 to hide. Alright, if you must, we've got three minutes. Hide yourself away. Yeah, is it really weapons grade? That's a good question, because it's from the NSA. So you could just say like, well, anything from the NSA is weapons grade, right? Which case makes it weapons grade beyond that? I don't know. But from the NSA, shouldn't it be like a security national security grade? Yeah, spook grade, intelligence grade, spook grade, shiny shoe grade. weapons grade substance is one that is pure enough to be used to make a nuclear weapon or as properties that make it particularly suitable. I don't think you can make a nuclear weapon out of this ransomware. I'm pretty skeptical. I'm just reading the Wikipedia entry for why not? It makes me happy. It irritates my wife because technically it's a non vetted source. But you know, friction in a relationship is really what keeps you young and sweet. You know about that, Tom. Now, here's where my mind with though, you started talking about weapons grade nuclear fuel. I thought of yellow cake uranium, which made me think of a bakery, which made me want pie. Oh, now I want pie. Thanks, Tom. It just happens. Okay, it happens. Yeah, everybody says that just happens. Oh, no, stop. Stop. Sorry. No, quick question for you, Patrick. Seven. Tech thing, AVXL, was there anything else we're plug? You want us to Twitch, but let's push. Let's push AVXL and tech thing, please. Done. Some point, I'm going to finish setting up my new audio blog, but you mean podcast? No, no, no, an actual place where I know, I know what you write with words on a written page. I know about audio. I get it. Well, just there's a bunch of stuff I want to talk about, you know, with speakers and headphones and audio gear and stuff. No, I would love that. I don't want to try to stuff and detect thing because, you know, my audience is kind, but there's only so many headphone reviews they can take before the world. And then my children starve. And since I don't want to starve my children. No, definitely not worth that. And then suddenly from weapons grade, I go to the sea of instability. We probably start the show then before you go out to sea. I love how you're ready. Instability goes to island of instability. In any case, come back to shore, Patrick. Dude, I'm learning here. I'm sciencing, man. Here we go. Three, two, one. Hey, you. Yeah, you. Do you want to help out the Daily Tech News show? Well, it's really easy. Just go to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support and find out how. Thank you. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 12, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today. Patrick Norton, host of Tech Thing and AVXL. Patrick, are you ready for Mayhem? Now that my computer is updated with the latest Windows updates, I feel I can leave the house again. Yes, I am the kind of person who very frequently will tell people on the show this security scare is something you should pay attention to, but it's not that serious. This security share is being overblown. These headlines are exaggerating. Today is not that day. This ransomware thing that is eating the globe right now is bad. It's only in 99 countries. It's only 57,000 computers and climbing. Why? You personally, if you don't work in a workplace that's infected, may not have to worry too much and we'll get into why, but it is eating a fiery path through the world's enterprise IT sectors and exacting wrath on those who have not implemented the March Windows patches. Yeah, I mean, when the government of Great Britain has to tell the people of Great Britain that the National Health Service has not been targeted. It just got wiped out along with everything else. Collateral damage was our national health. Yeah, I hate that. Well, we are going to get into that. That is coming a little later in the show, but let's start with a few other tech things you should know about. Apple announced that Corning will receive $200 million from Apple's $1 billion US advanced manufacturing fund. Corning, of course, makes Gorilla Glass, which is in all the phones, and they're the first company to get money out of this new fund. Yay, Samsung announced its fourth Tizen OS phone, the Z4 with a 2.5 inch WVGA screen and a gigabyte of RAM coming to India this month. Patrick, did you know they were still making Tizen phones? You know, I'm just delighted and shocked. Yeah, I mean, I guess Samsung wants to just keep it on the back burner just in case. Well, so they make those entry level phones. Here's some more top stories. US District Judge William Alsup denied Uber's request to have its trade secrets lawsuit with Waymo moved to arbitration. Uber wanted it moved to arbitration because Anthony Lewandowski, who is the accused, had arbitration in his contract. But Judge Alsup said, um, no, you aren't, they are not suing Lewandowski, they're suing you. Just so Judge Alsup decided to refer the dispute to the US Attorney for investigation, a trial has been scheduled for October. Waymo alleges that Anthony Lewandowski took 14,000 files with him when he left Google. And of course, Google's autonomous car project became Waymo. Judge Alsup has yet to rule on Waymo's request for a preliminary injunction, which would shut down some of Uber's autonomous car research. This is this is juicy courtroom drama. This is Perry Mason stuff when it when it comes to the tech court. And the big thing that we've been waiting for is that preliminary injunction because that is the one thing that could really impede Uber is if they can't conduct certain research. I don't know. I I I had another moment this morning where a car with an Uber tag in it did something you know, illegal in terms of maneuvering and endangered me. So at this point, I think anything that complicates Uber's legal life just makes me that much happier. And that's not a particularly rational response. And it's not a particularly legal response. Well, also, you want them to get the autonomous cars then so that that person is off the road and not not cutting