 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito and Steve Ayodharola. Coming up on DTNS, 3D scanning is saving art and architecture from war and disaster, plus what computer vision is good for and five ways to get around government internet shutdowns. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 6th, 2022 with Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger. I like to say we are optimistic without being hyped, but we are skeptical without being overly negative. That's that's us. We just we just bring it right down the middle for you. Like a fastball of tech. Want to be extra? Go somewhere else. Yeah, there's plenty of places for that. We're here for the rest of you. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bloomberg sources say that the Chinese central government ordered government agencies and state-backed companies to replace foreign PCs with domestic alternatives within the next two years. The government reportedly estimates this will replace 50 million PCs used by the central government. The policy will eventually apply to provincial governments as well. Zelda Ocarina of Time is among the 2022 world video game Hall of Fame inductees. Ms. Pac-Man finally got the nod as well. Dance Dance Revolution and Sid Meyers Civilization. Those are also the other additions to the strong museum's video game Hall of Fame. And Vidya agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreeing to pay $5.5 million to settle charges did not properly disclose that crypto mining was a significant element of its gaming business. The charges date back to Nvidia's fiscal 2018 when Nvidia did not disclose to investors its gaming revenue growth was partially driven by crypto mining. I mean, we called it gaming but I think everybody, yeah, that didn't work. The UK government said its digital markets unit regulator will be given the power to fine large tech companies up to 10% of global turnover if they are found to engage in predatory practices. In addition, the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport said it will be able to fine tech companies additional daily penalties of up to 5% of turnover for continued offenses with senior managers also facing civil penalties. Now it's not clear when the government will introduce the legislation necessary to enforce those changes but they've got the plan when it happens. Microsoft began testing a controller bar in Windows 11 with Windows Insiders letting users see and launch the three most recently played games. Users launched the controller bar through the Xbox button on a connected controller rather letting them launch a game without having to reach for a keyboard and a mouse. So that's nice. All right, let's talk about the government shutting down your internet. Oh gosh, okay, let's do it. It used to be that a government shutting down your internet access was a pretty extreme move usually taken in times of severe upheaval but the practice has become more and more common being used during elections, student exams, et cetera. Sometimes it's the whole internet. More often on a longer term basis it's blocking certain services. Rest of World has an article about the steps that you can take to get free information if that service might be affected for you. These are meant to help people plan ahead. So Tom, what's going on here? Yeah, the first one they list seems pretty obvious, VPNs. Get a good one, one you can trust, find one that's vetted. You might even wanna get two just in case one of them gets successfully blocked. And remember that VPN is only a way to get around blocks and region locks. It does not in fact protect your privacy because the VPN operator can still see all your traffic. It just shields your traffic from attempts to block it and that helps when you're on open Wi-Fi to protect it at such. Rob, this seems like the obvious one, right? It is the obvious and you made a good point. You might need to have more than one because if you've got one of the really popular VPNs the government could take those down as well. So you wanna have that backup that's also a good one just in case you have some issues there. But this is getting kinda weird with what's going on in places that generally aren't here to where, we don't like what you're saying, we're just gonna shut you down. I mean, real quick, I use Mozilla VPN, I pay for it, is there anything that anyone else is using here that they like better? I use ExpressVPN. I have Nord VPN. Yeah, these are all good options, I think. Cool. But if your internet is entirely shut off, a VPN is not gonna help you much. So this isn't gonna get you internet access but it can help you use internet-like functionality for things like messaging. Mesh networks, this is another workaround that definitely needs pre-planning. But there's some apps out there, you might have heard of Fireside Messenger, it's an example of a way to communicate by creating a mesh network between the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections on a phone. So there are mesh networks where you deploy your own hardware to create a temporary local internet but the Fireside just uses phones. So it's pretty easy to set up and use. Of course, they only work when there's enough devices to keep a network going. They are also not any more secure than the internet. So you do need to take all the precautions you would normally take with any Messenger app. Yeah, I'm actually a fan of the mesh applications. Now, for the reason that we're talking about, I haven't used one, but I remember, this is probably 10, 12 years ago, but was on a cruise ship with a lot of friends and family. And this is before everybody just got the internet package. So I convinced probably eight, nine, 10 of us to actually put a mesh application on just so that we kind of, I had connectivity, I think one of my cousins had it, but it kind of let everybody, you can at least check a message, you can check an email here and there without having to jump through a ton of hoops and pay for that