 time. Hello everyone. Welcome to the pre show of today's DTNS, the daily talk news show. That's right. We've changed formats to all talk radio. We'll be talking about Duke basketball. I'm just trying to make sure to see if Justin's listening. I'm listening. Did you go to Duke? No, he was complaining about them on Twitter last night. To be fair, though, I also am listening to you guys over my monitors speakers. Yeah. So, so anything whispered talk about you whisper and you'll leave. You won't hear us a bit. Got it. We'll try not to whisper. Yeah. Well, during the show, it shouldn't be a problem. Show voices. Use your show voice, Tom HP Enterprise Revenue. Can I get a quick journalism thing here? What's up? And like, I don't want to show for Uber, but here's a paragraph from this New York Times story. As a chief executive, Mr. Kalanik, or is it Kalanik Kalanik? I say Kalanik. I don't know. Mr. Kalanik. I don't know. I say Kalanik in front of people that work at Uber and they don't correct me. So I'm assuming that's right. Or people just don't want to correct me. Mr. Kalanik has long set the tone for Uber. Under him, Uber has taken a pugnacious approach to business, flouting local laws and criticizing competitors in a race to expand as quickly as possible. Now, I'm not saying any of that is untrue. Right. There's no, there's no quibble with accuracy. No, because they certainly have flouted local laws. Yes. And pugnacious means argumentative. I mean, first of all, New York Times, pugnacious. Come on. Let's, all right. That's so, that's so New York Times. Yeah, it is. But, but that aside, it's accurate. It's an accurate word. They do, they do quibble in our argumentative. But it's like flouting local laws and criticizing competitors to Uber sounds an awful lot like ridding protectionist laws from local municipalities who don't want them. It is, it is a choice of accurate words. There's something that I try really hard and I'm not saying I always avoid it, but I try really hard to avoid using the kind of language that may be accurate, but implies a direction, right? Yeah. So, and a great example that I've tried to curb myself from saying is HP announced it made only 47 million last year rather than HP announced it made 47 million last year down 3%. You should decide if that's only 47 million at 3% or not. That's like, you see that a lot now with the, with the, with the DeMarcus Cousins trade to New Orleans, because he's going, he now can't resign this summer for like the, the bonus that he would get for staying with his team. So now he can't sign his 230 million dollar extension. He will only be allowed to sign a $175 million. Oh, that's how can he live? All right. You guys ready? Let's go. Let's do this. Oh, I'm not ready. Okay. Now I am. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by you. Thanks to everyone who supports us. You can find out how to support us at dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 23rd, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt, Justin, Robert Young. How have you been? Oh, Tom, you know, I'm doing fantastic. We've had a little bit of a hectic week here in the Oakland studios dealing with some tech problems. But the one thing that brings me back that centers me to my core is a lovely Thursday afternoon with you on the Daily Tech News Show. We're just going to kick back, take it easy, chat amably about the end of SHA-1 as a cryptographic method, whether alphabet has solved trolling and commenting, and why everybody is so furious at Uber. Yeah, just some light topics. Yeah, just some really, really just, you know, pull out some some some lemon cakes and some tea and we're going to enjoy a serene little afternoon. Yeah, I was thinking of lemon cakes too. I'm glad we're in the same place on that. Hey, before we get to our top stories, quickly Google updated its Gboard keyboard. I know a few of you are big fans of that. This is the keyboard for iOS. It will now include some features like new emojis and language support. But the big one everybody's talking about is voice typing. You can type with your mouth. Yeah, voice typing that is only as activated by the spacebars of the largest real estate owner on that keyboard. Interesting idea. Root metrics, they have reported that U.S. mobile carrier reliability has given or they give Verizon the top spot in tests on reliability, speed, data, cell, and T-Mobile fourth. Now, that sounds interesting. It's because it's different than the recent open signal report that rang Verizon and T-Mobile neck and neck. Turns out T-Mobile thinks open signals report is more accurate. Yeah, I wonder if there's any colorful four-letter words that John Leguer will have for root metrics. Root metrics, by the way, very good at what they do. So this is not a BS report. Root metrics is very scientific. The difference is they don't crowdsource it. They use their own employees. Which, of course, Verizon says is a much better method to do. Website provider Wix.com has acquired art community DeviantArt. Wix said that it will continue to operate DeviantArt as a standalone site, but they'll start swapping features back and forth between the two products. Hey, they better or else they will incur the wrath of angry fan fiction drawers everywhere. Now, here are some more top stories. All right. In a paper published Thursday, researchers from CWI Amsterdam and Google Research describe a practical way to cause a collision exploit against SHA-1 cryptographic hash function. A collision exploit essentially is when you can have the same hash applied at two different files. So it allows you to discover keys. It allows you to fake keys. In regular terms, what this means, if you're still not following, is if you've got $110,000 and some Amazon cloud computing resources, you can break SHA-1 cryptography. So it is within the realm of practicality for anybody to do this. Doesn't mean it's being done in the wild, though. Source code for the attack will be published in 90 days, so it can be reviewed and guarded against. But it also gives companies a chance to move off of SHA-1. One of the biggest users of SHA-1 still is Git. So a lot of people are calling for them to shift off of them. Also, there's a tool out there to detect if files are part of a SHA-1 collision attack. You can find that at shattered.io. A note from Rich in Lovely Cleveland. He pointed out Microsoft, Apple, Firefox, and Google already have had plans announced to block SHA-1 certificates by mid-2017. Some of them were going to do it at the beginning of the year and then they gave a little extra time. But