 Ah, it's good to be home. All right. Patrick Beja, are you prepared? That depends. Did you select the right input to record the show, Tom? Oh, I see. I see. I'm just gonna go. You really crack yourself up, don't you, Beja? I enjoy a good laugh that I instill upon myself. That was, I didn't even prepare it. It just came out. Wow. I apologize. All right, no, we could play it that way. That's how you want to go. Good times. Good times. All right, poor AccuZod. Too hot now. Okay, yeah. Was it AccuZod responsible? Well, he's the one who selected the input, but I didn't check. So we bear community responsibility for it. All right. Yeah, shots were fired. All right. The audio people will never know unless I've got the wrong input selected. Here we go. Hey, you know that Tom Merritt? That's one guy that really knows where his towel is. And because he knows where his towel is, I support him on Patreon. If you would like to do the same, head on over to patreon.com slash ace detect. Push the button, Tom. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 8th, 2015. I'm Tom Merritt, joining me today as he does most Tuesdays. Mr. Patrick Beja, DTNS contributor and independent podcaster. How are you, Patrick? I am excellent. I'm happy. I'm energetic. I'm ready to do a show as I was born. You were, in fact, born ready. Oh, we can't hear this. I couldn't hear it. I was born ready. Yeah, you're born quiet too, apparently. I need to boost that one up a little bit. Back from DragonCon and I've got the blood to prove it. That was the blood from Justin's wedding right there. How was it? I was so sad I couldn't be there. They got married as a podcast, but really with all sorts of merriment and- There was a xenomorph and a dragon's egg and a horse heart and all kinds of great stuff. Cylons, a toaster. So sad I missed it. Go check out the Jurymore podcast, folks. If you wanna find out more about that, we've got some, we're in that tsunami-like sucking out of the news before an Apple event, but there's some really interesting stuff today. It's not an empty news day. It's like when the water went out of the bay, you found like a treasure chest or a sunken boat or something. Let's look at the headlines. Now, as I mentioned yesterday on the headline show, Apple will announce something tomorrow, April 9th at 10 a.m. That's what I announced on yesterday's show because I was in a post-DragonCon haze and forgot what month it is. As many of you kindly pointed out, this is September and the Apple announcement will take place tomorrow, September 9th at 10 a.m. We'll talk about that after they've announced it on tomorrow's show with Scott Johnson and Adam Christensen. Meanwhile, ZDNets Mary Jo Foley passes along the Microsoft announcement that Dell, HP and Avanade slash Accenture will resell Surface Pro tablets and add enterprise levels of service and support along with some software. For instance, Dell is going to sell the tablets along with things like a warranty, configuration and deployment, other kinds of service level agreements. Avanade, which is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft will install existing apps from Accenture as well as having Accenture build more. HP has yet to detail their plans, but Patrick, for some reason, when I saw this story today, it just all of a sudden made a piece of the Microsoft strategy click into place about making these what they've called kind of category leading template-like devices. If you get the people who you would otherwise be competing with to sell the devices and then make money off the service and software, that's basically saying, you know, we all understand the operating system as a commodity, right? Let's make some money selling our software, you guys make some money selling your software, we'll all make money off the hardware and everybody's happy. It seems like Microsoft is approaching the hardware in a very different way than they were a few a year or two ago. They've reduced the amounts of models on the Lumia smartphone line and we've seen the, what was it? The Mix 400, which is basically a Surface Pro 3 tablet from Lenovo, I think, or Acer. I can't remember, sorry. It was announced. I think that was Lenovo and it was a mix like with two eyes, right? Exactly. And it looks so much like a Surface Pro that I can absolutely imagine them actually working with Microsoft on developing it, which means between this and this news, it might be that Microsoft is taking the same approach to hardware as they are to software, which is basically be everywhere, we don't care who's selling what, we just wanna be on it. So, that's it. And if I'm HP and I'm looking at the fact that hardware sales are definitely not where I'm building my future business, I don't mind bringing in a Microsoft Surface and remember HP very famously used to sell an HP iPod. So it's not something that they haven't experimented with before partnering with another hardware manufacturer to kind of add something to their own line of offerings. And the Surface devices are by all accounts exceedingly well-reviewed and they're great devices, so I don't see why they wouldn't wanna sell something like that. Yeah. Moving on, an Adblock Plus browser is now available on Android and iOS for free. Adblock Plus blocks ads after they load using JavaScript. An Android version has been in beta since May and it was banned from the Google Play Store for interfering with other services and then was re-listed. The next web notes that iOS 9's forthcoming system blocks ads before they load. Yeah, so Adblock Plus is doing a lot to say, hey, we're ahead of the crowd. We're ahead of iOS 9, we're here now. You can block ads on Apple devices right now. And it's true. It is interesting to think of it as something that allows the ad to be loaded but just not shown, though. That is more nefarious to the advertiser, I would think, than what iOS does, which just prevents the ad from loading at all. Yeah, it's a little bit, the Adblock battle is shaping up to become one of the great battles of monetizing of the current year and next year because with iOS getting in the game. But with this, it actually loads so you don't really know that it hasn't been, it counts basically for the advertiser but the reader is not gonna get it