 Coming up on DTNS are all the tech people leaving Silicon Valley how Sony's new image sensor will make for fast cheap and safer cameras And what can Norway tell us about the return of theater? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May 14th 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang joining us today Very happy to have back on the show Chris Mancini, writer and podcaster Chris. Welcome back Great to be here. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, absolutely. We're going to be digging in a little bit Into the idea of whether we'll just keep streaming stuff at home or will we want to return to the theaters? And does Norway point the way in that direction? We were also just talking about all of our our pandemic era behaviors from from haircutting To breadmaking on good day internet if you want to get that show become a member patreon.com slash DTNS Let's start with a few tech things you should know Google announced a tab grouping feature is coming to its chrome browser Tab groups are created by right clicking on a tab and then assigning it a name and a color Which will then show under all tabs within the group The feature is available now in the latest chrome beta and rolling out more broadly next week Nintendo announced that paper mario origami king will be added to the fold of switch games july 17th It's the first major title. Nintendo has announced for the summer apple confirmed It has acquired next vr a startup that streams sports and some other content to virtual reality headsets They have partnerships with facebook sony htc and lenovo among others Next vr has deals with the nba and fox sports as well, but now they're apples china mobile international facebook global connect orange stc telecom egypt vodafone and wiocc Have all partnered together to build two africa. That's to the number two africa the most comprehensive Subsea cable to serve the african continent and middle east region to date Alcatel submarine networks has been appointed to build the 37 000 kilometer long cable To interconnect europe through egypt saudi arabia and 21 landings of 16 african countries To africa as expected to go live in 2023 or 2024 Mac observers charlotte henry notes that netflix and other streamers continue to downgrade hd video in europe and the uk The downgrade was announced two months ago as one as a one month measure to avoid internet congestion netflix told variety that it will lift the caps on a country by country basis as network conditions improve And twitch announced a new eight person council of both experts and twitch creators That's not throwing shade on the creators. They knew there's two different categories Called the twitch safety advisory council to guide decision making around new policies and products Twitch says this will allow communities to thrive on twitch Particularly at a time that the platform is seeing record levels of engagement and streaming. All right, let's talk about Nvidia's big GPU announcement the ampere architecture For scientific computing cloud graphics data analytics This is something you're probably not going to buy to put in your machine mostly because it's 199 thousand dollars The a 100 is the largest seven nanometer processor yet And can run several different programs on one chip Which is great for data centers with virtual machines and matches a capability intel has had for a while The first dg x a 100 systems are shipping The us argon national laboratory. It'll be using it to run applications research in covet 19 Microsoft amazon google dell and alibaba are all on board two as I said the systems start at 199 thousand dollars That's the dg x a 100 system that combines eight of the ampere graphics cards into one And nvidia argues that that high price is worth it because you could replace 75 $5,000 servers with one of these eight chips and systems nvidia also announced I think more significantly or at least I'll have more impact on us directly that it's shifting focus from autonomous cars To driver assistance tech the oren chips that nvidia launched in december will be used in a single architecture for all Levels of automation. They're not abandoning self-driving cars But they're saying this this is very significant because it's nvidia saying yeah We don't think those are going to be hitting wide use anytime soon And we want to sell chips to the things that are going to be in wide use Which are these driver assistants that are coming to more and more models of cars. That's really smart I mean as I've got a car my Volvo my most recent car that is It's not autonomous But there are some semi-autonomous functions where i'm like this is magic But i'm driving the car. I mean it's just it's just a cool version of the car that I was buying anyway So the more that that can be added on to packages for Consumers makes a lot of sense. I mean we've seen So much slowdown and right now the current landscape is just weird But you know the the autonomous car is being like, okay Well, when are they going to be ready to not have a human driver behind the wheel? You know, maybe they're that needs to be rethought a little bit um question layman question How much of this is branding How much of this is shared tech in terms of autonomous cars and and and driving assist that Uh, these chips would be used for it's just now this this is a a different version of a different version of how to sell it Yeah, I know some of some of it is is branding and a lot of it is marketing in other words telling the the automakers like Hey, uh, our our chips or orange chips can be used for for this too. Let's let's help you What can we do to put an Nvidia chip inside your car today? Exactly? Yeah, what