 Ah, just in time as we go live. Ms. Ashley Esqueda arrives. How was it? Hello. Did it sound good? Yeah, you said great. Okay, good. I feel like this webcam setting thing looks absolutely insane right now, so. It looks like you wandered out of the Black Lodge. Yeah, it's weird. Hold on. Let's see. It's okay. It's fine. I don't mind it. It looks crazy is what it looks like. It just looks like your power went out. Oh, there we go. Got a little backlight. No, that's better. My hair looks hot pink. Yeah. That's not the color it is. Is it blonde? It's like, yeah, it's real. This is super weird. Why is it? Yeah, it looks like you have hot pink tips. This is an old camera, my friends. Very old. So it's just shadow. It's just shadow that it's interpreting as pink. That's funny. Well, it's got a little bit of pink in it, but it's like pastel. But it's emphasizing it, yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well, oh, hold on. That might be too much. Guys, I really love, I just got to have it blown out. Are you on fire, Ashley? Are you okay? Yes, it's so hot here. Can I hang up on an incoming voice call? Wait, is that you, Ashley? Yes. Me? What? Are you trying to call an incoming voice call? I don't have an incoming voice call, though. I think you're looking okay if you're okay appearing as if you have more pink in your hair than you actually do. The light balance looks good. I'm scared. All right. Trying to see what it looks like so that I can adjust this. Like I'm green. Don't be afraid. That's getting better. It's starting to look like normal light. Like a normal person? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this is the problem. Is it a Logitech camera? Yes. Yeah. Now it's starting to just look like a camera camera. Like a person. Yeah. Do you are no longer emerging out of the spooky mystical forces? This I can appreciate. All right. You ready to go live? Or we are live. Are you ready to do the show? Yes. Why not? Me make sure I have control. I need to give you control, Roger. There you go. Oh, and Roger. I forgot to tell you this. I'm going to play the tech and travel minute in the show. So if you could put up during while I'm playing the audio, if you could put up Chris's website, which I have the link in the doc. Aha. I see. I see. Got it. Yes, sir. Okay. All right. All right. Hiding. Okay. Now I look like a normal person. Yeah. You look good. Here we go. The Daily Tech News show is brought to you by its global listener base, not outside organizations. To find out how you can contribute, go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is The Daily Tech News for Monday, May 22nd, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt. Happy to be joined by Ashley Esqueda, senior editor at CNET today and woman about the internet. How are you, Ashley? I'm so good. Now that my camera settings are all normal. Yeah. If you, if you didn't see our video version of the show, Ashley has gone from a deep mystical black lodge appearance to normal person appearance. Yeah. Totally normal internet person. Yeah. And today we're going to talk about how normally normal internet people are moderated by Facebook. Yeah. And what I want to get into is, you know, what is the line between Facebook and a publisher and Facebook and a totally open platform like a public square? Because it's neither of those things really. Right. It's a private enterprise. And the thing is, it's like a lot of people, you know, we use these services for free and they feel like such a ubiquitous part of our internet experience that it becomes, well, hey, like, you know, we see this on Twitter a lot, right, Tom? Like your people, you block somebody, oh, free speech. Like, you know, I got blocked for saying this like crazy thing. And we, people tend to sort of associate social media with, you know, just life on the internet. And so it ends up being sort of a question of like, how far should Facebook go? And, you know, there are other countries that are more willing to show more graphic things on the news. And is it U.S. rules? And I mean, it's just a really kind of convoluted crazy thing. We're going to talk about that. We'll let you know why we're talking about that starting right now with a few tech things you should know. The Guardian published what it says are leaked policy guidelines for Facebook moderators describing when to remove posts. That's what's causing all of this discussion today. The Guardian published excerpts from around a hundred manuals it obtained without getting into that conversation yet. It's centered around the things that it allows. It allows certain kinds of abuse to be shown. It allows certain kinds of self harm to be shown and take it out of context. It sounds horrible. Yeah, it sounds bad. You read it and you're just like, you read some of the news stories. You know, of course, everybody has these really sexy headlines. Like, you know, Facebook allows a portion to be shown without nudity. Like that's a, I