but the system is still getting the performance impact from the ad and maybe a little bit more even. So that argument is, so it's a very complicated thing. It's a complicated situation we're found in. And yeah, it could become its sole conversation. Adblocking is a very interesting thing. We've covered that ground before. I'm sure we'll cover it again. TechCrunch reports that Microsoft purchased Cloud Security firm Adalon for more than $250 million. Adalon is a cloud services security broker providing user data and application access control with services like Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, ServiceNow, Ariba, Office 365, et cetera. So that's gonna continue, I'm sure. Microsoft says Adalon will add to Microsoft's cloud security offerings including advanced threat analytics. If you're into enterprise, this is going to be interesting especially if you're into cloud security but the significant thing here is Microsoft is not holding off on acquiring companies when they think they can add something but they are acquiring smaller companies in the wake of having to write down so much of the Nokia acquisition. CNET reports that Joe Bone has added automatic sleep tracking to its up to up three and up four activity trackers. The up three and up four have been, now have passive rate, I'm sorry, the up three and up four now have passive heart rate tracking as well and the up two has been redesigned with two thin straps and a more secure hook clasp. The company will replace old up two models with the new one for any users that have had problems with the old clasp. The up two costs a hundred bucks and is available in six colors. The up three costs a hundred and eighty bucks and both are available now. Automatic sleep tracking does seem like a catch up feature at this point but giving people a new model because of a clasp is a good move, well done, Joe Bone. Cause this wasn't something that was so bad you had to recall it but you're going above and beyond here, I like that. I think the competition from smartwatches is probably encouraging them to be as consumer friendly as they can. It's not the exact same market, I understand that but there is a threat so. Raspberry Pi's official seven inch 800 by 480 touch screen display is now available for $60. An update to Raspy and OS will support 10 finger input and an on screen keyboard so you don't have to plug in a keyboard to use it. The display connects through the Pi's GPIO and DSI ports. Raspberry Pi touch screen is sold through the swag store, RS components, allied electronics and Premier Farnell with other stores getting stock later this week and you might want to keep an eye on those other stores cause a lot of these folks are sold out, I know swag store sold out quick. I'm wondering how well Raspberry is doing. It was aiming to become the machine that you give anyone to learn, the cheap machine you could learn tech and coding and all of this on and computers basically. I'm wondering if they've reached their goals of trying to democratize computers or if they're still going, obviously they're still going strong but not sure they've reached their goals. I mean they sold 5 million, they hit 5 million Raspberry Pi sales in February. I don't know if that actually answers what you're asking cause you're talking about something more qualitative I know but people are certainly buying them. Yeah, how long have they been on sale? 5 million, is it a large number? I don't know. But yeah, it's good that they're still going I guess and 60 bucks for a screen that doubles basically as a keyboard, it's not bad. Yeah, for instance, I'm looking at this TechCrunch article from February when Evan Upton launched Raspberry Pi, he said, I hope we sell a few thousand over the lifetime of the device. So 5 million is pretty good. That sounds like underselling it quite a bit. Well, I mean that's what they said at the time. Look, I think you're going to get emails about this because Raspberry Pi devotees are extraordinarily enthusiastic and it's got a really vibrant community of people. I think what I want to head off is people saying, Patrick doesn't know what he's talking about cause I think you're asking a really important question which is how much of an effect does it have? We know they've sold 5 million of them. We know people are really excited about the Raspberry Pi and doing amazing things with them. How much of an effect is it actually having though? And what can we tell about it? How can we show that? I think there was a sort of a hope initially when the Raspberry Pi was conceived that it would be the equivalent of our initial computers that we would get on, you know, fall in love with computers with. And I could tell you names of computers you've never heard of because they were designed and sold in France only or, you know, these kinds of things. I'm not quite sure that they've gotten into that space, that very specific space, but maybe, you know, I think it's too early to tell. Yeah. I mean, 5 million is more than I would imagine the VIC-20 sold in the same period of time. I could be wrong about that, I'm just guessing. Yeah, that's the kind of spirit I was referring to. And maybe, you know, also it's difficult to compare because times are so different. Definitely. Anyway, so thanks to Runaway Snail, which by the way is the best kind of snail, for the iDigitalTimes article pointing to a study from German security firm Gdata. The study discovered more than a million new malware files for Android, an increase of 25% since the second half of 2014. Gdata also found more examples of malware installed before purchase and believed this is not the fault of manufacturers, thankfully, but rather of resellers. And that's, I don't know if that's less scary. Well, it is to me, this iDigitalTimes story is a little bit inflammatory. I would like us to be picking better sources than that because if you click through the study, it's not saying Xiaomi sells phones with malware, which is essentially what the headline at iDigitalTimes says. What the study says is we found malware on 26 phones before purchase that was pre-installed. Xiaomi was on a couple of the models where Xiaomi, but they weren't bought directly from Xiaomi. They were bought by a third party reseller