ridiculously expensive service that was on the ship. Yeah, I used one of, I used a mesh Messenger once in an airport. Back when airports had spotty Wi-Fi or maybe you had to pay to message with people so that we could keep in touch while we were just walking around. International SIM cards is number three on RestaWorld's list. This works if you're near a border, you might be able to pick up service from a neighboring country, probably only useful in smaller countries or border towns and such. Number four, side loading apps can help you get around blocks on particular services. Most useful for Android where the operating system permits side loading. iPhone jailbreaking not as useful as it once was. Of course, when you're side loading on whatever platform, remember, nobody's checking those apps. You need to be responsible for what you install because there's no safety net out there. You absolutely wanna make sure you're installing what you think you're installing when you side load. Yeah, but Facebook is an example of this, like Russia blocked Facebook from app stores, but people are side loading it. So as long as you're getting it from a source you trust, then it's probably okay. I mean, just a question for both of you guys. For anyone who's like, well, I think this is a fine app, are there triggers that people should be looking out for before they install an app that's going to harm them in the long run? I would say that you have to absolutely know where you're getting the app from. For example, there is an Amazon app store for Android. You go to Amazon's website to get it. Don't just go to, well, here's an APK file for their store. You go to some website that is not Amazon. Make sure you know and trust the place that you're actually getting the APKs from. And that actually will make you a little bit safer than just downloading anything that you find on the internet. Yeah, I guess it's the same recommendation we always give for clicking links or signing up at websites. Make sure that you know who they are, where they came from, and also maybe cultivate some trusted sources. Don't just take recommendations from strangers, that sort of thing. The fifth one here is satellite content. Now, you're probably immediately gonna think of Starlink. And someday that will be a more widespread option. It is useful out there, but it's not really available everywhere and where it is available, it's not exactly cheap. There is a service called Napsack though that broadcasts packets by satellite. This will not let you send, but it will let you receive. So you could get over a normal TV dish, you could use this software to receive YouTube videos, news websites, things like that. It's one way, so you're not gonna do email with this, but it could be a way to get information you wouldn't be able to get otherwise. I know some people would think, well, if you can't send information, is it really worth it? But yes, because if you're blocked from just receiving any outside information other than what your government might be telling you, you wanna see, well, what is the rest of Earth saying? Just being able to receive might actually be better than just getting no information whatsoever. Yeah, I feel like these are five useful things to know in a lot of situations. Obviously, government shutdowns are what prompted this and those are more widespread, but these are useful in disaster situations where maybe connectivity is spotty or unavailable and stuff like that too, right? Well, moving on, Tech in Asia has an excellent article about computer vision, including a discussion with Liu Fang, associate producer, professor, rather, the Department of Computer Science at Jijapen Institute of Technology, Singapore. This is a great article worth a read. It will be in our show notes, but if we wanna get the gist of it, Rob, what do you got? Well, computer vision is about more than just facial recognition, which a lot of us think that it is. In Lee's words, it aims to recognize visual inputs and process them as fast as humans can. One of the earliest uses of computer vision was optical character recognition or OCR, the ability to scan a printed document and turn it into editable text. This is kind of it, though, from the 70s until all the way up into the 2000s. Today, however, neural networks are helping train algorithms that don't have to be taught what every individual object is, but can start to learn to identify objects. So that's what's new now. I don't know, guys. So intriguing, do we have examples of this? So if you think about doctors, and they're identifying things in MRIs from medical imaging, MRIs, ultrasounds, CT scans, it can be used for security. So we initially think just looking at people, but no, you can use it to actually count people and then actually do things like, not just realize how many people are in a place, but did someone leave a bag? Did they leave a backpack, those kind of things? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Oh, and also, autonomous cars. There's all kind of work with autonomous cars to where it's just not using LiDAR and radar to recognize that there is an object in front of you. It's actually using the cameras to determine what the object is, and then you may be able to use some of that neural network and some of that AI learning to say, well, this is a deer, as compared to a pothole, how do we effectively handle those situations differently? So, is there anything else that might be coming down the pike? Well, you know, Lou expects that we will lead to other applications. So computer vision could help realistically create virtual items from VR and AR rather than 3D items all having to be slightly cartoony. It could also be used for training, like in virtual surgeries. For medical students are learning to operate heavy machinery. I'm thinking flight simulators is probably the thing that most people would think of, but yeah, you can use this to actually train people to do things that are dangerous or things that are just not