 We're live. They don't make the ding anymore when you go live. I miss that. Is that ding, y'all? Jango's got a vet appointment after this. Oh yeah, I have my baby suit at least at 2.15 today. Oh, okay. Well, let's just get going then. We got reasons. Hey, let's go. You wanna know what? Let's just go. Let's just go, E. Let's just go. Oh yeah, Hunter. It's one of the few accents that's still okay to make fun of. Yeah. All right, here we go. The Daily Tech News Show is brought to you by listeners like us. Go to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash donate to learn how. Mmm, doughnuts. No, Homer, that's doughnut. But I'm sure Tom wouldn't mind doughnuts either. This is The Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 14th, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt. Joining me today, Mr. Justin Robert Young of the Weird Things podcast, the Night Attack podcast, FSL Tonight, Politics, Politics, Politics, The Jury Show, Monday Hotline Bling. I can never remember the actual name. Hotline Monday. Hotline Monday. I feel like I just need one big catch-all, right? Man about the internet, Justin Robert Young. Absolutely, man about the internet. We're gonna talk about why it's a great idea to allow people to text in the theater while a movie is playing. Later on on this show, stick around for that. Let's start off with the headlines. Microsoft filed a lawsuit in US Federal Court in the Western District of Washington for the right to inform customers of government requests for email and other documents. Microsoft says that in the past 18 months it has received 5,264 legal orders under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 2,576 of those orders prevented disclosure to the subjects of the order, and 68% of those without disclosure had no end date, meaning that Microsoft effectively can never tell the person their information was requested. US House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved legislation requiring authorities to get a court warrant to obtain email stored in the cloud, which isn't always necessary. There's some case law about that. They removed, however, a provision that would regard notification and require that, so this bill would not solve Microsoft's problem here. Several things going on here, Justin. First of all, Microsoft's claiming a Fourth Amendment violation saying, hey, people keeping their stuff in the cloud is normal. It's their stuff under the Fourth Amendment. If you search or siege their stuff, you have to tell them, and they say it's a First Amendment violation because the government is telling them they can't say something to someone. What I think we're seeing here are the continued ramifications of the Snowden-Links and Project Prism, the idea that there was a program in which the federal government and our espionage agencies were working with private companies, and that private companies legally could not acknowledge that it was happening. This was something that, a deal that I feel like they had never been wild about, and they were far less wild about the idea that they were having their reputations just drug through the mud as they were patsies to the government in something that they may or may not have believed in, and now you have Microsoft, which is no stranger to getting in fights with the federal government now trying to take a step. As far as the House Judiciary Committee approving the legislation, I think that to me is a sign of maturation for how much money Silicon Valley has spent in lobbying in Washington over the past 10 years, that this is not little things anymore. It is my opinion that these companies look at their relationship with their customers in a market where things can go south really, really, really fast if you lose it as very serious and this is a poison pill that they would like to spit out of their mouth. Now, Big Jim in the chat room asked a question I bet a lot of you have, which is like, wait a minute, you just gave some specific numbers. I didn't think they were allowed to give specific numbers. Two different things going on here. These are legal orders for information you're thinking of national security letters where they are not allowed to even give publicly the actual amount they have to give it in ranges. Two different things. It does get confusing because there are so many different orders. What's part of the problem here is that email communications are treated as they existed in the 80s under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. So in other words, there's a law out there or there's a precedent I should say that says after 180 days on a server, an email is considered abandoned. If it hasn't been downloaded into your IMAP client and removed from the server, therefore, you don't even need a warrant to go get it. It's considered abandoned property. There's a lot of conflicting law on these points. And what Microsoft is trying to say in this lawsuit is, look, this is the modern age, just because someone stores their email in a cloud service doesn't mean it's not their email and doesn't mean it's not town amount to going into their home and getting their papers. We're storing all kinds of documents in the cloud these days. And you can't say that just because we're storing our documents in the cloud, therefore, they've been abandoned or they don't have to meet the same search and seizure requirements that papers stored in our houses would. There are two things that I think are absolutely clear. Number one, we have laws that were not written for the modern age no matter how well-intentioned they are and our technological prowess has outstripped them and we need to take another look. And as far as we are now entering into a far more publicly adversarial age where Apple took on the FBI and the Apple was almost better for having done it. They were not pilloried in some circles. Certainly it was a 48-hour little