mean, it's, it's, and it's in there. That's the even crazier thing is they've kind of thought of almost every situation and they have a response for it. And so, yeah, we've seen all these kind of really titillating headlines, but then when you dig a little bit deeper, it's, it's, it's never a clear black or right answer. Right. Yeah. Ford announced it's replacing current CEO Mark Fields with Jim Hackett. He's chairman of Ford Smart Mobility subsidiary that handles autonomous cars. Ford's had a little financial problem lately and that's probably because you haven't driven a Ford enough. So, so moving into autonomous cars is one of the big areas of growth for all of these car companies. Makes sense to have your man in charge of that takeover. Yeah. Let's hope he can hack it. Hey, I'm only sad. I didn't think of it first. Here are some other top stories. This one's big. This one's big for you fans of East Texas Youth Baseball. And I'll explain the connection in a second. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled eight to nothing. Eight to nothing. Imagine that in this day and age, all sides of the political spectrum agreeing 100% that patent infringement suits should only be filed in courts located in the jurisdiction where the targeted company is incorporated. This overturned a ruling last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that said suits could be brought anywhere a company's products are sold. Kraft filed a suit against heartland beverages of Indiana. They filed it in Delaware court and now the Supreme Court says no, you got to file it in Indiana. You got to file it over there where the headquarters is. More than 40% of patent lawsuits in the United States are filed in the Eastern District of Texas. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion here. Eastern District of Texas, well known for, I don't know, companies like Samsung donating baseball equipment and sponsoring fields because they just want the local people who may or may not serve on a jury someday to feel a positive association with their brand. That blows my mind, by the way. What a really thorough investment on companies like Samsung's part. I picked up Samsung because I remember that example, but they are far from the only one. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. I mean, I love that some small area in East Texas is getting all of this crazy influx of community-sponsored cash. Just in case someday their kid grows up to be on a jury where they're going to be a patent lawsuit. Or the mom or the dad. Yeah. And so this puts an end to that because virtually none of the electronics companies that end up in patent legislation are headquartered in the East Texas District. There might be a few in Houston that would qualify, but mostly no. Well, don't they incorporate in specific, I mean, in corporations, we've seen, there are some sort of hot spots for incorporation. You see states that are a lot friendlier to incorporating because this is a Delaware in particular. So maybe now Delaware's kids will get fancy sponsorships from all these companies. And the Delaware court does not have a reputation for being as friendly to patent lawsuits as East Texas. East Texas was considered to always favor the patent holder. Got to crack down on those trolls, man. But Delaware obviously was more friendly than Indiana, or a craft wouldn't have filed in Delaware. So it doesn't end all of this, but it does make it so you can't just pile all of them into one place because you happen to have some judges who are friendly. Sure. Dish is the first television service to make its hardware compatible with Amazon voice services. Customers can now enable the dish TV skill and pair it with their dish hopper DVR. So you can just speak commands like change the channel to Bravo or rewind 30 seconds or whatever. I really love this. You know, I didn't, I didn't realize that I just hadn't thought about it. And that's my own experience. Not, um, no, not having any one in my family with a disability, but I really love that this is sort of also an accessibility play. So anybody who cannot physically use a remote, this is a great option for them. They can talk to Alexa. It's pretty good. Yeah. And they can talk to it without picking up a remote. I mean, some of these commands that they were showing on the, on the dish website, I'm like, oh, I can do that with an Apple TV, but you got to pick up the remote and press the mic button. Right. Yeah. As long as you've got an Amazon Echo nearby, you can just speak to it. And it makes perfect sense. I mean, DVRs, set top boxes, all of this stuff is, is already part of the smart home. So it makes sense to include. Yeah. In there. HP announced several laptop upgrades Monday. The HP Elite X2 is a tablet with a detachable keyboard case. So it's like a surface competitor. Uh, uses the core I processors instead of the core M. Now core M were considered a little underpowered, but, and by the way, there are