everybody wants to move off of this. So when looking at stories like this, it seems like the biggest points of contention that you get into are exploits that are revealed either too early or irresponsibly. Everybody wants them to be fixed. But now that we've kind of moved past the phase of companies feeling like it's going to be this tremendous embarrassment that something was hacked, the idea is find it, report it, give everybody a chance to deal with it, and then release it publicly so everybody knows exactly what the problem was. Yeah. And you want to do both because once you put it out there, it does two things. One is people can figure out how to stop the attack or figure out at least how the attack works. I mean, in this case, it basically the way you stop the attack is don't use SHA-1. But it gives folks a chance to learn, which is good. You want to make it public. But you also want to give companies who will be affected by the exploit a chance to guard themselves against it, again, by shifting off of using SHA-1. So yeah, this is a typical cycle for that. And honestly, people have been calling for SHA-1 not to be used for a long time. Most recently, in 2013, there was a paper that predicted just such a collision attack was theoretically possible. Now it's been shown to be practically possible. So people should have known this was coming. A lot of people criticizing get for not removing or changing from SHA-1 before now. Well, now they have a gigantic $110,000 reason plus access to Amazon's cloud computing to do it. Facebook announced Thursday that it will start putting ads in the middle of videos as a test and a U.S. publisher with 2,000 or more followers that has reached 300 or more concurrent viewers in a recent live video will be able to insert video ads into their live streams. Ads won't start until at least 20 seconds into the video and must be placed at least two minutes apart. Facebook will split ad revenue 55% to the publisher, 45% to Facebook. Facebook does not, nor do they plan on adding with this, pre-roll ads. Yeah. So what Facebook's doing here is saying, okay, we paid a bunch of celebrities to use Facebook live, but we can't keep doing that. Yeah. We need to find better ways to monetize these videos without us having to pay someone directly. So let's come up with some better advertising options. And we decided we don't want to do pre-roll because pre-roll annoys people. So let's annoy people less and still make money by putting them in the middle of the live streams. I don't know. I mean, when you're talking about live streams, a lot of times mid-roll ads, for instance, on YouTube, the algorithm doesn't get them right. And they just come up kind of in random and weird places. What Facebook's talking about, it sounds like, is a little more elegant where you decide as the streamer when they come up. So that's the real interesting idea here is the fact that you can tease past a commercial break, that it's not just all algorithmically driven, that it's like, ah, 20 seconds, time for an ad. You can say, hey, right after this, I'm going to tell you the reason why we did this thing before. And now just as if you put it in to the file itself, you can have a rotating to the highest bidder Facebook enhanced with their information ad placed in there. That's a very, very interesting idea. And I hope they do well with it, because as we've seen so far, there was that boom and bust when they were footing the bill for BuzzFeed in the New York Times and the Washington Post to have Facebook live teams. Boy, the sun was high and the metaphors were popping. But when that money went away, all of a sudden, it wasn't quite the same. Yeah. This word on the street, though, is that Facebook has still got people excited to use Facebook for video. I have been cautioning people like, sure, make your videos on Facebook. Nothing wrong with that. You should totally do that. But don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't move everything to Facebook, right? Like, there's going to be something else coming. And there already is. There's YouTube, there's Twitch, there's all kinds of stuff. Amazon continues to resist US prosecutors request for recording stored on Amazon servers from an Amazon Echo. We've talked about this on the show before. The Echo was present at the site of a murder investigation. A man was found drowned in his hot tub. They know that two people were there earlier in the evening. They suspect maybe there was foul play. And what they want to do is listen to everything the Echo recorded during the 48 hours that span the time around the time of death. Now, Amazon doesn't record a whole lot. I know a lot of people misinterpret this story and say, oh, so the Echo recorded everything that happened in that house for 48 hours. And it's not true. Amazon listens and only records in a buffer a small amount until it hears the wake word. Then it will save a fraction of a second before it hears its wake word. It does not keep that. It's not logging everything that's happening. It only has a fraction of a second before it hears its wake word. And then a few seconds after, whenever it thinks you're done saying add chocolate chips to shopping list, that's when it stops recording. That's all that will be stored on Amazon servers. So law enforcement is just hoping here that the Echo at some point misinterpreted something as happens quite often to be a wake word and recorded something that will shed some light on what was going on in that house. However, Amazon, which has handed over subscriber and account information, argues that the recordings are protected by the First Amendment and that what law enforcement has shown as a need for this is not meeting the burden you need to meet to basically run counter to the First Amendment. They're saying you have to show a real need for this before we're going to violate our account holders First Amendment rights. This is obviously a story that is ongoing. I find it to be fascinating. I think that this is a tremendous precedent that Amazon wants to delay as long as possible. And they obviously feel that this case does not meet that burden of proof. I think that they will fight any case like this until that they are compelled to do it until there is a witness outside that said, yeah, I could hear the Echo trying to talk, but I couldn't hear the voice of the person that was inside. As for what will happen, it's always up to a judge. But if you're Amazon, you got to be worried because not every judge in every district that's going to hear a case like this is going to be