and an unauthorized reseller to boot. So look, I think it's not a big lesson here. What the study is saying is, hey, if you're buying a phone from someone that you've never bought something from before, be careful because they might have installed something on it that you don't want to have on there. Yeah, don't buy a phone from someone in a dark alley is basically the- Or a dark alley of the internet, even, yeah. Yeah. EFC88 let us know that Jonathan Pettit, Principal Socialist, Principal Scientist at Security Innovation. Boy, Jonathan Pettit may hate me now for that. I have no idea. Principal Scientist at Security Innovation used a low power laser and a pulse generator to fool Carl Lidar into believing obstacles existed that weren't there. Now Lidar is used in a lot of cars for collision prevention. It's also used in self-driving cars as a key sensor for telling what else is around. Pettit's system was able to record unencrypted pulses from a particular model, the IBO Lux Lidar unit, and then be able to fool that particular model. He'll present his findings at Black Hat Europe in November. The point of this is to say, hey, before Lidar becomes way more popular in cars, you guys should look at the fact that it's easy to spoof and we might want to stop DDoS attacks on Lidar-enabled cars before they start. Yeah, once again, security researchers doing a service to the community at large. The other side of that story, though, is whether the question, the very important question of whether or not Pettit, as you called him, is actually petit, which is a French adjective which means small. It's a small but important study. TechCrunch reports the GoPro Odyssey camera array with 16 Hero 4 Black cameras that can shoot 360 degrees video for VR is available for purchase. You just need to apply. If GoPro and Google find you qualified, you get the ability to spend $16,000 on the rig. But hey, you get the Google Jump Assembler for compiling the video for VR. So what is it with Google making you apply to spend way too much money with them on prototype stuff? So here's what it is. There is no good way of selecting people for something that you don't want to make a huge amount of. If you're just testing something, it's what happened with the initial versions of the Google Glass, they do this from time to time. If you do a few items that you want to get on the development of things rather slowly, then what are your options? Either you go have everyone apply and it's first comes first served, which sucks. Or you do everyone applies and then you select randomly, which yeah, I can see it happening, but then you might get people who are not really qualified and apply just for fun or aren't the kind of people you want to give your very limited amount of devices to. So what's left, you apply and then you get selected. You know, that's the thing though, is I get the, we only have a certain amount of these and we want to keep the supply limited so we can communicate very closely with you. Why charge $16,000 for it? I mean, your R&D budget is bigger than that. I'm sure there's a logical and reasonable explanation for that. And some people with Google Glass were like, well, I made sure that a certain seriousness was available in the person who wanted to buy it and I guess that could be true here as well. But yeah. Well, 16,000 is not a small amount. If they're gonna give out a couple hundred of those, I'm not sure that GoPro wants to eat the cost of 16 times 200. If I'm GoPro, I'm just pointing to Google's pile of cash and going. The next web reports the German minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure said that by 2018, all of Germany will have internet speed of at least 50 megabits per second. That's 10 times faster than the current global average for broadband. 70% of Germans currently have 50 megs and the government is going to set aside 2.7 billion euros to try to get the other 30% up to 50 megs through local community initiatives like the Wirtschachtlich-Eitzleuken model in which the community fully builds and owns municipal broadband and the much easier to say bet or I better model in which the community builds the infrastructure at least as the pipes to larger companies. First of all, congratulations on that pronunciation. Second of all, I love this. This is for those who have been followers of the show for at least a few months. You'll remember that I was in Finland a few months ago and that I was connected through fiber internet in the middle of the countryside, really the middle of nowhere. And it was through a community initiative, probably similar to the one I'm not going to pronounce the name of. You mean the Wirtschachtlich-Eitzleuken model? Yeah, exactly. The Wirtschlaft-Eitzleuken model, that one. And you know, it's incredibly important that we understand everywhere how connecting our countryside builds up that possibility of bringing businesses back. And in France, at least, we're doing a terrible job at it. And I know it's been a contentious issue in the US, too, because companies don't want community internet to take off because it might eat up on their profit, you know, on their potential opportunities, but then they don't exploit those opportunities either because they're not built for it. Anyway, community internet seems to be working. And I think it should be looked at in different places as well. And we got our next story here actually is talking about bringing even faster speeds without laying the infrastructure as much. Which, yeah, I noted the irony of this when I was pre-reading all of it. Basically, it contradicts what I just said because as Strike It Rich one tipped us off to Verizon's plan to begin field trials for 5G wireless within the next 12 months and have some commercial deployment by 2017. According to Verizon's chief information and technology architect, Ruder Gurnani. 5G connections, is that not the way you pronounce this? Roger. Roger, what did I say? I don't know. Roger? Well, okay, let's pretend I said Roger. 