burst on the political scene. And I'm sure there's people in our audience who still think less of Apple because of that. And in fact, I know there are. Who think less of Apple for standing in the way of that. Right. Yeah, sure. It was not uncontroversial, right? But Apple, it's not like there were boycotts in the street for Apple stuff. It's not like that they reported some gigantic dip in sales or we even saw any of the cosmetic elements that might suggest that. And so you have to say now we are just in a different era for that. Well, let's move into the era of robots then. Sharp announced that Robohon, it's walking Robo cell phone, will release on May 26th in Japan. The Robohon has a two inch QVGA screen, Android 5.0 OS, LTE radios, and three types of voice recognition technology. Robohon can walk, dance, and show videos and pictures using its 720p projector embedded in its head. The Verge reports that it will sell for $1,800 American dollars plus $6 a month for nuanced cloud-based voice recognition service. Yeah, this ain't cheap. If you want your phone to dance around and talk to you, you not only have to pay $1,800 or 198,000 yen, but you also have to pay monthly for the privilege of having it understand you. It does have some on-device voice recognition if you're not connected to the internet, but paying for the good voice recognition is an interesting gamble. This is definitely for early adopters. It's very Japanese, but it's as cute as hell. I mean, listen, it's adorbs. There's no doubt about that, but it does seem far more well suited for the Japanese market than it does for the American. But yeah, if you saw this thing at CES or C-TAC and you were like, what? I want that. Well, now you can put down your $1,800 where your mouth is. Instagram made a change to its Explore page adding new video channels, including one called Videos You Might Like based on the kinds of people you follow and the things you've liked. Other channels are curated around topics. They'll have a Coachella channel, for instance, where they may have particular people with the highlight and all the videos from those people. Update comes to Android and iOS in the United States today with other countries to follow. Similarly, Vine updated its iOS and Android apps with a new Watch button. So now you can tap that and watch all the videos in a channel with one tap, whether it's a person's channel or a curated channel. Playback can be sorted by channel popularity, chronological order, or reverse chronological order. This goes with Snapchat's recent change. When you're watching stories, it'll just automatically take you to the next story in the list of people you follow. Everybody's trying to make that leanback experience. Well, certainly because you can far more easily put ads in the middle of a leanback experience. When you are just playing one, one, one, one, one, you don't know exactly what's coming in. It's very easy to, you know, just a real quick thing that you can tap or swipe to get to the next thing, but that would be very, very valuable. It's actually less, I hate to admit it, but it is less intrusive that way, isn't it? I mean, it certainly is a lot more friendly of a version and you already see it in Snapchat's featured stories where they have for events and stuff like that. That's where they slip in ads, is where you don't know exactly what is coming next and therefore you are almost more ready to be a wooed by any product and or service. Yeah, no, I mean, this just seems like the new wave of social media display. I may have mentioned this on this show. I know I mentioned it on cord killers. Eileen watched the MTV Movie Awards the other day on Snapchat, didn't watch it on MTV. She just went to Snapchat and looked at their story about it. Felt like, yeah, I got everything I needed out of it. GoPro has launched a developer program to encourage companies to create apps, accessories and mounts for GoPro cameras. More than a hundred companies are participating at launch, including BMW, Fisher Price and Periscope. Tom, tell me why this isn't just an app store which would ultimately only create one product, a white flag. Well, yeah, GoPro is desperately trying to show that it is doing things that make it continue to be worth investing in. And I think this is more than just an app store, partly because they have to do things that wouldn't be in an app store like mounts. So the Fisher Price thing is like, hey, here's a great mount for your GoPro that's child-friendly and can work with your toys so you can take darling photos of your kids playing with their Fisher Price toys. The BMW app is a lap timer. And this is something that's gonna go into other app stores like iOS and Android. So GoPro doesn't really wanna have their own app store. They're just trying to make it easy for people to make stuff that adds value to the GoPro ecosystem, makes people wanna buy more GoPro's and not say, ah, I got a camera on my phone, that's good enough for me. GoPro's in trouble. And GoPro's in trouble because right now, they are in a commodity battle. They're only going to be more and cheaper cameras. And GoPro's not going to be able to charge as much of a margin as they used to. This app store to me just kind of says, well, I don't know, we certainly hope somebody else comes up with a really great idea on why you need a GoPro. I admit that was my first reaction to the story when I read it. I was like, oh, good luck with that. Until I saw how many companies they have participating. So they have done the legwork. And actually the stock market ticked up a little when they saw this, because I think what they realized is, okay, they've got actual products. They got companies to spend money to help. This might prolong their life a little longer. You know, I'm sure that if they were still alive, the flip camera would be announcing their app store today as well. Yeah, I've got a bloggy over