as literate as you might hope on the technical factors around it. Well, and it is an interesting precedent that Amazon is dealing with here. And it is the kind of thing that could go to the Supreme Court and have wide-ranging implications well beyond the Amazon Echo, which is if I have recorded myself, whether it's on a virtual personal assistant on my phone in the Dropbox, does that have the protection of the First Amendment? And does it require that level of burden to say, no, we're 90% sure there's some evidence there, Your Honor, you need to give us a warrant for that? Or is it just subpoenable? Is it something that's like, hey, if it's there and they're involved in the case, we get to look at it? That's what Amazon's fighting here is for that higher level of proof. So it'll be interesting to keep an eye on this. And interesting that Amazon is willing to dig in its heels on it. In its earnings report, Fitbit disclosed Thursday that it paid $23 million to acquire the assets of smartwatch Pebble in Q4 of last year. That's less than the estimated $40 million that was talked about when the acquisition first went down. Pebble raised more than $40 million in its Kickstarter funding across several projects. And that makes a lot of Pebble fans scratch their head and say, wait a minute, really, only $23 million? What happened here with the Pebble, Tom? I don't know. And most of the people who were reporting on this were suspecting it was around $40 million. And to find out in the earnings that it wasn't near that much means that Pebble was in such dire straits that they were willing to just hand this over, that they saw no other future. And also that Fitbit is a pretty good negotiator and was willing to apply a little pressure and still not lose the deal. I'll tell you what, I would direct everybody on over to Business Insider. There was a great story written by, I think a former guest on this show, friend of mine, Steve Kovac, who talked about just exactly how much trouble Pebble was in, how big that they were betting on certain elements. And also the fact that, hey, look, Pebble is not necessarily a failure, but it is certainly a victim of the fact that smart watch sales just were not where they hoped they would be. This has turned into a very, very, very slim accessory market that is dominated by the people that can tie them to phones and make them a richer experience. And that's just kind of it. If you're wondering about the money, listen, that's business. When you are tying stuff up, when you're tying that amount of money into producing in China at that level and you're looking to play with the big boys, you'd be amazing how fast $40 million can come and go. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to call the Pebble an aqua hire. It's a little bit more than that. Fitbit got some pretty good assets here in the operating system and the community involved with it and all of that. Certainly a bunch of intellectual property. But when you don't buy the whole company, which is what Fitbit did, they just bought people and assets, it's because that company is looking for an out. And it usually means that investors are convinced that they're not going to get all their money back or an impressionable return. And so they're willing to hedge their bets and cut their losses. And so 23 million means that they were perfectly willing to do that. The FCC approved the activation of LTEU capabilities on cellular base stations, one from Ericsson and one from Nokia. LTEU lets carriers use unlicensed spectrum on the 5 gigahertz band to augment base station signals and improve short range connection speeds. It's very similar to a femtocell that uses Wi-Fi that plugs into your internet and then rebroadcasts an LTE signal or calling over Wi-Fi, which a lot of phones do. It just uses the same LTE protocols that your phone normally uses. So it makes things a little swifter there, but it's operating in the same bandwidth as Wi-Fi. So there was a ton of controversy about this. Google even filed an objection to this at one point because there was worry that this would interfere with Wi-Fi. And granted, it's an unlicensed spectrum. You don't need to get a license to use it, but you do need to get approval to create the hardware that takes advantage of it. So this is a big step and T-Mobile announced it will activate compatible base stations with LTEU this spring. Yeah, this is one of those fascinating ways to just make the thing that we understand to be connectivity on a mobile scale just better. However, like you mentioned, there's really no arguing that this took a rocky road to becoming a reality. And it's a patch. It's a band-aid. It's not the kind of thing that is going to solve all the problems. And obviously we're already moving towards 5G. And so this is only going to be useful for a few years here. And it's not going to be necessary in every case. But yeah, when you've got New York rolling out public Wi-Fi everywhere, they were concerned that if Verizon started popping these LTEU things on apartment buildings and it interfered with Wi-Fi that that could cause problems for everybody. So it seems like the tests have generally showed that they can operate these in a way that doesn't interfere with Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi Alliance got involved at one point. And everybody seems to, if not be happy, at least accommodated to this decision. AI scientist at Alphabet's Jigsaw showed off a tool Thursday called Perspective that helps websites moderate online discussion. Perspective aligns comments, or signs comments, a level of toxicity. Publishers can choose what level comments are held for review. Jigsaw hopes to add the ability to evaluate topic relevance and substantiveness as well. The New York Times, Wikipedia, The Economist, and The Guardian have all been working with the tool. And now any publisher can request access to the API. Have we finally used AI technology to solve the flame wars that have been raging? It's over. The flame wars are over, Justin. Do they poured what? No, I don't think so. This is an interesting tool though, because one thing that I don't see discussed enough, it gets discussed, but not enough, is that one of the ways you can make a healthy community is to have active moderators. They don't even have to use the band hammer all the time. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about moderators who get in there and engage with the community. And you remove useless posts, right? I'm not talking about posts where people maybe are saying, hold on, I get to say that. That's my freedom of expression, whatever. No, I'm talking about just trash posts. And so making that easier for companies who can't afford to hire full-time moderators or whose moderators just can't keep up with everything is great. And especially when you're talking about being able to identify off topic and when you're talking about substantiveness, that could sound scary. Like how do you decide? That's a subjective thing, except we all know that if a post just says first, that's not substantive. It may be fun, but it's not substantive. What if they're first, Tom? Oh, no, no. If you're actually first, that's substantive. I'm talking about the second one down that says first because they were paying attention. Yeah, obviously. Couple really, really interesting facets to the people that are working with this tool. The New York Times and the Economist and the Guardian are products of a very, very interesting, divergent path as we have gotten further into the internet age. As the internet has demanded more and more content, like for a lot of these media outlets and blog aggregates, you wind up just having an exploding number of posts, which makes moderating them, if they all have their own separate discussion, all that much more difficult. Same thing for Wikipedia, which has to do constant revisions into their articles. If you've ever looked into the back talk of any Wikipedia entry, you can see things can get contentious in what is now looked at as a more and more respectable way to understand our world. I think this is a great idea moving forward. AI is always just going to be as smart as the things you put in front of it. It is not on any level a cure-all. We are not going to flip a switch, and all of a sudden this thing is going to be better. Same thing with Twitch's Auto Mod, it is just a tool. We're going to find out how useful it is, and hopefully, this is the kind of adaptive resource that will only get better as time goes on. Yeah. That is the idea. It's not a set it and forget it situation. It's a situation that if you use it, and I think in the Fortune article they found out typing life's a bitch, which is actually fairly benign, set off the toxicity meter, and they said, look, what will happen is moderators will go through in the light and be like, oh, well, that one shouldn't have been withheld. Go ahead and put that one in there. I would rate it this level of toxicity, and then the AI learns, oh, okay, that's just a common expression, and that one's okay. But you have to use it that way for it to be able to improve. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines in each day in less than 10 minutes, please subscribe to our sister's show at DailyTechHeadlines.com. That's a look at our top stories. Okay, folks, you probably have been following a little bit of the fallout regarding the blog post alleging sexism and harassment at Uber. Users who delete an Uber account today have started to report seeing a message from the company saying, not an apology and not don't even delete your account, just saying, hey, let us explain. We're deeply hurting after former employee Susan Fowler's blog post describing sexism and harassment at the company. We found what she described abhorrent, careful choice of words there, and we believe in creating a workplace with a deep sense of justice. They refer to the fact that they have asked former Attorney General Eric Holder and Ariana Huffington to join an investigation that also includes their own HR head. This is the second time this year that Uber has responded to a campaign to delete accounts. The first was over immigration protests in New York. Uber already, according to New York Times article today, faces at least three lawsuits in at least two countries from former employees alleging sexual harassment or verbal abuse at the hands of managers. There is a post from early Uber investors, current investors, free to Kapoor Klein and Mitch Kapoor, saying, we are disappointed to see that Uber has selected a team of insiders to investigate its destructive culture and make recommendations for change. They imply that they've been trying to help Uber behave better behind the scenes, and now it's time for them to go public. They also criticize hiring Ariana Huffington, who is a board member of Uber, and Eric Holder, who was hired by Uber to help them with some lobbying efforts last year, saying, that's not really independent. You have employees of your organization and a board member. They're as good as they are not going to be able to maintain independence because they have a vested interest in the success of your company. And they may be a little bit, you know, just because of that conflict of interest, beyond their best interests, beyond their best intents, not be able to be as hardcore as they should be. Here's the thing, and keep in mind that I just mentioned there were already lawsuits. When those lawsuits were filed, you didn't hear a lot about them, you didn't hear a lot of public outrage. And keep in mind also, and by the way, I'm not justifying or casting aspersions here, but back in March of 2015, Buzzfeed reported on the tweets from a former Google employee alleging sexual harassment against Google. And we didn't see the same reaction. And that brings us to what Justin brought up in our pre-show meeting today. What is it about Uber? Forget about the truth of the allegations. What is it about Uber that causes the reaction to be so much sharper? And maybe not deserved, but we're showing you like there are equivalent things happening in other arenas, and it's Uber that gets a lot of the curiosity directed at it. So, and just to highlight, you made a point that this is the second time in a year that they have directly responded in their delete page to the controversy that is probably making people delete their Uber app. That is not in a calendar year. That is in the year 2017, which for those of us keeping track, you know, wherever you are in the world, for us is one month and 23 days old. So that is in one month and 23 days, they have now altered their, their, their, their delete page. So you can see exactly what they believe the response should be to why you are deleting their app. But let's get back to the larger point, which is, and we've seen this with other companies, but not in my opinion as sharp as Uber, that we feel, and I'm going, I'm going to use a royal we that, that does not necessarily mean everybody, but enough people that it's, it's turned the needle a little bit that there is a rage toward bad behavior at Uber. And let's assume it's all true that