 Quality content thrives through the support of those who benefit from its creation. If you gain value from The Daily Tech News Show, consider joining others like me who provide support. Learn how to help at DailyTechNewsShow.com. This is The Daily Tech News Show for Monday, December 26th, Boxing Day 2016. I'm Tom Merritt. Hope you're having a fantastic holiday if you're celebrating these holidays. Welcome to our Best of 2016 End of Year episode. Today's episode is a production of Mr. Roger Chang, our producer. He had the idea of taking clips that you all picked, and if you didn't pick them, it's your own fault for not sending us a suggestion, but we got some great suggestions from people out there on the best discussions they heard on The Daily Tech News Show this year. You guys picked some excellent discussions. Like I said, we've got some interview segments in there as well. These are just as enjoyable now as they were when they were originally recorded. You think we just took your suggestions and implemented them. So we've got five of them here. We hope you can sit back and enjoy. Maybe you missed some of these, so it'll be a highlight reel. We start with Justin's insightful comments on and tribute to the late great Prince from episode 2741. Prince passed away very sad day and people outpouring as they did with David Bowie, as they often do on the internet, very sad at the loss of a musical icon, one of the best guitarists in history. It's an interesting reaction from the internet. Now, Prince was a trailblazer along with David Bowie. He was the first to release an album exclusively online. If you remember back in 2007, he gave away two million copies of his album Planet Earth. He was very contentious with the music groups and on the side of the listener. But that started to change in the mid-2000s. He sued Pirate Bay. He was known for sending aggressive cease and desist, not only to YouTube, but sometimes to fan sites. He, in fact, famously declared the internet dead in 2010 and then later clarified, well, I just meant that the internet was dead for making money on music. And he announced in August that his next album was going to be exclusive to Jay-Z's title. So the news came this morning that Prince is dead at age 57. It is interesting to me to note, Justin, that the internet did not respond with any of these more negative facts, but they responded with nothing but sadness, love, and appreciation for the man's music. Certainly so. Prince was a tremendous figure, not only for the community that now populates the internet's chattering class, but also in a lot of the popular culture. I mean, Prince kind of had this everlasting quality, but let's... Yeah, I want to talk about this a little more. Big thanks to Jason Phil, Frans Games, Loki Robert, all those folks who submitted things we used from our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. That is a look at the headlines. But before we get into our main discussion, I want to talk just a little bit more about this because this is something where you are going and what people do when someone passes away and they're a musician is they find the music and they try to listen to it. They post videos on Twitter and Facebook. It is much more difficult to do that because of Prince's aggressive takedown policies. You can't find as much of his music. There isn't that much on Spotify. A lot of the videos that you find on YouTube have been taken down because of copyright claims, but no one's focusing on that. And I think that is a very un-internet like. They're being very forgiving. And as always whenever these kind of discussions come up, you have to be understanding of what is the internet and what is what we expect from the people for which we follow and read on the internet. And very often there are those elements of a hashtag well actually that will kind of bring up the lesser parts of them. There is no doubt that Prince's reaction to the internet, I think is one of the few elements of his legacy that I think will not stand the test of time. He was somebody that really through his creative prime, when we talk about everlasting cool with Prince, you have to understand that there was a huge dark spot wherein he very publicly, by way of changing his name to a symbol, had a fight, a knock-down drag-out who has rights to what fight with his label, where he very literally took his ball and went home. I mean this is one of the biggest creative forces of his era, making a gigantic stand for something that he believed in. So as time moved on and the record companies as they were began to decline in relevancy, I'm extrapolating here based on second-hand sources, but I believe Prince looked at the internet as, okay well I've defeated or I have learned to not trust the massive conglomerate thief, but that does not mean that I trust the many-faced thief of the internet. The one thing that was constant for him was keeping control of his own work, so he could sell it the way that he wanted to sell it. Now that is something that I think as we go forward will prove to be, if not wrong-headed, something that was unlike Prince, which is progressive, something that he caught a wave on. However, you got the sense that he was warming to the idea of different ways for people to experience his art. He very much wanted to be supportive of title. He did the concert out in Baltimore to help bolster that specific service. Now did that ultimately help title? Probably not, and we will see where that specific company goes, but I mean it's going to be very very very trite today to say, well it would have been amazing if Prince continued on, but I think as far as his legacy amongst the digerati, there was really nowhere to go up but up, and he always seemed to be somebody that was revising and thinking of different and new ways, and I think he would have become more internet-friendly than I think he did if he looked at it as just a den of thieves that was just yet somebody else who was looking to take his content without his say. Yeah, he was someone who was dedicated to his music, such that he didn't care whether you were a millionaire or someone in your bedroom. He wanted you to respect his music, and I think that was the common ground behind both the fights that you're talking about. So it is a missed opportunity that we will not see him finally be able to get to the point where he resolves all of this tension, which I think you're right, I think he was moving towards that. He hadn't got there yet, and of course obviously, I mean the guy was cranking out music like crazy at a high level of quality, and that will be missed as well. At least the beauty of technology is that his music is preserved for us to enjoy. And really what is amazing about Prince is that there is a lot, and everybody will say a lot, and rightfully so, about both he and Bowie's creativity and originality, that they were people who followed their own vision and marched through their own beat, and that is great. And that should be said a million and a half times, but here's what I want anybody who is sad about Prince to think about today. What separated those two from a million different people who had different ideas about what music should sound like, and what fashion should be like, and what sexuality paradigms we should be affecting, is that they went out and did stuff. They were prolific artists, they were workers, and the element of the internet that I think cottons to him is that we now have the tools to make things on the scale of which he worked his career to build. He built Paisley Park so we could record whenever he wanted. He was built for the internet age in terms of construction. So if you're sad about Bowie, you're sad about Prince, which I think so many people are, then make something today. Follow your heart and don't think about it. Don't imagine yourself to be this creative third-way walker. Actually