you off in traffic anymore. Well, you know, there's I do not want people to be unemployed, but I would also, you know, I don't know. I Uber's I don't see Uber having done anything that justifies making their life easier in court based on the way they've behaved in several other venues and several other cases. You know, I just wish the relevant orders weren't sealed. It'd be nice to have been able to dig in and start getting the really juicy details of what's going down there. Yeah, the upshot here is we're right down that preliminary injunction to see how bad it's going to be for Uber. And then after that, this is going to go quiet until the fall. Swiss security firm Mod Zero released a security advisory Thursday saying a key logger had been found in an audio driver package for HP business and enterprise laptops. A log was kept unencrypted in a user's home directory, began at login and overwrote itself with every new login. It was not being used by anybody. It was really easy to see it was there. It was very much not malicious, but maybe incompetent would be a word you would use HP rolled out a Windows update to fix the problem. And HP VP Mike Nash said the key logger was never meant to go into a production version of the driver. It was put in by the maker of the driver, Conexant, as a crude way to debug hotkeys and they forgot to take it out. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's you know, it's I I feel bad for HP because now everybody's like HP is just like Lenovo. They were trying to spy on us. And Lenovo was doing it on purpose. They wanted to make some revenue in this case, it was mere incompetence. You know, somebody forgot to check a box in the process of rolling out the driver. And you know, as you point out, nobody was actually using it. Yeah, it was just there. It was just there doing its thing the way it would do as a debugging piece, right? Like, tell me all the keys that were switched so that I can map it up about against how it performed and see if the hotkeys work the way they were supposed to be working. That's really all it was meant for. On the upside, like somebody found it and HP is issued a fix before somebody found it and put it into an exploit because these are basically enterprise machines that the key logger driver with the key logger inside of it were going into. Yeah, I guess the only fallout would be is if you were running backups, automatic backups, you might want to check the backups and make sure that key logger file isn't sitting in your backup somewhere, just in case. Good plan. An update to Google's Aloe app lets users create custom emojis based off selfies. So your face can become an emoji. Neural networks map the images and illustrate it using a kit designed by artist Lamar Abrams. And then you can tweak the emoji after the initial mapping to suit your tastes. Aloe then creates 22 custom stickers based off the template. Custom emojis are available on Android and iOS support coming soon. Fun use of machine learning for an app that not that many people are using yet. Several people have used it just in the last few days because they want to try out the emoji thing. Exactly. We've created the best emojis on the planet because we really, really want people to use this particular communications app from Google before everybody starts to like it and we kill it. It is what you do if you want people to start using your app. You come up with stuff like this. Right. So I mean there's some there is interesting stuff inside of it. You know, I love the idea that you can like change the size of your text so you can yell at somebody in your text conversations. You know, you can manipulate photos. But I don't know. At this point, I think Google has burned so many people over the last decade with sort of rolling out, you know, communications apps and then wiping them, stifling them or downgrading them. I just I can they ever get much traction on one of these things again? Yeah, I think back to and I and I wonder just on the side of machine learning going into all these things, if any sci-fi authors predicted that when AI finally came along, it would be used to have little cats follow you around in Snapchat or put a dinosaur in the driveway in front of a kid in a Halloween costume or or turn your face into an emoji that you can use in the aloe. Yeah, and then it became sentient and then it became Skynet. And that's the rule of Skynet. The cat. It's like Godwin's law when Skynet comes on. It's time to move on. John Piszowski at Buzzfeed reports that sources say the availability of that Amazon video app and Apple TV that we were talking about earlier this week will be announced at WWDC on June 5th. That might be a big announcement. Apple rolls out maybe Jeff Bezos comes on stage. Who knows? And Amazon reportedly would resume selling the Apple TV at that point as well, because remember, they stopped selling it in 2015 because it didn't have the Amazon video app on it. No, no, no, they stopped selling it because it didn't have an excellent Amazon video experience experience. My my my thank you for the correction. You're absolutely right. That's why they say they stopped selling it. Robert Herron and I were talking about this on AV Excel yesterday and we're both like, yay, it's finally going to be on on Apple TV and and and then, of course, you know, the joke we didn't make is like that means Apple, of course, will be available on on the fire TV and the Roku in the immediate future. But, you know, people are like, you know, Apple's preventing them. It's like they didn't submit an app because they didn't like the terms of it. You probably the terms are preventing them, but not but nothing else. It makes me wonder two things. One is will they allow Amazon's store? That would be the first time that an alternate store would be allowed on Apple TV. Apple TV allows all kinds of streaming. But voodoo is not up there. Google Play isn't up there. I guess there's a YouTube app where you could buy things and play them back through your YouTube