 Coming up on D T N S India widens its ban on Chinese apps. Microsoft's three part plan to fight deep fakes and why refresh rates won't help your game skills. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020 in the tiny little town of Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane, the vast metropolis of Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. I'm a shows producer, Roger Jane. We were just talking about Sarah's experience watching the wire and Scott's experience seeing Metallica at a drive-in theater. If you want to get that expanded conversation, become a member and get good day internet at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung has hopped on the trend of mid range 5G phones announcing the 6.6 inch Super AMOLED Galaxy A42 5G with a rear quad cam layout. It's launching later this year, but we don't have a price yet. Samsung also announced the 10.4 inch Galaxy Tab A7 tablet with quad Dolby Atmos speakers in gold, silver and gray. No pricing for that either, though. And the wireless charger trio. This is the one I'm actually kind of excited about, which can charge three devices at once. Sam Mobile says it will sell it for 99 euros. JBL announced five new Bluetooth speakers, the JBL Go 3. It's an IP67 dust and waterproof device with five hours of battery life for thirty nine ninety five. That'll happen in October. The chip for has a carbon, excuse me, what I say? Oh, I didn't say it right. The clip for has a carbiner is an IP67 as well and 10 hours of battery life. That's a lot. That'll be in Europe in November and December here in the US for sixty nine dollars ninety five cents. The extreme three is improved drivers and base with 15 hours of battery and a phone charger and syncing capability in Europe in October and November in the US for three hundred forty nine ninety five. And the party box on the go comes with lights and the wireless mic plus mic and guitar inputs as well as auxiliary and USB that's in Europe now. And in US it'll end up on or end up here on October 25th for two hundred dollars, two hundred ninety nine dollars ninety five cents and the party box three ten has all that. And I handle in wheels with two hundred and forty watts of sound in Europe later this month in the US. October 25th for ninety nine ninety five. After previewing new chips at Architecture Day twenty twenty or earlier this year, Intel officially announced its first eleventh gen Tiger Lake processors for laptops with Thunderbolt four support Wi-Fi six. You can get episodes to know a little more that will explain what those are bumps and performance and battery life over the Ice Lake line. The eleventh gen designs will be in Intel's U series now called UP three and why series class chips or UP four led by the core I seven one eighteen five G seven base speed starting at three gigahertz a maximum single core turbo boost of up to four point eight gigahertz and a maximum all core boost of up to four point three gigahertz. Tiger Lake also features Intel's Iris Z or XE integrated graphics with ninety six C use and a maximum graphic speed of one point three five gigahertz has a built in AI engine which Intel says will improve video calls support such as better background blurring and it can also support an eight K HDR display or up to four four K displays at once products with Tiger Lake inside are going to start arriving this autumn and there will be a bunch of them designed to offset a new digital services tax introduced by the UK government. Apple is adding an extra two percent on developer fees on the app store in the UK on top of the usual 20 percent value added tax known as VAT or VAT. Google is increasing fees for all advertising bought on Google ads and YouTube in the UK by two percent as well and starting September first Amazon is also increasing fees. So that was yesterday for third party sellers by two percent. Meanwhile Reuters reports that Russian lawmaker Fedot Tumasov a member of the state Duma which is Russia's Russia's lower house and its parliament has proposed a bill that would see all Apple store transactions capped at 20 percent down from its usual 30. Will that work? Not sure yet. But it is being proposed. The law would also mandate that a third of the App Store Commission would be paid to the Russian government and a fund to train people in I.T. It was just drive Apple crazy. Not even the conflict is the idea of different percentages in different countries. It's a fortnight moment happening in Russia. Podcast production company Parkast which Spotify acquired last year is unionizing. The company says it wants a commitment from Spotify to cover things like overtime compensation and clear job descriptions equitable pay transparent salary bands and movement around creative and IP Spotify now or sorry now can choose to recognize the union voluntarily which would be followed by contact or contract negotiations or request a vote from union members to prove that they have support Spotify owned Gimlet media and the ringer are also organized through the WGA union and still that is in negotiations. All right. Let's talk a little bit about India. India's I.T. ministry has said that the Indian cybercrime coordination center and home ministry sent a recommendation which sounds like it's optional but it's not to block 118 more apps considered quote prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India defense of India security of state and public order. So when they order these blocks that means the app stores have to keep them from being downloaded ISPs get the order as well. I'm not sure exactly what if