take those steps and do something. That's, I think, the legacy that he should have. Well put, well put. And one post note, if you're just listening to the audio podcast, as I know most of you are, maybe pop in to the video podcast around 26, 27 minutes. And just note the lighting tribute that Justin did during this discussion. Darren Kitchen has always been a vocal supporter of encryption and privacy, and he lays out some excellent reasons in this clip from episode 2693. So we're going to run through these. Basically I'm going to read a point from somebody, and I've edited these down to make them very salient to what their point of the e-mailer is. And Darren and I are going to kick each one around. You ready to go, Darren? I am so ready, because you're right. This is probably the biggest tech crypto important story about government control, and that since what? The crypto wars of the 90s. This is hugely important. We start off with Rob from Damascus, Maryland, pointing out that the iPhone 5C is owned by San Bernardino County. That has been reported in many different places. He says, my employer, which is a big tuck company, issued me an iPhone. If the FBI wanted to access it legally, they could speak to my employer, and with proper legal documents, they'd use their MDM, their mobile device management software, to unlock it and provide whatever they were required to. There's a very serious, and he says common, failing on the part of San Bernardino County to probably manage their technical assets if it were a bring-your-own-device situation that would be different, but it's not. Darren, do you think it's on the county a little bit for not having properly implemented MDM? What? Do you mean the government messed up that almost never happens, that we should pass a law that makes it illegal for the government to mess up in this way? Let's forget about the government side of it at this point, because it's easy to take potshots at the government. This is a small organization that bought phones for its employees but didn't apparently provide any kind of management of those devices, and small organizations. That's not uncommon. Here's the thing. They're really the only thing to say in this regard, because hindsight is 20-20, but this is just embarrassing. MDM, ActiveSync, those aren't very difficult technologies to implement, and even if it's a bring-your-own-device kind of situation, you can still apply the same things, and it's probably a good idea too, because your employees are going to be using these devices to do work-related stuff, and if they leave the organization, you want to be able to control your assets. I think this speaks more to how the industry has some ways to go as far as providing, making it more accessible for any organization, big or small, to have access to those sorts of tools. But yeah, it's definitely kind of like one of those, like looking back, hindsight's 20-20, it's like, ouch, had they just had MDM on there. Also, that's why I always bought my own devices when I worked for companies, because it was mine. And I wouldn't be surprised if we saw proposed legislation statewide or federal, otherwise, mandating this sort of stuff across the board, because yeah, I mean, there's no reason why it shouldn't be done. Mike wrote in, he's a law enforcement officer, and said, I may be misunderstanding, but it seems that the government is not asking Apple to break their encryption, but simply asking Apple to not prevent them from breaking the encryption on one single phone. It seems to me that Apple can create a custom version of iOS that only works on this one specific phone, and in this one specific instance, this is far from a master key, and in reality has no effect on any other iPhone in the world. The encryption and protection against brute force in my iPhone is in no way affected by these actions. Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference, but I don't believe so. People who are opposing this court order are essentially saying that they no longer agree with the Fourth Amendment, and that you have an unbreakable right to privacy in all instances, no matter what. That's simply not the case. By choosing to commit crimes, you are essentially gambling with your rights. The more heinous the crime, the more you gamble. I think this is a perfectly fair position to take to say, look, if this isn't going to affect anything but this phone, this is court ordered, there's a clear crime in case. Why shouldn't Apple cooperate with this? And to Mike, love you, love the Leos, but I feel like it's a little bit playing semantics here, and don't trump the terrorist card here. The Fourth Amendment thing is out the window anyway because the person is dead, so that doesn't apply. Well, but the FBI has a search warrant, right? So it doesn't matter if the suspect is dead or not, they have the right to search this phone. Sure, but using this one specifically, and they absolutely have that now. They can do that now. The only problem is that after 10 attempts, it's going to delete itself. Here's the thing, this isn't one particular instance. This isn't just one phone, and what we're talking about here is the lockout feature. It's a security feature, just like encryption is a security feature. And believe me, if the FBI knew that it could just ask for the encryption key and get it, it would have done that. In fact, it did that before, back when, before in previous versions of iOS, it could do that. It could have done that in most cases. Right, but what we're talking about here is we're talking about the courts forcing a software maker to disable a security feature. It doesn't matter if it's encrypted. But what about the fact that they're only doing it for this one phone? Why isn't it for this one phone? And we'll get more into that. Yeah, yeah. It's a reoccurring theme, but you know, here's the thing, whether it's encryption or whether it's a brute force lockout feature, it is a security feature. Whether it's on one phone or all the phones, it doesn't make any difference because in this case, right, what is the incentive for a U.S. company to even make security features at that point when it all takes as a court order to say, hey, on this particular instance, remove that? Well, then any particular instance, it might as well be. Well, here's where I would entirely agree with Mike if we could be certain that it would only be used on this one phone and that the precedent is narrow enough that it says, yeah, you have to have a preponderance of the evidence showing that this phone was used in a crime and that is the only way that the court is going to allow a warrant. We have a couple of emails from people who take issue with that. Alan believes that if this software is created and has gone through developers and testers at Apple, then investigators and other agents at the FBI, it seems likely that the crippled version of iOS would leak out beyond its limited use intent. Think of how Stuxnet, which was targeted, managed to surface outside of its targeted area. You can't unwrite code and software like digital media. It's infinitely copyable. This seems like a risk that hackers like Darren understand and are legitimately concerned about as well. And then right along with that, Rich in Chapel Hill says, if Apple were to be compelled to give into the FBI, then what will prevent any other nation-state or governmental actor from coming in and saying, yeah, that thing you gave the FBI, give us some of that software so we can prosecute criminals and terrorists too. Here's the order from our supreme leader, or I mean court. If you don't follow it, there will be repercussions. Okay, so first of all, it will leak. There is no guarantee that it won't be shared, used again. And what's even scarier here is that I feel like that's like asking the wrong question too because what we're talking about is setting a precedent