something you want to just do every day. And you could actually be a lot safer. Like I know I would much rather learn how to fly a plane in a machine that can't crash as compared to flying one. You don't learn how to fly one in one first. Especially if you're going to fly my plane. I want you to learn that in a machine that can't crash me either. Well, and those are challenges that we really need to overcome, right? So systems can recognize objects but don't necessarily understand the context yet. So that's right. Some of this can be overcome, however, by combining systems like natural language processing for context, for example. So when you're actually just taking, well, here's what the thing is, but you're going to use like once again, you go back to these neural networks and it actually pairs the two together. So these systems are figuring out what something is as compared to just there's something there. Yeah. And there's also things like processing power, still a limit to how far they can progress. There's also not enough people working in the field. Asia Pacific alone is going to need 47 million more qualified tech workers by 2030 than it's on pace to have. So you have governments like Singapore rolling out programs to encourage training of talent in the AI space. I like this article a lot simply because it points out that computer vision is something that is more than just the headline of facial recognition or Tesla car couldn't tell a bridge from a white wall, or a truck from a white wall, that sort of thing. And it puts it in context and shows we are making progress. These are the things that we'll be getting better at. This is what the limits are to it. And I think that's important in evaluating all these things where people are like, do I want computer vision to do anything? Yeah, you do. You want it to be able to help a doctor more quickly identify a tumor. You want it to be able to help train people to more safely operate equipment like Rob was saying. So it's a matter of developing it responsibly, right? Yeah, when you think about medical imaging, computers are way better at recognizing stuff. And they're much more effective. If you think about how this stuff works, every time it sees a new scan, it's never gonna forget that scan. And it can instantaneously compare that to every other scan that it's seen. So when you're thinking about a doctor, and we definitely want doctors to look at it and to say, yes, this is what the computer is telling me is what I think this is. But a human just can't process that amount of information. So just in the medical space, these things are way more accurate and they're becoming more and more accurate every day. And they really can lead to better diagnoses. Yeah, I won't overshare, I promise. I went to the doctor yesterday for just my regular annual checkup and she was like, I'm not an expert enough on this. It could be fine, but maybe you should have a specialist look at it. So I went to a specialist this morning. The specialist was like, been there. I think that's fine. Let's check back with you in six months. I would very much have liked a diagnostic aid to tell my physician yesterday, like, oh yeah, that's probably not a big deal. Maybe check back in six months versus having to drive all the way back and go through the procedure again, so to speak. And definitely the other side of it, your primary didn't even think that there was anything wrong and didn't tell you to go look at a specialist, but the AI would have caught it. That's equally maybe in some cases even more important. The AI would have been like, maybe take a double check at this one. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean, it's even sort of like, a doctor saying, it's probably nothing. And you kind of go like, good, great. I want it to be nothing. But an AI to say, no, we gotta do this test. That is helpful for a lot of folks because I think in many cases, humans want other humans to feel sure and secure. And we're good, we're good, nothing's wrong, but... And it can help avoid invasive test procedures that have risks of their own, right? So yeah. Well, folks, we are looking for ideas of guests to have on the show, maybe from other podcasts or other shows that might expose our show to new audience. So let us know who you like out there. Check out our guest survey. You can put in your recommendations at dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. Go do it now. Vice media is partnering with Blue Shield Denmark and the Danish UNESCO National Commission on a project called Backup Ukraine. Tom, I know you've looked into it. So how does this all work? Yeah, so the announcement from Vice is that they are working to coordinate volunteers to use the Polycam app to scan objects into a 3D model that then can be stored in the cloud. They're encouraging people to sign up for an official organization. They say, don't go into dangerous areas to do this. But if you can safely do it and you're part of an organized crew that's allowed to be in these places, we'll store it in a place that can't be destroyed. Data centers are at risk in Ukraine. Polycam does polymetric scanning using a phone's LiDAR scanner as well as the camera. It's being used for things like sculptures, monuments, buildings. There are also people's bedrooms. Just for history, there's a sleeping dog that's very cute and good to see. These are all available online right now. You can go check them out at poly.cam. They scans may be useful in reconstruction and restoration for buildings and sculptures, probably not for the dog. In some cases, they would be good for creating replicas of if an item was totally destroyed. And Polycam isn't new, right, Sarah? Yeah, you can get the app yourself. It's freely available, free to use in connection with backup Ukraine, has other uses as well. There's a free tier with unlimited LiDAR and five photo mode captures plus limited export formats. If you want to pay $7 a month or $55 a year, you can get 150 photo mode captures