Coming up on DTNS, Facebook wants to replace your phone with glasses, put a camera in your living room and set up its court of appeals. What could go wrong? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 18th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City in the week of the Switch Lite release, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. You mean the tabloid switch because it's smaller like a small tablet of medicine.  Yes, that's right. We were just talking about the etymology of the word tabloid. The answer may surprise you if you listen to Good Day Internet, which you can get by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Comcast will now offer its Xfinity Flex set top to existing Internet only customers for free. It was previously five dollars per month. Xfinity Flex comes with most of the usual streaming apps like Netflix, HBO, Prime Video, ESPN3, YouTube and Hulu is coming soon as well. Comcast customers will also get free access to NBC's new Peacock streaming service.  Hey, Pocket Cast, speaking of things you can spend a little money on, Pocket Cast, the Pocket Podcast app, rather, for both Android and iOS will now be free on mobile platforms with a premium service for 99 cents a month or you can do 10 bucks a year. They're calling it Pocket Cast Plus. The premium service includes access to desktop apps, exclusive app icons and 10 gigabytes of cloud storage. Anyone who purchased the desktop app will get three years of Pocket Cast Plus for free. I think that's pretty generous. And Pocket Cast says more monetization features are on the way. Although if you're a user of the web interface, there's some coveching about the fact that you thought you were getting that forever and now you only get it for three years. Google Assistant is launching new voices in nine countries. That means an alternative to the default voice. So if you're in a country that speaks Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean or Norwegian, you got a new voice to choose from. It's a non-gendered voice, by the way. English voices are also being launched in India and the UK. Separately, Amazon announced the launch of Hindi support in device software updates. Support for multilingual households is coming soon as well. Reuters discovered through freedom of information requests that officials from Facebook met UK regulators three times prior to announcing the Libra cryptocurrency project. A meeting with the junior minister and officials in charge of cryptocurrency policy at Britain's Finance Ministry happened on April 23rd. A meeting with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority happened on April 24th. And Facebook met officials from the Finance Ministry, Bank of England and FCA on May 14th. And California Governor Gavin Newsom, just before we started the show, signed Bill AB 5 into law, changing the definition of who qualifies as a contract worker in the state of California. Remember, this applies mostly, not mostly, but it's been targeted at Uber and Lyft and the like. Uber has said it will push for new definitions, including a potential statewide ballot initiative. All right, let's talk about those Facebook glasses, Scott. Let's do it. CNBC sources say Facebook is partnering with Ray Ban, their parent company, in a way, Laxacata, to bring augmented reality glasses to mark. Sotica. Did I say it wrong? Laxacata. Laxatica. You know what? When you hear your family. Anyway, they're going to bring these to market between 2023 and 2025. So don't get super excited yet. This is on its way. Anyway, the glasses codenamed Orion are reportedly being developed in Facebook, Reality Labs in Redmond, Washington and would handle making calls, displaying information and streaming video from the glasses point of view with a voice assistant for user input. Sound like a phone does to me. CNBC also reports Facebook is developing a ring with a motion sensor for input codenamed Agios. Yeah, if you take face, maybe Agios, if you take Facebook out of this, this sounds like an interesting take on a problem no one has solved yet. How do you make those glasses really catch on? And and putting all of this sort of technology in here just makes me go, well, if it works, well, maybe you put Facebook in here and suddenly it's like, who is who is going to really get behind putting Facebook glasses on your face and and with the ability to live stream. And when we saw how crazy people went when Google Glass could do like tiny little live streams, potentially, imagine Facebook with high level streams to Facebook Live at Facebook Watch. That's crazy. Well, and just the whole sort of augmented reality glasses make them look cool, make them do things. Snap is trying to figure that out and has made some strides in that arena. Facebook owns Instagram, which has done very well at taking things that work for Snap and making it part of its own product. So Facebook working on something that we wouldn't even see really for another three to four years at, you know, at the earliest, that could be, you know, it could be a very different world for what we you know, what we expect might take the place of everything that we do on a smartphone now. And also the fact that if if a rival company does it well, then, of course, Facebook would want to try. So this makes Snap feel good that they're entering glasses since Facebook. Well, it makes them feel good until their user base goes to Instagram wearing their Facebook glasses. Descript announced a new version of its audio editor called Descript podcast studio that uses machine learning to let you edit a transcript in order to affect the audio, delete a sentence from the transcript. And that sentence is then clipped from the audio. Kind of cool. A similar feature called Overdub lets you change words or phrases or even add new sentences using that same machine learning similar. Anyway, a user has to read a series of randomly generated sentences so that the software can figure out what they sound like and be able to replicate their voice. Descript podcast studio also supports simultaneous and collaborative multi-track editing with several changes synced in real time. It also offers transcription services that include humans assisted by AI for a fee. So Descript podcast studio is available now for Mac and Windows. It's free and for $10 a month for video and free transcription and $15 a month for multiple users. Yes. And that's lower than I thought it would be. This is free video software where you can edit audio without having to listen so much faster. If you're like, I know exactly what I need to take out and you can just look at a transcript, highlight it, delete it. Boom, gone from the audio and the edit is nice and clean because of the machine learning that alone is incredibly compelling to me. Overdub could be incredibly scary, but they say they're doing a lot of things to make it hard to use this for deep fakes. So first of all, it's only meant to be used by the user.  