player theoretically. But that that will be interesting to see. And Roku is starting to fall behind. There are a lot of services coming out like the Hulu live TV service did not come out for Roku yet. It's coming, but it didn't come out yet. So it it's it's starting to heat up the competition there. I'm down with that. Heat it all on Elon Musk posted a video on Instagram showing a sled traveling on tracks in a tunnel. It's a test run of the boring company. That's the idea of moving cars at 125 miles per hour on sleds underground to circumvent traffic. I mean, I don't know how big the sled is in this test hole. The hole doesn't look that big. It's moving pretty fast. I don't know if to move in 125 miles an hour, but he's dug a hole and put a sled in it like he's not messing around. Well, the pictures if you go on his feet, the pictures are really, really amazing because they're showing out the big thing with the boring companies that they're going to bore the tunnels. But the the the tunnel bore is actually going to be, I guess, a couple of hundred yards long. And we'll actually there it is if you start moving to the right. Oh, by the way, nice pineapple. That's the snail that's going to race the boring tunnel. But the idea is that there's the snail. Yes, now go pineapples have the the the tunnel is supposed to actually, you know, I guess, create the tunnel behind it or do shoring and bracing to decrease radically decrease the amount of time it takes to dig tunnels. So part of me is like part of me is is I don't know if anything's going to come out of high speed sleds traveling under the, you know, fault ridden soil of Los Angeles. But the tunneling equipment looks really, really interesting. Well, you know, they did a lot to try to figure out how to put subways here at all, right? And there was a huge sinkhole when the first one was dug back in the late 90s. Whoops. So if you can do it here, which you can do it, you can do it anywhere as the saw goes. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm really curious. I mean, having recently spent some time, some quality time in LA traffic, I would love to see this idea work. But the reality is is I don't think they can get in the what's the cost going to be for your sled ride? Yeah, as your cars hurtled at 125 miles an hour. You know, I, you know, what's the electrical cost going to be? What's the physical? Is it going to be $20? Is it's going to be like another classic, you know, Southern California? Well, if you got $13 each way for your commute, you can take the fast. The fast track. The fast track. But if you don't, you're going to be, you know, bumper to bumper track. Well, there's that one highway through Orange County where you pay to drive the whole length of it. And you that's the exact one I was thinking about. I took that several years ago, was like, this is great. Yeah, this is costing me an outrageous amount of money. But there's no one else here. It was fast. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to our other show, DailyTechHeadlines.com. You can get all the past episodes, keep up to date, super fast. And it's also available as a flash briefing on Amazon Echo and in the app, anchor at anchor.fm. And that is a look at our top stories. All right, ransomware. Called WannaCry has infected computers in the UK, US, China, Russia, Spain, Italy. We don't have time to talk about the 99 countries that it is in. It's also known as WannaCryptor or WCry or WannaCryptor. It is ransomware. It encrypts a drive and demands $300. Although there's some reports that some of them are demanding $600 in Bitcoin to unlock. It's distributed to other Windows machine on the same network, gives three days to pay before doubling the amount and then gives seven days to pay before threatening to lock your files forever. It's been out for a while. WannaCry has been around since March. And the most recent version, some people are saying, was identified a couple of weeks ago. But just in the last 24 hours, it spiked. Jacob Krusteck at AVG Avast has been keeping track of the instances of this. And Patrick found his latest tweet right before the show, 57,000 instances of this one from from like 12 hours before that. Yeah, on the video, you're seeing the wrong but the audio people are getting the right number. So is everybody else. 57,000 instances of WannaCry. And Checkpoint says that this is a new variant. The key part here is it takes advantage of the eternal blue Windows vulnerability, MS 17 010 in the Windows server message block service. That's the service that shares files and printers across networks. The tool Eternal Blue was released by the Shadow Brokers as part of the alleged NSA leak. It was patched by Windows in March, but apparently a lot of enterprises did not patch it. So this is one of those instances where consumers may be better protected, especially if they left Windows auto update on because they likely got the patch in March and they're fine. They also may not be on a network that has a bunch of other machines that might be likely to get this. But in an enterprise network with hundreds, maybe thousands of users, someone gets an email and installs this and suddenly no one else has to click on anything. It just gets spread across the network. That's pretty crazy about this is because nobody actually knows what the initial vector is at this point. They don't know how it's getting on to the networks. They do know because it's basically just running around SMB and using this whole. It is raining mayhem. This is the mayhem you were promised at the top of the show by the way. But yeah, they were like, I guess running around Telefonica or announcing over the loud speakers telling everyone at the Telefonica headquarters to shut your machine down immediately. National Health Service like, you know, the I want to say the prime minister just basically said, you know, the National Health Service was not targeted. We just have 18 hospitals shut down by this. They are they're closing hospitals and cancelling operations