 Different models. All right, we're live. We're ready, ready for action. Been talking Nintendo switch. If you're a patron, you already know that. Do you need anything else to prepare yourself for today's show? Monsieur Beja. I think I'm mostly good. Were you perhaps born into the state that you would need to be in for the show? I was brought into this world in a state of readiness. Yes. Like I always say, I was brought into this world in a state of readiness. I was brought into this world in a state of preparedness. I think we should say to keep like. It's ready to prepare us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, I see no reason to tarry any further. You do you think Roger is awake? Roger. Can you give us the go sign? Just yell. I can hear you from downstairs. Okay. Good. All right. Okay. All right. He's ready. He's good. I made him turn off his screens though. Nice. He's cursing me under his breath. I'm sure. All right. Here we go. Daily Tech News show is powered by its audience. That's you find out more head to Daily Tech News show dot com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 7th, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today. Patrick Beja along along board alongside on board somewhere in France. How are you, Patrick? I am excellent. How about yourself, Mr. Tom Merritt from the United States of America? Somewhere in the United States of America. I'm good. I'm good. We have a fan mail Tuesday, partly because we needed some flexibility in our preparedness schedule. So we've got several emails and a voicemail coming at you. But also we have some pretty big topics, multiple big topics. So we wanted to give ourselves a little room to talk about each of those. So without further ado, let's get into the top stories. WikiLeaks published a set of 8,761 documents Tuesday. They're calling it Vault 7. No space between the T and the 7. They're good branding. Vault 7 was allegedly taken from a secure network at CIA headquarters. The documents describe remote exploits and hacking tools that the CIA uses to pursue its information collecting. 24 weaponized exploits are detailed for Android, 14 for iOS, one for a Samsung Smart TV. That one gives you credential extraction, which a lot of people say, well, if you get the credentials, then you could use it to turn it on and listen to people through the voice activation feature. But it's not actually hacking right into that. It would take a couple other steps from what I understand. WikiLeaks says the archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner. So they're not getting it. Yeah, they didn't break into the CIA. It turns out that someone broke the rules and was circulating it. And among those people that it was being circulated to one of them handed it over to WikiLeaks identifying information of CIA targets and much of the code base was redacted by WikiLeaks before publication. So they didn't want to unmask people that the CIA may be after and they didn't want to give you the tools necessarily. Of course, that means that we really don't know just how widespread this is. We don't know exactly what these zero day exploits are and it's hard to tell Patrick if this is a set of tools that security researchers all knew about, which is probably unlikely and if not, which of these were known and which not. And of course, it does mean that the folks who make iOS Android and Samsung smart TVs, etc. now have a chance to fix these exploits which could impede the CIA in their business. Yeah, this is kind of I think there are a couple of things to note here. First of all, if they were already kind of circulating amongst they're saying former US government hackers and contractors, it probably means that other entities had access to it as well, right? It's people who might have malicious intent. It doesn't necessarily mean malicious intent. Hackers in this case does not mean crackers. Hackers means people that were under the employee of the CIA possibly, right? So it's hard to tell. People with malicious intent or not. Of course, it's not guaranteed. But what I mean is that if it did circulate outside the CIA, the current CIA and in those, you know, former employees and some contractors, it's not hard to imagine that other hackers or other hackers might have a first outside organization to get this handed to them. Exactly. Exactly. So between this and the fact that they did redact some of the information and some of the code, which I'm not certain that WikiLeaks is in a habit of doing. It points to a relatively responsible way of disclosing this information, which I'm again, I'm not sure that WikiLeaks has always been that careful in the way they pursue their goal of, you know, no more secrets kind of agenda. So even though there are of course very legitimate reasons to criticize this move, it seems that they are acting in a way that's closer to responsible hackers or responsible information leakers than what we've been used to with them. And that's a little bit surprising, I think. I don't know if that's actually true or not, to be honest. It's less surprising now that Julian Assange is no more in charge of all of this, but it's still a responsible way of doing it though. It's a more responsible way of doing it than not redacting IP addresses and some of the code base. It could also be obfuscating things that would be embarrassing to WikiLeaks. It's impossible to tell. I don't know that either of those are true. I don't feel like, in whole, releasing this is responsible. I don't think this is the way that you would want, say, the information if they got ahold of this to release it to put it out there in bulk. However, if you're someone who believes in transparency and whistleblowing, this is a very responsible way. So there's lots of ways to look at it. It's not the way that most journalistic organizations would release it. I think that's where my hesitation comes from. All of that said, because none of this has been verified or run past others or anything like that. All of that said, it's really difficult to tell how bad this is for you. A lot of folks are noting that because these are OS-level exploits, that means that they could bypass end-to-end encryption. So for instance, would the CIA use one of these exploits to get into your iOS? By the way, they don't mention iOS 10, so it may not even be current. They would be able to see what you're typing into WhatsApp. And so there's a lot of obfuscation out there, FUD, rather not obfuscation, about the fact that, oh, they can break encryption. They did not break encryption. This does not break end-to-end encryption. This does not mean that WhatsApp has a weakness. This means that if you get into someone's operating system, you can see everything they do. Right, and