I said that word wrong. I could just change it in the transcript and because I've trained it now. I don't have to go re-record the entire thing. OK, that could save me some time, too. If you're editing multiple voices, though, then it gets trickier because you have to have a person collaborating with you to have them train it in your session so that you can't just take anybody's voice and fake it. I'm interested in this on a couple of levels. My my biggest thing would be I don't even think they intend me to use it for this, but I would like to use something like this for when I'm just trying to reduce silence gaps in final cuts of audio and just audio in that regard. If there's a big chunk of part of an interview where we've just got bad lag over Skype, but I want to keep everything that was said and rather than go back and do it the meticulous slow way, nice to be able to identify those gaps and delete those. Yeah, I wonder how those show up in the transcript. That's an interesting question. Yeah, that kind of thing is it would be because the transcript seems to be made for taking out words, not taking out gaps, but it might work for that. I don't know. Maybe it treats negative space differently. But overall, though, I think it's a pretty neat idea. And I think there are podcasters at various levels or people just in the world of trying to get audio in a format they need for a presentation or something. This would be hugely. Oh, I can think of a great example a few weeks ago when we were talking about FaceApp. Remember that? Oh, yeah. And we talked about it, which is a big story over the course of a week. And I called it Facebook several times, you know, and hated myself for it because I know the difference between the two. This would have been perfect for that instance. Yeah. All right. HP announced the two and one thirteen point three inch elite dragonfly business laptop, and it does not look like a business laptop. This is a pretty laptop. Ways less than a kilogram, two Thunderbolt three ports, USB three point one gen one port, HDMI, headphone jack, Wi Fi six built in option for LTE with four by four antennas. If you want it sports windows. Hello, facial recognition has a fingerprint sensor on the palm rest and comes with eight gen Intel Core U series, V Pro processors. You can configure it up to 16 gigabytes of dual channel LPDDR3 RAM up to two terabytes of NVMe solid state storage. And there's an option for a fifty six watt hour battery. That will raise the weight of it above a kilogram, but it extends the battery life from sixteen and a half hours to twenty four point five. The dragonfly starts at one thousand five hundred forty nine dollars shipping in November. HP also announced a forty three point four inch four k sixty Hertz curved monitor called the S four thirty C that can connect to two devices at once over USBC. Show the screens for each device side by side if they're running Windows Mac OS Linux or Android and enable file transfer between the two connected devices. The monitor has a pop up infrared camera for facial recognition to USBC ports so you can connect those two devices for USBA ports along with HDMI display port and an audio jack and the HP S four thirty C monitor sells for nine hundred ninety nine dollars coming November 4th. I want it. I don't want. I mean, the notebook seems neat. Don't get me wrong. That thing seems seems awesome. If you're looking for a nice monster notebook that does tons of things. Hey, it looks like they got you covered, especially if you like HP as a brand, but that monitor is very, very tempting to me. And it's because I work in that kind of multi OS environment and I do it in real time every day with streaming combined with audio production combined with art stuff like it's all happening at once with Windows and Mac, in my case, it would be a great thing. And I would be spending the same amount of money that it would cost me to buy Apple stand for their next display, not even the display, just the stand that comes optional. So it's really tempting for, you know, somebody in the semi pro slash pro market looking for a good solution for that sort of thing. I couldn't find anything that clarifies if it works as a KVM for my laptop and for my keyboard and mouse, which I can work around with my own KVM, but man, it would be super slick. If you didn't even have to push a button and you still got both devices up on the screen, you could just move the mouse from one to the other, which synergy can do. So, yeah, there's such a no brainer for for multiple operating systems, right? And a single display. But also if you're just doing a lot of power intensive stuff and you just want to look at it in one place, you got two Mac minis, for example, which is something I'm probably going to get at some point then having the single monitor. And I think in this case, the curve makes a lot of sense, right? Because it is huge. So it'll be, you know, somewhat not immersive, but it'll it'll give you a little bit more of that feeling of, OK, I've got I've got this on to control this is all within my vision. Yeah, I agree. And the file transfer thing I don't want to give short shrift to because one of the problems I'm having right now is Windows networking and Mac OS, you know, Mac OS networking are notoriously kind of finicky sometimes with each other. You just have problems now and again. And so for me to move files back and forth, that's either working or it's not. And if it's not a US being from one place to the other on a stick or something, which is super inconvenient and lame and synergy doesn't support just drag and drop file transfer, which I wish it would. And I know there are other solutions I could get or I could get Chrome doing it. There's a lot of other ideas, but to be able to do that through a hardware, USBC based solution is I'm probably going to get this monitor is what I'm saying. I think I think we're all three going to have this monitor. I don't need it, but but I want it will make my life better. I kind of need it. I kind of need it. We need it. Right. We need it. Yeah. Feedback to Daily Technusio.com. If you think we need it, I think we need it. Let's live with it. All of us at an event in Shenzhen, Tuesday, Oppo announced its Reno Ace will come with the ability to charge its 4000 mAh battery in 30 minutes. Oppo says it used gallium nitride semiconductors to improve efficiency while reducing the size of the 65 watt power adapter. Oppo also announced a 30 watt wireless charging that can charge a 4000 mAh battery in 80 minutes, all without wires. The Oppo Reno Ace is due in Asia on October 10th. Yeah, they had some fast charging for some of their other models as well. This is this is crazy. 30 minutes to to charge up a battery that size and then and then run for 16 hours or whatever that that 4000 mAh battery is going to give you. That's that's just insane. I mean, that's that's a big old power adapter, and they had to do some stuff to to keep it safe. And they detailed a lot of that as well. But, you know, even the 30 watt wireless charging at 80 minutes ain't bad. No, it takes it takes a couple hours for more than a couple of hours for me to wirelessly recharge a phone usually. It's fun to watch. Battery innovation is kind of stalled in terms of capacity. The more battery you put in, obviously, the more capacity you have. And that's how some of these phones and things have gotten around it. But it's nice to see the innovation coming from other directions, be that power efficiency, being that charge times. Like I'll gladly trade that we're sort of, I don't know, it feels old school the way we do batteries now, but I'll trade that for faster charging for smarter. It is. It is. You know what? Now that you point that out, it's really sad that the innovation in batteries is coming at the chip side for power efficiency and the charger side for speed of charging. Not in the batteries. We were so like desperate for some kind of battery innovation. And there there's lots of possibilities, but nothing, nothing on the horizon that I've heard about. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, there's one place to do it. Go subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Let's get back into it with Facebook announcing two different things. We'll start with the one that is something you can buy and put in your hands. The portal TV, portal TV connects to your television using HDMI. It includes a camera for making video calls to other portal TV users as well as a WhatsApp video calls. AI focuses on individuals. This is something that all the portals have done from Facebook. So it can it can focus on the person who's talking. So it keeps them in view. It has a nice 120 degree wide angle, but it's not showing that wide angle all the time. It could follow kids around the room, stuff like that. Also has apps, so obviously Facebook and Messenger, but also Amazon Prime Video, Stars, Pluto TV, Pandora, iHeartRadio, CNN, ABC News, Spotify. Doesn't have Netflix and Hulu, though. So this is not a replacement for a Roku, but it is trying to give you some cool stuff when you hook it up to your TV. It's also not a speaker, has a really tinny built-in speaker. So you can at least hear responses from the voice assistant when it's not when the television is not on, but most of the time it's just going to use your television speakers. And it can be used as a smart speaker, including with Amazon voice assistant. During setup, the portals will all now offer users a chance to opt out of having your recordings of voice commands stored on Facebook servers. Meanwhile, Facebook told Bloomberg the contractors will now resume reviewing a small percentage of portal voice commands. So now that they've given you a chance to opt out, they're they're resuming that QA. Portal TV costs $149, available November 5th. Facebook also announced an eight inch portal mini. That's a smaller version of the 10 inch and a refreshed 10 inch portal. The eight inch and 10 inch portals. The new form factor allows you to turn them on their end. So it looks kind of like a digital picture frame. The eight inches, a hundred twenty nine dollars. The 10 inches, a hundred seventy nine dollars, and they're both available October 15th. So who wants a Facebook camera in their living room? Not me. But it's not really because I'm like, oh, you know, that Facebook is going to ruin my life somehow. They're going to know everything I do. But it but it sort of echoes what we said earlier in the show when we were talking about Facebook's possible AR glasses initiative, right? It's like if it was a company besides Facebook, you'd go, oh, OK, this is interesting. A little bit more video chatting. This is something that we we know a lot of folks do. WhatsApp users alone. I mean, it's a huge, huge number of folks who do video chatting on WhatsApp. OK, that makes sense. But the Facebook part of it just it's hard not to. Take a little pause. I mean, I have a similar feeling, but mine is mostly based on. You're they're not really offering me something that I'm already getting from a device that has more options, at least currently. I mean, if this thing really took off and sold tons. And, you know, I think Netflix and Hulu and others would be compelled offer services there. But if you're looking at this just as a smart speaker, like an alternative to buying an echo. That maybe has some of these other features that you want. I think this is OK, you know, that market. This is this is an all right solution for that. And I actually don't think the Facebook creepiness will hurt this as much as the fact that it's late to the market and not compelling convenience, Trump's fidelity and people who have an ability to talk to their grandkids with the phone in their hand may not see the point in going and buying a device to do this, especially if it doesn't do all the things that the Roku does. So why wouldn't I just get a Roku and keep talking to my kids through the phone in my hand on that video? The other side of this is Amazon and Google have have a big head start on the voice assistant display market. People are going to likely be like, well, maybe I should get an Amazon echo show because I'm already in the Amazon with the echo or or the same thing. I've already got to Google Home. Why don't I get one of the Google Home displays, the Nest displays? So it's going to be hard for Facebook to really make a move in here. I think it's less about people being creeped out by Facebook because we've we've seen that that people being creeped out for Facebook doesn't stop them using Facebook. It's just that I don't know that this product will compete. Yeah, I also thought they were going to push harder to make VR more of a Facebook experience. And they didn't really do that. Rift and not yet. No, they haven't yet. And there's always, you know, there's always something in the future. But with the exception of a little thing here or there within the service, there hasn't really been anything that made you go, oh, my gosh, it cannot be in this ecosystem of Facebook inside of this VR set. So maybe this is the other way they'll do that. Maybe this is the more the less obtrusive, more this is our platform.  And I don't know. I still say the smart speaker. People are going to be the ones that may want it, but I don't know why they just wouldn't want an echo to start with. So yeah, well, or they already have a smart speaker and they'll stay in that ecosystem, right? Yeah, wherever. Now, we keep talking about the fact that a lot of people are creeped out by Facebook and Facebook wants to do something about part of that, a small section of it anyway, which is Facebook censor speech. Facebook takes down things that are of interest to me and it's unfair. Facebook is unfair to people who I agree with. Well, Facebook announced more details on its independent oversight board, which is designed to handle content moderation disputes. This is a board of at least 11 people at launch. They want to grow it to as many as 40. Facebook will name the members. They'll let you know publicly who they are and why. So it's going to have to pass the Court of Public Opinion, but they can name whoever they want. Deliberations of the board will be public. So you'll be able to see how people come to the decisions they do about these content moderation appeals. Now, private information will not be part of that transparency. They will protect private information in these disputes. But otherwise, you'll get to see the deliberations. Members of the board will be paid, but not by Facebook. Facebook is setting aside money in a trust that will independently fund the members. And once all normal Facebook moderation layers have been used is when Facebook will decide to submit a case to the board. So again, it's going to be the Court of Public Opinion that decides whether to force Facebook to submit it to their own independent board or not. And then once the board hears the submission, they can decide not to hear it. Now, that's that's not up to Facebook. That's up to this independent board. Facebook says they imagine this board would hear about 12 cases a year that they think are precedent settings. So they really are thinking of it kind of like a high court, like a Supreme Court. Users would make their case in written statements, though board members can decide to ask for face to face interactions. Facebook will consider the board's decisions binding unless the decision is not technically feasible. And that, you know, you may say, well, it sounds like an out that just call everything technically infeasible. But it's actually pretty nailed down in the language to be like, if we can't technologically do it, obviously, we're not going to do it. Facebook also will be opening the trust for other networks to join in the future. So there's a little hint that they kind of want to make