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If you want a T-shirt, go to slashloop.com. Thank you. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 17th, 2015. I'm Tom Barrett, joining me today as he does most Tuesdays. Mr. Patrick Beja, DTNS contributor, independent podcaster at Frenchspin.com. How are you, Patrick? I am well. Thank you for asking. We have a weighty topic a bit today. We're going to talk about encryption and the fact that this idea of whether the government should be allowed to have a backdoor into encryption is being raised again in light of the attacks last week in Beirut and Paris. Patrick, of course, lives in Paris. You were out of town last week, but you're back in Paris now. I know that before we were going to talk about encryption later, but I know people would be interested in your perspective on the events from last week. I guess there are a couple of things I would like to say. The first one before we even get into any discussion is how thankful I am for many things, but relevant to this show for all of the messages of support and the kind words that I have received for me and for my countrymen over the social networks, specifically Twitter and Facebook, obviously. I know it sounds a little bit trite and you might think it doesn't really do anything, but having now been a recipient of that kind of kindness, really, I can tell you, it does help quite a bit. Every message did feel like it was a little bit of light in a very dark moment. Without getting too sappy, I just want to mention this. A lot of people were saying, oh, my God, Patrick is the only French person I know. I hope you're okay. I was like, yes, thank you so much. I am, and my family is fine. So thank you, I guess, is what I wanted to say. The other thing is there would be a lot of things to say about all of the social networks and the online activity and the changing of the avatars and the hashtags and all of this. If there's one thing I would mention, it's the use of the safety check feature on Facebook. Now, obviously, I was in Helsinki at the time. I was there for a couple of days on a family matter, but I think it would have been the same in Paris because the most difficult thing to do in those situations is to get information and the most important one is whether or not your friends and family are safe. Your immediate family and your friends are going to be, it's easy, you're just going to call them, but there are so many people that live in your city and you can't call everyone and it becomes, it was seriously a lot of worry and a lot of panicking until they turned on the thing and everyone started checking in. And I can tell you, every time I would see someone I know that checked in, I had a little bit of a relief moment because it's very, very, very unlikely they would be hit or they would be affected, but still there's a chance everyone lives in the city. It's not, it's a big city, but still there's a chance. So that feature is probably the one feature that I understand now I couldn't live without in a case like this, out of all of these social networking and web features. Well, that's, I guess, one light point out of what otherwise is a very dark week, 129 people dead in France, 43 dead in Beirut, going back to April, more than 100 dead in Kenya. These are not light matters and we are not going to treat them lightly when we talk about the technology slice of that. And we're not going to talk about international relations. We're not going to talk about Syria, but we are going to talk about, you know, encryption and that is an important part of this discussion. And I think that's the part that we can weigh in on. Before we get to that though, let's start with some headlines. Microsoft CEO Sachin Adela spoke on the state of his company's security today at an event in Washington, DC. And Adela said organizations need to improve not only the technology, but in his words, the security posture you have around the basics. He talked about the various huge breaches that have happened over the past year, things like the US human resources breach, the anthem breach, the target breach. He used Microsoft products, of course, as an example of what he means, Windows Hello and Microsoft password, reduced password reliance, credential guard, combat, combats against past the hash attacks, Windows Detend Device Guard prevents malicious code installation, among many other examples. And they announced on a blog post later today that Microsoft is building a cyber defense operations center to house its efforts. So pre-planned speech meant to be delivered about the importance of securing your own information happening at a propituous time. It's absolutely super interesting to have this kind of focus put on security now, and I guess we'll get back to that in the discussion topic. Google and ASUS launched the $85 Chromebit Chrome OSPC on a stick today. The HDMI stick has six gigabytes of onboard storage, two gigabytes of RAM, Bluetooth 4.0 and USB and a USB 2.0 port. Chromebit will be available in the US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the UK and apparently not France. Yeah, sorry about that. As a French person, I'm outraged and I'm sure that many people from other countries that are not in this list are equally outraged. Get back to Finland, buy one there. You know, this is an interesting product. There is a cheaper one called the Remix Mini, which gives you Android on a small device like this. There's that Intel compute stick out there as well. So it's not like we're saying this is the only one out there, but it is one that people have been looking forward to, you know, investigating and $85 is not ridiculous. It's probably going to be used a lot of times in education, in the enterprise, maybe a call center. Some people have said there's also an option, I think for $24 extra dollars, you can turn it into a single use kiosk. So, you know, you've got a TV in that window of your store. You can use this to program things to run on that, that sort of thing. It does it. It has Wi-Fi, I'm guessing. I didn't see it listed, but yeah. Yeah, no, we I didn't put that in the in the headline because it seemed obvious, but you have kind of harder to use. But it is it is obvious. TechCrunch reports that Google Photos will offer an update today that allows Android users to bulk delete photos that have been backed up to Google's cloud photo storage service. So if you're like, hey, they're already backed up, go ahead and delete the ones that are already backed up on Wednesday. Google Photos for the web is also going to allow users to downgrade stored photos from full resolution to a lower quality called high resolution, which doesn't count against your storage quota. So it's a way to clean up if you're running up against your limit. Google says similar features are