in many cases because of this like this is this is the kind of thing where like, well, this hack happened. It affected a limited number of people and it really didn't have any consequences is what I often say. Not in this case. This case, it is endangering lives, literally. Yes. I mean, this is this is the hunt to figure out who's doing this is going to get very interesting. You know, there's initial revival. I won't I won't name nations that the that one of Christ seems to be coming from. But I think there's going to be a huge, huge, huge multinational witch hunt. Yeah, because it does not appear to be a nation state in any way. It appears to be some kind of criminal organization. And it doesn't appear to have targeted when when they're looking at how the code works. It doesn't appear to have targeted anyone in particular. It just wanted to spread and it's spread way faster than I bet even the perpetrators expected. Yeah, I think of I was I was I can't think of the name of Reemdy. Then we're Neil Stevenson Neil Stevenson where the kids are basically they they they create a, you know, something a little nefarious in a massive online multiplayer game to basically force people to bring them money because, you know, they're all coin farming or they're gold farming and and and just, you know, want to move on with their lives and make a big score and then things spiral out of control. And this kind of seems like that because this is. We were, you know, I was giggling about the title from Dan Gooden's article in ours Technico where it's weapons grade. But the reality is is this is unbelievably nasty and it is spreading out of control in the way that we haven't seen a worm a computer worm. Yeah, I mean, I've seen a bunch of articles comparing it to code red in 2001, which, you know, spread around the world on Windows 98. Yeah, and it's really simple. If you have run if you keep Windows updates on your system, you know, this should be passed. It will impact anything from Windows XP up to Windows 2012. But, you know, if you, you know, if you're a home user and your Windows updates have been turned on, if your Windows updates are current, they're this should not impact you because it was patched back in March. And I think that's the biggest thing is that Telefonica, National Health, Ebert Rola, the power firm in in Spain, Gas Natural in Spain, Portugal Telecom, University in Milan, Italy, FedEx, KPMG, BBVA, Santande Bank, all of these companies should have been up to date. There are reasons I get that CIS admins have for delaying patches for, for, you know, deploying to large organizations. But a March patch, one would hope that this will cause many meetings to be had about how to make sure you roll those patches out as soon as possible. Yeah, I mean, it's it's also, you know, I feel like a lot of large corporations going to approach their are going to reevaluate their approach to Windows updates in the wake of this one. Because, you know, this is this is whether or not they pay the ransom to unlock, you know, I mean, you know, the the math on this is kind of outrageous, right? Let's, you know, if you have what are we at 77,000 machines? 57 is the last I saw. OK, 57, let's say 57,000 machines at $300 per machine. Sure. You know, assuming like everybody pays up, which is obviously not going to happen, right? But if they that's boy, am I reading the numbers there correctly? One billion seven hundred ten. No, I can't be right. I mean, it could be one million dollars right there. All right. If they get 10 percent of that. Yeah, we're talking about a couple of 10,000. Well, and one wonders with the attention that will be focused, as you said, on finding the perpetrators is 10, 10 to 15 thousand dollars even worth it. No, no, no. So if 10 percent of the computers hit pay three hundred dollars, we're talking about 17 million, one hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, that starts to make it maybe that I can see where somebody might be willing to, you know, to lay themselves out. Yeah, Microsoft, by the way, also having to deal with this, even though they issued a patch, they also they announced that they have issued new detection and protection and are working with its customers to provide additional assistance. So, you know, we criticize Microsoft a lot about being so pushy about updates. And yes, they have marketing reasons why they're pushy with those updates, but they also have legitimate security reasons why they're pushy because they don't want to have to be playing clean up in these cases. No, and it also reflects poorly on them because it's Windows machine, Microsoft Windows machines are suffering a catastrophic attack. Now, let's let's talk about the other part of this, which is the idea that the leak of these tools, you know, the way you look at the leak of these tools is often, well, it's better to have them known so that people can defend against them than to have them not be out there. And when Microsoft patched this 30 days before it was leaked, that sort of felt right. Like, yeah, OK, somebody made sure that Microsoft knew about this before it was leaked and now it's patched. On the other hand, we don't have this widespread outbreak if that isn't leaked today. I feel fairly certain about that. Well, you could have, I mean, man, I mean, are we talking about whether or not Shadow Brokers should have leaked this? I mean, you know, again, I'm not talking about Shadow Brokers in particular, but, you know, when someone sometimes they say, look, we're going to leak this out there because people should know it's there. Yeah. This this is the argument that the other side makes. I still think that responsible disclosure is the right way to go and 90 day limits seem reasonable. But the other part of that is companies need to patch their systems, right? Or it is dangerous to leak it out there. OK, I have a complicated viewpoint on this because I have close friends who have done the responsible disclosure and who have friends of friends. Let's put it that