 do so effortlessly, Tom, in keeping this podcast under an hour and 78 minutes. Which, God and I were just unable to do yesterday. You guys did fine. What are you talking about? It wasn't that bad. No. It was a million years long because I know, because I'd made, normally, if I make plans after I do DTNS, it'd be like, all right, well, we're starting at 130. We'll be done by like 230 or so. And so I made plans with Brett and then, you know, 330 rolls around and I'm like, well, I'm done now with my two hour podcast. No, we had it. We had it published by like 245, I feel like. No, I don't think I had a fever still. Everybody was trying to get you to go back to bed. I've never seen Tom more on the news than when he was like sick in bed. It was kind of fun. I didn't have to actually say, I didn't have to actually think about it. I could just write it and make other people say it. I totally get the producer vibe, Jenny. It was so brilliant when Justin just picked up that Tesla thing. I was like, it works. It works. Yeah, no, that was fun. I hope Tom continues to follow this career path so I can hire him as a producer for one of my shows. I thought you were going to say, you hope I keep getting the flu. Oh, no. God, no. Listen, I think the audience can tolerate a Tomless day, an extended Tomless period, I think would be a riot, a revolt. Yeah, I remember that time. It was really painful. You remember those three weeks last year? Yeah. All right. Last time I checked, we were over the halfway mark to day six. Yeah, we're barreling forward to day six. So yeah, we got to start coming up with that next milestone. Once you get to day six, I hope that it is just vindication for every time you've gotten an email from people saying that the show is too US centric. You have a whole day now. You have one six of them. Oh, sure. You just give the rest of the world one day. Yeah. No. No one will be satisfied unless you're just some globetrotting hobo doing the show. What I've come to realize as we have expanded the coverage and the daily show to include, try to include more regions, which I think is great because I've learned all kinds of good stuff is that everyone thinks expanding it to global coverage means expanding it to where they live. Yes. So if we have a week full of Indian coverage, I'll get an email from some guy in the UK like, why don't you do more global coverage? Exactly. It's like, oh, you mean where you live. I know. All the American fans should be writing about why don't you cover more things in my state? Yeah. Why don't you do more national coverage? I've gotten those from people. Really? Yeah. Nebraska sticks in my mind. Why don't you cover more Nebraska tech? Yes. I got an email from a guy in Omaha. And Omaha does have a pretty cool startup scene. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, that is not to say that I don't want us to continue to add international coverage. It's just that I think. No, it's good. I mean, I've always found really, not, I don't know, I don't think distressing or vexing or anything is the right word. But just interesting about that kind of conversation is that you always, everything I've ever listened to, I've always wanted to know a region. That's part of why I can understand the show is like, oh, this is a show that's made out of LA, out of New York, out of Chicago, out of London, out of some other part of the world. And to try and pretend like that's not a thing is fine. Now, if you want to say, hey, I'm a guy in LA, that's covering tech news, that is obviously California, also looks out toward the greater world, then that's cool. But you're always your identity. And yeah, yeah, yeah. That's for sure. All right, Dan, I'm sorry, we're going to be a little late waiting for Veronica to reboot. No worries. Her computer took a long time to reboot. Typical diva behavior by Belmont. I know. Typical diva behavior by her computer, actually. Yes. Veronica totally fine. No, that's what I refer to her computer. Her computer is called Belmont. Steve's Veronica, the computer's Belmont. Maybe we should buy Veronica a new computer. Dogs. Just two dogs today. Well, I think that's a fair point. But you have to realize that bones are a stereotype. Yeah. I know the dogs want to get in on the podcast. They want to know about big dog tuff. Justin just shook his head. No, I'm, uh... Oh, look at that. Veronica Belmont. Yes. You made it back. All right. We are. Cool. Here we go. Do you struggle to get everything you plan all done in one week? Do you sometimes wish you had an extra couple of hours? Or maybe another day? We here at The Daily Tech News Show think the same. And with your help, we can add an extra day to your week. DailyTechNewsShow.com forward slash support with your help. Day six, coming soon. This is The Daily Tech News for... I don't know what day it is. It was out sick yesterday. Thursday, February 11, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today. Mr. Justin Robert Young, who normally joins us on these lovely Thursday shows. How are you, Justin Robert Young? Oh, I'm doing fantastic. Good to have the heavy yoke of hosting lifted off my shoulders and returned to its rightful owner. No, you and Scott Johnson manned the ship with fine fettle yesterday. Thank you so much for doing that. Well, you know, I've been known for my fettle. Your fettle's pretty good. Another person who has great fettle is Veronica Belmont, who is also joining us today. How are you, Veronica? I'm fantastic as long as my connection holds up. Yeah. I haven't sent issues today, so we'll see how that goes. We hopefully got all the issues out pre-show because we want to get to our conversation with Dan Patterson, senior writer at Tech Republic, who is also joining us audio only because he lives in the far distant corner of the world known as Brookline. Fettle dot biz. Dan's been covering the election for Tech Republic, not in the horse race capacity, right, but in the how is tech being used capacity? Yeah, right. Looking at the trends of big data, social media and cybersecurity and how they relate to the horse race. So it is a heck of a lot of fun. So he's been on the campaign trail. Justin's been on the campaign trail. For those of you who don't like politics, should be fine. We're going to talk about big data, social media, things like that, not particularly issues or who should be president or any of that stuff. But let's start off with the headlines. According to the Wall Street Journal sources, Google is working on a standalone VR product that would not need a smartphone or PC. The supposed device would include a screen, high powered processors, and an outward facing camera or maybe cameras. This would be in addition to a rumored improved cardboard model to compete with Samsung Gear VR. So two different models potentially coming out of Google there. And not at all surprising either, for me at least. Well, the self-contained device without needing a PC is pretty cool. That's very cool, but they have been doing a ton of hiring in that space as well. So you figure if they're going to go big, they're going to go super big. But I think right here is where