 If I were Brian Brushwood, I would say it's go time. That'd be a different show and I'd be a different person. But Justin, Robert Young would still be there. I'd be the same. Both cases. You're the constant. I was trying to think of yesterday. My constant. That's the thing from Los. Like in the lost term? Yes. Gotcha. Exactly. All right. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is brought to you by me. You're welcome. But it's also brought to you by over 4,000 other people who also find some value in it every day. If you listen for the next 30 minutes and get even a little bit of value out of it yourself, consider going to patreon.com and searching for Daily Tech News Show and giving some value back. Now roll that beautiful theme music. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 21st, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt, joining me today, Mr. Justin Robert Young. How are you, sir? Well, a sad day for the internet. As we will touch on a little bit later. But you want to know what? A very interesting and informative day as far as tech news goes. And it is our job to soldier on. Yeah. We've got some privacy news in lots of different ways. We have an avalanche of products from Acer to tell you about, so let's get right into it with the headlines. Opera has added a VPN service to the desktop browser available right now only in the developer channel, the alpha channel. VPN is free, has no limits, no data limits, no time limits. The servers are available in the US, Canada, and Germany, at least at launch. It only directs browser traffic through the Opera servers, not all the traffic on the machine. So just your browser traffic. Opera says it will collect feedback from the developer channel with the aim to roll this out to everybody, including on mobile. In fact, Opera says its iOS version will just be a VPN app that offers VPN to the entire device and they're thinking about doing Android. We're gonna talk about this and the implications of a browser manufacturer now not only adding an ad block by default, its own ad blocker, but VPN as well. It is extraordinarily interesting news specifically as we will get into in our main discussion, the timing in which this is happening for Opera considering where the company is as a whole, but this is a very interesting play for what has been, by and large, a also ran browser considering the market share of some of the other, some of the other, just market share, right? Just don't send the emails. He's just saying that Opera doesn't have as big a market share, people. Market share, right? Yeah, listen, I know that I will get cut in the streets for denigrating Opera, right? Yeah, with a blade shaped like a red O. They will go out. I'm saying this. The reason why Opera has gigantic fans, this seems to be not only doubling down but giving unprecedented browser level support for things that its audience wants desperately. The idea of VPN as a free commodity could be fundamentally transformative to a lot of very important discussions that are going on right now. Yeah, lots to talk about there in the discussion. Last year, Google started listing what app or service carried a TV show or movie you were searching for. And now Google is announcing that it will add live TV listings to search results as well. Users will be able to add their TV provider to customize their results even further. Now that's the consumer news. The other thing in this blog post is all these details about how they wanna sell ads to television networks. So my guess is these go pretty hand in hand, Justin. Putting out the live listings to make it easier for people to tune in live to the network to certainly music to networks ears. You know, and this really shows where Google kind of screwed up with plus and a social network element. Just some kind of portal that's not necessarily tied to search for which what Google does well indexing and knowing where you're going to go or predicting what you would like to watch where there would be an easy way for that information to find you as opposed to depending on whether or not you're searching for basketball wives or to tell you that it's on VH1 right now. And it is one of those things even as a person who doesn't have cable, I still do over the air. And a lot of times I'm like, what channel is this particular playoff on? Is it something that I can get on Sling TV or do I have to go to my live? Like, it can be a pain. So the solution is to just subscribe to Comcast now that they've announced their HTML5 Xfinity app is coming to the Samsung Smart TV and a custom app is agreed to come to Roku. Subscribers to Comcast Xfinity Cable Service can access the channel guide, Cloud DVR, live and on-demand TV all through the app without having to get a box or actually install cable in any way. Comcast believes this shows the FCC does not need to mandate that set top compatibility it's thinking about doing. FCC told the Verge that the new app does not quote integrate or search across Comcast content as well as other content consumers subscribe to. In other words, like on Roku or Apple TV you can just do a search and it'll tell you, oh, that's available on Hulu and Netflix or whatever. The Comcast app isn't part of that. The press release from Comcast says they're exploring adding that though. Comcast is very often very correctly vilified as something sub the devil and north of a million devils. But this is in and, oh man, I can't believe, I've already, I've slagged off opera. I've mentioned basketball wives publicly and now here I am going to talk about silver lining to Comcast. Wait, you've come to praise Comcast, not to bury it? I'll tell you, considering our conversation earlier before we went live, I feel like I'm softening things up. But this is an encouraging look that although Comcast is looking now to push new hardware on customers with its X1 box, it is also at least understanding that the future is not putting all their eggs in that basket and they are going to ram this extra hardware rental fee down your throat whether you like it or not. Here is at least their seeming to have an ability to say, hey, let's diversify. Let's see what maybe customers would like to pay for their experience that they would like to interact with us because Comcast is not going away and the best thing that we can hope for as customers is that we can deal with it on our own terms better than we can now. Now here's the thing, the FCC wants to make it so that you can buy whatever box you want and hook it up to your