coming to the iOS app soon as well. If only they had had those features a few months ago when I did that transition myself. It's always the way. I always come up with these things after you buckled down and do everything yourself. It was an extremely arduous process. I can tell you that. Parrot announced its new Bebop 2 quadcopter in San Francisco today. It weighs 500 grams, has six inch propellers and can reach 100 meters in 18 seconds. Wait, grams and inches, that doesn't work. It should be different anyway. Bebop 2's battery life has more than doubled to 25 minutes from a 2700 milliampere battery. It also has an amplified Wi-Fi radio allowing it to allowing up to two kilometers of flying distance. The Parrot Bebop, I can't speak today. The Parrot Bebop 2 goes on sale December 14th for $550 or $800 with the Sky Controller. Yeah, so cool, cool advances. If you're into the Parrot Bebop, you might want to check this out and get some more flying time in. It feels like 25 minutes and two kilometers makes it significantly more usable than the previous version. That's a good session, 25 minutes. You can actually do stuff. Ten minutes feels like it comes down the moment you're done going up. Yeah, after recalling the shield tablet due to potential battery fires. Remember, we talked about this at Nerdtacular. Nvidia has put the gaming tablet, the shield, back on sale. Nvidia has rectified the problem. Don't worry about that. They've also issued replacements to affected owners and dropped the price $100 down to $199. They dropped the price $100. It is now $199. Only the 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi model has been reintroduced, though. There's no word on what's going to happen with the 32 gigabyte LTE model, whether that will make a return or not. Nvidia will also be updating the tablet to Android 6.0 Marshmallow in the coming months, but you won't get one with it if you buy it today. That's a significant price reduction. I guess it's been away for a few months, but $200 for a very capable tablet like this might be very interesting to some people. That becomes a loss leader for them. They just really want you to subscribe to their cloud gaming service at that point. Feels like it. D2 Phillips wanted us to discuss a report from the information today that Google's Project Aura, responsible for developing Google Glass, has three prototypes for new products. One model has no screen, but relies on audio. And is referred to as a sport model. The other two with screens are aimed at businesses. The team has reportedly targeting release for next year. Isn't that what they said last year? I don't remember if they said it or if it was rumored. But then again, this is just the information saying they have sources. So they haven't said anything, as a matter of fact. But I'm intrigued by audio. And I think the TechCrunch article I read about this was sort of dismissive. It might have been the Verge saying, well, isn't that just headphones? But if it's using a sensor or even a camera to see what's around it and then can tell you things and it's using some sort of like Google machine learning to do that. I don't know. I'd want to see that demonstrated. I don't know exactly what it might do, but it sounds like it might be good for fitness, especially since they're calling it sport. The other place my mind goes to immediately might be for people who have vision impediments or vision impaired people. You know, if it does have that some sort of connection to the very, very powerful Google photo recognitions that we keep talking about, you know, they're getting better by the day, it seems. We have Microsoft and Google announcements every other day, it seems. It that might also be a use for it. Oxford dictionaries have selected the emoji face with tears of joy as word of the year. An emoji, you heard that right, has been selected as word of the year. The principal effect of this, in my opinion, will be to have many people realize, wait, that's a joy emoji, not a crying emoji. I was picked because it best reflected the ethos mode and preoccupations of 2015. They just wanted to pick an emoji is what that means to me. Actual words considered included ad blocker, sharing economy, refugee, dark web and the lumber sexual. I am not sure what that last one is. That's a metrosexual dresses like a lumberjack. Oh, OK, so right, it does actually steps it down a minute once you realize that's what it means. Yeah, but you know what, I think it's very easy to dismiss this emoji as word of the year as something ridiculous and going like, oh, Oxford dictionaries going at it again, trying to get some easy click baity publicity. But you know what, I'm not sure it doesn't actually make sense. Maybe not specifically that emoji, but having an emoji. I see Sirius Tom being outraged on the inside on the on the video feed right now. No, no, no, I'm ready to hear your defense of this. The emojis have become an integral part of our modes of communication and of our written communication. I'm not saying they should be considered words, but I'm saying they could be considered an important evolution of the way we communicate with one another on the, you know, through written media of which the Internet is a major part. So I'm not as ready as I initially was to dismiss it. This this is the Time Magazine picking earth as planet of the year defense, right? Well, it never never was about being man of the year. It was about who what is the most important thing that affected us in the year. And it's kind of the same idea, which is, well, sure, it's not exactly a word. But we're saying this is the most impactful expression of semantic content of the year. I think it's like time picking you as person of the right. Yeah, they did that to like it was it was kind of silly, but it did say something about our history, society, culture in that year. So also crying, I'm sorry, face with tears of joy, joy. Don't forget it's actually joy. Recode reports go. Oh, I'm sorry, that's yours. You take it. I was going to do it, but, you know, you seem to. And I'm crying. This is tears of joy. I'm sorry. Yes, exactly. Recode reports Gogoro, the makers of the electric scooters and ATM like battery swapping stations, has announced Amsterdam will be its next test city. The company hopes to have scooters hit the streets there in the first half of 2016. Gogoro has 2000 scooters and 90 battery swapping stations in its first test city of Taipei. The biggest part of this story for me is not that this is a workable electric scooter idea or that they're actually able to now expand outside of their home country of Taiwan. It's that a product that we heard about at CES has not only become real, but it's expanding to a second city before the next CES. Pretty amazing stuff. I mean, if that doesn't bring you tears of joy that you