you kind of see the divergent paths for VR products. You have the, you are seeing something and have limited movement within it, right, when you can turn your head and get a fuller view like those delightful videos on the Discovery VR app. Delightful. Right, fresh wood. Or you have what you're seeing with the Vive, which is you're moving around in space and you have a greater exploration of a virtual world as opposed to just putting your head on a swivel. I think that's where Google can very much differentiate themselves at a lower price point than what the Vive is going to come out at. What a time to be alive. As part of a patent licensing agreement, Acer will pre-install Microsoft apps on select Android devices starting the second half of 2016. According to PC World, the software bundle includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, and Skype. Microsoft announced today that Head is now partnered with 74 hardware vendors in 25 countries to bundle its app apps with Android devices. Very cool. Bloatware though, like it's not bloatware if you want it, right? We would never call the phone app bloatware even though it comes pre-loaded. But is Microsoft Office bloatware? I guess it depends on how easy it is to get it off the phone. Well, or if it provides some kind of value that it's not quite ubiquitous like the phone app, but Microsoft's done a lot of acquiring with the very apps that I use all the time like Sunrise and Wonderlist. Oh, I love Sunrise. Those into their products. So maybe they're hoping, hey, look, yes, we're paying for the privilege of meeting you first, but these are things that people like. I think if you have to remove it, it's bloatware. But Dan, what do you think? Where do you fall on the bloatware scale? I think if it's marketed as, hey, look at these features pre-installed. So if you have maybe not quite Luddite parents or for work that's not the enterprise, it could be, hey, here, go load this up with your Microsoft stuff and you're good to go. You don't have to worry about any complicated app store business. If it's not marketed that way, it just seems like a nice little B2B arrangement that is business. Yeah. And with 74 hardware vendors doing this, Microsoft has turned its patent licensing regimen, which is how they're getting these deals, into making every Android phone that isn't a Nexus practically become a Windows phone. I love it. They're like, well, Windows phone didn't work out for us, so why not Android? Oh, no. I'm back. Am I here? I'm here. I'm here. You hear me? I hear you. So just so you know, Tom's probably still doing... No, I'm right here. Okay, he's here. And I'll just edit that part out for the audio. Apologies, video viewers. But Justin, just start in on Line 12 again, if you would, for the audio. You got it. Instagram announced today that it will begin showing view counts for videos in place of the like number. You can still click through to see the total number of hearts. Three second counts as a view in this new metric. And Instagram told TechCrunch's Josh Constine that more updates to video creation and consumption are coming this year. Wow, I didn't hear about that until just now. That's very interesting news, I think, for them. They're really true. I mean, they only do 15 second videos, but they're really trying to get creators to move from places like Vine that do even shorter videos over to Instagram. Well, and is this also the fact that Facebook has been successful with creating another video hub that's not YouTube that's very mobile friendly? And now Instagram's like, well, hey look, there's a lot of people that use this function. Let's make it better and easier. And specifically for people that actually make money on it, or to show viral success, let's have a big fat, gaudy number like Vines do, which, I mean, you can take a squirrel vine and it's because of how they count what a view is, it'll have 20 billion loops in five seconds. Yeah, it's definitely good for metrics, for sure. It's good for metrics and it'll be good for advertising, like say, and yeah, it'll be good for possibly for creators to get a little better of an idea without having to be a big advertiser. If you're a big partner with Instagram, you could see this already. But now everybody could see, it kind of makes it more widely available how many people are actually watching this. Amber MacArthur does a show on Instagram. I think this will be handy for her. And you're always going to have more views than likes, right? Because somebody still has to view your video even if they decide to not. So you are going, self-esteem is going up and not. But no, then I'm like, so many people watch this but nobody liked it, so what am I doing wrong? And we're back and we're back. PC World reports on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear platform. The platform is meant to let Android Wear watches work without being tethered to a smartphone. For example, an LTE module can attach to the Wear 2100 chip and maintain acceptable battery life, at least according to Qualcomm. Wear 2100 is a smaller and more power-efficient version of the Snapdragon 400. LG said it will launch wearables with the Wear 2100 chip in them by the end of the year. That includes smartwatches but some other things too. Reuters reports a person close to Google told it Google will change how it handles search results that are removed under Europe's right to be forgotten rules. Google has been removing results only for the country specific version of its site like Google.fr for France. Google will now remove the results based on the IP address of the visitor, not the country specific version of Google being used. And thanks to JSN Phil for posting this over on the subreddit. Kind of an elegant way of complying. France was saying, look, you need to remove it from Google.com too because if I'm in France and I want to be forgotten, I shouldn't be able to get to it any other way. And Google's like, well, just because you have the right to be forgotten in France doesn't mean that you have the right to be forgotten in every single country on the planet. So it probably took a lot of clever coding but they were able to say, okay, we'll turn this around and base it on the viewer. If the viewer is in the country where you have the right to be forgotten, then you will be forgotten. Blah, blah, comments on the non specificity of IP addresses. Can you edit that out too as well, Tom? Thank you. Yeah, we'll get to that. Let's not start making specific demands. Starting with Chrome 49, Chrome for Android will support Bluetooth Beacons. Google calls Beacons the physical web. When a user walks by a beacon, they'll get a notification asking if they want to enable the physical web. After it's enabled, you can tap on a notification to see a list of nearby URLs. Chrome for iOS started supporting Beacons through a widget last year. So they did this at CES where you could actually get information based on where you were. There's also a lot of talk about, oh, it'll be the parking meter that'll tell you how to pay for it just because you're standing nearby it or things like that. This is one of