 Coming up on D T N S using a moth antenna on a drone to detect smells. Why Uber is not giving up on autonomous cars and how to deal with TV subscription fatigue. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 8th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and from the Oh, well, I'm the show's producer Roger. Don't go off script. Roger. It's hard to improvise. I know I know. Joining us today, host of AVXL Patrick Norton. Welcome. How's it going, man? I am delighted to be here. I am full of mirth and good cheer. And indeed, we were just having a great conversation about moths and seagulls and why the California seagull is the state bird of Utah. You got to get that wider conversation. Good day. Internet become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Couple of Google notes for you. Samsung announced that Google Nest devices will become works with smart things certified. That means that your Nest thermostat, your camera and your doorbell can all be controlled through the Samsung smart things app and also streamed to Samsung TVs and refrigerators. Should you so desire Google also confirmed to the verge that all Stadia users will be able to live stream directly to YouTube starting Tuesday nine to five Google. Notice the feature started rolling out yesterday Monday research organization IPVM shared a document with the Washington Post showing Huawei facial recognition software has the capability of sending automated Uighur alarms to authorities when its camera system identifies a member of the Uighur ethnicity. The document was found on Huawei's website and removed after the post and IPVM asked for comment. Huawei and Meg V say it was quote a test and it has not seen real world application. Engineers at Cloudflare and Apple have developed a new internet protocol called oblivious DNS over HTTPS or ODOH. I like to think of it as odoh. That makes it harder for internet providers to know which websites you visit. So instead of a browser simply using a DNS resolver to convert a web address to a machine readable IP address, which is how it works. It's an encrypted process though. So odoh decouples DNS queries from the user by encrypting the DNS query and then passing it through a proxy server. The proxy server knows who's requesting it but not what site and the DNS resolver knows what site they're requesting but not who was requesting it. If you'd like to know a little bit more about DNS and how it works check out our Know a Little More podcast episode about DNS at know a little more .com. I like to think the odoh is a reference to Deep Space Nine somehow. Two Imperial College graduates have developed a browser called Zane spelled X-A-Y-N meant to protect your privacy while still customizing things like search results. The user will train the AI on its preferences by swiping on things like news headlines. It then uses the ZaneNet framework which was developed for uploading anonymous machine learning data to a server before sending a refined model back to your phone. Zane again X-A-Y-N is available for iOS and Android. Google announced an app called Look to Speak to help people with speech and motor impairments communicate better. With a phone positioned slightly below eye level you could look left or right to choose from a list of phrases which the device then speaks out loud. The phrases can be personalized so that the user, through the user though that setup is not accessible by eye gaze so it still requires some assistance. Google found that the app was helpful in environments where other accessibility devices weren't practical such as in transit if you're in the shower, if you're in an urgent situation, or maybe if you're outdoors. Look to speak is available on Android 9.0 and newer including Android 1. All right let's talk a little more about Uber and its autonomous car plans. Indeed so this story broke right at the end of DTNS yesterday. Uber announced on Monday that it's selling its self-driving unit advanced technologies group also known as ATG to Aurora Innovation, a competitor to Uber. The deal is expected to close in Q1 but if you think well is Uber given up on autonomous vehicles? Maybe not. Uber CEO Dara Cosvershahi will join Aurora's board and Uber and ATG investors and employees will own 40% of Aurora following the deal. Uber will also invest $400 million into Aurora directly and Aurora's autonomous cars will eventually operate on Uber's ride-hailing platform. Aurora was founded by Google's former lead engineer for autonomous cars Chris Ermson along with Sterling Anderson who helped lead Tesla's Model X project and Drew Bagnell who ran Carnegie Mellon's research lab and worked on autonomous vehicles at Uber. So they all are in the space and Gadgetz Matthew Beatum notes that this may be Uber outsourcing the hard work in a way that minimizes risk but still lets Uber reap the rewards if it all works. Yeah the the whole idea with with Uber developing autonomous cars was that eventually that would reduce costs because it would have autonomous cars taking people around instead of having to pay drivers and if we set aside Uber's totally fraught relationship with drivers and how much they pay them for a second you can see why that would make sense just in in a general you know like oh this will be cheaper we could we could make cheaper fares etc etc. I do think that you called Aurora a competitor and that is true up until the point that Aurora gets Uber's ride-hailing or autonomous car business at which point I guess they stop being competitors and start being collaborators. Yeah yeah. Patrick you were raising your hand. I was I part of me always thought that that some aspect