want to express. Tears of joy, I don't know what what does. You know, I think actually I might argue for the title of this episode to be an emoji with tears of joy. Oh, great. We have to go through that ASCII hell again. All right, we'll figure it out because I think you're right. I think it kind of has to be. Yeah, I have been a big fan of the idea of the Gogoro. It was always, well, can they actually make it work? And they are apparently making it work fairly well in Taipei. So Amsterdam will be a nice test for them. You've got really narrow streets, some interesting laws about what when a scooter can be a scooter and when it has to be a bicycle. And there's apparently a button on the Gogoro that can change its change its power to allow it to be run legally in the different lanes throughout Amsterdam. So this is going to be this is going to be interesting. It seems like Gogoro's really a thing like this is no segue. This is for reals. Yeah, and I think it can be a very interesting solution, maybe not everywhere. But, you know, in Paris, we have those Velib, which are basically bicycles that you dock at a station and you basically rent them, but it's all automated. And we have that with cars now. Tiny smart car like electric cars. And it seems to be working pretty well. I was using the Vidi by had a subscription for a long time. I have never I've never done the cars because you have to have a specific use for those, but it is working out. I'm not noticing a significant reduction in traffic. But maybe it could with other solutions like this, it could help. The most fascinating thing about Gogoro is they've insisted since CES that they're an energy company, that they're just doing scooters because they're like, well, that's the most the place with the most impact for energy use that we can think of now. But they have lots of plans for things involving not just two wheeled vehicles and four wheeled vehicles, but even non vehicles and houses. And I don't know, we may see. We're going to say I thought you were going to say six wheeled vehicles. Eight wheeled vehicles. Hey, our technical reports that Google will contest the ruling by the Russian authorities that the search company broke Russian antitrust laws by bundling its services with the Android platform. Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service had ruled that Google would have to sell its phone with only the Google Play Store preloaded. Russian search engine Yandex initiated the complaint. They've also complained to the European Union as well. The Nest, the new Nest thermostat introduced two months ago is now available in Europe and includes an extra feature shoppers in the UK. I'm sorry. I'm just rooting for France to be able to get it. Well, shoppers in the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Republic of Ireland can pay two hundred and forty nine euros for a digital thermostat that controls heaters, air conditioners, and has a remote hot water control plus open therm protocol compatibility. This allows for finer control of boilers. Yeah. So if I get it right, the hot water control, remote hot water control lets you turn on when the heating happens. So you're not heating your water overnight when you don't need it. Just starts up in the morning in enough time to get you hot water for your shower, et cetera. And the open therm protocol turns on the gas on your boiler exactly when it's needed to get the temperature right. Again, something that I guess wasteful United States and Canadian users just don't care about for some reason, because over here we don't have that. And that, my friends, is the headlines. If you are saying, huh, why didn't you talk about that story? Well, if you mean Pandora and Ardeo, we talked about it yesterday at the very end of the show. Listen all the way through. But if you're talking about some other story, get the to the reddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and let us know that story that you think should be in here and other people will vote on it. Now, I don't just take the stories with the most votes. I look at whether they fit in with the lineup and everything. But it is extraordinarily helpful when you make your voice heard over there. So go join the more than 5,000 people who are helping us put the line up together every day at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. TG Stellar's been awesome about posting commentary threads. If you want to have more discussion and extend the discussion around the show, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. And that is a look at the headlines. All right. So governments have been calling for backdoors out of the United States, out of the UK, now in France, for quite a long time saying we need to use this to spy on bad actors. The in the US, often it is phrased as we are hitting an intelligence blind spot because people are encrypting things. The thing is the United States White House, the executive branch of the United States, has decided not to pursue backdoors, partly because 14 top cartographers in the world sent a letter convincing the US executive branch that weakening encryption would make general consumers more vulnerable and push bad actors to adopt other modes of communication. Now, in light of the attacks last week, the debate is back on or at least government officials are trying to get the debate back on. The question becomes, can surveillance of otherwise encrypted channels make a significant difference in prevention? If you read the intercept today, you'll see an article saying, no, it doesn't seem to have shown that you'll hear people in the intelligence community saying, well, you don't know all the facts. It actually does help. Is it possible to make it so bad actors do not have secure encryption? I think that's a harder one to answer, Patrick, because if we make a backdoor say an eye message, well, the bad actors just aren't going to use eye message anymore. They're already using things like telegram to do their communication. Is it possible? Let's leave aside whether you should do this or not. Is it possible to make an encryption that allows for us to spy on the bad actors? Do you think? Um, I'm sorry. Can you repeat that question? Do you mean is it possible that we can make it so they can't use basic? Yeah, let's let's forget. Let's let aside for the moment, whether we should do whether the government has the right to do it or not. Does it have an effect? Well, I think that's a really important part of the overall question. But, you know, I was thinking about this a lot in the past couple of days. And we've gone through that discussion and thought process and, you know, intellectual path after the Charlie Hebdo attacks specifically in France. And we've gone, we've had a law that is pretty restrictive of freedom and of, you know, privacy