probably that the CIA and other information organizations had, you know, it kind of semi-confirms the fact that they probably have means to get the information they need in targeted cases and don't necessarily need to break a backdoor into encryption, although that speculation, but you know, don't need a backdoor into encryption for targeted cases. Of course, when you're talking about mass surveillance, it's a different story, but it's an interesting... Yeah, and the White House under President Obama had a program where they would, at least they were paying lip service to the idea that they were going to work with companies to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in a way that would allow the intelligence agencies to take advantage of them, but not endanger consumers more than a certain amount, right? And that may sound crazy to you, but if you have discovered an exploit, let's say you're the CIA and you've discovered an exploit, you're probably fairly certain that you might be the first one to exploit it if you're, you know, listening to all the channels, and so you know you have a little amount of time where you can exploit it, where no one else will, and since you're the CIA, you believe you're doing it for the powers of good, which means that consumers are safe in your mind, and at a certain point, you want to hand it over because it's just the right thing to do, and that's what that vulnerability program is about. We don't know if any of these have been handed over before. I mean, it's just too early and too many, you know, the eyes have not gone through all of the information here to tell all of that, and whether these exploits are actually the kinds of things that are revelatory or not. Well, to be continued, I guess. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The BBC reported a hundred offending photos involving children to Facebook, 18 were removed and the other 82 were found not to violate Facebook's community standards. When the BBC provided examples of the images, Facebook reported the journalists to the police saying it was against the law for anyone to distribute such images. Facebook now says the content is no longer on its platform. So this is troubling. This isn't any more clear cut than the WikiLeaks thing. Basically, the BBC went and they found images that they felt very strongly and they cite several experts who deal with child abuse and child pornography saying yes, those images you found are unacceptable, but a very small amount of them were qualified according to Facebook to meet the guidelines of being removed. Now, Facebook is very conservative in what they removed because they know that what might appear to be something offensive to one person won't be to another. However, when the BBC went to follow up and said, hey, we're journalists, we did this, we noticed you only removed this many. Why didn't you remove these others? They gave samples of the images and I guess Facebook felt they needed to follow the letter of the law, which is if someone gives you an image like that, then you report them to police. That also, Patrick right belies that they decided, well, that image you're showing me definitely is offensive and shouldn't be on our site, which still brings up the question, why didn't you remove it the first time around and there's a lot of supposition that it's there's not enough human moderation going on. Yeah, I mean, definitely that is an issue and I mean the way the article is written feels a little bit not one sided, but they're leaning on Facebook in a way that seems, to me, a little bit forceful, a tiny bit sensationalistic. Now, what they're talking about certainly is a problem. But for example, when they reported the photos to Facebook directly, it's not like Facebook said, well, you know, a few BBC go, the police is on its way to your offices. They reported everyone involved to the police like including the pictures that were on the on the site were then treated in that same manner. It seems like there's a little bit of word interpretation in that description. But regardless of that Facebook, I think has a duty as did the BBC to report these as criminal things that are being done on the internet, right, that there is a duty to do that. Exactly. So I can't tell now that Facebook following that policy or the BBC is sort of, you know, trying to poke Facebook and make them look bad. Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that and they're trying to make them look bad because it's a situation where they do look bad. But if you take the and I'm not questioning this at all, they do look bad and they should have handled it differently. But if you take a slightly wider view, I feel like this might be one example where it's very clear cut and, you know, they're taking a hundred offending images. But I'm pretty certain that Facebook Facebook gets, you know, thousands if not tens of tens of thousands of reports every day for images where the the the question is a lot more difficult to answer. It's always, you know, that line is very difficult to see. But you know, when you're when you've crossed it in this case, it was clearly crossed and they should have been removed. But it might be a case that is lost in, you know, 2000 other cases where the the decision is a lot more difficult to make. So I guess the the way I look at it is Facebook does need a more reliable way of addressing these. Yes. But then I'm pretty sure that many organizations, maybe not the BBC because they're relatively serious, but many organizations might find other examples where an image was removed and it shouldn't have been. And yeah, there are plenty of examples like that on Instagram a few years back, remember? Yeah. And even on Facebook, you know, there are pieces of art, well-known pictures yet like war journalism, things like that. So basically it seems like what the BBC is saying a little bit forcefully is Facebook's moderation needs to be to be better. And I agree with it. I don't think they need to put it in quite that somewhat sensationalistic manner. But yes. And I think Facebook beyond the cases where there is a question of local cultural morality, those cases we can still argue about and will be arguing about forever, but for the cases where there is wide range global consensus, they can't keep arguing about it anymore. They need to have a system that works to, you know, it's basically a couple of things, terrorism and pedophilia. And maybe the system does work. I mean, that's the point I want to make here. This is one person, a BBC reporter marking this as offensive. There is a very good reason that you don't prioritize the report of one person because one person could then go take down stuff they don't like. If these images are being very