anything they're expected to do. There are ways around it if you're using a VPN such but essentially it makes it really hard to get these apps if you're in India. Among the list of Chinese apps being blocked this time are popular game PUBG several of the WeChat spinoffs and Baidu. The main version of WeChat was already blocked along with TikTok previously but they had a few WeChat branded sub apps that are now on the list as well. A total of 224 Chinese apps have now been ordered blocked in India. You know second most populous nation on earth next to China in a border dispute with China. We talk about gosh what if the US were to stop WeChat from being available in the app store. India is not only doing that to WeChat but to 224 Chinese apps and then it's already done it no no in 45 days unless you sell or anything they're gone in a huge country. Yeah I mean it's it's given how some of these things are playing out in other places such as the US and how it's being played out differently. You know India kind of going like now you're just blocked. We don't we don't we don't want these apps. I mean maybe if the Chinese apps in question could come back and figure something out sorry about that. My phone is ringing. Don't want to talk to you right now. If there could be some negotiation in the future maybe so but you know India taking a hard line here and yeah like you mentioned Tom I mean a lot of people in India and there are a lot of other apps they can use. Yeah I do the interesting bit to me the reason I was I was super curious about the PUBG being kind of singled out and it's because they did single them out in their parliamentary standing committee. They brought it up as an issue given its effect on youth like hey a lot of kids play this. We're concerned about that and it's Chinese shut it down like Thompson no 45 days no go past go just straight to jail for these apps and it's quite the precedent for a giant country. Well if I told you that there was a new gadget called the Premier. What would you think it was. Anybody. I already know so I can't really imagine. Yeah I guess I guess not I'm not I'm not my imagination. All right I'll just tell you Samsung announced the Premier which is a 4k short throw laser projector. Samsung says it can be placed directly in front of a wall and still present an optimal picture. So that's good for folks who say I don't really have a room to mount a projector and get that distance and in all the things that might have held them back before. The Premier includes woofers and acoustic beam virtual surround sound as well and the Premier LS not P 9T rather offers up to a 130 inch projection with peak displays of 2800 anti lumens and HDR 10 plus. There's also the LS P 7T with 100 120 inch projection and a little bit less brightness. Both models support the UHD filmmaker mode and they're coming to Europe and the US and Korea later this year. But again don't have prices. I'm guessing expensive if I had to guess. But I have friends and family in particular. I just talked to them about this the other day that are eyeing this and want this real bad. So projection enthusiasts and those who have maybe makeshift and or really well made home theater systems probably pretty stoked about. Yeah. Short throw isn't new but as Sarah said it's super convenient. So some people were willing to take a hit in quality in order to have the convenience of being able to just put it up against the wall and not have to have to figure out where to stick it in a small room. But this is up in the game 130 inch screen projection Max 4K with some nice sound like you say Scott probably going to be pricey but it is something that is super convenient. And as we've heard from Robert Herron every time he's on the show you know projection is his favorite because it gives you flexibility and high quality at the same time. Right. And you're going to it's going to last you a while 4K. You know we still there's still the conversation about whether 4K is truly giving you that much more than 1080p. And certainly would 8K even do less for your overall experience. This is going to last a while. This will be expensive but an investment that will make sense for a lot of people. I mean I'm. Yeah forget the 4K it's the HDR 10 plus plus the brightness that 2800 ansi lumens are the LSP 90. That's that's great. Yeah the brightness is huge in this situation like anybody who's tried to do projection theater. It's terrible if you have bad lumens. So that's huge. Like I feel like this is going to going to tide people for a long time and they'll be OK investing a little extra money. Yeah. Well I mean it gives you lumens say hey great. Thank you. Thanks I'm saying. Also just having gone through a somewhat challenging mounting of my TV when I moved into the place that I live now because it's above a fireplace. I also have the added complexity of all of my walls or wood panel. So we'd have to rethink that before you'd have to get a screen you know which does complicated screen or you know cleverly paint or you know that sort of thing. But but the idea of just having fewer things that have to be mounted that are heavy and there's cords you know and that and and more kind of like oh where do you want to project this right now type thing you know even if there's a piece of art you know take it off the wall and I you know now you have a TV. That's pretty cool. That's right. Turn lumens into lumen aid. All right not just fishing for titles I promise. Twitter will add pinned tweets and short descriptions to some trending topics so you can figure out why they're trending in 17 