cable. I think that is old fashioned. I certainly praise their idea and I would have been cheering it in 2005. But at this point, what they need to be doing is encouraging Comcast not only to do what they're doing here, but to say, all right, great. We won't force you to do device interoperability if you actually make that service available to anyone on any internet service. I mean, that's the key here. You have to be a Comcast subscriber to get this, which means they're gonna be like, hey, you want the Comcast internet, but this is an entirely internet protocol-delivered service. So why not let me here in LA in a Time Warner area subscribe to it if I want to? Like that suddenly opens up the competitive gates. There's no more regional monopolies in the United States. They do that. Then I think they have really showed like, no, this is really about us providing a better, more competitive service. It's not what they're doing yet, but it's certainly a step in that direction. And this is something that you guys on Cord Killers have documented that this is the coming war that you guys, oh, so many years ago when you started Cord Killers, you were the watchers on the wall saying, oh, no, no, the war is coming. We need to all understand what this is. And what you're talking about, that is the final battle of the five armies where you see a lot of these major conglomerates say, you want to know what these fiefdoms that we have carved out for each other based on who laid cable where? Guess what? It's five points now, baby. And Butcher Bill's coming to lay down the terms of war because we are going to scrap. Speaking of redapping, Sony told Polygon in order to further safeguard our users and their accounts, we are preparing to offer two-step verification features. Details will come at a later date. A PS3 update Tuesday mentioned two-factor authentication after an incorrect login, though no such feature is as yet available. Polygon points out that it was five years ago yesterday that the PlayStation Network was hacked and shut down for 23 long days and nights. Biggest shame of my news selection life was that day. Five years ago, when I skipped the original story that said there was a PlayStation outage, and I still hold to this, which is like, eh, things have outages all the time. Call me when it's lasted a day. So the next day, we were like, all right, we're definitely gonna talk about it. And then it lasted for 23 days. About time, Xbox has had this for what? Two-three years, I think? Two-factor authentication, but you know what? Better late than never. Still pretty late. Acer announced several new products at a press event in New York. Here's the quick rundown. It's not even gonna be that quick. They announced a lot of stuff. The Switch Alpha 12, a fanless Skylake-powered laptop with a detachable keyboard and kickstand, kind of like the Surface. The Predator 17X gaming laptop. This one has a GeForce GTX 980 video card. The Predator G1 gaming desktop. This one can come with GeForce video cards up to the Titan X graphics card. And you can configure it with up to 64 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. And they say this works with HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. The Chromebook 14 is all tough and military grade, has Gorilla Glass and can survive 48-inch drops. The Explova X5 bike computer has a camera that turns on automatically at preset speeds and heart rates. You can even say by GPS, like this is a pretty bad turn. I want you to turn on the camera at this turn to document it. The Liquid Leap Fit promises 10 days of battery life. The 5.5-inch Liquid Zest Plus smartphone has a 5,000 milliamp hour battery. They say they can get up to two days of usage out of it. It's less than 250 bucks. Only two more announcements. The S13 laptop has 13 hours of battery life and a 13-inch screen and optional touchscreen configuration. Although you don't get the touchscreen at the opening price, which is $699. And finally, the 15.6-inch R15 convertible has 12 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM and the GeForce video cards that you can put into it up to the 940MX. A hat tip to CNET's Dan Garziano who did a stellar job covering and summarizing this literal avalanche. Well, I guess it wasn't literal because it didn't fall down a mountain and it's not snow, but it was a metaphorical avalanche of product balancements. And considering how much time that headline took up, I will only add everything's coming up, Acer. A Massachusetts judge has thrown out evidence obtained by the US FBI by hacking a site and hosting its illegal images for two weeks to collect IP addresses and inject visitors with malware. The reason for throwing the evidence out, though, is important. The FBI got a network investigative technique warrant to do everything that it did from a magistrate judge, which the court ruled did not have jurisdiction to issue the warrant. The Massachusetts decision points out that they could have got their warrant from a district judge. So it's not necessarily what they did, it's who they got the authority from to do it. Yeah, there's all kinds of sticky points here. You'll hear folks claiming that this is a precedent because it's the first time a judge has thrown out this kind of technique by law enforcement. But the reason it got thrown out is not because they injected malware, it's not because they ran a honeypot. The reason it got thrown out is there's something called Rule 41 that says a magistrate judge can't issue a warrant for something it doesn't know the location of. And when you don't know the location of the people connecting to your server, therefore the magistrate judge can't issue that warrant. That's why it got thrown out. But in the decision, and head tip to USA Today for pointing this out, they say specifically in the decision, it says there was a district judge in the same building as this magistrate judge. The law, Rule 41 says nothing about district judges. District judge could have issued this warrant, you would have been fine. Well, at least it wasn't Rule 43, which would have a totally different context for magistrates and Massachusetts. Here's the district judge who did something. US district judge Charles Breyer said that the Volkswagen group has agreed to buy back nearly 500,000 2.0 L diesel vehicles, which had software, that's two liter, software that illegally disabled the emissions control system. Details will be worked out over the coming months in order to settle some 600 lawsuits against the VW group. Other parts of this agreement, Volkswagen's gonna set up a fund for people who bought certain diesel cars, not just VWs, but Audi's and others to offer compensation on top of the car buyback program. And VW will fund an investment in green technology as well, that's kind of their civic duty punishment there. Yeah, this is, I mean, talk about one of the biggest embarrassments in automotive history. This is certainly something that they need to, they have a long road back, no pun intended. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced Australia's plan to spend 230 million Australian on 33 cybersecurity measures that would involve 100 new jobs moving the Australian Signals Directorate outside of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization to ease coordination with business. Wanna hear more on this and actual Australian accents? Tune in to day six with Peter Wells this Sunday. I don't know if he'll touch on this particularly, but he will have another day with just an update there. We are halfway through, a little more than halfway through the milestone to get to him doing day six every week. So you get it every other week right now and get these great international perspectives on the news. Well, they're international of the US. They're domestic to him, because he's Australian. Indeed, Australian for news. UK Transport Minister Robert Goodwill says it has not been confirmed that an unmanned aerial vehicle struck British Airways Flight BA727 this past Sunday. We reported that the pilot said something struck the front of the aircraft and he believed it was a drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle. Here's what Goodwill said. The early reports of a dent in the front of the plane were not confirmed. There was no actual damage to the plane. And there's indeed some speculation that it may have even been a plastic bag or something. And by the way, that is not just adding. That is the full quote. That is the quote or something. You know that this is transparency in government at its finest when a government official puts on record, it might have been a plastic bag or something. This is a minister who's very friendly to UAVs. So he may be trying to cast some doubt, but it obviously is clear that the pilot can't say for sure. And we had a couple of angry emails from people like, I'm really sick of pilots saying they think they saw something or they were close to something. In fact, the matter is the pilots are just doing their job. They need to report this stuff and say, like, I don't know, it could have been this, right? What is, what hay is made out of it politically later is not the pilot's fault. And I think the problem is is that whenever you have something that is as tenuous legally as drone, you know, the laws around drones are right now, you tend to get a lot of force back from both sides because everyone's worried more about the precedent that some little thing will set as opposed to actually trying to hash it out and make things safer going forward. Yeah, because I kind of doubt it was a plastic bag. Or something. The board said Thursday night, US FBI Director James Comey was asked at the Aspen Security Forum in London, how much the FBI paid for the technique to unlock the iPhone 5C in San Bernardino, California. Comey, no doubt taking a note from Robert Goodwill in his mirthful reply said, quote, more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months to be sure. Reuters, good at math. And according to the US Office of Management and Budget, that comes out to Comey making 1.34 million over that time. So, Director Comey, what you're saying is you've spent more than $1.34 million on this solution. Yeah, or it was a plastic bag or something. Or something. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is, it is an interesting story because of the quote, because he obviously wants to let people know in the neighborhood of where this went. They spent a lot on it, that's his point. However, like, do we really have a lot of context for whether or not that is, I mean, certainly that was about as public of a situation as the FBI is going to get themselves in. So a solution that will work probably did not necessarily come cheap from somebody who came in offering to do it. But I don't know whether or not that's a crazy number. I don't know whether or not people should be up in arms that that might. I know, were you talking take home pay or the value of his total compensation package? Yeah, number changes. Are we gonna put it in? I'm sure he's got a company car, right? Are we gonna add that in? Like, all right, a couple of earnings reports here. Microsoft reported its third financial quarter of 2016 earnings, $22.1 billion, 62 cents a share adjusted earnings. Analyst expected earnings per share of 64 cents. So they were just under that and 22.1 billion. So they're right on target there. Microsoft's own guidance suggested revenue between 21.1 and 22.3 billion. Microsoft stock fell a little bit in after hours trading. Always the interesting thing with Microsoft earnings, we'll talk about this a little more tomorrow is how it gets broken up. Productivity and business has 22.2 million paying office 365 users up 6% intelligence cloud, which is their Azure services, enterprise services was down a little 6.1 billion compared to 6.4 billion in the last quarter. And then MPC is what they call it, more personal computing, which contains Windows devices, Xbox, et cetera, was 9.5 billion down from 12.7 billion last quarter, although surface revenue increased 61% year over year. So that's a good sign there. Meanwhile, Alphabet reported Q1 earnings of $7.50 on 20.3 billion in revenue up from 17.3 billion in the same quarter last year. However, analysts had expected 7.96 on 20.38 billion in revenue stocks are currently down 5% in extended trading. Now it's always interesting now that they're Alphabet, how much Google makes versus what they call the other bets where they lump in everything from Nest to Google X. But here's an interesting thing. We've been hearing all this sturm and drong about the unsettled nature of these other bet companies. Company reported 166 million in revenue from those other bets. It reported a loss of $802 million last quarter, or I'm sorry, this quarter. Last quarter revenue was 80 million and an operating loss of 633 million. So they made more revenue, but they also lost more money on the other bets. Yeah. All right, finally, as Justin alluded to at the beginning of the show, Prince passed away very sad day and