cleverly hidden on Facebook groups and pages that you have to know about to get to, most people probably would not run across them. It might take the skills of a BBC investigative reporter to find them. At which case, is it Facebook's fault that no one is seeing these images? Is it as damaging if no one is seeing these images? Or is what the BBC did really pointing out that the police need to get in and find these Facebook groups and pages the way the BBC did and crack down on them? You know, maybe this isn't a Facebook algorithm problem. And yes, Facebook absolutely could throw more money at moderation. But if the BBC weren't out there investigating and trying to find these, they might not have been reported is my point. Yeah. And the fact is, you know, the BBC from the point of view of the BBC reporter, the situation is, well, I told you that they were there. I sent you the report. But the reality is that they get reports from one person, you know, a million times a day maybe. And maybe no one actually saw those reports. You know, maybe the 18 were people that actually the algorithm recognized that there might be something there. And so it got reported by other people besides the BBC, right? Yeah, for example, that's how it's supposed to show up on the human moderator's radar is a bunch of different people are saying this. Exactly. So I think there's a disconnect between and we're speculating here, but I think there might be a disconnect between the BBC reporters view that is, well, I did report them. So you did see them, quote unquote, you know, and the system where one person reporting them doesn't mean that it's actually reported to the level that it requires attention. Gouch, I'm in the chat room says maybe Facebook should just hire the BBC. That's all right. Twitch launched a new product called Pulse, P-U-L-S-E. It's a way for streamers to post updates, clips, YouTube videos, YouTube videos on Twitch, links, photos to a newsfeed style stream. Pulse shows up on the Twitch homepage. And if you don't see it yet, it's going to roll out slowly to everyone and displays posts from the channels you follow in reverse chronological order. And Twitch says they eventually want to do a relevancy ordering, but for now, it's going to be reverse chronology. Pulse pulls from each person's channel feed. So if I'm a Twitch channel, I can put posts and videos and links to YouTube videos in my feed. And that feed will then show up on the Pulse aggregation. Not everybody has channel feeds, but they say that everybody should have them by mid-march. So it's basically a threaded Twitter type thing for Twitch. I mean, it's a Facebook newsfeed type thing too. Like it's a social network on Twitch. More simple than Facebook, but certainly, but it's like the Facebook newsfeed. If you just look at that part, right? If you pull that part out. Yeah. I mean, to me, what's incredible is the power with which Twitch is fostering its community, which is incredibly niche. It's large, but it's like a very focused interest and it's fostering it in the best, most skillful way possible. Even in their announcement of that feature, they include all of the Twitch, you know, meme-y things and quirks and, you know, the little Kappa stamps and things like that. And they're just giving their community what they want. I don't know that that feed is going to be incredibly successful, but it certainly feels like it allows to build up the community to give the community means of communication that are separate from the moment the stream is happening. And that creates more engagement, more sticking power, more staying power for the community. It's a really clever addition to the Twitch toolkit. And yeah, it seems like what that community wants that they didn't know they wanted. Yeah, maybe. I think a lot of news organizations out there are trying to make this into Twitch takes on Facebook. And I don't think Twitch even thinks that's what they're doing here. I think what this is, is Twitch saying, well, the same things that make an engaged community at Facebook and Twitter will probably work on Twitch. So we're trying to do that to keep our community happier and engaged and having a good time on Twitch. Yeah. I mean, again, the thing that Twitch doesn't have is things for people to do when there's no live stream happening. And of course, there are always live stream happening, live streams happening. The channel you want to watch is not streaming yet. Right, yeah. So this is a brilliant way of, it seems like a brilliant way of answering that issue and again, creating more stickiness for the service. So we'll see how it works out. Absolutely. Amazon no longer needs to resist handing over communication data from an Amazon Echo found at a suspected murder scene. The defendant, James Andrew Bates, who pleaded not guilty, agreed to let law enforcement review information contained on the Echo. So this is the guy that died in the hot tub and at first, they thought it was natural causes and then they suspected foul play and then they ordered Amazon to hand over records and Amazon handed over some records but said that the records of the recording of voices in the house were covered by the First Amendment and while they could hand them over because of a warrant, the warrant that was issued did not meet the standard for handing them over and so this was going to be a First Amendment court case. This was going to decide where the line is between a device that records you in your house and the police wanting to know what it recorded. It was going to be a fairly important case but it turns out that James Andrew Bates has undermined that by saying, you know what? Just let them, let them listen and so Amazon has filed a motion to dismiss their objection because the defendant is no longer objecting. So they don't need to resist it. The defendant has given approval. Right. I mean, the information is still the dead person's information. So it seems like Amazon could if they wanted, I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me Amazon could potentially. I guess if the state of the dead person objected then that might cause a difference. But this is just, this is an incredibly important question that is being kicked down the street, right? We're going to have another case like this at some point in the future. Maybe not with an Amazon Echo but something that records your data and it's going to have to be answered at some point. This is just a stay in that question being asked. You may remember Stanford University student Joshua Browders do not pay chatbot. That's the one that helped people fill out paperwork to appeal parking finds first in London later in New York. He did a couple other bots one to help the homeless and a couple other things