those things where I don't know exactly what it's going to be good for and I hope there's a nice open standard so that all hardware can use it, but it could revolutionize the way we use phones in a location-based manner. So give me another example of how they were using it at CES. So when you were near a booth, you would automatically be able to see, like this is the information about that booth, that booth, these are the booths around you because it would know exactly where on the floor you were based on the Beacons. But through what app? Like, what were you looking at? I didn't use it, I just read about it. Like, I wasn't there, I don't know. I think you had to download a specific app to make use of it. Okay. All right. And so it would either push you a notification or if you wanted to just have an idea of what things are around, you open up Chrome and it shows you a menu. Yeah, I mean, this is used in malls already, where they have Beacon in the malls for iOS and then you can walk in and a coupon code can pop up on your phone. And transportation, I mean, it's one of the things that kind of leans into, we're a long way away from true smart cities, but this is one of those things that can deliver pretty basic push notification stuff, right, for transportation, historic stuff, that kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. Our report prepared by security researchers, Bruce Schneier, Kathleen Seidel, and Sarenaya Vijaya Kumar estimates that 63% of encryption products today are developed outside U.S. borders and therefore would be unaffected by any U.S. laws that mandated encryption backdoors. The most common non-U.S. country was Germany, which is known to be against weakening encryption, so the report concludes that criminals would likely just choose a product that isn't subject to mandatory backdoor laws if such laws were put to place. I'm surprised based on everything I know from watching Homeland that Germany is against weakening encryption. I think they're very much about privacy in Germany. That was a joke about watching. I haven't watched Homeland, so that's why I didn't get that joke. Too bad. But this is, again, Bruce Schneier, he's going on full guns these days with these reports pointing out why weakening encryption is not actually going to help you. This is the second study to come out in the last few weeks to point out that if you weaken encryption, you don't make it harder for the criminals. You generally don't make it easier to track down criminals or prevent any criminal activity, but you do reduce the security of people who use the products. You know, I think this is brilliant, and as I am sure Dan is well aware from being out on the campaign trail, now people who want encryption can finally make this a kitchen table issue by protecting American jobs. If you weaken encryption, the jobs go overseas. It's not bad, to be honest, yeah. And then you guys had that story yesterday that there's a bill being proposed in the House. I don't know how far it'll get, but that would make it illegal for states to weaken encryption. It's, I think, you know, stories like this keep the issue top of mind and really push us. The general public just doesn't understand why we can't have backdoors to protect against criminal activity, and I think we really do have to have people like Shaniah pushing this and pushing it and pushing it to keep it top of mind to remind people this is not the right solution. All right, well, moving on. Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration Did I get that? Or did you go? Say they have confirmed the first direct observation of gravitational waves. The signals were detected September 14, 2015 from two merging black holes. Their study was published in physical review letters today. Einstein predicted such waves as part of his theory of general relativity in 1918. Indirect evidence of this was seen in, I think, 1974. But this is the first direct observation of it, and it's huge. This is like shaking the foundations of the physics world today. I don't know whether it will really have any bearing on tech, but it is such a gargantuan scientific advance. I figured we could not notice it on the show. Not to mention easily the biggest, like a century old called it for Einstein. So big ups to Al. He said that he didn't think anyone would ever be able to prove he was right. So it actually also proved him wrong while proving him right. It proved, yeah, no one will ever be able to understand how brilliant I am. Oops, sorry, wrong. I'll take the L on that. And also a bunch of other things going on out there. The New York Times reports its sources say Pandora is working with Morgan Stanley to meet with potential buyers. Archive.org has a new section of emulated Windows 3.1 software. Go play some Windows 3.1 games, folks. LG showed off a quick cover case for its forthcoming G5 smartphone that allows touch control with the case closed. Case closed. That'll be being showed off at Mobile World Congress. And that, my friends, are the headlines that you and I put together together. Thank you for joining me at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com and that is a look at the headlines. All right. How presidential candidates are using data has been something ever since the 2008, almost a 2008 election. And we're going to start doing that. But since the Obama-McKean election, there's been a lot of talk about social media, big data. Seems like it's become a mature thing, Dan, and you've been out there taking a look at it. What have you found so far? Yeah, that's, in fact, the exact right way to phrase or to contextualize where data and social media are. In 2008, Obama, I mean, for us, Twitter was here and established in 2008. But Obama really used it not just for messaging, but to also get a sense of what the electorate is. And it fed what's called GOTV, Get Out the Vote. In 2012, this stuff was, it was really pretty sophisticated. And in Ohio, they were running thousands of simulations per day. And they were pretty confident that because of the data that they had aggregated in-house, the Obama administration or the Obama campaign, they were pretty confident they would take Ohio. This time, it is both the GOP and the Democrats are using data in really fascinating ways. One thing that we saw play out in Iowa was the campaigns that purchased big data from firms like L2 and Nation Builder were Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. They spent almost $2 million a piece. Donald Trump only spent about $500,000 and didn't really apply data to his, they call it in the business, micro-targeting. The ground game is the euphemism you hear. And that's like when people knock on your door or the canvassers or the mailers that come to your mailbox, the phone calls. All of that stuff is really, if you have good data, it's really, really unique. The language that's used in the mailers or the language that the phone call people will use is kind of tailored to your demographic and psychographic profile. And it's aggregated from both social media stuff as well as voter information that's provided by those firms I mentioned a moment