core M's that have been relabeled core I, but that's not these. These are the real core I processors. The real deal. You get a processing boost. Uh, battery life drops from 10 to eight hours because of that processing boot. Screen resolution has improved 3000 by 2000. Hard drive bumped up to 360 gigabyte solid state drive. Goes on sale next month starting at $999 and 99 cents. That's the Elite X2. They updated a lot of laptops too. The only one other one I'm going to mention here is the Elite 13, uh, got a lot thinner and added another USB C port. So now it has to that one. The Elite 13 starts at $1,050. And you know what? I mean, laptops pretty commoditized at this point, but I see some people pretty excited about this. Yeah. This is, um, I think HP has not been struggling, but I mean, I think that it's, it's hard for them and all of the other third party manufacturers to keep up with now Microsoft, um, and Apple. And so, uh, so them kind of getting into this game with these really interesting designs, which I also appreciate, uh, and also, you know, saying, Hey, we're going to use iProcessors now. You're going to get this bump that you're going to get the real thing, um, great, great plan by them. And price wise, if you're, you know, the Elite 13 is definitely comparable to a MacBook. Super competitive. $1,050 is going to sway a lot of people. Sure. A study in nature titled Mineral Supply for Sustainable Development requires resource governments. Uh, don't, don't go to sleep. This is important. Authored by scientists from South Africa, the US, South America, Europe and Australia indicates the world is in danger of running out of Cobalt and Colton. Colton also, uh, often called tantalite in industrial uses. Colton is needed to make tantalum capacitors. Those capacitors used in just about every piece of electronics that you can get your hands on. Uh, Cobalt is used in a lot of things. It's, uh, used in lithium ion batteries for the cathodes. It improves oxidation in nickel cadmium and nickel metal hydride batteries. More than 60% of the world's supply of Cobalt is mined at the Democratic Republic of Congo. Uh, that country has been accused of using child labor in its mines. Apple is committed to going 100% recyclable for its minerals, although it's not there yet. That, that is their goal. And 100% recyclable may be necessary in order to avoid a shortage on these. These kind of rare earth metals and minerals are often shaved close to the bone, and it's not till we get in crisis situation that we, we kind of figure out how to stabilize the market. Right. And I think with, with companies like Tesla and Apple and, and Microsoft and so, I mean, all of these huge corporations, there's no excuse for them at this point not to have these programs in place because they know that. Like they know, they don't call them common earth metals. They're rare earth metals. Like these are things that are- They're not just laying about everywhere. You know, just like, they're not growing off of trees. It's just like if, if they're not dedicated to finding a renewable version of whatever it is they're mining at this point, if that even exists, you know, they have to find ways to create their products with recyclables. And I think this is something that every major corporation is going to be facing as, you know, as, as we just start using the resources on our planet more and more and more just by proxy of how many people are here and how many people want smartphones and how many people are now connected to the internet. That's, you know, that is the future. It's that mismatch between the cost of reclamation and the cost of mining. And until the rarity gets to the point where the cost starts to look like it's about to go through the roof, the work you have to do to build up the recycling process doesn't seem worth it. Right. The incentive is not there yet. The incentive is not there yet. But when, you know, when people start paying three grand for an iPhone, hopefully before we get to that point, you know, people will be like, hey, guys, like, maybe we should, maybe we should figure this out. Finally, the Lindbergh Foundation has partnered with someone called Nurala, an E-U-R-A-L-A to use machine learning in its system of quadcopters used to catch poachers as part of its air shepherd program in parts of Africa. Nurala's AI does the sifting through the video footage sent from the unmanned aerial vehicles in the field to identify elephant and rhino poachers in real time before the poachers reach the herds so that they can be stopped before they cause any damage. I would like these drones to also be equipped with shootable horse tranquilizers. And then they just go, phew, and they hit them in the neck. Like, I just want precision tranquilizer strikes against poachers. You don't want to hit the elephant or the rhino, though, so you really need precision. You're right. Well, if you have like a really good horse tranquilizer, it's not going to