but he's been working for quite a long time since last summer on a bot to help immigrants. Browser's robot lawyer is now using Facebook Messenger's bot platform to help refugees fill out immigration applications in the US and Canada and apply for asylum support in the UK. So just like with the parking ticks it's the bot asked you in natural language a series of questions to determine whether you're eligible to apply for the refugee immigration status and for forms in the US and Canada it can actually file the forms for you it can send them in however in the UK they require you to apply in person so the form is filled out for you and then you have to print it and take it into the office. You can access the bot if you want to take a look at it m.me slash do not pay. It's a really interesting one I mean the way it works it's basically a flowchart in conversational form right? It asks simple questions you answer yes no maybe or well maybe just yes no right and then it leads you to the case that applies to your situation you know most probably but beyond the political questions that this might raise for some people I think the most interesting part of it is it's using technology and a chatbot really to simplify administrative tasks that should be readily available to everyone it just happens that you know it's so complex that you often need the help of a lawyer or some person who really knows the process really well to find out that information so it's not like helping you sneak or do something that you're not allowed to not really it's just surf a tech way of surfacing the information that is the most appropriate for your situation in the case of parking tickets anybody who's anybody who's filled out a form knows you get to that one question where you're like I don't know what this means I don't know how to answer this this bot is saying hey we're going to ask you the questions in you know in language you can understand it's English they are working on other language for it but as long as you understand English you'll be able to understand the question and answer it and then we'll do all the gobbledygook bureaucratic stuff on the back end for you yeah which is which is wonderful I mean this is what technology does when it's at its best right it makes the complicated processes that we don't have the I don't want to say manpower or brainpower but you know that are complicated it's an expertise I mean the part I mean the fact that there was a parking bot that helped people fill out applications to appeal a parking tickets at that level you needed a chat bot lawyer and you know if you're the person who's like no I've always navigated that process myself and got my own parking tickets dismissed good for you you're unusual most people needed this you can imagine that again and I think Patrick made this point but just to repeat it these are legal people applying for legal immigration and legal asylum status you can have a separate political discussion about what the laws should be and you should have that but that's not what this is doing this is not trying to circumvent the law this is just saying it's really complicated to understand these forms and fill them out so for people trying to do it right let's help them out yeah good stuff consumer reports disconnect ranking digital rights and the cyber independent testing lab with assistance from aspiration have developed a methodology to assess products security the standard includes best software security practices information collection and account data management consumer reports intends to gradually implement the methodologies in its products testing and rating a draft of the standard can be found at thedigitalstandard.org this is something that I've been wanting for a long time which is a standard that is voluntary and put out by organizations with expertise it's non-governmental but it says hey folks who make products you should pay attention to this stuff and if you go through the digital standards standard at that website you'll see that this is a lot of stuff that we just talk about regularly like you know is the software developed according to best practices does it make use of unsafe libraries is it overly complex how reliable is it susceptible to crashes does the maker offer a bug bounty program does it use encryption and properly implement encryption are there any known exploits that it has not defended against not unknown not zero days we're talking about stuff that's known out there like it just goes through a product which requires a password has users set a good password passwords are required to be of a certain length passwords are required to be of a certain complexity like this is great stuff this is the kind of thing that once it's put together it feels kind of insane that it wasn't put together beforehand you know earlier it's and yes you can argue about you know who decides what should be done how and this is just one well a couple of organizations getting together and giving their assessment of what the security is nothing you know forces you to do anything related to that or no one can say that no one else can do the same kind of assessment but it seems kind of insane that it took this long for consumer agencies to integrate security in their assessments of products you know I mean clearly we've been in the tech world worried about these things for a long time but yeah basically I don't see a downside to any of this I'm sure one someone could find one but it seems like an obvious plus yeah if I have to come up with the downsides you know which kind of my job of course you do well it could be that you know these are they having one standard isn't good because different industries have different approaches and different devices need different care and and yes that's absolutely true but having a standard that you can judge things by in general isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as you don't make it the law we're not making this the law we're not trying to apply one standard to everything legally what we're saying is we'd like a benchmark that most products should follow and they even have different ratings on the standard of how important and how applicable these different parts of the standard are a green checkmark means well understood with the develop testing approach in place a yellow caught you know half beaker says these are under development there's some outstanding questions on how you evaluate this stuff and then there's even ones with a red exclamation park that are under discussion usually due to the sensitivity and complexity of the issue so even the standard makers are being careful saying we're not saying one size always fits all we just want to do our best to get to that point where we can