 For the very first time ever we have been warned that we are only allowed to broadcast for eight hours. Oh, really? Yeah. So no, no nine hour marathons for us. Damn. That eight hour five minute show we've been planning for three years. Yeah, month killed it. Damn it. I really like the conversation just before. So if you're a subscriber, if you're a patron, a patron, just go and check out the full show because it was interesting. It was illuminating. So he brings bacon things we should test that time limit. Maybe that should be a goal, a milestone goal for us. We could do like Jerry's kids kind of telethon-y thing. Eight hours of pot people talking. I think no, I think we should we should do like to make time pass a little bit more easily. We could do a DTNS overwatch marathon where we all play together and we make fun of the people who don't know how to play very well. So you make fun of me? Well, I wasn't going to say. No, but I mean, that is pretty much what you're saying. Well, I wouldn't commit to because I think you pretty clearly know that I'm not very good at that. I mean, I can't confirm. I plead the fifth. How do you know what amendment that is? Actually, was it in Luke Cage, which I haven't seen in its entire piece in the summer? It was, I plead the eighth. Yeah, I plead the fifth. That one of those. That one. That one works. I plead the second. I think you mean the fifth. No, I plead the second. I'm going to carry an arm. Exactly. I plead the first. I get to say whatever I want. Now, I wonder if that would work if you were in the middle of a conversation saying something offensive and people are like. That's not okay to say. I plead the first. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. What's the third? I don't know the third. Or the fourth. Is it an assembly? I should. It's really bad. That's a good question. We know third never gets any attention, does it? It's, I think, I feel bad. Oh, it's the no quartering of soldiers in private homes. That's why. I plead the third, soldier. You will not be quartered in my home. I think if you get into that situation, you'll probably have bigger problems than pleading. I think you start a third amendment's right movement. The framers intended. Okay. What's the fourth? Oh, fourth is unreasonable search and seizure. Okay. That, okay. That does get some play. Interesting that that's number four on the list when they came up with lists. Blisticles in the time of our founding fathers. You're saying the Constitution just turned into a BuzzFeed article at some point. It's actually perfect. BuzzFeed has these long form like deep articles and then listicles. Like they just took their template from the US Constitution. They even, you know, if it was delivered back then, it would have been on a very scrolly paper. Top 10 things we forgot to include in the main text. Yeah. You won't believe the fourth or no, the second. You won't believe the third. Yeah. And then people were debating at the time, like, really? Do you think, like, the third one, what did it really need to be in there? And they were like, don't you remember the top 10 rights you didn't know you had? All right. Yes. Sorry. Let's go. It's time. Here we go. The Daily Tech News Show is powered by you, the audience, not outside organizations. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 4th, 2016. I'm Tom Marin joining me, Patrick Beja, all the way from France. How's it going, Patrick? It's going very well. You know, that pre-show conversation really energized me. It had non-threatening baby animals, pontificating Stephen Hawking, and the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, in the form of a BuzzFeed listicle. It was amazing. I'm going to start fighting for my third amendment rights now as soon as the show is over. You won't believe the third. We have a lot to talk about. Google, of course, had its big announcement today. Well, we'll go into what they announced. But I think Patrick and I are more interested in what these announcements mean about Google's strategy. This is definitely a shift in strategy. And we're having good conversations in the slack about that earlier today. But Yahoo, I think unintentionally, sort of upstaged Google in the middle of those announcements. And we'll get to that in our top story. Reuters reports that two former Yahoo employees and a third source familiar with the matter say that Yahoo built custom software to search incoming email in compliance with a classified directive from either the US NSA or the FBI in 2015. Now, the reason they don't know if it was the NSA or the FBI is often the NSA will have the FBI issue its directives in these sorts of cases. It sounds like the directive came from the FBI, but they don't know if it was on behalf of the NSA. What they did was scan email for a set of characters. Now, that could mean a phrase. It could also mean an attachment file name. It could mean data within an attachment. There was a selector is what they call it in the biz. They were looking for a certain bit of characters. As the messages arrived, they were searched for this string. If the string was matched, it would have been stored for remote retrieval. Now, Reuters could not determine what information was handed over if any was. Yahoo's chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, discovered the program after it was begun under Marissa Meyer's orders in May 2015. He initially and in his team believed the company had been hacked. Now, that is unrelated to the actual hacks that have been discovered around Yahoo. Stamos left Yahoo in June and now works at Facebook, and it looks like we know why. The sources are telling Reuters he was very upset about this, and that is why he left. He has not commented on this. Yahoo has not commented on this either. Yahoo unsuccessfully challenged searches on specific email accounts in 2007, so they tried to defend that. These were more targeted searches saying, we want you to show us what's in an account. Yahoo challenged it. They lost. This time, they chose not to challenge the directive. Apparently, according to the Reuters article again, because they thought they would lose. Upstream data collection