 Coming up on DTNS, an elevator button you can push without touching it. Using AI to find craters on Mars. And Dr. Kiki is here to help us understand China's developments in quantum communications. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, January 22nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm drawing the top tech from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. As I mentioned, Dr. Kiki Sanford, host of This Week in Science, is back with us. Good to have you back, Kiki. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. That's right. We are into it. Thank you so much for having me back. We were just having a long discussion of quantum tacos on good day internet. If you'd like that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Balloonberg's Mark Gurman sources say that Apple is working on a higher end, thinner and lighter redesign of the MacBook Air. Yes, the one I just bought. Actually, Tom bought it for me. It was a potential release in the second half of 2021, maybe early 2022. It would include the return of the MagSafe charging ports. Apple may also consider building a 15 inch MacBook Air in future generations. The sources also said that the next MacBook Pro would get an SD card slot, something that it hasn't seen since 2016 and made a lot of creative professionals very upset about that. Face ID and cellular modems and Macs are also reportedly in development, but unlikely to be released in the 2021 hardware. Bloomberg sources say Samsung is thinking about investing $10 billion to build a chip fabrication plant in Austin, Texas. A plan would target fabrication at three nanometers for future chips with preliminary plans to begin construction later this year and begin operations as early as 2023. If constructed, it would be the first US chip fab to use extreme ultraviolet lithography. New rules drafted by Chinese authorities and released by the People's Bank of China said any non-bank payments processor with over one third of the non-bank payments market or two companies with a combined half of the market could be looking at regulatory warnings from the anti-monopoly authority under the state council. A single non-payments, payments provider, non-bank payments provider with what over one half of the digital payments market. So it's a little different or two companies with a combined two thirds of the digital payments market could also be investigated for monopolistic behavior. Yeah, that is the definition of ant and Tencent right there. Yeah, Intel earned a buck 52 per share in Q4 on revenue of 20 billion dollars, beating analyst expectations of 17.49 billion on earnings of $1.10. Good news for Intel. Strong PC sales in the quarter helped buoy the earnings with Intel saying that 33 percent more PCs with Intel chips were sold in the quarter compared to last year. Data center revenue was down 16 percent on the year while it's self-driving car subsidiary Mobileye saw revenue rise 39 percent accounting for $967 million for all of 2020 on the earnings call incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger said chips using the company's seven nanometer process are on track for 2023, but Intel is still going to outsource chip fabrication for some things going forward. Honor announced the V45G flagship phone, it might pwn you. It's first device since being sold off by Huawei. Might remember that honor was part of Huawei at one time. The V40 offers a 6.72 inch 120 Hertz OLED display, a MediaTek Dimensity 1000 plus system on a chip, which includes a sub six G modem and a 4000 milliamp battery with support for 50 watt wireless charging. The device is only in China for now, but an international version may be able to ship with Google Play services. It's available starting at 3599 one, which is about $550 US dollars with an eight gig with eight gigs of Ram and 128 gigs of storage. All right, let's talk about alphabet shutting down the sky. Alphabet announced it's winding down its Loon company. Loon provides wireless broadband from balloons in the stratosphere. Company said Loon was unable to lower cost enough to sustain operations. Loon began back in 2011, had a public launch in New Zealand in 2013, had been deployed in emergency situations to offer internet service like in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. It had deals in Indonesia. Most recently launched a full pilot in Kenya last July. And it looked like it was very slowly making its way into being a company, but not fast enough for alphabet, which alphabet hasn't shut down a lot of its other bets yet. Waymo is doing well, Verily is doing well. Sidewalk pulled out of Toronto, but they didn't shut down the company. So this is one of the more high profile alphabet other bets to shut down. And it makes me think that maybe Alphabet realizes that Google money is not going to go up and up and up forever. And they need to start cracking down on the other bets that aren't going to pay for themselves soon. Yeah, well, the news broke after our show yesterday, saw a lot of folks online saying, Oh, yeah, you know, shocker Alphabet's weird project X loon project was too lofty. And, you know, we're not in that crazy time anymore. And I was kind of like, Listen, there were advancements, the company certainly wasn't talking about loon every single day. But we were like you said, Tom, we were seeing tests happening in various areas, emergency situations happening. So it sounds like it was a really viable solution for certain situations, just not a scalable solution. Yeah. Kiki, any thoughts on that? Yeah, I'm just gonna say in terms of the scalability. I mean, perhaps it is not going to be that low cost solution for for access for so many people as they were envisioning it to be, but perhaps the one, the one application is for disasters so that there is an easily deployable technology to be able to get people back online. When hurricanes have come through and destroyed infrastructure. Yeah, maybe yeah, maybe there's another business alphabet could salvage out of that. It'll be interesting to see what they do. They're not laying off those employees. At least they haven't said that yet. And if if you were