evaluate things as well as we can and it's voluntary so if we do a bad job nobody needs to pay attention to it right that's the risk but if they do a good job and people like consumer reports who's on board start using it and people pay attention to it that will force the product manufacturers to pay attention to it as well yep absolutely agree all right real quickly i was checking bruce schneyer's blog all day to kind of see what he's saying about the wiki leaks and i mentioned a couple of things that he said but since our conversation he points out that there is one document in the leaks that talks about comodo version five point x and six point x version six was released in february twenty thirteen and version seven was released in april twenty fourteen so schneyer says this kind of gives us a time window of that page and the cash in general if these tools are a few years out of date which would be the documents between twenty thirteen and twenty sixteen there'd be no twenty seventeen documents in there uh... it's similar to the nsa tools released by the shadow brokers and most of us thought the shadow brokers were the russians releasing older nsa tools to embarrass the nsa so this could be a similar situation whether it's the russians or not where whoever released this to wiki leaks is trying to do it to embarrass the cia more so than providing exploits that are particularly dangerous or damaging interesting again still too early to say for sure but that's that's kind of the latest from bruce schneyer and he's one of the people that i look to and trust on this issue one of hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in less than ten minutes you can subscribe to dailytech headlines dot com or just launched today uh... there's a new app called anchor my friend ron richards co-host a damn fine podcast with me uh... is working for them and they provide a way to listen to short audio programs as well in a more flexible way so for instance with daily tech headlines you get the five-minute podcast and if that's what you want you're good but with anchor you actually get the ability to flip through each headline and if you're like that no i already know that one not interested that one you can swipe on by justin robert young's doing stuff for them jeff canada is doing stuff for them uh... so you might want to check it out anchor dot f m and add the daily tech headlines channel alright let's get to our messages and our first one comes from riko riko considers himself well i'll let riko tell you hi time and crew this is riko the apostle of broadband jesus i adore when you guys spread the gospel of broadband keep up the holy work recently have been discussing mesh wi-fi so i wanted to add a great article published on ars technica recently it discusses how wi-fi works and all the crazy markets in terms of so if you ever wonder why you can never get a thousand plus megabits per second advertise on the box he explains why warning though this article is broken out into two pages i guess ars technica's web pages have a size limit uh... i've always wondered about that ars technica's done that for a long time and i know it does help improve page views a little bit but it can't be approving them that much i think it's just a usability thing where they're like when you scroll for too long people give up they think the article never end but the act of clicking to a next page kind of gives you a breather uh... but that aside jim salter uh... wrote this wi-fi explainer i i read it myself and it is very good it talks about all the different eight oh two eleven's and what they mean and how they progressed and what the differences in between them and how wi-fi interference uh... causes problems so yeah if you want to deep dive into wi-fi highly recommended it's at ars technica dot com look for jim salters uh... work or you can find it in our links at the show notes daily tech news show dot com you know the way i choose my routers is i always get the ones with the most antennas that seems to be the way to go for me yeah that's like uh... going by just the fastest processor i don't care what the computer as long as it's got the most maker it's you just go by antennas exactly i want the most antennas like the latest one i got what if you find out that a certain number of antennas start to cause interference reducing it's ability to transmit i don't care it has more antennas it has to be better more antennas got it okay at least you know at least you've got a way of looking at it uh... yeah um... alright we got a message from bill bermigam from huntsville alabama is that a yes it is there you go i know my uh... american geography um... and uh... he says my home was built in nineteen fifty two it has plaster over bell leith yeah where i learned words every day uh... years ago i ran cat six cable and installed three routers connected to the modem router provided by comcast via ethernet in bridge mode they are now all dual band ac routers i get about nineteen megabits down over on my nexus six speed my plan is a hundred and fifty megabits down and i typically exceed that on wired devices so there you go he's got that metal lathe he's got that fair day cage problem going on uh... and so he's had to do a lot to work around it i wonder if a mesh router would increase that speed because again as we learned last week the the the cool thing about mesh routers is they're not connecting to each other by wi-fi they have their own separate back channel that they can use to speed up the information transfer between each other because they don't have to be compatible with the end receiving device because it's only the endpoint that broadcast out that needs to do that so when it's coming in from the router and going all the way to the end of a long house it can go there faster then bridging routers would hmm but how many antennas do they have that's the question i don't have any visible antennas they're all internal so you probably know they're no good they're no good uh... hey so uh... the sales reports have been coming in for the nintendo switch and they have been very rosy uh... the uh... nintendo of europe says the nintendo switch sold more in its launch weekend than any other nintendo hardware in history uh... u.s. performance was described in the new york times reporter nick winfield by reggie fees a may of nintendo uh... saying it beat the we into second place uh... the information provided was for the america is not just north america specifically though the u.s. will have been the main contributor there so it seems like nintendo is very rosy game stop as reported on daily tech headlines has been very rosy uh... we looked amazon only has them available from resellers who likely since sniped them up and are now