people outpouring as they did with David Bowie, as they often do on the internet, very sad at the loss of a musical icon, one of the best guitarists in history. It's an interesting reaction from the internet. Now, Prince was up trailblazer along with David Bowie. He was the first release an album exclusively online. If you remember back in 2007, he gave away 2 million copies of his album, Planet Earth. He was very contentious with the music groups and on the side of the listener, but that started to change in the mid 2000s. He sued Pirate Bay. He was known for sending aggressive cease and desist not only to YouTube, but sometimes to fan sites. He in fact famously declared the internet dead in 2010 and then later clarified, well, I just meant that the internet was dead for making money on music. And he announced in August that his next album was going to be exclusive to Jay-Z's title. So the news came this morning that Prince is dead at age 57. It is interesting to me to note, Justin, that the internet did not respond with any of these more negative facts, but they responded with nothing but sadness, love and appreciation for the man's music. Certainly so. Prince was a tremendous figure, not only for the community that now populates the internet's chattering class, but also in a lot of the popular culture. I mean, Prince kind of had this everlasting quality, but let's, let's... Yeah, well, I wanna talk about this a little more. Big thanks to Jason Phil, Franz games, Loki, Robert, all those folks who submitted things we used from our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. That is a look at the headlines. But before we get into our main discussion, I wanna talk just a little bit more about this because this is something where you are going and look, what people do when someone passes away in their musician is they find the music and they try to listen to it and they post videos on Twitter and Facebook. It is much more difficult to do that because of Prince's aggressive takedown policies. You can't find as much of his music. There isn't that much on Spotify. A lot of the videos that you find on YouTube have been taken down because of copyright claims, but no one's focusing on that. And I think that is a very un-internet like. They're being very forgiving. And as always, whenever these kinds of discussions come up, you have to be understanding of what is the internet and what is what we expect from the people for which we follow and read on the internet. And very often there are those elements of a hashtag well actually that will kind of bring up the lesser parts of them. There is no doubt that Prince's reaction to the internet I think is one of the few elements of his legacy that I think will not stand the test of time. He was somebody that really through his creative prime, when we talk about everlasting cool with Prince, you have to understand that there was a huge dark spot wherein he very publicly, by way of changing his name to a symbol, had a fight, a knock down drag out who has rights to what fight with his label where he very literally took his ball and went home. I mean, this is one of the biggest creative forces of his era, making a gigantic stand for something that he believed in. So as time moved on, and the record companies as they were began to decline in relevancy, I'm extrapolating here based on secondhand sources, but I believe Prince looked at the internet as, okay, well, I've defeated or I have learned to not trust the massive conglomerate thief, but that does not mean that I trust the many faced thief of the internet. And he was, the one thing that was constant for him was keeping control of his own work so he could sell it the way that he wanted to sell it. Now, that is something that I think as we go forward, will prove to be, if not wrongheaded, something that was unlike Prince, which is progressive, something that he caught a wave on. However, you got the sense that he was warming to the idea of different ways for people to experience his art. He very much wanted to be supportive of title. He did the concert out in Baltimore to help bolster that specific service. Now, did that ultimately help title? Probably not, and then we will see where that specific company goes, but I mean, it's going to be very, very, very trite today to say, well, it would have been amazing if Prince continued on, but I think as far as his legacy amongst the digerati, there was really nowhere to go up, but up. And he always seemed to be somebody that was revising and thinking of different and new ways. And I think he would have become more internet friendly than I think he did when he looked at it as just a den of thieves that was just yet somebody else who was looking to take his content without his say. Yeah, he was someone who was dedicated to his music such that he didn't care whether you were a millionaire or someone in your bedroom, he wanted you to respect his music. And I think that that was the common ground behind both the fights that you're talking about. So it is a missed opportunity that we will not see him finally be able to get to the point where he resolves all of this tension, which I think you're right. I think he was moving towards that. He hadn't got there yet. And of course, obviously, I mean, the guy was cranking out music like crazy at a high level of quality. And that will be missed as well. At least the beauty of technology is that his music is preserved for us to enjoy. And really, what is amazing about Prince is that there is a lot, and everybody will say a lot, and rightfully so, about both he and Bowie's creativity and originality. That they were people who followed their own vision and marched through their own beat, and that is great. And that should be said a million and a half times. But here's what I want anybody who is sad about Prince to think about today. What separated those two from a million different people who had different ideas about what music should sound like and what fashion should be like and what sexuality paradigms we should be affecting is that they went out and did stuff. They were prolific artists. They were workers. And the element of the internet that I think cottons to him is that we now have the tools to make things on the scale of which he worked his career to build. He built Paisley Park so we could record whenever he wanted. He was built for the internet age in terms of construction. So if you're sad about Bowie, you're sad about Prince, which I think so many people are, then make something