thousands, but we haven't really seen a second wave quite yet. I know there's Uber. I know there's, there's, there's other companies Snapchat, but they all kind of seem like they're not really competitors or threats to fang. When does, when does somebody take down? Someone has to do kind of a social networking, but in a way that isn't like everyone else I don't know. Do they though? Like there was no social networking before social networking. Maybe it's something entirely different. Maybe it's a way to make friends online. Like real friends, both online and in real life. Like, like, it'll be like, like, something buddy or, you know, local buddy or something like you just, and it'll be, it'll be like a, it'll be like a stitch in be kind of like thing for the, for the 21st century. There also, I think there has to be a new technology because a lot of the early, a lot of the Googles and Amazons, they took advantage of the web. And then a lot of the twitters and Facebooks, they sort of took advantage of mobile. They took, they started on the web, but they really took advantage of mobile. And so I think, I think there has to be like, what is that next disruptive platform? Is it going to be augmented reality or AI or, you know, whatever it is? The company, because, because the fan companies are getting slow. They don't move fast anymore. They're too big. Well, they, yeah, they compass too much and that kind of success breeds that a little bit. That's why I keep looking at, you know, like bicycle rentals and a, you know, little AI companies. You know what they need is to automate your social network. It's blockchain, says Derek Silva. Might be, might be. Somebody might finally figure out blockchain. No, automation of social networks where you have an avatar and that, no, no, an avatar that does all that thinking for you. You're just holding something on to an exist. That's the mistake of futurist bolting something onto an existing product. It's going to be something totally different. I'm telling you. It's going to be local, buddy. That's now pretty good. Actually, I like that. That has the hallmarks. I'm not saying we're talking to people on the other side of the world. We're not talking to somebody in your neighborhood. We're local, buddy. And it's basically like tie in with travel so that your buddy on the other side of the world can become a local buddy. It could. I was just thinking the starter kit is two soup, empty soup cans with a string and you just kind of stretch it out to where you need it. All right. You guys, Roger, are you ready? Yes. All of us are ready. Are all of you ready? We go. Grace Hoffert has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Be like Grace. Get a commercial-free version of the show and more by becoming a DTS member at patreon.com. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 11, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Trank. Sarah Lane was going to be with us, but she got called away. She will be back tomorrow. But Roger and I are going to do our best to help you understand the technology world today. We've got some really interesting topics, including some good healthcare topics to get to. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. RSA's Data Privacy and Security Survey for 2019 found that while people enjoy personalized services, respondents did not want them at the expense of privacy. 17% of respondents viewed tailored advertisements as ethical. That means if you can do the math, that 83% didn't. And 24% said personalization to create tailored news feeds is also ethical. Again, means 76% didn't. Samsung released a teaser for its February 20th unpacked event. The video shows words being folded. And the phrase, the future unfolds, who knows what it could mean. We'll probably get Galaxy S phones. Now we're getting a fold of, they're definitely doing a foldable phone. We'll see it. Who knows when we'll get it, but we'll see it. India's Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology issued a summons to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for February 25th. The CEO did not appear for a meeting with the committee on February 11th. He set representatives, but he didn't appear. The meeting was meant to discuss protecting citizens' rights on social media and online news platforms ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections. Failure to appear on the 25th by Dorsey could be seen as a breach of parliamentary privilege according to the committee's chairman. So they're trying to get serious to get Jack in the door. And OnePlus says it will show off a prototype of a 5G phone at the Qualcomm booth during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, starting February 25th. Attendees will be able to try a demo of 5G gaming on the prototype. All right. Reddit confirmed a $300 million series D round of funding that valued the company at $3 billion. $150 million of that $300 million new funding came from Chinese company Tencent. And Reddit exploded. Reddit, as majority owned by Condonast, has raised $550 million in funding. So this $300 million round is a big chunk of the funding that's raised over the course of its existence, and it's been around for more than a decade. And $150 million is a big chunk of that funding as well. TechCrunch reported the Tencent investment over the weekend before it was confirmed. And Reddit users posted all kinds of reactions, including some protests, images that a lot of people thought might upset Chinese sensors to kind of stick it to Tencent. Reddit is blocked in China. You can't get it beyond the Great Firewall. And Tencent, just so you know, is also an investor in hundreds of companies outside of China. Tesla, Snapchat are also recipients of funding from Tencent.  Tencent isn't the only one. Every Chinese technology company has contributed to that firewall. You can't exist in China without doing that. It is run by the Chinese government, though. It's not run by Tencent. But okay, that's fine. So put some Winnie the Pooh images up, because those were images that had been censored in China last year. Okay, you know, that's fair. That's what Reddit's all about. I'm all for that. But some folks were saying that Tencent, by Reddit taking this money, they're somehow funding the Chinese firewall. Certainly by taking money from any Chinese company anytime, Tesla, Snapchat, or otherwise, you are tangentially sending some kind of return eventually into China. That is true. But Tencent's a multinational company. They have offices in Silicon Valley here in California. They have offices all over the world. They make WeChat. They make television and movies. They do financial investments. And that's the arm. It's a separate arm of the company that is doing the investor investments here that's putting the money into Reddit. So I'm not trying to tell you what to believe one way or the other. If you're mad at Reddit for taking this money, there are reasons to be mad. But I just hope that if you are critical, you have all the information and you're not believing something isn't happening that is. It's in this day and age, it's really, for a lot of people, it's hard to separate the nationality of the company from the company's business. Whether it's Microsoft dominating as like the American imperialist in Europe, taking over operating systems all across Europe, or whatever, there's a kind of a knee-jerk reaction, which isn't, which isn't, most times isn't fair to the company because, as you said, the Tencent needs to operate under Chinese rules because if you didn't, you wouldn't be operating in China. But at the same time, I think, and this isn't a jab at China, but like in countries in general, I think there oftentimes is a desire to kind of plant the flag on companies as an emblem or symbol of the country. You take certain companies with you on your trade mission to whatever part of the world that you're going to, and in certain cases, like for example, the whole Justice Department case against Microsoft, when they said, no, you can't access our Irish servers because they're in Ireland, even though they're Microsoft servers just because we're an American company doesn't mean you get access to that content. But there's a faking in a political circle as well. You're one of us. If you're one of us, you've got to run by our rules. It's like, well, no. Well, and that's also a great example, a great counter example where if you might think, oh, Microsoft is a U.S. company, so they're going to carry out whatever the U.S. government wants, right? That would be the same thing as saying Tencent's a Chinese company, they're going to do whatever the Chinese government wants. And Microsoft didn't. Now, the counter argument to that is China has a lot more influence and control over its companies than the U.S. government does. That doesn't mean they have full control. And the other thing I want to make sure we point out, there's a difference between Huawei, whose founder and CEO has connections to the People's Liberation Army. They may be overstated, but they are definitely connections. So there's a clear line that you could follow there to say, well, maybe he's in close conversation. Tencent isn't like that any more than any other Chinese company. So again, not trying to excuse anything or say there isn't smoke or there isn't fire where you might see smoke, but just the fact that Tencent Ventures is putting money into Reddit doesn't mean anything on its own. You're going to have to find some other connections and facts for it to have any influence. And again, Reddit, owned by Condon, asked majority-owned, Reddit has $400 million of funding from other companies. Even if Tencent wanted to have influence on Reddit, it's not likely they can have a lot of influence anyway. U.S. President Donald Trump is signing the American AI Initiative to Promote Development of Artificial Intelligence in the United States. The plan asks federal agencies to prioritize AI in their budgets. It does not add funding, but it does say, like, bump it up in line, give it some money out of the money you already have. It orders data and processing power to be made available for AI researchers, orders the creation of ethical standards, and encourages cooperation with other countries, although within the protecting the interests of the United States. It also asked agencies to create fellowships and apprenticeships to prepare workers for changes to the job market caused by AI. Now, it's all in the enforcement. It's all in how this gets carried out, whether this actually ends up being a good or a bad initiative. But, Roger, I have to say, these principles are the right principles to put into place, if you ask me. They definitely are, but as with all things, the first step is great, but it's the subsequent steps that you take that determine whether or not what you start out of the gate as holds up. There's no funding, and some of the things are kind of vague, but overall it's a nice sounding piece of policy. But as you said, what does it look like in two years' time? Is there going to be more funding? Is there going to be some sort of locus, like some kind of focus that companies can kind of zero in on? Or is it just going to be just kind of a let's throw everything against the wall and see what sticks? Or is this just, hey, let me write something