reselling them they don't have them in stock at amazon itself they don't have them in stock at best buy you were saying patrick that they are out of stock pretty much everywhere you're you would go in france right yeah absolutely this is a little obviously but uh... yeah it seems like it's out of stock in a number of places so nick who's in australia wrote in and said i saw the news that nintendo claims that the switch out sold the we in the respective first two days of sales for both consoles in america the americas i would really like to see numbers from all regions and sell in versus sell through before making any decorations about the switch's success i work at a department store in australia and i know we got almost forty switch consoles for the launch and the majority of them are still sitting out back unsold my friends at eb games tell me it's much the same for them and eb are generally the first port of call for the major gaming fans in australia so it's rather disconcerting as someone that wants to see nintendo succeed to have met so many unsold consoles also i'd like to add that someone that bought a switch day one i'm really impressed with it as a handheld device unless impressed with it as a home console but it's not bad just not the home run nintendo fans might have wanted also zelda breath of the wild gets a massive thumbs up from him so he's saying most of the same things on evaluating the console that we've been hearing uh but i guess what i would say is fine next door if you want to switch in australia it sounds like it got missed i don't know it seems unusual yeah you know maybe in australia the the switch is not as popular as it is in other countries but i mean he's right to uh advise caution there are things like sell in and sell through which are always something you want to take into consideration there are questions about you know when you compare it to other consoles the or any device the one thing that can always trick you into thinking it's performing better is uh the the number of countries it was released in maybe the previous model was released only in five countries and this one is released in 30 so obviously the numbers are going to be higher now that being said from from someone who's been looking at this industry for a long time and looking at a lot of the announcements we've had an analysis from people like daniel ahma then oscar lemer and tom abido on on twitter they are basically game industry analysts it seems like the everything lines up to suggest that this is a really successful launch definitely better than the wii u but that's not a high you know bar to pass but even better than what a lot of people had been expecting and uh a good a good first week for nintendo i think it's hard to dispute that even though we have some you know beyond the anecdotal evidence and on one side or the other of the of the the question that being said again it's very important to remember that the launch week doesn't mean the long term that you know doesn't always equate to the long-term success of the product especially in the case of nintendo where fans are often rabid and there are going to be it's the case for some companies where people it might be that people who want the product all buy it immediately when it's available and that means that the sales in the subsequent weeks and months aren't as strong as the initial launch suggests but it's also it might also be the case that you know it's actually a successful product it's the right thing at the right time but i i think the the thing to remember is that it seems like it's going well and it could very well have been going the other way around it was there was a real danger that people didn't respond to the message that nintendo was putting out that they weren't interested in the concept and that doesn't seem to be happening so it's a first it seems like it's a win for nintendo but it's the first of a number they're gonna have to win in order for the console to be truly successful it's but let's not say you know let's not paint it as not good when i think everyone most people would agree now that yes they've succeeded on that first push yeah i was uh it was entertained by the penny arcade comic from monday this week about one of the characters saying up all night catching a cold in the rain waiting to buy the switch and the other character saying well i just walked in and got one uh and and what's cool about penny arcade if you've never read the cartoon is that they always do a follow-up kind of explaining the story behind the comic and tyco on penny arcade wrote i did take off my glasses and coat and put on a stocking cap which might be a toke and go in to buy another one but none of them were for me i don't even have one yet i'm getting them for people at the office and i like the hunt i've only played on games i thought it was super smooth the person who told me i couldn't have another one was stocking a shelf not three feet from me so i had to order the product completely non-verbally i thought i'd been super smooth but one of them tweeted me later it said they let it slide because they thought it was funny uh so it wasn't as easy as just waltzing in later uh and grabbing one but uh yeah it it turns out you do have to strategize to get these things right which honestly i wasn't certain was going to happen but the other thing that you have to keep in mind as well is even if you know to to play devil's advocate even if you do have a hard time finding one it might also be that nintendo didn't manufacture enough uh for everyone to get them even if they're you know sold out doesn't necessarily mean they're selling tons it might mean that they didn't make enough and that they're we knew we always knew they were going to sell out those two millions initial target for the month of of march so again there's ways to yeah it's not yeah yeah yeah uh there's still ways to go but it's it's uh the signs are encouraging so far all right you got the last one oh sorry uh cloud pets says in their recent hacks the hackers quote only got email addresses and end quote that's enough for someone to create an email that says uh for example cloud pets is moving to a new building system please click here to confirm your billing information those that purchased a cute toy for their kids may not be sophisticated enough to recognize this as a scam so shrugging off uh shrugging your shoulders and saying it's only email uh is not okay says troid truax from phoenix arizona i suppose yeah probably he didn't specify but that would be he didn't specify but i'm guessing yes um it's an impressive display of geography i have to say thank you thank you um yeah i mean definitely email addresses are not uh trivial bits of information and i think