 Going live, going live. Hanging on there is live. But is it? Yeah, now we don't know. All right, hold on. Last time it did this, it wasn't actually live, so I'm going to check. Livestream is starting soon, it says. Well, I'm seeing. It's live. Okay, I'm reloading. Yep, okay. I'm watching it. Good, all right. Hiding. Dodge the bullet. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. This will also make a wonderful beginning of the YouTube video for people seeing my face of panic. Always close to Christmas, people will understand. I hope so. I hope you're right. Too much going on. All right, we'll give the old diamondclub.tv a chance to catch up. That's why we start the video a little bit early, is so that Diamond Club catches it. Diamond Club caught it quick, so we're ready to go. Awesome. Let's do it. All right, here we go. This is your captain speaking. I'd like to take a moment to remind you that this show is brought to you by listeners like you who give value for value. To show your support, go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. We know you have a choice when it comes to getting your tech news. And on behalf of the crew, I thank you for choosing the Daily Tech News Show. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 17th, 2015. I'm Tom Merritt. Joining me today, very happy to have Jen Cutter, producer who you might know best from appearances on Call for Help Canada or Hack 5 or her own gaming series, OpenAlpha.tv. Jen, thanks for joining us today. It's my pleasure, right? It's nice to be here. It's great to have you. We're going to talk about eSports because I know just this much and all of that I learned from Garrett Wineserl last time he was on. And we've got some cool things coming up in 2016 to talk about. And Jen, I know you're really excited about it. Well, I can't wait. Like, even if eSports does not go full mainstream next year, it's going to be so huge for every segment of the community. And I think it's fun. And even if you're the person who's like, wait a minute, I don't understand watching sports. That's what we're going to talk about is like why you might want to, what's cool about it, what your options will be. But let's start off with the headlines. Apple has promoted supply chain and Apple watch guy Jeff Williams to the position of Chief Operating Officer. That was Tim Cook's position before he became CEO and it's been vacant ever since Cook took over as CEO. Other appointments announced today by Apple include Senior VP for hardware technologies, Johnny Sruji's addition to the executive team, a hiring of gray group ad agencies, Tor Mayrn as president of marketing communications and the expansion of Senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller's role to include heading up the App Store. Schiller now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, so he's marketing and developer relations, essentially. Eddie Q was in charge of the App Store up till now. And there's always developer incidents and issues with the Apple App Store. But the other App Stores now need some attention as well. That includes the Apple Watch, that includes the Apple TV and of course, that includes the Mac App Store, which has been much maligned as being ignored. So maybe we'll see a little more outreach. An opinion about the App Store, Jen, do you use it much? I do, actually. I have a couple of accounts. I have my Canadian account, which does not get used much. My American account, which gets used more. And I have a Japanese account for all of the cute anime games you can't get here. Oh, sweet. And how hard is that to manage all three like that? I have to get people to send me cards from overseas. But it's not too bad. iTunes is surprisingly lenient about letting me log into all three in a row and it doesn't care. Yeah, you don't have to log into a VPN every time, either, you just... No, I don't. Like for Hulu and stuff, I do. But for Apple, I can just log in from anywhere and it works. Excellent. Yesterday, a lower court judge in Sao Paulo, Brazil ordered a 48-hour ban on messaging app WhatsApp starting at midnight Wednesday after the company refused judicial rulings to share information related to what is suspected to have been a criminal case involving drug trafficking despite being fined. Today, Judge Xavier de Souza lifted the ban on appeal saying, it does not look reasonable that millions of users be affected as a result of the company's inertia to provide information. And he recommended, why don't we give them a higher fine if they still won't comply? Nothing coming from Facebook about why WhatsApp doesn't want to hand over this information. It's one thing to not want to hand it over just as a government request, but this is a court ordering it. So there's more to this than meets the eye, obviously. WhatsApp competitor Telegram tweeted earlier today during the outage that it recorded 1 million downloads. So Brazilians were switching over to something else pretty fast. Can you believe that they shut down an entire country's messaging app just to punish that company? It's a little scary to think that this can happen with just not a lot of oversight, but it is their courts. And I'm kind of surprised as well that WhatsApp didn't hand it over. Now, is this a case of them not having data to hand over or just a straight up refusal? Yeah, and it seems to be a straight up refusal, but there's a lack of details about what the case actually is and what they're being asked to hand over. It's regarding a particular account, but whether they don't feel like the court order is properly, maybe it's too broad, I don't know. I would like to know more about that as well, especially because Brazil was a country that was very critical of US surveillance when it was leaked by Edward Snowden and even talked about bringing all data within its borders to keep an eye on it. So it's ironic to have a court order for essentially surveillance being resisted by a US company. Maybe there's something involved there that goes beyond just this particular case. Maybe there's a further dispute between Facebook and Brazil. Entirely possible. It's tough when these giant internet corporations start dealing with governments. Yeah, it never goes easily, does it? The Verge reports that Microsoft's flagship retail store in New York will open a hollow lens experience showcase for developers to get their hands on the hollow lens before they get a dev kit. They'll have three rooms. Verge's 80 Robertson tried all three rooms. One had a holographic version of MS Paint. Another one had Project X-Ray. That's the one where