 Oh, hi there. Just me today. It's the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday here in the United States of America. So I'll just be reading you some headlines to make sure you're up to date until tomorrow. We'll be back with Patrick Mezia and a full show tomorrow. So here we go. This is a public DTS announcement. A message in English will follow. Welcome to the show with daily technological news with Tom Merritt and guests. My name is Carl, and I'm one of several executive co-producers and also one of Tom's bosses. You can also get through to getting $1 or more in the month on Patreon.com. Let's start off with some headlines. At the DLD conference in Munich, WhatsApp CEO Jan Kuhn announced the app will drop its 99-cent annual subscription fee. A lot of people don't realize there is a 99-cent annual subscription fee. Maybe that's part of the reason they're dropping it. You usually get the first year of WhatsApp free. WhatsApp plans to test business-to-consumer communications as a source of revenue. Now, if you think that's a clever name for advertising, Kuhn hastened to say the platform will not turn to advertising for revenue. He named Bank of America and American Airlines as the kind of businesses that would test communication tools. WhatsApp is also adding encryption gradually with the goal of having end-to-end encryption for everything on the network. It's an interesting play because Facebook Messenger, a sister company to WhatsApp, in other words, Facebook owns WhatsApp, is also trying to do business communication with bots and things like that on the M Assistant platform. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of communications they can get companies to pay for, what kind of communications they offer to people, and whether that can actually make them enough money to justify their valuation. Although once they were bought by Facebook, they had a nice little cash cow that could support them in experiments like this. Reuters reports Malware, similar to that used in an attack on Ukrainian power companies back in December, was found on a computer in the IT network at Kyiv's Borisovil Airport in the Ukraine. The network includes air traffic control disturbingly. However, the malware was detected early and no damage was done. Ukraine's state-run computer emergency response team issued a warning Monday recommending all CIS admins check log files and traffic because of the increased instance of these kind of critical infrastructure attacks. Microsoft announced Friday that after July 17, 2017, it will reduce support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on machines running Intel Skylake processors, that's the sixth generation, to only the most critical security patches. For non-Skylake machines, full patches will continue for Windows 7 until January 14, 2020 and 8.1 until January 10, 2023. But if you're on Skylake, they want you to upgrade to Windows 10 before July 17, 2017. Also, Intel's forthcoming Kaby Lake and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 and AMD's Bristol Ridge will only be supported on Windows 10. They will not even offer support for Windows 7 running on them. It doesn't mean you can't run them on those processors. You can install them and run them. They just won't be supported by Microsoft. No word yet on whether the policy will also apply to servers. It'll be interesting to see the outcry if they let servers get by running older versions of Windows on these processors. But I imagine there'll be some kind of parallel system here. A couple of things going on. Microsoft says that they're doing this because of the complications around updating, especially Windows 7, which is more than 10 years old, to the systems on a chip that have been developed over the years. And there may be something to that. But there is also undeniably a benefit of moving people to Windows 10 that Microsoft has stated as a very big goal that will happen if you can encourage even enterprises that have upgraded to Skylake processors to get over to Windows 10. In fact, enterprises that are looking at buying new machines coming out at the latter half of the year and have these KB lakes, Snapdragon, Bristol Ridge processors would be forced to install Windows 10 on those as well. So it's definitely part of Microsoft's strategy of encouraging Windows 10 upgrades and likely to cause even more consternation and accusations of unfair practices. But Microsoft is holding the line firm on this kind of support. Wall Street Journal notes that Qualcomm and the Chinese province of Qixiu announced a joint venture semiconductor company at a ceremony in Beijing on Sunday. The province will own 55% of the venture. Qualcomm will hold 45%. They'll each invest an appropriately proportioned amount of money in there. Qualcomm will also license server chip technology and provide research development process to the joint venture. Qualcomm facing not as big of an issue as Intel, but a similar issue in that they are stuck in the smart chip box right now. I'm sorry, the smart phone box for selling their chips right now, and they'd like to diversify out into servers. They've gotten some uptake in that, but this will further that case by doing a joint venture. It also serves China's interests in making sure that semiconductor technology continues to grow strong in that economy, which is, as you may have heard, having some issues on the consumer side. And so they would like to underpin it with some good high quality server side, but enterprise side development here. So good for China and good for Qualcomm in this case. Pakistan said on Monday it has removed a ban on YouTube after Google launched a localized homepage for the site. The new site allows the government to ask for offending material to be removed or blocked from that page. Pakistan was banned, I'm sorry, Pakistan banned YouTube access in September 2012 over an anti-Islam film. JSN Phil on our subreddit noted the CSO story of a presentation to Chmucon