5G connections are expected to be 30 to 50 times faster than current 4G implementations. I'll say this again, 30 to 50 times faster than current 4G implementations as well as be more battery efficient and have less lag. CNET notes South Korea hopes to have a trial network up in time for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Japan aims to have a 5G network running for the 2020 Summer Olympics and China is pushing aggressively to roll out 5G. This is, I just wanna talk about Finland again because I just did and I said, fiber internet is super important. At the same time, they're currently using 4G internet with data capped less plans. Basically just pay for the speed, which is usually 50 to 100 megs per second max. It can go up to 300, but you don't get data caps. And they're now very seriously trying to put caps on those data connections because people are using them as their main home connection. And so with 4G, you can use it as your main home connection. 5G could potentially basically bring that, make that problem disappear because I'm guessing that with a network built to support 30 to 50 times the speed of 4G, you wouldn't have the kind of congestion that you're currently seeing now if bandwidth construction is not closed. The responsiveness is good enough that they're talking about using it for things like surgery, like really lag sensitive stuff. So yeah, your streaming video should be fine on gigabit type wireless service. All I have to say about this story is drool. A New York Times report previewed Microsoft's return to court over a warrant for emails stored in Ireland. We talked about that last week, but the New York Times report also reported another skirmish that I don't think had been previously reported. Apple apparently received a court order from the US Justice Department this summer demanding real-time access to an iMessage account and Apple responded that encryption made the request impossible. Apple did hand over backups of the user's messaging history stored on iCloud because of the court order. This is not them doing some backdoor cooperation. They had a warrant court said, give this over, Apple did. But on the encrypted iMessage side, which a lot of people have said, Apple stores the keys locally so maybe they could comply. Apple apparently refused to comply. I'll just mention one thing about since you're bringing Apple up again. In your defense, it's not like that we know there's not going to be an announcement on April 9th at 10 a.m. There might be, we'll see. Mm-hmm, do you think they planted that with the New York Times? It's possible. Yeah, possible. Where were we? I went back to the top of the document and now I don't know where we are. Anyway, yes. In line 22. Ubisoft has announced it's partnering with Malaysian amusement park developer, RSG, on a 100 square foot, 100,000 square foot indoor park in Kuala Lumpur, featuring Ubisoft themed rides and amusements. The park is expected to open in 2020. Ubisoft previously produced the Rabbids Dark Ride for the Futuroscope theme park in Paris, no, in France, and I have no idea why they would do this. I don't see how a theme park around Ubisoft properties would work better than just a random theme park. It's just like a giant super store size thing though. Think of it like a laser tag place. You can just do Assassin's Creed laser tag. I guess that's the kind of thing they would create. They're saying they want next generation life-sized video game, and I understand it works as a fantasy, but I fear that in practice it's just gonna be a kind of a Renaissance fare type thing where you run around with people at different times of the Assassin's Creed games. But maybe it's gonna be fun. I suspect it was RSG, the company, thinking we need an amusement park in Kuala Lumpur. It could make money. Who could we partner with to give it a... Who will sell us a license at a terms that we can accept? And this is for two expensive. Hobbit from PA sent us the RS Technica report about Space Whiskey. Scotty's Whiskey Distillery, Ardburg, teamed up with aerospace company, NanoRacks to send un-matured whiskey to the International Space Station as part of a scientific experiment, a science to determine the effects of microgravity conditions on turpent, an organic compound found in whiskey. Three years later, Space Whiskey! Return to Earth and underwent all-important taste tests. The verdict is that Space Whiskey tastes different than a control bath of Earth Whiskey. According to Tasters, the ISS sample had an intense and rounded aroma with notes of antiseptic smoke, rubber, smoked fish, and a curious perfumed note like cassis or violet, along with woody tones leading to a beefy aroma. The taste was very focused and an aftertaste had intense and long hints of wood, antiseptic lozenges and rubbery smoke. So the thing I wanna know is, how did they figure out that the taste was reminiscent of antiseptic smoke? Did they go around tasting it? These are professional testers. I can like semi-seriously answer you there. These are professional testers. You're not familiar with wine tasters? Come on, you're in France. Like that's what they do is that their job is to associate certain taste notes to particular flavors and aromas, right? But how do you know what antiseptic smoke tastes like? Because you're a professional taster and I can only assume that as part of your training you have to taste all of these things. Yeah, probably, that must be it. Must be it. I was watching, I just finished watching the cosmos talking about space and space anything is super cool. I would taste probably most things that come back down from space if they're... You would eat most of space, got it. Okay. Yes, probably. And I've been watching cosmos. It was really interesting culturally to see how Neil deGrasse Tyson was running circles around to try and explain to people how science really works, guys. He was like, yeah, I assure you science works. And it was really funny because for us, at least for me, it seems that in France you wouldn't need to be as careful when you're saying things like this. So it was an interesting thing. I don't know, man. I've seen some flat earthers in Europe. It can happen. Ah, really? Maybe not as much in the Paris. Maybe not in France. Yeah, maybe. I mean, my approach on this is basically if you don't accept, I've said it on Twitter a couple of times, but if you don't accept scientific consensus, then maybe you should lose the right to use your smartphone because science was