at some point any uh hacked or bits of information is something that you need to pay attention to if it's only the email you would usually when you get an email you probably get your name mentioned in the email so if your email doesn't mention your you know isn't like patrickbeija at awesomemail.com then if if it's like uh super duper at awesomemail.com if the email says or mr duper then it's not going to be you know what i mean is it's only one thing i think cloud pets actually had names along with the email addresses so try try's point is well taken like there are still risks associated yes it's not credit card information but it still it still could be used for nefarious reasons and people should always be careful yes of course i think the lesson here is it's never good to be hacked period yes exactly so don't pretend like it's not a big deal that doesn't make people feel better thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com thank you patrickbeija for joining us as well i know you just had a new episode of rendezvous tech and i was on a recent filious club which was fantastic you got all kinds of good things going on what do you want to tell folks about sure i guess well the filious club which you mentioned we had a fantastic conversation that was very well received about a week or so ago and you know the filious club is always a conversation about the world news with people from different countries different perspectives different cultures especially in the these troubled times i think that's really important and we try not to have any kind of bias although or at least to be open to other people's biases and the other one is pixels which we just recorded with our friend Scott johnson where we dove deep into the switch what we think of it the good points and the bad points and the legend of zelda which is a really interesting game we discuss a lot of what we liked and and well only liked there's nothing we didn't like but that's available on pixels and both shows are at frenchspin.com so go check those out hey thanks to everyone who gets value out of the show and gives a little value back that's what we ask including tim jakemson brian paulson denise adam all in their own ways help and make this show happen if you get value from the show all we ask is give a little value back maybe at patreon.com slash dtns our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're live monday through friday 4 30 p.m eastern at alphakigradio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com back tomorrow with scott johnson dr then it's part of the frog pants network at frogpants.com all righty good show you guys what should we call it uh let's call it getting hacked is never good um oh we don't have a lot of titles what's happening i'm on show about dot tv and there are like only a few titles i guess that um people don't love you no i think i don't know it might have been an issue was there an issue with the with the chatbot well what's there is good we have better called chatbot that's not bad i like it better called chatbot facebook moderates twitch book nintendo beats its we with a switch twitch takes on facebook face parentheses book twitch searches its social pulse i like this one i'm just an unfrozen immigration chatbot paralegal i saw that one oh look so he brings bacon oh thank you louie i just like this one not patrick yay yeah it's an snl reference back when phil hartman was part of the cast and he did a skit i'm just a simple unfrozen caveman lawyer i may be just a simple unfrozen immigration chatbot paralegal i think we could all agree that this doesn't make any sense i like better call chatbot okay i like it too but i'm sort of passion partial to i love not patrick i wonder why that is i mean it's a perfectly cromulent title uh well cromulent second place i think it should be considered i think we should do it like the presidential election in france we have two rounds ah we should have a runoff between barine le pen and i love not patrick wow oh you weren't saying combine the two you were yeah okay sorry no no a noble lectin bigens even the smallest soul does it though it does okay that's your some wow hey look i love not patrick is gaining ground thank you chat room i love you too that's kind of like it feel good hey chat room you could go you could all go to uh showbot.tv right now are you campaigning now and i have to dig up dirt on you that wouldn't be too hard check his fingernails so jammin 311 says eb games australia has the switch available for four hundred seventy dollars well there you go that's your problem it's way too expensive yeah it's really expensive i mean i i know australia is kind of they're always high cost they always get chaffed but um i mean well actually i'm curious what's the relation uh to say like for a ps4 is that is that cheaper oh my god neck and neck i love not patrick is has seven votes i demand a recount got all you want our electoral college is already picked listen the electoral the electoral college is clearly an outdated institution i agree but popular vote oh damn it someone voted for oh we're back this is this is so thrilling we're back to to being tied eight and eight actually i think they should why does eb games is eb games showing me a us price because i'm seeing two hundred ninety nine dollars for the switch that's weird are you at ebgames.com.au yeah dot au well they show me a price in euros yeah that that would be the teller thing right eb games not game ebgames.com.au shows the playstation for it three hundred forty nine dollars was four thirty nine hey and it shows the nintendo switch oh two hundred ninety nine dollars when you trade a we you with one we you game four hundred seventy dollars without trade so there you go right right yeah that's what was confusing me like why would it be showing is the is the australian dollar so low seventy something right seventy eight cents us so that makes sense i guess the prices make sense so yeah the switch is more expensive than the ps4 that's why like why would you do that there's no games other than the breath of the wild look at that i love not patrick is number one i demand a recap but you don't want to recap sorry um no i don't i mean i demand that i'm waiting for a vote are you are you saying your emotional emotional state is easily swayed by pure uh pure polling numbers no i'm saying this isn't polling numbers look i there is 11 for i love not patrick against eight this is a travesty the electoral college is robbing the dts people of its listen listen choice if i had wanted the title better call chat but to win the popular vote i would have campaigned it for you and i would don't listen to what the alleged journalist tom merit says we all know he's been dealing in fake news