 Our continuing coverage of Jeremy Galecki will be interrupted by an episode of Daily Tech News Show shortly. Don't forget, Carrie Ann Moss, lots of movie, and bring us up to date, she will have a cameo in Iron Fist. Oh, really? Carrie Ann Moss will. Oh, because Jessica Jones, she plays like the best power lesbian in television history on Jessica Jones. So she's going to cross over to Iron Fist, interesting. That makes sense, kind of like Rosario Dawson crossing over to Jessica Jones. Thanks. Yeah. She lit that series up in one, anyway, it was awesome. Many, actually, when you think about it, multiple, yeah, hey, we've got some spoilers here. I know. I'm doing visual spoilers. We've got some chakalot to soothe your mind. We still have CES news, folks. Don't worry. I'm going to go hide behind this logo. We broke the fridge decks. Yeah, fridge decks is off the charts. The fridge charts. All right, let me see if we can record this thing. Here we go. Two hundredths of one percent of the Daily Tech News Show were brought to you by me. If you would like to decrease my already meager equity, go to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 7th, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt. Joining me today, Justin Robert Young, back like an orbiting moon for a second round of CES news. You glutton, Justin. That's no moon, Tom. It's a bearded pundit. Yes. The CES news, because it's day two of CES, is starting to recede a little bit. We've had all the big press events, all the big press conferences, so now it's just people on the show floor actually looking at things, but we've got a few things to talk about here for sure, and other tech news as well as we always do. Just before we get started though, Justin, I want to note that three different posts this morning from three different organizations called it CES day and a different number. One was like, it's day two, one is day three, one called it day four. Well, people have been there since Monday. Many got there, many press people got there Sunday. Theoretically, they are getting private press briefings from the second that they are all in Las Vegas. That's where a lot of this news breaks, especially for some of the auto demos and stuff like that. Scheduling out your times, you can go to some parking lot and see that hot new new, but it's day infinity on CES, not really mattering. I think we need NIST to weigh in on this for a standard of marking the days. Let's start off with the headlines. Facebook's VP of Messaging Products, David Marcus, posted a roadmap for Facebook Messaging today announcing more than 800 million people use Messenger each month. Tech country reports that that makes Messenger the fastest growing messaging app of 2015. We're going to talk quite a bit about messaging and the future of messaging and using this as a launch point, but the one thing I think is really interesting here, which kind of applies to the rest of the messaging world, Justin, is the idea of using the messaging app as a platform for services like customer service and bots is on this roadmap that Marcus was posting about. The app world is over. Apps are old news. We're into the messaging platform now, Justin. Well, the idea is what apps did is bring slices of the internet or the interconnected world to an easier, more accessible point on your phone. Messaging could do is just further extend where those interconnected elements of our society could reach you more easy. We're going to get into a lot of this because I think there's a reason why they need to rely on this as opposed to just the value of messaging. However, as for 800 million people, congratulations, Facebook. You better have gotten 800 million people considering the fact that they leveraged it so hard against their mobile user base. Granted, people getting upset by a Facebook decision is not news and has been happening as long as Facebook has been in existence, but this was certainly a lot of a lot of Sturm and Drog for them to get this thing off the ground. It's good to see that it's done well, but you've got to figure it better have, right? Yeah, as much as they were touting it, yeah, 800 million seems like it's what they should have gotten. Yeah. Time Warner said Wednesday up to 320,000 customers may have had their email passwords stolen. The FBI informed Time Warner of the issue and Time Warner does not know yet how the data was obtained, although none of its own systems were breached. The passwords may have been stolen through malware downloaded on the user's computers or through a data breach of a Time Warner partner, thanks to Steve I.O. for posting the story in the subreddit. Yeah, kind of a difficult position for any company to be in that a partner gets breached and then you have to be the one telling people, but they are sending out emails advising people to change their password as a precaution. So if you're Time Warner customer, you might want to do that. Can we just have change your email day? Let's just throw a day on the calendar, right? Change your password day, you mean? Oh yeah, sorry, yeah, change your password. Once a year, we can come up with carols for it and everything. Just change your password day on all the major sites, rotate them maybe, you know, just make a little carousel where you move your passwords around. Just change them. It's healthy to do it. I think it's a good way to revitalize Arbor Day. Fine. Plant a tree of security. TM204 wanted us to mention that Bloomberg reports Amazon subsidiary Anapuma Labs announced Wednesday it will sell its Alpine line of chips to manufacturers and data centers. Amazon will be selling chips, silicon chips. The 32-bit ARM V7 and 64-bit ARM V8-based designs are targeted towards makers of things like Wi-Fi routers, network-attached storage, home gateways, Internet of Things devices. Amazon acquired Anapuma Labs in January 2015 and no, despite all the clever headlines you are probably going to see, Anapurma chips are not directly available from Amazon bundled with potato chips. Although, you know, if enough people ask for it, you never know what will end up in your basket. People who order enterprise-level amounts of ARM V8-based designs also ordered toothpaste. Uber will pay a $20,000 fine for failure to report a data breach in a timely fashion after being the subject of a 14-month investigation by the New York Attorney General's Office. The investigation was prompted by an executive's use of data to track a reporter with a system called GodView. The investigation found a data breach exposed personal data of 50,000 Uber drivers in September of 2014, but Uber did not disclose the incident until February of 2015. BuzzFeed reports that the Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, is expected to announce the settlement tomorrow. Yeah, so this is one that's easily conflated. If I'm reading this right, the investigation was prompted by the sort of creepy behavior of an executive saying, yeah, I was watching you on your way and knew when you got here because we have this GodView and the reporter was saying that maybe that was not okay