really, it's not going to phase an elephant or rhino. It's not a rhino tranquilizer. No, it's fair point. Rhino tranquilizer literally kills somebody. But I mean, if you have like a really good, like a high-powered human tranquilizer, you shoot it in a little dart, like put it on a drone, I'm sure somebody can make that. Let's weaponize it, but not to kill people, just to knock them out until we pick them up and take them out of circulation and then just like, you know. And then the poachers start figuring out how to shoot the UAVs down. So then you're going to have to have evasive maneuvers built in, but the AI can handle that. I mean, I feel like we can have stealth drones. We have to find out a way to make them quieter because that's really the thing. They're going to hear those things coming from a mile away. I love reading about these kind of alternative uses for AI that's beyond like, not to trash on an earlier story, but changing the channel on my television, right? This is other interesting stuff. Yeah, real world use, not first world problems. These are actually like world issues trying to save species from extinction. Yeah, whole world problems. Whole world problems, exactly. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, you can subscribe to Daily Tech Headlines. It comes as a podcast at DailyTechHeadlines.com. You can get it as an Amazon Echo Flash Briefing or in the Anchor app where you can just flip through all of the headlines as you're listening to them at anchor.fm. Go find them, subscribe in less than five minutes, well, less than six minutes for sure, guaranteed. Every day, you'll be up to date. And that is a look at our top stories. All right, let's get a little more into this Facebook rulebook. Guardian says it saw more than 100 internal training manuals discussing everything. We talked about a lot of this violence, hate speech, terrorism, cannibalism, match fixing. Like, basically, it is a testament to the breadth of human depravity, what it has to deal with in these guides. So you get things like photos of non-sexual physical abuse and bullying of children allowed. They do not have to be deleted or actioned unless there is a sadistic or celebratory element. Facebook is trying not to be the judge of the content while hoping to eliminate posts that are universally condemned. They are trying to walk this line saying violent language is most often not credible until specificity of language gives us a reasonable ground to accept that there is no longer simply an expression of emotion but a transition to a plot or design. They're trying to identify intention in what people are posting so they don't get criticized for cracking down on things and removing things that are part of a healthy debate, but they don't get criticized for leaving things up that are damaging. Monica Bickard, Facebook's head of global policy management, told the Guardian, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it's used. We don't write the news that people read on the platform and that's the line, right Ashley? I mean Facebook is not a publisher. They don't employ you to write. So they can't go out and direct you what to write therefore they can't really be responsible for what you write and so in that sense they're wanting to be an open platform of discussion. But they own the pipes. They own the bandwidth, they own the place and when something goes wrong on the platform people all point to Facebook, not the person who wrote it. And say this is your fault for allowing this. Yeah, so I mean, is it Facebook's content? I saw a source on the Guardian story said Facebook cannot keep control of its content. It has grown too big too quickly. But it's not Facebook's content, is it? I mean, here's the thing, I think it's obviously your content because you're the one who's writing it, you're making it. But you're choosing to give it to that platform. You're not choosing to post it on medium or Twitter or you know, you're choosing Facebook as the platform. And to me like that's like saying, you know, my dinner is mine but where I choose to buy it from like they belong, like if I, that belongs to them. It's their food until they give it to me but it's a little bit backwards like in the sense of Facebook. It's mine until I choose to upload its Facebook. But I think if they own that platform, it's still a private company. And I mean it's, you know, it is a company that is yes, public on the stock market but it's also, it's a private company. It's not a government owned entity. It's not a government social media network. There's not a responsibility there to honor the First Amendment. You know, it's that Facebook gets to decide on their platform what is appropriate and what is not. I mean we've seen in the sense of bots and spreading fake news. Facebook has kind of been really making an effort to crack down on that but we've actually seen an increase in bot usage on Twitter. And so Twitter is choosing for now to not police