you can shoot alien robots that are moving around the room you're in. And there was one called Holographic Storytelling, which seemed to be sort of a presentation software, sort of a marketing presentation thing that would track the interest of viewers based on their gaze. I assume that the viewers were supposedly wearing hollow lens as well. First wave of $3,000 dev kits, chips in the first quarter of 2016. I didn't opt to go for a dev kit, did you, Chen? No, but everyone I know who's played with it, like especially the paint, said it was really cool. Like I'm a little skeptical about all of the VR stuff just because there's so many different systems. How do you know which one you want? PlayStation Experience not too long ago showed Super Robot Golf for their VR headset. That looked amazing. I was like, well, I guess I have to buy that because that game looks awesome. It's like virtual on and off. Yeah, and then coming here, we're gonna see these things. I mean, in this case, it's just gonna be a dev kit in the wild, but we're gonna see more of these things in the wild. Oculus is gonna go on sale, PlayStation is gonna go on sale, and the HTC Vive is gonna go on sale. I love that. What's that? There's so many. I thought with two competing headsets, it was gonna be complicated, but now there's, how do you possibly afford all of this as a consumer? Yeah, you're gonna have to- It's already expensive. Now you need a headset. And then Magic Leap's gonna come out, and Cast AR actually issued a refund or said it's gonna issue a refund because they're gonna be delayed, but that's still in the offing. That's another augmented reality set. So yeah, I love the idea though that if I lived in New York, I could go and try this out. At least it's possible. You're like, hey, that's not that far. I can make a trip. Yeah, it's not that far from you. You should just head on in. Basically, whoever comes up with a first, like, perfect VR experience for driving games because I have the full racing kit and pedals and all that, I'm probably gonna have to buy that because I wanna drive Suzuka and it's hopefully cheaper than going all the way to Japan. Yeah, well, hopefully. Hopefully, we'll see. Facebook announced new features for Messenger, some of them holiday related. Previously, you could only get this in Australia. It's a face recognition tool called PhotoMagic, now available to everyone in the world except Canada. I'm sorry, Jen. Always. Well, not just Canada. Canada and the European Union. I guess there are laws about facial recognition that need to be navigated for this, I don't know. PhotoMagic will scan through phone photos automatically identifying people and then recommending which friends to send those photos to based on who's in them. Messenger also has some new customizability options, letting anyone in a conversation change their nickname or the color or emoji, add some holiday stickers, there's some snow animation now, anyone uses a Christmas tree or snow related sticker or emoji can get that and Android users, chat heads got a snow globe effect. So, all very festive. Well, all the rest of you have fun with that. See, that reports that in a blog post to employees about compensation changes, League of Legends creator Riot Games sort of let slip that its majority investor, Tencent, has bought the remaining equity in the company. So now Chinese Tencent owns all of Riot Games. Tencent owns WeChat as well if you're wondering, wait a minute, I know I've heard that somewhere. Tencent also owns 40% of Epic Games, which makes Gears of War and Tencent is a shareholder in Blizzard Activision. So Tencent, there's Alibaba, there's Baidu, the big search engine and there's Tencent are sort of the big three in China. I don't know that this is a bad thing because they're just kind of buying out the rest of their stake, but as someone who follows eSports, does this mean anything? Is this something anyone should pay attention to? Well, it'll be interesting to see how the structure may change in the future. Because right now like LCS, it's kind of you've got like the European scene and you've got the North American scene and the Asian scene is catching up. It'll be interesting to see the new push there to get more people into League of Legends and not other games. Yeah, I guess it probably means less to places where League of Legends is already popular and that makes sense that they would then try to make it even more popular in China. Well, with the shareholder in Blizzard Activision, which has Heroes of the Storm, that's gonna be an interesting relationship. Yeah, it's like Tencent has got a little piece of everything, which could end up allowing for some cross-league things, maybe? I don't know. They've got the money, so when they have the ideas, it's a lot easier to make it happen. Yeah. Pete Trevathon pointed out a lifehacker post that researchers Hector Morrow and Ismail Rapoli from the Cybersecurity Group at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain have discovered that a bug in the Linux Grub 2 bootloader lets anybody access the Grub Rescue Shell merely by hitting the backspace key 28 times when asked for a username. And then once you're in the shell, you can add malware or do whatever you want. Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian have all issued patches to fix this really simple transaction-cured vulnerability. I kind of love this stuff because who sat there and decided, I'm gonna try this and hit backspace a bunch of times. And can't. Yeah, apparently the answer to that is Hector Morrow and Ismail Rapoli. Yeah, how many, did they try 26, then 27, 28? I don't know, or was it just an accident where they were leaning on the key? I would like to know the discovery story behind that, the cat came by and then just... Oh, maybe the cat didn't get proper credit on this research paper. Healing from your pets, that's so low. I'm not happy with this. Yeah, it's not also a huge vulnerability because it requires physical access and someone to obviously be hitting that backspace key. Although I guess you could write a script to emulate the backspace key possibly that would require another vulnerability to get access there, but yeah, interesting. Internet.org. Yeah, internet.org provides an app called Free Basics by Facebook. We've talked about it on the show before. It provides access to certain web resources like Wikipedia and also Facebook without counting against your data limit. Now some people in India consider this a violation of net neutrality because you're picking winners and saying these guys don't have to