for him to just look at that for any reason at all. But it was the data breach that exposed the data of 50,000 drivers that was discovered as part of the investigation, which is what they're being fined for. They're not being fined for being a little creepy. And as far as Attorney Generals poking their nose into big headline grabbing companies, the idea of them trying to hold companies feet to the fire for not disclosing breaches and stuff like that, I think is a good use of time and money. We want to encourage people to be as forthright as possible, especially in a culture where there's not as big of a backlash for exposing breaches as there may have been five, ten years ago. Company like Uber though, you wonder if a $20,000 fine is really a slap on their wrist as a percentage of what they're doing. Well, is the $20,000 fine the problem or is them having their name in the press? You know, I mean, that's probably something that they would want to go away more than just paying $20,000. TechCrunch notes that Palmer Lucky apologized in a Reddit Ask Me Anything for misleading people into believing the Oculus Rift might sell for around $350 rather than the $599 it's selling for. Lucky had said the final price would be in the ballpark of the Dev Kit, which was selling at $350. He said, I was comparing $350 to the $1,500 that some people were saying, I would say in $1,200, so I'm one of those people, Palmer Lucky. I apologize for that. But that's why he said it was in the ballpark, and he's like, that was wrong. It was bad thinking on my part. He also emphasized that $599 is pretty close to the cost of making the Oculus Rift. So they're not making money on the hardware itself. It's a loss or a break-even leader at the very least. You almost have to wonder whether or not Oculus is going to be a company that brings in somebody else that has a better, greater understanding of consumer gadget device sales to maybe guide them going forward. Because your competitors are going to be HTC and Sony who have tremendous skills in selling consumer-level gadgets to people. One might be more expensive. One might be cheaper or perceived to be cheaper. But there's been a lot to ask for when it comes to how Oculus is handled. Even referring to this as a consumer device, quote-unquote, when it still is very much an early adapter hobbyist kind of thing, you would have thought that maybe a situation like this would be ripe to have an invite-only or some level of exclusivity to it, even if it was going to be not a developer's kit, quote-unquote. I think whether or not Oculus is great, whether or not people are happy with the final result, I think if they could in two years from now ask for a do-over of how they rolled this out, I think they probably want one. Yeah, I think the biggest issue is that he basically underestimated the literal net when he said, in the ballpark of $350, which you've got to give it the strictest interpretation, which means if that thing isn't $350 or less, people are going to get upset. If it had been $400, people would have been complaining. $600 is not what most people would call in the ballpark. He just misspoke and the Internet is hard on things like that, especially when you're marketing a product that is meant for the hardest of the hardcore who are the most likely to hold your feet to the fire on things like this on the Internet. I mean, Facebook owns Oculus. They have a lot of experience with dealing with rolling out products, as we mentioned earlier. So I wonder if maybe somebody can transition over from Facebook to help the matter. Like you say, hire away a good, excellent product marketer from somebody. I think people are making more of a big deal about this than it is. I don't think it's going to appreciably hurt the sales of Oculus Rift. I don't think it'll hurt the sales, right? I think that it might have hampered what could have been a more positive launch for them. I don't think that they did themselves any favors in shaping this device to be what it actually is, which is a hardcore gaming peripheral that the vast majority of people who are interested in VR will not be able to afford. And this is one of those stories that's not really about this thing. This is about how muddled, like, okay, so my friends have had Oculus Rifts, but they're not really the Oculus Rift. They're the developers' kid. He came out and said, it's going to come out, and it's going to come out in two days. And then we'll tell you what the price and what the release date was, which was weird and kind of confusing. He said it was $350, it wound up being $600. It's just a lot of messaging things that I feel like he's kind of paying for here. Also, he had a really entertaining, at least to me, exchange with somebody who asked whether or not there would be a warranty in that AMA and then had them change the text on it. When your kids are in bed, go ahead and Google it. It's very funny. The Wall Street Journal reports Apple has acquired Emosh Tent, an artificial intelligence startup that specializes in emotion and sentiment recognition based on facial expressions. So, Apple never comments on these things, but it's another brick in the AI wall that Apple is building, and the ability to sense emotions if they can do it well. I've always been fascinated with that idea of, what could you do with that? If you can tell somebody's happy, what kind of customizations will that make useful for me as a user of things? So I don't have much else to say about it, except I'm curious if this ends up surfacing in an Apple product down the road, what it'll end up looking like. Or even just tone recognition for Siri. Are there other little elements that they can do, just even considering they have different ways of having Siri interact back with you? And Tim Beck points out, Microsoft is working on this, too. A lot of companies are working on that aspect of things, being able to tell what mood you're in and tailoring content to it. The lazy one wanted us to mention the Microsoft blog post, reporting on diagnostic information obtained from Microsoft using Windows 10's new collection options. 44.5 billion minutes have been spent using the Microsoft Edge browser. 