that. And so I think it really comes down to it is their platform. They can decide what is appropriate and what is not. They absolutely can. The risk they run though is if they are deciding what's appropriate then how are they, then are they responsible when inappropriate behavior is posted? And that's what a lot of people are saying to Facebook right now. You're responsible for this. If something damaging is up there, it's your fault. And it's so big that they can't possibly cover all of that. And I think that that is in a way true. I think it is, what is it to Facebook? Two billion, they're coming up on two billion users at this point. I mean that is almost half of, that's a third of the world. That's our quarter. A quarter of people in the world, one in four people are on Facebook or account-wise on Facebook. And to me, that is unpoliceable. I mean 100%. But you could make that same argument about your local police department. Is it the police department's responsibility if somebody commits a crime in a city? No. I mean, it's that they can't possibly stop all crime. And so it's these transgressions. We can try to stop them as platforms. And these companies are at least making efforts. I mean, that's something that we didn't see for a while. I mean, we were watching murders be posted live and things like that. And that is wholly inappropriate. And hopefully Facebook is finding ways to sort of flag those things much quicker before they make it too live. Go ahead. But it's just, I mean, that's really the question. I mean, if you look at it in the sense of an offline perspective, an analog perspective, your police department is never going to be able to stop all crime. I think one of the keys here too is that Facebook is a walled garden. Sure. Facebook wants it both ways. They want to be considered an open platform. We don't tell people what to write. They just write it to each other. They control how public it is. We say in our terms of service, you own your content. It's not ours. Right. But okay, why is there a difference between how we see Facebook and how we see, say, Squarespace or Wix? Squarespace, Wix, they host websites. Anybody can host a website. So if you have a terrible website, host it by Squarespace. Yeah. If I put up an awful website, Squarespace is not accused of the same things that Facebook is because we all kind of generally understand, well, okay, Squarespace is providing a platform. But once they've provided the platform, everything created on that platform is the responsibility of the person creating the website. Sure. Facebook provides way more restrictions on what you can do. You can't control the look and feel of your page, not nearly to the extent of a website. You can't easily take your things in and out of Facebook. It's not actually an open platform, right? Right. And so they've trained us to think of Facebook as a destination and a place. And so we start to perceive them as the responsible party for it because of that. Sure. I think it's so ubiquitous in the minds of people at this point who are connected to the internet that it almost has a broadcast network television quality to it where it's like there's an added responsibility there where it's just sort of this shared mindset where they say, well, if one in four people is using Facebook, I mean, there's a responsibility there because everybody can see that. And on Squarespace, that is not used by 2 billion people. And that is not a platform in which people can share everything with each other in a newsfeed. I mean, it is its own independent silo if you're thinking about it in terms of websites versus hosting a platform or allowing a platform and also owning a platform and having it all together in this sort of like crazy stew of social media. Well, and if you think about it too, we look at Facebook, it gets compared to a publisher because we look at Facebook, a lot of us anyway, as a place for news, right? I'm going to read the news. Yeah, go to Facebook. A lot of people do that. The difference between that and say turning on the television is that Sony or Zenith or RCA never got accused of the faults of ABC News or CBS News, right? Because they very clearly were not involved. They're like, you turn it on and there's channels. We just bring the channels to you. Again, Facebook has done a lot to say, oh, we're Facebook. We're bringing you all of this stuff because that helped their brand. And now they have to deal with the downside of that perception. Yeah, definitely. And I think that is sort of the hardest part of having a platform like a Facebook or a Twitter is that, of course, these companies want to own all of it. That's the goal, vertical integration. Own as much of it as you can, make it as proprietary as possible because I want to monetize it. And these companies also are now having to face, like you said, the consequences of owning it. And Squarespace gets your money to host whatever you're putting there, but it doesn't