today. Follow your heart and don't think about it. Don't imagine yourself to be this creative third-way walker. Actually take those steps and do something. That's, I think, the legacy that he should have. Well put, well put. And one post note, if you're just listening to the audio podcast, as I know most of you are, maybe pop in to the video podcast around 26, 27 minutes, and just note the lighting tribute that Justin did during this discussion. So let's talk about Opera. Yeah, all right. So Opera adding VPN to the browser, that is very interesting. They have a lot of stats today about the number of people who use VPN already and they wanna make it easy for people to, and they're not pulling any punches. They're like, we know you wanna unlock sites for entertainment. That's one of the reasons. We know you wanna unlock news sites because your government represses you. That's another reason. We know you just wanna be private when you're at the coffee shop. You don't want people sniffing your packets. That's a third reason. They're all good reasons to Opera and they're gonna make them available to everyone. And of course, the thing that makes this very interesting is there's a Chinese consortium, including Keyhu360, Beijing's Cunlun Tech, Golden Brick Silk Road that does mobile games that are all trying to get together to buy Opera. They haven't yet. You may have heard us talk about the fact that there was a consortium going to buy them. The board has agreed, but only 72.19% of shareholders have accepted it and they need to get to 90% by May 24th to make it happen. Now, Opera denies that putting VPN in the browser has anything to do with this sale. They say, look, we just do our jobs. We're going to continue to do our jobs. That's what you're supposed to do during acquisition talks and that's what we're doing. It's what they have to say. And I can't imagine that a project like this, which by the way probably has its roots in their purchase of SurfEasy, a VPN provider that they purchased back in March of last year and then integrated as a link into Opera version 32 back in September. I don't believe that they purchased SurfEasy simply because they were worried someday a Chinese consortium would try to buy them. Yeah. So then let's read the D-leaves a little bit. Is this something that makes them more or less attractive for this acquisition? I don't know that it matters. Right now they need to get that next 18%. And that's all that the Chinese consortium cares about. The other thing that the Chinese consortium wants is Opera's mobile business, especially out there in developing areas, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and they wanna compete with Alibaba. And they think that Opera is one of the pieces they need to do that. So I don't know that they care. Okay. Now it will be interesting to see if they are allowed to compete with Alibaba on their home turf of China by providing a browser that gives you VPN or not. So then let's say that they don't care. And that the engineers at Opera, the people who are leading this product say, you wanna know what, maybe this is going to be something that will be bigger and better going forward. And we want to continue industry-wide feature arms race for which they have already baked in a little bit of the ad blocking. This is something that no other browser has even come close to thinking about and largely because they really can't. Microsoft, Google, and Apple all have very deep ties to a lot of people that would not be pleased by VPNs becoming more of a commonplace element of internet usage, let alone something that's baked into a browser, let alone something that people don't have to pay for. So I think this is a brilliant move by Opera to say, hey, look, we will eat the cost. We will take on the expense for people at the price of just you coming in and us increasing our market share. That seems kind of brilliant to me. It is. I could definitely see Firefox doing this as well, but the advantage that- The strengths in the chat room pointing out Mozilla as well. Sure, sure. No, absolutely strengths, you're right. I think that the difference is Opera already has been running traffic through their own servers for Opera browsing for a long time. That's how they do the compression that is saving you data when you use Opera on mobile. And I think they just plugged surf easy right into that system. I make it sound really easy. I know it wasn't, but that's the way to do it. It's like, look, we already have a system to send the traffic through here. Let's just give it a different IP address. We'll use the surf easy infrastructure to do that. It won't raise our costs that much and we have a business plan. I mean, their business plan does rely in part on advertising, but it also relies a lot on original equipment manufacturer and people installing Opera as a default mobile browser. All of that is what I think is most interesting about the Chinese consortium buying them. It's easy to say like, oh, so China's not gonna wanna VPN in the Great Firewall. No, they won't. But don't forget these Chinese companies are multinational companies. They're fine saying, you know what, Opera has a VPN outside of China and it doesn't inside China, whatever. That's just, that's the way it was before. That's the way it's gonna be. We get that. But what is going to be interesting is can they expand it enough to make that OEM money by changing the product when it is inside China and how is Opera gonna feel about that? So let's drop a little bit of drizzle on this parade. Under Mind in the chat room makes a very, very, very good point. I used to love Opera before Chrome was a thing, but now they feel like a glorified webkit skin in my humble opinion. The idea that- Oh, they're a chromium skin, not webkit. But here's what's interesting. The idea that a VPN is built in concerns me. An improperly implemented VPN can make users more vulnerable and non-technical people might not be able to understand the difference. Is there still, even in a world where free VPN, which is something that has been an interesting idea, is more ubiquitous, is there still a worth in paying for the peace of mind that, no, this is definitely not going to be intercepted or screw something? Well, and that's the key, right? And people should be wary of that and look to the folks who know how to test and find out about this stuff. Opera is very clean in that respect up until today. My guess is that it would pass any audit. However, new consortium comes in, new pressures from above are