82 billion photos have been viewed in the Windows Photo app, and Cortana has answered 2.5 billion questions. Data is anonymized when collected, and users can choose not to send such data by changing a setting to basic, which will still collect encrypted error reports, but nothing else. And even some third-party apps can block all the collection. This is another one of those stories that has turned into a big C. Microsoft's admitting all the things they collect about you. And then you've got Ed Bot out there saying, this is no different than what anybody collects on you. Visit any website. It's the same stuff. And the truth is somewhere in the middle, which is, Windows 10 collects more information and limits what you can stop them from collecting more than previous versions of Windows. But it really, at this point, is not that much more information than is collected by other people. It is sometimes a little bit hard to just even get a sense of what these numbers mean, because they are big, gigantic, gaudy numbers. But what do they really mean to the larger? I mean, I guess the fact that they have gaudy numbers to share for Microsoft is just always a good thing. They'd rather big, gaudy numbers than not have them. That's a little bit of a carryover from the Balmer era, I feel like. But he was always about, like, throw out the biggest number. But let's knock people over the heads and impress them. Twitter filed a lawsuit in Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, seeking to annul a 150,000-liter fine for a note removing content. The government says is terrorist propaganda. Yeah, this is just a follow-up to our story previously in the week that Turkey said they would continue to pursue this fine. So Twitter is fighting back in the courts in Turkey over the idea of whether, and I think it's PKK, which is a Kurdish party that the government of Turkey considers a terrorist organization and believe the European Union does as well, at least in a certain definition, and whether statements regarding the PKK should be allowed, certain statements. Go ahead, sorry about it, sorry. Twitter has 10,000 words to say about it, which is why you cracked it. That's why they want to possibly change the limit. A Chinese company announced the Ehang 184 Autonomous Aerial Vehicle, which can carry a passenger weighing up to 200 kilograms, around 400 pounds, for 20 minutes. Remember, it's autonomous, so you're not flying it. You're just being carried around inside it. Guardian reports the drone's cabin is equipped with air conditioning and a reading light. Vertical takeoff and landing points are preset, and then you get in, and it flies you, and in case of a malfunction, the drone will land in the, quote, nearest possible area safely. Kraft has flown more than 100 times at low altitude, and you can expect the Ehang 184 later this year for a mere $200,000 to $300,000. Justin. Now that would be the Disneyland world of the, the Disneyland ride of the next generation, right up onto my autonomous drones flying you all over the place. If you're waiting for the autonomous car, think to get regulatory approval? Think how long you're going to get for this to be approved by the FAA, just saying. Yeah, no, I'm sure Daring Kitchen is a, a trumming it. CNET reports BlackBerry CEO John Chen confirmed in an interview that his company will release one and possibly two new phones this year, both running Android. Chen said the company will concentrate on national security certification for its own BlackBerry 10 OS in order to sell to government and corporate projects. Yeah, so everyone's focusing on the big news that BlackBerry is essentially saying we're not going to make a BlackBerry OS phone this year, we're only going to make Android phones, one or two of them. I do think this indicates that their strategy is to pitch BlackBerry OS as a secure platform for enterprise use, particularly in military government and corporate contractor situations. And then for the masses to say, you know what, the Android operating system is fine. And we can sell good phones that way. While they continue, I think the main business of BlackBerry, of course, is going to continue to be BlackBerry Enterprise security and that sort of thing. So this all fits to me if you're following the BlackBerry saga. Yeah, no, and it makes more sense that they, your enterprise level service seems more secure if it's not also your consumer level service, right? Like there is an exclusivity and there is less of the general public running it. I mean, I think as a perception thing that that works toward them. 30 rights groups in India have written an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg that they posted on Facebook, criticizing Facebook for encouraging users to take action against net neutrality rules being considered by the regulatory authority of India. Group said it was disingenuous for Facebook to claim that only a small group opposes the free basics by Facebook platform, which has the practice of zero rating particular services. Many in India feel that that violates net neutrality because it picks winners. It says these folks won't count against your data cap, but other folks will. But what's a small group, right? I mean, that seems to really be what the point of contention here is, right? Is it? Or is it just like we don't like that Facebook is trying to trick people into thinking that they're for net neutrality. So we're going to show that there's 30 of our organizations out there that don't. And they, you know, they're picking on, they're saying calling us a small group as an insult, but what's small and what's not really doesn't matter. Exactly. Yeah. India is a really big country. Yeah. A small group in India would dwarf most other populations. Indeed. The UK's Investigatory Powers Bill was published in November and a cross-party committee has been collecting feedback. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo have filed a list of their concerns about the unclear state of encryption in the bill and the potential for conflict with overseas regulations on information sharing. Meanwhile, in the US Reuters reports, US government officials will meet with tech executives on Friday to discuss the use of social media by militant groups. So there's a roundup of government and tech company discussions on the fate of your data. Yeah. Right there. So yeah, in the UK Investigatory Powers Bill, the UK government says there's no backdoor mandated and the tech companies say there's no, nothing in there that says you can't mandate a backdoor. So they just really need to clarify the language of it, I think, one way or another. I mean, this is still some of the fallout of Snowden and the Prism Project and the fact that a lot of major tech companies felt that they were left completely holding the bag, being forced to cooperate with a lot of these programs and yet held up on pain of treason to not say that they were being involved in a lot of these programs. So they're going to make noise wherever they can. And that, my friends, is the headlines for today. Thanks to you, everybody who submits stories at our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Get in there and vote. Let us know what you want to hear us talk about. That's the headlines. All right, so we heard about Facebook. 