you don't tend to see, like you said, even with other companies in the valley with Google, let alone blue chip companies for which sexual harassment claims can come and go. Oftentimes with fairly little fanfare that that executives from companies can resign in disgrace. Uber did not, if we assume everything that has happened here is indeed true. Uber is not the, the original sin for all these behaviors. They, they have happened in other places. And what I'm curious to hear from you, Tom, and also from everybody listening is what is that connection? Is it because people want to affect it before it gets bigger? Cause it seems like a company that will continue to be a part of our lives going forward. Is it because there is just within Silicon Valley, a reactive nature that CEOs are compelled to have these tearful admission meetings, like apparently Travis Kalanick had yesterday or the day before. I can't keep track about the, the Susan Fowler medium post. I don't know. I'm just, but it is fascinating to me that we have our hooks emotionally in this company. And we want to, we want to punish them when they are bad. Yeah. And, and, and again, to Justin's point, the we may not include you. You may be sitting there saying, well, I don't really care. I don't even use Uber. They don't even operate in my city. And, and that's fair. What he's saying is the online community is really digging in on this. Some people think not enough. Some people think well deserved. Some people think maybe it's undeserved, but it is a big reaction. It's a bigger reaction than some other events have had. My theory as to why is because first of all, it's us. It's our, to the people who are saying this, it's our community, right? It's the tech community. And that's not just inside Silicon Valley. It's mostly inside Silicon Valley, but it's also Austin. It's, it's also New York. It's, it's other places around the world who are feel a community, a kinship about the tech world, and it's positivity and it's, it's ability to change the world for the better. And you see tech companies hammer that all the time. We are going to make, you know, blind people see and we're going to bring internet to the rural areas of the world. And we, we're, we're making a better world. And then you see one of their own come up and get accused of, of being really horrible. And I think part of it is that you've betrayed us. If you believe the allegations, which are believable, you betrayed us. And the other is it's not Google, which oh geez, they do so many good things. Do I, do I really believe that they would do this one bad thing? No, it's Uber. And Uber has been accused of abusing the driver's rights. They have law, they have settled out of court on that point. They have had one of their managers accused of abusing his access to user data and alleged harassment of a reporter. You have had allegations that Uber executives have gotten in shouting matches with reporters over things. And you have a general feeling that Uber just doesn't really care if they break the laws. They think it's worth it to be able to pursue what they want to do. And so maybe not even every single one of those events, but all of them combined have built up enough resentment that people look at this and say, that's the straw that broke the camel's back. I am done with you, Uber. So is that, are we just at a point where, you know, I once went to an allergist who described to me the idea of allergies is not that you smell something and your whole body reacts, but rather it is a glass of water that gets filled to the very top. And then it is that last whiff of hay or cedar or something that makes you start snotting uncontrollably. Is that where Uber is? Is their glass of water just full to the point where even something like the taxi strike that happened during the ban protest in New York City, which the more you look at that, the more Uber's response seems more reasonable than people gave it credit for. But it doesn't matter because, like you said, everything else that's come before us put them in a position where people don't care to give them the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. I think that's where we're at. And I think the signal that that is where we're at is that Uber felt it was worth their time and energy to not only put a tailored message up to people deleting their account that isn't just like, hey, we're sorry to see you go, but is a carefully crafted piece of literature that's not admitting fault, but at the same time making it very clear that they don't feel good. And they're not trying, they're walking that line. They're like, we're not trying to blame the victim. We're not saying she's lying. But also we can't legally admit fault here. We have to be very careful. Like that took a lot of thought and preparation. And you only do that if it's worth it because so many people are deleting. And I'm not saying so many people are deleting that it's going to close the company overnight, but it must be a significant number of some amount. Well, you hear whispers in this town, Tom. And I indeed have heard whispers that the first couple of days when they delete Uber thing, they were like, oh, okay. And then as soon as they noticed that it had sustained for three and four days, and they saw the numbers that were coming in, it became something that they added to their playbook of PR handling to do that a little bit better. So this is something that is being responded to. But I want to go back real quick that maybe there is something broader here that isn't necessarily about Uber and us just losing faith in them. But this baseline, and I'm going to say hypocrisy, that we're going to make blind people see. We're going to change the world. We're going to make sure that everybody can maximize their life by saving time, by earning extra money, by giving you freedom, the likes of which you've never had before. Hey, also, wait a minute, I'm a lady that works at your company. This guy is really squeezing on me. Man, that's a hard problem. We're going to have to really think about that one. Anyway, let's get back to moving literal mountains and changing the entire economy. Hey, there's this other HR thing. Oh, geez. Oh, man, I don't know if we're going to be able to get to that. Maybe put it on the whiteboard. Let's go back to causing real miracles around the world. I think that there is a disconnect there that is an unfair way to look at it from the outside. And yet I can't help but think that maybe that view is something that permeates a lot of people's view of Silicon Valley companies