ago. Really, it's like the metagame of politics. And that's kind of what actually a lot of people were saying about Trump in terms of Ohio is that he didn't do enough ground work and so he didn't have the right data and that was what kind of led to that colossal, like what happened situation. That's exactly it. Iowa. It was Iowa, but... Oh, sorry, Iowa. But that's exactly right, that they were... And then they attribute that in New Hampshire to, you know, they kind of got their act together and said, okay, we need a good ground game and we need a good data game and they spend money on that and lo and behold, I mean, they really, no pun intended, trump the competition. Well, I think one of the things that people don't realize is this data is coming from visiting websites. They are buying data from Google. They are buying data from Facebook. They are putting Google analytics on their pages. So that Facebook thing you hear about where it tracks you around the internet, if you visited one candidate's website, then all of a sudden Facebook is going to be tracking you and delivering that data to that candidate everywhere you go. It's... It is... So that's exactly what we're looking at with Tech Republic. Again, it has nothing to do with the horse race of the politics, but it's retargeting that you just mentioned, right? The marketing world has... We've been doing these innovations for a long time in tech marketing, and the campaigns have kind of got hip to that. Well, and just to give people a sense of exactly what this means on the ground, there was a great article in USA Today that followed a Ted Cruz canvasser and to try and just give a brief primer to explain why this matters, you know, beyond the horse race here, Ted Cruz spent very, very little time as a candidate in New Hampshire and yet overperformed his expectations, in part because he had this big data where canvassers knew what houses to go to, what houses are a waste of time and specifically when he goes to your house, what issues you care about, so he can lead with the right thing. If it's religious freedom, then he's going to first start talking about that. If it's the fact that you don't want Donald Trump to get elected, then he's going to talk about, isn't it about time that we stop this other candidate? These are all, these are all little data pieces that were not, specifically, hadn't really been folded into the the Republican side of the equation until this cycle. Right, Dan? That's exactly right. I talked with Harper Reed who was Obama CTO and Zach Moffat who was Romney's digital director and they're both pretty friendly. All of the campaigns kind of understand the professionalism that has to go into it and they respect each other. Harper said, you know, we were just, we were just ahead of the Republicans in 2012. We just figured some stuff out that they didn't and Zach said the exact same thing and he said, you know, we kind of learned from what they did over at the Democrats and we built a machine now that we think rivals them. It's really fascinating to see how each of these, you know, you think rivals kind of informs each other's decisions and play off of each other. So here's my question for you, Dan, because one of the things that we've seen and this even spilled into some of the mudslinging earlier in the campaign between Bernie and Hillary is where this data is coming from. How much comes from the parties which buy a lot of this data and give it out to the candidates? How much is by the campaigns themselves and specifically are there advantages between each candidate based on the data that they've gathered that they would consider proprietary and not owned by the party itself? Yeah, so that is fascinating question. The Cruz campaign is a really great example. So they have, they learned a ton from the Obama campaign but then built, they did entirely in-house. They built, they bought data from L2 and a couple other firms but then hired their own data guys in-house and then on top of that if you've seen the Cruz app they skinned an app that is entirely gamified. You know, a lot of the check-in stuff and leaderboard stuff and on the back end is this data that they acquired themselves and from big firms. On the Democrat side it's a little different. I don't know if you recall the hack that happened a couple weeks ago where the Bernie Sanders campaign was allegedly accessing data from the Clinton campaign and that's because they all use the same database system that they buy from the Democrats on the back end and they were able to kind of hack the URL and do some other little workarounds and access rival information but that's only because it's the same tool built with just different skin on top. Go ahead, Justin. Yeah, so they get the same data and then each campaign interprets it based on the stuff that they get to target things better for their canvassers and their call centers. Bingo, bingo. So this is the information provided by the Democrats and then maybe they'll buy information from another firm but it's like there's five or six different big slices of information and how you interpret that information is just up to who's got the best data scientists. And all of this is being done by advertisers too not just political campaigns. It's interesting to see it in political action because we probably get a better look at it because of the nature of how elections are carried out but if you're sitting here thinking well wait a minute so somebody could win a primary or win a state because they just happen to get a better data set than someone else makes me wonder if our election system is really useful. Same goes with advertising. Companies win or lose based on whether their data about you correctly marketed their product in order to get people to buy it. It is not frightening but daunting to think about how important this data can be. So one thing one way to look at this is kind of forget that this is politics going on so Harper Reed told me this and it was just kind of a revolution. A revelation. He was like forget the policies. It's this is like 10 different startups competing in a six or 12 month window to see who can be most efficient who can develop a product that resonates with people with consumers and who can convert the people who are interested into active customers. Right? It's the same thing as like converting a lead into a customer. All of these voters are the consumers that are being onboarded and he had this great analogy that campaigns really are like startups because you have to learn how to add 50 people a week. How do you keep an organization afloat and focused on a mission and at the end of the day all work well together. Yeah. That's brand management. But now that's exactly. Let's also put this into the proper perspective right because Trump has not spent near as much on data as some of his other candidates and he romped in New Hampshire. In general, Dana, I'm curious to know where your take on this is. The campaigns that tend to spend a lot on this leading edge kind of stuff that was newsmaking two cycles ago just tend to be the campaigns that are maybe smarter run strategically