that the government can compel a tech company to disable a security feature period, whether that's encryption or a brute force lockout or whatever have you. And just use it in the name of freedom or whatever have you against that. And there is nothing stopping another nation from copying the same thing. We know that China looks to us a lot about the way that we deal with encryption and even a New York Times article recently brought up that very subject and pointing out how China would love to follow in our footsteps and do the same thing. Interestingly, the entire section about China was removed from that New York Times article without comment. So, yeah, everybody knows that that's going to happen. I think you can still make a legal argument that says, look, you have to sign the image file for that phone. Even if the software got out, you could make it so it really wouldn't be used on that phone. And therefore, this is a narrow case. I think that's a legitimate point of view. It then becomes more of a policy question of, yeah, but should you do this because other nations will then say, hey, you were able to do it. So if you want to legally continue to operate in my country, you're going to do it again for this phone that I want under my court order because we have a human rights violator or a human rights activist that we believe is a spy, whatever it is. So you have to consider that precedent there. Well, I feel like the whole discussion about, oh, just this one phone is saying, hey, I understand that it is an overreach of the law to ask you to write a version of your software that disables a security feature, but we're only going to break the law this one time. I don't think it is an overreach because Apple has cooperated on these in the past. It's the fact that they have to create something new. I think that's the sticking point for Apple. They're not being asked to provide a key. They're not being asked to provide something they have. They're asked to be created something new. Right, and that's for a reason that we'll get to here in a minute. Yeah, Mink wrote in and has an interesting question that he heard about the iPhone decryption issue. He's like, what does the FBI expect to find on the phone? Any communication, by definition, would it also be somewhere else besides the phone if it was a text message? Wouldn't a carrier have the metadata? Wouldn't they have the data of the text message? What do you need to unlock the phone for? What could be on that phone that couldn't be found elsewhere? Do you have any guesses on that? I'm going to say that the FBI, if they could get this information otherwise, would have. So there must be something they think is on that phone that's only on that phone. I feel like the phone is a red herring. Any of the communications that somebody would want to get have already passed through numerous servers that could have been monitored. I think what's happening here is that the FBI realizes that it doesn't have exactly what it wants, and it can use this as a means to set a precedent that it can get this. And it has done so in the past before, because companies have responded, making more secure systems, and so the FBI is like, hey, this is a case where we've got the T-word behind it that we can use to set a precedent that... I don't think they're going to find anything significant, but I don't think we can undo the damage that this case, this precedent would set if Apple does comply. Yeah, and that may be true. I could think of great examples, though, and some people are saying them in the chat room right now. I don't think there's anything really stored that could reveal other evidence. There could be encrypted apps that encrypted the communication, so the provider of the data couldn't see the communication, but as soon as I legitimately unlock the phone, I'm granted access, because you can... With an encrypted app, you can say, yeah, but don't make me put in the password again if I've unlocked the phone, in which case they could see the messages there in that app legitimately tricked the phone into thinking they've unlocked it. So there are all kinds of things that they could be able to find on there. Sure. Vince, co-executive producer on the show, says, I don't think the analogy of the locksmith refusing the job is right. It's the government trying to make the manufacturer of the safe, give them a way to bypass the whole point of the safe. Plus, Apple should be able to prove it's a burden since they sell security as part of their package, which could damage their position in the marketplace, and they would need to divert key resources away from their job for an indefinite period of time to make this work for one specific phone and for every case involving an iPhone in the future. Yeah, well, okay, so here's the thing. The FBI realizes it is absolutely ill-equipped to deal with this new era of security, and they have to resort to forcing Apple or any company, in this case, to do the dirty work for them because they don't have that technical expertise. So, you know, they're playing the terrorism card here because they know that it will aid them in setting a precedent and pushing the law to go ahead and force tech companies to do whatever they want whenever they need them to do it. The All Rits Act being invoked is because Apple doesn't hold the information. A search warrant says, I need you to give me this. I need to look in your thing. Apple doesn't have the phone. Apple doesn't own the phone. And there's an interesting part in there about terms of service that I think could be explored at some point where Apple sort of claims ownership over parts of your phone in the terms of service that I wonder could come back to bite them. But that said, the FBI isn't going down that road. What the FBI is saying is, we need to compel your assistance in getting into this piece of data, into this locked box, if you will. And that's why they're using the All Rits Act. So that's why you heard the ACLU lawyers say, you can't compel a locksmith to go help the FBI break a lock. If the locksmith doesn't want to take the job, he has the right as a free person who's not and otherwise in any other way involved in the case to say, no, I won't help you do that. So that could be part of Apple's defense is to say, I didn't lock the phone. I didn't work with these people. I sold them the phone. It's theirs. I'm not involved anymore. And no, I don't want the job of breaking this. Go talk to John McAfee. He apparently does. And the FBI is trying to use the All Rits Act to force them. So again, it's not just that they have a search warrant because they can search. What they're saying is to execute our search warrant, we need your assistance. And we believe the All Rits Act gives us the authority to compel your assistance in this case. And so to give this some sort of context here, the reason that they have to use the All Rits Act to compel them to help them in any way, including writing software, I guess in this case, is because previously they could just go to Apple and say, hey, we want the key. And they'd be like, here you go. Yeah, because that was something Apple had. You have the key, we have a search warrant, give us the key, and Apple had to give them the key. Why do you think Apple has gone to great lengths to implement a system so secure that they do not have the key? I'll give you the answer to that. It's so that when the government comes knocking and says, hey, we want this guy's key, and that guy's key, and that guy's key, that they don't have to, A, waste resources doing that, and B, that they can create a secure system for users. What if Apple said, great, well, we'll hand over, we'll hand over the signed part of a signed file. We'll give you the ability to write, you guys write your own software, write your own image file. A big hacker. We'll sign it for you. Here's a certificate. You