that everyone's going to be happy about, even though there isn't any kind of real continuing push or drive on that track? So, I mean, it's a great first step. I would like to see the other steps that follow. I think if you go through point by point the potential pitfalls, prioritizing the AI and the budget, where a lot of countries just add funding to support AI, may look at first like a bad idea. If it's actually knocking other priorities off, it could be good for AI, it could be bad for other priorities. That's one of the downfalls. Or saying prioritize it may not actually get the money earmarked because it's not funded. I could see that happening as well. Ordering data and processing power to be made available for researchers, that is almost entirely positive from what I could tell as long as it's done. Creation of ethical standards. Again, this isn't going to make the ethical standards, but getting the government involved in talking with academics about that is good. We need more of that. We've seen other companies call for that. So, this is good for it to continue that effort to create ethical standards around AI, and creating fellowships and apprentices to prepare workers for changes to the market caused by AI is exactly what I think should be done. It's not that AI isn't going to have an effect on the workplace, it is, but it's identifying those areas where it will because it won't affect all areas and figuring out how people make the transition. Again, that might need some funding, but at least beginning to create those things and encouraging those things is a good thing. Again, on the face of it, it sounds great. I would like to see what it looks like in a year or two years to see if this drive continues. All right, IDC put out their numbers for smartphones in China, and as in other analyst reports, Apple's shipments declined. IDC puts the decline at 19.9% in China and Q4, but it rose in the rankings. Apple's now the number four. Xiaomi shipments fell 34.9% and dropped to number five. Overall smartphone shipments in China fell 9.7%. The entire smartphone market in China is cooling off. Huawei bucked the trend and rose 23.3%. Apple and Vivo sort of bunked the trend. Apple rose 1.5%, Vivo 3.1%, respectively. Cannellus estimates came out January 28th and we're pretty much similar to this. We told you about them on Daily Tech News Show back on January 28th. Cannellus showed a larger decline overall. They said it was a 14% decline, whereas IDC is calling it a 9.7% decline in the smartphone market in China. Also, Cannellus showed a slight decline for Oppo instead of a slight rise, which IDC shows. But really, I saw a lot of headlines today saying more bad news for Apple and I wanted to point out to people it's not more bad news. It's the same bad news. It's echoing the same bad news we heard back on January 28th and it's honestly not all that bad news because the market in general is declining and Apple isn't declining as fast as Xiaomi. So there's a tiny bit of good news in there for Apple, I guess. And like we said last time, this is just a broader trend of a market that's matured and consumers don't feel that compelled to upgrade as often as they have maybe in years past. So it's going to take a shift on the business side of how do you develop these products? Do you just want to have a new shiny, bright hardware or do you want to move slowly into services where you can continually sell into it over time instead of people just kind of sitting on what they have? Yeah, and I know it's tempting and it's not wholly unjustified to look at whether China's economy as a whole slowing down is the cause or maybe the trade conflict with the United States is the cause and those do contribute to this. I personally think that the more important thing here is that even without a slowing economy and trade conflicts, China would be saturated. The smartphone markets in Europe and the United States have slowed down too. So really, if you're a smartphone maker, you've got to be looking at India, Sub-Saharan Africa and maybe a few other places to figure out where you want to grow if you want to continue to grow. Apple announced that health records on iPhone will soon allow... I'm sorry, I got ahead of myself. Let's talk Microsoft first. Microsoft published a 42-second video teaser for its press event at Mobile World Congress February 24th. It shows a lot of amorphous blobs and fibers, some of which could be wires or processors, but who knows? What it really does is look like something you might see in VR or maybe AR. And it has everyone assuming it'll have to do with HoloLens too. But you can't tell anything from this video. More indicative is the previously known fact, and we've mentioned this on the show before, that among the speakers at the event is Microsoft technical fellow Alex Kipman, who is involved in HoloLens. So I mean, this video doesn't make me think that that won't happen, but I don't know. Roger, can you tell anything from this growing chords and ice cubes that turn into things that might look like processors? It could pave the way for some sort of... Part of it is I'm looking at where they're going to introduce it, which is Mobile World Congress. So there has to be some mobile smartphone... One would think.  It doesn't have to. It would make more sense if it was, yeah. But it makes sense that if it was some sort of... It could be a HoloLens that connects your smartphone or... Wireless HoloLens. Or a HoloLens that is a smartphone. How awesome would that be? Or like the Oculus Go, right? It's just a self-contained unit. And the melting could be like, hey, we're melting away your previous inhibitions or connections. There are a lot of wires in this thing, for something that should be mobile. They're showing a lot of wires in this video. I know that's parsing it way too close, but I think the upshot is this video doesn't tell you anything. No, it's basically telling you that Microsoft has a press announcement that they're going to do at Bubble World Congress and should probably tune in if you want to... And we already knew that. So it really doesn't have anything to do with the conversation. But I would be very excited to see HoloLens 2 become something different than HoloLens and become not just a developer kit, but something that everybody could get their hands on. So very curious to see. Apple announced, here we go, that health records on iPhone will soon let veterans receive care through the US Veterans Health Administration to view medical records in the app.  This is the first consumer record-sharing platform used by the Veterans Administration, which currently provides service to 9 million veterans in the United States. Fitbit's also working with UnitedHealth to sell to seniors through private Medicare plans in 27 U.S. states. And Apple recently introduced an app for Apple Watch and iOS called a TAIN meant for Aetna members. So if you're an Aetna member, you could get a similar thing. This is all pretty much showing that everybody is getting into the health technology platform slowly because it's such a complex business. But it looks like Apple who has said we want to become a services company and health is one of the sectors we want to move in is following up on what they said they'll do. And I do want to impress upon the audience that this isn't a kind of a business you go into lightly. I mean, there's a lot, a lot of legal liabilities involved with this, especially under HIPAA. And so HIPAA, I should say, HIPAA's the filter I use on my vacuum cleaner. That, you know, this shows that Apple is determined to be in this game, at least in this market, for at least a medium, if not longer term, because you don't make this kind of investment and decide you're later, no, I don't want to be in it anymore. No, you don't. And the flip side of that is once you're entrenched in this industry, I mean, one of the problems with the U.S. health care system is the entrenched insurance companies who have a lot of leverage. Once you're involved in this industry, you've got a nice safe product line that you can rely on. You have a nice safe revenue stream because everybody needs health care.  So when you're looking at that Apple bottom line and you're paying attention to iPhone revenue and things like that, don't forget that this is going to provide them a nice steady stream of revenue. The more types of products like this, they roll out. And if they're successful, like this becomes, you know, it doesn't have to be a knock out of the park kind of business, but they do well in it. They could look at to expand and doing back-end stuff, which is kind of one of the big problems right now with digital records and health care is you're relying on systems or if not a decade old, like even older, and you have all these mismatched things that you're trying to transfer over, they can kind of figure all that out. That would be huge. Well, I mean, that is essentially what they're doing with the VA here. And then, you know, no knock on the VA. You probably have very sub-pinions about the VA, depending on how you deal with them and whether you're a veteran or not. But it's an old institution. It's not new. It's not like cutting edge. It's not a startup. So it's probably not going to be the easiest client to be able to get on a digital platform like this. And if you can figure out that Chinese puzzle, you got the rest of it, I think, pretty well. Maybe that's it. Apple doesn't need to figure out the Chinese puzzle about smartphones because they're going to get all this money from health care. Woo-hoo! And in related news, Fitbit added two new fitness trackers to its website, the Fitbit Inspire and the Inspire HR. These are devices for corporate wellness, health plans and health system partners, not for you the consumer to go by.  