 Coming up on DTNS NVIDIA launches its monster new graphics cards, robot boats are on the rise and Facebook threatens to pull all news from Australia. All of it. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 1st, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the pale city of Helsinki. I'm Patrick Bejo. We were just talking about word histories, particularly. Oh, sorry, Roger. That's okay. I'm here too. I'm right. Yes. Well, there was a long pause and I think I just didn't realize you hadn't gone yet. Roger Chang, our show's producer, everyone. Wonderful human. We were just talking about the pronunciation of Lieutenant versus Lieutenant, as well as the etymology of palindromes on good day internet. If you want to get that wider conversation, become a member. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Walmart unveiled a new membership service called Walmart Plus for $98 per year. Might sound familiar. The Amazon Prime rival will combine free unlimited same day delivery on thousands of items, including grocery delivery and other perks like fuel discounts and access to a new scan and go service that allows members to self check out in Walmart stores. Walmart Plus will be available starting September 15 at over 4,700 Walmart stores, 2700 of which offer delivery. Members can pay $98 per year after a 15 day free trial period or decide to pay $12.95 on a month-to-month basis. Apple and Google launched the next stage of their exposure notification system. Previously, the framework required an app to be developed by a state wanting to use the framework. The second stage called exposure notifications express is the promised auto-generated framework, which lets the state take advantage of the system without having to develop an app. Only a config file is needed. The new framework comes to iOS 13.7 Tuesday and Android 6.0 and later through an update later this month. We have news of a U.S. company buying part of a Chinese company on the order of the U.S. government. But it's not TikTok, at least not as of this recording. U.S. hotel operator MCR Development will acquire the Stay in Touch property management software business from China's Beijing Shiji Information. This didn't get covered a lot in the tech press, but back in March the U.S. government determined the Beijing Shiji's ownership of the software threatened national security and ordered it to be sold. So there is precedent for the TikTok situation. ZTE has officially launched the ZTE Axon 25G with a 6.92 inch FHD plus OLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon at 765G, up to 12 gigabytes and 256 gigabytes of both RAM and storage, 4220 mAh battery and display fingerprint sensor. I'm getting all flustered because then you've got that in display front camera as well. We've been hearing about it. It is a real thing. Also has a 64 megapixel rear camera plus three other camera sensors on the back. The phone comes in blue, black, purple and orange and pricing starts around 322 U.S. dollars. Google has added several accessibility features to its Google Docs, Sheets and Slides products. Control Alt H or Command Option H will now toggle Braille support. Navigational shortcut now led to user here where the cursor has ended up. Also images, misspellings and grammatical errors are verbalized, quote, directly by assistive technology, end quote. Samsung officially unveiled that Galaxy Z Fold 2 we talked about. This was the unpacked part two event Tuesday. It now features a folding glass and polymer display. We knew that Snapdragon 865 plus chipset. Think we knew that 12 gigabytes of RAM, 256 gigabytes of storage, 5G support for both sub six and millimeter wave spectrum and 7.6 inch primary and 6.2 inch secondary displays. I think we knew all that. Ah, here's the part we didn't know. The Fold 2 is $1,999. Yikes, pre-orders open Wednesday, September 2nd at 1201 AM with general availability on September 18th. Twitter launched its quote tweets counter next to retweets and likes. Quote tweets are retweets with a comment. That's it. That's the Twitter story. How many people are going to quote tweet it? Bloomberg reports some Amazon drivers are hanging phones in trees near likely pickup stops like Whole Foods grocery stores or Amazon delivery stations. Amazon system looks for the nearest driver when assigning deliveries. The phones in the trees are synced with the driver's actual phone, which may be blocks away, giving the driver a chance to grab the job before others. So this is going to lead to other drivers grabbing phones out of trees and like, you know, driving them far away to undermine who knows. And South Korea has once again indicted Lee Jae-young, the acting leader of Samsung on charges alleging he manipulated stock prices and violated the country's capital market laws. Mr. Lee is also still on trial appealing a conviction for bribery as well. All right, let's talk about NVIDIA. Yeah, that's right. It's evil week. So we're getting lots of hardware announcements. NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3000 series of graphics cards based on its ampere architecture. The flagship being the RTX 3080, which NVIDIA says will have twice the performance of the 2080. The board is shaped like a pennant and it has a new cooling shroud and dual fans. All of that is to improve the airflow. They say more than 55%. It also uses a single 12-pin connector instead of two 8-pin ones. This allows for more space on the board. They'll include an adapter. Don't worry about that. Comes with 10 gigabytes of G6X memory for $699 shipping September 17. Now there's also the 70 to go with the 80. NVIDIA launched the RTX 3070, has a similar cooling system. That one will go for $499 coming September 17. Then it's better than anything you get in the 200 line. There's also the RTX 3090. The RTX 3090 has 24 gigabytes of G6X memory and can handle 60 