voted over the summer. But specific and we haven't gone back to the question of backdoors and secure chatting yet in France. I think we were, you know, we're still reeling for more immediate consequence of the consequences of the attack. But the way I look at it is trying to to understand with a metaphor that people will understand. I think of it like the the copyright industry trying to fight piracy. And it's not like we haven't put a lot of time, money, effort, cleverness, you know, general intelligence in trying to find a way to make piracy on the Internet impossible. And not only has it failed, but it's failed absolutely spectacularly. You know, it is still extremely easy to find a piece of copyrighted content on the Internet and to acquire it in near minutes. And I think that for the question of encryption, it is a very similar situation with the important difference that we're not talking about films here. We're talking about actually people's privacy. So I really think that no matter how hard you try, the people that are going to want to communicate securely are going to be able to do it. It's very easy to get, you know, an Android phone and side load. Let's say that all of the apps are controlled on all of the stores, you know, Google's, Apple's, Microsoft's, they're still going to be able to to find a bare bones app, side load it and discuss like that. It is impossible to make sure that they're not going to be able to do that. It's an arms race. You say, OK, let's get Google and Apple to allow a backdoor. Well, then the bad actors start using apps. They start using, they probably don't use WhatsApp from what I can read. They're using things like Telegram, maybe they're using Signal, maybe they're using Wicker. Then you say, OK, well, let's let's make sure that we lock down those apps. So those any apps sold through the Google and Apple app stores have to have a backdoor in them and let's say Google and Apple went along with that, which they don't want to. Let's say they did. Then the bad actors start side loading apps like like Patrick says. Well, then we say, OK, well, let's how are they doing that? Well, they're using open source operating systems. Well, let's make open source operating systems illegal. Where does it end? You're chasing a chain that is never going to end because it's math and you can't make math illegal at the end of the day. And the other aspect of this is that the result of the action that you're taking for very good reasons initially, it's a very good intent, which is let's try to make sure we can listen in on what they're saying, is going to be not only ineffective for your intended target, but is also going to be to make all of the unintended target if we assume that it's done with good intentions, which I believe it would be all of the unintended targets, the people who aren't doing illegal things suffer from that measure that you're taking again in a very similar way to what's happening with the content industry and the IP, you know, the copyrights holder who are DRMing everything and making trying to make sure that things can't get copied because the people who just want to buy the content are being inconvenienced in that case. Well, and that's the third of my four questions. So two of them was, is it possible to make it so bad actors do not have secure encryption, can surveillance of otherwise encrypted channels make a significant difference in prevention? I think I'm leaning towards no to the possibility to make bad actors not have secure encryption. I think it's unknown whether the surveillance of other of encrypted channels with a backdoor makes a significant difference in prevention. But let's get to the third of the four. Is it the right thing to do to let the government have a door into encryption for all in order to catch some? And that's what you're talking about, Patrick, which is, OK, yes, I want them to be able to listen in on the conversations of people who are planning to do awful things that are that are crimes. But is it worth it for me to give up my security to do that? And that is another problem of backdoors, which is, yes, you say that the government will only have the ability to use this backdoor. But we know from history and we know from these 14 cryptographers that wrote the United States government that if you allow a backdoor for one person, it is almost inevitable that someone else that you didn't want to use it will figure out how to get in. It's, yeah, I think, I mean, in this scenario that we're playing out, we're assuming that it could be done, right, that it could be that it would work the way it has advertised and that they could listen in to all of the conversation that that conversations. And let's say we even trust them to only listen to the bad guys conversation, which is questionable. But let's say, let's say, yeah, let's say that that becomes a very difficult question because in this scenario, we're assuming it would probably be effective and we're kind of weighing that effectiveness, sort of improving our ability to fight against terrorism. We're weighing it against the need for privacy of, you know, millions and hundreds of millions of people. And it becomes a much more difficult question to answer. I think it everyone has to come up with their own answer. One thing that I would mention is it's terrorism is their goal, their aim is to make you afraid and to change your, I guess we're encroaching on other questions, but it's they can't kill everyone. Terrorists cannot kill, you know, they're not going to win militarily, right? So they are going to kill some people, but it creates a very emotional response. So if you if you think about this, you're going to say, yes, obviously, you know, 9-11, I never want that to happen again. But if you look at the numbers and I'm not sure that's the way we should look at it, but if you look at the numbers, cars kill a lot more people every year than terrorism does. And we accept the idea that, you know, we are going to have car accidents that are going to be very lethal because we get some added benefit. So I guess in this case, it would be weighing the right to privacy of everyone against the possibility of having, you know, hundreds or thousands of deaths by terrorism. And I honestly don't have a good answer for that. And that's my fourth question. You're right. Isn't this what they want? Isn't this they want us to rehandering? They want us to to give up rights, to inconvenience ourselves, to change our ways of life, to mistrust each other, to look at people who are of a different faith, a scant. And and to say, we must give the government more power in order to secure us. That that that is if you read, there's an excellent article in The Guardian from Nicholas Hennan, who was held hostage by Daesh in Syria and was released. And he says, yes, that