counting on this for for access in areas with without infrastructure, there are other options, the SpaceX option one web. There's there's good half dozen operations out there to do satellite based internet. This was the only balloon based one Yeah, I went to a hackathon years ago in San Francisco and there were people doing they had a weather balloon and engineers attached a cell phone to a weather balloon and tried to use it as a tethered hotspot. And it was it was over a decade ago, but it was this fascinating kind of proof of concept. Yeah, that you could put a balloon up in the air and be able to transmit data and it's neat to see where it is gone. And it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Well, draft legislation for Australia's digital news code includes a requirement that Facebook and Google pay publishers for linking to news content, whether it uses a snippet description or not, and a statement to the Australian Senate Economics Committee inquiry, Google's VP for Australia and New Zealand Mel Silva said, quote, if this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google search available in Australia. Google Australia made 134 million Australian dollars in profit in 2019. Google's got a lot more than that has 100 billion dollars in cash on hand. But then Australian Senator Rex Patrick said, quote, it's going to go worldwide. Are you going to pull out of every market? Are you? Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned in written testimony that, quote, the ability to link freely, meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees is fundamental to how the web operates. Google wants the code to not only apply to its new showcase, a product it recently set up to pay publishers for content. Yeah, yeah, so this is bargaining. Google is playing hardball by saying, fine, if you push it this far, we'll just leave Australia and Australia's Senator is trying to call their bluff like, really, you're gonna leave Australia? What if Indonesia does this? What if Japan does this? Europe has a different thing that they've done that Google is not loving, but they're cooperating. We mentioned that on yesterday's show in France. It's not replying to links in search. It's only applying to snippets, and it's only applying to news, not every search result. So Google doesn't love that, but they'll deal with it. This is a bit too far. And I agree with Tim Berners-Lee. If Australia really wants to make companies pay for links simply based on the content, like, oh, you don't have to pay for a link to dailytechnewshow.com. But this list of Australian sites you have to pay for it. That's not good for the web. On the other hand, I think Australia knows that. And I think they're hoping to strike a bargain and say, all right, fine, what if we what if we only apply it to snippets, but you have to pay this much. I fully expect to see a compromise come out of this. It's just two sides playing the hardest ball that they can play. Groups trying to get money where there is money. And hopefully it doesn't break the internet. Well, I mean, it would break it somewhat if Google were to call Australia's bluff and say, okay, I mean, you're just asking something of us that we can't provide. So we just can't operate in the country. I mean, certainly there's workarounds. You know, you live in Australia, you're not like suddenly just never going to be able to search something on Google again. But it's when it comes to a new story. But it it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that Australia would be pushing it this far. And yeah, like you said, it's it's Tom, it's it's sort of asking for too much and hoping to get halfway there type of thing. That's the only that's the only way this makes sense. I because I mean, if I'm Bing and duck duck go, I'm over there going Yeah, pull right on out. That'd be great. We'd love that. A lot of people are wondering like, well, would this mean they pull out Gmail? Would this mean they pull out Google Docs? Or no, they're not going to pull out all business, even if they did pull it out. I don't even really believe they will pull out Google search. It's too much. They they called Spain's bluff. Spain tried to make them pay for Google news and they stopped doing Google news in Spain. But they seem to have found a better way to deal with it in the rest of Europe. And so I I imagine that this will not end up with Google leaving Australia. It will probably not end up with Australia requiring you to pay for links without snippets. But Australia will get a better deal out of Google and Facebook. Don't forget Facebook has also said we'll just pull news off of Facebook in Australia if you do this. So they're they're also in this and they're also playing hardball. Well, in this COVID world, touchless interaction has become more of a priority. Most touchless interactions will use light or sound. If they're doing some kind of motion detection to let you know that your intention, your intended input was detected. Singapore's stuck design, however, is demonstrating a way for motion detection to cause motion. They call it kinetic touchless. The prototype they designed is an elevator button that has a motor that moves the button backwards as it detects your finger coming near it, or pretty much any object getting close enough, I'd imagine. This lets you push, quote unquote, the button without actually touching the button. The technology could be applied to other gestures as well, like sliding or pushing up for other kinds of inputs. Yeah, I mean, I think that the elevator button, I had a hard time with it at first, because I was like, couldn't I just wave my hand? Because all you're really going to do is push the button for the elevator, right? There's not a whole lot of pulling or sliding that that happens. It's pretty pretty automated. But but yeah, some some other, some other solutions, I don't know, sliding glass door, I guess that would be one way where you can kind of pull along the door without touching it. Yeah, exactly. It's I mean, it's that sounds so foreign to me. But I feel like if that's something that could happen, not tomorrow, but in the