way. Sure. Who have done the responsible disclosure and the corporate response for a critical, dangerous, terrifying, you know, flaw that was you know, would literally be impacting hundreds of multinationals was to send one of their lawyers and a couple of FBI FBI agents to that person's door with like, you know, a lifetime NDA that involves this universe in a known universe or else they would basically have them arrested, you know, or at least if the FBI couldn't arrest them, the FBI agents, the pet FBI agents were going to make their lives in nightmare. So, you know, in the sense, yes, responsible disclosure is important. But one of the reasons why some of security researchers have issues with responsible disclosures is because some companies are run by scumbags. Yeah. And well, I do not think Microsoft or Google count in that list. But you know, there are a lot of large there are a lot of large computing companies that do not act in a way that would suggest they care about the security of their customers. Well, guess what? Now we have a big hunk and disaster. I don't feel like I am overusing that when I say this when hospitals are canceling operations and closing down. That is a disaster. You have a disaster 2.2 and say, you know what, you need to fix your stuff. And you know what enterprise and home users, you need to patch your stuff. This is this is not something to joke around with. I wanted to get into no ransom, no more ransom.org, which is another site that kind of helps people figure out what to do if they've been a victim of ransomware. It's it's meant for individual cases, not huge cases like this. But there's great information on there. And you said that a vast has actually joined that project as of today. They literally just announced that I want to say in the last couple hours, the you know, it's interesting, the rights you've got. You're a poll polity, Kipersky, Intel Security, where they the four founding partners from July 2016. Amazon Web Service and Barracuda are part of it. Bitdefender, Checkpoint, Trend Micro, MSOP 11 Path of Vast, and a ton of other groups working together. You know, they're there. This group is basically saying like, we don't generally don't want you to pay the ransom. You know, we don't want you to confirm that ransomware works. You know, in no small part because you may not actually get the key to decrypt your data, because sometimes, you know, criminals and criminals. But part of what they're working on is, you know, they're they're they're gathering data, and then they're creating decryption tools. So if you go to no ransom, you know, dot org, and click on the decryption tools, no more ransom.org. Thank you. I just did the same thing you did. That's why I wanted to make sure the yes. One more time. No more ransom dot org and then click on the decryption tools tag. They've got like the Rockney decryptor, which also works on Darmacrisis Camira, Rockney, Agent Aura, you know, Autolip Playtor and it goes down the Ronald decryptor, the Cry128 decryptor amnesia, Cry9 damage, Krypton, Mary Xmas, you know, I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And this is good for the industry and it's good for consumers. It's good for us. And there's good prevention advice on this side as well. I mean, this is stuff you all probably know in the audience. But it's just good to hand around, enable the show file extension in windows so you can tell if something looks wrong. Trust no one do not ever open an attachment unless you're absolutely sure it's safe, no matter who it's from. Keep all the software on your computer up to date. Use robust antivirus software. And of course, most importantly, back up. In fact, Rich Strfalino, who works for Gestalt IT and helps us out on daily tech headlines said that disaster recovery companies are finding out that their procedures are unexpectedly helpful in recovering from ransomware because they're meant to be able to not only back up but quickly recover operations in the case of a disaster. And one thing I want to say with backup, you know, we like on tech thing, we talk about it constantly, you know, three to one, three copies on two different mediums, one of them off site. If you're if all of your backups are attached to your PC, you know, it's like, oh, I've got my Drobo 5D right here. And I have my files copied up there, you're going to feel so profoundly stupid when not only is everything on your computer locked up, but everything on that Drobo or whatever do I you know, if it can impact the the the operating system or the drives on that device. So, you know, it's you you want to make sure like, you know, you want a hard drive, you want a thumb drive, you want your cool little offline gadget, whatever it is, make sure at least one copy of your data is not connected to your computer. Yeah. And and if you know if you if you get to that point where you have that sinking feeling because ransomware is infecting your computer and you see it happening, disconnect that computer. Yeah. Get it off your notebook. Quite cheerfully yank the if it's a desktop yank, I feel comfortable in saying yank the power cable out of the back of the box. Yeah. Don't be like, OK, I'm gonna, you know, have that'll corrupt the hard drive. Yeah. Well, the hard drive is being corrupted. 