 Coming up on DTNS, Apple may switch from Intel to ARM, for Macs, Google Meet uses AI for impressive noise cancellation, and Memristors could bring super computer level AI to your phone, even when it's offline. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 9th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the Bright Forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Bejo. Sweltering Southern California on the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking a lot about what kind of sandwich we are on Good Day Internet, as well as some new Chrome features that surprised Sarah today. If you want that conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Speaking of features, sort of, WhatsApp has fixed a bug that showed some users' phone numbers in search results. WhatsApp's click-to-chat feature creates a URL to start conversations quickly. But if those links were posted on web pages crawled by search engines, they would show up in search results revealing the phone number of that URL. WhatsApp has made changes to stop web crawlers from indexing at these sites. The issue was first reported in February by Wabata Info and brought to light again this week by security researcher Altho Jairam. It's not a bug. It's a feature. Twitter is bringing fleets to India. Fleets is Twitter's ephemeral message feature that disappears in 24 hours, similar to Snapchat. Fleets is also being tested in Brazil and Italy. Honda announced Tuesday that an attack on servers outside its headquarters in Japan forced it to suspend global production. Honda staff were advised not to access their work computers and to take paid leave if possible. Honda says much of its operations have resumed now, but it does not believe the attack was related to decreased security because of teleworking. Facebook News is launching to all U.S. users. Facebook News features selected posts from Facebook, chosen news sources. It was introduced to a limited number of U.S. users back in October. Been a while. Doing a little testing. Humans program Facebook News and algorithms personalize it. Users can react to and share articles, but they can't comment on them. The company also added local news and news video. The $80 Razer Kishi, which attaches game controllers to each side of a phone, is now available. An analog stick and D-pad are on the left side and an analog stick and face buttons on the right. The Kishi supports Android phones running Android 8 or newer that also have a center-line USB-C port. A Kishi for iPhones is expected this summer. Kishi has native support for Fortnite, Stadia, GeForce Now, and Project XCloud. And Singapore will introduce a wearable device for COVID-19 contact tracing that will not connect to the Internet or use GPS. It just has Bluetooth on it and it stores proximity data encrypted for 25 days. That's all it does. Data can only be extracted when the device is given to a public health official and the device will now be rolled out to all citizens starting later this month. Let's talk a little bit about that rumor floating around about Apple's processors, Patrick. Indeed, let's. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources say that at WWDC on June 22, Apple may announce that it will replace Intel chips with its own ARM-based processors. Project Calamata, as it is called, could result in max with ARM chips arriving in 2021, though timing is still subject to change. Apple already uses ARM-based processors in iPhones and iPads. Gurman's sources said Apple wants to make the switch because Intel's annual chip performance gains have slowed, especially for graphics and AI performance. Three Apple-designed ARM processors would include a CPU, GPU, and a neural engine for machine learning. TSMC will supposedly build the new processors on its five nanometer production lines. Gurman's got a great record with this sort of thing, so we mention that all the time. So it's likely that Apple is considering this. A lot of folks have been talking about this for a long time. It's possible they wouldn't announce this if it's not quite ready, but it sounds like they will. And if they do, this is going to be a big deal because even though Apple is 10% of the PC market, if they are doing this and if other companies look at this and realize they're doing it because of a lack of Intel performance, that could encourage other companies to examine whether they too should have an ARM-designed processor and maybe they design it themselves, maybe they get someone else like Qualcomm to design it for them. But this could be the beginning of a major shift against Intel's fortunes. It might also end up being something where PC makers look at Apple and say, well, they just want to have more control. They're not really getting the performance boost that we would want to see, but this is a significant moment nonetheless. It's interesting because there were a few sources this morning that were like, WWDC makes a lot of sense because that's how external developers can jump on board when they realize what Apple's doing. They know what Apple's doing. Whether it's announced at a huge conference that Apple puts on annually or not, I don't think anyone's going to fall by the wayside if for whatever reason they're not part of the remote WWDC that's happening this year. What I think is interesting though is this Apple has switched chips twice before. Back in 1990 something, they went from Motorola chips to PowerPC. That stayed, of course, for some time. In 2005, Steve