Saturday by the CTO of Presidio, his name's Sean Cassidy, that is his name, do not make any did-do-run-run jokes. The presentation outlined a phishing attack against LastPass that mimicked the design of authentication dialogue boxes that show up in your browser in order to capture a master password. It's pretty easy to do this stuff and LastPass doesn't do enough mitigation to alert you that maybe that's not a real dialogue box. If you're used to seeing LastPass boxes jump up and they're designed right, you might not pay attention to where it's coming from. The attack would leverage compromised websites or cross-site scripting to achieve the attack. So there has to be some malicious links clicked or loaded in the browser or maybe some cross-site scripting into a trusted website. It could even capture and relay two-factor authentication codes which wouldn't allow it to log in again later but would allow the attacker to make herself the emergency contact or make the attacker's server a trusted device thereby providing ongoing access as well as being able to download all the passwords that are stored in LastPass. So this is a pretty serious vulnerability that with some careful procedures on your part you can avoid, which is why LastPass said, OK, we're confirming there's not a vulnerability in our software, this is a phishing vulnerability. Cassidy says, yeah, but it's still a vulnerability because there are things you can do to make it harder for this sort of thing to happen. LastPass has upgraded their software so that a third party can't log you out of LastPass, which was part of the phishing attack, but that doesn't stop all of it and Cassidy has even shown how one of the things they changed could be leveraged into a different kind of phishing attack. So it's definitely putting some pressure on LastPass to tighten down their bolts to prevent people who aren't paying close attention from getting phished. Philip Shane passed along the Ars Technica article that Apple announced Friday. It will shut down its Pandora-like iTunes radio service starting January 28th. That was a service where you could just put in a song and then start listening to a radio station created by that song. It was very beneficial to iTunes in the days when it made all its money selling you tracks. But now that it also sells you a subscription, they would like you to pay for that subscription. So Apple Music subscribers will continue to be able to create stations with the feature, but non-subscribers will only have access to the Beats 1 radio with Zane Lowe and friends always on worldwide. But you can't tell what to play. You have to listen to what they play. And if you want to do the Pandora-like feature, you've got to pay for Apple Music, which is $10 a month. Thank you to everyone who submits stories at our subreddit, especially on a day like today. It helps us round out the show. So please get in there and vote. Help us out at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We appreciate all of your efforts there. You guys are the best, especially the mods. All right. Hey, couple of emails before I'm out of here. Pick of the day from Amy sent to us over the weekend. She wants to recommend Firefox on Android. Amy says it allows a user to install add-ons for gestures, script blocking, and the like. But my favorite feature at the moment is Open Later. I can queue a bunch of links from Google Now, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. Queuing the links put a notification in the notification shade to indicate how many links are queued. And when I'm ready, I can head over to Firefox for a binge reading session. This is really good for news gathering, too. Amy says I find it really saves time when I don't have to jump between apps to read articles. From Snowy and delightful Kansas City, have a splendid week. Thank you, Amy. I didn't realize they did the queuing thing on Firefox for Android. I'm going to try that out. That is a very interesting feature, and you can try it out, too. Send your picks to us, folks. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com. Few emails before I'm done. Just catching up with last week's shows and was listening to Tom and Patrick wax on about tech in the 1980s. I love looking back on those times. I grew up myself in New York during the 70s and 80s and was an active BBSer, says Levi. For any other old fogies out there like us, I'd highly recommend checking out Halt & Catch Fire, which was just renewed for a third season. The first two seasons take place in Texas Silicon Prairie, Dallas and Austin, during the early days of the PC and move into the online world of BBSes in season two. It's very technically and technologically astute. I feel like I'm watching Mad Men for the PC world. Great performances and writing as well. Strong female league. What's not to like, says Levi. Thank you, Levi. Good recommendation. I watched the first season, most of the first season of Halt & Catch Fire, and I enjoyed it. Too much television out there, so I haven't gotten back. But you may have encouraged me to go back and start into the BBS season. So check that out. Halt & Catch Fire, it's an AMC show. So if you get AMC, for instance, on Sling TV, you can watch it there. Or you might be able to purchase some seasons on Voodoo or iTunes, places like that. An undercover boss writing from an undisclosed location wrote in and said, TLDR, neglecting your core audience is a great way to hurt your business. Just wanted to write in and back up Peter Wells about his comment about how a core audience can make or break a community. Remember the law cats? This is why this person is undisclosed. The person says, I was part of the rise and subsequent fall of the Cheeseburger Network, formerly just ICANN has Cheeseburger. Once the company got funding, the focus shifted away from the core audience. People who enjoy cute animal pictures or humorous fails and towards growing new users by constantly chasing whatever was hot for