future, easily enough, we're not going to be touching anything. They're vending machines. Yeah, if you don't want to touch the buttons on a vending machine that everybody is touching, you can, you know, virtually wave your hand in front of the option that you want. Or perhaps, you know, perhaps there are apps that will connect you to these things beyond just the the motion control, maybe you just choose things on your phone, and then it connects with whatever piece of technology you're trying to manipulate. But I'm just imagining the elevator buttons with a child, when you go in an elevator with a child and they want to touch all the buttons, but instead they're waving your hands and touching all the buttons. I just don't know how they're going to be able to discriminate between I want to touch this button to go up or to go to the seventh floor versus just getting them all accidentally. Yeah, and just in case people are having a hard time imagining this, you have to be pretty close for it to register, right? You can't be standing at the back of the elevator. So don't worry about if there's, you know, three kids at the back of the elevator, they're going to be able to easily push all the buttons. I think this is cool. I don't know if it really is necessary. Their argument here is having light and a buzz to let you know you push something isn't as gratifying as seeing the thing move. And I agree with that. But in practice, when you got moving parts, that means you have more things to break, which means you need to have more maintenance. I worked when I worked at CNET, the elevator there didn't have buttons. It had touch sensitive thing that when you touched it, it lit up to let you know that it had read your input. And that could easily just have become motion sensitive, where you didn't have to actually touch as soon as you got close enough, it would light up. And that seems more practical to me, even if it is cool and satisfying to see the stuff move. Or you could go even smart building route, you know, and if you if you have an ID that gets you into the building, it only allows you to go in the elevator to a certain floor. And then you don't have to touch anything. You are your ID with its RFID chip is automatically automatically identified. And the elevator works for you and no one else. Star Trek has taught us we'll just be able to say where we want to go. We don't have to engage if you don't feel like talking. I'm sure there's somebody listening right now. We're watching if you watch our live streams and no, there's a perfect reason for this. And if you have that perfect reason, I would love to know about it because often the stuff is just you just haven't thought of it because you just haven't thought of it before. Feedback at dillitechniche.com. And you could also throw it in our Discord. Join in our conversation there by linking your Patreon account at Patreon.com All right, Dr. Kiki Sanford, we're glad to have you on the show today because we need you. We need you to help us understand quantum communication. Quantum communication. Yes, it's really exciting. Researchers are working to create unhackable networks for our data communication. And in China, they have been pushing this technology forward year after year and a team earlier this month from the University of Science and Technology of China in Wefe published an article in Nature on an integrated quantum communication network that achieved quantum key distribution. That's the QKD Tom mentioned earlier across 4,600 kilometers. Now, this is really extending the distance over which we have ever used this kind of communication before. The network in able to do that used 700 optical fibers and two ground to satellite links. So they're really creating a ground-based and space-based communication network. This QKD quantum key distribution uses quantum states for encryption. So it's based on photons of light and that's why they used optical fibers. So these photons of light can be sent as bits, individual photons being a bit down the fiber in the direction that they're spinning can be determined at either end. Observation of the quantum states, which would be which direction it's spinning, it changes them meaning any attempt to read the key outside the end points is noticed. And so if it's noticed, you can say, hey, we've been hacked and you can protect the data. Fiber can transmit quantum keys successfully over hundreds of meters and satellites can now do it for thousands of kilometers. And China in 2016 transmitted QKD 2600 kilometers and in 2017, 2000 kilometers by a series of fibers. They're also working with the international community in doing this, but really they have focused on their internal to China network. And this nature paper described the integration of these two methods as an average key generation of 47.8 kilobytes per second. And if you remember old dial-up modems being around 56 kilobytes per second, that is almost on par with old dial-up modem speed. The quantum communication network served industry banks, power grids, and government websites. They were working, they're already running this network and using it to protect data. The paper was just describing what they have put together. Quantum networks are going to exist alongside the current internet and in addition to QKD, you can link quantum devices that are physically separated so they can act as one big supercomputer carrying out large-scale sensing experiments for astronomy, materials discovery, life sciences. And the team is hoping to extend the range to 10,000 kilometers or more expanding its network within China and through its partners in Austria, Italy, Russia, and Canada. The US is working on its own quantum communication network, but we aren't good enough to get in that club yet. Yeah, if you remember back in December on DTS, we mentioned the Fermilab experiment, which was sustained, that was its big advantage, is it was sustained quantum communication across 44 kilometers and there's an effort to lay the foundation for a Chicago area metropolitan quantum network. But yeah, China definitely ahead in this particular case. Yeah, the really exciting aspect of