 Keep on DTNs, could littering the Arctic with glass cool things down? Why a macaque is less resistant to new things than you are and pig tech. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, October 18th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech news of the day from Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Len Peralta. Roger Chang. That is Roger Chang. You can barely hear him, but he's definitely here. And also with us today is Blair Basterich, co-host of This Week in Science. Welcome back, Blair. Hello. Lovely to be back. Thank you for coming back. I'm glad we didn't scare you away last time. No, not at all. We've got some great stuff to talk about. We were just talking about the person that told Len he needed to clean his internet lines on our Good Day internet show. So if you'd like that conversation and more, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Motorola sent out an invite, event invite for November 13th in downtown Los Angeles, which will feature the, quote, highly anticipated unveiling of a reinvented icon. The invite appears to show the profile of a Motorola Razer version three, and Previa sources told CNET that the company also plans to release a vertically folding smartphone with the Razer name by the end of 2019. French blog, McGeneration, noticed icons in the first two betas of macOS Catalina version 1015.1 that might be a depiction of a 16-inch MacBook Pro. The icons have slightly thinner bezels than those of the 15-inch Pro icons, and have the number 16 in both file names. That's kind of the big giveaway there. A lot of speculation about whether or not there's a touch bar. All sorts of good stuff happens with images like this. Nintendo announced that it has sold 15 million switched units in North America since it launched in 2017. The Wii U sold 13.56 million units in North America total. NPD Group says that the switch has been the most popular console in the US for the last 10 months. Wow, that's big. And Ubico launched Ubico login for Windows, which lets you use its Ubiqui hardware security keys as a login factor on your local Windows OS account. The app works on Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. If you've used macOS or Linux, you've been able to use that for a while, but now the Windows folks can use it too. All right, let's talk a little bit about a breakup, Sarah. Yeah, it's a breakup. Image sharing site imager wrote in a blog post that it will no longer display content from Reddit's NSFW communities on its site, saying, rather dramatically, quote, over the years, these pages have put imager's user growth mission and business at risk, NSFW images previously uploaded to Reddit and hosted on imager will keep their original URLs. NSFW images can also still be uploaded to imager if they're marked hidden. Not sure how much that's going to help anybody, but you can do that. imager said that it wants to be a fun and entertaining place that brings happiness to the internet for many, many years to come. Reddit introduced its own native imaging hosting three years ago, so not sure how much it impacts Reddit, but it might impact some users. Yeah, I mean, imager exists because people wanted a place to host images to put on Reddit. So, you know, these two grew up together, but one of them has moved on from these kinds of things, and Reddit's, you know, I guess imager's saying it's just outgrown Reddit. Yeah, I mean, imager somewhat vaguely said, listen, this is not good for our business. You know, there is probably too many complaints about, you know, content that is controversial or upsetting or perhaps offensive. And maybe that has happened within imager's own team. Who knows? But yeah, I don't really see life changing for Reddit users all that much. End of an era, really. Especially because imager's doing right and saying, look, what's already there, we're not going to make disappear because that's just going to make a bunch of people angry. It's just that you can't, you can't port it over anymore. And they're not cutting off all of Reddit, just the NSFW place. I think this is them realizing that they're going to get sucked into something that they don't feel they want to defend in the future. And it's a way to just cut it off clean right now. Arctic Sea Ice has receded to historically low levels in a California non-profit organization called Ice911, which is a little too close to Kurt Vonnegut's Ice9 for my taste, but okay, proposes spreading a thin layer of 35 micrometer silicate beads across the ice to boost reflectivity and therefore slow down ice melting. Ice911 research's CEO, Leslie Field, says that thicker Arctic ice layer could lead to cooler temperatures worldwide. The company has actually run tests on ice-covered lakes in the Sierra Nevada, Minnesota and Alaska. And the results published in the journal Earth's Future showed increase in reflectivity and ice thickness. So this is peer reviewed research. It really does seem to have an effect. It would cost about $300 million estimated to cover the 9600 square miles of the Arctic. And before that happens, Field wants to get funding for a test in a part of the Arctic Ocean where