Jobs at the time at WWDC announced that they were moving from PowerPC to Intel chips. So it's been some time. It is really significant the fact that Apple and Intel have had this relationship for 15 years. Things will change a lot for Intel going forward. Patrick, do you have any more thoughts? Yeah, it is definitely a gigantic change. And I think Intel has been aware of this issue for a while that they're not performing as they should be compared to other players in the field. And they've addressed it a few months ago and have sort of revamped the way they approach chip development. But now, if Apple does make the change, it begs the question, is it too late for Intel? Not too late because they're always going to be a player, but have they taken really too long to act? It should be noted as well that the Intel aspect of it is important, but Apple, through this move, if they indeed do it, gain an increased even more control over their hardware, which is something they've always strived for, and that makes their products better, in my opinion. And again, worth repeating before we move on. If they announced it at WWDC, that's to give developers time to know, like, OK, it's official. I need to start adapting my apps, and we wouldn't see it show up in products until 2021. Well, speaking of incumbents, suppose IBM wrote a letter to members of the US Congress, announcing that it is no longer offering general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software. IBM told Axios that its customers have already been informed, and while the company will no longer market or sell the products, it will continue to support existing clients. IBM is in the middle of restructuring its business units and also conducting layoffs, so this may be part of that. IBM also called for police reform and expressed support for the proposed Justice in Policing Act. IBM didn't comment on its predictive policing technology and aims to identify crime hotspots and predict suspects. So it's still working on certain things. Yeah, they're not ending all of their police contracts. They're only pulling back from facial recognition. I assume that that is principled, but also probably made easier by the fact that they want to reassess what parts of the business are doing well. Certainly, the thing is, obviously it's impossible to separate this from the current context in the US, but a lot of companies and a lot of people who know a lot about face recognition have been saying for months, if not years, that it is less reliable for certain ethnicities. So this is something that is definitely justifiable. It's not IBM taking a stand for the principle of something obscure that isn't tech-related. There is a tech reason to be saying, listen, this is not really working as it should be, and so we don't think we want to offer the product anymore. Yeah, and we talked previously about a lot of different tech companies and what they're doing here. On the one hand, IBM does, if they no longer provide this product, leave it open for someone less principled to move in and provide it instead, because there's no shortage of people who want to provide it, but at the same time, they're saying we are going to push for legislation to regulate the use of facial recognition and to audit it and say, let's find out when it's good, how it's good, and if it has improved so it doesn't introduce the biases that Patrick was talking about there. Researcher Jane Manchin-Wong uncovered a request verification field meant for the Twitter app's personal information section. That meant you could request the blue check mark. Twitter told TechCrunch, yep, this feature is not launched to the public, but it is in development and when it is launched to the public, Twitter will publicly document what qualifies someone for verification. If you recall, Twitter paused verification back in 2017. At the time, Twitter said that verification was meant for authentication, not endorsement, and it needed to resolve the perception that it was for endorsement before it would continue to grant verifications. Now in the meantime, Twitter said in 2018 that it was prioritizing election integrity efforts over verification. So it was saying, don't expect verification to come back anytime soon. And it has continued to verify some types of people on a case-by-case basis. Candidates for elected office, elected officials once they gain office and also this year started granting some blue checks to public health officials during the COVID-19 crisis. So it's not that they have stopped verification altogether, they've just very extremely limited it. And what they're trying to do is say we want to come out with a list of here's how you get verified and get the message out there. Verification means the person you're looking at is in fact that person, not someone impersonating them. Do you think that they'll be able to get that message across? Because the blue check mark for a long time meant status symbol, meant I'm cool. Yeah, well, and it was really hard to get. There were a lot of public figures who were like, why can't I get this? Why does Twitter listen to me? I am clearly an important public figure and I tried to get it and I never did. It was very frustrating. Sorry. Well, there you go. No, but and I understand that in this climate, you know, folks, particularly in the public health space, if there is misinformation that can be squelched in any way by somebody having a blue check mark, do it. But, you know, I kind of roll my