accept the responsibility of what you post. It's its own thing. It's its own silo. You are responsible for that. And Facebook's like, no, no, no, that's us. Like, oh, we're Facebook. Aren't you glad you can find all this great stuff on Facebook? Also try not to pay attention to the really terrible stuff that gets through because we're trying really hard on that. We promise. But it's definitely a double-edged sword. I mean, they get to own all of this and they get to say, oh, this is this massive platform that we've created. But massive platforms come with massive problems. Especially when you exercise control over them, right? If you're like, hey, if this was a federated platform, if Facebook said from the beginning, and it's even, it's hard to imagine this, but try. If Facebook said from the beginning, we're Facebook. These are the standards anyone can create their own groups and pages and host them anywhere and they'll interoperate with us and we'll make our money. We'll make as much money, but we'll make our money on being the best place to host it, right? Right. Suddenly, Facebook isn't responsible because it's very clear like, oh yeah, but there's lots of different servers and under lots of control. There could be anything. Yeah. But because they tightly held control of that, they tweak the news feed. They are both website host, search engine, and everything else behind a walled garden. Right. They become perceived as being responsible for everything that happens in there. I think I'd be really curious to see Google's moderation policy for YouTube. That's, I mean, to think about this, the first thing I thought of was I'd love to see how YouTube polices their content creators because again, they own that content. It's theirs, but it is also under the umbrella of Google and Google is responsible for the things it allows on its platform. And if a lot of people do not like, I mean, we saw the drama with the Daddy of Five account where they're now accused of child abuse and CPS is involved and they've taken down all their videos and all this stuff, but it's like, is YouTube responsible or is in some way responsible for allowing that on their platform, for encouraging that on their platform, for allowing them to monetize on their platform? I don't know. I don't know the answers to that question is, but it certainly is a similar issue. Yeah, it is. And I think YouTube gets less flack for that because they are perceived as channels, right? They are perceived more like websites than they are like... Individual silos. Yeah, they are like Facebook. And the thing is I want the internet to work that way. I want the internet to work that the person saying the horrible thing is the person responsible for the horrible thing. And yes, there are certainly times when a website might need to be taken down because it's criminal and that's why we have criminal laws for that. I've seen a few think pieces out there saying, look, Facebook is just trying to reinvent the wheel here. We already have rules about what's allowed and what's not. And yeah, they vary from place to place around the world and that makes it tough, but it's not like they're the first person to ever deal with this. It's just that it's all, they concentrated everything under one roof. Right, yeah. And I, like the laws thing is I find very interesting just because even in the sense of news coverage, you know, the BBC will have much more graphic images on their nightly news cast than anything we would see here in the US. Sure. And there are many countries that are like that that are willing to show its citizens much more graphic content in the way of news because it is newsworthy and we tend to sanitize a lot of what we show people. And I think that it is very interesting that this global internet community is now being kind of forced to conform to just only US sort of, you know, I almost think of it again as like broadcast, like network broadcast appropriateness. Like it's very much sort of like, you know, we have this idea of what is appropriate and what is not. It is, you know, shaped by a lot of people who come from all over the world who work at Facebook, but on that same note, it's here in the US and it's, that is the thing it is shaped by. And so I think that that is also a problem and it's a difficult one to try to solve, but it's one that Facebook should absolutely be thinking about as they create these policies. Yeah, the community standards vary. You know, it's funny you mentioned that about the BBC, Spain's national broadcaster RTVE, I am sometimes shocked with the video that they will show. And then the next video just shows a street scene about a car crash and they've blurred everyone's faces. In a way that we would never bother to do that in the United States, but they're like, oh no, we have to protect everyone's privacy. We could show you disgusting pictures of war and violence, but we can't show you someone's face in a calm street scene. Or like you