Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/08 - The PlayStation 5 Is Coming!

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

The PlayStation 5 is coming in about a year and Wired has the details, Hulu finally lets you download video, a gamer is banned for voicing support for Hong Kong protesters, how the Galaxy Fold was “fixed,” and Robinhood takes another crack at Cash Management. Sponsors: Castro Vistaprint.com promo code Ride Sponsors: Exclusive: A Deeper Look at the PlayStation 5 (Wired) Hulu finally launches support for downloads, initially to ad-free viewers (TechCrunch) Group Nine to Acquire PopSugar, Continuing Wave of Digital Media Tie-Ups (The WSJ) Blizzard Bans Gamer, Rescinds Money, on Hong Kong Protest Support (Bloomberg) Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments (Hacker News) Samsung Galaxy Fold Teardown (iFixit) Robinhood revives checking with new debit card & 2% interest (TechCrunch) Researchers “Translate” Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—A Lot (Smithsonian.com) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The PlayStation 5 is coming in about a year, and Wired has the exclusive details.

Hulu finally lets you download video. A gamer is banned for voicing support for Hong Kong protesters, how the Galaxy Fold was fixed, and Robin Hood takes another crack at cash management. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Wired got a huge gaming exclusive this morning. It learned that the name of the next generation PlayStation console will be PlayStation 5, and the console will launch in time for the holidays 2020. The console will have ray tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware itself.

The hard drive will be SSD, and the new dual shock controllers will have haptic technology and triggers with varying degrees of resistance. Wired's Peter Rubin spoke with PlayStation System architect Mark Serny. First, about that new controller, it's rumored to have a voice assistant built right into it, but Cernie did not confirm that at this point. Quote, the controller, which history suggests will one day be called the Doolshock 5, though Cernie says it doesn't have a name yet, does have some features Cernie's more interested in acknowledging. One is adaptive triggers that can offer varying levels of resistance to make, say, shooting a bow and arrow feel like the real thing.

The tension increasing as you pull the arrow back or make a machine gun feel far different from a shotgun. It also boosts haptic feedback, far more capable than the Rumble Motor console gamers are used to, with highly programmable voice coil actuators located in the left and right grips of the controller. Combined with an improved speaker on the controller, the haptics can enable some astonishing effects. I played through a series of short demos, courtesy of the same Japan studio team that designed PlayStation VR's Astrobot Rescue Mission. In the most impressive, I ran a character through a platform level featuring a number of different surfaces, all of which gave distinct and surprisingly immersive tactile experiences. Sand felt slow and sloggy. Mud felt slow and soggy. On ice, a high-frequency response made the thumbsticks really feel like my character was gliding. Jumping into a pool, I got a sense of the resistance of the water. On a wooden bridge, a bouncy sensation, end quote.

but really, the move to SSD, as Microsoft is rumored to be doing with Project Scarlet, will probably in the end be the biggest deal, at least for gaming on the new machine. Quote, with that in hand, back to the PS5's Solid State Drive, which Cerny first extolled for the way it can turn loading time from a hassle to a blink. It's not just the speed that makes the SSD formidable, he says, but the efficiency it offers. Think about the hard drive in a game console, spinning like a 5,400 RPM vinyl record. For the console to read a piece of information off the drive, it first has to send out the discad, like a turntable needle, to find it. Each seek, as it's known, may only entail a scant handful of milliseconds, but seeks add up.

To minimize them, developers will often duplicate certain game assets in order to form continuous data blocks, which the drive can read faster. We're talking common stuff here, lamp posts, anonymous passers-by. but data adds up too. Quote, if you look at a game like Marvel's Spider-Man Serny says, there are some pieces of data duplicated 400 times on the hard drive, end quote. The SSD sweeps away the need for all of that duping, so not only is its raw read speed dramatically faster than a hard drive,

but it saves crucial space. How developers will take advantage of that space will likely differ. Some may opt to build a larger or more detailed game world. Others may be content to shrink the size of the games or patches. Either way, physical games for the PS5 will use 100 gigabyte optical disks inserted into an optical drive that doubles as a 4K Blu-ray player, end quote. Sounds good, but Twitch streamer A-Drive did have a pertinent question on Twitter. Quote, isn't it super bad marketing to announce a console for next year's holidays when we are heading into this year's holidays? Sounds like a good way to kill your Q4 sales, but you do you, Sony.

