it's nice to get new patrons even when we're not on every day you know uh pushing for that so i really appreciate that y'all thank you for that and someone else who i dearly appreciate of course rob dunwood thank you so much for being on the show today rob uh where can people find more of your great stuff oh it's always a pleasure being on and i am at everything rob dunwood and after uh last week i've discovered twitter mentioned so i'm gonna pay attention to twitter and you can also get me on my weekly podcast over at smr podcast dot com all right and remember we are live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m eastern 2030 utc find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live we'll be back tomorrow with lamar wilson see you then i hope you have enjoyed this bro this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com