and that sometimes translates into great success. But other times there are campaigns that have spent a tremendous amount of money. Some with candidates that have three letter initials for their names. So you're saying how much of this is Moneyball and how much is Ron Washington? Yeah. And that's a heck of a good question. I don't. What have you seen on the ground? I mean, you've really been talking with people in the campaigns. I mean, that's a really good question. And I think maybe this year we could prove or test some theories. I guess here's the thing is that the Ted Cruz campaign has rightfully so gotten a lot of attention for how much they spent on data. But when I went to their headquarters they also had the most organized call centers. And that is about as ancient of a way of getting out the vote as anything since the invention of the telephone. So I think that this is a good indicator of people who have a plan and they want to execute on it. I don't know if it's the end all be all. I mean, it's like analytics in baseball. It's just, yeah, you're smart. You're doing it. But it's not a guarantee that you're going to bring success in. I think you're dead on. All right, folks. Well, if you want to find out more about the kind of data that's being used, how social media is used, Dan's got a three part series going on at techrepublic.com. We'll have a link to, I think part two, episode 27 of your podcast in there in the show notes. And keep an eye out for that. Let's get on to our pick of the day. Kevin, in that key state of Ohio, his pick is the program green shot available at getgreenshot.org. It's a lightweight Windows program that lives in the taskbar can be mapped to the print screen key and does all the standard capturing region window full screen plus allows for quick annotating. So you hit the print screen button and then you can add text arrows highlighting, et cetera, as well as sending and saving the resulting image. Kevin says his favorite feature is its ability to directly OCR text from the captured image using the Microsoft Office document imaging infrastructure. So you can capture an image and then turn it into a word text right away with about three clicks to any text I see on the screen can be copied to the clipboard even if that text is not selectable. Send your picks to us folks feedback at dailytechnewshow.com you can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Joe from DC wrote in telling how Washington DC's Metro system used to run automated trains until an accident in 2009 caused by the failure to maintain sensors. He says my biggest fear about self-driving cars are not when they first get on the road but when they are in their 10th year. Many people don't maintain cars well. Long-term maintenance will be important if there is a true driverless car with no way for a passenger to stop the car. I could imagine an incident where a car drives through a crowd of people without stopping due to some kind of sensor failure. This would probably put an end to self-driving cars at least ones without a driver behind the wheel. I totally disagree. For this reason, if you have self-driving cars and you put more of that experience into an automated process then you are also talking about the idea that hey, either this car is going to drive itself to a mechanic or it will refuse to go if it deems itself unfit to drive. If it doesn't hit some kind of a metric within it. And at that point, if you're looking at trying to hack your car to drive in an unsafe way, then you're already taking steps that make you a terrible, unsafe, awful driver. And I think, too, that we have to kind of assume that a lot of self-driving cars, at least in my perfect world, we're not actually going to really be owning the cars ourselves. So there's probably a situation where a lot of these cars will be going back to their hanger at the end of the night to get maintenance and to be checked up. And as Justin said, they probably won't function unless they are at peak capacity. Well, and I think that's the key, right? Because you could argue that well, even if only a few people own them, and then only a few of the people who own them don't properly maintain them and ignore the warnings. As soon as you have one cause an accident and kill somebody, there's going to be an uproar. And that's what Joe was saying, is in D.C., they had these automated trains. And the reason the crash was not as bad as it could have been is because there was a driver in the car who took over and hit the brakes. Sadly, he died doing that. But he saved lots of lives. And since then, they have not allowed the trains to continue to be automated. So what amount of safety reassurance do we have to give people in order to make them understand the first time there's a fatality involved with a faulty self-driving car that we don't just throw the whole thing out the window? Well, I think it's hard to put into perspective too because if you think about the number of fatalities and injuries caused by person-driven cars, and then compare them to what will potentially be the deaths and injuries and fatalities on, you know, self-driving cars, I mean, there's still going to be a huge, huge discrepancy leaning towards more people are going to die by people-driven cars overall. Yeah. But the... That's true. But it's always about perception. More people die in cars than airlines too. But we have way more safety rules around airlines and maybe that's why the airlines are safer. But there's a perception of danger there that we don't have in cars. Yeah, but in general, we also do have a higher threshold for how many people do die in automobiles in general. The reason why we are fixated on airplane stuff beside it being technically a newer or more impressive technology is that if one goes down, 300 people die. Right? Mm-hmm, yeah. That's a much larger situation. People are dying every single day as we talk to bring a sunny and happy note. Yeah, yeah. But it's true. It's a lot of fatalities. Finally, in reference to the big Veronica and Patrick debate of 2016, Twitter edition. I like how you've been saving this for me. Badger Beja wrote in and said, It's your times listened to the show and decided to jump in. Farhad Manju wrote a story called Twitter Could Save Itself. Basically arguing two things. This is what Patrick learned from the article. I'm not the only one who thinks Twitter could remain important even without growth. Farhad Manju is more articulate than I am. He says, I can't summarize the entire article, so I'd recommend you go read it. But I believe he is more or less making the same point I was trying to make during last week's show. We all hope Twitter will keep getting bigger and better. But even if it doesn't, I'll keep using it, and many others will too. And essentially what he was saying is, what Patrick was arguing, which is that Twitter might be at its peak that maybe as big as it needs to be. I haven't read the article, so this is unfair. So I don't have a good argument in place for what Manju said in the actual article. But I'll look into it, Patrick. Thank you for your input. Yeah. Go take a look at the