do I gotta tell you to get the chip? We've got these boxes in the storehouse, you know, we can't just let them go to waste Just think of something else guys. Come on. Let me let me let me go back and talk to my manager He just told me that we can do it with self-driving cars not just autonomous Orange chips are usually reserved for the self-driving cars, but I think Yeah, no, it's a it's a smart pivot. Uh, it doesn't require I'm sure it requires some technological Retooling, but it's it's not it's not a huge leap for Nvidia to do this And I think it's a big signal that with autonomous cars not even out there testing on the roads right now It's it's going to be even longer before they become practical And all the cars will run an open gl That's what'll happen hopefully The u.s senate voted 77 to 19 to adopt an amendment increasing legal protections of four targets of government surveillance Including ending permission to obtain phone records of u.s citizens in terrorism probes An amendment would have required probable cause and a warrant for browsing and search history failed by one vote The foreign intelligence surveillance act or fisa dates back to the mid 1970s has been used in government terrorism surveillance for some time now Much of it expired on march 15th. The bill is expected to be passed thursday Then it goes to the house All right A couple things here number one in terms of the fisa warrants I would I'm kind of surprised that we have not seen more pushback on fisa Specifically because it is at the heart of some of these surveillance of the trump campaign. Obviously there is now a trump white house I'm curious to see why that that has not trickled down to the senate Although the white house and the senate republicans have not always been on the same page That being said It's not shocking that this has gotten rubber stamped and we don't know how it's gonna fair in the house or whether or not trump will indeed try to veto it when it comes to his desk but Get ready for much more of these kinds of digital civil liberty conversations that we are going to see over the next 10 years Because not only fisa dates back for a while, but a lot of these powers That have been enhanced come from the patriot act And that was you know, I've now 20 years ago close to 20 years ago And we are still seeing rubber stamped Approvals of some of the expanded powers that we gave the intelligence community We are about to see another wave of that this time not for terrorist attacks that could happen at any time but for tracing and mitigation of Illnesses, uh, this is this is going to be something that we will see a lot more of So you're saying this is this this debate here is just a tiny taste just a preview Of what we're going to see because it was uh, it was a hard thought to try to get Uh, the requirement for a warrant to be applied to browsing and search history right now They can just be bulk collected They still have to show relevance to a case in order to look at them But it's much easier to do that than to have to prove probable cause And that's the kind of fight we're going to see about a lot of these other issues And by the way, yeah Getting a FISA warrant can at times be laughably easy if you have seen some of this stuff kind of come to light But absolutely look, uh, we we are there's no doubt in my mind We are going to see a push for surveillance technology because people are terrified rightly so about COVID-19 Sony announced the imx 500 image sensor which combines processing and memory on the same Sensor to perform machine learning powered computer vision tasks without needing additional hardware So you don't have to have a separate AI chip. You don't have to send it to the cloud for processing It can improve picture quality detect people and objects all on its own Sony says the chip can apply the mobile net v1 image recognition algorithm to a single video frame In 3.1 milliseconds compared to separate chips like intel's movideus, which takes hundreds of milliseconds So this thing's super fast. The upshot is faster cheaper and more secure Vision for single application uses at first. This means faster sensors for factory robots The so-called co-bots that that need to be really safe and be able to tell where the people are so they can work closer in secure health imaging So you're not having to send health images into the cloud. They can just stay on the device that's scanning you Uh retail implementation at things like amazon go the cashier list convenience store would be cheaper to implement And eventually it'll come to your phone IMX 500 test samples are shipping now with products using the sensor to arrive first quarter of 2021 in the industrial sector in the retail sector But down the line these sensors would show up in your phone and again meaning they would be able to say Oh, that's a person I'm going to apply this kind of approach to this photography because it's a person And not have to send a picture of that person or a definition of that person to the cloud They could just do it right on the image sensor. It wouldn't even have to go to an ai chip So it's nice to be reminded Go ahead Chris. I was going to say so sounds like it's not going to be skynet. It's going to be a smart camera That's going to enslave humanity, right? Individual smart cameras will all enslave us individually. It's distributed enslavement because they can think on their own That's perfect. That's what you want. You want a camera that knows exactly when to take your picture At least it's in your hand instead of I had a slightly more I don't know cheerful version where I was like, oh, you know, my my first reaction was like, well, I