different markets. Twitter says more than 500,000 people tweeted the words why is this trending. That's the the entire phrase in 2019 pinned tweets will be suggested by an algorithm and chosen by a human person as opposed to a robot person. Descriptions will be human written. Also Twitter announced the launch of two new accessibility teams. The CE team will work on accessibility within Twitter from office space to policy standards and the EAT team will work on making products and features more accessible. Automated captions for audio and video are expected to launch in early 2021. That's so good. That is so good. Twitter took a lot of heat when they put out some of the audio stuff particularly for not having captions just making it inaccessible. So this is this is long overdue but good job. Twitter on that the trending thing Sarah I know we were talking in our pre show that neither one of us really look at the trending topics but every once in a while you do run across that thing where you're like why is this being tweeted by people so much. Oh very much so I use a third party app. I use tweet but there are others and but you know I think Tom you said you use regular low web Twitter but you don't really look at trending topics and so I do see that a lot. Why is this trending and I don't know the context because I'm like I don't you know things trend all the time and you know and then you kind of like is it global or is it U.S. only and who's got the time. Some of you do and that's fine but but but yeah good for you to have a little bit more context in those times where I'm like but why is this trending what's the news story because I sometimes end up blind searching and kind of looking at stuff I'm like I'm not really sure what this all is and then I have to parse it and if Twitter is saying hey let's curate this a little bit more by giving you contextual information especially if the news topic and pin some stuff at the top that would be helpful. Yeah I like you say I use the regular old Twitter app but I never go to the trending topics I highly recommend never go to the trending topics do not use it as a news source it will make your life better but I will see those hashtags in the people I follow and I'll be like why is a go to hashtag what is it this time like and and so then I might actually go to trending topics in the future to get that explanation I think this is a really good yeah maybe there would be fewer fakes so and so died because that's what people always assume anytime anyone's trending on Twitter. Yeah like if somebody who's the last remaining golden girl or I forgot her name sorry. A strawberry. Betty White. So when I see Betty White's name and trending I do what other people do I freak out I go no Betty White national treasure she can't be dead no go look at the trending stuff and it's no she did a video with Snoop Dogg or something. But yeah but that's a very good example if you're like oh no oh no is what I think it is yeah why is it trending. It almost never is but now you can be sure. Yeah there you go. The story is so February 2020 a tech conference is happening with people attending it. The first tech conference to host attendees in person since before March. Ifa kicks off in Berlin September 3rd we've been talking about you know stuff happening in advance of ifa or ifa announcements coming out because Samsung usually has a huge booth at ifa they're not this year they're just doing their announcements on their own but there are some companies at ifa in Berlin displaying to the five thousand people attending usually this conference has two hundred thousand attendees or more they are limiting attendance per day I think I couldn't find exact confirmation except back when they announced it in April but at that time they were saying it would be limited to a thousand per day. So if you've got a three day conference that's three thousand plus you have the vendors and there's like eight hundred journalists attending in person so that probably gets it up to five thousand. Most of the business of ifa is still being done virtually everything's streaming online you can go see all the announcements as they happen online without being there but I find it interesting where CES was going to have an in-person in January then backed off of it because they said they just didn't think people were comfortable that ifa stuck to their guns in Germany which is having a little bit of a resurgence very small one of the virus saying no we think if we just limit it we can do it safely and it's still worth doing. Yeah I think this may be I don't know if it'll be a trendsetter or not because we'll have to see. They're kind of I was talking before the show they're kind of in a weird rock and hard place because if even one person gets sick then this is going to be called oops too soon what have we done. If nobody gets sick I'd be shocked because you're going to have people are just sick anyway or came sick has nothing to do with the convention they didn't know they had it when they left. People always were already talking about that from CES last year in January like oh people got sick maybe it was the coronavirus like well maybe but also CES people always get sick at these things. Yeah I had people in November from BlizzCon who were super sick and thought maybe early and there were a lot of Chinese players from the eSports teams there and they brought it with them and you know we people can go on for days about speculation about this sort of thing so I feel like they're kind of hosed either way and I just hope it's a good conference for those who