article. I'll have the link in the show notes, folks, as well. And then Veronica, when you're back, if you have thoughts about that, I don't even think it contradicts what you were saying, which is like, but the expectations are that Twitter is going to grow. Farhad agrees with that. He's like, yes, the expectations are there. He's saying maybe that's okay. Maybe the expectations are up. Well, I think after the call yesterday, I think people are maybe feeling a little bit better about the leadership over at Twitter right now and that they are really saying that they are still focused on being a... These are things that happen in real time. That is what Twitter is for. Even though we have the new algorithm in place that will show you interesting stories at the top of your timeline, still primarily we are focused, and I'm sure all the people at Periscope are psyched to hear this, around live events and things being on Twitter as they happen. So I think people are feeling a little more secure that they have this vision in place now and the leadership that is going to stick to that MO. Well, Twitter can't be Twitter and be in San Francisco and be a part of the community that it's in if you are talking... If you are not focusing on 10 years down the road, five years down the road, it's projections of where it's going to be. Going for an odd-mind-juice thing. Oh, no, no, no. Well, I mean, I'm just saying that there will always have those expectations and we can all say maybe they shouldn't, maybe they could be better if they didn't, maybe they should set their sights in a different place, but that will just always haunt them. It's a part of the culture they're in. It's never going to look good to have your monthly active users go down, you know? Like it's never going to be, like that's never going to... Also, this is a little bit of the press jumping in and finding a way to make the news worse. We don't do that. Yes, they said. They said, That's what we're doing. We're creating a narrative. Oh, don't create a narrative. Just tell them. I'm creating a narrative. The SMS that you take out the SMS users, suddenly the users went down. And it's like, well, okay, maybe that is significant. It's still SMS users. And it is 2000, 2008. SMS users went up. I think that's actually more interesting than the fact that monthly active users that don't use SMS went down. Like maybe there's an opportunity there. And it is very comforting to know. I would like to know that Twitter itself has a sense of what it would like to be more than a care about a fluctuation in numbers. Purpose is important. And the leadership that follows that purpose is important. Exactly. Well, if you want to follow the narrative that is Justin Robert Young, you need to go to twitter.com. Because he can't stop himself from launching podcasts. No, I got a new one. Me and a fellow Daily Tech news show contributor Scott Johnson are going to launch a podcast that I have been excited about this concept for a very, very long time. And finally, it's going to be a reality. Monday, five o'clock Eastern time, two o'clock Pacific time. Scott and I will be taking live calls. We're doing a drive-time call-in show. They'll be primarily focused on tech and geek culture. It's going to be your place to discuss the big movie that just came out. So we're doing a beta episode this Monday. You can find it on diamondclub.tv, alpha geek radio, all the fine places where you find stuff with Scott and I. It'll be Hotline Monday. That will happen Mondays. We're going to do the beta, and then I don't know if we'll launch right out of there, but we're going to test some things out, and it's going to be a great time. And I hope to see so many of you there. Mondays when? 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern time. Don't miss it. Because you know when that hotline opens. It's literally, I love the name Hotline, and I just wanted to name something Hotline forever. And I had to battle Scott because he's like, people are just going to think about the stupid Drake song. And I'm like, no, no, don't let Drake ruin the phrase Hotline. Twitter.com slash Veronica, if you want to keep track of what Veronica's up to, including hosting Dear Veronica at engadget.com. What else is going on? Snapchat, mostly I hit a Snapchat milestone today. I was very excited in terms of people who are watching my weird stuff. So yeah, Snapchat, Veronica Belmont is the username. Check it out. So I'm glad your yoga went well. Thank you. Yes, yoga was transformative today, Tom. Namaste for asking. Oh, I could tell. And Dan Patterson, Twitter.com slash Dan Patterson and techrepublic.com, of course to find his fine coverage these days. Tell people a little more about the project that you're doing on this campaign trail. Yeah, so this show is kind of a little nutshell of it. We are again not focused on the horse race, but through the entirety of the campaign, kind of tracking how startups and SMB small businesses can learn something from the tactics and strategies of political campaigns. So check that out, techrepublic.com. Thanks to everybody at our Patreon, patreon.com slash DTNS. We passed the halfway mark to the milestone for day six. That means you will definitely get two episodes of day six this month, February from Peter Wells. He's got the first one booked already. They will not be live to start with, but you will get them and he will be recording them on his Monday, so our Sunday. Big thanks to them. And of course, we're moving on up towards the actual milestone to get him to do it once a week and have an Australian edition of Daily Tech News Show every week for you, patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Give us a call 51259 daily. It's 5125932459. Catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphabiqueradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And visit our website dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Darren Kitchin and Len Peralta. No, not Len Peralta, but Darren Kitchin. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club, hope you have enjoyed this program. Boom, good show. What should we call it? Oh, excellent. Thank you, guys. Yeah, thank you, Dan. Are you going to hang around or do you need to get going? I've got to bounce. Huge, huge thanks for taking time to chat with us. Oh, huge thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And Justin, we'll maybe chitchat her on Twitter about the campaign. Absolutely. No, shoot me a line. I wish I would have known that you were in Manchester if only we had a mutual friend that could have connected. No worries. It was a circus. No, it certainly was. It was super great. But yeah, no, no, no. We'll chat on Twitter. Badass. See you guys soon. Yeah, buddy. Bye. You know those Ohio primaries. I don't know how that came out. That was embarrassing. He just said Ohio because he was talking about the 2012 election. So that's how it got stuck in your head. Someone did say Ohio. He was talking about Ohio from a previous race. So it put Ohio in your head. That's it. OK, that makes sense. Ohio was the big battleground that Obama was sure that they were going