going to put more of a spotlight on that. And I think that's a fair question to ask, absolutely. But there's also no reason that Opera couldn't provide a very solid and secure VPN. And in which case this is a brilliant move. It certainly has me thinking about making Opera my default browser on more than just Windows, which is, it is my default browser on Windows these days. But I'm like, maybe I should use it in more places. Well, and listen, there's a lot of very legitimate reasons why people want to use VPNs. You were probably the first person to make me to actually slap the sense into me when I was on the road to realize that I should be using a VPN whenever I'm on any kind of Wi-Fi network that is not my own. If you were out there in a hotel, to be properly hygienic, you're in a coffee shop, you're gonna want to use some kind of VPN just to be on the safe side. And they're gonna add more servers than just Germany, the US and Canada. However, they're gonna have to be in that whack-a-mole game against services like Netflix who detect that you're using a VPN and shut you down. Hulu does that now, BBC does that now. And so that's another side of the story that we don't need to get into again. But it's that same old, well, you can use it for entertainment and you'll fight that battle and then you can use it for security and then you're gonna have to decide whether you want to be secure or be entertained at certain points. Yeah. That's the way it works. All right, let's get to our pick of the day from AZ who said, if you're looking for a secure IM client, TOX is a great solution. It supports end-to-end encryption, makes use of the Tor network, supported on Windows, Linux and in beta for iOS and Android. I have been using the application ever since it was launched and I can't recommend it enough. Please take a look and see if it is worthy of sharing with your listeners. It gets great reviews. I've never tried it, but it definitely has good open source qualifications as far as I could tell. I'm not gonna warrant that it is perfectly secure. You should do your own due diligence on that. But it's worth taking a look at. Go check it out at TOX.Chat. And he didn't say OS 10, but there is an OS 10 version of it as well. Send your picks to us, folks. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can find more picks at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash picks. One message of the day from Mike in ridiculously beautiful District of Columbia, who says your discussion with Scott on the rumored elimination of the mini-jack. Remember that there is a phone that we talked about yesterday that got rid of the mini-jack from La Echo. And there's rumors that Apple might do the same. Hear me out. Most ruggedized phones have rubber stoppers over their ports to prevent water from entering the chassis. Apple, notorious for blazing ahead and eliminating floppy drives and optical drives and ports on its other products, might point to wireless connectivity and wireless charging as a way to streamline the phone and make it less likely to short from water exposure and have a unique phone that stands out from the competition. I would imagine a port might be hidden in the chassis for repairs or service, but when is the last time an iPhone user plugged their phone in for anything other than charging? And the headphone. Okay, let's assume that the headphone goes away. Now the rumors are, just to be, before you say anything, Justin, the rumors are not that they would get rid of all the ports, that they would make it a lightning port be the headphone jack, and this La Echo phone uses USB-C for that. Which the other interesting element there is, okay, well, what about people who wanna charge while they listen to things and the ability is to do that without another perhaps out. So I would love, love, love, love to live in a world where we only used Bluetooth or wireless headphones. I think that that as a standard would be great. I don't know if we are there battery-wise, even the best in show wireless earbuds are still fairly limited when it comes to charging as somebody who is a faithful Apple Watch user. It is annoying to have yet another thing that you need to charge over and over again, especially on a daily basis for people that are obsessive with headphone usage and I would count myself among them. The concept of having my earbuds go out on hour one of a five hour plane ride is something that I think would only be rivaled by spotting a goblin on the wing as terrifying. So I love the idea. I don't know if we're there battery-wise yet, but I think that that is yet another great way that you could say, hey, look, this should be the future. You know, Lil Wayne can pour as much champagne on this phone. You don't even have to worry about it. It might maybe getting in one of the exhaustful. By the way, side note, love that Lil Wayne buys high-end champagne to pour in his phone, not just any champagne. Well, I mean listen. I'm gonna go for the cheap stuff. Easy, baby. Right? I think you're right. I think Mike is pointing the way to something that if they can make it work, they will definitely consider. I'm not saying they'll make a shipping product out of it. I'm not saying they're not already playing around with it, but the idea of Apple putting out a portless phone just seems right if they could make it happen. Again, like you say, you gotta make the wireless headphone batteries work. I've got some epic headphones. They can make it through a week of my amount of usage without a charge, but I hate it when I pick them up and they're dead. And I'm like, ah, crap. I forgot to charge my headphones. So you gotta fix that. You gotta make the battery and the phone last long enough to handle all of this wireless stuff. And wireless charging is great, but wireless charging has not got to the point where it can really juice up a phone as well as a good old-fashioned direct connection. So I don't know, man. I love the idea, though. I love the way Mike thinks. I think this is one of those, it's not unsolvable. It is just not solved. Well, that's why we do this show is to keep you informed on the things that are getting solved and the many things that aren't. Thank you, Justin and Robert Young for joining us. What have you got in the works these days to tell people about? Oh, man. You can find out everything at Justin, our young on Twitter. Otherwise, we've been directing people to go ahead and sign up and follow our contender, the game presidential debate for which is available now at