made it. So I think it's a fair compromise, right? Well, yeah. I think that if you don't believe in electronics you shouldn't be allowed to use them for sure. And that's a look at the headlines. All right. Interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today about Xiaomi and their business model and the people trying to imitate them. If you're unfamiliar, Xiaomi captured a large market share in China with a budget approach. So they only sold online. They relied a lot on word of mouth and they did a loss leader model. So they would sell their phones at a very affordable price and make up the money selling services and accessories. They had 15.9% of the market in China in Q2. And gunning for them are the Lenovo Zuck, which is a spin-off from Lenovo. It's just called the Zuck. They don't even know what Zuck stands for. They haven't even got that far in the marketing, but they sell a high-end phone for $280. They do the online sales thing. Huawei is the number two seller in China. 15.7% of the market. They have bargain phones called the Honor Line. Their shipments grew 48% quarter over quarter in Q2, but their profitability is not growing as fast and they are trying to move into higher-end smartphones so that they can make more money there. There's also an anti-virus maker. You may have heard of Kihu 3360. They have a Kuiku branded phone. Video streamer Lei TV in China has the LaMax phone. They have said flat out we plan to lose money indefinitely on the phone, but we'll make it up on services. And what was really interesting in this Wall Street Journal article, Patrick, is that Wingtec is a company that designs and produces phones as well as providing big data and backends for app stores for not just Xiaomi, but also Huawei and Lenovo. So really, all these companies are using Wingtec to try to figure out how to do a razor blade model, if you will. This is the thing that struck me in the article as well, because this company, Wingtec, which I don't know about you, but I had never heard of them, they are apparently designing these phones for pretty much all of the super, I don't even wanna say low-end because they're, you know, around the three to $400 mark price-wise, but they're super high-end specs-wise. They're competing with the $600 phones, usually. So Wingtec is basically aggregating the research and development and design costs for all of them, for all of these cheap phone makers, and splitting the cost. Of course, they don't design the same phone for everyone, but it is a surprise to me because I would have swore that Xiaomi and Huawei and Lenovo were making their own phones. Apparently, for these lines, at least, they're basically, it's communism, which wouldn't be surprising for China, but it's capitalism slash communism. They're putting- Well, it's really no different from what Apple does with Foxconn, is it? I wouldn't, I don't think it's quite the same because Foxconn manufactures devices for Apple, and basically a lot of, well, manufacturers, really. There are a few of those companies that actually do the manufacturing, but what's interesting about Wingtec is that they are designing the things as well. Apple very famously designs their devices themselves. So it's really externalizing everything about the phone and then really just selling it under your brand. Now, they are working with Wingtec on the designs. They're working in partnership, so it's not quite- Right, it's not they just let Wingtec come up with it on their own. They work in partnership, correct. In partnership and it's, you know, each one of them has their own teams and separated buildings within the Wingtec offices, but yeah, it's a really interesting way of bringing the costs down in a way, I don't think it's comparable to what we've seen in the past somewhat, but not quite, they didn't go quite that far. And it's even more interesting when you look at the reasoning behind all of this, which is basically these phones are now in a, they're sort of an explosion. The market was almost just created, you know, maybe a couple of years ago with Xiaomi and OnePlus that inundated the market with those mid-range price phones that were actually high-end phones on the component and quality side of things. So there are a lot of people getting into that market, but they are all understanding that there is going to be a crunch at some point and not everyone is going to survive. So they're brushing like mad men or mad companies trying to establish brand presence and market presence in order to survive the oncoming apocalypse of that category. Yeah, it's interesting as more Kuikus and Zucks and LaMax phones move in. It threatens the business model for all of them because one of the things is you need to have a big enough market share so that you have a large enough population of people who own your phone to make the money on the services and accessories. If the market gets split up too thinly, none of these companies can succeed for very long. So there might be a big shakeout coming. And then you see a company like I mentioned with Huawei saying, well, we need to start making high-end smartphones too to be able to make more revenue. Or you see Xiaomi saying, well, we need to get into Singapore and India and other markets. Apparently they can't get into the US very easily because of patent issues, but they're trying to expand overseas. Or you see ZTE moving into the US. They're not even in the top five in China anymore, but they are number four now in the US as we heard on yesterday's show. So it really does show that, you know, we get used to these like, oh, Nokia's on top and Blackberry's number two. And then the next thing, you know, two years later, it's like, oh, Apple is number two and Samsung is on top now. Wait a minute. And those things cannot stay permanent because everybody's moving in to try to take that second mover advantage and learn from the mistakes of the people that went before. And you know, it's really telling that I didn't realize Xiaomi was a five-year-old company. You know, it would seem that Xiaomi has been here forever. They're just a five-year-old company and they're completely unavoidable in that space to the point that, very interestingly, they're saying that the entrance in the market now