ice is lost during the summer. So this isn't the kind of geoengineering company that's all big talk. They've got peer reviewed research, they want to do small tests to kind of study how it works. They've done testing with mammals to make sure that it's safe for land mammals anyway. They haven't done marine mammal testing, but they want to do that before they ever put this out there. Blair, you were just in the Arctic. How does this story strike you? So I was in the sub Arctic. I was in Churchill in Manitoba. Yeah, very close, but we were talking all about climate change. That's why I was there. I think the important piece of this is that just putting ice back is not going to solve a lot of climate change issues, but this is really addressing the fact that sea ice, more than just affecting polar bears and the animals that depend on it physically, is impacting the global climate system. So it's affecting the albedo effect at the poles and how much heat and light is reflected back off of our planet, reducing the amount of warming happening. But it's also changing the temperature of the ocean. It's this feedback effect where there's less ice, which means the ocean's hotter, which then affects climates and climate systems all over the planet. So knowing all of that, I think we know we have to reduce our carbon output. That's the bottom line, of course, but we really need to have a two-pronged approach, right? And that is reducing future carbon, but attacking the problems that we're currently seeing. And so I appreciate that this is looking at that second piece, because it doesn't get a lot of attention. I do think there's an opportunity to get stuck in that and say, okay, science will save us. Actually, the program I'm in, the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation, looks at specific messaging for climate change and how you can get stuck in what they call the swamp of climate change communication, where people kind of push it off as not their problem anymore. And this is one of them, is if you look at technology or science as a way, as a get out of jail free card for climate change, it can cause a lot of problems. But if you look at it this way, the way that this company is saying this is a bridge in between our long-term solution of less carbon, that's great. I will say, I saw in the article that their test on land mammals said that the silicate was too large to get in their respiratory pathways, which raises some red flags for me because if it's too large, that also means it could clog membranes. And I worry about bioaccumulation for marine animals in their stomachs or on their gills. If it's getting stuck on gills, then that could also build up over time. So I would want to see some long-term studies. But I think it's very interesting. It's a new kind of way to tackle this topic. Yeah, that's a really good point. 35 micrometers, not very big, right? So this would easily get eaten. And certainly for marine mammals get swallowed. So those are all good points. But like you said, I do like the fact that ICE 911 research is not just going for the like, we'll solve this. They're saying, we think we have an idea that might buy us some time and it's worth researching, and that's what we're doing. And that seems to be a reasonable approach. As crazy as it sounds to be like, we're just going to scatter glass all over the Arctic. Yeah. It's, they're smooth. They're not shards. But yeah, it needs to be done responsibly. This is the kind of thing you need to look at though. And there may be showstoppers along the way and you say, well, this isn't going to work out. But you need to be looking at all these kinds of things because this is how you build a strategy that makes sure we avoid something serious. Yeah. And I think the other thing that we talked about before was that the Arctic is kind of this weird no man's land where there's areas that are contested, there are areas that no one actually has a kind of final say on environmental impacts on. And so I appreciate that they're actually testing it in a space that has a government that's in control first so that they can kind of pull back if they need to and assess it as it goes. And they don't just throw their hands up and go, well, not my problem anymore. I mean, the biggest problem here may not even be the science of it or the environmental impact of it. It may be just getting someone to agree to let it be done. Because like you say, the Arctic doesn't have just one country in charge of it. Some places has no countries in charge. Right. Yeah. T-Mobile announced a partnership with the streaming startup Quibi providing its upcoming streaming service as part of an offering with the carrier. Whether the service will be discounted or even free for T-Mobile users or pre-installed on devices or something else has yet to be determined, we don't really have a whole lot of information now besides the fact that the two companies are working together. Quibi's streaming service will offer mobile focused premium content that's 10 minutes or less aimed at millennials and will charge $5 a month for the service with ads or $8 per month without ads when it launches. Quibi's