based on content has been found legal when it applies to phone carriers, and that's what this is, upstream collection. So you're not going into an account to find an email. You're just asking essentially for a wiretap to say, look for anything that has this phrase in it. If it matches, store it. We'd like to see it. This is a surprising and somewhat confusing story, because it's very easy to fall on both sides of the ideological debate that we've had a million times. I'm not sure this is the place to have it again. But the one thing that is really surprising to me is that in 2015, they decided to just comply. And yes, they thought maybe they would lose, but it seems to me that it's at least unusual for a tech company a year ago to just go ahead and agree with such a wide-ranging search. Because yes, it's upstream and it's the equivalent of a wiretap, but it's a wiretap on the entirety of the messages that come into their servers, which are many. And I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like that's a very wide net to cast. So I don't know how that affects the comparison to a wiretap. But the fact that Yahoo wouldn't even fight it seems very strange to me. It doesn't, it doesn't. In some ways it doesn't seem strange, because they fought a more egregious attempt, which was we want to look at an account. That is a more intrusive attempt rather than a filter. Basically what happened was Yahoo put in HTTPS. And so the NSA couldn't just look at the email traffic coming into Yahoo servers as they could before, because it was encrypted. So they had to get Yahoo to do this. It was the only way. But up until then, up until 2014, when Yahoo encrypted their account, the NSA could have just done this on their own. So they went in with a less targeted situation and said, we just want to have that same upstream tap. I think what does shock me though is not that they wouldn't say, well, you know what, we've lost these legal challenges in the past. We don't think we're going to win this one. Is that they would then say, but, and so we're going to save the money and just give in. You still fight it. I mean, Apple fought against what they thought was an unfair request. Yahoo is being asked to create software here. And so they could have appealed and said, hey, we think this is an undue burden. On the other hand, I guess, if you're really sure you're going to lose, you don't spend the money to appeal. And yet you don't tell your security officer? I mean, that tells you something right there. Yeah. I mean, even if they, the thing is, it's even more on the philosophical standpoint. Maybe they agree. You know, maybe at the top of Yahoo, are people, you know, Marius and I or others who think this is something that should happen. And maybe that explains it. But it's just an oddity in what has become the world of tech in the past few years where they seem to be shifting more towards trying to protect their users' privacy. Because they feel, I mean, it seems like the tech world feels there's been a shift in another extreme, which is not enough privacy and too much surveillance. And at the same time, they shifted to HTTPS for a number of reasons. Maybe it could be argued it's just security and not, you know, when it comes to this. Just good practice, yeah. Right. But doing that and then allowing for the government agency to just cast such a wide net. I mean, again, it could be defended as saying they're just filtering and looking. Once they have a certain piece of content that matches the filter, then they send it. So it's not like the NSA or the FBI is having a look at all of the user's data. So yeah. They're only looking at all of the user's data. They're not keeping it. They're not even reading it and understanding it. They just have a filter on all of your emails. Every single email sent to your Yahoo account. Like, yeah, man, no, I get it. I get it. It's less than reading. It's less than storing. But a lot of people are not going to be okay with that. And I think Alex Stamos would not have been okay with that. And that's why this Reuters article says they didn't tell it. They left him out of it and kind of just hoped he would never discover it. The problem is that Alex Stamos and his team were very good at their job. And so they did find it. Or at least they were good at their job in this case. Yeah. I mean, we only have half of the story, too. The certain set of characters also could cast another light on this. You know, maybe it's just imagination running wild at this point, which maybe we shouldn't be doing. But let's say it was a certain passcode that criminals were using in specific communications to detail some terrorist attack, for example. And it was a specific set of characters that was like a password or something. I don't know. But it was a piece of malware as an attachment that would have been very damaging, right? I mean, we don't think that was it, but we don't know. It's a very good point. I think the most telling piece of this for me is the fact that Alex Stamos quit after this happened and went to Facebook. It tells me something about Facebook. They met Mr. Stamos's measure as far as like, will you not do these kinds of things? Not to say that they'll never do them, but at least he was convinced by them like, no, we hold a standard this high. And it shows a lot about the disarray of Yahoo, desperate to figure things out and keep things from getting out of control in the middle of a sale. We saw that with the 500 million accounts that were accessed, which I think was overblown in that case, because while it was vast, Yahoo is vast. And in other ways, the hack was not materially different than things that have happened at Dropbox and LinkedIn and other places. That said, there are certainly questions about the fact that it happened at a certain point in the middle of an acquisition. And now this, I think this is even more damning that she would circumvent her own security organization in order to comply because she just didn't want the controversy. She, I mean, no matter what side of the issue you're on, if you're a company looking to acquire another company, you're going to wait until this sort of thing is