attend and it's a minimum amount of spread of anything is possible but I don't I don't see how it feels like a no wind to me on the other end of it. And you have to assume that you know everyone involved with putting EFA on has thought long and hard about how to keep people as safe as possible and I have no doubt that they will do their best. I have never been to EFA but if I'm going to compare it to a variety of other conventions I've been to yeah it's kind of shoulder shoulder situation you're touching things a lot of this is tactile things where you're like oh cool let me look at this pick it up that kind of thing and you know handshaking and just none of that will be able to happen and you have much fewer people in any sort of enclosed area at one time it can be done I guess in theory but I I hope for the best. Well let's hope for the best here it this is actually kind of cool Acer announced the 24.5 inch Predator X25 gaming monitor with a 360 Hertz refresh rate you heard me right people that means frames are displayed every 2.8 milliseconds the Predator X25 rather also comes with the Nvidia G-Sync processor to reduce tearing and runs Nvidia's reflex latency analyzer to report on mouse and monitor in PC performance no price no availability yet but if you're wondering if this is something that you actually want or need sounds cool but do your eyes need this Alex Wiltshire over at PC Gamer had a really good write-up about frame rates and refresh rates and what the human eye can really see and what it actually can't turns out among other things peripheral vision is different but then straight ahead vision so detecting motion is different than detecting light for example and when you can probably see the difference above about 20 Hertz in fact people who game more often get better at it it doesn't mean it'll make you a better game player so if you're already questioning and arguing go read that article for more but I guess the question now is if you know that you're not going to be better at a game by seeing better do you care about seeing better well and also can you actually tell the difference and there's also a tendency for gamers to I've done this you'll you'll see something that's previous gen and then you'll see new gen and you'll go oh you can see how different it is but if you actually went and quantified the differences it's actually pretty small or if you did a comparison back to back you'd see how small it is but in this particular case like frame rate and refresh rate and all of that has been really important for gamers for a while because we have seen tangible jumps in the in the technology and it's translated you know with evidence that it looks better feels better seems smoother all that sort of stuff or eyes are detecting more smooth motion better frame rates and so on but we're getting to the point of diminishing returns a little bit like 4k to 8k or 8k to 16k we're going to get to a point where we just can't tell the freaking difference on our 75 inch TV same things here I don't think anybody with a 240 hertz or 144 hertz monitor is going to see substantial differences between that and this but if you don't already have something higher than 60 or 59 then maybe this is the jump to take because now you're going to be so maxed out it'll never matter and depending on the price right unless you're just paying for something that doesn't matter but you're also getting other things like the reflex latency analyzer and stuff like that which that might make it worthwhile but the 360 hertz may not be the thing that matters here in your decision the thing I took away from Wilchers article at pcgamer.com was that yes those of you saying but I can tell the difference can tell the difference but it doesn't mean anything it just means you can tell it's there it means you notice tearing it means that your peripheral vision is maybe a little more acute because you've trained it it doesn't improve your gaming because it's your other visual aspects that matter in your response time and so saying I can tell and having the feeling that it's better doesn't actually affect your gameplay and so I found that it's very fascinating it might just make your overall experience better it might make sure and that's a different thing if you're like yeah but it's just more enjoyable because i'm not being distracted by tearing and getting all frustrated right then you're back to price and until we know that that'll that'll be a hard thing to get but yeah sometimes the cutting edge is stuff you don't need but you still want to be kind of but even that it's like 50 60 even the ability to tell the difference starts to max out at a certain point maybe a hundred I don't know they don't really know that's the thing different people everybody's different hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com microsoft has launched a three part plan to fight deep fakes feel like we need to have a whiteboard up behind me the first is a tool meant for political campaigns and journalists this is not something you'll go download yourself it's called the video authenticator it detects quote the blending boundary of the deep fake and subtle fading or grayscale elements that might not be detectable to the human eye so this is machine learning trained and it's looking for things go yep that's indicative that this might be faked uh it will deliver a percentage frame by frame as you're watching the video uh that includes a square on the video showing green when the video appears to be more than 50 percent chance of real as well as the percentage number and then it turns