there from Sony that wants to have a chat. Hey, Vice News and Motherboard report that court documents made public in a Montreal crime syndicate case say the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used Blackberry's global encryption key to decrypt roughly one million messages in connection with the case dating back to 2010. By the way, lawyers from RCMP worked very hard to try not to divulge this to the public, but it has been divulged. Documents do not indicate how the RCMP got the key, although Blackberry was aware and cooperating in other matters on the case. A server in Ottawa mimics a mobile device to receive and decrypt the messages. The key is for the consumer Blackberry Messenger service. That is a service that Blackberry runs and holds the key for. This is different than Blackberry Enterprise service, which gives control of the keys to the customer. And this confuses a lot of these issues. For instance, India and Pakistan both ran into conflicts with Blackberry overwarning the key to the Blackberry Enterprise server. And Blackberry said, no, we don't give those keys. Those keys are managed by the Enterprise customers. And the confusion was because they're like, well, you gave us the key to the Blackberry Messenger service, or at least that was the implication. You know, this has been the key brand element of Blackberry, right? Is that no matter what, no matter what you might think of our devices, no matter what our trajectory as a company in terms of our stature in previous decades, the one thing that you know you can count on when you say Blackberry is that your messages are secure and increasingly, again, this goes on along with our first story, we're finding out that security on a consumer level is never quite what we think it is. And on one hand, that just shows that you are the Blackberry Messenger on a consumer level, certainly feels from these particular ailments, but also Blackberry Enterprise, maybe that is the firewall, and especially for companies, that almost shows like, hey, look, it's even secure compared to the other stuff that we do. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of questions here. One is how much this is going to impact Blackberry Messenger, which is not nearly as widespread as Blackberry Enterprise Server. But the other is how the RCMP got the key makes a big difference. Obviously, Blackberry seems to have played along, at least that's the best we can tell from these documents. If the RCMP recovered the key some other way and then told Blackberry about it so Blackberry could secure it, that's sort of a good thing, not a great thing, but it's better than Blackberry handing it over and it's certainly better than having an insecure way to get that key. If Blackberry gave the key to the RCMP, that's extremely concerning. So for Blackberry, a pick how you would like to think about them. Are they a sucker or stupid? You got choices. One of the first big money makers on Kickstarter was the $13 million raised for the coolest cooler in the summer of 2014. Ah, 2014. However, in 2016, you could order one of the coolest coolers on Amazon right now for $400 with two-day shipping. The problem, most of the backers from 2014 haven't received their cooler yet. Motherboard spotted nothing, shut up the motherboard, just kill it. Spotted an update to the 66% of backers who have not received their cooler yet. It offered to take $97 more from them for expedited shipping by July 4th, which last I checked was more than two days from today, April 14th. Yeah. This isn't a scam and it isn't fraud. No, let's just be clear about that. But wow is it shady. Cooler's cooler seems to keep saying, look, we just need you guys to be patient because we have to sell these other ones to make enough money to make the cooler so that we can make the coolers to send to you. If we sent you guys all the coolers, we wouldn't have any money to continue. At the very least is incompetence in poor planning, don't you think? I feel for them. Let's just say theoretically, I know a friend who recently ran a Kickstarter. I've run Kickstarter's that don't involve actual physical products that have skated close to this line, believe me. It's easier than you might think, especially on something that requires as many components and sold itself as a technological leap beyond something that is a fairly common commodity item. Even radio coolers are a commodity item for which you can get cheaper than what they are offering. There are a lot of reasons why this can happen. Does that excuse them? No, because ultimately, Kickstarter, for anybody who's run one, especially when it comes to physical products, it is like a genie. You are going to get your money, your wish will be granted, and yet, like many tales of genies, you will realize that the bargain was more complicated than you might have thought. And if you are always forthright and you are good at math, which is very important, because many people who run Kickstarter's are not so good at math, then you will be okay. You might have some hiccups here and again, but you will be okay. The coolest cooler will not be okay. They're gonna get out of this, and I don't know how long the coolest cooler will be around past them fulfilling their Kickstarter orders. I mean, depending on how they're selling on Amazon, I feel like all the people involved will probably want some kind of break from dealing with this, because this has gotta be hell. Yeah, and the outrage to them asking for $97 to guarantee shipping by July 4th was not pretty, put it that way. No, and that is a crappy thing to do. For the record, it's a crappy thing to do. I understand why they did it. It's a crappy thing to do, sorry, go ahead. Europe's Parliament passed the General Data Protection Regulation Thursday. It will come into force from 2018, takes a while for the countries to all reconcile this and transpose it into their own