write the exploit. We'll sign it for you. Would that comply? That would comply with Apple to say, here's the thing we have. Great. Take it. Write your SIF. They don't have the software. They need to write the software. And that becomes a good defense for Apple to say like, look, you're compelling us to do a thing just because we're good at it. And that's not the way the law is supposed to work. Well, that gets into our last comment and not this next one, but the very last one. So let's see. Yeah, let's get to James. Very relevant. Because James is expressing something I've heard a lot of people say. James says, to me, the screams of Apple through Tim Cook being opportunistic. Marketing is all this is. Apple is using this case to market. Cook's letter to Apple users and it's appealing. The order accomplishes two things. One, we can't open this device if we wanted to. And two, we shouldn't be made to help in any way to open a device. One, this is why you buy our stuff because we're secure. So don't worry. And two, this is why you should buy our stuff because we'll defend you. If this is not the case, why did Apple fight behind closed doors with the Department of Justice for months? He's like, why did Apple want the case to be sealed? Yeah. Well, OK, so here's the thing. I agree with you in the sense that, yes, one aspect of this may in fact be marketing. And I don't feel like that's inherently a bad thing. You see, whether Apple wants to stand up for your rights because it's good for its marketing and will sell more phones, or because it's the right thing to do, doesn't change the fact that it's the right thing to do. And if this situation were played out in a slightly different manner in which the phone in question weren't an Apple phone running iOS, but say it was a phone running a free and open source operating system with the same level of security, then there would be no monetary incentive here for the developers of that open source operating system to comply or to do anything different than Tim Cook is doing in this instance. So yes, I absolutely buy that, sure, this is making Apple come out looking like they're fighting for the user. And that's good because that shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. Fighting for the user is always the right thing to do. Well, maybe it should be seen as a bad thing. Maybe you're like, nah, this is marketing BS and I don't have to listen to it. That's fine. I think it is part of it. I think the reason Apple wrote an open letter and published it before they have finished conducting their court defense is because of marketing. Absolutely. And you can decide for yourself whether you think that's good or bad, but I don't think it's the only reason. I don't think that Apple is only doing this fight because of a marketing reason. I think it certainly would have been easier for them if they had kept it sealed. And I think that's a compelling point for James. Now that it's in the public, they kind of have to fight back. But I also think Apple does believe that they should not comply with this order. I think it's both. I think you can have two concurrent motivations propelling this. And you could decide if that negates one, if one of those motivations negates the other for yourself. Yeah. And you know what? I want to chime in with Shane and Beatmaster's comments here because they say, Shane says that he thinks that this is a rare case where marketing and privacy rights are actually working side-by-side. Beatmaster chiming in. A stopped clock is right twice a day. Casually your marketing and your civil rights can be pulling in the same direction. And then Beatmaster says, hey, it's capitalism working for once. Michael, for once. Anyway. Michael, a San Diego software developer, thinks if Apple wins this, if Apple wins this case, that the FBI will come after them for their signed certificates and code base. So this plays into what we were talking about earlier about, hey, we'll give you the signed file. You write it yourself. And then the FBI is saying, great, give us the source code. He points to a similar situation where the government asked Lovabit to do the same thing, leading Lovabit to shut down their service. Keep in mind that the FBI, he says, doesn't want to have to do this kind of work themselves. But if push came to shove, they will go after the code base and certifications need to accomplish this. And who's to say that stuff doesn't end up making its way to the NSA or other agencies? Apple's in a catch 22, because it doesn't want to do it, but by fighting against breaking the encryption, they will eventually have to give up their code base and certifications because it's something they physically have. Now, I wrote back to Michael, and we had a nice conversation about this. I disagree. I think if FBI wanted the code base, that's what they would be going for. It's easier for them to get the court to order Apple to work with them. And if the court rules against the FBI, it would then be much harder for them to say, well, then we need the code base. And so usually in the legal situations, you go for the bigger win first, and then if you don't get that one, then you can try to scale back. FBI went narrow at the beginning, implying that they wouldn't go after the code base. And the other thing is the Lovabit situation was about surveillance, not about assistance. So I think there's a difference there. But Michael has a perfectly reasonable opinion to say, well, but maybe the FBI will expend the resources to fight to get the source code if they don't get the assistance from Apple that they seek. Well, in the Lovabit case, though, what they wanted was encrypted, and Lovabit did not have. It wasn't just like, hey, give us that thing you have, and it had to be, and I don't believe if the All Rits Act was used in this case, but it was a help us get that thing that you have. Well, that was a FISA court case. It was under an entirely different system of disclosures. You know, and actually that's a very good point because how many of these exact battles, this is a huge thing right now in the mainstream media, and this is something that we should all be very passionate, and I don't care if you agree with me or not, but you should be very passionate about this if you care about privacy, but how many times do you think this exact thing has gone down in secret courts? And the fact that we're not hearing anything from Google, I know I've kind of gone off the rails as far as the question here, but we haven't heard anything from Google in this regard. Well, we have. Sundar Pichai did five tweets saying that he supports Apple. Oh, five tweets. Five tweets. Okay. Well, in that case... So you're saying we haven't heard a very strong support from Google? No. And so this comes back to what we were talking about, like, oh, well, you know, if we just had to give you what we have, then here's the certificate. Here's the thing. If the FBI knew that they could just say, give us the encryption key and get the encryption key, they'd do that. Then they're like, well, we can't do that, but we can ask for them to limit the brute force protection so that we can do the thing that we know how to do, which is to brute force stuff, because by the way, Android phones don't have this protection. You can try a bajillion times. It won't erase itself, which is kind of effed up. But regardless, if they can't get that, then they will ask for the source code, and they will ask for the signing keys, and the thing is, Apple needs to realize that they are under attack from the government. It's like any other threat, and they need to protect themselves, and they need to protect their intellectual property, and one way to go about that would be to encrypting their asset, in this case, the signing key and the code base, and distributing parts of that key to various jurisdictions around the world to prevent