Pricing will vary by employer and provider. They don't even put a price on them. Although Fitbit says they'll be inexpensive, but you have to be a company that comes and says, yes, I want to give these to my employees to be able to find out how much it's going to cost you because they're at enterprise rates. The Inspire features basic activity and sleep tracking, supports call and text alerts, offers a monochrome touchscreen water resistance to 50 meters in a five-day battery life, the Inspire HR, which hilariously as an enterprise product makes me think it comes from human resources, adds 24-7 real-time heart rate monitoring and a silicon band. CEO James Park of Fitbit told CNBC that 6.8 million patients, employee and health plan members incorporate Fitbits into wellness programs and company revenue is increasingly tied to business customers. So here is a company that is navigating those difficult waters that we mentioned earlier in a couple of different ways. We mentioned Fitbit in the Apple story as well in a different way. So they are the competitor for these dollars that Apple has out there. And the pitch for them is a little bit different. It's less about services and more, hey, if you want your company employees to be healthier, give them a Fitbit and that will help keep them healthy. At least that's the pitch. And you can track where they are or what they do. That's my sort of... It's interesting because Fitbit was one of those rising stars that everyone thought would be like, they're going to own this market. In fact, they already own this market. And as we've seen, the marketplace is extremely fickle, as Apple has found out with China, that things that seem to be on the trajectory don't often stay that way and you need to be flexible on your business model to adapt and to pivot where you need to. And sometimes that isn't to another consumer product but as Fitbit has found is business to business. Yeah, and I think we're going to see a lot of wearable makers try this. They may or may not be successful, but the wearable market itself has not grown at the rate that even tablets did, I don't think, certainly not that we saw phones. So it is not the next coming of smartphones, but it is a valuable marketplace. And Apple has been very good at selling its consumer watch based on some health and exercise plans. Fitbit kind of ran the exercise thing as far as they could. So they've got to try something else. In many respects, this is kind of what Detroit did with car sales, right? They did fleet sales because not enough people were buying cars but they could sell X amount of block of, like say, four tourists or whatever. And to be honest, that's the future of car sales entirely. The idea is like, individual ownership may decline a lot more in the future. But it's so advantageous. Guess what? I don't need to produce 12 different colors with custom options. I can build it to one spec for a rental car company or a company like Uber or Lyft or whatever. And I don't have to worry about just making individual models. I can save money, I can produce more and maximize the amount of productivity per worker instead of kind of having it going back and forth. Yeah. I mean, if Fitbit's doing something slightly different from Apple, it's not as much of a health involved thing. I'm sure there's some HIPAA compliance involved here but it's not providing access to your actual data, right? So it's no different than the data that you collect if you buy the Fitbit as a consumer. So a little bit easier, I guess. And still, you can get some big contracts if you get employers on board. We'll see if they do. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. It's where we get the ideas for a lot of the stuff we cover here and it's important to see what you're interested in. So the more of you that get in there and submit stories and vote on them, the better. And you can discuss with other Facebook-minded people, I mean people who are on Facebook who like the show, at facebook.com.com, slash groups, slash dailytechnewshow. All right, Nate Langston is back with the text message podcast every Sunday, coming out of the UK. And he's got a preview of what's happening on the latest text message. Nate? Thanks, guys. One of the most amazing bits of feedback I get about my podcast, text message, is that it gives North American listeners a huge amount of global context about topics they're already familiar with. This week, for example, we talked about the UK's tests of 8 gigabit per second fiber optic broadband, one of our biggest phone networks being accused of violating net neutrality laws by overly compressing streaming videos and a regulator banning hotel booking websites from pretending rooms are more popular than they are. All topics you'll know about in the US, but we can help explain how they compare this side of the pond. Do check out the latest episode 157 to hear about all those stories at techpodcast.uk. We'll also find some handy subscription links. Back to you. I really want to be one of those eight houses that has the 8 gigabit per second fiber optic lines he was talking about. You got to hear the show to find out where that is, because I don't remember it, but go check it out, techpodcast.uk. I want that. I would so want that. But it would need to be reliable. Like, it'd be great to have 8 gigabits per second, but it's only up for like half the week and the other time it's down for maintenance. Is it gigabytes or gigabits? I thought it was 8 gigabits per second. If it was gigabits, I should say. I think it's the speed, not the amount of the download. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Andy Beach sent us a note in Slack, an interesting aside to the conversation about Fortnite from last week. Andy says, Scott has mentioned it was where kids now gather to talk, meaning Fortnite. I experienced this recently with my daughter who's now eight and in second grade. She and her friends love a game called Roblox, R-O-B-L-O-X. It's somewhere between Minecraft and Fortnite. And I found out that she has been coming home from school. She and her friends hop on Roblox, go to the same location in the game, and help each other do their homework there. When they are done, they then plan the mini games or other adventures in the game for a while before saying goodbye. She'd been doing this for a few weeks before I caught on that this is what's happening, a funny aside to the story or confirmation that these games are, in fact, the chat rooms kids use for their daily lives. And I wrote back to Andy. I was like, I'm most impressed that she got together in a game with her friends and did her homework with them. And he wrote back and said she had been in a homework assistance thing in person, but she couldn't stick around anymore. She had to be able to come home. And this was their virtual replacement for that. So is this like Second Life for Kids or something? You know, it's funny because Roblox is very popular with my wife's nephew. And it's like the thing he and his friends all play. And it's interesting because I remember doing this back when I used to play online, there were certain people you would meet over and over again and you would just have a normal kind of casual relationship where you just talk about stuff.  And it was very interesting because I found it to be very much like going up, going to a bar or going, hovering out of the water cooler and you just kind of have his, excuse me, discourse. One of my favorite things about his story is that you think the first time you're reading this or hearing it, they're like, ah, I came home and found out my daughter was going into this game when as soon as she got home and meeting with her friends and you think it's going to be, so I had to tell her she had to do her homework. No, she was going into the game to do her homework. This was not get your homework done before you go into Roblox. This was going to Roblox to get help with your homework from your friends. So you are all learning more. I think that's pretty amazing. It's pretty cool. And I think before the show, during the good day in the night portion, we were talking about what the future of what would come after Facebook, right? Like what kind of, what would take the place, what would disrupt it? And it could be something like Roblox. It could be something like Fortnite where people are now engaging, connecting via an interactive experience instead of something that just amounts to a digital yearbook. Yeah, I could see that because a lot of what happens is your Twitter's and your Facebook's come from folks seeing people using an existing tool in a new way, right? Twitter was essentially saying, you know, people use text messages for this. What if we created a service that was even better than using text messages for group organizations or whatever? Facebook, sort of the same way. People use online forums for X. What if we made an even better online forum, right? It's not that they were entirely new, but they found a new spin based on how people were using existing tools. So maybe there's something there. Maybe that next big startup idea comes from somebody realizing, hey, if kids are meeting up in games, what if we made a game that did this better for kids? I don't know. Local buddy. Local buddy. You got to listen to Good Day Internet. By the way, if you don't know, we have an entire show wrapped around Daily Tech News show called Good Day Internet. If you like to hear Roger and Sarah and I talk about stuff, we range beyond just the topics of conversation on the tech news. Sometimes we'll explore them in depth. Sometimes we'll talk about food or pop culture. It's called Good Day Internet and it is available exclusively as a perk for patrons at any level. You get an RSS feed for Good Day Internet and you can listen to it or you can become a patron and just listen to the DTNS. They're both options available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Also, I don't have it with me today because I was actually wearing it outside earlier because it was a little chilly and this is warm, but there is a Daily Tech News show, beanie slash stocking cap slash toque. Whatever you call it, the warm knit thing that you put on your head in the winter available in the Daily Tech News show store. I was walking around the other day and some guy yelled at me from his truck. I don't know if he was yelling, hey, love DTNS or if he was confused, but he gave me a thumbs up so it was positive. I don't know, your mileage may vary, but it will keep you warm. I can say it's a very comfortable hat. You can find it at dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Sarah Lane and Patrick Beja. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. And if you do order one of those hats, tell me what you call it. A head sock. I used to call them head socks. Head sock. We used to call them, I think we just called them stocking caps when I was growing up. Like when I think of stocking caps, I think like the Christmas ones, the elves wear that are pointed. That are real long, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These are very short stockings. These are crew socks caps. Crew socks. Oh, yeah. So what do we got for names? Let's go to showbot.chatrealm.net. If you watch this live on the YouTubes or listen in the Discord, by the way, you can hook up your Discord through Patreon. Listen live on the Good Day Internet channel. You can go to showbot.chatrealm.net and vote. The headlines are submitted through IRC, through IRC.chatrealm.net. And right now, we've got $300 million and $0.10 Reddit investment. That's pretty funny. That's pretty funny. Good job, Bojan. Apple pairs with veterans. Nice. That's a good one. Zoe brings bacon. Out of lane. We are out of lane today. We miss her. $0.10, but it'll cost you. That's funny. India is trying to get Jack in the box. Get it? The testimony box. Jack Dorsey. VA is AppleCare. That's not bad. AI raising ethical human standards. Ironic. Cell phone saturation. Wires and ice cubes. Fitbit inspires corporate health. More ApplePie is healthy. Don't know that that really fits where you were going, but I totally support the sentiment. Apple pairs with veterans the most. What about you, Roger? Let me see. What was it? Is a Fitbit for your employees? Like, it's a good fit for your employees. Is a Fitbit for your employees? See, that one didn't work for me as well. All right. All right. I had to work too hard to understand it. Apple pairs with veterans, it is. All right. Apple pairs with veterans. Veteran's Day. I was about to, and I will put this online, one of the doc so that you have it. I was about to start explaining Good Day Internet again, and then I realized the only people hearing this are people who already know what Good Day Internet is because they're listening to it. Oh, man. What you might not know if