is exactly what they want. They love seeing the reactions to these things and seeing the hand wringing and seeing people starting to throw around accusations and fight with each other. That is exactly what they want. So so you're right. There is there is a if you are overreacting in in in lots of different ways, you're you're playing into the result of what these sorts of events are meant to provoke. And that's not to say that these aren't frightening events. No, it's but you know, that's again, it's not just what they want. It is their only weapon. I think it's important to realize this as well. The horror that they provoke and the terror that they provoke is their only weapon. They will not win military. They cannot invade the countries. They cannot kill enough of us that is going to make a difference in our culture. The only thing they can do is make us so afraid that we are going to change who we are ourselves. And that is why I think it is very important to not make these kinds of culture changing decisions because of fear and while we are afraid. This is obviously things. It's things that is has been happening that have been happening for a while. You know, arguably even before 9 11. But these decisions, I'm not saying they shouldn't be made. And maybe even without taking fear into the equation, maybe even assuming that people are making those decisions extremely rationally and cool headedly, they would have come to the same conclusions. And that's fine. I'm not saying those decisions shouldn't have been made. What I do worry about, however, is that they're being made because of fear, because politicians don't really know what to do. And this is the one thing that they they they can do to not only show. I'm not saying it's just posturing, but it does show that they're doing something. But for them, they feel like they're doing exactly and lacking the technical knowledge as I think I honestly think is the case because every time you ask someone who does have that technical knowledge, they tell you it's a bad idea. So lacking that technical knowledge make that makes them do things that end up being regrettable. And there's another thing that I want to add that is relevant to this question. A lot of people are saying we should take these measures temporarily. And maybe if they were temporary, I could almost understand the the thought process. What does worry me, though, is that there is never going to be a moment where we say, all right, now we don't need them anymore. For a number of reasons. First of all, there's always going to be terrorism. I don't you know, we think about this kind of jihadist terrorism now because it's what we have. But we've had terrorism for a long time. We had anarchists in the 1800s. We threw into the early 1900s. There were fascist terrorists. There have been terrorists in Ireland in the Basque country. Exactly. You know, I mean, this is not this is not something new on the face of the earth. It's not new. And obviously, I don't think it's going to go away. And what politician is going to say, OK, now we don't need it anymore. Make those things go away and risk another terrorist attack and be branded responsible for it. No one. So no one ever. Yeah, it's an absolute, you know, it's almost a truism to say once a power is granted to a government, it is almost impossible to get that government. To give up that power for lots of reasons. So I guess we're left with the question is, OK, well, if you let us all have strong end to end encryption and the bad guys have it, too, how do you catch the bad guys? And that's that's a question I would like to hear from anybody who really does know about that sort of thing. One thing is encrypted products do leave a metadata trail. There's a good article in the BBC discussing that from a security professor. This has led to arrests using link analysis. In fact, link analysis was used following the events in Paris last week. Face to face communication is often used by the plotters of this in which encrypted communications would have no part. So infiltration is often one of the ways to be used, both infiltration in real life, which is incredibly risky and infiltration online and malware. There's a story in again, in the BBC article I read today about one attack being disrupted because they had used a pretty girl on Skype to distract someone in Syria into allowing malware to be installed on their computer and they could spy directly. And frankly, you're going to get a lot more content information if you have malware installed directly than if you're trying to tap a communication channel. Yeah, I think obviously I think we're to an extent biased because we care a lot about this topic and privacy is something that apparently both of us deem very important. But I really think that looking at all the elements of this issue, this very complicated and deep and important issue, it seems that there is no upside to the solution that some people are trying to put forth again for good reasons. And there are other ways of achieving what we should be achieving. So it's it does become a very frustrating conversation when you get out of that techno sphere and try to get people to understand those problems. That's a really important point, because if you tell someone, we're not going to let you rent cars anymore without special permission from the government and an application, people would be very resistant to that because they're familiar with renting cars. They rent cars in their in their daily lives all the time. Encryption isn't something people are used to yet. So there is a factor there of people giving up something they don't feel they really have already, and that's going away. Encryption is becoming more and more important, but it's less of something that your average person out there really feels like they would be losing if they gave it up. Yeah, and I don't know. You know, I'm trying to find metaphors and ways of explaining it because every time I go on Twitter and try to explain these topics, even among my followers who are more aware of tech topics than the average French person, I guess, I get reactions like, well, we should, you know, initially, some of them are reluctant to the idea that we shouldn't allow for these kinds of back doors. And then I try to explain things and they tell me, well, we should ask the experts and hear what they think. And I try to answer, we do have the opinions of the experts and we do know what they're thinking. I think the real problem is, I was saying this on Twitter as well, people say they want the opinions of the experts, but really they don't. They don't want to listen to the opinions of the experts. They want to feel safe and they want to feel like something is being done. And that is more important than actually understanding the problem for people right