just so weird. If you haven't been following this, the idea is Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman are creating the company to provide snackable content like around 10 minutes each episode so that you can easily watch it while you're waiting in line on your mobile device. And it's from big names. Steven Spielberg is doing a horror series for Quibi. My wife's company Rotten Tomatoes, she works for them. They're doing a series. NBC News, everybody is doing a series for Quibi. Got some TMZ in there too. All sorts of stuff. One of my big questions was how are you going to get people to try this? It's going to be hard enough to convince them that they want to pay for something that has ads in it, but how do you get them to even try it in the first place? This is one of the answers is you partner with a T-Mobile and you get it in front of a bunch of T-Mobile users as a free trial or an easy add-on or something like that. Yeah, to be clear, it's not an exclusive. You'll be able to watch Quibi content all over the place, but presumably T-Mobile users and customers will get some sort of discount or some, you know, maybe free bundle thrown into a particular plan. T-Mobile still has the T-Mobile Tuesday where they give away free stuff. So maybe they'll be given away free subscriptions to Quibi if you sign up on a Tuesday. That's how I got my MLB network, my MLB.tv subscription this year. So they do big things like that. I could see them doing it. I mean, unless I'm desperate on a plane or something, I'm not really watching long form content on mobile devices. So I get why this makes more sense. Yeah, you're waiting in line or you've got a few minutes at the bus stop or whatever it is. That does make sense. I still don't watch a lot of short form video content on my phone, but maybe that's because the right show doesn't exist for me yet. But then you look at something like Verizon's Go 90, which was around for a few years and kind of died in the water last year, I believe. And I wonder, okay, well, we don't really have any company that has proven this concept very well. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be Quibi, but it's still unclear to me who wants this. I mean, they have all the names, all the advertisers. This is the definitive moment for a quick bite of video. If they can't make it work, nobody can. I will say that. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jason Rossi announced that the Strategic Automated Command and Control System, or SAX, has moved to a, quote, highly secure, solid state digital solution as of June. If you don't know why that's a big deal previously, the system ran off of eight-inch floppies. It still runs on an IBM series one from the 1970s, but now they've got some solid state storage involved in that. SAX is one of many duplicative systems used by US Strategic Command to send emergency action messages from nuclear command centers to forces in the field. That's why they want to make sure that this system doesn't change fast. They need it to work reliably and solidly and throwing new technology at anything, as all of you in the audience know, is a great way to make things mess up. And you don't want to mess this up. Yeah, this isn't really a story about saying, oh, look at the government, they're just behind the times, aren't they? It's like, well, no, it's actually pretty big security issues at play here. Yeah, you can't hack a floppy disk, so that's a pretty... Yeah, well, as I point out in the story, you can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address very easily, and even with the solid state drives replacing the floppy disks, that's still the case. So, you know, talk about your secure messaging. I do wonder if it's encrypted, though. I didn't see any mention of that. Of course, they might not want to mention that because then people will be like, well, what kind of encryption? Yeah, let's get in there. That may be on purpose, actually. How about we talk about some pig technology, everyone? Yes. Okay, good. Glad you're excited. A paper published in Memelian Biology found evidence of pigs using tools. A group of scientists from several French institutions observed 11 instances of a Saiyan warty pig using sticks and bark to help build their nests at a zoo in Paris. Video shows the pigs holding sticks in their mouths, using the sticks to them dig smart pigs. The scientists gave the pigs spatulas and the pigs used them twice. Add pigs to the list of animals who use tools alongside cross-catching prey with sticks, otters cracking open shellfish with stones, and elephants covering watering holes with rocks. Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity to kind of crack open the question of what is a tool and what is tool use? This is a conversation we have on this week in science all the time. I had a story about these little bats that like to go into a particular shape of blade of grass that works as a megaphone for their calls, and I would call that tool use 100%, but not everyone would. And so I think this is a very clear case of tool use. They're using the stick, they reposition it in their mouth, and they use it just like a spade to dig this hole. But are there lots of animals out there doing a form of tool use that we just haven't even recognized? I'm going to argue, yes. This stuff is out there. There are inanimate objects that animals can use to make their lives easier. Evolutionary pressure would tell me, yes, they would find a way to do that. And if you're not watching the video or if you haven't seen this video, go look at it, because you might be thinking like, oh, so they just kind of just stick. No, they pick it up and they shovel with it. They literally are using it to shovel. Like, this is a kind of tool use in my mind, definitely, from the look at it. I think the question of do animals use tool or not isn't sophisticated enough anymore. It's what are the classes of tool use, right? What are sort of like maybe blind accidental tool use versus intentional tool use or some other delineation of them to be like, well, there's tool use the way we use it at a very sophisticated level. And then there are other levels as well. And the pigs are using it at a pretty good level. I mean, they're digging with it. If there was ever an argument to get some pigs as farm hands, I think this is it. They're going to dig the, you know, dig in your garden for you, put them to work. Yeah. And I mean, some animals store their tools. Some animals modify their tools. So I think that, you know, to Tom's point, this is where the question stretches further. And with these guys, that was just in zoos. So we really need to go out there and look for pigs using tools in the wild now. You hear that audience? Get out there and look for some pigs. Find us some tool use and pigs. And this video is feedback. And I did, we did call it pig tech. I was tempted to say they're using technology, but that, again, that's where the debate comes in. Like what is technology, which is a more sophisticated tool use versus what the pigs are doing here. And I, when the pigs start trying to sell their tools to ace hardware, that's when you know. Yeah. Well, I think their, their, uh, resistance to use the spatulas is a perfect example of that. The, the stud, the people studying it, the researchers were like, Oh, here's a better tool. And they didn't, most of them didn't really recognize that as an option. So I think that's where technology comes in is will you take the better option for a tool if you find it? Yeah. They're just not early adopters. Yeah. Thank you. In fact, that leads us to our main topic today. Uh, first though, if you want to get all the headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. So are you, I don't want to say, are you a little like a pig? Uh, but did that ring a bell to you? The idea of like, you know what? I've got a tool that works fine. Why do I need a new one? Uh, if you've recently scoffed at a new piece of software or a new device had proudly stuck to your old laptop or phone, uh, have you looked at new software innovations with disdain and stuck to how you've always done things? Well, you, my friend, are probably not a cappuccino or macaque, uh, because monkeys are better at adopting new ways of doing things. Blair, is that right to say? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so this is a study that, uh, looked at how monkeys can adapt to a new method of doing things, uh, that or a shortcut would be a way to say it. They, they took, um, monkeys in a trial and error using a computer, a touchscreen. Monkeys and humans had to follow a pattern. They had to push a striped square, then a dotted square, and then a triangle, and they would get a banana pellet. Yay, treat. For humans, they did the same thing and the reward was a jingle or points. So just like, yeah, you're smart. You did it right. Well, there's your problem right there. You should have been giving the humans the banana pellet too. We were probably jealous. I mean, for me, that would have been a deterrent, but, uh, but yeah, so it was, uh, the humans were signaled with that and then the monkeys got their pellets wrong results, got a timeout and no reward. So they knew right away if they got it wrong. Um, and after that strategy was learned, they did subsequent trials where the triangle showed up at the end or right away actually. So the triangle is the first thing they saw and the monkeys use that shortcut right away, but 61% of the humans did not. They went the old way. They did the stripes and then the dots and then the triangle and we're following the rules that they, yes, yes, exactly. Um, so 70% of the monkeys use the shortcut the very first time and only one human in the whole study used it the first time. Even after the humans watched videos of other people using the shortcut, most or 30% still of the humans did not use the shortcut. So this is a clear case of humans wanting to stick. I like the way I do things to the method. I already know that I get the treat at the end. So I'm just going to do that again rather than, you know, rethink this, which is, you know, it's, it's, it's quite an analogy for how a lot of people use technology. And so, yeah, I mean, you could look at it a bunch of different ways. You could look at it is you