resolved if Yahoo is fighting it before you make an offer. Right. That also could have played a heavy role into it. So anyway, I guess the thing we all agree on is that this is raising a few eyebrows at least. Certainly I'm raising my eyebrow, at least one. Yeah. Well, it's on the eyebrow ranking level. It's one eyebrow. Okay. On the other end of the spectrum, the security spectrum. Like I said, the other eyebrow. I really did. Maybe I should have. Reuters reports that documents unsealed last week show open whisper system received a subpoena earlier this year requesting email addresses, history logs, browser cookie data, and other information associated with two phone numbers of signal messaging app users. The request was part of a grand jury probe in Virginia. The documents show signal was only able to supply the duration of a user's membership. Open Whisper Systems security expert, Moxie Marlin-Spike, said it is the first subpoena that the company has received. So an entirely different situation in comparison with Yahoo today. Now becomes a little compare and contrast. What signal does is end to end encrypts everything and doesn't hold the key. So they can't do what Yahoo did. They're like, we could scan all day long. All we're going to see is encrypted traffic. We're not going to see anything. And so all we can tell you is the user signed up on this day. And that's it. That's all the information we have. And if they close their account, we can tell you that too or we can tell you whether it's still active. That's all. They have set their system up. Open Whisper Systems has set their system up such that it's just not in their hands to hand this data over. I wonder how there's the story. Is it Brazil where they want WhatsApp to deliver some information? It's like a ping-pong game, right? There'll be one judge who doesn't quite get this and say, well, we're going to suspend you or find you. And then another judge goes, well, hold on. They physically can't give you this information. We're not going to make them do that. But yeah, it's happened like three times in Brazil. Yeah. And in this case, it seems at least that, well, Open Whisper Systems is saying we just don't have it. So I wonder if this will have a different kind of repercussions as well because I don't think we've had many cases where the request was made and a company that was using heavy encryption has actually said, well, we don't have anything. So you can ask, but we can't provide it. So the other thing here is this is a grand jury probe. This is not a surveillance secret court order national security letter. It's none of that. This is out in the open. A grand jury issued the thing. And that's why Open Whisper Systems can actually comment on this. I think it's very interesting that Moxie Marlin Spike was able to say this is the first subpoena the company has received. Now granted, subpoena is different than national security letters. So I mean, they haven't been approached in other ways, but that is important. Japan's NHK has created a 1 millimeter thick 130 inch 8k display. What they did was took 65 inch 4k OLED panels, put four of them together. They're from LG display, LG display panels to make this 8k display. They also had to mount them on a 1 millimeter thick board, doubling the thickness, Patrick, from 1 millimeter to 2 millimeters. But in the end, it does play video at 7680 by 4320. So 8k at 60 frames per second prototype was developed for research purposes. They're showing it off at SeaTac in Japan. NHK demonstrated 8k broadcast during the real Olympics this summer, if you remember. And they're hoping to have regular 8k broadcast by 2018 because they definitely want to do the Tokyo Olympics in 8k in 2020. This is so first of all, the screen. Do we not have 8k screens, even prototypes at this point? I thought 8k was almost good. We've had some 8k screens, probably just not quite this big or thin maybe. Sorry, you're silenning out for me, so I hope I'm not for you. I said we have had them before, but maybe not this big. Okay, so the thing is they have a very visible line in the middle in both axes. So it's not quite as impressive as you might think, but 8k is to me. The more I look at 4k, the more I'm wondering if 8k is really got to be a thing. Because 4k is already hard to discern when you're close enough. Do you think, I mean, that just begs the question again for me, is 8k really going to be something other than a demonstration, a technical mastery demonstration for the Olympics that no one is really going to use this? I don't know, it's like too much. I wonder what the 8k use case will end up being. What I remember was when 4k came out, a lot of people said, doesn't look that much better. I can't really see it. And there were a few people, including Sharif Sark from Engadget, who said, dude, skip 4k, let's just go right to 8k because he had seen an 8k demonstration and said the beauty of 8k is you can tell the difference when you walk up to it. You can make bigger screens at high resolution, but you can also, it's almost like looking at paper. You can walk right up to the thing and see detail that you can't see definitely in 1080 and certainly not 4k. HDR came along and made 4k viable. People say it's not the 4k itself. It's the fact that 4k makes HDR a viable difference to see like these crisp colors and true blacks and all of that sort of thing. So I wonder what 8k will make possible. I mean, obviously you can zoom in on an 8k screen and see an amazing detail, but I don't think that's enough to answer your questions. It's going to be some way they're able to put that resolution to use, not simply the resolution itself. That's interesting. I didn't really think of it that way that you actually have. I mean, people are not going to get up in their living room and go look at the screen. Not after the first day that they get the TV for sure. But maybe there are other use cases. Yeah. What is that resolution going to make possible that we weren't able to do before or maybe haven't even thought of before? Yeah, magnifying glasses. 