256 bits at a time. Thanks to everybody who participates at our subreddit helps us figure out what to talk about. Obviously, this is a hot one on the subreddit today. You can submit stories and vote on them yourself at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. Real quickly, I wanted to mention that Sakane Wright is back writing your private driver, the column that he writes for us over at DailyTechNewsShow.com. He's got a new one up about whether that old adage any publicity is good publicity still holds true for Uber these days. And he is he is a guy who drives for ride hailing companies drives for lift these days. So go check it out Daily Tech News Show.com. A couple of quick messages before we're out of here. Travis, a.k.a. Mechagobbler says working in federal defense R&D, we talk a lot about security trade offs with the proliferation of crime cybercrime identity theft, etc. Are we to the point where creating the longest random password allowed and simply writing it down at home is more secure? Password managers are great, but can be cumbersome and vulnerable themselves. Homebreakens rarely target information and you could easily obfuscate the password list by slapping it into a copy of Animal Farm or something. What do you think? I have a friend of mine who is a a talented and gifted pen tester and he basically has given his mom a notebook, you know, that she keeps her password information and by, you know, there's a system she has. So she doesn't have like bank accounts password. But as silly as that sounds, I am perfectly comfortable running a password manager. I will not name on the show. And, you know, if they fall down on the job, then yes, it could completely ruin my personal and professional lives. So I understand, you know, you need to trust the password manager or you need to, you know, I have no issues with writing passwords down. Just don't put them on stickies on your monitor on the monitor. Yeah, that's probably that's that's probably good advice. Maybe sticky on the bathroom mirror, you know, and I've got like, I think 175 passwords now, so I could probably cover the bathroom mirror. You're gonna have to go on the inside as well of that of that medicine cabinet. Well, Patrick, as always, man, a pleasure, my friend, tell folks about all the good things that you got going on these days. Oh my goodness, of course, I'm still doing tech thing tech thing.com T E K T H I N G that's with Shannon and I which are we answer viewer questions, we review products, we have a wonderful, wonderful guide to gifts for mom, tech gifts for mom from Mother's Day, I did a couple of USB type C docs, docking stations for laptops this week. And I also do Robert Herron and I, we used to do HG Nation, now we do a show called the A V XL its podcast, and we talk about home theater, and audio and speakers and headphones and just generally getting the most out of home entertainment, whether you have like $12 in the dorm room, or you've got a million dollars and you want to build a bunker and everything in between. Mostly in the middle stuff. And that's a fun one. Robert's Robert's always fun to talk to as as you well know. Yeah, absolutely. We got to get him back on here one of these days. Tech thing T E K T H I N G dot com and A V XL A V X C EL. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, man. 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We'll get some bot takes from Veronica Belmont on Monday and look for that Spoonauer interview in your feeds this weekend. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants.com right now. Diamond Club, I hope you have enjoyed this bro over. All right. Good show man, as always. My pleasure, any time, dude, any time what should we call this one? Dick could only leave the gun Roger. Oh there's Roger. But we can't hear him. It's time to panic Well, we have a showbot TV has a bunch of a Bunch of ideas Incompetent not malicious. I got 99 countries and a Bitcoin ransom I didn't realize like 99 problems and the delete expletive ain't one was originally nice t-song. Oh, yeah Now we can hear you It's only 99 countries. I like that. This hack is a big deal Bigly deal brace your ransomware are coming or brace yourself ransomware are coming are coming. They're a coming Like incompetent not malicious. It's pretty good, and it's only 99 countries It's only 99 countries is a really good one, too It's all I got 99 countries in the Bitcoin. It's only 99 countries Friday Friday It's funny you get a self-moji you get a self-moji Now if you don't count Taiwan Ransomware a ransomware makers mess up mundane detail put decimal point in wrong place Because they only charge three hundred instead of three thousand Well, you're more likely to get some of the pay a smaller fee than you are a larger one Well, you know what? That's a good point. That is another indication that this was not targeted at large companies Because they went for a smaller price point if you're shaking down companies you you raise that price Well, they may be doing that as we speak Deal Ransom everywhere Ransomware I ran somewhere and got tired ransomware I was using it in a sense. Yeah, I ran somewhere Yeah, I got I know I bet I understood let me explain it to you at like Let me explain it Someone doesn't catch the glory of your pun just glare at them You know once they get those quantum computers online they should be able to decrypt these things like super fast Right, you should be able to decrypt these things before they're actually encrypted And go back in time Simultaneously everywhere quantum electrodynamics. It's science. Let's go fast enough, right? Actually that that's still up for debate So incompetent not malicious tops, what do you want Patrick? What do you flavor or I'm still a big fan of incompetent not malicious followed by it's only 99 countries I feel the I'm gonna pick it's only 99 countries and that's only because in the back of my brain I feel like I've done incompetent not malicious before or something similar to It sounds familiar to me. Why you were probably just saying that about news headlines this week Yeah But yeah, so I'm gonna go with it's it's only 99 countries and counting Because I know I've said that incompetence not maliciousness I've made that remark before if not use it in a title All right What else is going on Patrick? Yeah Raising children working on the garden. How are your laundry stain removal tips? I you know, I think you've made a big mistake not just doing a whole show of those because I am you may be right What's your top tip Never underestimate the power of dawn detergent and presoking I put that I put we put a little dab of the liquid detergent right on the spot. Let it sit Yep, and if you've got like a really greasy nasty stain mixture of dawn