red if it's more than 50 percent chance faked and you get that percentage number the tool was trained off the face forensic plus plus public data set and tested on the deep fake detection challenge data set so these are top tools microsoft wrote the fact that deep fakes are generated by ai that can continue to learn makes it inevitable that they will beat conventional detection technology so they're not saying this is the silver bullet they're saying this is part of an arms race however in the short run such as the upcoming us election advanced detection technologies can be a useful tool to help discerning users identify deep fakes microsoft's partnering with the ai foundation to make the tool available to organizations that need it campaigns and journalists can contact the reality defender 2020 project to learn more that's at rd2020.org microsoft doesn't stop in there though it knows deep fakes can slip through detection it's also working on a system to let content producers add digital hashes and certificates to their media this would allow you to verify authenticity users could install a browser extension and then as we are looking at something if we know it's from a creator that says yes i've authenticated mine you can check certificates and match hashes to certify with high accuracy whether that's the authentic content on altered microsoft made that tool for the bbc led trusted news initiative its verification arm called project origin will test the system with the aim of making it the standard so the first project the authenticator the video authenticator aims to detect fakes if it doesn't detect a fake that doesn't mean it isn't fake but the ones that does detect are very likely fakes so that's useful on one side the second project is the other side it aims to detect reality if content isn't authenticated it doesn't mean it isn't real but if it does validate with this tool it very likely is real now there's a third system i mentioned it's just general awareness so microsoft's partnering with the university of washington a deep fake detection database company called sensiti and usa today to raise awareness of deep fakes the partnership launched the spot the deep fake quiz at aka.ms slash spot deep fakes where you can learn about synthetic media develop critical media literacy skills and gain awareness of the impact of synthetic media on democracy if you're like i already know deep fakes exist this will help you understand what they can and can't do they're also going to support a public service announcement campaign to encourage people to pause and make sure information is reputable before they share or promote it so i noticed something the other day on facebook there was a video that got a lot of traction i'm gonna have to get into the actual video but it was a video that was edited to look like an interview happened that never happened and that's not a deep fake no it's not it's just an edit and yeah which is why which is why bring it up if if this stuff could also i know they're not stating this directly it's all about deep fakes but if this stuff could also help us down that road because i'm i'm actually a little more worried about the second tool could help there if the original video maker had authenticated it and you had an extension running you would have been able to see oh this has been altered by that extension now that said we didn't need the help everyone very quickly said ah that's been edited like i found out about that video because someone was pointing out that it had been edited not because i saw the original video right yeah and then i guess what i'm saying is at the point of view deep fakes or edits whatever they may be at the point of viewership that's when this needs to happen or that's what we need to work toward because finding out after the fact or after it's been shared 50,000 times oh by the way that's fake well then a lot of people that already it fits their narrative have already accepted it as real and moved on to five other videos that may have been real or fake and they're not even remembering that when they just know it you know served the purpose it served i think i think ultimately it'd be great if my 82 year old mom could see a video and see that there's a little dot at the bottom that says you know does not authenticate or whatever and give her a little bit of hover over information or something i've something like that i feel like is the future for this stuff and if not then it's a lot of well i found out later or i was i'm media savvy so i understand when this stuff's fake because i learned this thing so now i got to tell all my friends who aren't that way like it just feels like we need a i don't know if it's a standard or not but some way of like oh yeah this is fake and i'm being told that it is or and it's not just simply like twitter saying manipulated media click if you still want to see it like more than that like metadata i would like to see more of that happen and come out of these great programs these are great i love to see microsoft doing this is great yeah i mean this stuff is this is this is very cool and i was mentioning to the guys before the show quite honestly i mean i'm glad it hasn't happened but i am shocked that deep fake stuff hasn't become more of a way to get out of you know bad behavior and i don't i mean not even calling out anybody specifically but i can think of you know videos yeah that were made to look like somebody was saying something that they weren't and then another video and maybe these are you know opposing views on on one hand where i kind of go like well