the moment. As Peter mentioned, the majority of the content came from a small number of users and as those users were driven away by the neglect, the content began to suffer until it had done irreparable harm. To see what irreparable harm looks like, expand this chart out to the beginning of 2010. He's got a Quantcast chart showing some traffic numbers. But yeah, backing it up, you got to pay attention. And I think that is what happens to a lot of these companies like Foursquare. The opposite example to this is something like Anchor Desk, the Anchor Desk newsletter that ZDNet ran for years and years and years could not shed subscribers. People just kept subscribing, even though Jesse Burst had long moved away and other hosts moved away and they kept changing hosts. So there is a core, there's the phenomenon of a core audience that won't go away. And then there's the phenomenon of the core audience that can just disappear and undermine your entire product. But you've got to pay attention to that audience and appreciate that audience if you want to make a really good product. Joseph from Greenville, South Carolina writes, data caps are like a gym charging you for lifting more weights or for more reps just because they can. You pay for a gym membership and that comes with the understanding and expectation you'll be able to achieve your goals using the equipment that belongs to the gym. But imagine that they say that if you want to increase how much you lift or you want to work out in a specific area longer, that you would have to pay a premium. Ludacris, it's the same with the networks. There is a small amount of maintenance, but nothing that justifies the caps and premiums they claim. It's just a blatant attempt to wring out every last penny from their lockdown and optionless customers. Another way of putting it is that data caps, especially in mobile, are a way to maximize profits for shareholder value. But either way you look at it, they're not about congestion management in most cases. They can be. I've seen experts say, well, there is more of an effect on congestion management to have data caps on mobile networks because of the way capacity management works. But even then, it's not the best way to manage capacity. And certainly for landlines, it has never been proven to be a very effective way of managing congestion because the congestion comes all at one point. So it will have a broad effect of maybe lowering usage, but not at the time you need it. If everybody's saving up all of their bits to watch at 9 p.m. and that's where your congestion comes, the bandwidth caps really aren't doing anything for that. But they are a profit mechanism and perfectly acceptable if you admit that as like, well, the reason we have bandwidth caps is we want to make more money off of you. But yeah, as I agree with Joseph, it does come down to competition. If you have several people with different offerings that you can choose from and find the one that fits best for you, maybe two or three of them can thrive and provide the options people need. But if you're in a choice limited situation, they can abuse those bandwidth limits. That said, I think people sometimes overreact to bandwidth limits because they tend to stay just on the edge of acceptability. They rarely put bandwidth caps that will keep you from getting the most out of your internet because even if there's no competition, public outcry starts to become a problem and people complaining loudly has become a problem and they don't want that. You don't want to make that your only way of getting what you need from a company either. So competition is a better way of doing it, obviously. But yeah, it's an interesting metaphor that Joseph gives about the gym membership. It's an all you can eat membership, right? And exercise as much as you want. Does that mean you're using up the gym? Well, yeah, I mean, there's wear and tear, right? It's the same sort of argument. So I like this metaphor. I'm sure people will find holes in it. Metaphors are never perfect. But thank you for emailing to us and thank you guys for supporting the show. The reason that I pull myself out on holidays like this and do the headlines partly is because I love doing this. I'm not going to lie to you. I just really enjoy looking at the tech news every day and figuring out what the stories of the day are. Especially because so many of you have found the value in the show and are willing to give that value back. I feel like it's only fair to keep it up. So help us get to the next level so we can provide even another day. Peter Wells mentioned earlier in that email is willing to do it. If you're willing to hire him, go to dailytechnewshow.com. Support to find out all the ways to support the show. And if you want to get us to day six of DTNS hosted by Peter Wells, go to patreon.com. DTNS and just support us at whatever level you can. Whether that's five cents a show, 25 cents a show, whatever it is, every little bit helps. Also, we get great contributions from our audience. Bonus material like Rich from Lovely Cleveland putting together a Best of the Post show, which I put in the treasure chest. If you're a patron and you didn't see it, check out on patreon.com or in the treasure chest. You just need to be backing us at the 25 cents a show level. That's $5 a month and you get access to that Dropbox or we have it on BitTorrent Sync as well. Thank you to Rich from Lovely Cleveland, by the way, for doing that. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can give us a call 51259 daily. It's 5125932459. Normally catch the show live this week Tuesday through Friday. Normally Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And visit our website dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. It's fun to do that. I know you don't get much of a post show now, but I enjoy sometimes just focusing on the news, getting it out to you. So thanks everybody. And we will see you with a full show tomorrow. Goodbye.