of their effort if they hadn't they've obviously spent a huge amount of money and resources on autonomous vehicles but part of me always thought that Uber's move in this direction was part of the reason they got such a ridiculous amount of funding in the earlier VC stages and then we're going to eliminate the cost of drivers. Well yeah I mean two years ago that was still absolutely the play was you know that the drivers were the you know the first version of what would eventually be you know a bunch of autonomous cars taking people around everywhere obviously 2020 hurt some of Uber's business pretty heavily you know a lot of people aren't sitting in the back of cars anymore but Uber Eats has seen a huge uptick because people are at home not wanting to go out and they're still wanting food so I think that the company is saying listen if Aurora can do the hard stuff and and we can take a big stake in the success that the company has in the future why wouldn't they and they're trying to save money and you know I mean Uber has had no end with Anthony Lewandowski and the whole lawsuit with Waymo with the death of a person getting struck by an Uber autonomous car that had a safety driver who who didn't do their job you know this has been difficult for Uber and I think that also makes sense to say let's hand it over to a company that's doing very well Aurora has Fiat Chrysler it has Hyundai as and several other people as clients so this makes sense to for Uber to say you know maybe we're not the organization that should be running this and we should invest in and partner with a platform that can provide this technology to us when it's ready Apple introduced the AirPods Max over the ear headphones this morning supporting high fidelity and spatial audio adaptive EQ and active noise cancellation they feature 40 millimeter dynamic drivers Apple's H1 chip that's the same one in the AirPods that means you can use active noise cancellation and transparency mode with windows because that H1 chip will will activate that and Android you cannot use the spatial audio the spatial audio requires a connection to an Apple device a digital crown is on the headphones to control your volume and playback activate Siri answer phone calls a separate button switches between active noise cancellation and transparency mode on the AirPods Pro you you kind of hold for a long press on the new AirPods Max you just tap that button Apple says you should get 20 hours with active noise cancellation and spatial audio enabled so pretty good battery life if it meets what they're saying Apple says the knit mesh and the headband reduce pressure so it should be more comfortable there's memory foam in the ear cups which they say will create a better seal that's not cheap replacement cushions are going to cost you 69 bucks each AirPods Max AirPods Max come in gray silver blue green and pink and can be ordered in the U.S. for five hundred forty nine dollars that's more than the Bose yes for right now with shipments starting December 15th and Apple also announced Apple Fitness Plus will finally launch December 14th in the U.S. UK Australia Canada Ireland and New Zealand it's 10 bucks a month 80 bucks a year or if you pay for Apple one premiere bundle it's included in that that cost you 30 dollars a month Patrick you're the host of AV Excel what do you make of these headphones I I don't know I was kind of staggered like a lot of people by the price that's a pretty impressive price for noise canceling headphones even from Apple I I pre-ordered a pair going to get them very curious I am a feared that it will be a lot like many of the wireless Apple products where any improvement because the previous product was so awful people will be like sound amazing compared to and it's like they don't if you buy a competing product at the same price it'll probably sound better mostly I want to see what they've done with the noise cancellation given that so many of the patents are nailed down on that by other companies very curious here with the microphone quality is they do a really they have like nine microphones in it or something like that right so I think it's nine for the noise cancellation and three for your voice okay there's a lot of mics you know there's so many microphones it's a little kind of just disturbing I have to say I have the AirPods Pro and the active noise cancellation is quite serviceable it it knocks out leaf blowers and airplanes it is weird where it doesn't work it's it's very you can tell it's been tuned to certain situations and there are other situations where it just doesn't work because it wasn't tuned for that I had that experience I've spent a lot of time in the last year with some of Sony's overyear noise cancelling headphones and one it was kind of fascinating experiencing some of those because they the the EQ on those is really bizarre out of the box especially the low end as in there's way too much bass and but it's also kind of I'm very very curious to see what the noise cancellation is like on this because the I was yeah I was like oh the the inner is like the the the pods the noise cancellation works but it was weird how much it didn't cover or maybe it's weird how much of my life which situations it didn't cover it's fit within the the noise cancellation capabilities or a curve for those in my first thought this morning when I saw the press release because that all it really was is like gosh that you know is how it's just kind of under the radar but then I thought okay well it wouldn't have made sense in the Apple Silicon you know Mac announcement a couple of weeks ago it just didn't really work probably wouldn't want to