now. So I think it's incredibly difficult and important for people like us who do understand these issues to be incredibly patient and didactic and kind in the ways we try to get across these ideas to people. I don't know how successful we're going to be, certainly in France, for the surveillance law that was passed last summer. We weren't, we didn't manage to explain things, but I think we should keep trying. Yeah. And I think you're right that it is feeling safe that people want. So maybe it occurred to me as you were talking, the counterargument is if you want the hackers to get into your credit cards, if you want the Office of Personal Management to continue to leak background investigations, leave backdoors into things for the government because the bad guys can take advantage of them too. I don't know if that argument works, but that if you want to feel safe, you need encryption. You actually are going to be safer with encryption on your materials than you are with weakened encryption on your materials. Yeah, that's such a counterintuitive idea, though, for in that context. But these breaches are becoming more and more relevant to people's daily lives. So maybe they will start to think about it that way. We're just going to have a pick of the day before we get out of here. Ed Ross from quite dark now, but lovely in the summer, Go Sport UK says, being dyslexic, I often find it easier to listen to information than read it. I was therefore happy to find the service NARO.co. It's two hours, N-A-R-R-O.co, which converts webpages to spoken audio and also provides a podcast feed for the files. It works via bookmarklets or a Chrome extension. They currently have an iOS app in beta. The developer, Josh Beckman, who is NARO app on Twitter, has been very quick to respond when I've emailed them about the service, too, which is nice. If you'd like to check out my feed, says Ed, you can go to on.naro.co. And I think that's a it's a cool service. I went over there and tried it out and had it read a next web article to me and the idea that you can turn it into a little podcast feed for articles you find interesting. If you're if you need accessibility to articles, I think this is fantastic. But even if you just want an easier way to read some of those articles that you might not otherwise have had time for, I think this is a cool thing as well. Very cool. I've been looking for something like this for a while. I think I might give it a try. Send your picks to us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. And you can find my picks at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash picks. Do go to our subreddit to keep this discussion going. DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. Thank you, Patrick Beja. I am very happy that you're safe. I am sorry that your city has had to go through this now twice. And I hope that for the sake of you, your city, your country and the world that we all as human beings can figure out a way out of this sort of thing. Yeah, that's a tall order. But, you know, the world has seen worse and I want to believe that we'll see better. Well, you can find Patrick on the internet at twitter.com slash not Patrick. You can find his podcast and the other things he talks about, including the Philias Club, perfectly relevant to the conversation we're having today, where he, I think, does an important thing, which is gets people from different parts of the world with different beliefs, Islamic people, Hindu people, white people like me to come on the show and discuss their point of view on the world with each other in an effort of greater understanding. It's a fantastic show now more than ever. Thank you. Yeah, you know, it's a really interesting concept that I took because I want to. And I also do it because I honestly think it's the one thing I can do to you know, talking about tech and talking about things is cool and fun and important in narrow ways. But I think this is the one thing I can do to make the world a slightly better place. So actually, we are, I've had a few people ask me this, but we are going to be talking about this, you know, the Paris attacks in the next episode of this show. It will be out, you know, at the end of the month. So if you want to hear that discussion, you can go subscribe to the show now. It's on frenchspin.com. We also have a show. I have to tell you, Patrick, for some reason, whether it's your mic or connection, your audio is breaking up. But if you didn't quite catch that, Patrick said there will be a discussion about this, the events in France at the end of the month. I think I have that right at frenchspin.com. So we're going to we're going to wrap up the show there. If you want to support us and keep this show going, dailytechnewshow.com slash support, whether it's giving us a dollar or buying a coffee mug or something like that, we appreciate your support. 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 and diamondclub.tv. Visit our website, dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. The show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Sorry, Patrick, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I don't know if it was a robot. OK, yeah, no, I had a slight issue that I might not know. Your video is smooth, but your audio is crunchy. That is very strange. So I don't think it's an internet thing. OK. Try unplugging your USB and plugging it back in again. Um, would you like some titles in the interim? Yeah, sure. I don't know. Whoa, whoa. Now it's just happened to me. No, I think. Hello. Yes, Pat. Patrick was talking at the same time as you. Ah, I was. No, I wasn't talking at all. Oh, my back now. Now your your audio is still messed up. And my video is smooth. Your video looks perfect. That's that's the weirdest part. Usually it's the other way around. If anything, no, it was me, too. BioCal, it was me. I couldn't tell. Maybe I heard it, but you're fine now. Yeah, I'm going to try and change my mic to see if it works. Did you unplug it and plug it back in? Yes. OK, now I'm on my webcam. Now you're fine. No, is it my mic? It's the Kodak, though. It doesn't sound like a mic going bad to me. Does it does it to you, Jenny? No. Yeah. And it was so sad that it felt like a failing something. Yeah, is it is it crappy now? No, it's fine now. Huh, interesting. Let's try this. Is it crappy now? No, it's good now. OK, well, OK, I don't get it. Never mind. Um, would you like a title? Love a title. I live for titles. A laugh sob emoji. That'd be awesome, but I don't remember that you can. No, I think it's going to be a it's going to be an issue. Right? Yeah. I have no words for Oxford. Yeah, I like that one. That's my second fave. Although face with tears of joy is also nice. Or a laugh sob emoji. Gentlemen, I must depart and go to an appointment. OK. I don't know