frames per second at 8K. Time for you to buy an 8K monitor. Those of you who must have this card. Occupy's three slots comes with a silencer, which they say will make it 10 times quieter than the Titan RTX. It ships September 24 for a mere $1499. That'll be the one you get, right, Patrick? Of course. I am looking to replace my six-year-old 970, which is still working out pretty well. That's actually what my machine did. Yeah, it was a really good card back then. Nowadays, the 70 series is not really that kind of price range anymore. There used to be a sweet spot of price versus performance, and now they're all super expensive. The really exciting thing about all of this is that ray tracing is really arriving. With these cars, they have announced a couple of things, or other companies have announced, for example, that ray tracing is coming to Fortnite, which is not a game that you think of when you think of graphical performance. With the new generation of consoles, it means that the majority of platforms that developers are developing for now will have ray tracing, so we are finally going to get ray tracing in many different games, and that's really exciting. Yeah, when the 2000 series came out, everyone was like, why ray tracing? Nothing has ray tracing, and we were making the argument then, you put it in the cards and then people start developing it, so then the next series of cards has a bunch of games, and now we're realizing that, where we have the games that have it to take advantage of it. Forget the 3090, that's just silly. People will buy it, good for Nvidia, but the prices 699 and 499 for these new versions seem about right in the middle, where I would expect. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing if they're working with Nintendo to maybe make a mobile version of that chip and give ray tracing to the next version of the Nintendo Switch. I do want to turn very quickly to our resident fiscal responsibility expert, Roger Chang. Does anybody need to splash out on any of these cards really, Roger, in your opinion? No, if you have a 1080p monitor, and you're not really into ray tracing, if you have anything like a 1060 or something equivalent, I'm not going to be upgrading anytime soon, even though I have a 4K monitor, but I mean, that's it. All a duty Black Ops Cold War in Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe, but I don't know, still too rich for my blood. Well, Bloomberg sources say that Apple plans to release four new 5G iPhones with OLED screens this fall, including a basic 5.4 and 6.1 inch model and two Pro models with 6.1 and 6.7 inch displays, all with the same squared edge design of the most recent iPad Pro. Apple reportedly plans to make 75 million 5G phones, but pushback release a few weeks from when it released iPhones last year, which began shipping new phones on September 20th and offer the lower end devices first. Apple may release two new watches also and give the iPad Air slimmer bezels and touch ID on the power button. Apple will reportedly also release a smaller and cheaper HomePod speaker and over-the-ear headphones that are specifically Apple branded. Up until now they've just been beats. A new Apple TV with a redesigned remote may not come until next year. Meanwhile, TFI securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who knows a lot of Apple stuff, says that while Apple's upcoming iPhone 12 models may all include 5G support for both sub-G and millimeter wave networks, shipment estimates for millimeter wave versions are likely to be several million units lower than expected due to delays in the global rollout of millimeter wave base stations. Kuo notes that the global pandemic may contribute to shipments of millimeter wave phones in 2020 to about 4 to 6 million and 25 to 35 million in 2021. Yeah, that's interesting because I think what Apple would prefer to say when they get on the 5G bandwagon finally is if you've got 5G service from your carrier, our phones will work. But it sounds like there will be models that will only work with the sub-6 gigahertz version of this, which, again, having carrier specific versions of iPhones isn't new, but I would imagine they would prefer not to have fewer millimeter wave versions out there. If you wonder what the difference between sub-6 and millimeter wave is, the short version is sub-6 has much better range, but the top's theoretical speed isn't as good as millimeter wave. And if you want to know more than that, go to know a little more.com. Look for the 5G episode. I do want to mention the two Apple watches is a really interesting one because they have quote-unquote cheaper versions of their products for almost every product category now. And Apple does have a reputation for only making high-end products. It's not really the case. You can find mid-range iPads and mid-range iPhones, and it seems the watch might join that club as well. That is interesting, yeah. Will it be the pro moniker for the higher-end watch? I'm curious. And will they also have two sizes for each type of watch? Oh, yeah, yeah. They must, right? Yeah. I mean, that's a tough sell, right? Because the watch is like, here's all the things that the watch does. It's so great. You want this on your wrist. What would a pro model have that a mid-range watch would not? A higher price tag, right? Right, but for what? It's not really professional. They already have like EKG, and they could do the blood oxygen and stuff like that. Oxymeter. A company called Octify has a pair of smart glasses that use AI to make you pay attention. The glasses called Specs are launching on Indiegogo. Specs use machine learning to identify what you're looking at and send it to an app. You can leave it at that and just get a pie chart of how you spent your time that day based on what you were looking at. But you can also set what's called a focus session