you're a patron is at the associate producer level, you get the editor's desk. And Friday, I had my first guest on the editor's desk. The editor's desk is usually just me talking about why we picked things, why we did things the way we did them. And so Friday, I brought on Justin Robert Young, partially because I wanted to talk about why we decided to cover the Bezos story. Some of you still disagree with us covering it, and that's fair. But I wanted to explain where my thought process is worse, so you at least know this wasn't just a random reason. But I also brought Justin on, partly because he's good at understanding these journalistic choices as well. He also went to journalism school like I did, but also because I really just wanted to get his take on some of the non-tech aspects of it, some of the wider political aspects that we didn't touch on in the main show. So yeah, you always get a little extra at patreon.com slash DTNS. Yeah, and Len, Zoe Brings-Bacon mentions, Len has had a ton of good reaction to his artwork. It was picked up by an editorial cartoon newsletter. He has taken up the idea of sending a copy to Jeff Bezos. If you haven't seen the art from Friday, go to lemperaltestore.com to take a look. It is safe for work. Most, it is. It's totally safe for work. It's funny though. And yeah, we'll see if he gets any response. My guess is he won't get any response, but you never know. You never know. I think it's worth doing. Ace said, I went to journalism school and hated it. That's why I went into fiction. Yeah, it's funny. I went to journalism school and kind of assumed I wouldn't use it because I was like, I don't want to work at a newspaper. I kind of don't want. I worked at a radio station and I was kind of like, I'm not sure I want to work at a radio station. I don't necessarily want to work at it. And the internet came along and suddenly I was like, oh, I want to do that. And I'm actually using my journalism degree to do it. It was unanticipated. So you never know. You never know when something comes along and you just end up using it anyway. Life is like a box of chocolates. Life is what happens when you're making other plans. That's why I never make plans. That way I'll live forever. I want to know how many different life metaphors, similarly, aphorisms there are. Aphorisms. You mentioned several different categories of things just now that don't all relate to each other. So how many life aphorisms? Like a box of chocolates. Although life is like a box of chocolates, I guess is both an aphorism and a simile. That's a good point. Well, with Sarah gone, I feel like we have a little opportunity here on Good Day Internet to play a little question game. So if you are in the Discord, shoot some questions my way in the general channel. And we will do our best to answer them. You can also do it in IRC, irc.chatrealm.net. Don't do it if we're not live. Well, I mean, you can go ahead and do it if we're not live. We just won't answer them right now. But yeah, we'll do a little impromptu AMA. Roger and I both. Roger, of course, will be publishing the show as we go. But I will make sure to do as much as I can. Old guy wants to know, where does the white go when snow melts? Because the water isn't white anymore. It goes back into space. Isn't the white just the function of the crystal? Oh, I guess no, you're right. The white would go into the earth. Because the white is the refracted colors of the ice crystals. And when the ice crystals are melted, then the water no longer refracts as much. It doesn't reflect, I should say, not refract. It does refract. It doesn't reflect. And the white, which is caused by a combination of multiple colors, then just passes on through. And goes into it. It doesn't reflect. So it goes through the water into whatever it hits next. I mean, technically it doesn't go anywhere. You just don't see it anywhere. Old guy says, I like to think it goes back to the clouds. Zoe Briggs Bacon wants to know, for each of us, what's your favorite kitchen gadget? Like the one thing I couldn't live, I wouldn't eat in the kitchen. She says, what's your favorite kitchen gadget? Does it have to be a gadget or could it be a utensil? And I don't mean like a fork or a knife. Well, yeah, I was wondering that too, because my first gut reaction is the garlic press I have, because it's perfect. It's all stainless steel. It presses garlic wonderfully. It's easy to clean, but it's not necessarily a gadget. So I don't know if that fits the profile here. So he does say garlic press is acceptable, so a utensil could work. Because I like my tongs when I cook. Yeah, do you have a good, what are they made of? They're just stainless steel tongs. I mean, it's like... They're just solid tongs, huh? Yeah, I mean like... What kind of tongs are they? What brand? I don't know. We just got them at a restaurant supply store. I'm sure there's a name engraved or etched somewhere on the base, but we just paid like 10 bucks or something. Matuba wants to know if we did a story on Lowe's killing their Iris smart systems. I may have missed it. No, we didn't. Didn't show up on the feeds. Wasn't, wasn't buzzy enough. Fork would be too basic. But tongs, tongs I think are okay. Because if they're spring loaded and, you know... And Tim wants to know what food qualifies as a gadget, because somebody said we were talking about food. Is there a food, is there good food that qualifies as a gadget? Like, is that toast with the circuit board made of Vegemite? That's a gadget. Matubus and just pizza rolls might be considered a gadget. But something you can eat that can also fulfill another baguette? You can hit someone with it if it's ill enough. Now, DRNXN said something in the Discord, but didn't include a link. So I'm checking to find out if I can see anything about it. If you do see something that catches your eye, because news breaks all the time that we didn't talk about in the show, and you want us to mention it in the post-show, by all means do include a link so we can make sure that we're verifying. That's just what we do. It's not that we don't trust you. We just, we trust but verify. Thank you. There we go, CNBC. That's exactly what I wanted. DRNXN, you're the best. So CNBC says Amazon is acquiring ERO. ERO is actually what I use in my house. It's one of those mesh Wi-Fi routers. Amazon said it has acquired ERO, and it will, of course, compete with Google. And they say Apple's airport, but they discontinued that last year. And CNBC says they discontinued it. We are incredibly impressed with the ERO team and how quickly they invented a Wi-Fi solution. Amazon is focusing its smart home efforts on the Echo and is willing to acquire where it makes sense. Yeah, all right, not much else to say on that, but makes perfect sense for Amazon to acquire ERO. It probably makes sense for ERO to sell to Amazon. We don't know how much the sale is for. There's no amount quoted here, but ERO probably wasn't going to become a big company yet. If they don't want to wait 10 years to evolve and try to become something that's more than just a router maker, then selling to an Amazon is probably a good exit for the founders. I bought the ERO off of Kickstarter several years ago. ERO was founded in 2014, and the startup laid off a fifth of its employees last year. So that may be part of it, too. Maybe they were running into cash flow issues, and it was a, can we get another round of venture funding or should we just sell to Amazon? Because Amazon doesn't care if this is even a loss leader, as long as it's good technology, and it is good technology. I don't love the idea of more consolidation. I'm not going to lie. I use the Amazon Echo, but I like that ERO was a thing that was independent, and I didn't even pay for their cloud service because I'm like, yeah, I don't need anybody else having access to my data more so than they need to, because they have a cloud service that'll do some virus protection and stuff like that, and feel like that was absolutely necessary. I can protect my network in other ways. So Amazon is now going to do that, which could make the product better by providing some Amazon Web Services. Maybe that cloud service is bundled in with Prime or included in some other service like that. Tim wants to know if anyone's excited about the new Twilight Zone. I'm hopeful. I want to see it, but I'm not doing handstands. I'm not doing handstands either, but I'm pretty excited. I will say I'm pretty excited. I am a big fan of Jordan Peele. I think he's the right guy for the job. I love the original Twilight Zone. I love that they're at least keeping the trappings, like the music and the logo. And the door. He feels like he has veneration for the concept. So I am very optimistic. As long as they don't do what they did with that reboot, they did in the late 80s, where the production was done in Canada, but the stories were a little more hopeful at the end, instead of being a strength type like that. Oh, no. Yeah, we're in a 70s era right now. We're not in an 80s type era. So I don't think these will be hopeful stories.  Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Like in the 80s, everybody wanted good news. Let's have good news again. Let's be positive. That's not the culture we're in right now. People want black mirror. They want dark stuff. So hopefully that won't be a big deal. Zoey Brings Bacon says, do people actually buy internet-connected fridges? Are they actually a good idea or more of a gimmick? I have not yet seen an internet-connected fridge that I felt was necessary yet. I personally, outside of DTNS, would recommend against buying one for now. You would recommend to buy one inside of DTNS? No, I recommend you would not. You said outside of DTNS you would recommend you not, but I was wondering if inside of DTNS you would change that. My whole thing about white goods, basically any kind of large appliance, refrigerator, washer, dryer, stove, the less complicated it is, generally the better it is in terms of longevity and maintenance. I don't mind it having some connectivity. I think that could be perfectly fine. I don't think that the fridge needs to do much. Some connectivity and some sensors might be a good idea someday. I still haven't seen a compelling reason for it. The only thing I've seen that has been in any way appealing to me is the cameras that they put in some of them where you can see what's in the fridge and even some of them claim to be able to tell you expiration dates without having to open it. I can see that maybe being useful, but it's probably not even as useful as it seems because how hard is it really to just open the fridge and look? And I say that not because I'm a big believer in how hard is it builds up to where it's like, hey, things that save me a small amount of time can build up to save me a lot of it in time. But how hard is it to open the fridge versus opening an app and looking at it? You know what I mean? Like, it probably doesn't save you that much time, really, in the long run. Longer run, longer run. I don't know. I could be wrong. One of these days. Maybe some of those days. But we need to say goodbye to the viewers on YouTube. Thank you, video viewers, YouTuber or otherwise. Thanks for being with us. That's it for today's show, except if you're on audio, stick around. There's more to come.