count against your data cap. Facebook has begun serving Indian users a message and filled out form when they use Facebook, encouraging users to send an email to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India or TRAI in favor of Free Basics and saying that not supporting Free Basics will hurt farmers and poor people. The TRAI is taking comments on net neutrality right now until December 30th, so this is Facebook's push to get more of those comments be pro Free Basics. TRAI expects to respond to those comments on January 7th. And a lot of net neutrality advocates are upset about this because they feel like people just sort of click without looking and may just send these emails without really understanding the issue. That's very likely. George Hotz, AKA GeoHot, one-time iOS jailbreaker, showed off his homebrewed self-driving car tech to Bloomberg yesterday. It was pretty impressive. However, today, Tesla responded with a blog post saying, quote, it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles. Now, one way to look at this is, huh, Tesla kicking dirt on little GeoHot who's just trying to do an impressive hack and why are they picking on the little guy? I read this very carefully as it's unlikely that they'd get validation to be deployed to a production vehicle. Well, yeah, if you're not a big company, you can't get Department of Transportation approval in the United States anyway to do this sort of thing. So that's kind of an obvious one. Maybe this is just a move to calm down shareholders? I don't know. It's entirely, it's a mess. I cannot imagine the regulatory backing and systems and handshakes that go between getting a car to market for even the major companies right now. I'm just really impressed with GeoHot because following the homebrew scene for many years now, the name comes up a lot. It just seems like it doesn't matter the tech. He's gonna find a way. Yeah, I mean, let's be honest. I'm not unimpressed because GeoHot didn't create a production-ready vehicle. I'm super impressed that he created something that could drive itself at all. I haven't dug into it to find out if there's more smoke than mirrors here, but a lot of other people I trust opinions have and they say, no, it looks like he did something that can do this, maybe just for a few blocks, maybe did not let loose in an entire city. But that's still pretty impressive for somebody to do in their garage. Democratization of tech, if you have the skills, you can make amazing things happen. Microsoft announced a joint venture with the China Electronics Technology Group in order to make a special version of Windows 10 come to market for the Chinese government. If approved by regulators, the venture provisionally called C&M Technologies would be the Windows versions exclusive licensor and provide support for patches and updates. Licenses would be sold not only to government agencies but also state owned enterprises in China, in fields such as energy, telecommunications and transportation. Microsoft just trying to combat unauthorized copies of Windows out there. And then again, major tech company dealing with the government, what else is in there? In a place where you only get to do business by dealing with the government as recent game console. Well, Microsoft is one of them, finally got the permission to sell game consoles in a very limited way in China. The blockchain, don't fall asleep if you're not a Bitcoin fan. It's the part of the Bitcoin system that validates transactions without requiring a third party. That's what the blockchain is. We won't go into how it works right now but just that's what's attractive about it is you don't have to have a middleman. It's a tamper proof distributed system so nobody owns it and it makes the whole Bitcoin system work. A lot of companies like to use it for other transactions that need trust and there's a few implementations of that using the Bitcoin blockchain. IBM is now leading a group involving way more people than I can mention. Intel, Cisco, the London Stock Exchange Group, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan and more to create something called the Open Ledger Project. Now this would be separate from Bitcoin's blockchain but an attempt to make a similar blockchain-like project it will be open source, run by the Linux Foundation and create a blockchain-like ledger to be used to track the exchange of assets like stocks, bonds, car titles, other financial securities. By all accounts, this is a really important move to create an alternate blockchain. It's not like we all just have one website so a version of the blockchain that does different things is perfectly acceptable to a lot of people and to make it open source and run by the Linux Foundation I think is a great choice. That's a lot of stuff in that small paragraph there. Yeah, there was a lot going on with IBM here too and they've got everybody on board and nobody's going to own it. It's going to be open source which I think is fantastic as well. So... When I first heard Open Ledger, I was thinking like, yeah, yeah, with these guys, sure it is. I'm like, oh, Linux Foundation. Okay, maybe they meant it. No, and IBM is starting it and contributing code. They're one of only two companies committed to contributing code so far but the Linux Foundation's gonna run it so IBM won't own it. They're just getting the ball rolling. That's pretty cool. Hey folks, what also is cool is when you let us know what stories you want to hear on the show. Go to dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. That is our subreddit where folks submit stories which you can do and should do if you have the inclination as well as vote on stories and everybody can do that. You just go in there real quickly and upvote. Maybe downvote if you're like, eh, I don't really care about that one so much but do some vote and then let us know which stories you would like us to talk about on the show at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and that is a look at the headlines. All right, let's talk some eSports. CS GO $50,000 tournament coming to CES. Fortune talking about it today. It will feed into Turner's prize pool for 2016 which is $2.4 million at stake. Turner Sports and WME Image both are teaming up on this. We talked about it on the show when they announced the launch of that and at CES it's gonna kick off with the Counter-Strike Global Offensive Finals. I think there's a three week tournament, 700 teams leading up to that January 7th final. Then that will lead into two 10 week tournaments, one in Q2, one in Q4, each with a 1.2 