detergent and baking soda Baking soda does this extraordinary job of drawing oil out of fabrics. Oh And dawn takes grease out of the way Yes, wait this is often the only that's palm on so the baking soda lifts the oil up and then dawn like takes it away Take on kind of it helps break it up So it doesn't reattach itself and the baking soda absorbs actually was We had somebody had put a somebody meaning me had left a container of transmission fluid in the the foot well of the passenger seat of Might know actually the Subaru and one of the children like you Patrick Oddly enough in that particular case it is unlike it was unlikely thing to happen and within a week Seamus had managed to jump on it while he was getting in the car ouch right before we like drove for two hours and like What's that smell and why is it so slippery? transmission leaking inside the cabin and Yeah, it looked in and literally the entire If you've never if never experiment with transmission fluid it has It's just it's it's an insane chemical and it will leak through any it draws. It's the surface tension on It's kind of crazy and so it had soaked itself completely soaked itself and then diverse itself over the entire sort of Quarter of the backseat carpet and then ended up picking up one of those costco Like four pound five pound bags of baking soda putting about half of it down there And within about 24 hours the bottom like three quarters inch of baking soda had just Yeah, what does it turn into is it is it a new material Yeah, it turns into a mess. I don't want to get technical right right. It doesn't turn nice pink. Yes I hate doing laundry so much of it now so much It's not even mine. I haven't done my clothes in like two weeks Everything else tablecloth. I was amazed we went our old our old we had this little Bosch Like apartment-sized units. Oh, I remember that little think love that thing It actually captured the water that the dryer condensed the water and captured all the water from the laundry And one of those finally died we couldn't get the repair part we needed so we ended up getting like full-size machines life-changing Going to a full-size machine from what I had before in the apartment It's huge. It's funny because it had a whirlpool guy I was telling Tom this to Fix the under warranty to fix the ice machine in the fridge And we were talking about washing machines because of the Maytag the whirlpool owns made the Maytag brand So it's like, you know, you don't really need to use as much soap as they tell you to It's like you just need enough liquid soap to cover the bottom of the cap. Yeah, I use I use like a tablespoon Yeah, you said I'm sorry for laundry really said he says to avoid all the as long as it's a chi Don't get any of the additional like any h e x 3 or turbo or anything else Because he just says it's more condensed and you have to use even smaller amounts And he said because I have a front loader or washing machine So the roughly use about two gallons of water so you don't want too much soap because it won't come out in the rinse cycle Yeah, I And it could damage the electronics because too many suds goes up the moisture sensor straight into where the The the computer sits and then shorts that and then they want the entire price of the machine to replace it And so you just buy a new machine instead of replacing the part Because they're best for not me. Oh My goodness. Yeah, I Frontloaders are amazing. It's cool. You just need to remember to leave the door open after you wash some old Doesn't build up and to wipe out the little rubber part every once in a while Yeah, that rubber part we we have that on ours and it's it's a pain kind of gross But you know what can you do actually know the cool thing is I need to dry my clothes at a shorter interval Because it does such a good job of extracting the water on the spin That's so loud It is so incredibly loud when it does that Maybe it's time to insulate Acoustically insulate your washing machine. I got so many things to do at this house before I even get around to that My goodness, I gotta get a new roof. Is this the new house in LA? Glendale, yes. Do you have to get like a fireproof roof? No, I just it's it's just coming off like it's old. It's it's why they knocked like 35 grand off the price of the house um But it's just it's worn. It's like super worn And we're thinking about oh, I was looking at the tesla solar panel roof things shingles I did use a little online calculator. It's like wait a minute 60 grand. It's like Yeah, that's a lot of money a lot of money and you know Really you want a roof to last at least around 30 years, right? They're they're doing I mean, you know, nobody's going to be alive for you to actually make the claim on it But they gave us like a you know 50 year guarantee in our roof the the shingles now They're they've got the formulas on the shingles now to the point where you know It should last approximately forever or you can do one of the steel roofs and it will last forever Yeah, but what about is it stainless steel or my concern with those is don't they expand especially in southern california with the heat everything expands That's why they construct them the way they do all materials expand when they're heated. Well not ice, but Like all the roofing materials expand to one degree or another. Yeah, I don't know of any roofs made of ice At least not down here Yeah, I wanted to do like terracotta tile, but that might be too heavy, but they make the synthetic material Kind that looks the same And then they make them in sheets like tile sheets Well, supposedly musk is going to reduce the price of the solar tile You know what musk should do a demonstration on my house and I could be I I could be I could be on this little like poster with the grinning homeowner like I've saved so much money Roger chang said x amount of money this thing powers my ac all through the summer So much money by having the company use me as a demonstration and putting me in their ads In fact, I think so much. I bought a tesla