thecontender.us, a party game that I think a lot of people are really going to be enjoying over these summer months. We have a lot of really, really, really fun stuff coming out. You're gonna need to follow our social media to be the first ones to get it. So go ahead, twitter.com slash contendergame, facebook.com slash thecontendergame, absolutely free, and I guarantee you, there will be some funny, silly videos in your life over the next week and change. So go ahead and check that out. That is at contendergame on Twitter and facebook.com slash thecontendergame, follow them there and I'm gonna do your right. Also, remember to bathe yourselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. Yes. Thank you all for supporting this show. We can't not do it without you because there is no other source of funding but you. There is, of course, different ways you can fund us. You can buy a Daily Tech News Show mug or a born ready t-shirt at dailytechnewshow.com slash store. You can just give us a one-time PayPal donation saying, you know what, I got a couple bucks. I'll kick it your way. That's all I got for now. That's fine. 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Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Oh, it's quick on the trigger with those things at the end of the day. Oh, Jack. So I don't think any Len Peralta tomorrow. It says Len Peralta here, but I'm pretty sure he was. Yeah, no, there was no Len. I used to automatically write Len on Fridays for some reason. So he's going to be first. Sorry. What have you got for titles? Can you guess? You guys said something at the top. I think a plastic bag or something. Yeah, a plastic bag or something was number five. Bags of drones, BPM Phantom of the Opera, to Xfidity and Beyond, two-factor authentication. Authentication. Coming on Cast. Actually, a metaphorical avalanche. Baggy drones, Alphabet or Spoker, Purple Stream, Virtual Purple Network, The Prince of Our Hearts. I like VPN Phantom of the Opera, but that's me. You're a big musical fan. Yeah, but it also ties in your main discussion. Topic, Tropic Topic. What do you have, Jerry? If people haven't seen it, to me, my favorite Prince clip that is available widely on the internet is his performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in celebration of George Harrison, wherein a mega band, including many of George Harrison's traveling Wilburys compatriots, sang while my guitar gently weeps. As popular legend goes, Prince showed up to none of the rehearsals to the great consternation of Tom Petty, who was singing lead vocals in The Tribute. Prince shows up, and Petty throws him some shade on whether or not he knows how to play the song. Prince shows up and is designated the person who's going to do the famous guitar solo on the song. And his behavior and performance is just everything that is the raging id of Prince, including doing a final shredding right in Tom Petty's face. And then falling backwards into the crowd where somebody catches him and then raises him back up as if he is returning back to life from the side of the stage. It is so great. And as far as those kinds of big gang F tributes that they always seem to do at the Hall of Fame, where 90 people are playing the same guitar riff, it actually is a pretty good performance. Do you have the link? Post the link. Yeah, I'll put it here in the chat room, including George Harrison's son, who is just so delighted that all of this is happening right in front of his face. Let me actually, well, no, I don't know. Don't play any of it. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, no, I don't. Wildlife, let me just put the link here in the chat room. Wildlife, I thought you'd never ask. There we go. Yeah, Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Linwood, Jeff Lin. I'm going with the VPN Phantom of the Opera, by the way. Oh, OK. Just so you know. Yes, I tried to find there's a great video not too long ago of Prince doing David Bowie's Heroes. I wanted to watch, and it's not available anymore. I mean, what's amazing is that he was such a virtuoso that that was part of the reason why when you talk about creation, and that's why it kind of irked me, and I wanted to say it here on the show about there's so much talk about, oh, look, he taught the world that you could dance to your own beat and everything. And that's great, and he certainly did that. There was never any mistaking that Prince was Prince with a capital P, right? Or for a few years not, but yes. Or his symbol, right? Yeah. But that's a dude who was so hard working that he recorded all the parts with all the, he would record his own music. There's a reason why he had his own studio. Paisley Bart was its own entity and a monument to how hard he worked. And that's where I think we tend as creative people to get paralyzed, because you look at people that are that talented, and you get scared. And you say, well, yeah, Prince can do that. Bowie can do that, because they're Prince and Bowie. But what is hidden by their brilliance is their hard work. And nobody. I mean, again, this is why the internet element is the worst part of Prince. Because Prince was so protective of his work that he felt so tied to that, again, this is a bi-popular legend, he would be his own content ID and would just search Prince on YouTube and then call the people to send take-down notice, call the people that he had to send take-down notices. And in a way, what he was doing is a better way of doing it than what the music companies do, which is like, no, I'm just going to go find it. And now when I know it's mine, I'll put something out, rather than hiring some company that just searches for the term Prince, and then they're taking down things that have nothing to do with his music, they just happen to mention Prince Harry in the title or something, which happens. Yes, oh no, absolutely. Although, I think it is open to interpretation exactly. I don't think that his understanding of what was his and our understanding of what was his. I'm just saying, if there was a video of Prince Harry, he wouldn't send a take-down notice. He would not send that video of Prince Harry scored to a cinnamon girl. Probably totally different. Yeah, not quite the same. Hindu Love God's video, we're doing Raspberry Baray, 50%. I don't know, I don't know which way to go on that. Now, I do want to know, somebody mentioned in the chat room and it does mention noting, far less of a tech angle, but another big death last night, a female wrestling superstar, China, Joni