million prize pool. Most of this stuff is gonna be digital although some of it and especially the finals will air on television on TBS. And Jen, one of the things it's gonna have to try to do is avoid some of the mistakes that the ESPNs and others of the world have made in the past, televising these sorts of things. And it sounds like Craig Berry who's the EVP of production at Turner Sports wants to treat it a little bit like the Olympics to introduce people to the players and tell their stories so that you care a little more about somebody even if you don't necessarily follow the game they're playing. That made me really excited when I read it and really scared at the same time because there was this thing called Championship Gaming Series. It was born in 2007 and it died in 2008. They tried to do the same thing, they were like drafts for the teams, there were these huge stages now which are common but back then it was a really new thing. Player profiles, so I'm hoping that they have learned some of the mistakes of the past. They can bring this to the audience and make it accessible, not trying to be too extreme with it because that's my fear. You get like all the Mountain Dew and Doritos jokes all over the place with gaming. And they're major sponsors, like you can't ignore your major sponsors but there's a way to do it without insulting the intelligence of the viewers new and old. Well, and maybe that's part of the progress is that you need to make some attempts that don't work a few times before people really learn the lessons and say, okay, now we know what to avoid, what was cheesy, what didn't work the last time. I love the idea though of having, it could be overdone obviously but having a package that says, when Firebat signed up for the Hearthstone Tournament, his parents didn't believe it was a real thing. You know, and giving us a little backstory so I know that, oh, okay, that's that person's actual path to this and now I wanna cheer for them because that really does work in the Olympics. Oh, it's huge. In the fighting game community Red Bull did this series called Cultivation for Snake Eyes. Where they followed him around, he went to China. I think it was six episodes and it was an amazing thing that I think we're gonna see more of. Red Bull really set the bar very high for those kind of player profiles and it does get you involved because these aren't robots playing the game. They're kids to me most of the time who have spent thousands and thousands of hours and they've traveled the world. They have all of these experiences that people who just watch on Twitch don't always get to see if you're watching just the major streams. And when you watch the personal streams you get a lot more insight to them, their characters, their habits. But they're real human beings, thoughts and feelings and emotion plays a big part in esports because you have to have incredible control and incredible focus to compete on that stage. Sure, you've got headsets. There's thousands of people around screaming and cheering. Yeah, and you can feel their eyes, I'm sure. Even if you're trying to pay attention to the game. It's an interesting thought that a lot of the fans of esports players and teams bond to their favorites by watching the Twitch streams where they get to see them and talk to them and understand what they're like all the time. That's a real hard thing to replicate in a two minute package. Very difficult. And it's one of those things that pro sports can't quite match because you don't get the same kind of practice access or the same player access that you get with esports. If I had a question for, say, how to play Balrog and Street Fighter, I can go to PR Balrog and send him a message saying, hey, I'm trying to do this combo and it's not working, how come? And the pros are really good about answering or talking about new smokes on different maps for Counter-Strike. It's a new world and it's a lot of demand on the player's time. So I'm hoping that this league doesn't detract from one of their real lives and also all of the other tournaments because this is gonna be a big time commitment. So they're gonna have to miss out on other things by taking part in this television thing. But with Turner, the really good thing here is the money's probably guaranteed. There was a tournament recently that did not pay the players. That was a big step back. That feels like stories from traditional sports that are out of the 1920s, right? The barnstorming tour that didn't pay off and then there was a fight or something. And we're kind of emerging from that stage of things with esports and seeing things get more formalized. What do you think of choosing Counter-Strike as the tournament game? The idea apparently is that it is easier for folks who don't follow esports to follow along because they get the military action and what the objectives are supposed to be even if they're not familiar with the game. Yeah, you've got terrorists who are trying to plant a bomb in one of two sites. You've got the counter terrorists who have to stop them. Counter terrorists win by defusing the bomb or killing all the other guys. And the terrorists win by planting the bomb, having it go off or just killing all the other guys first. And Counter-Strike, because it's been developed over so many years, there's 1.6, there's Source, now there's Global Offensive. They have really great tools to show people inside the game who can see what, who's where, who's blinded, who's got the smokes going on, who's got what weapons, which does play a part, body armor. And it sounds like a lot but it's visually represented on the screen very well. And then you have this role called the Observer who controls the camera in games. So you can be watching through their first-person view if someone's like the last guy alive so you see exactly what they see. Or you have a third-person view where the camera can swing around. You can see two people who are about to have a showdown. And if someone's defusing the bomb, you can get these really cool camera angles where you see the guy trying to approach to take out the diffuser. It doesn't seem relatively straightforward because you also have like the life bars on the side screen, you know who's around. And unlike real sports, those folks never get in the way of the actual players. No, that's very handy. There's no ref block in any of my thoughts. So let's take, before we get off this topic, let's take a look at 2016 Esports. There's going to be more than just this TBS show. Obviously Evo 2016, what is it now? And it's 13th year, I think, something like that. Happening in July in Las Vegas. 