Hi everyone, this being the networking track, we are going to continue the discussions around networking, going quite deep into the data path this time. So we're going to look at OVS data paths, also view router, and how flexible they are, how we can make them faster, and specifically also how we can extend them using P4 or C languages, in other words how can we make them more flexible. To do that we'll delve into the traditional OpenStack networking options that are around there. We'll look at the older OVS without connection tracking, the new OVS 2.5 that does have connection tracking support. One that you may not be familiar with is Contrail View Router. It's an alternative to the OpenV switch, except it's using more routing-like constructs, BGP, IP forwarding, etc. We'll compare SRIOV to VertiO and similar solutions, focusing on flexibility and performance of the data paths. Then we'll have a look at how we can make things faster using SmartNICS, specifically evaluating the flexibility and the performance achievable using these SmartNICS. To make things yet more flexible, we'll introduce those programming languages P4C, but also a new Linux kernel construct, EBPF, adding flexibility into the Linux kernel, which can also be offloaded to the SmartNIC. Looking at various permutations and combinations of either doing the entire data path using these or by just injecting little pieces of code into existing data paths. Let's look at the traditional OVS model to get started. Typically you would have a NIC that does not do any intelligent processing. This NIC would then feed traffic into the OpenV switch subsystem. That's composed of the kernel data path, as well as the user mode agent. A typical packet would go first to the kernel. The kernel would notice, I don't know anything about this packet, about the flow to which the packet belongs. Would send it to user mode. The user mode would then push down a flow entry into the kernel data path, and all subsequent packets of that flow would get forwarded more or less directly to the virtual machine. OVS 2.5 is able to now integrate with the Linux connection tracking feature. So this is something that you would normally encounter attached to NF tables or IP tables. So OVS can talk to it directly now to have an implementation of OpenStack security groups, which is both stateful, still offers high performance. So once that first packet has traversed the data paths, the idea with the kernel module is to forward traffic directly to the VM without involving user space anymore. So in essence, then, the kernel is a fast path for the user space. The actual packets get sent to the VMs using VertiO or many other host-to-guest communication channels. The SIOV style of forwarding traffic to VMs involves really basic configuration driven from OpenStack, setting up things like MAC addresses and VLAN tags that are then used to pick to which SIOV instance certain packets get sent. Once that configuration has been completed, the X86 is not in the picture anymore, and the SIOV style NICs can send the traffic directly to the VMs. In return for this very direct path, though, you end up with very limited intelligence. You can basically only use simple criteria like the MAC address or the VLAN tag to direct the traffic to the virtual machines. So to start peeling the onion further here, with OVS, you have a few options for your control plane. These flow entries that drive the forwarding of traffic or the other policies associated with traffic are sent by OpenStack using the ML2 plugin to the compute nodes. An SDN controller like Open Daylight may or may not be involved. It's typically involved if you have some hardware switches as well or some more complex setups. New facility that emerged recently is OVN, which is a layer on top of OVS, where the OpenFlow protocol is no longer going over the whole data center network, but it's only local to the compute node with OVN protocol based on OVSDB replacing OpenFlow in the data center. But either way, the forwarding is typically done on layer two, layer three criteria. Even though it's built on top of OpenFlow match action tables, that's what's typically used. OpenFlow being there, there's fortunately some room for growth. If one wanted to, one could direct the traffic based on layer four criteria like TCP port, UDP port, et cetera, as well. In terms of overlay support, this solution supports a variety of tunnel protocols. And in some cases, they can even be combined. For example, VXLAN can live in VLAN, NSH can be inside VXLAN, et cetera. And for the security groups, as mentioned, from OVS 2.5, we have the contract interface for micro-segmentation. VRouter is very similar in its feature set. It's only the details that differ. With VRouter, you have a control driver. It's not using the ML2 mechanism, it's a full driver. L2L3 forwarding is done using dedicated forwarding tables. And there's also a separate flow table that's used for the security part of it. It also supports tunneling, a different set of tunneling protocols. The SRIOV, again, of ML2 plugin is used, there is some vendor-specific code in LibVert to support different variants of SRIOV-enabled cards. Forwarding intelligence, very limited, and no support whatsoever if you use the SRIOV method for tunneling or security. If this is necessary, people typically do that using an external physical switch, which obviously has a lot of additional cost and complexity associated with it. So let's now look at the accelerated approach. A smartNIC, like the Netronome Agelio smartNIC, is able to offload the entire OVS kernel data port. So similar to with the unaccelerated version, a first packet of a flow might get sent up to user space. When that user space OVS agent determines what to do with the flow, it pushes down a flow entry into the OVS kernel module, which acts as a cache for the user space and a fast path. That kernel module pushes the flow entry down further into the smartNIC. In addition to that, the smartNIC also has another level of fast buffing to even avoid the OVS kernel style match action lookups. So after this, you may also involve contract in the host site, which is similarly offloaded with the contract state being synchronized to the smartNIC. Once the first packet of a flow has traversed all of us, the flow entries are set up in the smartNIC and the traffic can then be processed autonomously on the smartNIC for all the remaining packets of a flow. Using this mechanism, the vast majority of traffic can be offloaded to the smartNIC and then actually sent directly to the virtual machines. So the traffic can go via SRIOV to the virtual machines, despite the fact that there's virtual switching happening because the actual virtual switch is pushed down into the NIC. So this therefore gives you the combination of the features of SRIOV and virtual switching. You don't need an external physical switch for this. Furthermore, there's the option of using VertiO to feed traffic to VMs. And this is very useful when it comes to, for example, via migration. V-Router, very similar. The details differ. It actually has a separate forwarding table, which is preemptively pushed down to the NIC. The flow table works similar to OVS where a miss causes packets to go to user space, causes flow interest to be installed. And once it's all set up, again, the traffic can go more or less directly to the virtual machines. VertiO and SRIOV both being supported. Looking at the performance, if we compare the solution to the baseline OVS running in the kernel, we see a substantial improvement in throughput. OVS running on DP2K does have a higher throughput, but the SmartNIC has got a higher throughput storm. However, look at this CPU usage. To achieve this result, the kernel and the user space OVS were each given 12 cores, whereas OVS, when it's offloaded, only needs a fraction of a core. I just rounded it up to a core here. That's because only that first packet in the flow needs to consult the host. All the remaining traffic is handled autonomously by the SmartNIC. So to visualize that a bit, in a networking heavy case, you may actually lose one of the two sockets in a dual socket machine just to network-related processing. Whereas with a SmartNIC, a fraction of a core is used. I'm freeing up the majority of the system for application processing, VMs, containers, NFV applications, whatever they may be. So if you would like to delve into this further and look for your use case, what the savings could be, please access this link and you can go and do your own ROI calculation or just Google for ROA calculator at Netronome. So to summarize the traditional unaccelerated approach, with SRIOV gives us high throughput but very limited expressiveness, typically, as I said, MAC or VLAN matching, not stateful matching, not very deep insight into the packets, let alone tunnel termination or any other actions that modify the packets. With SRIOV, one cannot migrate the VMs, so it becomes a manageability issue. OVS and Control V-Router unaccelerated give you high expressiveness but much lower throughput or they actually use a lot of the CPU cores. With a smartNIC approach, we get the best of both worlds. We get the benefits of SRIOV based data delivery to VMs while still doing the full switching. Netronome is also offering the express VIRTO feature, which gives you close to the performance of SRIOV while still being compatible with VIRTO drivers in the VMs. The accelerated OVS and V-Router gives you the same expressiveness as the baseline V-Router and OVS at a much higher throughput, yet with a lower CPU utilization. So we talk about the efficiency, which is the work done per server core. We actually have 50 times better efficiency because we do five times the throughput at a tenth of the resource. Let's say, however, that is not enough for you. You want additional flexibility that's not offered by the match action tables in these data puffs. So fortunately, the smartNICs have dynamically downloadable firmware and this firmware can even change while the smartNIC is running. By the way, there's a variety of port speeds available from 10 to 100 gig in these smartNICs. One way to exploit that is to use things like Contrail and OVS and simply offload them then they're a drop in replacement for the upstream versions. You could get more flexibility, however, by using something called EBPF, which takes effectively a little program, a little expression in the Linux kernel. That is compiled usually with adjusting time compiler to native code or for host processor and then it can run on packets, it can do lookups, it can do packet modification, etc. So it's very exciting, a new development is EBPF. Another term you'll see about it is XDP. The smartNICs can offload that and can actually run EBPF programs and just speed up the processing at that level. Further programmability is supplied by using traditional programming languages. I'm sure you'd be familiar with the C language. The P4 language is a new language specific to the networking domain, allowing you to very easily and conveniently do packet passing, matching actions and so forth. These can all be compiled into the firmware for the smartNIC and we can then combine the P4 or C derived firmware with OVS, EBPF, Contral based firmware. So since you may not be that familiar with P4, here's an example of a typical P4 program. You can see how easily one can declare header fields. This just declares Ethernet, IP would not be much longer and this describes also the parsing. One starts by parsing Ethernet, then it extracts the Ethernet header and in this case jumps to the ingress part, which is on the right-hand side of a slide, which proceeds to do table lookups. It applies the intable. This table now matches the ingress port and can invoke certain actions. So by putting appropriate entries into the table, you can for example say port 1 must go to port 2, port 2 must go back to port 1 and build a wire that way. So what you see here is a NIC implemented in one slide of code. Now try and do that in regular programming languages. You can very easily declare other protocol headers, also include them in matching. It can do exact match, range match, prefix match, etc. So the net of it is that we get a lot of additional flexibility by using P4, whereas OpenVswitch implements the OpenFlow standard that has a predefined set of protocols that it can work with. The OpenFlow has a 40 tuple, so 40 different protocol fields are defined. That's already a lot, but if you want to add more, you need to either do a proprietary extension or work with a standard's body to go and extend the standard. The standard also defines the match action behavior and the overall control flow. So for example in OpenFlow, you get a bunch of flow tables in the pipeline and then at the end you would have maybe a group table to do things like load balancing. And if you want to do the load balancing in the middle, well, you need to wait for a new version of the standard. In the case of P4, we actually start with a blank slate. We effectively have a switch that has nothing in it and the language can go and declare where