this an industry wide court of appeals. But at this point, it's really a Facebook run operation. It's very different from Libra in that case, where Libra has a board of people that Facebook is just one member of overseeing it. This is a board of people all picked by Facebook. Interesting. It's hard to call it an independent oversight board when it's structured this way. And, you know, I think some some folks will take issue with that and maybe take issue with the fire engine outside my house right now. But, you know, that members not being paid by Facebook directly, but from a trust which comes from Facebook money, that kind of weirded me out at first. But but I guess it's true, Tom, that that once the money is there, then that, you know, it's out of Facebook's hands. Yeah, the whole idea of a trust is that that separates Facebook from being able to affect that money. Right, right. You know, they can't turn it or do whatever they're going to do it. But I kind of like this concept, I think, at least in theory. I'm very curious and say they say they're going to be public about it, whether that's public about the results or public about the actual deliberations. I hope it's the former or the latter, rather, because I want to watch this like C-Span. I want to see a precedent setting issue like what constitutes porn on the site? What doesn't? What constitutes hate speech? I'm like, whatever it is, the precedent setting cases that they're going to cover, I would love it to be like cameras in the Supreme Court and listen to how they do that stuff. That to me is an interesting process. So as much as it's easy for me to want to look at the broader idea and just go and make a judgment on it, what I really want to do is see it in action and understand the kind of thinking that goes on, how people go back and forth, if there's division, where's the division?  Is it a five to four decision? Like all of that stuff's really interesting to me. And I want to know the decorum of that is like, I hope they do that. I hope we stream it on Facebook Live and I hope I get to watch it. And who, you know, the members that that Facebook names, you know, you mentioned watching it as something kind of unfold the way that you would on C-SPAN.  You know, are they members of the community that are representing various, various different groups, right? Sociological and racial and whatever. Are they people who work in tech that are sort of big names? Does this become something that the public becomes a lot more interested in because that could be a really good thing? Whether or not the rest of us have a say in it to kind of to pump up the discourse in general, especially when you're talking about content moderation disputes and the sort of thing that happened on Facebook all the time and really tend to upset people. It's kind of it's an interesting move for the company. I don't I don't know if the way that they structured it is the right way. But it seems like they're making a pretty good effort. I mean, yeah, it's not as good as Libra, as far as its independence, in my opinion. Two for two reasons. One is Facebook decides what to submit to it. And there's going to be a case at some point where they don't submit it and people are going to go, why didn't you submit it? And even if they bow to public pressure and submit it, people are going to go, see, they delayed submitting it. And that will erode faith in the system. And then the other thing is they choose the board members. So I mean, they can choose the best, most balanced, equanimical board ever as soon as this decision goes against someone. That someone will say, well, obviously, this board was stacked against us by Facebook because Facebook picked them and won't matter who's on the board. And then there will be all the all this like parsing of, you know, the balance of the board and where the interests are and lobbying of those board members and trying to get board members kicked off by finding horrible things in their background and and then seeing who Facebook will come up with to replace them. I mean, it's the there needs to be a better way to select the members. Yeah. Yeah. Very much. Very much. Well, thanks, everybody who participates in our subreddit. You are our Supreme Court of Swartz. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Facebook, you are our Facebook group. You're our other Supreme Court. Facebook.com slash group slash daily tech news show to join if you haven't already. We like to hear from you through the electronic mail. We're old fashioned that way. Who'd we get a mail from today? Well, we did get a picture of a cat because I suggested that you send in photos of your family members. So thank you for that. But we also got an email from Chad and this was in reference to Tom's comparison of TV shows to books yesterday saying you just we can't get to them all. You know, there's there's just too many of them. And Chad says, I think the difference is that I have the ability to read any book that I can think of with some exceptions. If my local library doesn't have a new book, then I can order it from any number of places. There are very few new books that are denied to me with produced content though we're seeing the opposite. It's being walled walled off left and right so that the only way to get it is to subscribe to a producer, a publisher, distributors. That's all you can eat buffet. So Star Trek Discovery, great example of this. I already subscribed to Netflix, Amazon, BBC and Hulu. I pick up shows that don't show up on these four streaming sites by purchasing them all a cart from Amazon usually. But Star Trek Discovery, I had only one option to watch that show. Subscribe to yet another streaming service. Chad says, I believe this is where subscription fatigue is coming in for people like me. I don't want to watch everything. I just want to watch what I want to watch, but the currently fragmented market doesn't give me the option. And instead to watch what I want to watch, I'm forced to subscribe to 15 different services. Chad says we've we're closer than we've ever been, but the fragmenting of the market with all these streaming services is setting us back for years in the fight for true cord independence. Yeah, Chad and I had a nice little email back and forth about this. And I pointed out that it's not the opposite. It's actually better than books, because when you pay $26 for a hardback book, you get that book. But when you pay six ninety nine for Disney Plus, you get all those movies and all those TV shows. And even if you only want the Mandalorian, you still have access to all that other stuff. Maybe there's something else in there you'll discover and like or want to watch. So to me, it's it's a little bit of a of a false problem because it's like, well, you can still pay to get your thing. You're just mad that you're also getting more because you feel like you're paying for all of it. But you can still just pay to get that one thing, right? You haven't been denied the subscription service. That's like paying for the hardback instead of waiting for the paperback, which is cheaper. I also pointed out that all of these shows end up for sale at some point. Now, Chad pointed out he's like, yeah, but Star Trek Discovery, Game of Thrones, they delay selling those till sometimes long after the series is over. I'm like, yeah, that's a fair point. And what Chad and I agreed with in our email exchange was there is not a good equivalence for libraries. So a library means you don't have to pay for books and you can read them. But with TV and movies, you can check movies and TV shows out of the library and there's even like cool digital services like Hoopla, but the selection is just not comparable. So I think that that library access is the one place where this analogy falls down for sure. Yeah, I agree. I also, I mean, you've convinced me more than anybody, Tom, over time that we have more, we have actually more control in this equation than we've ever had. Yeah. If I don't, if I, it used to be that if I didn't want your channel, it didn't matter.  