this sort of thing from being able to happen. What about just putting in user confirmation of any firmware update, and saying you've got to put in your passcode to accept any firmware update to anything? You're right. That's actually a good protection, and it should be done regardless so that when the government tries to push a firmware update to your phone unbeknownst to you, because they might do that through your SIM card and various other nefarious means, that you would have to be involved in that system. However, if that were the case, then again, that would be, what would we call that? A security feature, and what is the court's asking Apple to do? Remove a security feature. Couldn't Apple say, we can't help you with this because you need to know the passcode in order to get around the security feature? I wish that were the case, and they should absolutely implement as many of those systems and layer them on top of each other that they possibly can to protect the phone, to protect the device, but they should also, and this isn't just Apple, this is any developer that is creating secure systems to keep this in mind, that there is a attack vector that is the US government, and if you are creating secure systems in this country, you need to look at how you're protecting yourself with your signing keys with your intellectual property in a manner that is best benefiting the user, and that may be distributing encryption keys for your own signing keys around the world, so that the FBI has to go to an entity in Switzerland and an entity in Germany. Sure, well no, and that makes it extra secure. I'm just wondering if that's even necessary if you require, if the key is the password by the person, in this case you're right, it would change it. What you're saying is, what if you could be compelled to give the passcode? Well, the reason that the system works this way, the reason that the secure enclave with so much attention put into building a system in this regard is for this exact reason so that they couldn't be compelled to give that key away. Otherwise, why even bother doing this? Why even bother creating a security fee? I'm just saying if you were required to enter your passcode to update the firmware, then they wouldn't be able to assist the FBI in this case by giving them a signed image file because the FBI would need the passcode in order to push the firmware. Oh yeah, you're saying sign the firmware with Apple's key and your own passcode. Yeah, it's a great idea and they should do that and the reason that they should is so that they can't be compelled. Yeah, and then there would be nothing. Apple wouldn't have to take a principled stand in that case. Now, when you say that government is an attack vector, you're referring to surveillance methods, which is different than what's going on in this case. I want to make that clear. You're talking about the precedence of metadata surveillance and things from the NSA. What the FBI is doing here isn't surveillance. This is very clearly, and I think this gets muddled a lot and I think it's important to separate. This is very clearly a criminal case. This is the FBI saying we've got a criminal who conducted a crime and we have a warrant in public with a court order. This is not the same as what the NSA has been doing. This is not a secret court. This is not a fishing expedition. This is we know we have reasonable suspicion there is something helpful in this case on this phone and we want to get at it. So it is a different situation than what we might face in surveillance and what Apple is saying is not that they can't technically do it and not that they think it's illegal. What they're saying is we think it sets a bad precedent. We don't think that we should be in the business of helping law enforcement circumvent encryption even if we can. And whatever you think about this, and you may think that Apple is on the wrong side of this issue, that is the thing to understand is even if you think Apple is on the wrong side of this issue and you think they should cooperate, should they be compelled to cooperate? I think that is the nut of the issue. That is the key here. That is the number one thing that I have issue with and why I think the argument's about, oh, just this one time is irrelevant and don't get me wrong. I sympathize with the Leos. I have friends at the FBI and I understand the difficulty of their job but I just feel like if a perfect security system could be implemented, there's no reason why it shouldn't and compelling a company to then reduce its security just because it's going to help this one time, I'm not buying that. Well, you folks have been awesome in sending us your opinions on this and your insights into this. We really appreciate not only the people we read today but everybody who's communicated with us in all the different various forms. Darren Kitchen, for sharing your insights on this and your expertise as well. H-A-K-5.org What else you got that's not Apple related? Oh, well it is Apple related in that the word Apple is in the name which once got us sued by Apple but the Wi-Fi Pine Apple is now out there. If you're looking to do some wireless penetration testing and security auditing of your own. I don't know if you know this but manufacturers really cool security gear to do fun things on wired networks and wireless networks and hidden stuff, so check it out. It's government approved gear. You know, it's certified by our boys and they love them and I love them. So if any of you guys are about to email in like Darren's anti-government, actually no. We have a very good working relationship. But yeah, so Darren's anti-overreach where he sees the overreach and that's fair. I want to look at any sort of system with laws and rules the same way whether it's secure privacy enabling software or the laws set forth by our founding fathers. You know, history provides us with a lot of context for why technology develops the way that it does and in this clip from episode 2797 Tamar Brown, the amazing Tamar Brown sat down with Scott and I to have a conversation about the history of personal audio technologies, not just about Walkman. Alright, today, June 29th is the 9th anniversary of the launch of the iPhone and coming up in October it'll be the 15th anniversary of the launch of the iPod and so when we think mobile devices, this is what we think about. We think about phones, we think about music devices but many of the features of the modern smartphone have their roots in much earlier music devices that didn't let you get to pick the songs because they were radio before the 1950s, Tamar you didn't carry audio and video with you, this is relatively new in human history. Yeah, for, you know, 50 plus years prior to the transistor radio people actually had to sit down with a really big box or cabinet like a piece of furniture and play records, play phonographs listen to the radio, it was something you did at home, kind of like many people probably remember TV in the 60s, 70s and 80s that's what radio was, that's what music was, it was very much like sitting on the couch, sitting at home with a big box, that was really big. So what made that change, what was the thing that brought us to like, hey you can actually, you can take this AM radio station around with you. Yeah, so you have the development of the transistor itself in the 40s, which was originally more designed for military usage, it was really expensive and they decided to start putting it in radios as a way of sort of showing it off. It was really like almost a PR move, they did it in time for Christmas in 1954, it was really expensive and not really good when it first came out, but the idea caught on and in about 10 years it went from being like about a in today's dollars over $300 purchase to something that was more akin to like 30 to $50 purchase so it suddenly went to be really accessible and