eyes at the rest of it of being like, we all just sort of stopped caring about that because Twitter didn't care about it in the first place. You know, there were certain people that got check marks for reasons that seemed legit, but then other people did not. Like you said, Patrick, so at this point, I don't know how much people pay attention to that. Well, even more importantly, once it's clear how you get it and people can start getting it is when people stop caring about it. You know, at some point it will be even cooler to be like a well-known person like me, very well-known, very famous and not have the check mark. Actually, let me correct what I said earlier. They offered, they asked, they begged to give me the check mark. And I said, sorry, that's that's not how I do things. You said, no, I don't want people to know this is really me. I don't want to verify it. Tom, you think I don't want unfair praise. There's so many other people. I don't want to have to take responsibility for my dreams. I want deniability. I'm a man of the people who you think with the minds of people who need the check marks. I don't because people already know it's me. But your Twitter ID is not Patrick. It's confusing. Is it though? No, and I think you're right there. I think that the blue check mark as as status symbol has faded away. And so Twitter's problem may have gone away. They may it may have an easier time introducing this. And I think it is important. That's why they've continued to do it for elected officials and public health agencies. It is important in certain situations to say, no, this really is coming from the person or agency that it says it is. And if it's absent, you can rightly say like, well, wait a minute, is that is that for real? So I don't know. I think maybe they won't have as many problems this time. Well, if they have managed to have clear messaging about how it is, what it is, that would be a good first step because they've never had that. Google Meet has started to roll out noise cancellation for enterprise accounts, starting with the web version of Meet with iOS and Android support to follow. A video from venture venture beat demonstrates it removing sounds like crackling snack wrappers, clicking pens and clinging glasses. Google says it will also work on keyboard noise and barking dogs. Tom, that one's for you. Google used to used its own meetings to train the algorithm. It will not use customer meetings to continue training. Processing happens in the cloud and is encrypted during transport. Only the noise processing software can access data. Noise cancellation will be on by default in Meet, but can be turned off in settings. Now that video you mentioned on venture beat has Serge, a product manager in Stockholm for Google demonstrating this. Let's listen and he's going to start with crackling wrappers. Not people doing hip hop. I mean like a package for snacks here. So I can't hear. I can talk at the same time and it will be removing the crumpling from my voice. It also muted his voice. Here is me the nervous type with my pen. Clicking a pen. Nothing. And my Allen key glass demo here. And the ruler ahead. Snapping a ruler. This. All right. All right. So it affects his voice. It's not perfect. Yeah. And you can hear the thing with audio is a little bit, but it definitely definitely removed it. Yeah. That's the kind of funny thing about audio and, you know, all of us who work with audio and want it to sound as good as possible at all times know that like when you duck audio and you're using software to do that, it's going to get certain things wrong. For example, his voice got a little muddy. And that's probably okay most of the time. Listen, if you're if you used to be hanging out in a conference room talking to a bunch of people and now you're at home or otherwise remote. And this is something that kind of allows you to do your thing without seeming like you're being unprofessional. I'm all for it. And it sounds like based on the reviews today that largely it works pretty well. Yeah. I mean, it's just machine learning. So it just, you know, it works in the cloud, like you say, but it works as as the voice is just passing through Google servers. And so it scales pretty easily. I don't know. I think it's I think it's an interesting advantage in this race to become the best video conference set of features. Google Meet probably has a good one here. It is a useful tool. I don't know if you saw but a few weeks, maybe a couple of months ago and video released a piece of software that would do the same thing using their GPUs latest versions of their GPUs that I think seemed to work a lot better. So it's because it's local or because they have more processing power in these graphics cards that are very expensive. But yeah, it's promising as well. Yeah, Nvidia's solution does not happen in the cloud. So it couldn't happen on a broad range of hardware the way the meat can. I think that's the big difference there. Yeah. Germany will commit 400 million euros for funding of electronics research and development to reduce reliance on imports used in critical infrastructure. Research Minister Anya Karla Zek said that will be vital to source 6G equipment locally. Our first award of 25 million euros goes to a project working on edge computing processors and two on artificial intelligence applications are now being accepted for the next round of 20 million euros as well. Last week, France and Germany announced the Gaia X Foundation, which is