for years oh man and we cut off rather get his headlines yes i mean that's fine the switch is uh more expensive than the ps4 when it was first uh announced at that conference in uh january for for france and the price steadily came down to the same price as the ps4 and i think that's a important factor why it did so well at least in france um the the difference in price might explain why it's not doing well in in australia if it's yeah and if that's the case if that's the case the price might come down pretty soon well looks like they're trying to do that trade-in thing but then that requires you to have a we you well so there are stores basically micro micro mania micro mania which is the equivalent of gamestop in france and actually gamestop in in finland as well the the console is a little bit more expensive at their stores but they have that trading program that allows you to get the price lowered a little bit if you if you trade in a console but the other stores like amazon and the other regular stores in france don't really have that system in place so those usually hold off to their slightly higher price because they figure if people want to you know there's a way to get it cheaper yeah you can you can trade in consoles here too at gamestops and stuff um but i haven't seen any yeah so how much is it at gamestop uh gamestop.com gamestop outside u.s.a visit site 50 the switch and when you trade toward any new nintendo switch games or accessories nintendo switch with great joycon console starter bundle 600 dollars the thing you really don't want yeah yeah i mean on the other hand you kind of understand why they're doing it like this it's uh compete with amazon or the other the other stores so wow it's impossible yeah it's on the site it's impossible to find like just the switch just the console yeah they they're really put it looks like it costs 600 dollars because they're only showing that big 600 dollar bundle it i mean gives you an sd card in three games like it's it's probably worth 600 dollars if you break it all down i i doubt it would be worth all of that if you well what does it give you it gives you four games including zelda it gives you an sd card that's always the problem like just dance i mean a separate glimpse okay um there's a game code download digital season passcode not something you really need right now i guess but well beyond that what is it's yeah as we said it's impossible to find 300 bucks nintendo switch console with great joycon boom okay where did you find the way at the bottom joycon joycon i'm glad i didn't get the blue and red joy cons a little tacky it looks silly yeah yeah this should we cut this should come in national colors so whatever country you sell them in green and gold well there there's uh there's a lot of rumors or um suspicion that there are going to be many different types of joycon being uh sold with like different games for different types of uses which would make sense i can already see the accessory market 600 dollars you get five games so zelda and wind waker or wait link to the past i guess um it's kind of hard to tell what's in here you also get extra joycon controllers what i don't know it's classic zelda sorry you get a cover so you get extra joycons you get a sand disk 64 gigabyte card you get a cover you get just dance and you know all of those accessories you get they they get the huge markup and that's where they make their money of course um but it's stuff that as a consumer i doubt many actually want that's always what happens with those bundles anyway yeah bundles the worst oh breath of the wild expansion pass that's what i was oh snipper clips and official guidebook why would you need that what's the whole point you only get the guidebook after you've failed to complete the game on your own you know i don't understand just a person who knows you're going to fail so the guidebooks market is i i don't know how healthy it is but it still exists i don't understand that who i mean maybe it's like moms who buy games for their kids and they're like i'll take the guidebook as well oh maybe yeah they get sold on it i don't know maybe but uh guidebook was uh wrath of the lich king and that's because i just started playing warcraft like less than a year before right i got a hand down one and you were going to what was it to it wasn't an in how did you call it on that first how i wow i think i called a hotel oh right really you know when you go to the hotels oh my gosh is that how i were out there i need to listen to that to just make me laugh yeah it's on the archive.org pretty sure i'll find it i didn't know i'd been playing for like two months at the time i think yeah i didn't know i didn't know anything more excited that you were on the show and then i totally like ruined my rep with you no it was fun he doesn't know what he's talking about at all there you go how i wow you found it i found it but i don't know where the download options can you download individual episodes show oh 66 files 24 original it should have been called how i wow poorly oh there you go that's the oh here it is do you want the link uh sure put it in the chat it's in the chat here we go oh let me link to the to the one to yours actually tom merit episode 11 here we go oh boy here the chat room man have fun you know they just need to come out with another rogue squadron i'll buy it another rogue squadron dope game there is a star wars game that's being that's being rumored forever needs to be as cool as rogue squadron because that was what made me buy a game cube because i wanted to play that game so bad so if it's it's world's rogue squad or nothing easy for you to say well the last one they did for the game cube sucked because they tried to put the same mechanics on an on foot mission and it just didn't work they got to come out with another luigi's mansion you brought up game cube and that's what made me think we played ssx tricky which was not a game cube exclusive of course uh rogue squadron and luigi's mansion and had a great time with the game cube i still have fond memories of the game i kind of actually had the game you've at our wedding reception i don't know what's the last skyfox i got the skyfox for starfox not skyfox starfox but there are some really annoying mini games in there that bothered me the one on we you know for the game cube oh there was like one where you had to go to different like just like you had to tap the button really quick to i guess trade or buy is it on we you like when you're just sort of i i see where you're going with this you didn't see your sentence and a big dough all right we are all published thank you all for hanging out having a good time at least we hope you did and we will see you tomorrow with scott johnson