simultaneously TV took over the big box, radio now became the thing that you could take with you. Well and at the time a lot of people were thinking TV was going to eventually kill radio, do you think this is one of the things that saved it? It definitely did along with you know over time you also have the development of FM, but that came a little bit later in terms of rising with you know different music styles but at least in the 50s and 60s having more of the early rock music that played well on the tinny AM like say the Beatles like high pitch kind of just need a basic you know beat played really really well in those little devices that everyone could carry with them, especially young people. That's interesting I'd never considered the idea now it rings true in my head that the Beatles style of early music especially the later stuff you could make different arguments but the early stuff did very much seem to be perfectly suited for that kind of technology. I had never really considered that before and later they messed around with like stereo in a way that a lot of other bands weren't as well. I hadn't really thought about it, this is a band that is so influential and so important in the history of rock and roll that they also either knowingly or not rode right along with the changes in the technology would you say accurate? Yeah 1960 1963 Beatles all the early sort of British invasion even kind of like late 50s like all of that sort of early rock was like perfect to be played on what we would now consider kind of a sort of low-fi device and similarly over time later the Beatles switched over to that sort of high fidelity like really good stereo system but they definitely rode the wave all of those sort of late 50s early 60s bands their music which was sort of you know key baseline tinny kind of like light guitar kind of high-pitched voice all was like perfect for the transistor radio. Well and another thing that I think affects that is solitary listening I had forgotten until we were preparing for this and you pointed out that yeah people had headphones that they wore over their ears but transistor radios maybe they had a little thing that you stuck in one ear but mostly you just listened to them out in the open it wasn't until later that headphones became an essential part of mobile technology. Yeah there was actually like an anti-headphone movement that happened when they first came out because with a little square device and an earpiece it looked a lot like the hearing aids of the day and they didn't want other people to think for better for worse that they were using a hearing aid so they sort of ditched the ear plugs and they might hold it up to their ear or they would put it on a shelf but the only time people ever used the sort of earphone piece was either for secret listening so nowadays we think oh people take their iPhones to bed oh this is so horrible people took their transistor radios to bed kids, teens and would secretly listen with that sort of headphone they would also you know do all kinds of other things to hide their listening but generally it was kind of more public. Yeah I wasn't allowed to stay up too late on a Sunday night but I would go with a very small radio with a single earpiece one ear and listen to Dr. Demento on Sunday nights in seventh grade or whatever and it was because I could like suddenly this portable thing was available to me it's no different today than me going alright I need to watch the Game of Thrones finale but I've also got kids in here watching Seinfeld on Hulu on a television I'm going to just watch this on my iPad and over in the corner because I don't know what HBO is going to show me this week in a way it's just moved to video like that same kind of ability is there we've got a TV that's thinner than a book in our hands and has a 12 hour battery life on it and it's kind of insane if you think about it that way. I used to steal my dad's silver transistor radio and earpiece and a flashlight so that I could listen to American Top 40 which wasn't on until 10 p.m. after I was supposed to be asleep and then I would write down all of it was the only way for me to get the Top 40 back of the day that's crazy the other thing that I think is interesting that you pointed out to Mar is that before transistor radios devices were expensive and you fixed them if they broke you got a new crystal or you took it into a repair shop and these days you get a lot of people complaining like why don't people try to fix anything anymore it's because these devices became so cheap it wasn't worth it anymore. Yeah it was partly a factor of cost it was also design they actually started designing transistor radios so that they you couldn't open them or that you couldn't open them easily and in the past people would like open up the cabinet with the radio to fix and that was just a thing that you or your neighbor or a professional did but between the sort of ease of replacement like it was cheap and the difficulty of opening it up to fix it it really sort of shifted the consumer electronics model to be more like oh now radio devices are now like a lot of these sort of new texts that were developing it just became disposable it was easier to replace than to repair it was like that's true now of phones you always hear people say well wouldn't it be great to have replaceable batteries in our phones and others say well I'd rather have a phone that doesn't rattle or doesn't come apart when I drop it or whatever because I'm just going to replace this thing in a year anyway like from a historic perspective I feel like we are echoing a lot of that stuff again today Yeah a lot of pretty much almost everything that someone has written either to complain about or to like celebrate about the whatever the iPhone the iPod the tablets has been written for at least 50 to 60 years about probably a radio if not a walkman or a boombox like it's pretty much been covered like every major sort of warning concern or heralding by the companies the exact words the same images that they use has been repeated like about every 10 to 20 years about a new technology for the last 50 or 60 years So somebody like you's got a good handle on the history of all this you have a more historical perspective on these trends and when they come and go when you hear a shock piece or some link bait or something about new studies suggest Nexus phones are giving us all cancer or whatever you probably see them through slightly different eyes than the rest of us I tend to say like wait about two years for the like hype fear or whatever two years for them to say it in the exact same words about another thing that's absolutely true well and you were mentioning before the show cars have gone through this evolution where there were cars that were trying to be like the locked down transistor radios that made them hard to repair so you'd have to go to the dealer and now because cars have software the manufacturers have sort of moved on to protecting that yeah I mean cars are an example where a lot of people really enjoy like modding out cars and they kind of don't really care if you like physically change them but they freak out if you try to touch the software so nowadays like they're less inclined to be concerned about opening up a physical hood as it were they're really concerned about you like touching anything that involves software like that's the new sort of like they don't want you to access that at all yeah and I know a lot of farmers have run into that with lines and tractors and things like that as well there was a whole controversy over John Deere saying you can't fix your own tractor anymore and that did not sit well with a lot of people yeah it's funny how like fixing things used to be sort of what you or your friends or professionals did and now it's like either nobody does it and you get a new one or send it back to the factory