and all export formats. But in the example of Ukraine, which is obviously a very interesting example, this isn't the first place 3D scanning has been used for preservation. Yeah, that's right. This scanning has been used for historical preservation for a while now. There's a company called CreaForm that touts working with a city in Hungary. They wanted to scan this historic mansion before they began the restoration so they could preserve how it looked before the work was done and then be a benchmark during the restoration itself. A company called Ferro, F-A-R-O, uses laser scanning to help preservationists identify issues with structural integrity or any other vulnerabilities to help stop degradation before it begins. They can do some interventions that they might be putting off. It can also be used to modernize buildings without compromise. Let's say you want to add air conditioning to a building. It can help you figure out where best to put it. In fact, a five day scan of Notre Dame Cathedral was done in Paris in 2010 and that was incredibly useful after the fire in Notre Dame in 2019. It is proving essential in helping the restoration there. It's being used as a preventative measure in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The government commissioned scans of the Saigon Opera House just in case anything were ever to happen to it. A company called VMT Solutions scanned that as well as other buildings in the city, including City Hall. So we're not just talking about physical items. We're talking about preserving digital records. So in wartime, natural disaster situations, servers might be destroyed without backups and records could be lost. Yeah, the Washington Post ran a story April 8th about librarians racing to store digital archives on servers outside Ukraine. Again, this is why Polycam is offering to store in the cloud because data centers are under threat. So about 1,300 people or so, including volunteers and children, but a lot of librarians have been coordinating over Slack and other software to back up everything from census data to basket weaving instructions. That effort is called Saving Ukraine Cultural Heritage Online, which turns into the acronym SUCHO, S-U-C-H-O.org. The internet archive, you might be like, what about the Wayback Machine? Can't that store stuff? It does, but it doesn't store all images to save space. So it's partnering to help store as much as it can, but the group also uses an open source archiving tool called WebRecorder. There's an automated one called Browser Tricks Cloud and they're using the archive web.page browser extension. Those will capture everything on a website and store it locally, and then it can be uploaded to a cloud service to preserve it in ways that archive.org's Wayback Machine does not do. So things like calendars, 3D tours, images, all that sort of thing. They say more than 25 terabytes of information have been backed up so far. This is just ridiculously cool technology. I think back to any heist movie over the last 15 to 20 years, they always set a device down and it scanned the room or scanned the object they are about to create. If you pair this up with 3D printing, I mean, we're in the real world now. You can actually do this stuff. And like I said, Tom, you mentioned Notre Dame. The fact that they actually scanned it, they're now able to go back and repair this historic building and make it look as close to what it used to look like as they can because they scanned it and they know exactly what this piece of wood goes here and that piece of marble goes there. It's just really awesome technology that is allowing you to do these things today. Yeah, even things like they were talking about how beams come together, it seems like an easy thing but they can come together in a lot of different ways. And if you wanna preserve the original feel of the architecture, you wanna know little things like that. I was also thinking about the accessibility of this. These images aren't just used for preservation, they can also be used in order to let people see this architecture in ways they couldn't from just a flat 2D picture. Or when you brought up 3D printing, I immediately thought, oh, souvenirs, right? What if you could print a version of a sculpture at home and have your own model of it, it'd be kinda cool. Real quick, Rob, what is your favorite heist movie? I gotta go with the oceans, you know, oceans 11 through 13, those are pretty awesome. Tom Crane Affair, the one with Pierce Brosnan, I really liked. Yeah, Renee Russo, yeah, good stuff. Well, if you've ever been swayed to visit a resort or a city or a country based on the experiences of a travel influencer, Chris Christensen has some words of caution for you. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you like travel and you've ever been on social media, you have probably run across a social media influencer and you may have wondered, can I trust what they're saying? And the answer is usually yes and sometimes no. And there is a new nonprofit consumer advocacy group called Travelers United that is apparently trying to be the new sheriff in town. They are suing a social media influencer over what they claim is misleading and deceptive advertising. And they say she talks about a lot of brands that she's getting paid for and doesn't disclose it, which is against the law of the US. But also saying that she's making claims about herself, that she's the first woman to travel to every country that they say is not true and that she wrote five-star reviews for her own book. I don't know if any of that is true. I don't know if you care or if it's just me. I've always encouraged travel influencers to tell the truth and apparently I'm not the only one. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Yeah, I don't think any of us are shocked that there might be an influencer out there not telling the whole truth. But it is interesting that Travelers United is a group trying to hold influencers accountable so that you're more likely to get the truth because the ones who wouldn't won't wanna run into this group. So are they saying that that hostile that costs $6 a night to stay in may not actually be as good as the Grand Y Leia? No, it must be. It depends on how you spell Y Leia. Yeah, because there's a little shack down the road that calls itself W-H-Y-DASH. Yeah, like why not? Yeah, why not Leia? Or Han. Anyway, yeah, TravelersUnited.org, that's good. It's good that there's somebody fighting a good fight out there. And I think Chris did a good job of saying, hey, don't tar everybody with the same brush. There's lots of good folks out there giving you good information, but let's hold the ones that don't play by the rules. Do you tar people with brushes? I haven't. I mean, I just, I don't, neither. Now that you say that, yeah. I just wanna do it right if I'm gonna do it. No, don't ask me, I've only heard of it. Well, over in the mailbag, Nick from Australia wrote in feedbackdailytechnewshow.com by the way and said, I always liked the promise of Fido to get rid of passwords, but until yesterday's news, this was on the show, it seemed like nothing but a pipe dream. While I would benefit from passwords going away myself, I'm much more interested in it for my less tax tech savvy, savvy friends and family. I can easily use LastPass and have a different password on every site and have them securely stored in auto-filled. But for average people, LastPass can be daunting and overwhelming. In a few years, I can get them to just use a notification on their phone to sign in securely to anything and it will be a weight off my shoulders. Oh, I love this email, Nick. Rob, you probably cut this story yesterday that they're making it easier for you to use Fido across platforms. You don't have to re-authenticate on every platform. And Nick is like, yeah, I want this, but man, I really want this for my friends and family. I understand. I regularly have to remind people how to reset their password or I'll get folks, you know, it's generally in-laws or parents. Hey, what's my password for Netflix? Or what's this? Because I somehow am the holder of all of their passwords. So, yes. I can't wait till the day where we can just get rid of this stuff because when you log in because you have something and you are someone, it's just way more secure than just typing in a password that if you're not using a password vault, you might use that on every single website. I know that my family members how many times I tell them don't use the same password. I can guess what the password is because they always use the same password. So. And the hang up with multi-factor authentication has been people not wanting to go to the trouble because you have to set it up and then it's a second step when you log in. And what this does, what Fido does, you know, in short, again, we have a whole know a little more episode if you want to get the details, but in short, it does the multi-factor authentication for you so that all you have to do is be like, oh, I have the thing and I'm doing the thing. So, yes, let me in. Some day, some day we'll all be on Friday and we'll look back on this and be like past. We're getting there. We're getting closer. How did we ever live like that? Yeah. I know we are, we're getting closer. I mean, 2FA sometimes actually ruins my day, but I know it's the right thing to do. Exactly. So that's what we do. Well, thanks to 2FA and also thanks to you, Rob Dunwood for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do. So I am at Rob Dunwood on all the things and you can check me out at my other shows, the SMR podcast or at smrpodcast.com and at The Tech John, which is just TheTechJohn.com. Head over there, check us out. We talk about tech, something different than what you're probably used to listening to. And you know what, I usually, I try to send you an email on my thoughts on every episode of Tech John. So I'll just give you this week's right here. Great episode again. You all are on a roll. These episodes have been smart. They've been informative. They get me thinking. You're bringing in all these different perspectives from all three of you, not just the fact that the three of you are there, right? But each of you has a different angle and you triangulate each other's perspectives and challenge each other. So good, folks. If you're not listening to TheTechJohn.com, you're missing out. Also, if anybody's watching our video version of the show, The Tech John hoodie is pretty cool. I would like one. You can get one. Appreciate it. Where do I get one, Rob? Yeah. Head over to TheTechJohn.com for a flash shop and we have all kinds of swag over there you can get. I'm wearing TheTechJohn sweatshirt today. Last time I was on, Tom had one on. I appreciate that. So I said, you know what? Let me rep my own show. Nice. And we're still with my own stuff. Well, speaking of rep in the show, we love the folks that rep our show. Special thanks to Tony. Tony is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Tony. Tony, Tony. Tony, Tony. There's also a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We'll roll right into it after DTNS. It's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you're not familiar, now you're familiar. We're live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 2,800 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And man, it's Friday and I hope you all have a great weekend. We will see you Monday. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Trafalino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Kuntz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding. Our mods, beatmaster, W. Scottus 1, BioCal, Captain Gipper, Gadget Virtuoso, Steve Guadirama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A. A. Cast and Len Peralta, A Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's shows include Nika Monfort, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Rob Dunwood and thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.