when you want to concentrate on a certain activity. You can choose to let the glasses alert you when you're looking at the wrong thing, either with a light in the corner of your vision or a sound. Specs can identify 20 different activities including reading, writing, looking at your phone, your laptop, watching TV, working out at the gym, doing yoga, cooking, playing an instrument, eating, and chatting to other people. You decide how to categorize activities. Specs can also do some fitness tracking with a blood oxymeter, accelerometer, and gyroscope, and will let you listen to music. You can use them with your own prescription lenses and Specs are being launched on Indiegogo, as mentioned, with discounts off the expected $400 retail price. Now, you know, the normal caveats of this is a Indiegogo with maybe a prototype, but the verge has vetted it to cover, so I feel, you know, fairly good passing it along. But even if this ends up being vapor hardware, I love the concept of your smart glasses being for productivity. And not like in the enterprise like we have with Google Glass, but for helping you like, oh, I need help focusing. So when I turn away from my laptop, alert me so that it reminds me like, oh right, no, I need to not get distracted right now. I think that's an interesting approach. Yeah, I mean, talking about smartphones, you know, in our last story, our smart watches, rather, I have, you know, a watch that buzzes at me when I, you know, haven't taken enough steps in an hour. I have a phone that buzzes at me to let me know you've been on Instagram too long today. You know, those things are, it's helpful data. I appreciate it, you know, and I don't totally ignore it, but I don't always change my behavior because of that kind of thing. I wonder if something that's truly on your person in a way where it's, it's, you know, line of sight, that that would change behavior in a more healthy way for anyone. I mean, I, I, if it, if it did for me, I'd be super excited to try it out. But I wonder what, how that changes just, you know, in people's brains. Yeah, it's, it's like instant, the difference is this is instant feedback. It sees what you're doing. It's not inferring it. Well, I guess it's inferring it because it's machine learning. But you know what I mean? Like it sees what you see and can immediately say, hey, you turned away from your laptop with a little beep. So that feels different to me, but I don't know, in practice, would you just turn it off? Feels like you have a very annoying cop just behind you. I think that key is you're in control of that cop, though. You can turn it off. You can tell it what's productive and what isn't. So it's not like somebody else is doing this. And we didn't mention all of this is on device. None of this goes to a cloud service. Oh yeah, that's good. I think, I think that, yeah, the, you know, the sort of, you know, tapping on your shoulder, you know, cop situation of this whole thing is like, it really just depends on does this change behavior where someone's like, I really need to focus better. I really need to do these tasks and I can't be distracted and I know I'm bad at that and I need help. Does it actually help or does it turn into like a resentful situation? Because I think a lot of the other kind of equivalent options that we have now, you know, app based stuff. I often just ignore. Gotcha. Well, the Wall Street Journal has a report on the state of autonomous robot boats, everyone. There are not enough boats to do all the scientific research, naval patrols or shipping of goods. So autonomous boats would cut down costly things like crew cabins, toilets, possibly be cost competitive with trucking. UK based sea kits, 12 meter long ship is equivalent to a 60 meter, 60 meter ship with humans aboard, but consumes one 100th of the fuel. That's not big savings. The challenge for autonomous boats includes weathering storms. 41 crude ships were lost in 2019 to things like rogue waves and fires. That is something that you have to consider whether you're crude or not. An autonomous boat must also navigate around other boats. Make sure you don't collide in the water. Rudy Neganborn, a professor at TU Delft told the Wall Street Journal, quote, Technically, it's not possible yet to make an autonomous ship that operates safely and efficiently in crowded areas and in port areas. But we're getting there. And already being able to navigate the seas is a big deal. It's a very different proposition from autonomous vehicles on ground, autonomous cars and trucks. It is much easier to navigate the seas when you're not in the port, when you're actually on the open sea. And we also don't have a lot of boats or people to do research on the ocean, to map the ocean floor, to go explore other parts of the ocean in the sea. So there are applications that aren't just making freight less costly and especially on bigger freight boats on tankers and things like that. The crew isn't huge and they have sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of merchandise. So it's not going to replace that, but it could add to the possibilities of different kinds of ships, which is interesting. Yeah, I think that is fascinating because, you know, the idea of, you probably imagine when you think of autonomous boats like, Oh, those big container ships, you just make those all autonomous, but it seems like it's the opposite. Like those may be the last things to become autonomous because of what you're talking about the cost savings isn't that much. And Roger was telling me in our prep meeting that the fuel, the bunker fuel used by those big boats really does need human supervision to work safely. And it's really difficult to automate that. So you might want to change them to a different kind of fuel that adds to the expense. So yeah, this is not going to fix everything. But you know, think how many times have you heard somebody say, Oh, we explore space with all these robots, but there's so much we don't know about the ocean. Well, we build our own robotic boats to go explore the ocean too. Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Facebook is warning Australia, it will quote, stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram. Why would they do that? Well, it will happen, says Facebook, if a plan to force negotiations with news publishers to pay for content. In other words, Facebook would be forced to negotiation to pay publishers for content goes through. How would it do that? How would it stop people in Australia from sharing news? Well, Facebook notified its users that its terms of service will change so that as of October 1st, it quote, can remove or restrict access to your content services or information. If we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook. It didn't say how in practice it would tell whether you were sharing news that falls under the definition of this code or not. That devil is still yet to be revealed in the details. This is all because of the proposed Australian news media bargaining code. So what's that? It requires Google and Facebook specifically, no one else right now, just Google and Facebook to negotiate paid licenses for using news content on their platforms. The companies must license if they wish to allow any news content on their platform. They don't have a choice. The code says Facebook and Google cannot discriminate against Australian providers. So if they want to remove Australian publishers to avoid paying, Facebook would have to remove all news from its platform for anyone viewing it from Australia. This plan was up for review. Consultation ended August 28 and the final version from Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission, the ACCC, will be put before the parliament for a vote. Hence the ratcheting up of the rhetoric. Now, why are they doing this? Google and Facebook have increased their share of advertising while advertising has declined on news publishers sites and in news publishers publications. The logic goes that sharing news on Facebook and Google is taking ad revenue from content creators, giving it to Facebook and Google, without compensating the content creators, the publishers for it. So the code is an attempt to remedy that. Now, who gets to benefit from this? Who is a news publisher? Eligible media companies must meet various requirements including having revenues exceeding $150,000 a year and must have a certain focus on the Australian market. So it doesn't benefit everybody who says something newsy. There's a definition. But Google and Facebook argue that news content isn't a great revenue driver for them. They argue that ad revenue at news outlets is declining for other reasons. It's not their fault. And if anything, exposure of links and news on Facebook and Google drives traffic to the publishers and helps them. It doesn't hurt. That's what Google and Facebook say. Facebook Australia's managing director, Will Easton, wrote in a blog post that quote, over the first five months of 2020, we sent 2.3 billion clicks from Facebook's news feed to Australian news websites at no charge. He's like, we didn't make you pay for that. You're not to buy an ad. We just sent you all that traffic for free. Now you want to make us pay? Facebook said, quote, news represents a fraction of what people see in their news feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us. So what the left Facebook is asking you to call is if we got rid of news, we'd be fine. We'd make plenty of money. People would still use Facebook. In fact, University of Canberra's 2020 digital news report did find that 39% of Australians use Facebook for general news. Now, the ACCC wrote in response to all of this quote, Facebook already pays some media for news content, which is true. The code simply aims to bring fairness and transparency to Facebook and Google's relationship with Australian news media businesses. And the code isn't just about payments. This is worth considering as well. Another aspect of the code would require Google and Facebook to give news publishers advanced notice of changes to algorithms. Facebook says this would give Australian news organizations an unfair advantage. And Google has warned that its search results would be less relevant and helpful if this plan is put into effect because of that same alleged unfair advantage. So there you go. We have the publishers saying, hey, you took all of our ad money. You need to pay for that content that you're using to make money now. That only seems fair. Facebook and Google are saying, no, no, no, we're helping you. You'd be in worse shape if it wasn't for us. Why should we also pay you for that? I have seen this story being played out so many times. In Europe, we've had that multiple times in France, in Germany, in Spain, mostly with Google for Google News, but it never ends well for the publishers. And when Facebook is saying, we'll be fine without you, I would be inclined to think that they are that would be the case. Now, that might actually be part of the problem because Facebook and a handful of other companies are so big now that they would be fine with any of anything. So there's no way to apply pressure on them. And the issue with ad revenue being transferred from publishers to Facebook and Google is indeed something to consider. That being said, I don't see how the Australian media lobbies can win this one. Because the other thing to consider as well is if Facebook and or Google exceed to those demands, they're going to see many, many different countries come and demand the same thing. And they don't want that. But it's already happening with Cynil in France, you know, with a different law, but similar situation. And, you know, just as I don't share a