this, I mean I emailed you late at night, early January, Tom, with this story going, you need to talk about this because this is huge! This really is the beginning of quantum communication networks. We actually have a quantum communication network on the planet right now. This is a first, this is going to set the direction for secure encrypted communications moving forward and it's just really amazing and I mean I applaud the Chinese for putting this together, putting the resources behind it to make it happen. They really are first in this right now. Yeah, and there's a few people, and rightly so, in our chat room saying like, okay, whenever you say unhackable, eventually somebody figures out how to hack it and that's fair, probably at some point someone will, but it's a really hard problem that's not going to be broken anytime soon. I mean you have to, in order to hack it you'll have to figure out how to observe a quantum phenomenon without changing it and that is something that I don't think anybody knows how to do yet. So if you can work around physics then you know, call me. Yeah, probably the easier way to crack something like this is with some kind of social engineering, some kind of end point where you wait until it's decrypted and then you siphon it off really quick without noticing. So you know, when you say unhackable it's like, sure, that spin as soon as you observe it has now changed and as soon as you detect that you can shut it off and they don't get any more data and that is unhackable. Right. So yes, that is a really really difficult physics problem. Will there be other ways to work around it that doesn't have to break physics? Probably. Okay, yeah and bringing that up, the NSA actually when on their website talking about QKD they say that that is one of the problems and having secure end points is going to be one of the biggest issues with this technology. Yeah, ENAP 49 in our chat says the hacker would get a jail term and a Nobel Prize. Yeah, exactly. All at the same time. Yeah, no, this is like you said, this is a huge advancement because it's implementing quantum communication. And if I understand this right, you don't need quantum computers no necessary. This is no quantum communication part of this. Yeah, it basically takes text-based data encrypts it in a in that optical quantum state and then decrypts at the other end and puts it back into a text-based format. So the computers on the ground do not have to be quantum computers but there is off-the-shelf equipment that can be used to create the end points for encrypting in this manner. Huge advance in secure communication. Yeah. Yeah, huge. All right, scientists can use the age of new craters on Mars to estimate the age of older craters. It's probably not surprising. We do that all the time on earth too. A little harder to get to Mars and see those craters. If they can look at new craters they can also discover things about ice and water distribution based on, you know, if a new crater get throws up a bunch of ice how long does it stay? Does it sublimate? Where does it go? How much ice was there? All of that sort of stuff. So you can learn a lot from new craters but they're hard to find. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been swinging around Mars for 15 years taking a lot of pictures of the entire planet multiple times. So they have a lot of images. Images of new craters that could be used for benchmarks definitely exist but there's a lot of image data to go through and it takes a long time for humans to work through that and see if they've really found a new crater. So Wired reports NASA has developed a convolutional network machine learning algorithm to do the looking and last year put it into action and was able to identify probably 60 to 70 recent craters. They're still verifying them. The algorithm was trained on 7,000 images that they knew whether they were new craters or old craters. Once it got good at only detecting the known new ones they loaded it into a supercomputer at JPL and had it look through 112,000 images then followed up on identified new craters with the high res imager on the actual MRO and said all right let's look at it now and see if it looks like a new crater and if it was actually there if it was some kind of artifact. First confirmation came last august eventually orbiters can run their own algorithms on the orbiter without having to use the 75 core supercomputer back on earth but right now spacecraft don't even use multi-core processors so you're going to need very efficient code but that that is the long-term goal but either way this is definitely going to speed things up quite a bit. Yeah I think it's it's I love the advance I love the using of this networked machine learning to be able to identify these new craters versus old craters. We see examples of this in all sorts of areas of science where machine learning is starting to impact discovery and in addition to being able to just figure out what's going on on the surface of Mars it can also tell us a lot about the solar system itself so if we know when craters have been formed it can help give us information about when you know when asteroids when foreign bodies we're flying through space and we can correlate that with with impacts on Venus on earth on our own moon and and further out so there's a lot of information to be gained not just about Mars but the whole system. Yeah the more data we have the more we can correlate it and say like oh it looks like a bunch of things moved in at this point what was that about was it a comet was it an extra solar object who knows. Yeah and these these machine learners they're quick. And as we joke about Skynet and they're going to take over and all that I mean really they just take the so far what they're doing is taking the TD amount of stuff and helping us speed stuff up. Yep Well companies get patents all the time for all sorts of things Microsoft has been granted a new patent to create chatbots using the personal information of deceased people from images voice data social media posts electronic messages you know like email the patent states quote the specific person who the chatbot