800 million users. The roadmap, if you want to know, is they want to replace the phone number. No more using text messages with your phone number. Let's get device-independent for real. They want to replace apps with threads, as I alluded to earlier, probably what those leaked bots that we heard about earlier in the week would lead to. So instead of launching an app to manage your bank, you could just chat with a chatbot securely. One would hope about what you want to do with your bank account and get your balance and all that. They want to get more people using groups on Messenger. I think this is the weakest of the roadmap items, which is like, hey, guys, you can talk to more people at once. You should do that. And more AI, which would enable those bots that we were talking about in the threads. M, of course, is their flagship. But they say they want to develop that even more. And then the last one, you might say, should be actually the weakest, even weaker, that encouraging people to do groups, is be delightful. Yeah, I feel like I hear JJ Abrams and Lawrence Kaston saying that about Star Wars a lot. And now it's going to become a buzzword of like, oh, we're the delightful product. We want to be as delightful as that. Well, it is important for chat because that chat is a very personal platform, and the way that Snapchat's a very personal platform. And there's a reason why we were talking about Snapchat making changes to their lens store, because Snapchat is this fun, personal, silly thing. And so these fun, personal, silly lenses are important to people or have found people have enjoyed them enough that Snapchat has had to make vital decisions about it. Oh, Justin, I don't know what happened to your audio there, but it just went out for a second, right as you were about to make that cogent point. So listen, personal communication is exactly what we're talking about here. That's a perfect point because what we want to happen is to have a really easy way to discuss things with people. And everybody has to be on that platform, right, Justin? Everybody has to be on the thing. I mean, Snapchat is cool because you can put it out there in my story, and it doesn't matter who sees it. But if you really want to start a conversation, which is what messaging is about, you need to have the ability to get to the person that you're sending it to. And one of the reasons I don't use Messenger or Line or WhatsApp or WeChat, instead I use text messaging is everybody I know who I want to text has a phone number. That just might be because we're old, though. Is it, though? I mean, even young people have phone numbers. But I get what you're saying, and it's a fair point. Young people also gravitate toward these messaging platforms, and the idea that the phone number could become obsolete is legitimate because they, generally, when they first start interacting with these devices and want to communicate with their friends, don't have SMS plans. And they don't have cellular communication plans. These are Wi-Fi-enabled devices that they use at their home and their school and other places that offer Wi-Fi. And that's how they are able to connect with each other. And many times, once you are in, like in the same way that me and you and so many other people are raising barns like Amish people here on SMS is because, again, that's where our social network is. We know we can get to somebody if we text message them in a way that other people younger than us know that they can get to their friends if they hit them up on these messaging apps. Now, that explains why you have 800 million users on Messenger. That explains the popularity of Snapchat and WeChat and WhatsApp and all of them that they're popular. But for them to go the extra mile and replace the phone number means that everybody has to use them. Your old friends have to be able to use it for the times that you need to text your parents. The person you meet in a business relationship when you exchange information needs to be on the same platform. We could never get instant messaging to really get past that need of a unifying client because not everybody was always on the same platforms. Do you think that we can get that ubiquity to where everybody will be on at least one or two platforms so you only have to have a couple apps? It's not that it will all happen at once. It's that it's already happening and it's inevitable. Every time that two Apple devices talk to each other in a blue bubble of beers, you are usually going through iMessage, and that's the reason why when you're on a plane and you get Wi-Fi, despite the fact that your cellular radio is turned off, you're still able to only talk to the people that have iPhones or are on their Mac computers. Messenger is a huge part of this. We chat's a huge part of this. We are doing more than we think of communicating without a telephone number right now. And I think probably more than we would have thought we were doing five years ago. And I used to be more on the side of, yeah, messaging apps are just going to take over because you can use it across platform, right? When I realize that I can't talk to my friends who are on Android through my iMessage app, I'm going to turn to something else. I'm going to turn to WhatsApp. I'm going to turn to Facebook Messenger. I'm going to turn to Line. And those things are huge in certain regions, but again, it's regional. I still think to get the text messaging app that's tied to your phone number because of things like iMessage or Hangouts, which can also tie into your phone number and provide messaging amongst people that are on that platform. And even two people on iPhones who have the Hangouts app. I feel like that those are, there's a safety net with the phone number that is not likely to go away soon. And I wonder if, even if we replace the phone number, we end up with a less reliable system because you're always going to have to think, wait, what platform is that contact on versus what we do now, which is like, well, I've got my contacts list and my phone numbers. And maybe I talk to my friends on one of these other messaging platforms, but I know for text messaging I use that. Now granted, that's a cultural thing for me in the United States in my age demo, for sure. But again, it's like, one thing to say you can get a billion people using it, it's another thing to say you kill off that safety net platform. Sure, and I don't think that even in their wildest, most optimistic views that behind closed doors, Facebook saying in any five year, 10 year solution are we completely doing away as users with a phone number. I think we'll always be there as some kind of safety net to some extent. And what is not mentioned here is let's say they succeed. Let's say that WeChat and Line and iMessage and Facebook Messenger succeed in taking out the phone number. There's no guarantee that this is a better solution than what we have now. It is just a solution that has those services in the power play position and take the carriers down a peg and further commoditize them as just the movers of bits, as opposed to the more powerful controller of your phone number in all caps with thunderbolts behind it. Well, and how are they gonna make money off these things is going to change how you use them. One of the advantages of the messaging platforms is they're more fun, they're more relaxed. You can send gifts and emojis and all these things that some of the text messaging platforms have some phones don't. It's just, it's more options, but a lot of that is about advertising. Advertising related gifts, advertising related lenses is how Snapchat's gonna, you make their money now. And that means that your platform for messaging is going to be at the behest of big money advertisers who are going to try to force you to use their services and their games and their stickers on that messaging platform. In fact, WhatsApp, which says no, we don't do anything. We're just about messaging and we just charge you a dollar to use our service. Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, said in their Form 10 queue filing that the company monetizes WhatsApp in only a very limited fashion and may not be successful in efforts to generate meaningful revenue from WhatsApp over the long term. So Facebook's looking at it as a loss leader, whereas Messenger is the place where they think they can sell ads. Well, and bots are a huge part of that, right? There's a very good reason why they're talking about bots because bots are something that me and you can visualize saying, hey, you wanna know what for the right bot that solves the right problem for me, I might not only pay one time, I might pay a subscription if it's at the right price. I may, you know, if it is just for me and you to schedule out not only our recordings on this show as well as the other podcasts that we do together, you know, if there's just a thing that's plugged in to our own phones and knows our schedules and can, you know, point out to us, hey, it's getting about time for us to record FSL. Let's just get a conversation going. Here are some suggestions that my bot talking to your bot can come up with. That's worth it. That's something that now shows utility, but what it also shows is that no one's making money on just us talking to each other and there needs to be an add on. And we thought, you know, stickers were something that people thought, oh, wow, it's making a little bit more money than you thought. And now you're, you know, all these Facebook messaging further plans all depend on you dropping more cash than just what it costs for them to run. Yeah, dropping more cash on stickers and stuff is one thing. I think that's 20% of lines revenue. Another 60% of lines revenue comes from games that they sell you, but also advertising. And I think that's what Snapchat is realizing is we can make a couple hundred thousand dollars in a day selling a lens to somebody who wants to promote their bit. And that's what I worry about is, for instance, line I installed and was playing around with and using it with my wife. And as a joke, I installed the Taylor Swift sticker album which was free and sent her a Taylor Swift sticker. And then from then on, the only messages I get from line because Eileen stopped using it are from Taylor Swift telling me when her new stickers are available for purchase or special concert things that are available for purchase. So basically advertisements. So what you're saying is that people who are using these services can only in their wildest dreams imagine a pure version of these messaging apps forever. Yeah, I'm saying we're not out of the woods on how to monetize messaging apps. Where do you think that it goes? I mean, because I think right now in 2016, we are in a day after the party situation for messaging, which has exploded over the past two years. But now the question is, okay, look, Facebook, you won. You bought the biggest player in the game and even if it's a lost leader, you kept it out of the hands of Google. You've created at possible cost to your user base a really good product. I don't think anybody would say that Messenger is a bad product. It's very, very fast. It's very reliable. You don't even need a Facebook account to use it, which I think is a brilliant move. Don't need a Facebook account to use it. It is a good product. They forced people, they twisted their arm and they're still shoving me outside of my Facebook app whenever I dare hit the Messenger button, right? What now? You know, if none of this stuff picks up, if messaging, because everything we've seen in the roadmap is all stuff that we hope will be adopted. We think will be adopted, but it's vaporware right now in terms of people actually using it. Like, is messaging just going to be the great utility boondoggle that wasn't a goldmine? I, you know, I think it has the weight of a product that is too useful to not be cracked by someone. Yeah, I don't know. And text messaging is an example of that. That was a huge cash cow for phone companies. They, you know, when they could charge you 15 cents a message and eventually the ability to charge you that just went away, partly because of these web-based messaging apps. I think somebody will crack it and I think it will be some combination of what we're talking about here. I think the idea of threads and bots really does, in my mind, point the way to the most likely revenue generator and crossing with the most useful way of using a messaging app outside of just the utility of sending a message to one or another person. I also think Snapchat is evolving into a social network more than a messaging app. So I would kind of put their success on a different road, a different path. I use it less for messaging now than I do for just sharing things with people. So I think some other messaging apps may follow that path as well. Aligning Kakaotalk very much have social aspects to them as does WeChat. And I am right now saying in our own Slack that we forgot about Slack in this discussion because Slack is the future of what we consider to be business peer-to-peer communication. But if you want to talk about the B2B aspects, yeah. This same idea of the future being a bot-enhanced, AI-enhanced, delightful, easy, frictionless communication platform, Slack has cracked it. So there's no reason to think that there's not going to be more of this on the consumer space, which we've already seen. The question is, does it make money and how ubiquitous does it become? All right, I just took a Snapchat of your Slack post and added it to my story. So there you go. Let us know what you think. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We've got a few more messages to get to before we're done here. The pick of the day comes from Rich in lovely Cleveland in all caps, which he does not usually write. So this indicates that Rich is very excited. We can stop the pick of the day. It will never get better than this. We've reached the future. We can all quit. What does he mean? He has a link to a TechCrunch article about the grill bot, a robot, Justin, that cleans your grill. And I mean the grill that you make me done. Yeah, no. Pretty amazing. If it works, which we have no idea if it does, $129, three replaceable metal bristles help to robot clean and move around your grill, rechargeable battery. It isn't going to be as effective as good old elbow grease says Fitz Tepper of TechCrunch, sadly. So yeah. Also you have to wait until your grill hits a temperature of 200 degrees. Oh yeah, all right. You want to know what? That's it. We're restarting the pick of the day. We're restarting it high. It was close. It was close. So keep sending your picks to us, folks. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can find more picks at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash picks. Matt wanted to point out that the Casio Android Wear Watch we talked about yesterday, the rugged one for camping and trekking and hiking, as we mentioned, has a dual LCD LED screen and he points out you can toggle that to use only the LCD screen, which has a month-long battery life. So if you manage it right, you can use it for your long camping trips. Thank you for pointing that out, Matt. Absolutely. We also have one from Nick. Nick writes, hi Tom, esteemed contributors and distinguished guests. I'm a PR researcher with a computer science and math background and over the past months I've heard the Oculus and other VR devices are referred to as having 360 degree and two PI by two PI degree views. Two PI, like Pyrus to read it. Two PI degree views. Unfortunately, even the latter does not adequately describe their capabilities. The devices in combination with the application are denoted by the degrees of freedom, here to fore referred to as DOF, possible by experience. For instance, Brian and Jury's project would constitute a three DOF experience since the user can move their view in azimuth elevation and roll movements more technically at angles about the X, Y and Z axis. Further, a VR game that also allows users to control their position with additional input devices would have as many as six DOF. Best wishes in the new year, Nick. Well, it's not just 360 degree, it's Pyrus to read it in, but really the question is, how many doffs does it have? Is what I will now be able to say, thank you, Nick. Exactly. Nick, I doff my cap to you. No, this is a great point. It's not just about the degrees of view, it's about the degrees of movement and the degrees of freedom. So yeah, I joke, Nick, but I really appreciate this email. This is fantastic. And he said, we left it out of the part we're reading here, but he said, we do rely on the wisdom of our audience to help us make the show better, and that's exactly what Nick did. Thank you so much. Also doing it is William and Cole Portland, Oregon, who wrote in with a substantive email asking whether designers are considering blind and visually impaired people when designing virtual reality. He writes, is the solution to have a VR advisor that does the visual work for you and is continuously talking to you, describing the environment? He's not sure that's the right way to go. So I did some research. I'm like, that's a great question. What kind of VR option is there if you're blind or visually impaired? There are a section of booths on accessible technology in the sands at CES level two, about five exhibitors, and they're not about VR. But today at CES, the FCC said it will start accepting nominations January 11th through March 31st for its fifth chairman's award for advancements in accessibility. So there may be some people who use VR or implement VR in that contest, something to keep an eye out. And a cursory search of just the general topic shows that research is underway for accessible VR applications. Virtual reality interactive environments for the blind is a research project at De Montfort University in Leicester in England. They are trying to find out if it is possible to accurately model computationally in a virtual space the auditory cues used by blind individuals for understanding the configuration of an environment. So not describing the environment, but giving you the same auditory cues you would have if you were moving around an environment. And a paper from Egyptian researchers called Virtual Reality Technology for Blind and Visually Impaired People reviews and recent advances covers a number of the types of things that people have been doing with virtual reality both to assist and also to provide a VR experience to people with blind or visual impairments. So it's happening out there, it just doesn't get covered enough. So thank you, William, for kind of making me take a look and see what was going on. Tom, I just wanted to jump in and say that a long time ago I went down to USC way back when I worked at CBS News and experimented with their advances in 10.2 audio. And one of the issues was that there wasn't, there were some applications for it, but it wasn't really like at a consumer level. And I'll bet you that that sense of like complete surround an incredible detailed positioning of audio throughout a spherical space around you is something that would be huge for this, you know, for people with visual disabilities because you can literally recreate sound at like the accurate human level of all different kinds of scenarios. So just a thing from my past that I remember that would be hugely, you know, useful. Very cool. Yeah, folks, William asked the question, we're throwing it back out to you guys too. Like we've got a couple things that we've noted here. Do you know of anything else that's going on virtual reality for not only for visually impaired or blind people, but other accessibility issues around virtual reality. Love to hear about them. Send it to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thanks, Janney. That's really cool. I didn't know about the 10.1 thing. All right, that is it for this show. Thank you, Justin, Robert Young for joining us. You are always moving, man. You're more than a shark. You eat sharks. I do, I do, but when I'm not eating sharks, I'm obsessively checking to see whether or not people like The Contender, my brand new card game, the Game of Presidential Debate, and very thankfully to not only listeners to this show, but also just everybody else who backed the Kickstarter, we hit a amazing milestone yesterday of all the physical games on Amazon. If you sort them by average review, we are the best reviewed game not named Cards Against Humanity. Pretty popular. Their experience is very well reviewed. They have more reviews than we do, but 124 people have reviewed The Contender with 122 of them giving them five stars. This has been just an amazing over-the-top reaction. Thank you guys so much. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, head on over to thecontender.us or just search on Amazon for The Contender. We're thankfully now beating the Andrew Cuomo biography as well as the 2000 Joan Allen movie, The Contender. But I'll tell you what, I'd love to hear what you guys think. If you've already played it, you want to leave a review, please go ahead and do it on Amazon. Otherwise, go ahead and check it out. It's a fun social party game that you don't need to care about politics to play. In fact, if you are confused, bewildered, or angered by politics, you're probably gonna love it all the more. Thecontender.us. Thank you to all our patrons who make the show possible. We are more than 25% of the way to our next goal, which is to be able to pay Peter Wells to do a sixth day of Daily Tech News Show from Australia. So we would have it on Sundays here in our hemisphere because he'd be doing it on Monday in his hemisphere. If you get value out of the show, if you're listening to this and you think, you know what, I got a bucks worth of value out of that show, we don't even ask you to give it per day. So that'd be awesome if you want to. Just a dollar a month at the minimum. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. Also, y'all, I'm doing a convey UX talk in February. That's a conference up in Seattle, Washington on the Internet of Things. Len Peralta's gonna be there. We're gonna be doing a Daily Tech News show from there. He's gonna illustrate both of those things. There'll be a bunch of professional designers in the audience. So this is my chance to get some of your ideas and complaints about the design of Internet of Things in front of people who can do something about it. Be helpful to me if you could answer a few quick questions about Internet of Things by going to bit.ly slash IOT questions. If you have a minute, it's only like three questions, three or four questions, bit.ly slash IOT questions. Stay tuned if you're listening to the audio version for a special CES report. The last one from Allison Sheridan. Or if you're watching the video, you can find those in the treasure chest available to certain Patreon backers or in the links in the show notes. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can give us call 51259 daily. That's 5125932459. Catch the show live Monday through Friday at 430 p.m. Eastern at alphageekradio.com. Visit our website at dailytechnewshow.com. Don't forget about diamondclub.tv. Back tomorrow with Len Peralta and Darren Kitchen. Talk to you then. The show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at thefrogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this rover. Great show. What should we call it? Let's see. Yeah, 10.2 audio is one of those things we investigated a long time ago, like could we do a piece about it? And it's really hard to do a piece about audio and television. But it always stuck with me. All right. Ads kill the messenger. Hey, I'm talking here. Face Palmer Lucky. Maybe a little editorial for us. That might be a little editorial. I think Palmer Lucky was doing a little like I'm Face Palmer myself for saying it. I think it's a little editorial. I agree. He's 23 years old, people. Come on. I feel like he was owning it. Like, yeah, I screwed up. I shouldn't have said that. 23 hours. Well, I can't tell you what I was doing in 23. But I was not having a Facebook. Oh, yeah. ET message home. Grandpa has a phone number. Grandpa still has a phone number. I think phone numbers are still going to be around as a security issue. They're just going to be your carrier's account number, essentially. I think it'll be the one thing that you don't worry that goes away like, oh, will the company be viable? Will Snapchat be here in five years? And I move on to something else and have to repopulate it. Oh, you mean a phone number won't go away? Even if your carrier went under, you'd still have the phone number wouldn't. Yeah, because you need somebody to give people that's not your name, which is more secure than your name. Face detect. Except it becomes your name. And then phone number? Yeah. It's just another name. It's just another way of reaching you. There are four, four, four, three, three, two, one. Wait, that's eight numbers, seven numbers. Too many. Justin, are you just quiet, or did your mic go off? No, no, no. I have no idea what's happening. We set up a countertop washer, and in the process, for whatever reason, there are just these little spikes of energy that throw off our USB drivers. Do you have any static mat? No. Do you put everything into a power strip, or do you put into a UPS? Several power strips. And when you say desktop, is it like a washing machine washer? Yeah, no, a dishwasher, like a countertop dishwasher in the kitchen. It could be just running off the same circuit, and then. I'm guessing that's it. And if it's not grounded properly, it might be giving you the. Yeah, the weird thing is that even when it's not running, it's been being silly, so I don't know. I think we might just need to find another better surge protector or something. I mean, yeah, ideally, you just get a UPS into whatever your most sensitive equipment. Yeah. Something with the automatic voltage regulation just to deal with any stray issues, or just unplug the dishwasher when you're not using it. Is it plugged into a wall outlet, or is it just actually wired in to your? It's plugged into the wall, basically. I mean, it's plugged into a power shipment of the wall. Yeah, try unplugging it for a couple hours and see if it fixes all your issues. Yeah. Yeah, there's also some good UPSs here for like 30 bucks. So remember, people don't realize this in the audience, but before the show started, I had a little issue with my sound not coming through, and I had to unplug and plug back in my USB audio codec device, which means that Audacity now won't play anything back, because it says, oh, your thing isn't there anymore. So I'm just going to edit by waveform. Oh, boy. That's bold. Well, I have to say that after editing for a solid year and editing audio, I feel like I'm finally learning a language where I can actually look at something and be like, somebody's saying, um, somebody's saying, like, oh, that's where the bit ends. It's actually really kind of amazing. OK. See what this sounds like. I'm going to go with ads kill the messenger, I think. Yeah. That good? You good? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to take a nap, and then I'm going to start my first New Year's resolution, which is to learn Snapchat. Nice. Follow me on Snapchat. Follow who? Follow me. I will snap each other. Oh, I'm following you. I got that far. Good. You, Jeff, Tom, and Tom Merritt. Yeah, I've got like, I don't know. I think I've got like 200 people following me on Snapchat, but only like 18 actually look at my snaps. So a big audience. Here's my question. It's hard for me to find people. It's hard to find people on Snapchat. Like, it involves some mechanism that my brain rejects. So that's my lesson for today. Sorry, I'm just looking at that. Oh, yeah, because I actually did Snapchat of the Slack. Yeah, I think I might do it tomorrow, or I might wait till Monday. We'll see. But I want to Snapchat. I want to do a My Story of my day of prepping DTNS. And then you know how you can save them out. I'm going to save it out and publish it separately for people who don't use Snapchat. The only problem is you have to do everything portrait in Snapchat. So making a YouTube video out of it then becomes embarrassing. Well, no, just making more like the kids these days. You can't turn their phone. You know, back in my day, we used to turn the phone. You know, is it that hard? Jeez, is your wrist broken? You know, back when George Bush was president, this wasn't a problem. Ha, ha, ha, ha. How long is a My Story? What's the limit? It's just whatever you've posted in the past 24 hours. Oh, I see. OK, so they all combine together. So they mean story in a meta larger sense. It's just your list of videos. Yes. OK. With a 24-hour limit, yeah. Yeah, OK. And it just rolls through. They just drop off. And whatever's in the past 24 hours stays in there. Is your story. And you can save them out, which I did on my vacation a couple of times because, yeah, you