bundle in an AirPods Max announcement with the redesigned HomePod because because people doesn't reason to buy a HomePod right because you're like oh let's get get the headphones and also the price is pretty high so it's like I think it's Apple saying we're in the holiday season let's see what we let's see what we sell you know get them out there and then we can make them part of maybe a bigger Apple music push the next time we want to talk about that yeah I am excited about Apple Fitness I I don't have an Apple watch so that's something that I will have to come to terms with if I want to use it in in any realistic way but I think that for anybody who is reconciling the fact that they might not go back to a public gym anytime soon 10 bucks a month for something that you use a lot again it always depends on how much you use it but that's a that's a pretty cheap gym membership if you've got if you've got an Apple TV or you know you want to cast it from an iPhone or something to a monitor it's kind of cool I'm looking forward to trying it out few people sold off some Peloton stock today after that yeah oh Peloton engineers at the University of Washington nothing to do with Peloton in the sense have developed a small drone that uses moth antennas as chemical sensors and they call it the smelly copter the team took the antenna from a common hawk moth and then mounted it onto a drone connecting each of the antenna to a thin metal wire the antenna status changes when it's exposed to a certain chemical the platform passes a light electrical current through the antenna to monitor that status if it loses a scent it can automatically fly crosswind until it picks up the scent again the moth antenna is fast it's reliable and it's more accurate than traditional sensors of the same size and power of course it can only detect some chemicals naturally so one of the next steps is to figure out how to reprogram it to be able to pick up more the hope is that it could be used for things like detecting gas leaks detecting unexploded IEDs search and rescue etc the paper on the smelly copter is published in the journal bio-inspiration and biomemetrics biomemetics biomemetics because it's mimicking mimetic ah yes yeah yeah um man when I watched the video for this thing I had no idea how big a hawk moth antenna was it's it's big and long and fuzzy and uh and yet that when they bend it over and and and attach it to the wires uh it really does work they they were showing it going after a flower scent so they had it hooked up to the drone and they had the flower scent being blown by a fan and they kept moving the fan and the drone would stop and then find it and then start heading towards it like uh essentially they said look we tried all kinds of materials to mimic this and nothing worked as well as the actual moth antenna itself I love it uh moth to a flame or something but yeah this is this is this is neat hopefully it's a flame hopefully you know stays safe everybody but yeah it's a helicopter using uh hawk moths yeah shout out to the University of Washington for for an excellent name on your product there yeah uh what do you want to hear us talk about on the show folks more moth stories let us know one way to let us know is in our subreddit submit stories of vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com oh streaming services they are hot AT&T CEO john stanky today told a conference that hbo max subscriptions rose from 8.6 million at the end of q3 to 12.6 million as of early December at that same conference mbc universal CEO jeff shell said peacock past 26 million signups as of monday up four million since october we talked about the possibility that Warner media might have a couple new services out there we talked about discovery plus last week launching and you may think well wait a minute how am I going to afford all this stuff here's some stats to consider in march decision data put out a survey and found the average us cable package cost people 217 dollars and 42 cents a month that's how much people were actually paying for their cable service now that usually includes internet sometimes it might even include phone but you still save money when you cancel that tv part a study from cg 42 found people shaved an average of 85 dollars a month when they cut out cable tv a study from lendesco put the average closer to 115 dollars a month that's how much money people have to play with once they cut cable now i usually take that and i compare it to an over the top streaming service like sling tv or youtube tv if you apply it to that you definitely could save some money but what about netflix what about hulu what about disney plus what about peacock what about hpl backs what about discovery plus do those count too i because i used to say well you were going to pay for netflix and cable tv anyway it's just an added feature like an hbo or a showtime but there's so many of these and they feel essential patrick i know this is a question you've been wrestling with oh well i was we you and i were going back and forth in email before this episode and i was laughing because i wanted to talk to you about this because i think you're the only person i know who probably subscribes to more things than i do and it was i think it was the the discovery plus announcement really kind of pushed it over the top for me where i was sitting there and it's like okay amazon prime i got that with you know amazon video again with amazon prime but it's you know there's apple tv plus and there's netflix and there's you know i started rattling off all the ones and it's like okay i got a star's subscription so i could so i could see american gods