when you see stories like this. Yeah. And it's unfair to paint all tech companies with the same brush. Plenty of them who are trying to move mountains also don't have constant accusations of sexual harassment against them. But Uber isn't the only one, and it's not the first time. And there is a feeling that there is a bit of a cultural issue. And it gets difficult to deal with because when someone points out a single example, the people who don't want to admit it say, yeah, but that's it one single example, right? The fact of the matter is I read her post and got the impression that while sexual harassment very likely was a problem, it was not the only one. And that the kind of factors that have to lead the series of events that she experienced to happen involve people having stuff on each other, right? You know what? If you come at me for that, I'm going to make it real hard for you because I know this other thing. It just felt like some kind of Italian banker novel from the 1400s about internecine war. Everybody's got something on somebody else, and so I can't move against them. I'm sorry, Ms. Fowler, you just don't understand the game. And she even used Game of Thrones as an example of what it felt like there. So I think not every organization suffers from that, but I got the impression that there's more going on than just what is revealed in this post. There seems to be, as the NCAA refers to it, as a lack of institutional control when it comes through some of the bad behavior centers. Sports leagues, man. Best euphemisms in the world. Got to hand it to them. All right, let us know what you think. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Pick of the day from Ryan Faircloth. We were talking about blockchain yesterday, and he said, you know what? I've heard a lot of talk about financial tech and blockchain, and I have a friend who has a business in fintech, as they call financial tech, innovation. He has a podcast, and he's a great resource, so you might want to check out bigfintechmedia.com if you want to learn a little more about all of that. And Ryan's been our boss here at Daily Tech News Show for three years, so he's got a little standing to make a call like that. Just saying. Thank you, Ryan. Send your picks to us, folks. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Let's alternate on these emails, Justin. I'll start with the first one from Alex, formerly of Olympic, but now he's in not sort of decadent Rio. And the Ethereum Foundation, he wrote in with some points in response to John Wolpert's appearance yesterday. Essentially, Alex doesn't quite categorize fabric, Mr. Wolpert was talking about yesterday, as purely blockchain. Here's Alex's explanation. He says, first of all, Bitcoin is one giant spreadsheet on the sky tailored for keeping track of ownership of a single currency. Bitcoin, which is run by multiple computers with very strict rules on which transactions go in and which orders and how they affect the balance of people's bitcoins. Anyone can run a computer for the network. Anyone can send transactions. A general-purpose blockchain system, and he's using Ethereum as an example, is one giant computer in the sky that keeps track of multiple spreadsheets that can interact with one another, each one with their own little software on how to update the spreadsheets. They can be built to keep track of anything. The computers have strict rules on how transactions are processed and anyone can participate or write their own spreadsheets. A decentralized ledger technology, which is what some industries like IBM are promoting, is similar to how the internet servers now run. And that's what John Wolpert said yesterday. Protocols in which multiple servers interact, each one carrying their own database and their own rules on how transactions are processed, how they affect the databases, and who has the permissions to write to that. Now, decentralized ledgers are less complicated than global blockchains and might fit the need of corporations, conglomerates, and consortiums better as they usually don't want to build databases where anyone in the world can participate. But I also think they're less exciting. A great example is how he mentioned that the internet isn't really permissionless as it's subjugated to ICANN in the domain name system. The Ethereum community is building an alternative domain system that is controlled by very simple automated rules instead of an organization, which would allow sites to run without any sort of central servers by using P2P file sharing of any large static resources and using the blockchain for resolving things that need single global resolvers like domain names. IBM's looking at how the internet is structured today and trying to create a blockchain that mirrors the current internet infrastructure. Ethereum is trying to use blockchains to change the structure of the internet. These are different approaches, each one with their own merits. So I think what Alex is very carefully trying to do and the reason I'm reading his article or it is almost an article, his email is, you know, John Wolpert described fabric and the benefits of that and said a few times what Ethereum can't do. And I think Alex is wanting to say, okay, yeah, but there are some things that we think Ethereum can do. So you've got a little bit of a friendly rivalry going on and I think it's interesting to watch. It's amazing. Finally, we found people who are going to argue about tech standards. I know. Tom and team writes Russell, on yesterday's show, you and Scott were discussing how there has been an increased attention in graphic abilities by Microsoft. While some of the conversation focused on the creative space, we have seen a big increase in the use of data visualization both at our offices and from our clients with the amount of data being generated on so many fronts in so many businesses making sense of it visually has become a much bigger priority than many businesses outside of the traditional creative fields are needing to address. Thanks for the great content as always. I hadn't even thought about data visualization and then the demands on your graphic processor. Thank you, Russell, for that. That's a really cool piece of insight. Finally, Al was listening to the discussion about app usage going down with Rich from Lovely Cleveland. I'm sorry. Allison, by the way, Al is Allison Sheridan. She was listening to the discussion about our app usage to go down with Lovely Rich from Cleveland and then she writes, I know I reversed that, but he was lovely. I thought about my own app