to win Ohio, which was thought to be encroached by Romney because of their data. That's what it was. Oh my god. We just dodged that. Are you kidding me? I can't believe that just happened. That's the best-behaved glitch I've ever seen. Well done, Glitch. I haven't seen any titles that made me feel like I had to have them as the title. I like that one. Yeah, well, many of me. I'm definitely going to go again. It's definitely going to happen again. I can't believe it waited until the end of the show to keep happening. That's amazing. That was amazing. One, three, Veronica's online. Three, Veronica's online. I feel like this will just be- Oh, nope. Nope. Yep. Still- I'm here. I'm here. Oh, OK. Yeah, you're here. I'm here. I'm here. Veronica's here, everybody. All right, let's see. What should the title be? Two Veronica's. So many Veronica's. So many Veronica's. Anyone see anything that makes you say, hey, this is a title? It seemed low on title suggestions today. It seemed low on titles today. I don't know if Showbot was buggy. There's just not as many of them in the list as usual. You guys just not feeling it? Chat room? I'm sorry. Patrick Beja wrote in. I like that one. Yeah, I'll have the flu. Like, I feel like he's haunting me. Even when I'm not on the show with him, like, the specter of Patrick Beja and this Twitter argument just keeps popping its head back up. Like, yeah, he's got his own day. He could take shots. He doesn't need to email in, right? You know, give me my- Well, I can't say my day. Technically, it's just a day. That email has been in the lineup since 8 this morning, though. Well, I didn't get that far. I was yoga-ing, okay? Namaste. Give me my yoga-ing. Where? Wait, so what was your side of that debate, Veronica? My side of the debate was basically that Twitter's not going to last if it can't demonstrate that it's growing and has some kind of plan for making its shareholders money. So by last, do we mean like existing or selling or being- Yeah, like, in some way, they're going to have to either they're probably going to have to sell or they're going to have to start making money of their own. And they just- There's not a lot of confidence right there right now in terms of the leadership and the direction, but some of that's being rectified. So hopefully it will continue to be okay. But they've just not shown a lot of any growth, really. So that's problematic for a company like that. It really is a problem when you start to look at like, you know, it's not that there are other popular social networks, but like something that was thought to be kind of a not an also-RAM, but something that would be sub-Twitter, like Instagram now has more users than it. Yeah, and it's just like rocketing in terms of new users and growth and stickiness and everything. I mean, it's crazy. And Snapchat, even. Look at Snapchat. I mean, they're crushing them. If I understood Monju's point, he was saying we're thinking about maybe, he was saying maybe. He wasn't even saying, you know, this is the only way to think about it. He's like, maybe we're thinking about Twitter wrong. Maybe we shouldn't be comparing it to Facebook and Snapchat. Maybe it is a different tool. Well, that's what, yeah, I saw that quote where it was like, you know, don't think of it like, think of it like Wikipedia. Don't think of it like, you know, a news thing. So who knows? And to me, the larger question is, does every successful social networking service have to have a billion users? Is that the new metric for success? Or can one thrive and be influential? Look, The New York Times has a pathetically small number of subscribers to the actual paper and not that many more subscribers and they still retain a huge amount of influence rightly or wrongly. So I don't know. No, I think we're getting a couple of things confused. In like, is it the end of our discussion if Twitter sells, right? Because if Twitter sold to another organization and was just allowed to kind of do what it does and cater to its users and try to expand its base, then I think that can happen forever. I think that Twitter can be Twitter as it is now forever. Now, is Twitter as a company, you know, is their future tied to being bigger, better, more? Yeah, I think that Veronica's 100% right that Twitter as a company relies on that kind of growth. But Twitter as a website, Twitter as something that I'm going to use every day. Yeah, that'll be the same if it sold a Snapchat tomorrow. No, and it doesn't even, and this is the discussion we were having when Patrick was here, and I think Patrick felt a little alone, is that even if it stays as an independent company, it only has to keep growing if it wants to be a stock market superstar. It could easily take itself private, like Dell did, or it could just end up being a stable stock and say, look, we're not going to go for growth. That's problematic based on investors, investors who want their return, and that's the pressure to grow. And that's where Veronica has her most solid point, is like, yeah, but they've taken all this venture capital money from people, and those people want to return. They don't want to see stability. They want to see growth. But Patrick's not wrong that they wouldn't even have to sell to anybody and possibly create a stable business. It also matters for culture, and it also matters for hiring. Independent Twitter is very different than Verizon own Twitter. Yeah, and people, top talent, don't want to go to a company that's flat. They want to go to a company that's got upward momentum, forward momentum. And they want stock options that are going to get more valuable. That's the way you get to a talent. Or just white hot, right? Just exciting. I mean, that's when I was saying the culture of this area, and you only have to talk to a few people that work in tech to understand that everything is focused in the idea of five and 10 years down the road. What could this be five and 10 years down the road? And that's why explosive companies are catnip because like, oh my god, imagine where this can be in five or 10 years. I want to be here now because I'm seeing the future. That's why in Twitter's already losing talent. I mean, people want to go to companies like Slack. They want to go to companies like Snapchat down in Venice. They want to go to companies like, you know, even Facebook because they're doing so many cool things. So it's difficult. But Stoic Squirrel makes a point. Twitter could still do exciting things without being focused purely on growth. And if they were a really good company to work for, that kind of stability could be attractive to a lot of people. Yeah, I don't know if they are a really good company to work for. I think the culture has made it so that you as a company feel you can only be focused on investor maximization or in trouble. And there should be a third way or a fourth way. Yes, I don't know if that has the big office right on, you know, in Soma. And I don't know if that has the same hiring pattern that Twitter has. All right, fun fact, blind item. I don't want to name the company. But there is a company that everybody knows that has a visualization