But now, if I'm like, well, there's only one show I care about on Netflix and I've just seen it all. And there's not a new season till next year or you're two years later, time to switch to one where there's something else I want to watch. You have full control. You're not locked into anything. You just leave and come back at will. And that is a huge thing. It's just hard to remember that because it does feel like, oh, they're all doing it now. Now it's like cable again. Not really. Yeah. There's a little bit of these shows or movies are all horrible and I have to pay so much to get them. Yeah, yeah, there is a bit of that going on. Well, thanks, Chad, for the email. Also, the cat's name was Buster. Thank you to Mikey for sending in the photo of Buster. Jojo always makes my day a little bit brighter. And also thanks to Scott Johnson. Talk about a bright daymaker. What are you even doing since you made our day bright one week ago today? Well, from a tech point of view, a couple of things are going on for me. One is I'm going to figure out how to make a GoPro five look amazing on stream. Once I've done that, I'll talk about it on the show and tell you how I did it. So later today, that's happening. And I'm very excited about it. And I'll probably chronicle it on my website as well, which is over at frogbanz.com. More importantly, though, I have a webpage up for this card game I keep talking about on here. And now you can see it. It's an actual physical look at the cards. You can see the whole thing. The rules aren't up there yet.  But if you want to go check it out, you can go to frogbanz.com slash. Let's see, slash rock runners. Or it's just right there on the menu. Just find it and check it out. Let me know what you think. We're very excited about a Kickstarter coming soon for details and updates. Check me out on Twitter at Scott Johnson. We are changing our Patreon rewards for DTNS starting October 1st. So this is the last month to get classic rewards. I thought I thought I'd try that aspect on it. Yeah, but yeah, if you want to see what the new rewards are that are coming starting October 1st, that means they'll be delivered on November 1st. So we will make them official on October 1st. But if you want to know what's coming, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. Emails are a great way to send us feedback. A feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is the address. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. Find out more dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Hi everyone, I am going to present the paper Time Memory Trade-off in Tumku Multiplication, an application to module lattice base cryptography. This paper is a joint work with Anshuman and Ingrid. I am only going to show the slides on the screen, so let me first introduce myself as the speaker and you also get to know my face. I am Jose, I am a PhD researcher at the K-11 and my research is focused on implementation aspects of lattice base cryptography. You can find a list of my publications in the link shown in this slide and you can also contact me by mail with any inquiry or just because you feel like it. Ok, so now let's jump into the presentation. I will start introducing some necessary background such as the context of this work, the basis of module lattice is in cryptography and efficient polynomial multiplication algorithms. I will continue explaining how we have improved these algorithms and how we apply these optimizations to speed up Saber, which is one of the finalist schemes in the initial standardization context. I will also explain some memory optimizations that can be applied to Saber when low memory footprint is needed, for instance in embedded implementations, and finally I will show the most relevant results of this work and draw some conclusions. As I am sure you all have heard, the security of the currently deployed public key infrastructure is based on number theoretical problems such as integral factorization or the discrete logarithm. However, these hard problems can be efficiently solved by quantum computers, thus retaining our security and privacy. To anticipate this threat, NIST is running a standardization competition for post quantum cryptography and they have recently announced the finalist of this contest, listed in this table for each category. As we can see, lattice-based schemes seem to offer the most promising solution for post quantum cryptography. Moreover, among these lattice-based schemes, the constructions based on module lattices are the most popular. The first lattice problem used to build a cryptosystem was learning with errors. In learning with errors, one can create a sample B which is equal to the product of a public matrix A and a secret vector S plus an additive error E. The error term is what makes the system nonlinear and therefore hard to solve. If the dimension of the matrix L is large enough, it will be hard to distinguish this sample from a randomly sampled vector as long as you don't have any information about the secret or the error. Module lattices are built in a similar way to learning with errors, except that each element of the public matrix A is a polynomial with n coefficients rather than an integer. This allows us to reduce the parameter L while achieving an equivalent security level. And this also makes module lattices more efficient. The challenge for the implementation of module lattice schemes is no longer the matrix vector multiplication, but the polynomial multiplication. The most straightforward algorithm for polynomial multiplication is the so-called schoolbook multiplication, starting from the coefficients of the operands and performing n squared multiplications plus some additions, one gets the result. However, this method is not the most efficient for polynomial multiplication. As I said, for using a schoolbook, we need the polynomials to be represented in the coefficient form. However, the most efficient polynomial multiplication, which is a complexity, is based on a point value representation of the polynomials. In practice, one performs an operation called evaluation to transform the polynomials from the coefficient form domain into their point value domain. Then, the point value multiplication and finally the inverse of evaluation call the interpolation to recover the result in its coefficient form. Since the point value multiplication is linear, the complexity of the overall multiplication will be determined by the evaluation and interpolation algorithms. The most popular choices for cryptographic applications are the entity Karatsuba and Tunkuk. Among these three, the entity being linear arithmetic in time has the lowest complexity. However, it imposes some requirements in the parameters. The modular arithmetic requires a prime modulus and this modulus has to be co-prime with double the length of the polynomials. Both Karatsuba and Tunkuk achieve a sup-quadrility complexity, which is worse than entity complexity, but they don't impose any requirement in the parameters, giving more freedom to the designer of the cryptosystem. In practice, the entity is using crystal casciber and