want it in my phone I want the coolest sensor. Well, yeah, as anybody with any photography knowledge knows sometimes that doesn't Exactly make us all better photographers But it's nice to be reminded that there are many sectors that the sort of technology goes into Where and it might be something that we use every day and we'll begin to use more and more of it Just like it's so great. Thanks for that company for having this technology that I don't understand That does something kind of cool. This is the type of technology from sony that you know ends up getting bought and put into products The downside if there's a downside to this is that uh, and this may make you feel better chris It can only do one thing so you can train it to be like Looking for like in a camera on your phone to to look for and identify objects and people But it can't do other stuff. It can't break out and and and reason about other things or or even perform But but that is a limitation to it. So it's not a multi-purpose sensor that could do a lot of stuff You'll still need a separate chip if you want that sort of thing Business week reports that bay area median housing price is double the national level at $600,000 Now anybody lives in the bay area is like yeah, we knew that but everybody else might be like that's a lot Combine that with people working from home And we're seeing a lean towards people considering maybe moving away from the costly bay area Companies report that employees have been asking about it moving cost calculator at move buda.com says that 90% of requests Involving the bay area have been for outbound moves not internal or inbound Business week's sarah fryer raises the question of whether this might lead to lower salaries for workers who move to a less expensive location And whether companies will start hiring people from farther afield Well, I I I I happened to know somebody who was just hired at a company based in the bay area in fact based in San Francisco proper and They said yeah, gosh, uh, you know because of the situation I was hired while a lot of people are working from home and the company's A startup but trying to figure out how this all works going forward and they have floated the idea of Okay, well not everybody can just work from home forever But we can maybe stagger salaries based on where your physical location is to kind of Make the whole thing more fair and also to you know Make the company able to to scale because that was one of the Sort of strange things about bay area companies or anywhere where it's very expensive to live in general is in order to get talent You had to give them these astronomical Packages so that they could afford to live there in the first place And you also have office buildings that are cost of fortune every month just to maintain and rent So if you have a smaller footprint on your workforce, you know, you don't need as big of a building So you're looking at ways you could cut that cost with remote working and smaller footprint I'm sure they're looking at everything combined Well, yeah, I mean a lot of the biggest companies that do the biggest amounts of hiring You know, they they build status campuses or they build status headquarters in in san francisco It's going to be curious to see how much that matters going forward, but I'm more interested in this idea that Remote work is something that has been pioneered by bay area companies they you know tech companies have been at the forefront of the Unlimited vacation unlimited work from home kind of movement that have their own little complications But I wonder whether or not some of that Will eventually trickle down to what sarah said that Okay, sure You can have a bay area salary If you live in the bay area if you live In bakersfield if you live in Omaha if you live In Pensacola Then we are going to pay you Pensacola Omaha bakersfield money On on top of whatever we would pay you just to do the work That is a very very interesting concept that i'm curious to see A play out or if i mean part of the reason why bay area salaries are so high aren't only because Of the cost of living it's also because there is a race for brains. There has always been a race for brains I don't think that that will diminish now that more things go online So whether or not cost cutting measures are in the immediate future I almost wonder whether or not the the race for the talent will erase that going forward That's really that's an interesting way to look at this because on the one hand If you know your worker now Lives in the house they bought for 160 thousand dollars across the street from where I grew up In greenville illinois, it's it's it's reasonable for the company to say look your cost of living is not the same Like the salary package doesn't have to be the same and then add to that the fact that plus We also can hire people from that same area now where we couldn't before without co-location Uh, I know there's going to be companies talking about you know, maybe even providing relocation fees To say like look we'll pay for your move to the cheaper area But we we make it better in the long run. Yeah, you would actually pay somebody to move further away from the company Yeah, you work from home will pay you to move there But your salary goes down because you don't need as much and we want to save that money Well, I mean obviously the companies want to save money. That's the bottom line across the board You know, I'm sure you know, some of them are all very nice people. But you know, that's that's the reality but for a lot of I don't know it depends on where you are in life particularly people with families or who have various reasons that They have