chasing that model are chasing after a model that is too old. You know, it's already a two-year-old model and it doesn't work anymore because that market is kind of settled. So it is an impossible situation for all of these manufacturers because on the high end, they're facing really tough challenges because Android doesn't sell as well as they would want to on the high end models. And of course, the market is split between a lot of the different manufacturers. And on the low end, and that's why they went to the low end, but on the low end, the market is split as well and it's advancing so fast that I don't really know if it's ever going to be possible to have that situation where, all right, now things are this way and we're not going to have another new entrance that's going to make things better for a cheaper price or these kinds of things. I don't know. This makes me think that, first of all, Apple is probably right to be chasing the super expensive end of the market. And it makes me understand a little bit more of Samsung's strategy to be going back to super high end, qualitative Android phones, even if it's a dangerous game because there's no way they can win on what's happening below. Well, they could, but it's a much tougher battle. There's diminishing returns down there, yeah, at the bottom of the market right now. It's safer to go into a newer market like Africa and go for the mid-range phones than it is to go into China in the low end, it seems like. Yeah, for sure. All right, our pick of the day comes from Brian. And this would be my own pick of the day as well. I'm glad Brian wrote in with this one. He said, I'd like to bring everyone's attention to Russ Pitt's Kickstarter for his stage of development series of video game documentaries. I usually wouldn't promote someone else's Kickstarter like this, but I really don't want to see this one fail. Russ was responsible for the excellent human angle video series at Polygon. And with this project, he hopes to continue in the same vein. DTNS listeners might remember him as an occasional guest of the show and as head writer and producer of the original screensavers on tech TV. Brian says, I don't know what else to say. I really want this series to be made. Russ is a longtime friend of me. We used to work at half price books in Austin together in the 1990s. And he has got a long way to go with seven days to go to make this series happen. But he's already shooting it. He's already committed to at least doing a few episodes. And I'm a backer myself. So if you like to have high quality documentaries, if you're interested in video games, you want to see the stories behind a lot of these, some from sympathetic characters, some not. Go check it out. It's an interesting Kickstarter. I don't know if you've taken a look at this, Patrick, but I'm cheering for Russ. I hope this one turns out well for him. I can't believe I missed this. You know, the human interest pieces on Polygon were stellar. They were really excellent. And I'm going to go support it right now. It looks like, yeah, he's got ways to go. But we've seen strange things happen. And I'm following Russ on Twitter. How did I not? He should promote himself more. That doesn't make sense. I'm going to go support it now. Send your picks to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, folks, you can find my picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. One quick message before we're out of here. Sergeant Cisco, a.k.a. Adonis, wrote in with a good word for the Samsung Gear S wearable. He's like, look, I love the Gear S now. He's not even talking about the new one that was just announced. He said, I use my Gear S daily. I'm not supposed to have a phone where I work. And since I was using the Samsung S's health app to track my steps and note when pain levels became less than tolerable on my knees and ankles that he messed up, I decided a watch was an ideal solution. The Gear S in particular, because it is a standalone phone. When I leave the phone behind in my bag or in the car when I go biking, the phone automatically forwards calls and texts to the watch after I exceed about 33 feet away from my phone. It tracks my movements, lets me store music on it or stream it, has Bluetooth so I can wear headphones and still stay in touch. Voice recognition is much slower than the Android Wear offerings, but it works. And it lets me have a whole day and the included charger is a plus. In fact, he's got a couple of chargers and he talks about his charging strategy. He says, PS, a little tip for Android users. Pulse is a great RSS reader that's very easy to use and works on browsers as well. So there you go. Big fan of the Gear S, Sargent Cisco. So it works without a phone. Two questions come to mind. First of all, how come he can't use a phone where he works? And second of all, but then if he's using a watch that basically is a phone, is he not the... I assume because his nickname is Sargent Cisco that explains the answer to your first question somehow. Whether the watch is really like sneaking around the rules or not, I don't know. That's interesting, isn't it? But I think what he wanted to be able to do is track that stuff and he could do it by wearing the watch. He was allowed to wear the watch. So I don't think he was trying to get around the phone calling rules if that was why. I don't know. But good review, thank you. I like to get these many reviews from people who've lived with a particular product and can tell why it works really well for them. I think that's helpful for all of us. Send them to us, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. And that's it for the show. Thank you, Patrick Beja. You can find Patrick on Twitter, twitter.com slash not Patrick. You can find his English language podcast at frenchspin.com. And you always have a good show in the hopper. What do you have up lately? I guess I would mention Pixels, which is a video game show. We just recorded a new episode today. But even more than this, I would reiterate my plea from last week, which was basically go listen to the Phidias Club. It's also on frenchspin.com and the latest episode is about a week old. We record every month and we get people from different countries to tell you what's been happening and how they saw things from their own perspective. It's a show I really have a soft spot in my heart for and I would really love it if you gave it a chance. So frenchspin.com, it's called the Phidias Club. And a couple of people said, well, you pleaded and I went and listened and it was cool. It was cool. So thank you for pleading. So I'm doing it once again. Thank you for your questions. 