deletion, while combinations of Tunkuk and Karatsuba are used in sable. Our work is focused on improving Karatsuba and Tunkuk in the context of module lattice base cryptography, so we demonstrate our speed-ups on sable. I am not going to explain here all the details of sable, but for the sake of this presentation, I am going to recall that for the standard security level of sable, the parameter L is equal to 3. For this category, a matrix vector multiplication and an additional vector vector multiplication must be performed during the encapsulation. This amounts for 12 polynomial multiplications. For the encapsulation, even more polynomial multiplications are necessary. The polynomial multiplication is thus critical for sable operations, and it has an optimal algorithmic choice consisting of a top layer, where a 256th coefficient polynomial multiplication is broken down into 7, 64th coefficient polynomial multiplications, using Tunkuk four-way. Each of these is in turn broken down into 9, 16th coefficient polynomial multiplications, resulting in a total of 63 schoolbook multiplications with polynomials of 16 coefficients, plus the additions and multiplication bugs' context of the evaluation and interpolation to perform a single multiplication of polynomials with 256 coefficients. If we represent a polynomial in an image, we would start with an operand a to which we apply Tunkuk evaluation, followed by Karatsuba evaluation. Similarly, we do for the other operand b, and then we perform the multiplication of a and b in the point value domain. For the coming figures, I will also use this dash purple box to highlight the evaluation and point value multiplication altogether. After performing this point value multiplication, we perform the interpolation to retrieve the result. When applied to module lattices, we propose two optimizations. First, less interpolation takes advantage of the fact that we don't really need to get the result of each polynomial multiplication, but the row column multiplication to accumulate the result in the point value domain, saving us most of the interpolations. On the other hand, pre-computation takes advantage of the fact that one of the operands, in particular the secret vector, is reused for different row vector products during the matrix vector multiplication. We can then perform the evaluation of these polynomials only once and store them in the point value domain, saving up the time of some evaluations. In this figure, we summarize less interpolation as applied to save. As you can see, we perform the evaluation and point value multiplication of each of the three products. Then, we add the results in the point value domain. Since both evaluation and interpolation are linear operations, after running interpolation only once in this accumulated result, we get the result of the full row column product. In the pre-computation, compared to the original figure for the multiplication, we would not need to perform the evaluation of the operand b for some of the multiplications, since it has been previously computed and cached. Both less interpolation and pre-computation can be combined. We illustrate this combination with this figure. As you can see, the evaluation of one operand does not always need to be computed. As for the rest, the result is accumulated in the point value domain after running evaluation and point value multiplication for each pair of operands. And lastly, only one interpolation per row column product is performed to retrieve the final result. These optimizations can be generalized for an insecurity category, defined by the size of the matrix through parameter L, or when it's matter-sized more in general. In this table, we show the improvement in the number of operations for the key generation and the encapsulation and the encapsulation of Sabre for any value of the parameter L. As you can see, the greatest improvement is due to the less interpolation. We know that the theoretical improvement does not always translate into an effective speed-up when implemented. So we have applied our methods to the available optimized implementations of Sabre. The implementation optimized for AVX takes advantage of the vectorial registers of these processors to accommodate 16 coefficient polynomials and perform a schoolbook multiplication using the vectorized instructions. Something has to be taken into account is that the polynomial needs to be transposed after performing the multiplication. But this plays in our favor. Using the same approach as for the less interpolation, we can transpose the register only once for each row column product when we are going to carry out the interpolation. Therefore, the AVX-2 implementation will absolutely benefit from our methods. On the other hand, the performance of the implementation optimized for ARM Cortex-M for processors is very much dependent on the schoolbook multiplications since it is performed 63 times for a single polynomial multiplication and this embedded processor does not enjoy the powerful vectorized instructions from AVX-2. However, we can still benefit from the DSP extensions to minimize the overhead. The only penalization in performance will come from the extra preloads that are necessary to perform the accumulation of the result. Less interpolation overcomes this penalization only for the larger cyberparameters as we will show in the results. Having to store polynomials in the point value domain to implement less interpolation and precomputation has an important cost in terms of memory. For some applications, it may be desirable to have a low memory footprint rather than the highest performance. This is particularly true for embedded implementations and this motivated us to research some memory optimization for cyber. Firstly, the secrets, as any other element in the scheme, are stored as polynomials with n coefficients, bnn equals to 256 for all security levels and these coefficients are moduloq being q2 to the power of 13 that is, there are 13 bits per coefficient. However, these secrets are sampled from a binomial distribution. We know that a binomial distribution defined by its parameter mu will have samples lying in the interval minus mu to mu and we also know that for cyber, the worst case is given for the highest security level for firesaber where mu equals to 5. This means that we need way less than 13 bits per coefficient. In practice, we have decided to store the secrets using only 4 bits per coefficient. This has two advantages. First, the office reduction in the memory requirements to store the secret key, which now requires between 35 and 40% less memory. Additionally, the packing and unpacking functions from bitstreaming to a polynomial and baseversa will become way simpler than for 13 bits per coefficient. Two coefficients can be directly packed into one byte. Moreover, we can embed the unpacking into the evaluation of the multiplication routine. The other memory optimizations that we have applied to Saber are the bookkeeping of the randomness for the computation of the hash functions, the just-in-time generation of the polynomials of the public matrix A from the seed, the in-place verification of the ciphertext using the capsulation, the use of only Karatsuba rather than a combination of Tumkuk and Karatsuba for polynomial multiplication, since Tumkuk is more memory-demanding. And, as we already mentioned, the in-place unpacking of the secrets during the Karatsuba evaluation. So now it's time to discuss the results. First, I want to show the impact of less interpolation and pre-computation on the matrix effect of multiplication alone. As we