a hard time being attached to a physical place where they're you know, maybe it's their dream job But but it's not necessarily their dream life and to be able to reimagine what you might have wanted Had you had the option before you took the job. It's kind of cool Yeah, I will say the one wrinkle in that for anyone deciding to move is if you're in the stage where you still want to Maybe hop to another company that does the same or similar work It's far easier to do it when the company's down the street from the company you work at versus Oh, I need to fly back all the way to the barrier from wherever Location I now live in because I want to work remotely and then convince them Hey, I want to work remotely and do the same job and see if you get anywhere with that Well, you can just interview remotely too. I don't know if that really makes that much of a difference I'm more I'm more curious Uh, how many of these people really are going to move And even the ones who do how many of them are going to realize that it wasn't the beautiful Uh escape that they imagined and they miss the the certain quirks of the bay area that you can't find everywhere else People get used to what they have right and and I've moved around a lot So I'm kind of used to it, but I know a lot of people find it disconcerting the first time they move away from somewhere HBO has partnered with a startup called senor S-C-E-N-E-R to offer a chrome browser extension that lets you co-watch HBO shows with folks over the internet similar to netflix watch party senor lets up to 20 people watch And not only do uh text chat, but also audio and video chat as well In fact, senor is considering larger groups and is talking all kinds of things like oh We want to do what twitch does with tips and shoutouts So senor may have some some bigger ambitions here, but right now 20 people watching an hbo show together Everybody has to have an hbo subscription for this to work Senors google chrome extension supports hbo now and hbo go for mac os windows pc and chrome book Senors primary investor. I just had to include this is real networks. Yeah Oh So they're still around at investing and they uh one of their startups that they're investing in has partnered with hbo I mean the the netflix watch party at chrome extension. I don't believe had any official Connection with netflix. So it's interesting to see hbo Seek this out and say let's let's do a deal to have you do this for us I think I think it makes sense and it's also something that can be added as a selling point Obviously hbo max will be the new offering from the coming out and assume that this would be a part of that that you can say Hey Join with your family watch this with your friends and family now that we are in a more telecommuting Or telecommunication society. They're trying to sweeten the deal for hbo max for sure Then this is not going to work with hbo max at launch by all indications Which but but yeah at some point I think you're both right it has to right that has to be one of the things that they they eventually get around They are not they are not buying this so they could not have it be a part of the suite of why you would want to use it And and furthermore that part of the advantage of them being directly involved in it is they can make it a A better and more seamless experience and a more feature rich experience Well, and that's because we do like to watch things with each other Even if we can't be in the same place as each other Let's talk a little more about that first though get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes By subscribing to daily tech headlines dot com Uh theaters are reopening now and the question is how much do we really want to watch with other people in the same location? Especially strangers, uh, they've reopened in some us cities other smaller chains Turning to online alamo draft house theaters launching alamo on demand with special q and a's trying to capture that ability But around the world theaters opening spain tentatively may 25th germany's States may 18th through the 30th netherlands june 1st with a 30 person limit the uk trolled us by saying no earlier than july 4th And korea's already open korea and uh cj cgv and lotte cinemas doing contactless service They nicknamed it intact you order your food through an app or a kiosk It's delivered with led controlled pickup boxes. You get tickets through your app Uh, and uh rainy day in new york from woody ellen took the top box office last week knocking trolls world tour to second Let's talk norway. Yeah this weekend apparently me too hasn't made its way to korea 15 percent of norway's cinemas reopened with restrict restrictions of 50 seats per screen Ringen keno in oslo sold 96 percent of its available tickets That led to it getting about half the average admissions it gets because it usually doesn't fill up all the theaters Uh, so when it's allowed to sell all of its seats it sells about double that the top grossing title was onward Followed by bloodshot the gentleman parasite and local titles cloven three the final and flukten ver grenzen Evening screenings in the early part of this week have been about 70 percent And that's usually when you get nobody coming to the theater and screenings for parasite this coming week are sold out Now what they're doing is staggering the showtimes to try to keep people from crowding into the lobby Uh concessions are still sold by people, but they're kept under control So popcorn is refilled and stored separately. They don't have it out in a big open thing They give you a coffee cup to get your coffee rather than leaving the coffee cups by the machine But there's still a machine out