we want to do the parsing. That's the yellow block. In other words, which data plan protocols we want to support. We can declare the green match action tables, the queuing and scheduling, et cetera, and permute them in any order. And that does require therefore a new concept, which is a data path program that needs to be written, that needs to be compiled with a front and a back end compiler and downloaded into your switch. So for something like OpenStack to be based on this, this would be a new construct that would need to be supported in OpenStack. These programs would need to be managed and sent to the compute nodes, network nodes, compiled, upgraded, et cetera. But in return we have a lot of flexibility by being able to in the language express exactly what we want. Some things you may want to do are telemetry to debug the network or do advanced monitoring, support new tunnel protocols, maybe add some security features, et cetera. Instead of using the regular open flow from an open flow controller, which is then plugged in beneath OpenStack, you would have probably some form of central controller managing the networking in the data center. But it would need to be an extended version of open flow because to add support for dynamically definable protocol fields, you would need that. It's to be determined whether one would use this also to go and download the program or whether you would send the program to the nodes in some other way. So let's have a look at how we can use P4 or other languages like C to extend these data paths. One simple way is using a plug-in concept. We also call that a sandbox concept where you use an existing data path to do your first level of matching and then decide using one of these rules called flows in open flow to send the traffic to the sandbox. So you may, for example, say we want to implement a custom tunnel protocol. And we can match UDP port 1, 2, 3, 4, if it's that UDP port, then send it to the red plug-in for detunneling or maybe send all traffic to some block for statistics gathering. These data path extensions could be written in this P4 language that we just saw. They could also be implemented in C or EBPF. We could also have them both on the host and on the SmartNIC with the SmartNIC again offloading the host. What do we gain by this? We have quite a bit more flexibility in the action area. It's easy to filter or modify packets. It's a bit harder, though, if we want to use these plugins to go and do classification. Think a little bit about how you would do that. You would need to have a table lookup and then feed it to maybe that P4 block for additional constraints to be determined. And what if that additional constraint is not satisfied? Now it needs to go back to the original table lookup and get the next highest priority match. And feed it again to some C code or P4 code to do further refinement. So that's kind of hard, but the scenario I described where you do the outer protocol with something like OVS and the inner protocol with some of these new mechanisms, that's much more feasible. In terms of how to integrate all of us into OpenStack, if we model the additional functionality as an additional port, then we can use the existing SDN controller like Open Daylight, existing OpenStack infrastructure. And we just need to know, we need to feed it not to a physical port, but to a logical port representing that functionality. If we elect to make it a custom action, we would need to change the open flow action list to be able to have these new action types in there. What though if we want to go and replace the entire smart data path with a data path written in these languages. In this case, we'd write it in P4 as far as the matching goes, because that's very convenient. The action maybe we want to throw in some C code, P4 can also do some actions. And now we offload the OVS host data path similar to what we did before. In this case, it becomes quite easy to program the smartNIC using these languages to do the offloading. And you could easily do custom behaviors there, but since we did not touch the OVS C code on the host, we are limited to what OVS supports. Integration will be very minimal effort if it's just doing what OVS does today, but if we are enhancing OVS and adding support for new protocols or new behaviors, then we will want to create that open flow plus plus that we saw in the other diagram. What though if we start to replace some of the blue OVS code with the burgundy P4 code. In this case, more substantial changes are needed to OVS. But in return, we get all the features of P4 where we can more easily add new data plan protocols, new behaviors, etc. So here there's unfortunately some fine print because in theory, it's very easy to go and implement all these new things in P4. In practice though, if you look at the detail, open flow matching is in fact more flexible than P4. Because with open flow, you can at any time go and replace any table match field, add a field. Let's say you have a table matching ethernet, you can suddenly start to match IP in the, or TCP. You can at any time introduce a new action as a consequence of a table field whereas in P4 all these things need to be pre-declared. So in order to solve that issue, one can regenerate the program on demand. Once you see a new pattern of behavior being introduced, you would go and recreate a P4 program to correspond to that. Alternatively, a little bit more practical is to pre-define what you want in terms of the maximum flexibility you need. And then just return errors if incompatible requests are sent from the cloud management system to the compute nodes. So this is a considerable effort, but it's already been done for the OVS host part. There's the so-called Pisys project by Muhammad Shabas. You can get more details at that link. There's an independent P4 implementation for the smartNICS that one can get and play with. They just haven't been connected together yet. So once that infrastructure is in place, it will hopefully be much easier to add new data plan protocols. They're talking about an order of magnitude less code to add a new data plan protocol. What though, if we say we get rid of all the last remnants of OVS and we just replace the agent in user space, also with a new agent. Now we have full flexibility. We don't have to use any of the existing things like the OpenFlow protocol, the OVN protocol, etc. We can basically make it a remote procedure call from the cloud management system over the network into the compute node, or define a new protocol to go and push the policies down to the compute nodes. However, we now run into the issues that I mentioned. Who will go and download the programs? Is it OpenStack? Is it another system? How do we pick which node to run a VM on? Maybe a certain program needs certain acceleration hardware to function properly or needs some other resource that varies between the compute nodes. So now we need to go and modify the Nova scheduler to go and pick the right place to run this kind of networking infrastructure program. The discussion started in the Austin OpenStack meeting around acceleration. I think it's still in its infancy but at least it's being worked on to try and grapple with these issues and define the right constructs to support them. So we get in this case a lot of flexibility, easy to implement new behavior, a completely different control plan being possible. But conversely, a completely new control plan is required. We're starting from scratch with developing all of this and therefore that's a lot of work initially. But eventually it has a lot of benefits. Just one note to consider here, people are not only using open daylight and open flow for the virtual switches. They do use them to configure the physical switches, maybe the wire gateway or top of rack. So if we do go and replace everything with a new system, we will need a network protocol to go and cope with these older devices, physical boxes as well. So to summarize, there are many ways to just plug in smartnicks into existing data planes, whether they be OVS, Vrouter, EBPF, and you will see significant speed up of the data path, higher throughput, lower latency, etc. Significant offload to free up the server cause for application processing. One can go and program the smartnicks in P4 or C or a combination. There is work for us to go and evolve for standards to make all of us flexibility possible. The plane OVS, integrating OVS into OpenStack, integrating accelerated OVS into OpenStack. That's underway, there's still some steps needed. But when it comes to having P4 embedded in OVS or replacing OVS, a lot of work is needed there. Please, for example, join the discussion on a runtime API. This is currently happening in the Open Networking Foundation, but we're thinking of moving it to another body and actually having a cross body effort to host this discussion. In general though, all these efforts are very much worthwhile to have increased flexibility in the network while having higher performance and freeing up the server resources. So I think we have a few minutes for questions, if there are any. There's been a little said about latency. Did you perform any tests regarding all the configuration? We expect that latency will be lower, but. Yes, we did do some tests of latency. We actually found a tenfold reduction in latency in many cases. So from latency that can vary considerably because the moment the Linux scheduler is involved, it can potentially cause long spikes in latency. And if you pin things to a core, you can reduce that a little bit. But the fast path through the SmartNIC is just tens of microseconds of latency. So it's a huge benefit for that. And in fact, sometimes people deploy SRIOV in order to get higher throughputs. But sometimes they just deploy to get the lower latency. And with this way, you can do the virtual switching and still have your low latency and high throughput. Maybe you touched on that and I missed it, but in terms of hardware, what is different in a SmartNIC compared to a traditional NIC? I didn't actually spend enough time on that. The SmartNICs that we were referring to here are actually heavily multithreaded multi-core processors. So they have 72 to 120 cores on them, eight threads per core. So that gives you a huge amount of parallelism and a lot of cycles available to do all these processing tasks that are necessary. But they also do run to completion processing of packets. So therefore, nothing is fixed in terms of what to do per packet.  You can go and repeat them. More passing of an inner header, internal, detunnel, QoS, etc., it's just all up to software. Furthermore, these SmartNICs actually have DRAM on them. Gigabytes worth of DRAM, and that DRAM is used to store lookup tables or state tables to do things like the connection tracking, etc. So yes, there's a lot of capability in them. That's why they call SmartNICs and not just somewhat intelligent NICs. And that's really what makes all of us possible. One of the things about OpenStack networking is that when you want to go out from the VM to outside world, you typically have to use the network node. For doing the routing, and of course the way to avoid that is to use the DVR system. So have you thought about implementing DVR with the SmartNICs? So you would do forwarding directly from the VM to outside world? Yes, I think there's enough capability to basically do what even is necessary just by pushing the right policies down to the compute nodes. And there also is a question of capacity in terms of how many table entries. Can you support and how quickly can you update the table entries? Let's say if things move around, you need to go and also migrate the table entries that go along with the virtual machines. I guess it's really hard for me to comment on specifics without going into more specifics of your question, but in general it's possible it's supported in terms of the capability being there. And it's just up to the cloud management system to deploy the policies appropriately to get it done. So can we say this SmartNIC is made from the CPU. So the CPU actually was processing the package in that hardware. I'm not fully understanding your question. I'm just wondering how do you implement the SmartNIC? You used the CPU I heard before. It's quite of the main core inside the SmartNIC. Yes, so basically normally the open V switch or V router would run on the X86 and it would have a user space component talking with the cloud management system and it would have a kernel component focusing more on packet forwarding. What we would then do is go and write software that's equivalent to that kernel data pop that does the same kinds of matching, same kinds of actions with the tables being synchronized. So it also matches against the same tables. In terms of the physical implementation, if that's what you're asking, it's basically a mini core system with many threads. It looks like a RISC system with many, many different cores and that just runs the software. I think we're out of time so I'll need to let you go but please grab me during a break if you have any further questions. Thank you.


Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Darcy Taylor from Leaf Mobile. How are you today? Absolutely great. How are you today, Tracy? I'm good, and I really enjoyed Matt Boulson's update on what you're doing right now. We published a story on how your subsidiary eSide Games in collaboration with Universal Games and digital platforms will soon release a new mobile game called The Office. Somehow we manage. That seems like a good starting point. Let's talk about that deal. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we were beside ourselves with excitement for this acquisition of IP and a partnership with Universal. I mean, what more can you say about the U.S. version of The Office? It's the most downloaded TV show on Netflix, a five-time Emmy Award winner, loved by many people. And we're absolutely excited about bringing it to the mobile game space later this year. And I think this is where we lose some investor interest because they love Hollywood, but they want to know about numbers. So I'm just going to ask the next question leading off with the fact that there's a lot of analysts or people out there that seem to be following you presently and they're anticipating nearly 100 million in revenues. Is that correct? Yeah, so that's the analyst consensus is showing us north of 100 million this year, and then continuing to grow as some of these super marquee games such as The Office, as well as RuPaul Drag Race, start to hit the market in worldwide launch. And we recognize that revenue late this year and into 2022. So we have Hollywood. We have numbers for you shareholders. Everyone gives me a hard time here, Darcy, and now to me, this is equally as interesting. You have this media kit as well. You have the technology to back all of this up. Yeah, it's actually, it's our game kit. We refer to it as idle kit, and it's a technology framework that we utilize across our portfolio games. But sort of the hidden gem of it is that we also license this framework out to professional developers in the casual game or free to play game space. And the big benefit or the plus to the people that are on the platform is it allows them to develop games faster, less expensive with a higher propensity of success. So we utilize it internally to de-risk our game watches and to increase the surface area of our success. And we have 10 partners now globally utilizing it that will be launching over 15 games on the platform in the next 6 to 12 months that are going to benefit from this platform as well. We've built it over the last five years and we continuously iterate it. And we license it out on a SaaS-based model with upside sweetener in the success of the games as we do a revenue or a relative backend with those partners. And just for everyone out there, that's the game kit platform, not the media kit platform. And on that note, your growth really does seem to be exponential. Since we started following you, you're going to have what three creative studios, is that correct? Yeah, we're within our LEAF group. We have three studios right now, Eastside Games, Leaderly, and then most recently, Truly Social Games, sitting within the group based predominantly in North America. But we also have offices in Belarus, Minx as well. And right now, we can say that we will go from 10 games in our portfolio now to almost doubling by the end of this year. And we have more games in development than we've ever had to date. We have 17 that we'll see worldwide launch in the next 12 months. Well, I must admit that I love your trading symbol, LEAF. Do you have ESG investors calling you just because they're not paying attention? I mean, this is just an excellent trading symbol. Yeah, it definitely raises some eyebrows a lot of the time. And I mean, the company has been a true backer of ESG in the traditional sense and inclusive in diversity throughout our company as well as our games. And I think our RuPaul launch coming up is a true testament to our view of serving underserved markets like the LGBTQ plus space, where we think we're going to create a category and drive an amazing gaming business with the likes of another, I think RuPaul won 13 Emmys two nights ago for the show and with the most recognizable icon in the space. So we're not only are we excited about the office, but we have a one, two punch of the office and RuPaul coming out this year. So we think we have a very exciting back half of the year and it's even going to get more exciting going into 2022. Well, I must confess, I think RuPaul is an absolute genius. So Darcy, can you just add anything else for shareholders or interested parties that are looking at leaf now on what to anticipate in this upcoming quarter because you are moving so quickly. We're just we can't keep up. Yeah, it's definitely moving at an accelerated pace. I think, I mean, anyone who's been looking at this place under the space understands that it's a watershed moment for gaming. I mean, gaming is eating entertainment and we focus on mobile and mobile is eating the world. So we think right now we're deeply discounted versus our competition out there from a stock perspective. And I think what you'll see in the back half of this year as our super marquee IP games such as The Office and RuPaul come online is that we will have a very strong glide path of stacking revenue and new games exiting this year and going into 2022. And as I highlighted earlier, we have 17 games in the pipeline that will only build upon our existing success where we over the last 12 months we've done roughly 94 million in top line revenue and delivering that profitably with a very strong margin today. Darcy, thank you so much for that excellent update on a leaf mobile and just make sure I think we're on all your update list. That's leaf for everyone at Investor Intel. Thank you. Thank you.


In this video, we're going to attach an alternating voltage generator to a capacitor and find out the relationship between the current and the voltage, and then eventually draw a graph for the current with respect to the voltage. So let's begin. One thing to clarify is we're imagining that this circuit only has capacitance, no inductance or no resistance. And although that's not really ideal, it's a nice way to learn how capacitors behave when you put an alternating voltage across them, and it'll help us to learn more realistic circuits using these insights. All right. So where do we begin? I want an expression for current, right? So where do we begin? Well, let's assume there's a current. At some moment in time, there is some current flowing this way. And let's say that the generator has, at that more point in time, has a positive voltage here and negative voltage here. It's continuously oscillating. So at some moment in time, let's say it's positive here and negative here. All right. Let's say I build an equation. Well, whenever we are dealing with such circuits, I think the way I like to think about it is in terms of voltage, I know that because there are no circuit elements in between, the potential at this point is the same as the potential at this point. And similarly, the potential at this point should be the same as the potential on this point. And therefore, I know that at any moment in time, the voltage across the capacitor should equal the generator voltage. And that's where I can start. So let's write that down. We can say, at any moment in time, the voltage across the capacitor should equal the generator voltage. So the source voltage, all right? Now comes the question, how do we figure out what's the voltage across the capacitor? Well, we've seen before from capacitor equation, voltage across capacitor is just the charge on the capacitor. Let me use pink for charge. Charge on the capacitor divided by the capacitance. This is the definition of the capacitance, right? So it's a charge by capacitance. This is basically saying that to generate a voltage, the capacitor must get charged. So there must be some charge right now. You can call it charge q. And that charge, because of that charge, there is a potential difference. And that voltage is equal to the generator voltage. So this should equal the generator voltage. The source voltage, which is v0 sine omega t. And so from this, I get an equation for charge. So I know charge should equal c times v0 sine omega t. So I found the expression for charge on the capacitor. And it's telling me that the charge on the capacitor is not a constant. It's continuously oscillating just like the voltage, which is not so surprising. I would expect the capacitor to charge and discharge and charge and discharge to the charge will continuously keep changing. So I found the expression for the charge. But I want the expression for the current, not the charge. How do I go from here to there? I want you to pause the video and think a little bit about how do you get current from this expression? Okay, let's see. Here's my question. Can I just say current equals charge divided by time? So if I divide this thing by time, I'll get the current. Can I just say that? Can you pause the video and think, is this right or wrong? If it's, yeah, with the reasons. Okay, I can't say this. This is not right. The reason I can't say this is because this would only work if the current was a constant. If the amount of charge flowing per second is a constant, only then I can just say it's charge divided by time. But clearly in our case, the current won't be a constant. It's continuously going to change its value. It's going to change its direction. So for this, we have to differentiate. So over here, the current is going to be dq over dt. So you have to consider very tiny amount of charge flowing through very tiny amount of time. And that would be a current at that moment in time. And just to clarify, one thing you might say is that, hey, this is the charge on the capacitor. So when you're differentiating, you're calculating how quickly the charge on the capacitor is changing. Is that the current? Yes, because the rate at which the capacitor charge changes is the same as the rate at which the charges are flowing here. If there are 10 coulombs flowing for a second, then 10 coulombs are getting deposited on the capacitor plate. Okay, so the rate at which the charge on the plate is changing is the same as the current. And so this makes sense. So again, if you couldn't do it before, now would be a great time to pause and see if you can differentiate and see what expression you get for current. Okay. So this will be c and v0 are constants. So you can pull them out. And differentiation of sine would be cos omega t. But that's not it. Remember, we're differentiating with respect to time. So we have to use a chain rule, and so then omega pops out. And so we're going to into omega, I'll write that omega over here. And ta-da, we've found the expression for current. But now we want to compare it with the voltage and draw a graph, right? So for that, let's try to bring this in the same format as the voltage equation is. So the first thing I see is that this portion over here, this part over here, this now represents our maximum current. Just like how this represents the maximum voltage. And immediately, this is telling us that even though there is no resistance in our circuit, our