anticipated, the gain for the AVX implementation is quite significant, while for the cortex M4 is more limited as well as dependent on the size of the matrix. The speed of both matrix vector multiplication for AVX reaches 30%. On the other hand, the implementation for cortex M4 for the parameters of lightsaber that is L equals to 2 offers no improvement at all. For larger values of L, the speed-up is around 12% to 18%. For the overall results on Sabre, we start by showing the results of a generic seed implementation without any platform-dependent optimization. The blue colors correspond to the previous state-of-the-art implementation, and the wing colors to the implementation provided in this paper. The three blocks from left to right correspond to the key generation encapsulation and encapsulation of lightsaber, sabre, and firesaber, respectively. Similar color codes will be used in the following plots. So, as I said in this setting of an only seed implementation, we can observe that the proposed methods yield impressive speed-ups, since logarithmic optimizations are the only available. In the AVX implementation, the polynomial arithmetic is so optimized that the hashing operations have become the bottleneck. Then such a big speed-up as 13% to 5% for matrix vector multiplication has a limited impact of only around 10% of overall speed-up in sabre, neither of its security levels. Even though we can consider that a 10% speed-up can be significantly speed-up for an already optimized implementation. For the Cortex M4, we first show the results for the speed-optimized implementation. We can see that the overall speed-ups are quite limited, of 0.5% and 10% approximately. In addition to the bars, we have float in orange and yellow the memory requirements for the previous state-of-the-art implementation and the one provided in this paper, respectively. We can see that there is a big penalization in the memory utilization. Finally, we also show the Cortex M4 implementation optimized for memory utilization. In this case, we show the results for sabre for L equals to 3 since we can only compare to a similar implementation in the state-of-the-art. We can see that the implementation is almost as fast as that while achieving an impressive memory reduction. So, to conclude this presentation, in our paper, we have formalized and generalized interpolation and precomputation and its applications to model lattice-based cryptography. We have shown how an optimization at the theoretical level does not necessarily relate to an optimization at the implementation level due to different trend-memory trade-offs. We have provided the fastest software implementation for sabre for both C, AVX and Cortex M4 platforms. And additionally, we have provided the smallest sabre implementation for embedded platforms and effectively reduced the required storage for the secret keys of sabre. And that's all. Thank you for your attention.


It's finally here. You're welcome right here guys new electric air compressor from airventury that goes up to 4,500 psi and is ready for this right for this under $1,300 bam, that's what I'm talking about We saw it at shot show they just released it It's exciting because as we know you can't use a regular air compressor because we can't get enough air You know you get in a shoebox is more difficult and it doesn't always get you up to 4,500 psi and blah blah blah blah Now we've got one electric air compressor that does it all from filling up guns to little tanks to medium tanks all the way to Big tanks and actually a reasonable amount of time So no longer do you have to rely on someone else to bring you air because you can fill up everything and off you go Which is what I'm about to do so you've actually caught us on a weekend of shooting here for American air gunner And we've got a lot of shooting to do so we're gonna fill up all the tanks We need the ring those shoot for the next two days and we don't have to call anybody no fire departments None of that we don't have to deal with any of that. We just get to do it ourselves and Make things happen. So Basically, it's got a cooling system It's got a pressure gauge where you can actually set what so like this is only 3,000 psi So I can set it to 3,000 psi and when the compressor gets that amount of air it shuts down So it doesn't overfill into my bottles it takes about it's pretty simple for a 90 cubic inch Which is this little guy right here This takes about 10 minutes to fill from 0 to 4500 psi 10 minutes That's awesome, and then you fill this in your bag and this will fill your gun as many times as you need I know with some of these guns we have to take 4500 psi You're gonna get as many but for the average gun that goes about 3,000 psi. You are good to go this tank on the other hand This is an 88 cubic feet. There's also a 74 cubic foot version of this that's gonna take 74 cubic is gonna take about an hour to go from 0 to 3,000 psi and a little bit longer than this one But for most of us who shoot our guns with once we get down to 3,000 psi We shouldn't refill up to 4500. Well, that takes about for this size It takes about 20 minutes for the 74 cubic foot it takes about 15 minutes So we're gonna test all this basically what we're gonna start with we're gonna turn our compressor on cooling system on It's cooling you can hear it right here. I got my old oh Samyang Sumatra So it comes with the with the hose here, and it comes standard with a female quick disconnect here So any of your guns have fittings or already existing male Disconnects like so you just clip it right on and you're good to go. So right now. We've got a gun It's at a thousand psi It's where we go. So the Sumatra actually this is 200 bar. So it's gonna go to 200 bar, which is about That's right. It's right around 3,000 psi.  We're gonna see if it does We've got a thermometer here telling us 58 degrees 60 degrees So you know if you need to let it cool or not But right now it's moving. It's almost there we're getting close to our perfect fill right here and Let's see what happens. We're up to 60 degrees That was easy. That was so easy Let's set that here Because I've got other stuff to fill Here we go. This is 13 cubic inches. So we just again we take our hose Fire it up connects right there. We look and says it says 3,000 psi. Let's have this guy here We're going to move this Set our valve here to 3,000 psi So it's about that loud. They say it's 90 decibels. It's about as they say a lot as a blender This is not as loud as my blender. My wife turns out on it scares me to death. I don't know about you guys So this isn't that loud. I'm having a normal conversation I'm not yelling and screaming like I normally do Yet and I can still talk and this is still functioning, but we've got some time. It's gonna take a little bit I'm gonna juggle oranges Let me know what it's done.  