lot of news on Facebook, but I know that a lot of people do, and that is a place that that things get circulated. And if I were to say, hey, Patrick, this thing happened, and you were like, well, I'm okay, I don't want to just believe you where's your source. And that news source is somehow blocked. That does not seem like a win for either of us. And that could be an Australia that could be anywhere. And so that I wonder how this whole concept of what is a new source is going to be enforced. And I guess you just have a bunch of domains that someone has decided are you know that the news sources that again are making 150 K a year or or better. You know, news is a really loose term. It gets it gets quite muddy. I guess there would be a number of organizations that would come and ask for money from Facebook and Google that maybe wouldn't qualify. It becomes it's a it's a mess. I don't know that it won't need to be addressed at some point. I think there are growing concerns that are growingly legitimate about all of this. But in this specific instance, I yeah, I don't see how it could work. Well, that's another part of this is if Facebook kicks off all news, it doesn't kick off all links. And so suddenly you can link to fly by night sources that aren't vetted and aren't professional. And and so this this is Facebook thrown around its weight and saying we are the platform in which people communicate with each other and we're going to use that power. To force you away from putting this law in place. You can think the law is wrong and also think that Facebook's power is too much at the same time. Those are not those are not necessarily contradictory thoughts. Well, we know where the good news goes. And that's our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on others at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com and help us know what you care about talking about. Looks like we have a friend of mine in the mailbag. It does Tom. In fact, your friend, who is a high school teacher in Maine, the state was having a problem. He has half his class at home, half in the classroom. Everyone's wearing masks socially distance. He was trying to crack how to make sure the kids in the room could be heard, but also hear all the kids on zoom to make sure that he could be heard when teaching. Here's what he came up with in case you're dealing with a similar situation in your school or a church or anything. You know, where you're where you're doing these kinds of events for the first time. He says, so I figured out a workaround in my class today. We have a laptop and an iPad. So I'm signed to zoom on both with the laptop volume muted and laptop zoom on mute. The camera is pointed towards the class and the laptop video going to to a projector that the whole class can see the iPad video is off. The mic is up and unmuted on zoom. So essentially the iPad is my wireless mic. I can also carry the iPad around if it's just me talking and the sound is great. And I put it on a desk in the front middle during discussions to pick up the students their audio for videos sharing on the iPad is a challenge. So I exit the meeting on the iPad, share the video on my laptop with its volume on at the point and after the video rejoin on the laptop. If you don't have an iPad, perhaps logging in on our smartphone would also do the trick. Maybe not as good of sound, but an option. Yeah, the thing he was asking me about over text message last night is do I need to have everybody on their own zoom call even if they're in the classroom? Is it there a way I can make sure that everybody can see in here without having to have everybody also logged in with headphones on? And I was suggesting like, well, you get like a snowball or something, you know, put it in the middle of the room. But, you know, through the course of this brainstorming, he came up with with his own solution here, which I think is genius. Like you make the iPad your portable mic, essentially, and then everything else is going through the laptop. You know, he's got a few particular cases where you adjust that. But I thought that was a clever solution and would be useful for some folks out there because a lot of people are doing similar stuff, whether it's exactly the same in the classroom or like you said, Sarah, elsewhere. Well, thank you, Tom's friend. I'm sure a few people in our audience will appreciate that little life hack. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Mike Acons, Tim deputy and Daniel Dorado. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja. Patrick, what's been going on since we saw you last? I guess there's a new episode of Pixels where I summarize the entirety of the gaming news of the summer, all of it in 60 minutes. If you're interested, just go to notpatrick.com. The link is right there on the page, notpatrick.com, and the show is called Pixels. Excellent. Also, Work Insanity is in the second half of season two. It's Patrick and I giving you tips on working from home. We've got a good one up right now. If you want to check it out, go to workinsanity.net. And of course, you can always support this show directly on Patreon. Lots of perks in there. In fact, it's September 1st, so a lot of those perks get rolled out today to all the folks who supported us. Thank you for that. There's some Len Peralta free digital art that goes out to folks. Some folks get to have us record stuff. In fact, Paulo got us to record his ways navigation directions. So we are now telling him to turn right in 300 meters. Thank you, Paulo. I hope you enjoy that. And he's going to share that with everybody else as well. We're working on that. So get in on the action. Go to dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Ride us early and often. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. Bye. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.