I don't know. I really like the whole test video They have where they shoot a two inch hailstone at 100 miles an hour At a piece of slate roof and uh, oh, yeah terracotta tile And the terracotta tile just disintegrates Uh, no, it breaks me with a half dozen big pieces. Oh, okay. Yeah, that I'm not so worried. I'm more worried about, um Uh horizontal wind That's my big one because that that we had one of those that was that folk group out of uh, samber to dino, right? Yeah And unfortunately last month it blew a bunch of extra time if wind in my my neighbor's driveway and they felt really bad We got it. So we we did we got unusual wind recently Um, it usually is not that windy. It was crazy. The tesla tiles are rated for it's got a wind rating of class f based on astmd 3161, which is 110 mile an hour winds Okay, so, you know, uh, if you get 110 mile an hour winds, uh, in you have other problems in the valley in la It's probably because there's a firestorm or the summer 110 miles an hour. I've been in 110 miles an hour in a hurricane. They are very unusual You don't remember there's a time. It's probably right before tech tv But or a zd tv But there's a storm in center school in the mid 90s that had like hurricane force winds Yeah, I've been in I've I've had a laser out in the alameda estuary in 45 not winds Because I was the laser of the sailboat not like the laser in actual laser sailboat. Yeah I'm just imagining you do it with like a little laser pointer I'm gonna make my cat chase a laser until he gets picked up by the wind and ends up in the oakland hills I wonder so did they and they still and they were still operating after they hit the uh, the panel or the tile with the the Test hailstone. They don't really say anything about that. They just show it not exploding Made with tempered glass sold a roof tiles are more than three times stronger than standard roofing tiles That's why we offer the best warranty the industry the lifetime of your house or infinity watch our hail test video to see how We take durability to a whole new level I mean, you know The functioning of the panel would be impaired because there would be You know, well, I guess that might just be ice embedded in the surface of the panel which would melt away I'm actually way if it's light enough. Yeah, I'm just worried about weight. Well asphalt shingles are heavy roger It's not gonna be that much heavier in fact, it's probably actually lighter Yeah, they're basically saying 30 years on the weatherization 30 years standard all roofs I would like it to last for the life of the house. I never have to worry about it Yeah Although and you know southern California. I want a power wall in the worst way. I just think they're so cool Yeah, I want one of those but like I wonder if I could just do the garage because it's it's a detached garage I could just cover that And empower the power wall That'd be pretty cool I don't know if there would be enough juice to come in Well How have you been living there long enough to know what your average actually you should figure out? I just moved in december. I don't have any idea what my annual power is. Well, you gotta get through this You gotta get through this summer Yeah, but we have we have a little um Tom see it. It's uh, it's a little uh Courtyard area So I plan to spend a lot of most of the summer out there underneath the wow These are incredibly expensive Why they have that it's like 60 grand. It's like, I don't know Well, I mean when you look at you know The problem is it's an upfront cost if they could I mean, yeah, you could amortize a cost But that's just a lot out of pocket, you know in 2018. They'll have the tusken tiles you so You want They have texture smooth and then 2018 tusken and slate I don't know. I Part of me wishes I'd done solar when I did the roof but It gets really uh You know, it's not cheap. It's not cheap. But what and the but the the the the tesla or not the tesla So solar tesla says the typical homeowner could expect to pay 21 and 85 cents per square foot Is that what you're seeing? Yeah 21 22 bucks. That's a roof where 35 of the tiles are solar In some cases depending on ruse customers will be able to have up to 70 solar tiles But in most cases it'll be about 40 and then they have a calculator Which any homeowner can use to get an estimate based on data from google sunroof project. Is that what you're using rudger? Yeah, it was on the um, it was on their site. Yeah, they asked you to punch in your square footage Okay, give you an estimate It estimates that its non solar tiles are cheaper than regular tiles and its solar tiles are cheaper than anything else But only when accounting for energy generation. So there you go. It's the amortization you're talking about. Yeah I see i'm catching up Soon when you become a California homeowner You get to delve into the wonderful world of which what do I do to my house to Ensure that at last yeah, I I just had to deal with fog in my my oakland house Wait fog Happened actually no you had to you had to you had to deal with uh, you should have a condo board, right? Yeah, yeah I do They Why? They're actually very nice people Sure, they are They're actual people that it's not a one of those ones that outsourced it to a I wonder if you could do like uh solar roof on on on like a like you're you're building There and then like everyone we talked about it when I was actually living in oakland about uh, because we put a new roof on that condo Building and they talked about doing solar but at the time it just was too expensive What are you gonna do we had to do a special assessment? That was a pain special always sounds expensive to me That special was it was code for expensive. I got a special assessment to increase my taxes. It's my property taxes Yeah, you've been assessed at a higher rate because you bought it in 2016. You're special You're special All right gents, thank you again for joining us everyone. I hope you have a lovely weekend We'll be back on Monday with Veronica Belmont. Talk to you then