2020 Olympics. The 2020 Olympics are not that far off, so it maybe, you know, I mean, I already have my 2020 Olympics t-shirt that I bought at the airport in Japan, so. You do? Yeah, I do. Actually, about the Paralympic t-shirt, to be honest. But does it come in 8k? It did. It came in all the k because it was a real object, so I can see every pixel. All right. Well, let's move on to Lenovo CEO, John Franco Lanci, who said, the company does not intend to release any new Windows 10 phones. Speaking at the Canalist Channel Forum, Lanci said, I am not convinced Microsoft is supporting the phone for the future. He did say, however, Windows 10 is doing well in the business world on the desktop. And let's be honest, we're only noting this because it's a milestone, right? It's a mile marker. It doesn't shock you, does it? So no, it doesn't shock me, but I think it's interesting that manufacturers are now stating the unspoken truth of the mobile phone world, which is, it seems like Microsoft is actually not even supporting the Windows 10 phone platform anymore. And if Lanci is saying this as the CEO of Lenovo, which is a huge manufacturer, it probably means that it's a kind way of saying, no, even Microsoft has told me they're not planning to support it in any way. And yes, we knew it. But the fact that they're saying it publicly now, a manufacturer is saying it like that, makes me look back at the journey of Windows Phone. And how many times has it been a, I mean, Windows 10 on the phone? Are you guys getting a little dusty in there for you when you look back at the journey of the Windows Phone? It's getting, I'm seeing all the bumps in the road. And I'm wondering, I'm wondering, you know, how much Microsoft ever really wanted it, I guess. I think they did, but it's just, I don't know, they moved on, now it's a new Microsoft. And I think they don't really look at Windows on the phone as, I'm even wondering how much they're looking at it in the context of Continuum and the use in the workplace. I think they'll come up with some kind of mobile platform, because they haven't given up on tablets. I think what Nadella might be doing is saying, let's just rip up the past. Let's let that just fade out and we'll start over with something else. I'll be curious to see what that ends up being. Yeah, thanks to all those who participate. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, here is what Google announced. 5-inch Pixel and 5.5-inch Pixel XL. These are OLED phones that have Google Assistant built in, and you can access it by long pressing the home button or speaking a keyword. They played up their camera, which is the new way of differentiating a smartphone, is to talk about how great your camera is. They claim that DXO Mark has rated it the best camera ever made by anyone. Shots fired, Apple and Samsung. By the way, on that DXO Mark thing, when they were saying this, I think everyone in the world went to the DXO mobile website. For those who are wondering, yeah, the Galaxy Note 7, I believe is one point below or two points below, and I believe they haven't tested the iPhone 7 Plus yet. You can get the pixels in 32 or 128 gig versions. USPC comes on both. They made a point of mentioning that a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack comes on both. Four gigs of RAM in both. The specs are basically the same, except for the size of the screen. They're also throwing in free unlimited photo and video storage. 24-7 live customer support, a la what Amazon was trying to do with their fire phone. You can get it in quite black, very silver, really blue. Really blue is a limited color, though. It's the actual name for those who don't know. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not just making that up. That is what they recall. In the United States, it'll be exclusive to Verizon, or you can buy it unlocked and get Google's Project Fi service for it. Here's the thing. A lot of people reacted very negatively to this price point. Patrick, $649 or $27.04 a month up to, for the top level, 5.5-inch phone with 128 gigs, $869 pre-order day in US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. So a lot of people are saying, well, yeah, okay, that's about the same as an iPhone. It's actually cheaper than a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, but we expect cheaper phones from Google. Well, so I think people, I think this is a momentous change in Google's strategy. In this conference, there were two main points, and the first one was this phone. I think it's a fantastic move on Google's part because they are, the problem with the cheap Google phones was that they were sort of introducing confusion in the marketplace for Android. If you wanted, you know, if you were one of the people who cares about the technology and you just want a good Android phone and you think, well, I want the pure Google experience, you would be tempted to go the Nexus route, which are excellent phones for the price, but they're not the best phones you can get, right? The best phones would be some of the Samsung or maybe even LG, these kinds of phones. And yes, people are used to having cheaper phones from Google with the Nexus brand, but that's only because that's what they've been doing until now. And nowadays, you have other manufacturers like Huawei with the Honor line and things like that, that provide excellent devices at that price range, which are, you know, almost premium phones at the price of a mid-range phone. And what's happening now is that Google is realizing and thinking in order for us to provide a premium experience with Android, we need to be in control of the software and the hardware. And they are creating a package, which I believe, and maybe that's my preference for the Apple proposition speaking there, but I believe they're creating a package that is a clear decision for people who want a great Android phone and don't want to have to deal with the issues that come with another manufacturer's, you know, UI improvements, I put that between quotes and all of that. So on the Google side, it's a change in philosophy saying, we need to design the entire package. And for the customers, it's an easy choice. Now, if you want a great Android phone, you take the brand one, the Google one and you have what you wanted. Yeah, the