current is limited. There is a maximum value and it depends upon all these numbers. And we'll talk more about why or how all of that happens in future videos. Now let's focus on this part. This is the part that I'm really interested in. To compare, you know, what's happening with our current, it'll be great if you can have that same function over here. So here we have sine, here we have cos. It'll be great if you can convert this into sine function as well and then compare the phase angle and see what the current is doing with respect to the voltage. So again, it was a great time to see if you can pause the video and use some trigonometry and convert this into a sine function and eventually tell what the current is doing with respect to the voltage and maybe try to even figure out what the graph is going to look like. All right, okay. So we know how to convert cos to sine. We can say cos theta is converted as sine of 90 minus theta. So I can say this is sine pi by 2 minus omega t. Now the problem with me, I mean, sorry, the problem with this, not with me, the problem I have with this is that it's hard for me to compare this function with this function because there is a positive omega t over here and there is a negative omega t. I really don't know what to do with that. I can't tell just by looking at this, what's my current oscillation doing compared to the voltage oscillation? It's really hard for me. It would have been great if I could convert it into a sine function with a positive omega t. Then it would be really, really easy for me to tell what's this oscillation doing compared to this one. Then I can easily compare. So can I do that? The answer is yes. Because remember, sine of pi by 2 plus omega t is also cos omega t because in the second quadrant, sine is positive. Therefore, instead of doing this, I will write this as sine of pi by 2 plus omega t or I'll write as omega t plus pi by 2. And one thing to remember, it doesn't really matter whether you keep it this way or whether you change it, the graph is not going to change. It's just for our understanding, this is a more convenient way to put it. And you'll see now why this is convenient. Now when I look at this, I immediately understand, ah! So the difference is the current is having a plus pi by 2 here compared to this phase. That means the current is oscillating ahead with a phase angle of 90 degrees and that means it's oscillating a quarter cycle ahead of the voltage. And that's why we say in capacitor, current leads the voltage. So they're not oscillating in sync with each other. And in a second, we'll see the animation. But current leads the voltage by a phase angle of pi by 2 radians. And so if you were to look at the graph, this would have been the current graph if the current and the voltage were in sync with each other. But now that we know that the current is leading by pi by 2, I want you to again, last time I want you to pause and think about how would the current graph be shifted? Do you think it'll be shifted somewhere like this or do you think it'll be shifted somewhere like this? Can you pause the video and think a little bit about it? All right. So we want our current graph to be ahead of the voltage. And at first it might seem like, OK, ahead means, you know, go to the right because that's the time direction. But remember, this is the future. So if you shift it to the right, that means it's delayed. It's more in the future. So we need to shift it to the left so that we say that current comes before the voltage. You get what I mean? So that means our current will be shifted to the left. And how much? One half of a one quarter cycle. So this part will be here. So this will be somewhat like this. There we go. This will be how the current graph is going to look like. So this means current first reaches the maximum, then the voltage reaches the maximum. Current first reaches zero, then voltage reaches zero. Current first reaches negative maximum. So these are our positive and negative maximas. So this is minus I naught. This is plus I naught. You get the point. The current leads the voltage. And now let me show you how to visualize this. So here's our visualization. The way to visualize this, just like we've done in previous videos, is I'll make the graph go back. And then we'll concentrate over here. And we'll be able to visualize the oscillations. So I'll dim everything. And you can now clearly see that the voltage is chasing the pink current. Look at that. Look at that. And we can use arrow marks. The current first goes to maximum. And then the voltage goes to maximum. Can you see that? And therefore, we say that current is leading the voltage. OK. So the moral of the story is for a pure capacitive circuit, how can you find the expression for the current? Well, we can use the capacitor equation. And then once you get the equation for the charge, you can differentiate it to get the current. And what we find is that the current leads the voltage when it comes to oscillations by a phase angle of pi by 2. And I'm sure you'll be very curious to understand, why does it do that? Why is the current leading the voltage? What's going on? How can we understand it logically? We're going to explore all of those things in a future video.


Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to document Federal Land's Highway Project X-7-7-4-8-3-G-5-8-3-6-1, codename Construction Documentation. You'll find further instructions in the main file. Before starting your assignment, it is imperative that you view the classified information contained in this videotape. Your predecessor failed and currently paves dog runs in the desert. Don't let us down. Shooting good video doesn't have to be a mission impossible. I'm Bob Byheller and I've been a video producer for over 20 years. I picked the scenes you just viewed because they're good examples of bad video. You can't really see what's going on. The camera really never stops moving long enough to focus on anything. Here we see where someone spent hours videotaping construction. And the result was very little of it was usable. Also, there will never be another chance to document this event. The video you shoot on a project is used in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it's used to document the when and where of daily construction activities. It can also be used to subtle disputes between us and a contractor. This means it must be good enough to serve as evidence in court. It could also be used for in-house training and could ultimately be part of a video seen by the public. This video will show you what good video documentation should look like and give you some ideas on how to get the job done. Before you begin, always check your equipment. Fresh batteries make sure they are recharged each day. Sufficient videotape? This is also a good time to remember to label the tape. Is your lens clean? Before you shoot, clean your lens with soft paper or cloth. And now it's time for the two most important pieces of video equipment. Your tripod and the camcorder. Always use them together. It's one of two rules for getting good video. As steady as you think you can hold a camera. When compared to the tripod, your video will look like an earthquake just hit. The second rule is never zoom or pan. Static shots are easier to shoot and much easier to watch. Now why don't we go out to the construction site? Say that today you've been assigned to document the construction activities on this project. The first thing you'll need to do is find the best place to shoot your video. Make sure it's a place where you won't be aiming the camera into the sun. Also, nothing should block your view of the activity you're going to shoot. Now you're ready to tape. With your camera on the tripod, check your camera controls. Generally, leave your camera's white balance, exposure and focus in the automatic mode. At the beginning of each scene, say where and what you are taping. It's a concrete pour, east of Buttman on the Pine Creek bridge. And make sure to shoot each scene with the time and date for legal purposes. Of course, all our video needs are not for settling disputes. Documenting some activities without the time and date is greatly appreciated. Let each shot run for at least 30 seconds. There are three basic video shots that can be used to properly document an activity. A wide shot, a medium shot and a close up. One of the most used shots is a static wide shot. With this shot, you are trying to show the entire activity being documented. Use the zoom control to set the camera for the widest shot. Then pan left and right until it is correctly framed. In other words, you see just the things you want to see. In a wide shot, that means you can see all phases of the work in relation to each other. Remember, what you see in the viewfinder is what you get. Notice what happens when too much sky is in the picture. The camera adjusts automatically to that bright part of the picture, making everything else too dark. But by moving the camera, so we see very little of the sky, the rest of the picture lightens and can be seen. Next, you might want to get medium shots of individual pieces of equipment working. A medium shot isolates individual activities. By panning and using the zoom control, you can arrange your shot. Not too close, but not back too far either. Just right. Then if necessary, you'll want a close up shot of the work. A close up shot shows the work in great detail. Again, don't forget to tape each of these activities with the time and date. Many times you'll find that you can't take all the video you need from one position. Move to as many locations as needed to complete the documentation. When a tripod is unavailable, find something solid to set your camera on.  By using a piece of clothing, you can easily aim the camera at your subject. If you must hand hold your camera, make sure your weight is evenly placed over your feet. Keep your elbows close to your sides. If possible, find something solid to lean against. Never zoom in for a close up shot when you hand hold your camera. Instead, walk up to the action with the camera zoomed out to a wide shot. This keeps your shot as steady as possible. The only time you should pan with your camera is to follow action. When you do, remember not to use a close up shot and leave room for the action. Don't let the action bump into the edge of the picture. Although you're not quite ready for Hollywood, follow these simple tips and you'll be able to shoot good video. Video that not only documents your work, but video that you'll be able to show to others. Now let's recap. Check your batteries. Make sure they are fully charged. Use new video tape and make sure tapes are properly labeled. Clean your lens before taping. If you're on a particularly dusty construction site, clean it more often. Leave all settings, white balance, exposure and focus on automatic. Never shoot into the sun. Make sure it's at your back. Use a tripod to stabilize your camera. If one isn't available, find something to steady you and your camera. Never zoom unless there is no alternative. Shoot a wide shot, medium shot or close up instead. Pan only to follow in action. Follow these video tips and you'll be shooting video like a pro in no time.