why I just did it that way. But I will talk to you both soon. All right. And you have a lovely appointment. I will. I will. Wow. Listen to your accent. So good. All right. Bye, gents. All right, see you. Bye. So now you have to keep us entertained, Patrick. This is very entertaining. I have to say I'm still here. Sorry, I didn't show the door. Roger could help. Hey, Roger. So is show gal available yet? Oh, and here's here's this. Oh, right. Yes. I assumed you knew what was what I was talking about. For a second, I thought it was an overwatch, but then I remembered that no. I thought you were trying to say sugar like the painter. Oh, yes. I was the painter's girl available yet. I was waiting for him to do my portrait. I was about to say, it's like you have very exquisite taste, Patrick. Oh, she got all. Oh, yeah. It I think it might be is it. Oh, very nice. There are lots of people playing heroes spread the virus. Are you are you playing a fallout for Pat? No, I'm actually not a huge fan of fallout. So I know it's it's a it's a shameful flaw. I say the opposite. I'm a fan of fallout, but I suck at those kind of games. Well, so I put it on my on my Christmas wish list. So it's not like I'm not going to get it at all. But you're just not running to play it right away. Yeah, exactly. Gotcha. Well, maybe you should maybe you can pick it up. I wonder if I'll mark anything down for Cyber Monday. You kind of go I think games are getting super expensive now. Super expensive. They're all 60 bucks, right? Yeah, that always happened. Now, the the the generation before was 50 was the was the top. And then the generation before that was 40. I don't know, 60 seems seems right. The title is I have no words for Oxford. Oh, Oxford comma. Don't give about the Oxford comma. I read those English dramas, too. Well, it's you know, I had some to say to Patrick about like what you're saying about, you know, this is a new way of communication in the written language. It's like really, it's just kind of the reverse. We're going back to the grams. That's true. It's all in the hammer and some clay tablets. I guess so. Yeah, bird facing left, bird facing right. Couple of reeds, hippo, hippo. Horse, horse. So really, the cave paintings are just proto emojis. Could be. If they could combine that cave paint, different cave paintings to a single emoji, it's like had a good time. And it's just like a cave painting of people spearing a buffalo. Hang it out with the boys. That's what the emoji I see you says I should just play followed on easy and build stuff and chill. But then it becomes a time issue. But that's life, really. I know. I don't even have enough time to play Hearthstone these days. You didn't do the first wing of the. I did. Oh, I did. I completed it and the class challenges. But I barely have time. Yeah, same for me. And that's the thing, right? If you love something enough, you make time for it. So and I love those class. I love those those new wings and challenges and adventures in Hearthstone. So I definitely made time for that. But then fall out for I'm like, I love it. But just to sit around, I don't know. It's not a priority, I guess. I'm learning something about myself right now. Did you did you try it on your new shiny iPad Pro? Hearthstone. Yeah, yeah, I did. In fact, that's how I played the adventure. Oh, so it didn't convince you to play more because it was glorious and giant. Not not enough, I guess. Although it's pretty glorious, got to say. I really love the Logitech Create keyboard. It adds a lot of weight to an otherwise lightweight tablet, unfortunately. But it's a it's it's basically a MacBook Pro keyboard. It's a it's a really good keyboard. Yeah, but that's the thing. It makes it it makes the whole thing into basically the weight and of a of a laptop. It's like it's still lighter than my MacBook Pro. Yeah, MacBook Pro for sure. But yeah, you know, actually, I had a I have a friend who has a very interesting way of putting it, the question of whether or not people will want an iPad to replace their laptop. Basically, he's saying that's the wrong question to ask. He says the right question to ask is, do people still want or need laptops? And it led me to the to the thought that actually most people hate their computers. We love them because we're nerds and we're idiots. But most people hate their computers. They don't understand how they work. They don't want to maintain them. They don't so looking at it like that, I'm not sure the iPad Pro is the solution right now, but I'm thinking some people might think even if it, you know, it becomes the same size and weight or whatever. And it is slightly less capable. Some people might actually be happy to get rid of a laptop and just have a very simple system like an iPad. So in that sense, it doesn't matter that the iPad can do whatever a laptop can. People would be happy to to give away their their laptops. I Ben Beharen had a really similar article on recode today. And I know some people have issues with Ben's analysis sometimes. I think he's really smart and it's a really well written article about observations of his daughter and how she used the iPad Pro as someone who has grown up with touchscreens and just, you know, younger people always pick things up faster than older people too. And it was saying a lot of the things that your friend was saying about, like, yeah, you just you just use it. It just it doesn't matter that you don't have a mouse because if you if you don't rely on a mouse, then you don't miss the mouse. You just find other ways of doing all the things. I feel like just based on your conversation and what you're saying right then that could my reasons for wanting to keep a laptop are the same reasons people have for wanting to keep a desktop. It is the right form factor to do the thing that I want to do. Maybe it's like high powered gaming. Maybe it's, you know, video editing. Maybe it's, you know, some other thing that I need a bigger machine that has bigger parts to do it, but it's a specialty device. And I think laptops are going to become that too. Somebody like me who's like, no, I need audacity and colloquy and I need to have, you know, enough ram to handle a bunch of tabs and I do a lot of tab switching. I want to have multiple browsers and and be able to customize details. Yeah, you know, stuff like that. I'm going to want a laptop, but that's not most people. Yeah, exactly. I think we have a tendency of thinking of of it in terms of, you know, hierarchical terms like a laptop or desktop is better than a less capable device, but the way that that the way of looking at it that might also make sense is actually some people might prefer those other devices. Yeah, my friend Andrew, for us, it's like we're waiting for them to be able to do whatever we're doing on a laptop, but that's the wrong