usage and it seemed I really only do use a small few even as a power user, but then I thought maybe it's that some are so interwoven we forget about them. I probably wouldn't immediately think of my password manager, for example, because one password feels like a thread through everything. And guess where my one password data is? Dropbox. But I don't think about that either. Just made me think. That is a really good point. Do you count those as apps or services if you're not using them as apps? And Dropbox particularly here, she's describing using it as a service. It's just storage service. It doesn't really matter if it's an app. One password is a little different though because you do go into one password and manage it as an app quite often. But when you're using it to to auto fill a password, perhaps you don't you just forget that it's an app. Well, and this kind of comes with the maturation of the mobile OS scene, right? Is that now apps are getting more and more permission to interact with each other? We're facing a larger patchwork of how they can how the apps can provide services, you know, beyond. Yeah, you're right. Dropbox is just kind of a thing in the cloud that's being asked to give you information. But the idea that every app or maybe very, very impressive apps can really just be local service providers to other apps is is awesome. Well, and it actually ties into what we were saying. And I talk about this a little bit in my Patreon column this week, that if an app is just providing a service like one password and Dropbox are here, then it can provide that service to your virtual personal assistant or your messenger that you're using. And you're right, app doesn't go away, but it fades into the background, right? And you're just interacting with it by saying, Hey, Justin bot, you know, get my password here. And it just goes to one password, pulls it out of the Dropbox and puts it in done. Yeah, no, absolutely. I can't wait for Justin bot to be developed. Thank you, just Robert Young. I am glad you're here and human. What do you got going on? Well, I'll tell you what, I got a great thing coming up tonight. So you will hopefully be able to get in on it at six o'clock Pacific time. I will be hosting a trivia contest for Mozilla. The fine folks at Mozilla are bringing me in. It's going to be live streamed at facebook.com slash Mozilla. But if you are in the Bay area, then feel free to just, just go ahead and Google. I think you can probably actually get it on facebook.com slash Mozilla or just Google Mozilla trivia. We work with WEWRK, which is the facility that it's going to happen at. But it's going to be a great trivia contest. And I'm the host and it'll be a fun time. I've read the question. So I can't participate, but you can. There's also going to be a fun way that you can interact live, watching it live streamed. So just go ahead and check it out. Facebook.com slash Mozilla 9 p.m. Eastern time, 6 p.m. Pacific. And if you've missed it, if you're already listening afterwards, go check it out anyway. Still fun to watch. Hey, this week in the DTNAS Weekly Tech email, I talk about why I think virtual personal assistants and messaging apps will converge and take over for apps a little more about what we're just talking about. Get that and more when you back the show at $5 a month. That's only 25 cents a show at patreon.com slash DTNAS. Thanks to everybody who already does. Find that in your inbox right now. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at AlphageekRadio.com and DiamondClub.tv. And of course, our website, you guessed it, DailyTechNewShow.com. Back tomorrow with Shannon Morse and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Well done. Awesome. Well, I'll tell you what, speaking of that gig, I'm going to have to hit the bricks and get into the city to prep for that. But I love you guys and I'll talk to you soon. All right. Thanks, man. Have a good show. What do we got for titles, Mr. Chang? Shattered. Shattered. Shaw one of the dead. Get it? Shaw one of the dead. Shaw one of the dead. I like both of those. Shattered. Shaw one of the dead. The Flame Wars are over. Let him cast the first pebble. Ha. Uber and out. Pugnacious Technos. Get Uber it. There's a good one today. I know. And an unfortunate series of Uber events. Facebook wants to annoy people less. Lego my echo. The Adventures of Alexa Home. Alexa Home. Oh, sorry. A Homes and Dr. IBM Watson. The Pebble Drops. Better Perspective on Comment Moderation. Uber's Cupeth Runneth Over. Uber Jesus. Kalanix the Prince. I don't understand that one. What? Kalanix the Prince. Oh, because I was talking about Italian 1400 era. Intrigue. An unfortunate series of Uber events. Shattered. Shattered. Yeah. I could go with either one of those. I'm just going with the Uber events one, because that's the main topic. Yeah. I put Shaw one in the show description, and it is the top, the first of the top stories. So I could go either way. I could go with Uber. I could go with Shaw one. I like them both. Let's let some folks vote. Showbot.ChatRom.net. Go vote. Go vote. I'm still levelating. I think I think I will get my hands on a copy of Pilot X for the first time today. Oh nice. Because everybody has been showing them on Twitter, but I haven't got my own copy yet. So I've started to get really jealous. Don't they send you a proof or something? They sent me an e-proof. Oh, interesting. So I never got a physical version of it. So yeah, I was able to look through it and make sure everything was spelled right and looked right and all of that before it got printed. But after the print run started, I didn't get a call. And I would like one. They said they sent it though. And I got a note that something showed up at my post office box. So I'm going to go check that out. I didn't pre-order my own book. I know I should have. What am I thinking? But yeah, I'm excited to see it. You didn't order one, did you, Roger? Wait, what did you? You're going to argue with me? No, I said, you're not. What are you reading? Oh no, I'm just freeing these stuff. I'm bad. I'm bad. I know that. I know that sound in your voice. I didn't even have to look at the video I knew. Mumble, mumble, mumble. It's the giveaway. That's what Jen says. Oh, she knows what's wrong with me. I should eat. I should just eat some of that peach pie she ordered from. Now you're talking. Peach pie fixes a lot of things. I love peaches. I like nectarines, the unherry version of the peach. I like apricots, but I don't like them in moderation. Oh, see, Eileen doesn't like apricots, so I never buy