don't want to risk. It's not a risk that you want to take to lose out on something, which is how I feel sometimes when I'm adopting new adopting new technology is, do I want to give up my old phone that I know how it works for a new phone that I might not know how it works or it might not do the thing that I like best, right? But it could also say just the way that we learn is different. But what I actually think it, it shows us, at least in this case, because it was with a Western humans. And that's how I learned in school is you're supposed to do something a very specific way. And if you don't do it that way, you did it wrong. And that's how we teach kids from a very early age is do it this specific way. Now, what's interesting about that is the studies co-author Sarah Pope tested this with members of a semi-nomadic tribe in Namibia to try to eliminate the effect of Western education and still more than half resisted the new shortcut. So what that makes me wonder is not whether you're wrong about the conditioning, but whether the conditioning is actually part of how humans work. It's not that we're conditioned to follow the rules, it's we're conditioned to raise our young to follow the rules, if that makes any sense. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's yeah, how much of it is rule following, how much of it is a resistance to new things? How much of it is related to risk? I think there's a lot of layers here, but I do think it's very cool that the monkeys picked up right away. Oh, this is going to get me the pellet sooner. I'm on it. Yeah. It's funny when you talk about something like Blair, like a new phone that you may or may not like as much as your old phone, it's like, okay, well, you kind of make that personal choice for yourself and the world still spends. But this study does open up questions about much larger issues and the way that humans try to tackle issues and the fact that we haven't always done a good job of that. For example, there was an example used about the latest housing crisis and the fact that even though there were signs that lenders should work differently with people who thought that they had enough money to buy houses, that wasn't the case because everyone was just kind of following protocol. So it's really fascinating that not just that a monkey might have less cognitive bias, but how humans kind of do this to themselves, ourselves. It could actually be related to a similar cognitive bias that humans have, which is the sunk cost fallacy, which I think about all the time. I stood in this line at the grocery store, it's moving slower, but I've been here so long, it's got to be my turn next. I've put in so much time into this that I shouldn't give up on it. And there are other species that do a better job of giving up on a foraging behavior that's not working to go try somewhere else. But humans get really stuck in this, okay, I've been doing this, I'm going to stick with this because I've put so much effort into it. And it does feel adjacent to kind of this line of thinking. Yeah, I'm tempted to make a joke about how the Rhesus macaque would obviously just upgrade to Catalina right away, but their 64-bit apps or their 32-bit apps won't work. Look at them. But there may be advantages to upgrading to Catalina that the Rhesus macaque is getting that I'm not because I'm worried about those few apps, right? That's kind of how this works out. Yeah, absolutely. I do wonder if, I mean, I don't mean this to sound too speciesist, but if our success as a species is kind of owed to that conservatism of being a little more careful about adopting a new thing too fast. Yeah, I think a lot of evolutionary stories can be told by specifically this idea of risk taking, and there's just the right amount. And if you take too much risk, you get eaten by a predator. And if you take just the right amount of risk, you can get a big payoff on a new home or a huge food cache. And so there is a kind of a Goldilocks zone for that for all species. And that's why we're still here. So this might have something to do with that, that we have so much complex stuff going on with our social structures and having this worldwide culture and all the sorts of stuff going on as a species, things are extra complicated for us. And so because of that, perhaps following the rules and doing things step by step are advantageous for us. Safety mechanism, really. Capuchin monkeys didn't have a housing crisis, but they also don't have houses. Yeah, well, not yet anyway. Unless we build them for you. Yeah, you know, the pigs would be great at that. Given the tools, they don't try to go right away, start using the patchless. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Science stories always welcome. We also have a fun Facebook group, join in if you haven't already, facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show. Let's see if any monkeys wrote us in the mailbag. Yeah, well, we actually got quite a few responses and positive responses from your latest editor's desk, Tom, which was, well, it was an audio editor's desk. It wasn't video, about 10 minutes long. Really great listen for our patrons and wanted to read a couple of the responses that Charlie Dude wrote in. I really liked your differential privacy talk, which was something that we ran on Monday show because we didn't actually have a regular show because it was a US holiday. Charlie says it was very different than your usual shows, but that's good. I was hoping to play it for my little intro to security kids, aka my students. David also wrote in and said, I love editor's desks. They're awesome. If you can plan an editor's desk for a holiday, that's cool, but I'm fine with just daily tech headlines as I want you to have some time off to recharge. I don't want you getting too burned out. Thanks for the amazing shows to all of you. Thanks, boss. I'm glad to hear that's your vacation policy, seriously. On Monday, like Charlie Dude said, we did a show that just explains differential privacy. If you missed that and you're like, wait a minute, what is this differential privacy? Well, go listen to that. Then on the editor's desk, which goes to the people at the $5 level or above on Patreon, I sort of talked about why I did it, how I did it, what our policy is on taking holidays and why we take them and all of that. You can find that in the Patreon feed as well. In fact, shout out to our patrons at the Grandmaster level, Dustin R. Campbell, Andrew Bradley, Chris Allen, and Paul. You can join them at patreon.com.dts and some levels even get some free art from Len Peralta. One of these days, what he's drawing today might be on there. What are you drawing today, Len? Well, I think it's great that monkeys demonstrate a better cognitive flexibility than humans. However, I'm going to go on the pro-human side here and say, hey, they may have that, but all they got were those stupid banana pellets, and that's sort of where I'm falling on here. This is like a t-shirt that all those wonderful humans can wear that is kind of anti-monkey. We may not be smarter, or you have better cognitive flexibility than us, but you only got banana pellets, and we got a fun sound. We got someone saying, good job, and we decided never to change our ways again. No, it's better than a banana pellet, proud on the back. Chris Hardwick yelling, points. Oh, yeah, that's awesome. So I wanted to say that this is available right now for my patrons at Patreon.com forward slash Len or my online store at LenPeralta store.com. And speaking of which, I know that you guys talked about this earlier in the week, I just want to remind people that I do have, whoops, there we go. Let's pull back on here and show you this. I do have the DTNS poster, the Rise of Skywalker poster, which is available right now. There are naming rights on this thing, which you can get your name on the credits of this. You have until November 15 to do that. So head on over to LenPeraltaStore.com, it's right on the front page, along with the pro monkey poster. I just- Yeah, Len's been doing this every year, where he makes a poster with all of us on it. This year, it's like he said, the Rise of Skywalker. So you have Roger in the role of the emperor, looming above Sarah, holding her live with it light bulbs, and myself a microphone, battling on top of an iPhone. It's amazing. It's pretty great. I'm really proud of it. And yes, it will become a print after the 15th. But you got to get your name on this. That's the most important thing. So LenPeraltaStore.com. Excellent work as always, Len. And also, thanks to Blair Bazderich for being with us, which I believe has not been since July. You missed you, Blair. And it's been great. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Sure. Go to twist.org. That's T-W-I-S dot org. For this week in science information, we have our live shows there, as well as information on how you can get a Blair's Animal Corner 2020 calendar. We're accepting pre-orders right now. And it's filled with art that I created this year, all with amazing animals that were featured in our science news this year. So that's all there. You can also follow me on Twitter at Blair's Menagerie. And yeah, I tweet out animal news stories and pictures of animals that I work with. And you should follow Shouty Blair, which I know is a totally different person. Yes. That is a completely different person. That's if I had absolutely no filter and I shouted my raw emotions at all times. So I should not be held accountable for her actions, but she is available for you to follow. Yes, folks. Get a twist calendar, because then you can be like me, because I'm going to hang mine right behind me here. So you should join me in that. We have some new Patreon rewards. If you are always interested in the show before we do the show, if you want to sneak peek about what might be in the show, you can follow along with our rundown. We're going to start giving November 1st people access to look at the rundown as we put it together every day. So that is among the new rewards you can get at patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Send that feedback to us. We love to hear it. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. And you can find out more and tell a friend dailytechnewshow.com slash live. See y'all Monday.