there. That's interesting. The cinemas are expecting some small releases coming in june And norway's theaters counting on big releases in july To fill the gap they plan to run some classic movies. In fact, uh, the owner of ring and keno Nordish film keno told deadline We're quite sure that some big children's movies will surprise us by releasing early in july They're more worried about having too many films when the glut happens at the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021 So chris, I don't know about you, but this is not what I would have expected I would not have expected Sellouts even of limited amounts and I certainly wouldn't expect theaters to be hinting that we will get earlier releases than we thought Um, I yeah, I think there's a couple things going on here and it might be You know being misinterpreted a little bit by the data I think one of the things that's going on is people just want to get out And no matter what it is even if it's a movie theater bully. It doesn't matter. They want to go out so there's part of that but also it's a It's a desire to get back to normalcy and it's also of course It's a love for cinema too But what what there's a lot of moving parts here Like even if you're staggering seats like do people have to especially in this country or people going to have to wear masks How do you keep people from congregating in the lobbies like you could stagger showtimes? But you know, we have arc lights with like 12 14 theaters. That's that's impossible. You can't do that for for us The other side of the equation is movie theaters We're in trouble to begin with before the pandemic because of the way Lower attendance and the way studios are releasing their movies now. I mean you you guys talked about the row with amc and universal And if you look back at that how ridiculous amc's response was thinking that universal was the only studio thinking about changing how they release movies No, it's all of them are thinking about it. So I think what you're gonna see Is you know, and I've I've been in love with the cinema since I was a a tiny little child So I'd hate to see movie theaters go away or even You know get diminished in any way, but I think there's there's gonna be kind of a After an initial push and initial like everyone wants to go back out and see movies again. I think it's gonna level off I think you are gonna see the same thing here like when they do reopen that people are gonna want to go out But with the restrictions and the lower capacity It's gonna sound a little bit more like a success than it really is because you also have the distribution models of the theaters and the movie studios the split isn't really Conducive to what the studio wants and with concessions and capacity is really what the movie theaters need so you're kind of have like a bit of an impasse between attendance cost Licensing fees and the way movies are being released So I think all of these things needed to be figure out before we could kind of see like a kind of like a return to any kind of Equilibrium with the the movie theaters That's my rant I do think that part of this is going to be nostalgia people You know, there was a a supreme court situation in in wisconsin that temporarily or likely temporarily Struck down there stay at home order and people were in bars because people want to see bars because they remember the time that they were there Forget your personal feelings on whether or not they should be the desire is what matters in this particular case I think we are going to see probably Larger and more vociferous movie attendance in this country when we are allowed to do it and in the in the shorter capacities, but Uh, whether that is enough to save the theater industry. I think remains to be seen And I mean, there's a big thing on that article that you just said like well We're getting a bunch of kids movies now. That's another thing our parents going to be taking all their kids That seems the least yeah the theaters Yeah, and especially if they have to wear masks, which they're not going to want to do and and the safety issue But also you've got all these options for streaming now and you know, we mentioned onward it did really well Well onward came to disney plus here. So all our kids saw it on the streaming service anyway So you've got and these are always big huge summer money makers is the animated and the family PG 13 pgs and kids movies. So They're going to be a big part of the equation moving forward Yeah, I think this is interesting because of the numbers, but it's also One theater in oslo, and they're going to start opening more of their theaters next week It'll be very interesting to see when that compressed demand We're like, this is the only theater all of oslo can go to right that's that's a whole different situation Then okay now you got three or four and at that point when do when do you hit when do you run out of the people who are like? Yeah, i'm not worried. I just want to get out I just want to go somewhere and you start going into the people that you're gonna have to convince Like to say like hey man, I can watch HBO with my friends over the internet at home right now. HBO Nordic You know, why why would I why would I go to a theater? So I'd be o ice Yeah, yeah Well, and we don't know where that line is yet Yeah, no, and we won't until you've opened a few more and a few more and a few more Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit lots of movie talk there as well as the larger tech conversation You could submit stories that you care about and vote on them at daily tech news show reddit.com Let's check out the mailbag Let's do it Dan from surprisingly sunny