it starts adding up right if you want all the new star tricks stuff you need cbs and it's i was sitting there i was laughing in pre-show when we were talking before the show on good day internet because you know it's been so long since i've had cable or satellite i was flabbergasted by the 217 dollars and 12 like 42 cents a month i'm like is that is that include phone is that is that just cable services that's ridiculous but you know i'm still also at one point i think i was paying like 140 bucks for not much in the way of cable in the bay area and it's interesting to when you start looking like how do i parse this should i buy the season of the show i want do i have to wait for the season to show i want because of the you know the windows appearances is everything changing in in 2000 or is that you know 2021 because you know all the theaters are still going to be a mess until this summer you know if you want to see the new wonder woman movie and you don't want to go to a theater well you can see it on you know December 25th and HBO max it's been kind of crazy watching all of this evolve over this year and things that i've never seen out of stock before like subwoofers from reputable companies or den and AVRs has been sold out so i don't know i i feel like a lot of companies may be accelerating the launch of their online services just to get them in and get people hooked before the end of the pandemic which is cynical even for me or really practical for them but it's kind of crazy how many different competing services are are from all the different studios at this point and google and you know the list kind of goes on yeah yeah i mean they were all in the works but right i i think launch plans and promotional items certainly things like wonder woman on HBO max sure are definitely due to the pandemic like like we say with so many things regarding the pandemic the trend was there but it got accelerated right i think that's true here too i yeah and there's so many streaming services but i i know for myself if i'm a creature of habit it's like there's only so many things you can watch in the small amount of free time you have in any given day right so if i'm like oh i like things on netflix oh here's a series that's going to take me a little while to get through i'm not like clamoring to you know buy a bunch of other subscriptions because i kind of got my thing and then you get used to it and then you're like oh this is just what i watch because this is what i have the way that cable subscriptions used to work for folks i mean two hundred dollars plus per month even with internet is i mean it's a lot of money you can you can definitely whittle it down and save a lot of money and and still see a lot of the stuff that you want to watch but i think that the folks you know Discovery Plus for example i mean wasn't necessary for Discovery Plus to roll out last week i mean i think that the network's like we just got to get in there you know we got to be a player or else it's going to become one of these things that you know early 2021 people would be like well i already subscribed to five cable cutting services why would i bother you know i'm i don't have enough time to watch your content even if it's good yeah i started listening it out netflix hbomax disney plus stars amazon pran apple tv plus showtime criterion and i think i'm missing at least one service and i'm not talking about any of the monthly audio services that i subscribed to it was well these are your subscriptions yeah yeah right it gets it yeah you know it's so so here's a few of my thoughts because i i i cover this very closely not only here but also on cord killers and i think all the companies looking that this are at the point where they realize there are still tens of millions of people in the united states who haven't signed up for one of these so there's lots of people to go around and and nobody's really behind at this point so you want to get your service launched and out there so you can get your market right discovery plus isn't meant to capture the same group that netflix is netflix is a wide appealing one discovery plus knows there are people who love our programming and we want to get them when they cancel cable and we want to be there for them when they're like well i'm canceling cable but i don't want to miss shark week or or whatever hg tv yeah yeah or house hunters so so that's happening and i think that the mental disconnect that's happening to a lot of people is in the old world you paid one price you got most of the channels you might pay a little more to get that one special channel which you also had to pay for everything else in that tier and then you decide whether you wanted to add stars or hbo or showtime to that right yeah part part of what was so crazy about that is is there we said you know i remember seeing studies where they were like okay the average consumer has 400 cable channels they skim 17 and 95 percent of their time or 90 percent of their time is spent on a maximum of four channels so to speak to to sarah's point earlier people watch what they want to watch very specifically and we haven't got used to being in charge of that right the the mental space is well okay i could pay one price for live channels like an atnt tv or youtube tv and then i have to pay all this money for all the all the card services and i'm used to having everything so i guess i have to have everything and no you don't uh the the question i have is which ones are like hbo and showtime is netflix a new way to pay for a channel or a new way to pay for a premium channel that you only have sometimes when there's something you want to watch