Hulu has finally launched support for offline viewing, letting users download up to 25 titles across five devices with 30 days to watch any downloaded content. If you start to play something that you've downloaded, then you only have two days to finish watching it before it goes away. Initially, this download option will only be available to iOS users on Hulu's no ads plan, quoting Sarah Perez and TechCrunch. When reached for comment, Hulu couldn't offer a timeline for when support would arrive on the ad-supported version of Hulu or whether those plans had been shelved. The company did say its focus was shifted this summer to mobile upgrades, including the interface update and live guide improvements. At launch, there are thousands of TV shows and movies offered for offline viewing, including Hulu originals like The Handmaid's Tale, Shrill, and the Act, as well as series like Family Guy, Desperate Housewives, This Is Us, How I Met Your Mother, and ER. In fact, the majority of content on Hulu is available for offline viewing as its content agreements were already negotiated to allow for downloads. In a few cases, however, only past seasons of a TV show will be offered for download, end quote.

Hulu will be adding a new downloads tab to the bottom of the app, and you can also search for content available to download by hitting up the see what's downloadable link. If a title is available to download, you'll see an icon alerting you as such on the title page. Consolidation continues to be the order of the day in the digital media space. Group 9 has agreed to acquire women's lifestyle publisher Pop Sugar. Sources say the all-stock deal is worth $300 million and values Group 9 at more than $600 million, consistent with its last fundraising round. Pop Sugar shareholders will have 30% ownership of the combined company, and the combined entity is being valued at $1 billion.

Quoting the Wall Street Journal. Pop Sugar's top advertising categories of retail, beauty, and consumer package goods will be a nice compliment to Group 9's, which include financial services and travel, the company said. Quote, there are lots of complimentary revenue streams, Group 9, Chief Executive Ben Lerer said, in a joint interview with Pop Sugar's husband and wife co-founders Brian Sugar and Lisa Sugar. There is a shockingly small amount of cannibalization, end quote. Pop Sugar expects to have about $100 million in revenue this year, a person familiar with the matter said, end quote.

So no doubt you've heard about the whole NBA, China, Hong Kong, Darryl Morey tweet controversy, but you might not know that there is a parallel controversy going on in the e-sports space. Activision Blizzard makes a game called Harthstone that is popular in the e-sports space. There was recently a hearthstone competition with a bunch of prize money at stake. and the winning competitor in that contest made pro-Hong Kong protester statements after winning the tournament. Activision Blizzard is partially owned by Chinese company Tencent. You can probably guess where this is going. Quoting Bloomberg.

Blizzard Entertainment said it was banning Ingwey Chung, also known as Blitzchung, from its professional Heartstone e-sports competition for a year. Blizzard is also withholding money he had already earned in the company's top-tier Grandmasters tournament, which Ining said in a Twitter message cost him $10,000 of prize earnings. The move was triggered when Ng, dressed in a gas mask and goggles in defiance of authorities ban on face masks, used a slogan in support of Hong Kong's pro-democracy protesters during a post-match interview. Quote, after an investigation, we are taking the necessary actions to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future, Blizzard said in a

statement. On Chinese micro-blogging site, Weibo, the official account of Harstone, reposted Blizzard's statement in Chinese, quote, we will, as always, resolutely safeguard the country's dignity, end quote, it added, end quote. Today, hashtag boycott Blizzard has been trending across social channels. The hacker news thread about this story has over 900 comments at the time of this recording. And in a tangentially related follow-up to a previous story, it also turns out that you remember that app we mentioned that got taken down from the app store because it helped Hong Kong residents monitor protest activity in real time. Well, Apple did reinstate that app. It's available again for Hong Kong users. But apparently in iOS 13.1.2, Hong Kong users' emoji keyboard