But I can't tell because I work for the NHS and I've been living in databases for six weeks Bristol UK Dan says a few days ago, sarah mentioned that the new reply all storm protection feature that uh, Microsoft had announced might be kind of an interesting idea and tom said well, how many 5000 recipient Reply alls have you been on and everybody on the panel that day was like, okay I guess none of us Well, Dan says I had the pleasure of experiencing this incident in november of 2016 were half a billion emails were generated In just 75 minutes across the NHS email network I presumably no unemployed contractor Misconfigured a local distribution list to include at NHS net meaning that all 850 000 users were added to the test message That was then sent Dan says then they're followed the inevitable the inevitable storm of Why am I on this list? Please remove me from this list and the classic Please stop using reply all but was sent using reply to all At one point I was receiving over 800 messages per minutes Which was the point I decided to go for a very long coffee break to pass the time and because they have a dark sense of Humor our in-house geographical information system team leapt into action Plotting the location of the worst offenders for reply to all and why am I receiving this etc He actually sent us some interesting images of a map that was was put into place because of the incident Yeah, those were some funny graphs They used emojis, you know for the angry people and the people replying doll telling people not to reply to all It's funny stuff. So yeah, there we go. Now we know there's there's one person who's lived through the storm and appreciates that new outlook feature By the way, if you want to google ESPN reply all there was a famous thing that got chronicled by dead spin where all of the ESPN employees got on a reply All and if you are a fan of sports media, you will enjoy some of the trollish replies that came to it Lesson is don't put asterisk before an outside You know what you should do though become a master or grand master patron And we'd like to shout out a few of you today mark Gibson dr. Carmine and bailey and mike mcgloughlin Hey, thanks to chris mancini for being with us today chris. Where can people keep up with your work? Um, I just launched a new company and website. It's called white cat entertainment dot com You could find my uh, my podcast there and my books But most importantly, I have a Kickstarter going until uh, may 31st. This is one I talked about last time I was here. This is rise of the kung fu dragon master It's an action comedy kind of like big trouble little china It's a follow-up to my last comic book that uh, tom is holding long ago and far away It was kick started that came out It's out now from star burns press the rick and morty people And you could check that out of comics ology if you want to check out my work before pledging But please pledge it's a uh, we only have two weeks left But we're we're getting very close. We're less than 3 000 away from goal. We're about 63 64 funded But we need your help. I know a lot of people from uh, you know, your show have always supported So I really appreciate it, but we didn't quite get there last time So we retooled and we redid it and the middle of a pandemic. I thought that was a good idea, but uh Yeah, but yeah, yeah But what we did is we made it easier and cheaper and we broke the book up into two parts So we wanted to kind of make it we made it a no contact project One of the things that Kickstarter has is a inside voices kind of thing So there's no shows. There's no Contact rewards. We got rid of all the tours and all the people will be working separately So it's a really fun action comedy rise of the kung fu dragon master You could get there through white cat entertainment dot com or just go to Kickstarter and search the title Very cool. Uh, well, thanks for being with us. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today Justin where can people find the rest of your fabulous work? Well, of course, you can find my politics podcast politics politics politics, uh, which yesterday had An interview with the executive director of the electronic frontier foundation. Check that out now, which uh might also be gracing the dTNS feed If if folks would just like that a little bit later in the week But uh, go ahead and check it out now if you are interested A great conversation About the future of where the EFF is looking specifically in the coming years like I've mentioned before about the uh, digital rights and uh, Where they like and don't like some of the solutions that have been pitched So far including immunity passports and contact tracing. So check that out politics politics politics Wherever you get your podcast or politics politics politics dot com Thanks everybody who supports us on patreon daily tech news show dot com slash patreon and huge Thanks to everybody who's been reviewing us in the apple podcast store We've been seeing those reviews come in and it's really great. Uh, so keep those coming if you haven't got to it yet Review review review or at least just leave stars, uh, even if you don't have anything to write It still helps us get discovered by other folks Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com. We love your emails. Keep them coming We're also live money through friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc We'd love to have you join us live. So please do so and find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live Back tomorrow with rob dunwood and letting for all to talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Time and club hopes you have enjoyed this brover