question, a couple of things there. One is they are very much taking a page from Apple. Who was taking a page from Alan Kay at Xerox Park on the theory of integrating hardware and software? But Google was up there echoing both Kay and Jobs saying, hardware and software, the intersection of these, this is what we do now. So that is a big shift for Google. Google is doing more than what they did with the Nexus. If you don't realize with the Nexus, Google apparently what they say is they would come in after the phone was 90% done and have some input. Now, Google is not only beginning this thing from the start saying, this is what we want, but they are managing the inventory. They are building the relationships with carriers. They are sourcing components, making supply chain deals, managing distribution. HTC is assembling the Pixel phones, but they are not manufacturing them the way they did the Nexus or the way that Huawei did the Nexus. And you don't see their name anywhere. Yeah, they are assembling them the way Foxconn assembles the Apple iPhone. Right. So I think this is a really, and the thing is for the people who wanted cheaper phones from Google, you do, that's the great advantage of the Android ecosystem. You do have that alternative. There are phones that are at that old Nexus price range that are available. But when you're talking about the true Android experience, I think Google is the one that is going to deliver it. And if you want the true real thing, I think it's good. I think it's an advantage to have a real premium phone, even if it comes with the premium price. Yeah. Now, here's the thing. The difference with an Apple situation is if you want an iPhone and you want iOS, you have to buy it from Apple. With Google, if you want a Pixel, you have to buy it from Google. If you want Android, though, okay, and Nougat 7.1 is only available on the Pixel 4 now. But you can still get Nougat 7.0 from lots of other phones. And you've got loads of other Android phones, which is, I think, part of this price-perception reaction, which is like, hey, the OnePlus is a lot cheaper. Freaking, some of the old Nexus's are a lot. The 6P is cheaper. And these specs are really close. You mentioned the Honor. Like you have a lot more to choose from that is perceived as, on the software side, pretty much equivalent. So what Google was trying to do was differentiate it on the Google Assistant, saying, we're the first phone to have Google Assistant built in. We have it integrated. It's long press from the home button. You can do all these great things with it. And we're going to introduce the Google Home, which is a device very much like the Amazon Echo that also has the Assistant built in. And if you have a Pixel phone and the Google Assistant built into Google Home, suddenly those are going to play nicely with each other and your shopping list will show up easily on your Pixel phone. Oh, by the way, we're going to introduce the Daydream View as well. That works only with the Pixel out of the gate. Yeah, it will work with other phones now. But they're trying to introduce this ecosystem that says it's not the same as buying a Samsung Galaxy S7. It's not the same as buying a Nexus 6P even. This is a phone that gives you more because we have differentiated the AI. And they talked a lot about AI and machine learning. I think this is the other huge aspect of this. It's not even this conference, but it's the trend that had been going on for a while, but that was very much accelerated by the success of the Amazon Echo, which surprised a lot of people. I think everyone thought it would be a blip somewhere in the radar. And not only has it been successful, but it has basically shown how important the AI and virtual assistants are going to be in the future. I can't remember if it was on this show that we were talking about this, but saying that paradigm shifts come from unexpected places. And the masters of technology in the 90s were basically Microsoft because they owned the main UI, the way humans interfaced with computers at that time, which was the Windows operating system. In the 2000s, that main interaction sort of shifted in a way to the web. And Google owns the web, so they have that main... If your product is how people interface with computers and technology, then you own that world. And of course, you still use computers and things like that, but it's important to have the main central hub. Again, we shifted to smartphones, and that wasn't expected. And I think a lot of people are thinking the next shift is going to be virtual assistants and AI in general. Of course, at this stage, it's goofy, it's scripted, and it doesn't work as well as the promise, but at some point it will. And at that point, it will constitute at least parts of your interaction with your devices and with computers. And that supersedes Google the homepage, because if you're talking to your phone, whoever owns that piece of the chain owns where they direct you. And the really big thing that Amazon showed with the Echo is that it's not only going to be on the phone, and they talked about this ad nosium during the conference. They showed the Google Home, the TV, the phone, everything, and basically the disembodied voice of the AI that serves as your interpreter to make computers do their thing. It's going to be everywhere in a few years. I mean, we're still at the very beginning, but this is the huge trend I think everyone agrees is going to materialize in the next few years, and whoever owns that is going to be the next Google, the next Microsoft, the next whatever. So this is why you see Google pushing it so much, Amazon pushing the Echo as well, Apple reportedly developing a kind of Amazon Echo themselves and Cortana and all of those. Yeah, by the way, bringing up Apple is silly because they have no product, but they do have Siri, so there's a possibility, and I guess they have Siri on the Apple TV. Microsoft, closer, also a little bit silly though, Cortana is in your Xbox and it's in your Windows machine, not quite the same. Really, it was just Amazon who had this device in your home and they could sell dots to you in 12 packs. Google just stepped up and