them. You know why? Is it because she used to eat those dried ones? Because I can see, because my sister's kind of the same way. She doesn't like apricots because she used to have to eat those dried ones. I'll have to ask her that. I never asked her about the dried ones. I like fruit just a lot. I like most fruit. The thing that bothers me that's really hard for me is only buying in season. Because when you start buying off season, even if it's in season from the country it comes from, they're never ripe when they pick them because they need them to rip and never is good. You get those New Zealand. Nothing against New Zealand, but they're apples that you get at the supermarket. It's kind of bland, not very tasty. I do the local thing as much as I can. Although most fruit is grown in the United States is grown in California, so it's not like you have to go that far to get strawberries and stuff. Although not everything that's grown in California gets sold in California, so there's some stuff that's imported. Except for the heirloom tomatoes, tomatoes come from outside of California. Avocados come from Mexico. Yeah, that's one of their big exports. Although we have a lot of avocados in California, so I don't know if we get the Mexican ones as often. I'm sure we get them sometimes. It depends because what happens is they're used to, and this kind of sucks if you're not in California, is they're used to fill out the produce aisles in other states. You get spoiled though. I'm so used to seeing fruit year-round, and I remember going to Little Rock. I always bring up Little Rock because that's just my example of going to a Kroger's and seeing their produce aisle, and it's so tiny. It's like such a small section of the supermarket compared to a safe way out here. People just don't eat as many vegetables and fruits there, I guess. Or not fresh. I'm sure they eat a lot of canned. They just eat steak and potatoes every day. I can eat steak. I can eat red meat a few times a month, but too much. It just weighs me down. Funk around. Funk around is moving from London to Texas. What's funk around? He's someone in the chat room. He's worried about fresh produce, so I would say you probably don't need to worry too much. He's going to Plano. It's a small town. It's in between Austin and Dallas, if I remember right. So you want to go to HEB or Whole Foods. Whole Foods will have the freshest produce. HEB as far as the big grocery stores will have a good wide variety. That's the one thing I remember not visiting a lot of in Texas or supermarkets. Although the last time I went to one in Texas, I think it was in Austin. I'm still amazed that they sell cheese in the shape of the state. Yeah, I thought that was just a joke. I didn't realize it was a thing. When I was living in Austin, I couldn't afford to eat at Whole Foods. I'm an adult, but barely can I afford to eat at Whole Foods. Oh, Plano is north of... This is where the planes congregate. Oh, so you're close enough to Dallas. You'll be fine. You'll have lots of grocery stores to choose from. You may not have HEBs up there. I'm looking for grocery stores. So all shattered and unfortunate series of Uber events are both... They're tied. Make a call. Shattered. I like it. Make a the call. Make a the call. CaptainJack913 in the chat room asked, you're surprised that Texas would do that? Referring to my comment about the cheese. Cheese. I'm not surprised, but it's one of those things that she's like, you assume it's something that they do for tourists, but not like it's like a... Oh, no. I used to get the Texas-shaped tortilla chips, too. Why would you do that, though? Because then you would have all these irregular sides. The round ones are the best if you want to pick up a decent amount of salsa and guac. It was just fun to have Texas-shaped places. Yeah, but it doesn't affect the taste. I mean, I guess you're kind of a kid. I mean, if you're buying those, you're not buying the best ones anyway. You want to get a really good brand if you want the taste to be the best. I get the Gish Mission brand tortilla chips. Out here, yeah. That's the best store brand. Just something about tortilla chips, like just when you just eat the plain ones, just like you're hungry, you just eat a few of those and you're set. Oh, and TextJab, by the way, could get a Texas Navy in here. Plenty of farmers markets around Dallas, too. So, yeah, if you're close enough to Dallas, you should be fine on produce. What used to be in Plano, Texas that I used to see, you would always have to write to Plano, Texas. Yeah, like Pueblo, Colorado. Yeah, like those government things. I don't think they do the Pueblo, Colorado thing anymore. I think it's because everyone submits things online. It's just all on the web. Eating out is not cheaper than buying. I don't know why it appears that way to you, but definitely is not. Eating out in really crappy fast food restaurants might come close. So it's easier just to buy food and then put everything in a casual dish, stick it in the oven at 400 degrees for 45 minutes. Roger's rule of thumb on anything that isn't fish. Chicken, 400 degrees for 45 minutes. Red meat, 400 degrees for 5 minutes. Cool. Brownies, 400 degrees for 5 minutes. Drive to Glendale, 400 degrees, 45 minutes. That's my joke about how far anything is. It is. It's ridiculous. I was mapping out like it's only 24 miles from 25 or 26 miles to your house from mine. But it's like I look at the map and it's like two hours. I definitely find buying groceries much cheaper than eating out in the US. Yeah. I do the Costco and then they buy all the fresh stuff at supermarkets. I get Ron's homicidal bread or killer bread. I always call it homicidal bread. Homicidal. I always want to call it Ron's homicidal bread, but it's Dave's killer bread. It's really good and they sell it super cheap at Costco in two packs. Oh, rest is sold in two packs. Yeah. That is a big change for sure. Funk Run is going from London to Texas. You will definitely have a different cultural experience. Some would say a cultural shock, depending on the cultural shock getting there. Mostly because at the time people were still smoking indoors. And I was like, what? You still smoke indoors? Mostly people driving on the right, too. And big, big cars. It's going on Tuesday. It's going to be fine. You're going to have a good time. Don't shudder. It's going to be great. Okay. That's it. Everybody in the chat room send good vibes to Funk Run on this coming trip. Everyone watching. Thank you for watching. Everyone have a lovely Thursday and we'll talk to you tomorrow.