no longer include the Taiwanese flag. The Taiwanese flag has apparently been banned in iOS in mainland China for over a year. I have gotten some pushback from some of you about covering the Galaxy Fold saga. The argument made to me has been, hey, the phone is a flop. No one is buying it, Brian, so give up on it. But to that, I say, this is the first time in years anyone has tried to do something meaningfully different to smartphone design beyond the usual 2001 monolith-style rectangular slab. So I'm here for people at least trying stuff. And also, how often do you see such a high-profile product launch implode so spectacularly? So I admit I am interested in I-Fixit's new teardown of the Galaxy Fold to find out how Samsung, in quotes, fixed the fold. And if it really is fixed,

quoting I Fix It. We found covers over the gaps on either side of the display crease and tape around the inside of the hinge, both working to keep debris away from the backside of the display. For further reinforcement, there's an extra layer of metal bonded to the back of the display. Last but not least, the screen protector is slightly larger, hiding its tempting edges beneath the plastic bezel. That said, this thing is still pretty fragile. We'll have to see how it holds up in the real world, but for now we can't help but wonder,

Why weren't these revisions a part of the first fold? It took reviewers and us less than a week to figure out the phone's weak points. Why ship something they must have known could be so easily breakable, end quote. Yes, that is why I still find the fold saga fascinating. Speaking of products that needed tweaking before launch, Robin Hood today unveiled cash management, which earns a 2.05 annual percentage yield on uninvested money that's just sitting around in users Robin Hood accounts. Cash management also features the ability to spend that money through a MasterCard debit card. The wait list for this product opens today in the U.S. But about that need for tweaking, quoting Josh Constan in TechCrunch, the $7.6 billion valuation startup first attempted something similar in December with Robin Hood checking, promising a stunningly tall 3% interest rate. But the product turned into a PR disaster when the Securities Investor Protection Corporation that was supposed to ensure users' funds declared Robin Hood ineligible, with its CEO noting it had never agreed to cover

the checking accounts. That led Robin Hood to shelve the feature, scrub its side of any mention of checking, and apologize. Now, despite CEO bot claiming cash management is a brand new program built from the ground up, end quote, it will offer the exact same debit card design. and network of 75,000 ATMs. It's even using an identical promo image for its half-translucent green, black, white, and American flag debit card designs, but each user's funds will be covered by the FDIC up to $1.25 million. To get around the $250,000 FDIC limit per bank, Robin Hood is partnering with five banks

that it will spread a user's cash across as necessary to bundle up to that sum. Robin Hood earns money by taking a chunk of the interchange fees from transaction on its debit card run in partnership with Sutton Bank, and from a fee paid by the five banks, cash gets swept into. To help it avoid further regulatory missteps, Robin Hood yesterday added former SEC Commissioner Dan Gallagher as its first independent board member. He joins the startup's recently hired CFO, chief compliance officer, VP of risk and compliance, and VP of legal and regulatory to bring more supervision to Robin Hood, end quote. Yes, when it comes to financial products, it can be a good idea to have your regulatory ducks in a row before launching.

Researchers have translated what bats say to each other. Brian, you might be thinking, that's cool, but what is the tech angle here? Well, the tech angle is that it's a machine learning algorithm that helped researchers decode the squeaks of Egyptian fruit bats. So there, that's the tech angle fig leaf that I'm hiding behind to give you this story because one way another, I just think this is cool, quoting the Smithsonian. According to Raman Skiba at nature, neuroecologist Yoseovo and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats for 75 days using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices. They fed 15,000 calls into the software. Then they analyzed the corresponding video to

see if they could match the calls to certain activities. They found that the bat noises are not just random as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60% of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates that the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances, and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skippa points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a

handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds. The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports, end quote. Yeah, it turns out that not only do bats address each other as individuals, but when they do talk, it's mostly fighting and bickering. Which makes me wonder, though, might machine learning eventually enable us to interpret what other mammals, like, I don't know, our dogs are saying to us, sort of like in the movie up? If so, I am totally here for that. Talking to our pets, that is exactly the sort of flying cars and jetpack's future that we were promised all along. Hey, I haven't asked for ratings and reviews in a while, but I checked the Apple Podcasts.

reviews this morning and the most recent one was from a troll. So I'd really love to bury that. So if you've never rated or reviewed and or reviewed, I suppose the show, please do so. It helps other people find this podcast. And don't limit yourself to Apple Podcasts either. Anywhere you can rate and review the TechMeme Right Home, kindly do so. Thanks for your help and talk to you tomorrow.