laws. Among the new rules are tougher penalties, fines up to 4% of global turnover, a required data protection officer at large data processors, 72-hour breach disclosure, as well as taking on liability if you process data, not just control it, expansion of the right to be forgotten, data portability rules, parental consent for social media is now required, and a bureau will be set up for handling data protection complaints for breaking all these rules. I mean, seems legit. Yeah, I mean, they've been working on it for a couple of years. Let's give them a hand for getting it done. Indeed, let's hear it for the boys. That's a lot of hard work. Facebook is working on bringing image recognition to video, including facial recognition. This would allow you to search video for people and automatically add captions. So people are getting real excited about this, I guess, because of the idea of it, but it's the same technology they use in images that sometimes recognizes who you are and tags you automatically. They would just bring it to video, which I know is a cool trick. I don't know how often I would use it. Like, how many times do I need to look for a person in someone's Facebook Live video? I mean, how many times people are doing Facebook Live videos is already a question. I think the idea is more, I wanna search for my friend, how rich is that search? Yeah, okay, that's right. Yeah, I wanna see that video from the birthday party last year. You know, the one where Justin was in it, boom, boom. Yeah, well, or it's like, yes. Or you have a bunch of pictures and videos from that, like, let's say, the Night Attack Live show on May 7th at the Piano Fight in San Francisco. And why is video not a part of that? Why isn't video so easily brought up in the same way the pictures could be? A study published in the journal Nature describes how doctors from Ohio State implanted a chip in 24-year-old Ian Burkhart back in 2014 when the coolest cooler was still funding, bypassing a spinal injury to give him control over his right hand and fingers again. Essentially, the chip sends signals to a computer which learns what the signals mean. So they say, like, imagine yourself, you know, gripping, imagine yourself straightening and it interprets those signals. Then once it's learned that the computer can send the signals to a sleeve on his arm which stimulates the muscles to execute the action. Hence, it took a couple of years to get this up to speed and perfected. But now, Burkhart, while sitting in a lab connected to the equipment, can pour from a bottle and pick up a straw and stir. You can even play Guitar Hero. They show him, or it's some kind of Guitar Hero-like game in the video. And he's paralyzed from the chest down to the biceps unless he's hooked up to this machine. That's amazing. That is nothing short of a miracle, a modern miracle. And this is the first time that this has been done where they're like, we're not doing anything. We've set it up where he can just think and move. And yes, he can only do it in the lab right now. But this is that crucial first step to be like, okay, now all we need to do is make it more practical so that he could be able to walk around and do this all the time. Or, you know, I say walk around. Like to make it so he could walk around at all. Exactly. Reuters reports the .krd domain name has opened this week for private companies, organizations, and individuals to use. ICANN granted the domain name to the group of Kurds led by Haya Afandi, the head of the Department of Information Technology in the Kurdish region of Iraq. It is not a two-letter country code. Yeah, that's why I found this so fascinating. So if you don't know too much about the Kurdish situation without getting into the politics of it, the ethnic Kurds are spread out among several countries. They have been fighting in various ways with all of those countries for their own homeland where they are most successful is in the northern part of Iraq where they have been granted autonomy. And it is people from that region who've created this to try to, again, further assert that identity. So it's ICANN threading the needle here saying, no, we can't give you a country code because you're not recognized as a country, but we can give you a TLD. Anybody can get it. You can get a .coke bottle. You can get whatever. So sure, we're gonna grab this. I will say, I mean, again, listen, this is a far, far, far more complicated issue than some scruffy nerve herder on Daily Tech News Show can do to justice. But the Kurdish area of northern Iraq is one of the most fascinating regions geographically that you could possibly read about. Their independence and ingenuity is something that I think has been overlooked as we've focused quite a bit on the Middle East since the 9-11 attacks. And this is yet another sign of them making progress in what is oftentimes violent, violent opposition. Yeah. And then am I reading this last one? Oh yeah, no, this is, Roger just threw this in here. I had seen it earlier today, and I guess it's gaining some more steam. I think it requires Andy Greenberg reporting on Cornell Tech researchers demonstrating the unexpected privacy invasive potential of brute-forcing shortened URLs. Basically, you can guess at the shortened URLs until they found working ones and then sometimes could pull off the trick of spreading malware. It's basically just URL guessing. But researchers notified Google about the work in September of last year. The company responded by lengthening its shortened URLs to make them a little harder to guess and taking the new measures to identify and block automated scanning. Researchers say Microsoft, on the other hand, initially brushed off their concerns when they contacted the company in May last year. But last month, Microsoft removed the URL shortening feature from OneDrive altogether. So again, URL shorteners and linking to sensitive materials