know. The mind immediately turns to, why not just record a video? Oh, that's like saying, why not send an email instead of a text message? Why don't you just finish showing your flag to give to the cause? You drove to the post office. Why didn't you just walk? I know. I just, ah, I can't. But how long is the limit on a snap? Is it eight? Is it eight seconds? I don't like that, yeah. But you just shoot a bunch of them. You'd be like Alice Pagnolin. Or DJ Khaled. Just keep, oh, yeah, DJ Khaled, yeah. DJ Khaled. They don't want you to use Snapchat, Jenny. So you're going to use Snapchat? Sure. It's enough to make me want to buy an Oculus. That'll solve your Snapchat issue. It'll solve my problem. I'll just be in there. Well, it's a brilliant LLC bought one. So you can borrow it for sure. Really? Yeah. And then I talked FrogPants LLC to buy one, too. Yeah. Well, that's the whole point is you have to have a bunch of people that have it to have fun. Oh, my god. That's so exciting. Yeah, I don't know. We'll figure out the computer, because I don't think I actually have a computer in this building that can work with it. Because my gaming machine's so old. Yeah. That's what I was. I mean, we just bought this new doghouse last year. So I haven't checked the specs. You might be OK within a year. But even then, it's like, I don't know. You might be able to get away with just upgrading the video card. I had a good conversation with Andrew yesterday that the real big difference that we're going to see this year and next year in VR are free range versus tethered. Everything that's coming out now is all tethered. Except for the dinky ones, the ones that you stick your phone in. And their big hold up is no controller. So Samsung was showing off these prototype controllers for Gear VR, but that's still a year away. Well, and Gear VR is, I mean, you might as well just get drunk and pretend like things are happening, like, for as long as they are. And they're great. If you've never seen them before, they're really, really fun. And they're really great. Have I seen it? Oh, no. I'd just gotten drunk and was pretending. Yeah, you know. But I think that there is a future for you understanding where you are in full space and having maybe less of a gaming experience, less of a your head falls off because it's so impressed visual experience, but just putting you in a created space more effectively and letting you walk around. And there are enough advancements in those kinds of areas that could be really interesting. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready to sink into the chair that feeds me protein solution and put on the glasses and never come out. I have a funny feeling that with the popularity of VR goggles increasing, you're going to get a lot more nearsighted people, especially kids. That's a bunch of bonk. No, they've tied in nearsightedness in children with overuse of smartphones and tablets. The reason is because your eyes naturally focus on the horizon. No, it doesn't. All right, all right. I want to believe. I'm just curious. You read Reddit, so I'm just curious. Would you say that they've found that? Is that a replicable study or? No, I actually read it in The New York Times, but I guess I could better chance. Tom, it's The New York Times. It's a little blog that I follow on Snapchat called The New York Times. They basically referenced a study from a Singaporean university trying to figure out why Singapore children, I think, of under the age of 12, had higher incidences of kids wearing glasses compared to their counterparts in Australia, same like Singaporean Australians, that didn't have to. And what they noticed is that in Australia, the kids spent more time outside as opposed to children in Singapore who spent a lot of time in a class or either in a cram school or just regular school reading. And their hypothesis is the eyes aren't focusing on this. So it's a hypothesis. It's not something that they've, it's an indication of further study. There's a correlation now. It doesn't mean it costs. And that's fair. I don't want to be a correlation bachelor, because that kind of study is important for figuring out what's true, but that doesn't prove that it's true. You're absolutely correct, Tom. There is no smoking gun next to the eyeball, all right? All right. You're just one of those people, no, not going to happen. I'm not saying that either. Don't get stressed. Put your theories to the test. It's East meets West. Nice. Can we use that? Yeah. That'd be great. Whether or not you missed the part where the New York Times, by the way, I adore. It's a little blog I read on Snapchat called the New York Times. Hello, war. Maybe you've heard of it. Call it World War I. You're making me laugh like a dork. No, you naturally laugh like a dork. That's going to be fair. I shouldn't blame everyone else. That's a good point. I'm going to go see Star Wars tonight. Oh, you? You. On IMAX. Wait, but it's IMAX this time, right? Yeah. There's a 3D version, right? You saw the first one in 3D. I saw the 3D, yeah. I have not seen it. But that you couldn't enjoy because you were too close to the screen. No, I saw it three times in 3D. Wow. I enjoyed it two of the times. Actually, I enjoyed it all the times, but I could actually see everything two of the times. I always have to sit right in the middle of the theater if I watch anything in 3D, because then my eyes go all weird. Can't see that. Gives me a giant headache. Yeah, that happens to a lot of people. I read the study in The New York Times that Singaporeans should. The New York Times. I heard it on a popular podcast. Yeah, you guys. It's a little snap story that I read on Facebook Messenger called The New York Times. It's a thread bot that I follow. Sorry, it's a little Twitch TV account that I like to subscribe to called The New York Times. I like how Ellie woke up so hard in the middle of that whole diatom of The New York Times. Her head just went like, oh, yeah, there it is. We're only two babies away from a trend piece. That's right. Wait, so doesn't mean I have to come up with two more, or is anyone there to contribute? Well, we have two more babies than The New York Times and I can write a trend piece about how listening to somebody talk about The New York Times is the hot new trend in babies. No, what we should do is find a correlation between fertility rates and DTNS audience members. Oh, my gosh. They're just wrapping up now. I can see all those countries are trying to get their women to have more kids just constantly playing DTNS, playing DTNS, elevators, shopping malls. Yeah, wait, I started publishing something. I know. It's got real weird real fast, Tom. I don't know. It just got real weird. I'm paying my attention for it. All of them, you can just hear the choruses around the country. Great fertility session. What should we call it? I don't know. Let's go to TheBot.tv. Oh, righty. Well, good, DTNS and chill. Thank you, Ian. I am going to call a close to these proceedings. I'll say. Thank you all for joining us. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.