on one of their boards, on one of their monitors in their headquarters that has a graph of Twitter stock price next to applicants for that company from Twitter. But yeah, I mean that is perfectly natural in that culture. And they're applicants, people who are applying to this company. Oh, I was exactly right. What I just said is exactly right. And that is larger than the culture of that one company that is crawling about it. That is industry-wide. I think what we have between Patrick and Veronica are two different approaches. Veronica is describing reality and saying, this is reality. This is what is happening. And Justin, that's what you're doing too, saying, no, look, this is the culture. This is what happens. This is what people value. Patrick, I think, is being more idealistic and saying, but it doesn't have to be that way. Especially because he's outside Silicon Valley. So he can say, yeah, but why? And I come down on the side of what should be, which is, yes, if there was a way for a company to declare itself, this is not the right analogy, but a company that is for social good versus a company that is for growth is one way to think about not having to always please shareholders. Is there another way to quantify something like that and say, okay, we are not for continued stratospheric growth per se. We want to be this not quite social good but something else. Patreon's done a great job of saying, hey, look, we're going to raise what we need to raise to keep this going and grow it, but we want to have people that are brought in that have previous experience funding the arts that understand that this is not a gigantic growth thing, that if Patreon doesn't, we're not going to have it turn into a virtual currency distributor in five years if we don't show explosive growth. Not going to be pressured to go public. I think that's something that has set their expectations, but let's understand when we say, oh, you don't need to grow, oh, what that means? That means that they don't have the same features that other social networks might. Now, granted, insert bitching about the fact that they don't have an edit feature and their abuse reporting is horrific. But they don't have the leeway to do periscope. They don't have that kind of flexibility. Now, it looks more like Wikipedia, so let's think about it like Wikipedia. Or Craigslist. Yeah, Wikipedia's got their hand out every year looking for you to- Yeah, that's not a fair comparison, though, because you can have a for-profit company that doesn't go out and put their hand out like Patreon. Okay, and that's probably unfair, but what is, is that, look at Craigslist and Wikipedia. They had the same design for the last, how many years, right? And they probably ain't never gonna change. Why? Because the aesthetics of how it looks and how it functions with you, the user, is lower on that list of priorities when there's works of money to go around. Or they don't change it because it works and they're not always changing things just to stimulate some kind of growth. That's the problem Facebook had in its early years was like, we have to change. We have to change. And people kept bitching and saying, stop changing things. No, but I mean, listen, there is, there is a, I think that it could be reasonably said, that there is something beyond never changing and adding common sense of things that make your user experience better. And I read, by the way, that entire Twitter book. Remember the one by the guy who was at the Times? I forgot. Catching Twitter. Nick Bilton, right? That book was very detailed about the culture at Twitter. And from that perspective, that is the thing that is probably causing investors worry more than numbers, right? Because that was a climate of like, we made a thing by accident and listen, we don't know what to do with it. Like that was the message of that whole book was like, look at this thing we invented as we were pivoting. And I think that that is actually the most valid concern about Twitter as a company because it's been good by accident rather than by design. That's a really good point because you can be Amazon and keep your profit margins razor thin and the investors will grumble, but you're a successful company. So they're not going to revolt. You can be an Apple and keep that cash pile huge and not buy back any stock for decades. And the investors will grumble, but they won't revolt because Apple's bringing them value. Twitter, I think, it's not just about growth. It's also about that vision. And I think, I can't remember Veronica if it was you or Justin that said this because I don't see gender. It is that we actually got from Dorsey an idea of what Twitter is for the first time in a coherent way yesterday. And one of the things that I really like that Farhad Manju said in that article was that, oh now I forgot what he said because Veronica dropped out and it distracted me, but it was a very well written article about basically saying like, no, it's gone. My really excellent point just disappeared. Oh, I know what it was. I know what it was. My point is that when you look at Twitter, and this was in the Farhad article, it looks like code to the uninitiated. It doesn't look like something that you could easily pick up. If you just read a straight down Twitter feed, it's full of all these weird app replies and half of a conversation, but where's the other half? And I can see a reply to something that Tom Merritt has said three hours ago, but not the thing Tom said. And that is not the way that the human conversation goes naturally. And so it is a higher barrier to entry if you didn't get in on it from the beginning. And that was a point, that was a good point for our article and I think a good point overall in terms of like, hey, let's fix the design of this and how we see it. So, that ever. Yeah. Well, I think we can all agree to disagree. No, no, I refuse. I think we're all basically agreeing just on different things. Oh yeah, no, I don't think. Isn't that America right there? Well, I think we can all agree that Patrick's wrong. Oh, God, you're going to get more emails. Can't even. Listen, his argument has the right to be forgotten. In from someone in his country. Yeah. He does not have First Amendment protection, by the way. No, he has Finnish protection right now, whatever that is. Are we finished? No, we're Swedish. No, that never gets old. No, we're hungry. All right. Yeah, I'm pasting the bed in right now. Folks, heart. Oh, Justin, thanks for being on the show. Hey, two days in a row. Thanks, man. Ah, happy to do it. As per usual. Awesome work. I'm a go eat ice cream. That's my plan. Are you? We've got a plan and it involves ice cream. Are you screaming for ice cream? No, I'm mildly interested in that screaming. All right. Sounds like I didn't screw up the publishing because I'm not having a fever anymore. Good job. That's good. Oh, yeah, it looks like Google Plus went down. So there were Google problems today. That may be part of Veronica's issue. She just may be suffering randomly more than the rest of us. That's weird. All righty then. Thank you all for watching. We'll talk to you later.