aren't good combinations to begin with, and this is why. And that's your moral for today. Thanks to PCGuy8088. Go share TM204 and all of those who submitted things we used from our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and that's a look at the headlines. Okay, AMC's new CEO, Adam Aaron, has been on the job for four months. He's at Cinemacon. That is a big conference about showing movies. All the big theater chains go. All the big studios go. So he sat down and he talked to Variety about his plans for AMC theaters. They've got a merger. They've got all kinds of things. One of the things that he said that's making headlines today is that he's open to allowing mobile devices and texting-friendly showings. Here's exactly what he said. When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don't ruin the movie, they hear, please cut off your left arm above the elbow. You can't tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cell phone. That's not how they live their life. At the same time, though, we're going to have to figure out a way to do it that doesn't disturb today's audience. What may be more likely is we take specific auditoriums and make them more texting-friendly. That's a very reasonable statement to say, hey, we're not doing anything. We're thinking about this. Maybe I'm over-stereotyping 22-year-olds in my example, but I understand cell phones are real important to kids these days, so I wanna do something for it, but we're gonna be careful. Can he, first of all, resist the torches and flamethrowers that were aimed at regal CEO Amy Miles in 2012 when all she said was they were considering allowing younger patrons to use their cell phones with certain types of movies, and she had to backtrack and say, no, I'm talking about interactive showings and stuff, and then had to totally turn it over and go, no, we will never allow that. So this is obviously more than what this quote is, right? Again, this is a quote from a CEO at an industry conference meant to be heard by other industry people. Certainly, cinema viewing is something that is culturally important in America. However, the reason why we are talking about this is the visceral reaction that people have when they are engrossed in a movie and they are taken out of it by a distraction. In this case, the bugaboo will be texting. And of course, the ever-present meddling millennials. An unnamed co-contributor to this show said, sounds like hot burning hell to me. So here's the deal. I'm for this. More so. What? I am 100% for this. Wow, okay. Tell me why. Why is this okay? Number one, let's recognize that theaters are not in a good position. They are not doing as well as they have been in the past. And the trend lines show that they are trending down. You know, they make most of their money on, you wonder why big gigantic blockbusters happen? Sorry, man. Making it a hot burning hell for me to go there with a bunch of texting teens. Doesn't sound like a way to get me to go in theater more. Let me get, can I finish? All right, all right, Ross. Here's all I'm saying. Theaters need to understand that what is often the future is providing not necessarily an enhanced experience like we've seen with 3D or, I mean, God, I heard somebody talk about a hot burning hell. Somebody described the 4D or 4XD experience where you get like rained on and your seat shakes. That to me sounds like hot burning hell. What has been successful and you've seen in the face of declining attendance for theater chains, you've seen rising attendance in the Alamo Draft House. What has the Alamo Draft House done? They have curated an experience for us cranky old people. Exactly. Who harken back to a day. You've proven the opposite of your point, Jerry. That's the successful model. I'm getting here. I guess my point is that that's for us, right? We used to go to a theater and say, it'd be really great if somebody brought me whiskey. And the Draft House said, great. We'll just get someone to bring you whiskey. That's how we'll change this experience and make it better for you. I applaud AMC thinking outside the box to say, what is something that we can make a theater more interesting for teens, for a generation that isn't us, for a generation that doesn't long for just a quiet, pristine screen and a clear sound system and a rigid, no-nonsense, straconian rule to kick people out. I think that this is something that they need to think about or else they're not going to survive. And so what I'm saying is that it's not necessarily texting that I am for. It is the idea of creating another unique theater-going experience that just might not be our preferred way to do it. We will always go to other theaters that do things in the way that we like it, but if they don't try something different, then they're literally just gonna keep coasting toward the iceberg that's very obviously there. Now let me give some statistical backup to what you're saying too. Because you may have seen that it was another record year at the box office for theaters, 38.3 billion worldwide, up 5%. 