15, looks like it'll be 15. 15th, wow, no kidding. Amazing. Yeah, that tells you something, folks, if you're like, I thought the Esports thing was new. It's been slowly building for more than a decade. What does 2016 have in store for us, do you think? Well, let's just talk about Evo history real quick. Right now, we have all these amazing tools. There's Twitch, there's Hitbox, MLG has their own thing. Niko Niko is showing live stuff. Early Evo's, they had to cart in arcade machines for people to play on. And if you weren't there, you could order like these VHS tapes and maybe 3Ds of what happened at the tournaments. So you would find out months later how these matches actually went in. So your on-demand access to early Evo tournaments was a video cassette, mail team. Nice. But anyway, so for Evo 2016, it's, Evo's like the major fighting game tournament. There are a whole bunch of majors, but this is the one that more people seem to pay attention to. It's the most well-known for people outside of the fighting game community. And right now, we know the dates. We know that it's gonna be in July. We don't know where it is. And we don't know what the actual game list is yet. That's all going to be announced in January. Well, that's, when you say you don't know where it is, you mean like which hotel or what city? I thought it was in Las Vegas. I thought I read that. It's gonna be in Las Vegas, but we don't know which hotel. We don't know if they're gonna have to expand to a full convention center this year. We're all kind of waiting, hovering over the button because we want to book rooms. So we need to know where it's gonna be at. And the only thing we know for sure is that Street Fighter V is gonna be there. And that's fighting games. There's also loads of other tournaments cropping up. I'm most familiar with the Blizzard games because I play those. So I know about the Hearthstone Grand Challenge and all of that, TCGs are just a tiny slice of what's coming in 2016. TCGs, I actually think that you're gonna start seeing them pop up alongside fighting game tournaments because it seems like everybody in the world plays Hearthstone. And so in between matches, I've seen people like bust out their iPad or their phone, just trying to get a match in and things like that. That's crazy. That's one of those things where you can do, even if it's not a major, you know, little side tournaments, wherever the heck you want because setup is reasonably simple. Yeah. I'm not great at Hearthstone. It's not something I follow a whole lot. And that's the key. I think, listen to the Angry Chicken guys talk about this all the time, but Hearthstone has got to the point where you can't just take somebody who's winning in Hearthstone tournaments deck and use it because you probably don't know how to use it right. Like there are people who spend enough time on Hearthstone that they get skilled. You can't easily dabble in Hearthstone and become a legendary player. Like that's the other thing for me is like, even though I've played a little, I know so few of the cards and what they do. I understand the classes, but I would need somebody to explain that to me in a match, which is one of the things that Dota does really well for the international. They have the stream and then they have the beginner stream or the noob stream where they will explain all of the stuff that you don't know as if you've never watched the sport before, which is really handy because there's so many heroes. There's so many things going on that you might not know about. You don't know about the item builds. You're not an expert in the game and that's how you have to introduce it to new people because more people are gonna watch than play a lot of times. Like more people watch hockey than play hockey. Yeah, that's true of all. I think you'll have to get there. Yeah. If, last thing before we move on to our pick of the day, if you were to tell somebody who was saying, you know what? I think I wanna try watching some eSports. I wanna get into eSports. Is this TBS thing the best thing to start with? What would you recommend? I'm really excited to see the TBS thing. I hope to do it well. I've heard some hiring. They've hired some really good people and because Counter Strike is so well established in the scene, there's so many good commentators out there. I think it is a good way to get into that and I think Street Fighter the other thing that's relatively simple because you have the two life bars and there's only a couple of things that you would pick up really quickly. Because like, see somebody's fighting Zangief, the big Russian wrestler. It's gonna look like he's losing because he's gonna take damage trying to get in. But once he gets in, you're dead. And I think watching just a simple match of two rounds, you're gonna figure that out pretty quickly and then know what's going on. And same with Counter Strike. The more you watch, the more you're gonna understand. All right, let's get to our pick of the day from Mike Kepper. Suggests an app that he uses to control data usage in conjunction with Project Fi service. He says, I use it to stay under the one gigabyte cap. It's called No Root Firewall. You can set what apps you use Wi-Fi and or data. It's good at forcing apps to only use Wi-Fi and limit your cellular data usage. It works best when you have good Wi-Fi and over the past four months with Project Fi, the most data I've used with No Root Firewall active has been half a gigabyte. The one disadvantage is you cannot use a VPN with No Root Firewall active because it uses a VPN itself for some of its blocking actions. For me, that's no problem as I have access to secure Wi-Fi 99% of the time. No Root Firewall is available free from the Google Play Store. I'm Android only, so I don't know if there's an iOS version. I highly recommend this app though for limiting your data usage on Android. Thank you, Mike, for sending that along. No Root Firewall. Did you worry about data usage on your phone much, Jen? Yes, I have the wonderful Canadian tradition of very low data caps. So I'm very careful about that at home and on my phone. I have some things set to Wi-Fi only or I just disable them if I know I'm gonna be on 3G for a while. I've started, and this is in response to another recommendation that we had a couple of days ago, but I've started to really play around with Opera. Opera has data compression on their browser. They have Opera Max. I always get that wrong, but I think that's right. They can do data compression in general. There's lots of tools for that now, which I think is really good. So keep the picks coming, folks. Send them to us. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Yesterday we were talking about Google search terms and Tim was listening to our conversation, was wondering maybe services like Google Now are affecting the top trending search terms of the year. We were noticing they weren't quite as obviously newsworthy as they were last year. He writes, I find that the more I use Now, the better it gets at guessing what I'm going to be interested in, and I think that affects my searching habits. For instance, I don't ever need to Google for news on the Surface Book or Gear VR as my Now feed keeps me up to date with those products. I think we'll see continued weirdness in trending terms as machine learning suggestions systems become more advanced and these internet giants do more and more to keep us from leaving their platforms. And then Sakane wrote in and said, he thinks social media can be affecting these search terms. Sakane says, if nothing else, the fact that Facebook is the number one overall search term on Google should tell you how much social media Now has an impact on where we get our current events information. I think those are both great points at things that are kind of eating into Google search as being an overall good data point of what we're interested in or representative of what we're interested in. Yep, for me, Twitter has really taken over my news because I've got all these great people that I follow and they're on top of the news before the news gets to the news. I don't even have to look up anything because people are gonna send me like really great well vetted articles about it. I'm a lot less searching now that I've got my curated Twitter feed, but again, that's only things in my bubble because I have picked the people that I'm following. Right, I'm doing a search if I don't know about something because like you, I have people on Twitter that are telling me things all the time. I've got RSS feeds that I'm looking at all the time. I subscribe, I'm using the Facebook notifications app. I think it's just called Notify and I found that, yeah, Notify. I found that to be incredibly helpful at giving me local news and breaking news notifications. So yeah, I'm not out there doing a lot of searches for newsy things anymore. I think that's interesting. And Tad, a proud co-executive producer of the show, said yesterday someone in chat suggested the idea of you being responsible for a self-driving car. If you didn't hear, California has said it's going to propose rules that say if you're in a self-driving car as the person operating it, you are responsible for what it does even if you're not actually in control of the car. And so chat said, well, it's kind of like having a dog. You don't control the dog, but you're responsible as the dog's owner for the dog's actions. Tad wrote in and said, well, what if my dog was designed, engineered, manufactured, marketed and sold to me by a third party with the implication that it would be safe to take out in public without having to worry about it biting someone. Seriously, what's the point of a self-driving car if I have to watch it like a hawk for fear of liability if it does something wrong? Pretty good point, Tad. I mean, there has to be some shared liability there. I still like the idea that the liability rests on the person within the car, but maybe if that person is then found liable, just like right now, if you're driving a car and there's something wrong with the car that causes the problem, you can also have some share in the liability from the manufacturer of the car. Jen, do you have any thoughts on this? I kind of dropped for half of that. Oh, sorry. It's just about self-driving cars and their responsibility is going to be an issue that we have to work out. Tad brings up a good point here. Thank you for writing in, Tad. Appreciate that. And Jen, thank you so much for joining us. This was really fun. Thanks for kind of bringing me up to speed on eSports. That's fantastic. You'll probably hear more from me during Evo and these other majors, because if you follow me on Twitter, yeah, I'm probably gonna flood your feed. You can go to openalpha.tv. You can follow her on Twitter at Jen Cutter. It's two Ns, two Ts. J-E-N-N-C-U-T-T-E-R. Anything else to let folks know about in particular? There's some really cool stuff coming for me personally in 2016 that I can't wait to talk about, but can't yet. Yeah, you don't wanna curse it, right? No, I can't curse it. I've been burned before. I gotta be extra cautious. Well, cool. We'll follow Jen Cutter on Twitter with the two Ns and the two Ts, and then you'll find out as soon as you can talk about it. Thank you again, Jen. It was really fun. My pleasure. And thank you to our patrons, the folks who make the show possible at patreon.com.dtns. There are all kinds of ways to support the show. Patreon gives us an idea of our ongoing budget. People who give us money through PayPal as one-time donations, they can help us with purchasing things that we just need to get once, equipment purchases, and things like that. And of course, we have mugs and t-shirts and things in our store. You can find links to all of that at dailytechnewshow.com slash support. If you get some value out of the show, you're willing to give a little value back, that's the place to go. We had a guy who didn't like that we were making jokes about having problems pronouncing names. I said, I don't think it's intentional. It's just having problems pronouncing names. He's like, well, I'm withdrawing my support then. I'm like, that's right. That is the way it should work. He wasn't getting value out of the show anymore, so he took his value out of the way. That's fine too. If you get value out of the show, and you would like to make up for his lack of support, go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can give us a call, 51259 Daily, 5932459. Catch the show live, Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphankeekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And visit our website, dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. As you have enjoyed this program. He values well-pronounced names, exactly. You know, it's called a pronouncer. I would be more than happy to put it in for any name that exists. I was gonna mention this, but it escalated so quickly. Well, it's, he was saying, I'm tired of the joke. It was, you know, it was like, it was, and I was like, I don't think it's a joke. I think it's just people. Laughing at your