on it and how does peacock fit in there how does hulu fit in there it's a new model and you have control of it i think it's a more complex model because if you don't want to keep because you have control yeah because you have control you have to keep track so the next phase of the cord cutting revolution i think and we're starting to see the hints of it with apple tv plus and amazon prime and roku is platforms that help you keep track of everything and manage your bill so you only have one bill to pay and you can decide like oh it'll make it easy to add and remove stuff as shows come along that you want to watch well and i think with your so many original shows that have been hits then the whole kind of like oh pay for cable tv still maybe i'm overpaying a little bit but i get everything just not true i mean i have conversations with my mom all the time where she's like queen's gambit sounds good what is it okay netflix mandalorian disney plus yeah they have hamilton too maybe i'll do that and so it's like none of this is anything that direct tv was giving her for you know paying too much each month anyway so all right well moving on allister davies of the zoological society of london quite it quite a segue and emily duncan of the university of extor were among a group of researchers who wanted to study how plastic pollution moves through rivers and then out to sea the team released 10 plastic bottles into the ganges river in india each bottle contained a small cellular chip that connected every three hours to record how fast the device has traveled and gave the folks data each bottle was expected to upload about two kilobytes on each connection for an expected total 100 megabytes of data so no small pings but one of them racked up 300 megabytes when the scientists checked the location log for that bottle they found it had left the river and gone into someone's house where it stopped updating its location but continued to rack updated charges and it appears somebody found the plastic bottle opened it up took out the sim card and then logged into facebook so so they cut off that service sadly for that person i guess but this is a great study about you know where plastic goes and it's a fascinating read on ars tectica the whole thing about getting technology into a bottle and some use gps and some use sim cards depending on where they think it's going to go but it was pretty funny that somebody was like hey that bottle's got an antenna sticking out of it what's inside there i'm going to take it home and look oh wait a sim card this is great yeah hey i'd cool it works facebook hey friends all right let's check out the mail bag let's do it this one comes from friend of the show allison charidan a frequent guest in fact allison says this young man aspen pallettnik developed an ios based app that will sequence dna as a mobile genetics laboratory she gave us two links one comes from fizz.org that's phys.org we'll have these links in our show notes she says this is a human readable version of it and then there's some more nerd level details but still kind of readable from oxford academic we also will have that link in our show notes as well the oxford academic articles is titled comprehensive dna sequence analysis on your smartphone yeah this is great so there are hand held dna sequencers now but they had to be connected to a much larger equipment until this until somebody's like hey why are we lugging around all these laptops and desktops to do this couldn't we do this on a smartphone and then just plug in the hand held sequencer so that's that's a that's amazing I mean we've gone from you know millions of dollars and months and months to sequence a string of dna to doing it on your phone with an attachment essentially very cool thanks to allison thanks to everybody who sends us articles that we might not have seen otherwise appreciate all of that all of your feedback is appreciated in fact and you can send yours questions comments or otherwise to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we also would like to shout out our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today they include chris smith martin james and agracia a daniels also thanks to patrick norton avxl co-host himself patrick how have you been since we saw you last you know just moving and getting used to an actual winter and leaves on the ground that I remember having to rake when I lived in that part of the country my boys were not really thrilled with that introduction until they ran through the pile good times good times leaves so yeah folks go check out avxl.com it's avxcel.com we want to send you a holiday card if you're a patron and you haven't given us your address you got a couple of days to do it you got to get it in by December 10th that's by December 10th on December 10th I will download the database and send it to david so he can start printing up the cards some people have asked for electronic cards I'll email everybody on patreon a link to the digital version of the card if you want to see that but if you want to get the physical one check if we've got your address go to patreon.com slash pledges find dtns look in the right hand column if you want the holiday card make sure your address is correct and in there become a patreon supporter right now dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon if you'd like to join us live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m eastern 2030 UTC put it on your calendar more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we will be back tomorrow with one of the only Scott Johnson talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this brover