70% of people in the US and Canada went to the movies more than once a month, up 2%. But here's the concerning number for Adam, Aaron, and others who operate theaters. Among frequent moviegoers, that's more than once a month, in the 18 to 24, that 22-year-old bracket, they saw a big drop from 7 million frequent moviegoers, 18 to 24 to 5.7. Per capita, people 18 to 24 years old going to the movies is down from 6.2 to 5.9 per capita. So in other words, even when you adjust for the number of people in a demo, like, oh, maybe there's just more old people, and even when you adjust for that, it declined. However, 31% of frequent moviegoers own at least five devices, 24% own six, and most of those are computers and smartphones. So what he's looking at is, we see people 18 to 24 not going to the movies. We know they have phones. We know that's one of the things they do. This is our idea. We'll have certain showings, right? That say, okay, the text, here's my question. Is that going to bring in more 18 to 24-year-olds? Cause that's the one thing, like I'd go to the theater, but I can't text during it. I know. No, you're right. I do not necessarily think that this idea will be successful. I am for the idea that AMC is thinking, how can we diversify our experience to make it better and more attractive to younger people? Because I'm ancient, and I like to go to movie theaters, and I like to have these periods that I have, and I want them to diverge them. If all the kids want to do is talk on their phone and text during the movie, but they also want to go and watch the movie because they get to be with their friends and outside of their parents' gaze for two hours, then give them that. That's fine, like I just think that the idea that we are diverging things, if people think that it's a hot burning hell, that's fine. Like you are allowed to think that. Don't go to that showing then, yeah. Yeah, or say, listen, I just don't make all the theaters that, and AMC has been another, that they have theaters that do draft house like kinds of things where you're able to get and you serve to you. And to get back to your point, it's not letting people text while they watch a movie that's gonna bring teens into the theater, but it could be the thing that opens up movie makers to say, okay, we can do an interactive showing like Amy Miles wanted to do back in 2012 where you're allowed to use your phone. In fact, you're encouraged to use your phone during the show for particular things, whether that's hashtagging on Twitter or taking snapshots or whatever. Maybe there's a movie that responds to the audience and you switch to different plot lines depending on what the audience is saying about it in that theater right then. I don't know what the idea is, but you can't do any of that right now because the norm is your device needs to be off and in your pocket. I had an idea. What's that? You see every horror movie now. You see the trailer is a glow in the dark footage. Not glow in the dark, but a night cam footage of test audiences seeing a movie and them freaking out when a big thing happens. What if you are given either mounts on the back of seats or something that can then live stream directly to your Twitter or Facebook that is set to go off just when they know the most scary parts of the movies are about to come up so you can have a live feed, go out to your social media view getting scared for everybody. There is a million different things or you can just have it be like it'll text your friend like oh, record, Jamie, because you've now filled in or used his app or something like that. Yeah, sure, and I think that's it. This isn't about, everybody's gonna wanna take this story and go I don't want the kids in my showing texting. First of all, it's not about that, it's about particular showings. Second of all, it's not about letting people text while they watch shows. It's actually about letting people use their phones while they watch shows to create a different movie going experience that you don't have to like and go to, that's fine. But that's, I embrace more technology in the theater for people that want it. As for me and Tom, you'll just be able to find us at a very, very quiet mid-afternoon showing at the Alamo Draft House or requesting two whiskeys, please. That's probably true. Although I'm not gonna rule out the possibility to come up with some nifty thing that makes me go, you know what, I'm gonna go to that texting show because I get to do this cool thing with my phone that affects the movie, I wanna try it out. So, bring it, bring it movie industry. Convince me to put down my bourbon and pick up my phone during the movie. All right, let's get to our pick of the day from Brett. Said I had a quick pick, I wanted to shoot your way. That has made my life significantly easier in recent weeks. I've been using two desktop customizing programs, Stardoc's Fences and Start 10. Fences lets you organize desktop icons into simple folders which you can then hide and move about and Start 10 lets you customize your Start bar pretty extensively, which is nice if you're not a fan of the Windows 10 defaults. I've had them for a month now and love them. They're 15 bucks together, 10 for one, five for the other. I appreciate that Stardoc only makes me buy them once. A lot of software makes you pay for yearly licenses and you can use it up to two computers according to their end user license agreement. So check it out, Stardoc been around forever making cool things to customize your Windows experience and they're not stopping and Brett likes it. Stardoc.com. Look at him, he likes it. Send your picks to us folks feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com and you can find more picks at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash picks. Wow, lots of messages of the day. Thank you everybody for responding to Scott and I talking about e-readers yesterday. We've got loads of perspective, more than we can possibly fit in the show. So if you don't hear yours red here, it was definitely red and appreciated. We tried to pick a representative sample and so we're gonna run through these tag team style Justin. Starting with Gary the senior geek who says, I have a paper white I use for reading in the evening before I go to bed. It allows me to read magazines and books without messing with my circadian rhythm. No blue light. Claire I got a paper white too but for a different reason. Quote I'll be traveling to Asia this summer and I tend to do a lot of reading while flying and neither my iPad nor my other devices e.g. Android phone, MacBook Air, et cetera has a battery life that lasts much more than half the duration of a flight to Asia. Greg says I want my next e-reader to display the book and have no