own, it's like, look, it we, first of all, we need a title. So I think all I would say about it is, sometimes when people get insecure about whether they're doing something right, their logical inclination is to laugh because they're nervous. So to me, what I saw was realizing you're in the middle of like a moment of insecurity about how to pronounce the name. And as a producer, what I would just say to that is, I'm gonna put pronouncers in from now on, and that will help. So there. Well, and that kind of feedback helps us to get better. And if that person is like, you know what, I just, I'm withdrawing my Patreon support. If you, you know, if that's what's gonna, you know, if that's your response is that I don't think we're doing it on purpose, that's right. That's all I'm saying. I'm not even trying to defend anything. I'm just saying, hey, you know what, if you don't get value out of the show, then you shouldn't support it. But if you do get value out of the show, then you should support it. That's all. What should we call the show? There's a top right now is what's app with the band. What's app, Judge? What's app with that? The next one is what's app, what's app, Judge? All right, password invalid, press backspace 20 times to continue. There's hots, wheels. What's up with what's app? Microsoft's Holo promises what's band through the Holo lens, Facebook hates Canada, and the EU. I added the blame Facebook. May the tech news be with you. Press backspace to hack this Linux system. Hots, car wheels, R-E-N-G sports. Ring sports? R-N-G random number generator, if we random. Random sports, random sports. Gamers cash in on TBS, e-sports and p-sports. e-skills to pay the e-bills. Wait, e-sports and p-sports? I don't know what the p, is the p stand for promotion or pay? Like e-sports and p-sports. Ian is disappointed by the lack of Star Wars themed titles. And I think that's a fair point to make. So, could we all just take a few seconds and pop some Star Wars themed titles in there? Here's my objection to that, if I may. I haven't, yes. I have, my objection to that is, I found myself today. Oh, that's a good point. I'm clicking on things, because they have Star Wars in the title. Ah, fair point. I lost half of my Twitter feed, because they're not coming back on until they've seen the movie. Yeah, I actually went to Tweetdeck and took off the home column. The one that scrolls down with everything from everyone I follow, because I assume everyone I follow will be awesome about it, but just in case, I just took away the live stream. I think we should call the show No Spoilers. Yes. Spoiler-free DTNS. Yeah. P.S., can we talk about how awesome that this hoodie is, that it actually looks like... It looks like a Jedi hoodie. Jedi hoodie? Like it's particularly crafted to have that sort of cool... Monk look. Monk-like hood. I'm in love. I wonder if the Jedi were confused for homeless people by various citizens of the Galactic Republic, because they're so threadbare in their appearance. Or in a monastic order, I guess. They were all aware of the same thing. They can't have personal relationships. They can't have personal relationships. Apparently. You know, the other thing, they all live at the Jedi Temple, or do they just have like a... They're out and about. I mean, do they get their own space RV to live here, I mean? It's like, you always see them traveling, but you never really see them like, oh, this is where I come to... I'm sure donations to the Jedi organization have been strong over the thousand years that they've been guarding the peace and justice... Promoting peace and justice throughout the galaxy. Is it anyone a little concerned that their primary law enforcement establishment runs on donations? Well, I mean, I feel like it's no different than going to a Jesuit school, except you're in a Jedi universe. Yeah, but a Jesuit school isn't maintaining law and order throughout the planet. Well, they're maintaining law and order throughout the school. I mean, you know, maybe. It's not like you don't see one in like, you know, cop off a cruise liner and like, all right, I'm here to solve a civil disturbance somewhere like, you know, in Spain. You don't see that. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. That's what the extended universe is for, okay? Just like, do they yank off the crucifix and that just turns into like a handy-dandy, you know, slight saber or something? Maybe a light saber. Choo-choo-choo! Look, right now I look like the Emperor. No, your face isn't pasty or wrinkly. Oh, it'll get there, don't worry. You have to have like a very prunish appearance. You do look like a bad-robed guy. Yeah. I'm Darth Joseph... That would be a great joke if like some of the... Darth Josephus. Like, okay, so everyone, so does everyone kind of clue in after he became Emperor, that Emperor, it was Emperor Palpatine? No, what? What? Are you going to spoil all those shows? I think he's going to spoil the prequels. Are you going to spoil the prequels? Because I know there are people that listen to this with their kids. I know there are and I can't assume that all children... Right, right, right, right. I mean, yes, I think it's fair game to talk about them. Soylentgrinus people. Well, to be honest, it's just a portion of people. That's true. It's just made up of a majority person. But that's a derived ingredient. I almost found that to be... A lot of filler in Soylentgrin. Well, that's the thing I didn't understand. It's actually a very inefficient way to get food stuffs. Like, wouldn't it be easier just to grow the algae and whatever? Well, that's why I buy artisan Soylentgrin. Artisan. From local sources. From local deceased sources. So I know where it came from. I actually met the people I came from. I'm changing my nick to Emperor Prune Patine. Because that is amazing, Kandagasa. That would be an awesome cross-campaign for prune sellers. They would put a prune and put a row graphic over it. I've seen things of the dark side. The Star Wars marketing has really reached it up to a new level. This is the most blanketed promotional campaign I've ever seen for any property ever. Because it's not only just your standard advertisements or, hey, get a chance to win free tickets. It's like in car ads, like Dodge did one, where they had a black viper lead a row of white chargers behind it, like Darth Vader walking with stormtroopers. They're just driving down the street. They have Campbell Soup Star Wars. They have cereal. They've always done cereal. They have BB-8 Go-Gurts. Go-Gurts. The oranges, come on. I want to see, because it is a