a cloud nonprofit based in Belgium, whose 22 member companies must abide by goals of data sovereignty, data availability, interoperability, portability, transparency and fair participation. The goal is to encourage the creation of European cloud business. So Patrick, you know, you're probably not the only one doing this, but two examples from Europe of localizing technology, moving away from the broad global cooperation and collaboration that we've seen to saying, you know what, there's some bad side effects of that that we want to clamp down and bring it in locally. How do you feel about that? It is a difficult thing to do. And I think it's very easy to criticize or at least see the drawbacks of or the potential ways it wouldn't work. But I don't think anyone would say this should not happen. At least when we're talking about critical infrastructure, if we've learned anything in the past few months, it's that it is important to have at least some measure of control over what you can still manage to run when things become really difficult when crises arise. So is that the best way of doing it? Maybe we're going to need to try a couple of times, but I think it's probably something that we need to keep trying to achieve. I think it's unfortunately going to reduce overall innovation if this if this became a common thing. And I'm not saying that these two programs are bad. But the trend of saying, well, we need to make everything locally will leave you again doing things that you do well locally, okay, but leave you behind and things that you don't do well. And yeah, in a crisis, that means you at least have everything under your control. But it means the rest of the time, which is the vast majority of the time, you might be dealing with less than ideal stuff. And not every country can be the best at everything. China and Russia have tried this with operating systems and failed. Now, maybe that's because it was China and Russia doing operating systems. It may not be a representative sample, but I don't know. My instinct is when you try to just bring things locally, you end up reducing quality rather than if you try to collaborate globally. You don't reduce quality, but you do increase security risks. So there's a balance to be had. So I completely agree. It should be noted, at least in France, we've had previous attempts to do sovereign clout. And those were essentially the government getting to getting, you know, saying we can do this because we're big and powerful. And we have expertise, which they do. But as you mentioned, if usually doesn't work. And in that case, they tried a couple of times it didn't. This is private companies, which do have a lot of expertise and who can be inspired by the best best practices in the world. But of course, I agree with you to an extent it will reduce innovation. However, in those cases, in the cases of critical infrastructure, innovation is not necessarily the prime value that you want. It's like the kind of software that runs a power plant or, you know, these kinds of infrastructures. Sure, it might be Windows, you know, NT from the 90s, but you need it to run. You don't want to update it so that you can tweet from your console. So of course, I'm caricaturing here a little bit. Well, and neither one of these projects are saying and therefore you can only buy from them from now on, right? They're trying to create a alternative that to what's out there in the marketplace. And in that respect, I think it's good because it's just adding more competition. One of the last thing, one of the elements that we should point to a little bit more is portability. The ability to easily go from one service to another could influence the rest of the marketplace, including the big players, if it does end up working out. Yeah, there's always already some things pushing for that, such as Facebook making photo portability happen between Facebook and Google because of other efforts. And this could be another nudge down that road. You're right. Scientists at MIT published a paper in the journal Nature Nanotechnology that describes a small power efficient memristor that can handle AI computing locally. Memristors are memory transistors. It's a portmanteau that are sometimes described as artificial brain synapses because they work sort of like our neurons do. Instead of responding with a one or a zero, a memristor varies the signal it produces based on the strength of the signal it receives. So it has a whole spectrum, a gradient, if you will, that it can respond. And because of that, it can sort of remember by recreating the same signals for the same received current over and over again. The problem has been to get it to work at smaller sizes because the ions tend to start wandering off as they cross the channel from the anode to the electrode in the small sizes. So you could do memristors, but they weren't real practical in modern computers. However, this MIT team designed an alloy of silver and copper working within silicon that keeps the ions from wandering, and that allows them to fit tens of thousands of memristors into the size of a piece of confetti. These memristors can recreate images from memory, perform inference tasks better than previous memristors, and they're smaller. For demonstrations, they were able to blur and sharpen pictures of the MIT campus and reliably reproduce from memory an image of Captain America's shield. The team wants to use them to create complex artificial neural networks that would not need connectivity, not be based on software, and would not need powerful GPUs to run. So you just put these chips in your phone or in your camera, and you're not executing software, you're not calling the cloud. You can do high quality supercomputer level neural networking locally. It's pretty great if they could make this practical. Tom, in our pre-show meeting, you were saying, I've been thinking about memristors for some time now. Well, I haven't. They're somewhat new to me. The idea that this is possible is fascinating, very cool. And when you hear about AI stories these days where it's like, okay, well, the computer isn't quite ready. It's not quite a human yet. I mean, is the bridge that we're looking for? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I've been waiting for this for longer than I thought it would take. There's probably an episode of Buzz Out Loud at CNET from more than 10 years ago with me saying, you wait. In 10 years, memristors will be revolutionizing things. And it's taken longer, as all these things always do. But this gets me excited because this is one of the biggest roadblocks, is getting it practical for mobile devices, for actual devices that we use. And I think this is an important piece of news that, again, it's not out of the lab in this case. It's a peer-reviewed published journal, though, and that's a good first step. So I'll say it again, in 10 years, folks, remember that you heard me talking about memristors. Memristors. Yeah. It's something to keep an eye on. And this could be a one-off and we may not hear about it again for a while. It could be the beginning of starting to see it pop up in lots of different places. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Also, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories that you care about. You can vote on others that your peers have submitted, and it's all at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, we got a good one from Tyson who wrote it and said, on our conversation yesterday about what kids like, I can confirm the Roblox and YouTube for kids. We have a single child. She's in the tween range. Roblox is her playground and we aren't able to hang out with other families or friends because, you know, quarantine stuff, which I can frequently to see what she's doing. We review the chat logs with other players. I'm actually amazed at some of the things that she's building in the games. As a gamer myself, I'm impressed that the tools available for building are superior to some of the games that I play for building housing or bases, etc. She's also becoming a content creator, making videos of her builds, fashion shows, music videos, posting them to her channel. I'd like her to be able to play with friends, but this has been a great way to keep her occupied and interacting as well as engaging some creative thought processes during a pandemic. I also have to mention she's now very high level and just dance on the switch. I can do most of the songs facing away from the TV and still rate really high. I'm jealous of your daughter. Thank you goodness for having some of these options available during these crazy times. That's great. Patrick, are you Roblox familiar? I am not, but I'm guessing that in fairly soon I will have to, but I do know the game. It is huge, especially with younger audiences. Very few people actually know about it unless you have a kid, and it's really big. I don't know if we can say it's bigger than Minecraft, but it's up there. Yeah, same idea. It'll be interesting to see if your son is a Roblox era person or Minecraft or something totally new that we don't even know. Well, I know. Let me tell you, he's going to be an overwatcher. Of course. I mean, if there's anything that's true, it's that parents can make sure their kids are the exact same as them. Absolutely. It works every time. That's what I've learned. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Tony Glass, Steve Ayadarilla, and Michael Eakins. Also, thanks to a number one dad, Patrick Beja. Patrick, what's been going on in your worlds? I guess a couple of things. You have all heard and appreciated Tom's earlier episode last week about the difficult situation in the U.S. I would like to recommend an episode I recorded with a gentleman named Gunner. It was on the Phileus Club. Phileus is the name, the first name, P-H-I-L-E-A-S. And he lives in Minneapolis. He has lived there for a long time and told us about the context and his experiences there, his life there. And it was a really interesting thing to get more context. So if you're interested in that, go check it out, the Phileus Club. And if you like lighter things like games, we are going to be talking about the PlayStation 5 presentation in the next pixels just a few hours after the presentation airs. So it will be live on Friday, but you can subscribe now to not miss it. And that's big pixels. You can also support Daily Tech News Show and get extra content, bonus episodes. There is a Threat Wire cross post from Shannon Morse today, talking about some of the surveillance efforts going on there, talking about signals efforts to do some face blurring and photos that you share. Do that by becoming a member. Get all that stuff at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. You might be sitting there wondering, what can I do if I've got feedback on something that I really, you know, I have something to say about. Well, good news. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.