other features, no advertising notifications, shopping, browsing, tracking, my reading, no Orwellian removal of my books. In fact preferred device for me would have no internet connectivity, just a cable to my Linux machine so I can copy my e-pubs on it. God bless you, Greg. Joel writes I actually use my phone, the OnePlus One with the Kindle app to read most of my e-books now. It has a large 5.5 1080p screen so the text is crisp and clear. I can set the Kindle app to dark mode so I don't have a bright screen in bed next to my wife. On the other hand, Tony writes this year I made the switch back to physical books. Already I've finished three books and I'm halfway through the fourth I've fallen back in love with reading. True love never dies. Also on Tony's side, Rich from Lovely Cleveland says while it's great to be able to take notes on an e-book and have them available on all my devices I find that I take less substantive notes with the built in Kindle notes function even when using the Kindle's physical keyboard. And Kevin in auditing from Ann Arbor buys physical books for his own reason. He says I consistently have about four or five different books that I slowly read at different times. I have one in my car, one in my bathroom, one near my bed, one in my girlfriend's apartment and I never have to worry about battery remembering my device, eye strain, notifications. I always have something near me when I want to read. Mike buys e-books and keeps them cheap. I avoid titles over $10. I just wait until the price drops down below before I buy best sellers. Bookbub helps me find titles for cheaper even for free. I've heard a lot about Bookbub. Apparently it's really, really legit. And Drew likes the fact that the e-readers themselves are cheaper. He says I wanna go all the way and say e-ink readers are disposable but I do feel way more comfortable in situations where the possibility of dropping, breaking or losing the e-reader is somewhat higher. Don't wanna drop that $600 tablet. Mike in annoyingly cold DC prefers e-readers for weight. I kept offering to get my fiance at Kindle. She never wanted to spend the money. She just left on a trip to Iraq and was severely restricted by the weight of her luggage. She borrowed my Kindle and was an instant convert. Derek thinks e-readers are actually more comfortable. He says more than anything I just feel that the Kindle is the best form factor for reading. I have a Surface Pro 4 but it's too heavy to be comfortable in bed. My phone is too small and for whatever reason holding open books has always given me hand cramps. Then finally Simon splits the difference. On the bedside table I have a Kindle paperweight which is a lovely reading experience and somehow even feels indulgent when I settle down for a read. However for my commute by rail, I have an old Windows phone. So there you go folks. Lots of ways to skin a cat or you could read a book which is probably nicer and better for cats. We also got an email from a Tony who says he's a long time listener, first time writer in regards to our story about Alibaba's AI, the AI that's called AI. Anyway he says the one that predicted the winner for the Chinese show I'm a Singer. I just wanna give you a little background on the show. I'm a huge fan. What they do on the show is sort of like American Idol. There are 500 live audience members watching the show. There's always seven famous singers competing against each other and basically the season's winner is picked by the 500 audience members. So when they showed the prediction by AI they actually showed it to the television audience and the in studio audience did not know who the majority of people watching the show were picking. They didn't really mention too much about AI other than it was predicting using all these different algorithms and people's reactions. If you've been watching the whole season you'd know who was going to win anyway so it didn't really do much for the TV audience but I guess it kinda works. Also you should check out the finale of last season because they got some famous American musicians like ACON. Also one last thing, AI means love in Chinese so there's a double meaning in love the show. And finally we were going to get some invites from Kite, Adam Smith's new venture Kite.com which does like a cloud connection when you're coding. Whatever editor you're using it it can follow along, you give it permission and it can suggest things, it can help you look up syntax, it can get you checking out on things that you're coding. I did not get those links from him but if you're interested in trying out Kite.com you can just go to Kite.com and sign up. It's basically like a big auto suggest to help you code better and or you can email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and I'll see if we can get those codes from Adam. Thank you Justin, Robert Young for joining us. Of course May 7th you say? In San Francisco you say? Indeed, if you are a fan of the Night Attack podcast that is Wearing One, me and Brian Brushwood. Chop it up and have a good time. You can see us live for free. Oh geez, head on over to the Piano Fight Theater that is at 144 Taylor Street in San Francisco. May 7th at 4.30, more details to come. Hopefully we have a few special guests but this is the first time that we've ever done a live show outside of the context of a convention or some kind of festival like South by Southwest, DragonCon, Nerdtacular. We're very nervous but very excited about it and hopefully we can get a few people in there to have a good time. So Night Attack live, San Francisco, Saturday May 7th, it's an afternoon show. So just clear your day, man. You can have a few drinks in the mid-afternoon and party until the early light. It'll be a fun time, I guarantee it. Check it out. Thanks to everybody who supports the show at dailytechnewshow.com slash support. If you already support the show, thank