said, hey, our Google home is 129 bucks. That's $30 cheaper. I think it's $30 cheaper, maybe more, maybe $60 cheaper. It's cheaper than the Amazon Echo, the full version. This has a speaker built in. It's going to come with a six month free trial for YouTube Red, so you got some music in it. It's shipping November 4th, by the way, pre-order today in the US. It's going to work with SmartThings, with Nest, with Philips Hue, with Ift. So it's on par with Amazon Echo. What they tried to argue was, but because it has Google behind it, we can do things that Amazon can't. Amazon has been working with Search with A9 and certain things for a while, so they can do some fancy tricks. But Google can bring in its whole knowledge graph, all its machine learning, all its voice recognition, all its text-to-speech technology, and do things in a more conversational way. They argue, and we'll have to see once we get one of these things in our hands, but they argue that this can be a more natural conversation and a richer conversation because of being powered by Google Search on the back end. And I think you're sort of... I mean, I would disagree that the others don't have that product, because the real... They don't have this product. That's all I'm saying. Well, yeah, but that's not the product. There is no Microsoft or Apple device like the Amazon Echo or the Google Home. But that's my point. That's not the product. That almost doesn't matter, and it's interesting that they're... This is only the materialization of the real product, which is the virtual assistant, which is what they were selling. Today, I can use Amazon to be my hub. I can use Google Home to be my hub starting in November. I really can't use the others yet. No, but that's a blip. That's all I'm saying. They can do it in two months. It doesn't matter. Yeah, no, I know. And when they do, then that will be them stepping up. I'm just pointing out this is the second step up. Right. And what I'm saying, though, is that they have all been doing the work to make all of this possible, because whether or not you have one device in your living room that speaks and listens, it doesn't matter if you don't have the work, you know, the machine learning and the speech recognition and the picture recognition that you can then put anywhere. But let me say, because I get that, let me say, does Google have enough of an advantage with its knowledge graph, et cetera, being top search dog for decades now, that it will be appreciably different once we do have all the competitors in the arena? Well, that is the big question. And that, to me, matters a lot more. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure who has the best one yet. I think we're too early in the game for it to really matter at this point, because no matter which one is the best, they're still all a little bit clumsy, right? They don't quite answer exactly what you want when you want it. I think if they're all working towards that, and it's important that they all are, because when they want to put it in your car, in your little earpiece that you have, why you're less because you don't have a phone jack on your phone, a jack on your phone anymore, or your watch, or all of this lives elsewhere, anywhere. The hardware is just a little piece of metal and silicon that beams it down from. I think you're right, eventually, that these things don't become necessary. These are sort of the Trojan horses that get everybody to experiment and try them. The other thing is to get all the things to work. So Chromecast Ultra, $69 in November, 4K HDR, Dolby Vision was announced. That's basically just them saying, hey, we're going to have a 4K version of the Chromecast if you're getting a 4K TV. You can do HDR, you can do Dolby. It's even got an ethernet port in the power adapter, because 4K takes a lot of data, a pretty clever trick. But the big point is our Google Assistant through Google Home can control those Chromecasts. So if you put a Chromecast audio on your speakers, you can just tell Google Home to play your music on that speaker. If you have Chromecast on your TV, you can say, and they showed this, because they're so conversational, play the latest Katy Perry video on my living room TV. And it will do that. So Google's trying to argue that if you play in their ecosystem, you can just have a conversation. And Google Assistant will know everything you're talking about. And I want to add on to that, Google Assistant SDK is going to come out in December for something called Actions on Google that will allow you as a developer to integrate Assistant on third-party hardware and implement either a direct action like turn on the lights or a conversation where you can say like, who is the president of the United States in 1860? And then go back and forth on things like that. Yeah. And this is, it's really interesting too, because it allows them to expand the capabilities of their Assistant. And I hope they had spent a little bit more time on this instead of some other things that you're the president of. The other, we mentioned briefly the Daydream View that's coming in November for $79. It's cloth. I think that's a really interesting competitor to the Gear VR or the cardboard, both of which are somewhat uncomfortable. It just uses NFC to connect to the phone. And it's available in slate, although they say snow and crimson colors are coming later. So it is affordable at $79 headset that is among all of these mobile headsets that are saying, hey, you don't want to spend a lot of money on a new computer in an Oculus or an HTC Vive. You can still enjoy some good VR and they showed off some games and videos and Netflix and Hulu and stuff are going to be in there. And then Google Wi-Fi, which is their mesh Wi-Fi network competitor that's $129 per unit, or you can get a three pack for $299. This works like an Eero up for pre-order in November shipping in December that will let you automatically create a mesh network in your house that adjusts to you as you walk around. Daydream View sort of tangential to some of this other stuff where it's sort of saying we're taking our toes into VR and we'll bring that into the tent once it catches on. Google Wi-Fi is saying, hey, if you're going to have Google Home and you're going to have all these Google Home things in all the rooms of your house and all these Chromecasts, you're going to have to have better Wi-Fi coverage so we'll sell you that too. Yeah, it's a little bit of a nod product to be creating for Google, but okay, why not? And because they need all of them to be on the same Wi-Fi network, maybe? Or I don't know. The one thing that was missing, though, was the very heavily rumored tablet with the Andromeda OS. And that they went, just when we were expecting them to talk about it, they were like, and we're done. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Boom. Yeah, which makes me wonder if there was a little NDA moment. After that live stream ended. Nothing has leaked out yet. Let me check my feeds. But they definitely said, now, for the people on the live stream, goodbye. Now, all it could have been was, for those of you in the hall, you'll get to put your hands on these. We've got the devices over here. That might have been all they said. I'm just stoking the conspiracy theories when I say there was something else. But yeah, I don't see anything else leaking yet. By the way, another footnote to this, Google hired David Foster Monday, not the composer, the VP of product engineering from Amazon. I'm sorry. He was a developer at Amazon. He is now the VP of product engineering at Google. He worked in the lab that developed the Kindle, the Kindle Fire. He worked on the Echo. He worked on the Zoom HD back at Microsoft. This is a guy who's worked on lots of products. So they're bringing in a little Amazon. They poached from Amazon to get somebody to work in this space. It looks like he's going to be working on the phones, no, not on Google Home. But all of them have basically a lot of the same competing products. They all have something that connects to your TV, something that on your computer, on the phone. They have very similar offerings, all of them now. All right. We're going to introduce a new segment to Daily Tech News Show today, instead of Pick of the Day. Not the Pick of the Day is going away. We'll still have it when we have good picks. But we're going to introduce Thought of the Day from Patrick. Amazon Game Studios, as we mentioned last week, announced its first titles and they announced deep integration into Twitch. So if you miss that, if you're playing the game and you're a Twitch streamer, you can put in some real-time stat overlays. You can invite followers to play. You can set up viewer polls, allow match wagering, using the new stream plus currency, all from within the game. It's all integrated into the game. And Patrick, you've got a theory about this. So basically, I think this, along with the Twitch Prime offering, which I'm sure you discussed as well, which gives perks if you subscribe to Twitch in a premium offer, which is basically it comes in with Amazon Prime. Are the two reasons, I think, why Amazon bought Twitch? And those are, first of all, you get a huge bet on eSports. And that might seem obvious when looking at it from here, but it was two years ago that they bought Twitch. And they're betting that eSports are going to be enormous, which we're seeing materialized now with the different sports teams buying eSports team and such. And they are trying to encourage this by making games evolve from, we had single player, multiplayer broadcasting, and now interaction in games with the audience, which makes it that more engaging. And the other thing is getting, padding, the Amazon Prime offering with the Twitch Prime makes Amazon Prime so appealing that I think it means a good portion of the Twitch audience, the engaged Twitch audience, is being converted to Amazon customers. And that makes the Amazon Prime offer incredibly, you know, it's almost, I can't remember who was saying this, but someone was saying it's almost financially irresponsible to not be an Amazon Prime subscriber. And I would say that's a joke. There's so many doorways into it, right? Like, there's the free shipping. So if you buy anything on Amazon, that could be worth it. Then there's the television and movie streaming service, if you want to watch Transparent or the tick when it finally comes out, Man in the High Castle, that makes it worth it. Then now there's Twitch and there's the Kindle Unlimited Library, like they've put so many doors on this building. But there's what? Music. And the Amazon music. Yeah, not terribly compelling. You know, you're not going to do it just for that, but it's certainly something that's like, oh, well, I have Prime. Now it might as well, maybe I'll take advantage of this music service. And none of them are incredibly compelling. I mean, video is not as compelling as Netflix, for sure, but you get all of them and they're still half the... Well, you seem to be hesitating. I think the shipping is compelling on its own. I think that the movie and TV is close to compelling on its own. In fact, that's why they now offer it on its own if you don't want to have it as part of anything else. And all of them are half the price of the Netflix subscription and you get all of them. You get goodies in the game. So it sort of completes their offering of having advantages for every part of your life is becoming better. Of course, I'm hyperbole here a little bit, but every part of your life, of your entertainment life and shopping life is better if you have an Amazon Prime. And the bet on eSports is just two pillars of a reason that makes buying Twitch completely reasonable when it was a little bit puzzling back then. All right. Well, thank you, Patrick Beja, for your thoughts. And we'll see, this is kind of cool, a cool way to follow up on a story and get a little more context from it. So hopefully we'll do this again. Let folks know where they can find more of what you got going on. You can go to Frenchspin.com and download or subscribe to Pixels, not to be confused with any movie or any phone from Google. It's, I was there first. So Pixels is a show about video games and we just recorded one with our good friend Garrett Winesroll and we discussed everything about this big move towards eSports in sports and in Amazon and we discussed Forza Horizon 3, which is apparently a fantastic racing game and a bunch of other things. If you like video games and want news about gaming, Pixels is the show for you. Thank you, folks, for supporting us. DailyTechnewshow.com slash support tells you all the ways you can support us. And the main one is Patreon. I just want to thank Melissa Johnson for upping her pledge. You are the best. And also a brand new pledge from Adrian Pratt. You guys are fantastic. Thank you for supporting the show. Thanks to everybody who's been supporting the show at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. AlphaGeekRadio.com and DiamondClub.tv are the places to see us. And our website is DailyTechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson and Donald Bell talking about maker stuff. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. DiamondClub hopes you have enjoyed this program. Oh, that's a new one for Frog Pants. That's hot off the press. I just got that from Scott last night. We went a little bit long. I'm sorry. Who used to do the CTR podcast? Oh. Yeah, I'm sorry. We went a little bit long. You know, I figured we were going to go along with all the Google stuff. So I don't mind at all. And I think the Amazon conversation ended up being really good, too. More than just, not that I didn't expect it to be good, but I thought it might be a quick like, Hey, here's Patrick's thought. That's really interesting. And then we engendered a little more conversation there. So I thought that was great. Excellent. Titles. Oh, titles. All the pixels. Is that what you want? Oh, it's the one I like. I don't get nitpickling. Is it a play on the word? Like nitpicking? When you're nitpicking at something. All right. I think I see you might be accusing us of nitpicking the pixels. Well, you know, it's interesting because they use DXO mark. And that's one of those things that it's not, it's not that camera, camera heads are against it, but it sometimes paints an unrealistic picture because it measures the sensitivity, but doesn't measure the entire image quality from the lens on down to the actual image product. Oh, really? Yeah. It measures the sensitivity of the sensor, which is great, which is what you want. But it's like measuring like, Hey, the engine in my car puts out 500 horsepower, but it doesn't tell you what kind of transmission it goes through. Or, you know, whether or not you have ball tires, you know, I mean, there's an, it's an entire, you know, it's entire mechanism of which the center is one part. Right, right. So all the pixels and nitpickling are both at five. Tom gives people's eyebrow. Oh, gives the people's eyebrow. I think that's a rock reference. The people's eyebrow. 8K because it does not sound like the F bomb. It's not like 4K. Okay, I get it. Third amendment. You got to fight for your rights. Oh, wait, you don't like Google. We're home. Google, we're home. Like Chewy, we're home. You know, I have a thing against, I won't go into it. All right. Google, all the things. Lenovo says Windows support is micro, soft. Pixel, I was there first. Actually, I like all the pixels. It's pretty good. I think we all like all the pixels. Should we just go with that one? Yes. Let's. It sounds like a political thriller, too. Like all you zombies. Or like a, is it Blink 182? A Blink 182 song. All the pixels. All the pixels. Episodes are available. Well, they're no longer available. Frenchman.com. All right, they are. They're still a band, but what's his name is no longer part of it. You showed a phone and I thought it was cool. By the way, we are counter-programming right now to the afternoon attack. Night attack because Justin Robert Young is in England, Mary Old England is on right now in the afternoon. So if you're watching DiamondTheClub.tv live, why are you looking at me? Go watch Night Attack. Or afternoon attack. Night attack. Day edition. Got to flash those diamonds in the chat room. It was so cool having Brian and Justin here last week. That was really fun. I'm looking forward to Patrick coming in November. Oh, are we doing the live coverage of the election? Oh, right. Well, you're not coming out here for that. No, I'll be back in Europe. Or staying out here, I guess. Yeah. As far as I know, I would like to. All the coverage of the election. Hopefully it'll be like a hanging chad situation. A what? Hanging chad. Yeah, we'll keep guy named Chad hanging outside. He's the last one to hold. When Gore and Bush, they had to recount Florida and the hanging chads were the things where they couldn't tell whether a vote was okay. Who did you vote for? We can't tell. Although someone did. Someone made a very a just joke. He was complaining about like all those voters, all those seniors, they know how to play bingo and they get it right, but they can't figure out how to vote. Usually that kind of thing isn't a problem because you have so many votes. But since we have the Electoral College, it ended up being a problem because the popular vote didn't matter. And that's when I gave up on the Electoral College ever being changed. Because even after that election, people were like, nope, we love it. Like the Imperial metric system, the Imperial system over metric. Well, it's no longer, it's not even really Imperial either. It's a offshoot of the Imperial system. Since an Imperial gallon is slightly larger. That's right. It's the American Imperial system. Well, it's the standard. We call it standard. It's standard, Tom. Just remember, we went to the moon six times on it. Yeah. Remember when we lost a thing on Mars because of it? Good thing that didn't happen more than it was. It wasn't, is it our American scientists using the Imperial system? There, yes. Sometimes. But when the way I understand it is they typically work in metric. Yes. Until they need to. But some things are provided from third parties in feet or inches. And then they, if they don't remember to convert, then you lose something on Mars. Your probe is destroyed. Oh, it's just the probe. Yeah. All right. I'm going to go. All right. Yep. We're going to go too. Thanks everybody for watching. We'll see you later.