they don't want you to see how they open it up you think people freak out about automated cars or at least the idea of automated cars for similar reasons they don't it's once again another layer of self-control being taken from them yeah I think people like to think that they would open up their phone to fix it if they had that ability like when you were saying they want to be able to open it up I think that they say that they want to be able to open it up but most people don't really want to learn to fix every single thing in their home they really just want the ability to do so yeah the same with the cars they want the ability to control it or you know they like the idea but reality is like they want to drive they just want the right to ignore the option yeah just have the illusion you have the illusion that you can do something about it is right I want the self-drive button to push but I will never use it now speaking of history in episode 2758 we had the honor to talk with Stuart Sheffey host of tv's the computer chronicles by the way shout out to Alison Sheridan for connecting us with Stuart it was a really fun conversation and we talked a lot about the role that archive.org has had in preserving so much of the internet including Stuart's television show before we wrap up on this another thing I want to point out is that you were able to get every computer chronicles episode on archive.org now virtually all are up there yeah yeah one or two that slipped through the cracks working on this right now and is that and the ones that slipped to the cracks that you're just trying to find the source material we have the source material that we took us a while to figure out that some of them weren't there interesting story as to how it all started if you want to hear it yeah absolutely I'm very curious so I was doing another show at the time called net cafe which is all about internet stuff not different from computer chronicles and one of the guests I interviewed on the show was Bruce Tricale of an internet archive and at the time we had been doing the show for 15 years or something chronicles for 15 years or so and after I finished the on camera interview I sat down with Bruce and I said you know I've got an interesting problem maybe you have an idea because you're into this archiving stuff I've got hundreds 500 shows basically the virtual history of the personal computing revolution sitting on shelves inaccessible to people and this is a crime what can we do about it so we're the internet archive we'll do the video archive now and he offered right on the spot to pay to digitize all these videos we had took two years to do it put them up online now we had to take a big swallow too because we were being asked to give away all our intellectual property we had spent millions of dollars developing and this was really wasn't a sharing economy at this time so we had to make a big decision to put that online for free and downloadable not just viewable so that's where it came out it took two years to get it all up there and it's been fantastic we have over the years I guess shows have been an archive for 10-15 years now I mean in total we have far more viewers on the archive shows than we ever had on television we used to have television million viewers a week well two million around the world and it amazes me you know what the most popular show by the way on the internet is yeah which one Commodore 64 the most downloaded show a lot of people had a lot of nostalgia tied up in the Commodore 64 Apple II was up there too it's great because that is what archive.org is meant for we put this show on archive.org even though we don't necessarily need to we serve it from elsewhere just so it's there I mean that is the purpose of that how did you get yourself over that hump of saying well you know I might want to sell these on DVDs or re-syndicate them and still be able to allow archive to do that well it was really Rick Prelinger and the Prelinger archives Rick was the first one to actually jump in the pool and say okay I'll put a lot of my stuff up for free and he convinced me that it actually was a good business decision good business decision for spreading the word that things exist it became just great PR promotion and free advertising people would find the stuff on the archive say oh I want to use that in a documentary whoops I guess we've got to call the guy who owns it gets the rights to do that because our stuff both Rick's and mine are only for non-commercial non-mashed up use so it was just ended up being a great promotional tool and people basically know about our show who didn't ever watch it on TV through the archive collection I must say the risk we took was bigger than we thought because they've all been pirated oh yeah of course the collection on YouTube is bigger than the official collection and it's impossible to keep up with it my feeling knowing that it's all there it's weirdly cathartic absolutely I mean in one way obviously you guys are going to be selling a bunch of new 386s because of exposure what you are doing is creating I don't know there's a historic value to this that has a lot of other value outside of just quick monetary value and I'm really grateful you guys made that choice that's a treasure for me to go check that stuff for example CNN is doing a show either tomorrow night or a week from tomorrow night on Tech in the 80s and we provided a lot of footage to them for that show which they couldn't get anywhere else it is a great resource I wasn't thrilled at the time but I'm thrilled now that we did it well yeah that's the thing it's counterintuitive sometimes how this stuff works now in an infinitely copyable universe so the rules are constantly changing and anybody who tells you they know how it all works is selling you something I just have to take a deep breath and accept and say it's a good thing to do we'll see what happens and finally episode 2747 where Justin Robert Young comes fresh off of a conversation with Wolfram Alpha's founder you got a chance to sit down and chat with Steven Wolfram one of the greatest minds around machine learning and just a peach of a human we had an amazing conversation that nobody will ever hear because my recorder broke and I do want to apologize to all the DTNS patrons because the entire reason for recording it was obviously to give to you guys in full but you'll unfortunately have to deal with my orative capacity to relay to you my conversation that I had with Mr. Wolfram specifically this I wouldn't say bullish on bots but he is bullish on the promise of bots so much so that he was very insistent and he brought this up a couple times and I wound up following up with him that he wants to botify himself he wants Steven bot and not Wolfram Alpha bot that's something that they were thinking about doing and he says in this current iteration where bots or ideas and think would be necessarily novel or anything better than the input methods that they have for Wolfram Alpha now however for himself and I asked him what would a Steven Wolfram bot do he said answer emails you know this is something that he believes he can program enough of himself into a bot that he could read over an email and then just hit a button that would say just answer this email as I would answer this email and the idea being that the bot would have learned how he communicates and what his responses might be and be able to just compose an authoritative response now you are absolutely right how would he be able to do that he explains very thoroughly he has meticulously recorded so much of his life in fact he shared with me the idea that he has a screenshot of his desktop taken once every second and it is all logged and it is all stored so he can have a meticulous record of exactly what he does and how he does it he said he made a video for south by southwest that was a time elapsed year of