100% backpack. Go check out the Phidias Club. And thanks to all the folks who support the show. I loved seeing you guys at DragonCon. I know not all of you were there, but the ones that I did see, it's always a pleasure. Some of you I get to see quite often and that's awesome. But just the people who would randomly walk up and say hello, say they were my boss, one guy came up and just gave me cash. He's like, here, here's my support. That was hilarious. Lots of DTNS T-shirts at DragonCon. So you have entirely changed the way we are thinking about doing content. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And for those of you who don't yet support the show in that way, or in any way, and are wondering maybe how you could. If you get some value out of the show, go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support and check out the store. You can donate once by PayPal or you can keep a regular pledge going. That's the most helpful at patreon.com slash ace detect. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can give us call 51259 daily. That's 593-2459. Listen to the show live Monday through Friday at 430 PM Eastern on alphageekradio.com and visit our website, dailytechnewshow.com. Tap an announcement day tomorrow with Scott Johnson and Adam Christensen. Talk to you then. The show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. And by donation, I do mean bribe. You are correct, BioCal. Yes, good show everyone. What should we call it? Space Whiskey. I agree. Done. Space Whiskey with an E or no? You know, they didn't spell it. That's a debate. I mean, that's like a serious whiskey debate. They didn't spell it with an E in the article. But I feel like I was uncomfortable with that. Yes. Yes. That's a Condonast style because the article was ours, Technica. Yeah, but like whiskey in Wikipedia is spelled with a Y but of liquor.com is an EY. Bullet, which makes whiskey, spells it with an EY. I'm going for EY. Scotch whiskey and Irish whiskey are distinguished in spelling. What without the E is the usual spelling in Britain and with the E is that in the U.S. This was a Scottish whiskey. According to the Oxford English Dictionary. Yeah, it's a Scottish distillery, yeah. All right, all right, fine. Space Whiskey. No E. Whiskey. They, do you know how much? They should just start bootlegging. They should start bootlegging to the ISS. Yep. Them Duke boys. Drunk in space. Right, well now you've got SpaceX can like sneak the Duke boys up there to make their moonshine run. Oh, moonshine. And we're done. Did we lose Patrick? No, I'm here. I was watching the stage of development video. I just contributed. Excellent. Go Russ. Space Whiskey. So yeah, I think we'll still give credit to Silverblade W. Scottus because you both have it. Silverblade used extra A's for the space madness. Space Whiskey can lead to the space madness. Be careful. Especially if it smells like burnt rubber. I love that the notes are like, well, that sounds like gaskets and yeah, they probably have a lot of disinfectants on the ISS, I would imagine. My gosh, this does look like such a great video series. I wanna help. Help Russ, help Russ, help Russ. Okay, so Patrick, let me know when you're done with watching this great video series so I can yell at you about France getting Star Wars. You still watch. That's motivation. It's okay, I'm ready for the fight. I'm just tweeting. Because I have a bone to pick about that. You and apparently everyone on the internet. Yeah, because you're the only person we know in France and so you're just gonna have to take it. You're gonna have to speak for your people, man. Yeah. All right, go ahead. So first of all, soccer blue, WTF. I don't understand, it's American film. What the fromage is what that means. If anything, if it was gonna be any other country, it should be England because at least they filmed it there. It makes no sense. Okay, I'm done. Now we have to move on to your behavior which of course you're gonna see it on the 16th and that's fine as you should but you are not allowed to talk about it until Saturday. There, I've said it. I'm gonna have so much fun. You're not even allowed to raise a little French eyebrow about it until Friday. I could tell already that Patrick's gonna be posting things about that amazing Jar Jar scene. So bad. So first of all, we get movies released on Wednesday. All of them, it's almost never happens yet. Why is that okay? That's not okay. But then you could say, but it could be released on the next day. And then I would tell you, well, that would mess up a lot of planning that they had for the holiday season. Second of all, we get movies in afterwards, you know, after you guys all the time, including the Steve Jobs movie, which I did not think I was going to want to see but is apparently getting raving reviews. Like Wozniak even liked it. Exactly, was liked it. That one is not getting released one day later, two days later, one week later. But three months, three months later, madam. So I would gladly... Two wrongs don't make a right, Patrick. Who would do 5,000 previous wrongs make one other wrong? I think three months do make a right. Three months do make a right. And you know, we got Age of Ultron before you guys. We got, I think, Ant-Man before you guys. Oh, so your other points now invalid because listen to all the stuff you do get first. But they were a couple of days. And first of all, I didn't make a big deal out of it. You know, it's not like I mentioned it more than three or four times on Twitter, mocking everyone. But seriously, you have a huge, with great power comes great responsibility because you could accidentally say something that impacts the way an entire community feels about the Star Wars movie. You mean spoiling stuff? Not even spoiling because I properly assumed by that point we will just be flooded with half the movie in