you. If you don't, go check it out. Tell me, you know, think to yourself, how much value do I get out of this show? That's all we ask. Give that value back, patreon.com slash DTNS or dailytechnewshow.com slash support. If you can't afford anything, that's fine, too. Just tell people about it. Thanks to everybody who have been reviewing the show on iTunes or telling their friends about it. If each one of you convinced one other people, one other person to watch the show, we double our audience and double the fun. I guarantee it. We'd have, you know, listen to all that e-reader feedback we got today. We'd be killing it. So please tell folks about Daily Tech News Show if you like it. Support the show if you can, dailytechnewshow.com slash support. One of the ways we reward you, if you give $5 a month on our Patreon or more, you get access to the treasure chest. Now, all you audio listeners, stay tuned after the show for tech and travel with Chris Christensen. He's gonna talk about smart water bottles, and if you want that, if you're watching the video show, or if you want that just on its own, it's in the treasure chest right now. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can give us call 51259 daily. That's 5932459. Catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. Visit our website at dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Darren Kitchin and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Brog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club, I hope you have enjoyed this brog. That was a show. That was tight. Tight. I lost connection in between somehow. Yeah, I was keeping an eye out. I'm sorry it took me a beat or two to get you back in. But it was like, ah! We were a solid, we were a television team right there on that texting story. I feel like that was- It was a good one. It was a good one. Headlines. Top is Tap Dat Snap. Robohon Price Not So Low. Lean Back and Vine. AMCOK's U2 text in movie theaters. Textual Frustration. I know I rarely ever ask for a title. Yeah. But I really want one that basically says texting in the theater is good. AMC for TXT. AMC for TXT is close, yeah. Another mass text cinema. Why you should text during a movie. I don't know, something like that. Something that just raises the blood pressure. Of everyone my age. Let me see. I think our chat room is too much abhorred by the idea to even form those words. I mean- Although Silverblade just wrote texting in the theater is good. Yeah, I think that's the point that I wanted to make. Oh wow, TVZ God might come up from Phoenix to Oakland. How sweet. Awesome. No, I'm not gonna come up too. You know, I was gonna say- It's fine, I'm on the floor. Pop, skip and a jump. You know, it might come up from LA. I'm just saying. Maybe if it came up from LA, it wouldn't be a bad thing. There's no reason I couldn't. I mean, I'm just saying. No. So are you coming up or not? Yeah, I'm definitely coming up. Why didn't I get your mass text time in your movie theater? I wish that wasn't so long. I kind of love that. So, matinee texting. Texting for- I mean, what do you guys think? Are you in along the same lines of the provocative title? Why don't you just say AMC says AMC will allow texting or AMC considering allowing texting? I'm thinking more, even more like- Blatant. Yeah. Let's all text in the theater. Like. Texting is cool, old man. Rev's engine. Let's all text from the lobby. Let's all text during the movie. How's that? Send mass spoilers, SMS, that's good. I mean, yeah, we didn't even touch on the idea of letting people use their phones couldn't piracy or spoilers. I have to grab my kid real quick. I mean, really, that's really the most encouraging element is that maybe theaters are realizing, you know, piracy is not the worst thing that could happen to them, like old style. It's not good, but it's not going, yeah, it's not the thing that they should make their top priority. Well, it's like they no longer control the feed, so it's like this is not the only place where you can watch these things. So it's like, hey, let's focus on creating the best experience. And I think what I wanted to try to get to, and hopefully I did, was just that the, I had the same visceral reaction as everybody else. That like, no, stupid, I don't want to be distracted by a million kids with their stupid texting. But at the same time, if they want to do that, then you want theaters to still exist? Then I applaud them thinking outside the box. Well, and you got me thinking during the show, I hadn't even thought about this until we were talking that this isn't about texting. This isn't about, because you rightly pointed out, whatever gets this age group to come to the theater, you need to be able to figure out how to do. And I'm like, yeah, the kids don't really, I mean, there's plenty of people who are 22 years old who also don't want a bunch of people around them texting in the middle of an otherwise silent movie. But if it's, oh, this is the thing. We're all on our phones because there's a game to play or there's some element. Then I think that's the kind of thing that maybe the olds like us would be like, ah, that's too much trouble, but you'd get more folks in the theater seats that way. Yeah. All right, I gotta get back to the grind. I'll talk to y'all. All right, I'm gonna call it, texting in the theater is good. Good, texting in the theater is good. It is, it's great. Maybe we should all do it, all the time. All right, thanks. Do it, I do it. You do it. I just did it. Yes, by the way, I loved our TV show tag team. That was good. That was good. All right, I'll talk to you. All right, take care. And while Roger's out getting his baby, I know y'all might wanna see the baby, but I think I'm gonna stop the stream down because I gotta get off to the vet and everything. So thanks everybody for watching. Sorry for the shortened post-show today. We'll see you tomorrow.