Disney, are Dolwhits considered Disney? Because it's the only place I've ever had it. I think my favorite one was the makeup commercial. Oh, yes. The women were wearing Star Wars makeup. Which is just standard. It was just normal, this normal standard line of makeup. But more of it. Yeah, and they just were using the words Star Wars. Like, they didn't even look, I guess they had like shiny metallic outfits on, but they didn't look like anything out of any movie I did. Light Saber Blade. Spaceballs, the flamethrower. The funniest one is... Go ahead. The funniest one I remember seeing is the one for Kraft Mac and Cheese. I guess KD Dinner for you, or Kraft Dinner for you, Jen. And it goes into this guy's room, and his son is with him. It's like, ooh, toys. Like Star Wars, so it's like, don't touch those. It's like, they're not meant for playing. And it's like, ooh, look, boxes of Kraft and macaroni. Can we eat some? It's like, no, they're not for eating. And the kid turns to him and says, toys you can't play with, food you can't eat. This room is a room of lies. Ah, that's the best one ever. Because that's me. Well, there was that whole Saturday night live sketch. That was so good. Take them out of the box and play with them, or don't. The problem is they've probably cranked out so many, their value is a collectible, or it won't be seen for like 50 years. I like my original Boba Fett. I had one of the original Footlongs. I actually don't have an original. Original would have the rocket that came out, that they recalled. Stupid kids, quit chewing your food, or chewing your toys. Quit chewing your food. It's the opposite of what you want. You actually want them to chew their food. Chew the food, but don't chew the toys. Man, you let your wife watch Ellie for one day and you're out giving bad advice to kids. Oh yeah, where's Ellie? I didn't notice. Jen was a little under the weather today, so she's out to stay home. And it's a good opportunity for her to bond with her child. Oh, another one they didn't do. Has anyone done a cross promotion for the Bantha milk? We're making alcoholic Bantha milk at our party tomorrow. No one's done it with yogurt, or one of those yogurt. What's those beverages that give you back all your gut bacteria? Oh, probiotics? Yeah. Probiotic Bantha milk, that would be amazing, actually. And just so people know, Banthas are elephants in disguise. Spoilers, more spoilers. Are you Roger? Roger. I didn't know that. Well, if you read the expand, no, it's just... I just remember what you said. Listen, you cannot be silent about the entire history of Star Wars, because then that's just one giant spoiler for, what, 30 years. Yeah, I know. It's like saying that Ronald Reagan will eventually become president. No, wait, I haven't watched the 84 election yet. Stop. Spoiler alert, from the past. Right next to my Evo. For a mantra, I won't have a baseball team in the future. What? Yeah. People are still wearing exos and Nordic's hats around here. Wow, I love that. Go Expo's. It is. It brought back the jets, it's possible. It's all, yeah, that's true. Well, you know, was it because they couldn't get the attendance for the home games? Is that why they... I know it happened during the big player strike. Montreal wouldn't approve a new stadium, was part of it. I don't know if that was all of it. And that stadium has a long history of corruption and falling on people. So that would not happen. Yeah, literally falling on people. Literally, pieces would fall. I went to the, what's the, is it called the biosphere that's next to the mark? Oh, the one by the F1 track? Yeah. Yeah, the World Expo thing. Yeah, yeah, that's fun with all of the animals and stuff. But we were like, they were offering tours of Olympic Stadium. I'm like, nope, I'm not going in there. I'm good, thanks. Yeah. Oh, Olympic corruption never ends. So Tom, you are to thank and or blame for Matt's current obsession with the Andrew Allen Trio's Star Wars Tales from the Cantina. Oh, good. I'm not happy. He listens to it every night like it's medicine. Andrew is going to be so pleased to hear that. Yeah, we're playing it all throughout the party. That's our party music. Did you guys get to meet Andrew at the particular? No. It was pretty awesome, though. Well, next time you can. I have it playing on my Spotify and my TV through the PlayStation. I have truly arrived. Then you got to get Smooth Federation. Oh, God, oh, what a star trekker. Oh, that'll be great. I can't wait. And Jen, I don't know if you know the Andrew Allen Trio by chance. Not offhand. Well, you should make yourself familiar with them. It's a guy Andrew, it's a jazz musicians doing covers of video game, geeky television games. I might know them, then. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of his first albums that he kickstarted was like thick bit themes. AndrewAllentrio.com. Trying to remember. Because I think I helped back that one. Oh, yeah, it's called Free Play. It was arcade, mostly arcade stuff. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Yeah, I think I know some of this. Very well arranged. Ah, Jenny. Yes. If by humming that, I have now caused this video to be unuploadable, I apologize. No, we're just going to have to pay the mechanical performance fee. Oh, God. We're going to go broke now. I take it back. You can't take it back. You can only move forward. It's too late. That won't really happen, will it? No. OK, I mean, it's Disney, so I got a little worried for a second. The content ID bot doesn't generally find covers, which I am loosely going to call it. You just did a cover. Very loosely. What if we call it parody? We use parody law. Yeah. I think it's very news. Yeah, exactly. We've literally been talking about it the whole time. With YouTube, it's never about the law. It's about what the robot will actually recognize. And then you have to worry about, oh, well, if somebody comes along, even though content ID didn't get it, would they go after you? And yeah, I think it's a fair use. Agree. Right, well, I've done uploaded the show and everything. In fact, it might be downloaded into some people's pod catchers already, so. The show will be with you. Thank you again, Jen Cutter. Thanks for hanging out after the show, too. This is great. I'd love to do it again sometime. Oh, please do. Come back soon. Goodbye, Darth Josephus. Josephus. It's going to be so weird when I see your eyes next time. Hi, I'm right here. I'm right here. Hi. Red, and she's shooting lightning bolts out of her. They're yellow. All right, have a good day, everybody. We'll talk to you tomorrow.