clips, right? Like, I can't say that I don't think that's gonna happen. But it's that feeling of walking into a movie with, oh, never mind, walking into a movie with no expectations. There's no way that can happen. Talk about it. I was going to make fun of you for that one. No, I just caught it. I caught it myself. Say whatever you wanted to survive. Okay, I still, we have a problem here. And like, it's not about revenge. It's not about who usually gets what Steve Jobs movie first. It's about the fact that France releases their movies on Wednesday and America releases their movies on Friday at the earliest Thursday night, like late. So why that? You would have to talk to the French government, I suspect, to get that answer. Wait, so it's only because it's the holiday weekend that France is releasing the movies on Wednesday? No, no, no, it's on Wednesdays, every Wednesday. It's always on Wednesday. Okay, so why, I think everyone in the world should release their movies on the same day. Come on. I think it would make sense that, you know, instead of yelling at me for my country getting the movie a couple of days early, I think the real culprit is Disney, which is releasing the movie in the US. It's home base late. I agree. I think that is kind of unacceptable. So I think you should direct your justified anger. You've blown my mind. At the right target. Patrick Beja for president of Earth. Agree. I 100% support this because they have done that. They have released movies early in the US. They've released movies on Wednesday in the past. That is not unheard of, right, Jenny? No, it's not unheard of. And I feel like here's the thing that Force Friday brought up, though, which is it's Friday for an awfully long time around the world a whole 24 hours. And someone's always going to get it first. There's a difference between I got it at one o'clock in the afternoon, which is 4 a.m. your time and two days before, though. That is a significant difference. Although I will say that they kept, remember when the Star Trek movies came out? I remember Star Trek into darkness, and they're doing this more and more with the big movies is that they say that it comes out on Friday and then the theaters get all of these advanced things, some of which are as early as Wednesdays. I remember going and buying tickets into darkness for Friday and then finding an earlier screening on Wednesday and being then disappointed because it wasn't a full crowded theater because nobody knew about it. So, you know. Well, yeah, they should make it. They should make it apparent that they're doing early screenings, but they should freaking do early screenings. Yeah, so what I think I'm gonna do is just buy a pair of earplugs that I wear around from Wednesday to Friday afternoon and then just go straight to the theater with just my own personal baggage and no one else's baggage. I'm just gonna eat everything up. Patrick, tell me everything you see. No, I think I'm gonna, I like to live dangerously, but not that dangerous. I mean, I can call you up and tell you directly to you, Tom. I don't think I'll put it out on the internet though. No, I wouldn't make you do that either, but yeah, I'm reading everything I can find about it. I love trying to guess what's gonna happen, but there's a difference between reading rumors that may or may not end up being exactly true and only seeing pieces of the puzzle and seeing the trailer and trying to piece things together. That's fun for me. You're trying to deduce it. It's different to talk to Patrick and say, so does this happen and have him go, yes or no? I would be happy to get a message from that one person in the world who genuinely doesn't care if they get, you know, they're not excited. So they're like, yeah, whatever, tell me what happens. And I'm like, yeah, so the stormtrooper is actually a Jedi. And he's like, oh, I don't care. You know what, just you saying that right now just made somebody cringe involuntarily. That's all that I could feel it in the force. Me, it was me. Because they're like, oh, but what if that's true? Yeah, it's just like saying, what if Yoda comes back? Yeah, it doesn't make sense. You hear me stomping my feet on Tom's ceiling, right? Yes. You're making my light shake. Ah, oh God. And the lighting rig comes crashing down. And that is how we concluded the last ever episode of Baby Techies. That's how we ended, folks. Went out with a bang, literally. But you know, it's really funny that people get so angry at basically me, but France for getting movies a little bit early because it's really rare. It happens maybe for two or three movies every year, maybe a little bit more. But every time it's like, oh, I can't believe that you're getting the movie first. And you're like, especially Scott does that a lot. And I'm like, dude, you get all of the other movies first. What are you talking about? I don't care. I want this one. It's an American movie. There's a difference between seeing Iron Man early, which is like, oh man, you're getting to see it early. That's cool. Wish I could see it early. And freaking Star Wars Force. You're seeing our childhood early, Patrick. I don't know if that's what I signed up for. Our only chance at redemption were the prequels, and you're getting it. You're getting redemption. You're going to heaven two days early. So first of all, there are gonna be a few other movies. I don't know if you're aware. And second of all, you know what the easiest solution to all of this is? Oh, you cut off. We can't hear you, Jenny. Oh, what happened? She muted herself. Who took Jenny's voice? What happened? Jenny, we can't hear you. Just come down. But you know what I'm talking about, Tom, right? You know what the easy solution to all of this is? Move to France? Eggs, well, maybe not move to France, but I'm pretty sure they let you in the theater even if you just chill up a day. Oh, so we should just all vacation in France in December. Yeah, we're coming to France. You go, exactly. Okay, problem solved. It's really not a game screen. It was easy. Yeah, we're coming to France by extra tickets. Yeah, we'll be staying with Patrick. Okay, great. Okay, good, solved. I feel better now. Excellent, me too. Cool, problem solved. All right, thanks everybody. Have a good night.