represents may correspond to a past or present entity or a version thereof such as a friend a relative an acquaintance a celebrity a fictional character a historical figure a random entity etc. Microsoft also describes how a living user could train a digital replacement before the event of their own death but before you get too excited or freaked out about this Tim O'Brien general manager of AI programs at Microsoft confirmed on Twitter Friday that there is no plan for this so they got a patent they don't necessarily have a plan but they don't want to tell somebody yet. Yeah you know there's a lot of debate over this sort of thing and whether you should do that even if you can so I think Microsoft is responsible to say hey we figured out a thing let's patent it so we're in control of it for now and we can decide what it could be good for. I noticed today an article about funding for event surf backed product called immortal that lets you preserve your digital legacy so that it won't get locked away on an outdated device or operating system by uploading it to the cloud documents photos videos like all the stuff that the Microsoft chatbot could use to you know man I just want all that stuff to die with me you know all the things to make Sarah chatbot just come visit my grave someday so so okay you don't necessarily want people to be making virtual seras but what about being able to have that dinner party the virtual dinner party with people from history well what if historical figures right who were they what would they have said to you asking a particular question and I love that I was already playing around with that whole idea of what would William Shakespeare maybe have said you know when asked a specific question I get that I do but I've also read pet cemetery and I know that they don't always come back the way you want them to right you think you're gonna have a lovely party with lady lovelace in Genghis Khan and then suddenly all of a sudden yeah Genghis Khan was kind of mean it turns out lady lovelace was actually meaner than Genghis Khan and wasn't there a Battlestar Galactica spin-off about this I don't know probably very topic it was called Caprica thank you very much Roger yes I wasn't sure if it was a spoiler to say what it was but all right nobody watched Capric it's fine totally fine I did a long time ago I did too let's check out the mailbag let's do it this one comes from stealth Dave stealth Dave says Roger I wanted to share how much I appreciated your weekly art update article on early end of life products as the family tech expert tech support in my family I find myself more and more recommending products based on their longevity rather than their features especially when it comes to phones my parents just asked me for new phone recommendations they're in their 70s they're on a fixed income they can't spend $1,000 on a new phone that they're going to have to replace in a year or two because the manufacturer stopped supporting it stealth Dave says I recommended the pixel 4a to my parents they don't need 5g at least not now and it hits the sweet spot of affordability and longevity for a phone we're still trying to get my dad to give up his flip phone oh yeah go check out that column if you're a patron you've got access to it at patreon.com slash dtns at most of the levels Roger does a great job putting together his thoughts on on tech every week and you get them right there in your inbox if you if you get your posts emailed to you if you have feedback for us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is just one of the many ways that you can get ahold of us but boy do we like those emails keep them coming also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Paul Boyer Phillip Shane and Irwin Stern let's check in with Len Peralta who has been drawing something for us today what do you got Len everything came together for this it's me on a Friday Dr. Kiki talking about quantum computers for me to redraw the very first image I ever drew for dtns is Quanto the computer but this time it's son of Quanto Quanto the quantum communicator uh and uh and you know if this is a deep cut for everybody who is who's a long time dtns fan uh you know almost bow down and before before him in despair I don't you know I know that's not exactly how quantum quantum communication works but uh you know it's it was sort of fun sort of fun to draw this so this is available right now at my patreon patreon.com for slash Len you can also get it on my online store and as a special uh a special thing Tom I guess we're we're giving this away as well the uh the original yeah uh anybody who wants the original Quanto go to patreon.com slash dtns don't even have to be a patron uh and you can find a digital version of the original Quanto there and then pair it up with the current Quanto collect the whole set collect all the Quantos good stuff Len also thanks to Dr Kiki Sanford for being with us today what's new it so much what's what's new in the world of science and beyond the world of science and beyond we are very very hopeful these days there's a lot of science happening and it's always changing and if people want to keep in keep in touch and keep tabs on it head over to twist.org and subscribe to this week in science folks we love patrons that stick with us we've had a lot of you since the very beginning are very close to it that's why we're happy to offer patreon loyalty rewards at certain of the the four highest levels you can get a unique sticker a mug a t-shirt or a hoodie every three months as long as you stay a patron top level gets the hoodie I'm wearing it right now it's got our seven-year anniversary logo and then three months later you get one with Roger on it and three months later you get one with Sarah and then there's one with me it's all unique art from Len Peralta go check it out patreon.com slash d-t-n-s we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m eastern that's 21 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and guess what we're gonna be back and do it all again on Monday talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com hope you have enjoyed this brover