his desktop and he wound up not releasing it because he thought it was too boring it was it was mostly him reading articles I mean that would be mine anyway we're doing some code he probably had a lot of proprietary code on there he didn't want to put out yeah well I mean for him he said yeah you know it's just my emails kind of going up and going down you know I'm like well Steve I think people might find you a bit more interesting than you might find yourself that is why he wants a bot though because he realized this is all I do I'm looking at my screenshots and all I do is answer email and of course it's the perfect type of thing but he said something else to you I thought was interesting about processing images right because when you talk about taking screenshots that implies that there's enough data from those screenshots that could be recognized certainly so so one of the and I say this in the warmest possible sense that Steven Wolfram is a quirky individual and I think anybody who has watched him speak or has followed his career will know very well what I'm talking about so he shared with me the idea that Wolfram Alpha is a tremendous resource for students students use it a lot and it was funny when I when I was lamenting on Twitter yesterday the fact that this interview as a recorded clip was lost I had a teacher email me and say oh that's really disappointing my students love Wolfram Alpha so I promise to share this story and here it is Steven Wolfram is well aware that there are students around the globe right now that are using the image recognition portion of Wolfram Alpha to take pictures of their homework hoping that Wolfram Alpha will solve their homework for them now, quirky, funny all that what's even better is that Steven Wolfram explained to me how he would look to solve the kids homework he wasn't against it he's like well listen this is a very complicated complicated problem to put that in and then spit that back out to formulate it in the right kind of way and what you realize when you talk to them about Wolfram Alpha is so much of the extra mile that makes I believe Wolfram Alpha a seamless integration to so many other especially natural language systems like Siri is that there is a lot of rounded edges in how they spit content back for example something that he they said they worked very very hard on was in voice data that comes back to you if you ask how many people are in Cleveland it doesn't just give you the big number of there are x x x x you know the number number number number number number they found far more people what retained the information and found it more useful if they said it is around x number or more specifically that number that that there is these there are these anchoring points to how we mentally deal with that kind of information more so something that they have not been able to figure out is if you go to Wolfram Alpha on the website right now and you search for something that would be a tables worth of data it will give you in visual form that table what they have not figured out and vexes Mr. Wolfram personally is how to get that information back on voice and they have experimented with the idea of having he he said specifically musical notations which I'm just going to assume is the idea that the audio would be sung to you in a way that wouldn't just create the blindness in your head I compared it to in newspaper design there are far more paragraphs and drop quotes because to look at a big block of great text is to have your brain just shut down and say okay skip skip skip skip skip get to something that I know all that is is is psychological not something that they are very very focused on because he wants to get more information to you via voice but doesn't want it to be something that damages when the voice comes to you in in general by having it be boring or just too much to deal with I think what's most interesting about that is they are obviously just as concerned with data storage on your end as data delivery on their end they don't want to just deliver the data they want it to sink in they want it to stay they don't want you to have to do that search again that that's really that I get like you say that shows that they are thinking about the product from its point not just from what it can do and and and to that end that's why he's willing to help with the homework uploading because it's like well this is going to be helpful for them this is going to show them and and if I'm doing my job right they'll actually have a better understanding of their homework when they start to read the answer the way I deliver it to them then they would if they just ignored it so he's probably hoping to help them understand and do their homework better I mean you don't not design a calculator because you're worried about people doing math you design a calculator because you think well this is going to help them understand math better and then hopefully that leads to a solution and that we are building up as opposed to making it a shortcut one more thing and this is is almost more news wise and something that you should not be shocked if you see from Wolfram Alpha over the next year or two years and I'm completely making up that timeline but he referred to it in a way that made it sound like it was closer rather than farther is the idea that he wants more Wolfram language this is his own code base or code language that he's come up with to be put into programs that allow you to process your own data this kind of gets back to him making himself a bot but for you to be able to plug in your own social media your own data that you create every single day in any kind of digital footprint and using the Wolfram language to process that and give you easier easier data computation so for example and I'm totally making this up on our conversation this is I think where he was going if I were to say hey when do I have the most time this week it would be able to spit back based on not only historical data but also what I have on the calendar now well you generally have Wednesdays from noon to three free and that's something that very much is within their capacity but also you can do a lot more fun stuff that's something that I got from also other people that I talked to about machine learning that you know there is a lot of fun to this and that's really what they almost want to lead with I saw a Watson demo that was you know very much about hey look we can use these very very simple Watson calls to show you what celebrity you are most like and and and you know so for this with this Wolfram alpha thing based on what you say who's the meanest to me on Twitter stuff like that like you can you can you can find other elements that like you know once you start thinking about where things are going and how you can use the tools and even you know what we might think to be superficial kind of ways there are a lot of there's a lot that kind of gets gets kicked up there and that's why I think it's no surprise that they don't want to make a Wolfram alpha bot Wolfram alpha is the brains powering lots of bots not only Siri and Cortana but eventually your own personal bot and maybe even Steven Wolfram's own personal bot so it's interesting stuff I'm really glad you got a chance to sit down and chat with him. The one thing he did say that he wanted to to create as a bot was for debugging he thought that that a Wolfram language development is something that could very much benefit from a better bot debugging system because it's such a robust language that you can kind of you can get to your destination in a lot of different ways because it is meant to be a little rugged and finding different ways to get there however you are not going there on the most direct route and that's ultimately what they want to do in terms of cleaning up development code. 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