way of looking at it. And I have to say, one of the reasons I love this keyboard, it is it has unlocked the usefulness of some apps that I was like, I hate doing this on an on-screen keyboard. And then suddenly it's like, oh, this is now really useful. I can I can totally use this as a word processor now, which was one of the things I needed a laptop for. The arrows or what keys are you thinking of? Just the keyboard being able to type. Yeah. Oh, just the fact that you can type, not specific keys that give you functions. No, no, no, no, although that helps. But no, just just like typing on an on-screen keyboard is always a pain for me. And I think for most people, you know, some people get used to it, but I don't think it's ever ideal if you have to do a lot of typing. Yeah. You just need a new way to interface with machines or computers. I can't wait for thought thought interfaces where I just think what I want. And it shows up. Ideally, yes, that would be awesome. I think really what you'll see is kind of bifurcation of computers where you have once on one side, you have powerful machines where people who content create, whether it's video editing, podcasts, music, designers or what I need, the flexibility and all these, you know, you know, additional advantages of having a large machine with lots of power. Yeah, people who consume and then do any kind of like content work like, oh, I'm going to update my blog or I'm going to send in my, you know, quick book report, I don't know, thoughtful reports. Do you still have book reports? Yeah, but that's the way people have been thinking about them for a while now. I think that's that's the usual, you know, the conventional wisdom about the two types of devices. The thing that we haven't, the way we haven't been looking at it is people just prefer the iPad. All things being equal, people who would have a choice would actually prefer to go on the iPad rather than on the laptop. The only thing that I don't think is about that is the closed nature of the app ecosystem. And that's not particularly an Apple thing, although they are at the extreme end of it. I mean, the Android ecosystem is also more closed than the open web. And that that starts to that starts to erode some of the advantages that the worldwide web has given us. Yeah, I I understand that on a theoretical level, on an intellectual level, I have a hard time. Now that there are there are still, you know, the web is very well supported by Apple and Safari, and I have a hard time seeing a huge deficit, you know, every time I am in an app and I want to send a link to what I'm talking about and it either has a hidden menu option or just no way to do it, I miss the open one. Yeah, I understand that. And every time someone says, hey, are you available in downcast? And I have to be like, well, yeah, we're really also available in every app because we have an RSS feed so you can put us in whatever you want. Like, it's just sad to me that people think about it as like, oh, you have to put yourself in every app while we have an open protocol that should make it so that everybody is available everywhere. And that's been one of the driving factors of innovation. Is that is that idea of like, there isn't a limit. You don't have to go ask permission to publish and the apps make it more so that you have to ask permission. I guess so, yeah, it's true. It's just a theoretical issue because in the case of downcast, for example, they just scrub the iTunes store where everyone is and they get every podcast in there anyway, and you can search for a daily tech news show and you get it done about Star Wars. I never submitted to the iTunes store. So every single person has to subscribe manually. Now, is that a dumb thing on my part? Yeah, but the way the web should work. I shouldn't have to go submit it to the iTunes store. That's actually it's practical versus theoretical. I get that. Like, yes, Tom, but you can still go submit it and then it would work. No, I think no. In that case, people can still go to your website, get your link and input it into downcast because a lot of them don't know that it works that way. True. How not having an app? How would not having an app help that though? They would go to your website and listen to it open or if if there were just, you know, if we just used an open interface that said, hey, you know what? These links are out there. Here's here's a list of them. You can you can have our curated list, but then just search for anything and it will show up that that would help. That's downcast. That's all of the podcast players. You can search iTunes and find podcasts that have not been submitted to iTunes. So you would want an open service that iTunes that would do what iTunes does. Yeah. OK, I'm I'm sure that there could be one called the World Wide Web. No, no, no, no, that that you're talking about the central service that indexes all of the iPads, all of the RSS feeds. Yeah, it's called Google. But no, I think in this specific example, I don't think your argument holds because the lack of apps wouldn't change the situation. Sure, if everyone if everyone used Google to find their podcasts, then I wouldn't have to submit it. That is a flimsy argument. Or if podcasts work where every app went and indexed RSS feeds, I wouldn't have to submit it. That's all. But how would they find them? Search. Oh, so basically everyone would have to develop a web crawler. You can have a portal. You can have a portal where people curate. But then you would make a difference between permission and and not. That's all. But you don't have to ask permission to be on iTunes. You just made it. I guess, yes, I guess they can reject you. OK, well, and you have to go and give them the URL. I'm not saying they're being unreasonable. OK, I'm just saying you don't just publish to the web and it shows up. You have to take another step and say, oh, Mr. iTunes is actually right. So what you would like is some kind of service that would crawl the web for all of the kind of hypertext transport protocol. Yeah, even I don't see how that service would work magically indexing all of the podcasts of the web without crawling the entire web like Google does. Exactly, it would crawl the entire web like Google does. OK, sure. Anyway, I don't know. I don't know if this is a productive line of. The Varki, but it is fun. No, I think it is interesting. It's it's highly theoretical, but it is interesting. Exactly, it's highly theoretical. Also, I'm done publishing, so that's that's the other thing I'm doing. Thanks for hanging out, though. I know it gets late for you hanging out after the show. I really appreciate it. Yeah, you know, it did take away from some overwatch playing time. Oh, well, then I'm not going to let you go. All right, thanks everybody for watching. Thank you, chat room.