that one was so this one probably is also fake right because they're just using the same methodology but that's not necessarily true and i just don't i don't see a lot of people being like that's clearly a fake video i never said those things at which case somebody who is also in the room would have to be like well you did and i have you on a recording and then there's a whole you know there's a whole other conversation to be had but i'm surprised especially in you know it certainly in the u.s. a heating up political climate that we haven't seen more conversations about deep fakes beyond kind of stuff that someone says like literally what happened and then a bunch of other people go that's just fake yeah because it's really hard to make this stuff stick keep in mind that what we get upset about is that somebody was spreading it around what we don't seem to see is people changing their mind usually people swayed by a deep fake are swayed because it reinforces what they already believe and pointing out that it's fake doesn't change that because they already believed it yeah so this stuff really doesn't have much of an effect because it's very quickly outed which i think is why sarah you don't see people trying to like use deep fakes like oh that's not real it was fake because it's very quickly shown that it is real it doesn't i mean we can i think it's important i think the awareness part of this is the most important versus actually trying to catch stuff because it doesn't seem to actually change minds just reinforces people and awareness is the best way to keep going along that route of like be you know be skeptical about what you see pause before you share something to make sure it's true well uh don't pause before you jump into the conversation in her discord because everything there is true like you know grain of salt but they're wonderful people you can join by linky to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns let's check out the mailbag let's do it right before the show big jim wrote in our discord regarding autonomous vessels because we were talking about autonomous boats yesterday on the show big jim says yes it makes sense for smaller applications such as C's subsea cable lane or basic exploration whale monitoring yes we still have vessels to do that however i can tell you there's a huge amount of interest from the steamship lines right now for containerized vessel vessels and row row which is roll on roll off like a car carrier vessels to go down the automated road there are several reasons for this but the most current is thanks to the wonderful joker of 2020 covid due to covid there's been less and less opportunities for vessels to change out their crews in fact the seafarers international union allowed vessels to maintain the same crews beyond the normal three to five months by an extra three to four months then when they finally did start to swap out crews there was no country willing to allow the transfers to take place for over a month so don't count out the big nine vocc's that's vessel ocean common carrier to try and push this as much as possible in fact reported last year on dtns i brought up the story that mitsui ocean line or mol which is a member of the one federation of japanese vocc's has been testing autonomous vessels between mainland china and japan thank you big jim for always being on the beat appreciate it seriously also thanks to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including chris miff mark gibson and reed fischler also thanks to the one the only scott johnson scott what's been going on well i'm happy to report that tom and i and our little project on the side current geek chronicles which we've been working very hard on is in full swing for its season episode two dropped yesterday last night you can grab it now if you're already subscribed to current geek you'll get it if you haven't then go find current geek chronicles at current geek dot com or wherever you get your podcast we do a deep dive on sort of why is wrestling so popular why do people nerd out about it the way that others nerd about their favorite thing tom and i are a little bit noobs to it although we know enough about wrestling to get in trouble so this is a great way to educate ourselves pulling some great guests actual pro wrestlers and talk about it i think people are really like it it's wrapped up in a very entertaining cool package that's at current geek dot com go check it out and give it a listen yeah and it's not just about wrestling and the wrestling episode is great whether you like wrestling or not but we also have an episode already in there about the history of the term manna how it ended up in video games we've got one coming out about the violent video game panic of the 1990s we've got one coming out about all those cables why do we have so many different cables scuzzy in usb so you want to get in on this and stay subscribed current geek dot com you can also support this show and get all kinds of cool content as well including no a little more no a little more as a podcast you can subscribe separately out there in the wild world or you can just have it delivered to you on a plate or rather in an rss feed at patreon.com slash dtns our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and we do love your feedback so keep it coming we're also live Monday through Friday and we would love you to join us at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live Justin Robert Young is with us tomorrow talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com time club hope you have enjoyed this program