Lorre, dead at another impossibly young age for somebody that had such a career, certainly filled with very, very, very rough life, many demons, but an undeniable presence for women's wrestling and what she meant to the industry will never be unstated. So worth it saying in the after show for people that wonder, well, why not mention her? So she does deserve mentioning, although she doesn't quite necessarily have the tech legacy that Prince had. No, he had both positive and arguably negative impacts on technology, but you cannot argue that he had an impact. I mean, he's, it's amazing. It's amazing to look at Prince and his public profile that even now, the idea that Prince would show up at somebody's party and play a set was insanely relevant. Yeah. No, that was, there was still this aura, the idea, even in like the aftershock nostalgia of Prince's popularity, typified by Dave Chappelle's sketch on the Chappelle show of the Rick James True Hollywood stories, those, even those were never about making fun of Prince. It was about telling a story so outrageous that it had to be Prince. And there's a great story told by Neil Brennan and Dave Chappelle that as they were shooting the Chappelle show, they wind up getting a call finding out that Prince is gonna play a show, Prince wanted to see him. So they come down, they see Prince out there and Prince invites them backstage and eventually back to their hotel. And they're, Prince is very gracious, he's very, very nice, but they can never really get a handle on whether or not he is excited about the parody or whether or not he is upset about the parody. And Prince had that kind of razor's edge sort of personality that you never really knew, but they finally got an answer as Prince calls down for room service. And he's asking everybody what they want from room service and Dave Chappelle and Neil Brennan about the, oh yeah, we don't want anything and Prince looks back at them slyly and just says, pancakes, you sure you don't want any pancakes? You know, I bet you he enjoys that, he enjoys that kind of reaction like where people can't, like not being able, not being easy to read. Oh, I mean, this is a man who cared about Mystique, you know, there's the old adage that James Brown never wanted to walk through the lobby of a hotel knowing that there were fans there because fans didn't pay to see James Brown in blue jeans, they paid to see James Brown up on stage in a cape. And Prince lived that, oh, more than Brown, you know, Prince, you know, that we, as we know him, more than Bowie, you know, there is just this idea that Prince did not die, he ascended, he was not a mortal, he is just this elven creature that came in to delight us and make us feel things that were strange and different and now he has returned to his home realm. There is, it is a cultivated legacy. Again, this is a man who worked, he didn't, every inch of him right down who was meticulously a manscape mustache was thought through and projected to you, the viewer, the way he wanted it to. And that's something that, you know, if you wanna be creative, you wanna think about what that legacy is, then think about that because that's what it took. Man, you are on fire today, just to remember, young. I thoroughly loved what you said in the show and you definitely got a handle on this better than I ever could. So, well done. No, listen, this is why Daily Tech News Show is a great platform. Also, we gotta talk about what, I mean, we didn't even tease the fact that I'm gonna be going on assignment for Daily Tech News Show. Oh, shoot, yeah, yeah. Next week at the collision conference in New Orleans, so hopefully we'll be lining up a couple of really cool people. There's one really cool name that I think we, I'm gonna put in the slack here now on questions that we want to ask, but hopefully more to come, but there will be more special content and your Patreon dollars continue to expand the reach of the Daily Tech News Show. That's the idea, man. We just wanna try stuff and do different things and the more people that listen and support the show and enjoy it, the more we can try. So, this is gonna be fun. I'm looking forward to seeing, like, it's not that there are no rules, but essentially you can't do it wrong. Well, you know, it's funny, so I was talking to, I mean, I guess I can say, because either it happens or it doesn't, but Stephen Wolfram, we're trying to line up a short interview with Stephen Wolfram and I was talking to his assistant who was trying to suss out what we were looking to talk to and where we wanted to go with the conversation and I was like, well, listen, I can get your reference questions if you wanna know generally where we wanna go, but I know that my personal interest is nobody has thought more about that kind of computation as far as Wolfram Alpha than Stephen Wolfram and I would love to hear his perspective on that kind of natural language, big computation, especially considering now we have maybe its best input method in what we are doing now with Alexa and Siri and literal natural language as in it comes from your voice and then something answers you. I would love to hear his opinion on that and she was like, okay, cool, but anyway, if anybody else has any ideas on questions to ask, Stephen Wolfram, and this is where we want to get, I am only your messenger. And yeah, we'll try to keep you updated on, well, not try, we'll keep you updated when we know who else you might be able to talk to. Some of them you may not know till you hit the floor too, I imagine. Yeah, I am a pugnacious and tenacious reporter and I will try to sit down with as many people as possible, obviously audio interviews are both a blessing and a curse. In that we gotta physically get them to sit down somewhere to talk to them, like we had the CEO of Roku apparently will be busy during the conference, but his very helpful second in command wanted us to know that if we have any questions that she could answer, that's a thing, but that's obviously not what we're looking for here for the D18S listenership. We'll see. Awesome, man. Thanks for doing that too. Oh, by the way, also in three minutes, I'll be on the Angry Chicken brawl episode. Oh, shit. All right. Well, let's get out of here. Thanks everybody for- I'm trying to build up my own library of tapes, man. I want to be like Prince in Paisley Park and just have 4,000 tracks of unused podcasts. That's amazing. That's what I'm trying to do today. All right, thanks everybody for watching. Goodbye, we'll see you tomorrow.