That's right. And it's done. Let's see 3,000 psi 3,000 psi Now these are the kind of bottles that you're used to you typically have two types of well There's three these days because there's a bigger version kind of a medium version But if you saw these you wouldn't know the difference and then this this is kind of that portable tank now this you can actually fill up from this Okay, but you don't need to anymore because you have a very affordable electric air compressor right here That works like a charm as we're seeing so we're gonna pump this thing up now This thing is on it's got about 2,500 psi We want to get to 4,500 because we know this is a 4,500 psi tank So we change our setting just like so we close our release valve and there you go We fire the sucker up so to go from 3,000 to 4,500 shouldn't take long Well, it does that I'm gonna do this What have I got myself into I? Mean why you're filling up air tanks? Why not dance and there you go? I mean you can do whatever you want. Why it's all filling up. I Chose to dance. So there you go 4,500 Take a look at our 90 cubic inch It's warm at best not hot at all There it is 4,500 fill up a gun foot of a 13 cubic inch and 90 cubic inch It's been like 15 minutes all we got now Is this big puppy right here? this sucker is at Right around 3,000 to fill back up to 4500. It's about 15 minutes now. Here's the cool thing if you've got a hose like this And you don't have where this is made Where it disconnects like that so you can just attach right there, but a lot of them the hoses actually screwed in if that's the case You take your hose like so you take the mail mail Put that in there, and then you can fill your tank just like that easy simple may take a little bit more time As opposed just going through one hose especially if it's a slow fill But that's it and then you can fill that up takes about an hour guys. That's it This is I mean this is the most entertaining version of showing an air compressor filling up other tanks with air That we could possibly do right here on American air gunner. I'm Rossi Morialli. I'm tired, but you know what I got? I'm full air. I'm gonna go shoot see you later


These line items, which are the income statement side, are assigned to the customers. That's why it breaks out the income statement properly, I believe, and not the checking account. Save it and close it, and then run it to the right, running. And so you can see here, it didn't break out the cash account like it has been breaking out nicely the AR accounts. So if I go to the tab to the right, run it, then now we've got our another sub account here on 512. So it can get kind of an extensive sheet here, but you can see it works, it does its thing quite nicely in a job kind of system so I can break out my income statement by customer, although it gets a little bit tedious, so a little bit redundant because you have this concept of the customer and then the sub customers and then the total. So, I mean, you have basically two extra columns here. I mean, sometimes it'd be kind of nice to just run the report by just the jobs, to see the open jobs and not having these two redundant columns, which can make your report really long. If you were using class tracking, then you can do it that way, right? You could sort it by job and it's a little bit shorter of a report. Then you got customer two, which has the sub customer, sub customer, and the total for customer number two, and then the total income statement. So one of the primary things that is nice here is that you can run this report that has all of the customers in it and it's got the total so that you can tie everything out to your actual financial statements, as opposed to like tags or sometimes when you go into the project reports, just the individual reports, they just give you the income statement activity, by that particular project or job. Great, that's great to zoom in sometimes like that, but it's nice to be able to see the whole, everything tied out so you can tie it out to your financials. Then you can filter this kind of report by going to the customize up top and you can use your filtering options. And if you were using other kinds of things as well like classes and location tracking, then you can filter, you can run the report by customer and filter by location and class tracking, right? That's one way that you can do it. If you don't have location and class tracking, then you would most likely filter by customer. So if I wanna focus in on one customer or one job, I can say let's just take a look at that, let's take a look at that 415 customer only and run it and I didn't do anything for 415 apparently. Let's run it again, wrong pick, don't pick that one. Let's do it for 410, 410, run it and so there we have it. Now again, it's a little bit tedious even when you do this because the subcustomer is tied to the job so you're gonna have the customer and then the subcustomer, the subcustomer is tied to the customer I mean. So you got the customer, the subcustomer and then the total and then the total over here but that's not too bad to deal with, right? So now you can zoom in to each individual job by filtering to each of those individual jobs. So it's a workable kind of system. Now note that the primary thing that happened after subcustomers were in play is the projects. So if you go over to the projects, then like if you were using subcustomers before in another accounting system or jobs before in QuickBooks desktop or subcustomers in QuickBooks online and then they added the jobs, then the question is, well, do you wanna convert everything over to, I'm sorry, then they added the projects. The question is, do you wanna convert everything over to projects? And I mean, if you have a system that's working maybe it's not worth it but they have some conversion concepts that you can look at to try to convert everything to projects but it's still kind of a scary task to do. But the projects are different. They work in a similar fashion. So we'll talk more about projects later but you'll see that basically you have your own kind of area that's separate from the customer area that sorts the projects and you've got a little bit more of the sorting tools down here for the projects as opposed to the jobs and then you could run the reports by project. So do the projects then make the jobs or subcustomers obsolete? Not necessarily, because again, you could imagine that you're using subcustomers quite well and thank you very much. I'm going forward quite well with them. You might keep going with that. The projects also add some features like sometimes when you're trying to integrate payroll and stuff into the projects but you might still use the jobs or you could say, hey look, I would like to have a use the projects but let's say I wanna tie them to a job. So now you can say I'm gonna make a project that ties to a customer. The projects ties to the customer in a similar way as the subcustomers or jobs tie to customers even though it's not in the same window but you might say, hey look, I've got a customer and then I've got the subcustomer which has a different billing address to the other customer. So I would like to say yes, it's tied to customer number one but I wanna make the project tied to the subcustomer. So you can see the tiering action you might have customer number one, then the subcustomer and then you might tie your project for some reasons to the subcustomer. So if I make a project for example, I have to tie it to a customer instead of actually customer number one, I could tie it to a subcustomer which might be useful for like billing type of purposes. So obviously the subcustomers haven't gone away. They haven't removed the subcustomers. They are there in a system where you might need them if you don't have access to the projects possibly even if you have access to the projects if you're using the subcustomers and you're content with the subcustomers because that's what you've been using. Then the question is, do you wanna try to convert all the subcustomers to projects or are you good going forward with the subcustomers? And then of course you could still use the subcustomers in conjunction in some cases with the projects even if the projects are kind of taking over some of the functionality that the subcustomers would have done in the past. So we'll get into projects more in future presentations.