said, if there was like a car accident, they would show like blurred out faces, but all of the carnage would be shown. It's just such a surreal experience for us, but it's very normal for somebody in Spain to see somebody in another country. And I'm sure they think that the way we handle things is surreal. Right, it's very prudish. Yeah, they might see us as very conservative in the way that we show the news. And I'm not going to argue with that. I sometimes often agree with that, but it's certainly a hot topic of conversation and absolutely one that Facebook is going to have to figure out. And it will keep evolving, obviously. They'll just keep building it out and expanding their surveillance powers. I mean, they hired more people a couple weeks ago. Zuckerberg has said, oh, we're going to hire 3,000 more people to watch for these terrible things online. But that's a tough job, man. And hopefully Facebook is offering those people counseling and just like any police department who works in things like sex trafficking and, you know, SVU, there's a lot of graphic things that law enforcement officials are subjected to that we have policies in place to help them get through those things. They have access to things that, you know, they need like counseling. And I hope that Facebook offers the same to their employees. Well, it's definitely something that is another example of the internet having a category that doesn't nicely fit into our previous categories. And so metaphors just don't hold up. And this is what it looks like when you invent a new system for dealing with something. Yeah. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. A couple of things more before we're out of here. Loyal Patreon Harvey from Mildly Wet and Cold Perth, Australia listened to episode 3034, where we mentioned the rumors about Tim Cook trying out a continuous glucose monitoring technology and thought he would share his five cents. He says as a type one diabetic and a tech fanatic, I'm always excited to hear about new gadgetry. I've been lucky enough to be able to use and afford two different CGM products, continuous glucose monitoring products, currently on the market in Australia. First was the Freestyle Libre from Abbott, which consists of an NFC-enabled glucometer and a disposable sensor. The sensor runs for about $92 Australian, has a subcutaneous cannula, and sits on your arm for about two weeks. You tap the sensor with the glucometer to retrieve your current blood sugar levels and the previous eight hours of readings. The second is the Medtronic 640G insulin pump, good name, a Bluetooth solution that communicates between a similar sensor that sits on your stomach and the pump. This one lasts only six days, but the power source slash Bluetooth module is rechargeable, although the sensor itself is disposable. Biggest advantage here is that it is constant communication with the pump and is capable of shutting off the insulin supply should your levels drop too low. The consumables cost about $3,000 a year on a subscription service. It is certainly a massive improvement over constant fingerprint tests which only give you instantaneous data or as CGM solutions show you the trends giving you access to vast amounts of data. Biggest problem I see are accessibility and bureaucracy. At current prices, not everybody can access them, and with all medical technology, it takes years to reach market. I'm very interested to see if Apple does and if so, how they attack this space. Such an interesting story. I was most curious how any major tech company is going to really get into biotech and obviously that's going to be a thing that they're going to be moving more and more into as we move forward. Yeah, there's so many, especially here in the US, FDA, so many regulations, so much testing that needs to be done. It could be 10 years before we see something like that come to market. Absolutely. Let's take a moment now and check in with Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler podcast with his Tech in Travel Minute. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. I've been traveling domestically for the last couple weeks in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia and one of the things I like to do when I'm traveling domestically is go to national parks and I usually use the national park passport and the national park passport, the normal one is one that you can get and you can put stamps in, you can find them at every visitor center in the national park system, national parks, national monuments, national historic sites, those sort of things. And one of the reasons that I like that is that it leads me to national parks that I wouldn't have known about. So for instance, we first got ours in Haleakala on Maui and when we went to the Big Island we went to Volcanoes National Park which we would have known about and gone to already, such as the best named national park and the national park system which is Poo-oo-oh-oh-oh now now or something like that. In the tech part of this story you can now also get the national park passport as an app that you can load on your phone. You won't be able to stamp it in the same way and get that satisfaction but you can still check off parks that you've gone to and find about different national parks that you may not know about. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. I'll try to stamp your phone if you use that app. That's really cool. I didn't know they had an app now. I've always noticed the passports. I've never actually used them myself but I've probably been more likely to use them now. Yeah, that's cool. Ashley, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find more of what you've got going on? Oh, I'm over on CNET.com. I just posted my review of Pirates of the Caribbean 5 Dead Men Tell No Tales which I actually really liked. It's been very mixed that I've seen online. As soon as the embargo drops, I always like to go check what everyone else said to see if I feel right. It's been very mixed. Some critics say, oh, this is more of the same. I didn't like the last one, The On Stranger Tides with Penelope Cruz and The Mermaid. I didn't care for that. But this one I really liked and I thought it was nice to see some familiar faces again. Orlando Bloom comes back and Kira Knightley and the new kids are great and it's sort of a, I don't know, it's a soft reboot. It's going to do gangbusters at the box office this weekend, but I really enjoyed it. So that was the most recent thing that I've done. All right, check that out. Twitter.com, of course, follow you on Twitter. I'm sorry, check it out at CNET.com. Follow you on Twitter at Twitter.com. Ashley Esqueda, that's A-S-H-L-E-Y-E-S-Q-U-E-D-A. We'll have a look at the show notes as well. Thank you again, Ashley. Thanks. Oh, can I plug one more thing? Yeah, of course. I host Alpha Comic Book Club on Nerdist every Monday night. It's live on their Alpha service, which is subscription, and it goes live at 6.15. And it's a book club, but for comic books. And so we're reading a bitch planet this week. It's going to be really great. Lots of strong feminine characters in prison. And then there's like kind of a hunger games thing going on. It's really cool and we really like it. And we talk about all kinds of comics. So come stop by if you're on Alpha. Hey folks, if you ever wondered what we talk about before the show begins, sometimes it's news, sometimes it's theme parks, sometimes it's food, sometimes it's more about the topic we're about to talk about. Patrons get an exclusive RSS feed that they can add to their favorite podcasting app to get the exclusive pre-show, plus the regular show and the post show. Just support us at any amount at patreon.com. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. Our website is dailytechnewshow.com and we're back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ah, fantastic show, Ashley. Thanks so much. That was fun. That was great. Good conversation about this. Yeah, yeah. Good topic today. It's such an interesting dilemma. I mean, it's because, like you said, it's just a totally new thing and this is, you know, Facebook's really the only company with the volume. That was the best point, yeah, that you made about like 25% of the world just using this thing every month. It's just such a beast and that's sort of the big thing is it's just like how do you keep tabs and 3,000 people versus 3,000 extra people versus 2 billion. Yeah, and growing. It does not seem to be slowing down, too. Exactly. And now that we're seeing more and more people in emerging markets start to connect to Facebook with the light sort of Facebook experience, was that, I forget what it's called, that sort of lightweight Facebook experience? Free basics. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're going to see more and more and more and more people joining Facebook just because it is so massive at this point that you almost have to be on it if you want to be connected to the internet. The only place that it really doesn't look like it can penetrate right now is China, but never say never. But I mean, who knows? Yeah, it's like, I mean, for now, it's completely possible that China might work with Facebook to create a Chinese government-appropriate version of Facebook. I mean, there are a million ways Facebook could potentially go, you know, get into that market. What do we got for titles, Roger? All right, can you hear me? Yep. Cool, we got sensor book. East Texas, no lawsuits for you. That's a big story too, yeah. You haven't driven a Ford lately. Facebook rule book. Alexa's new dish recipe, don't go to sleep. This is important. Drones poaching the poachers. Facebook equals Uber for publishing. Facebook is Jurassic Park. Fake stews. Fake stews. Facebook likes faces, but Naughty Bits not so much. They should have an adult version. Well, there are other companies that do that. Ass book. Yeah. Oh, no, but you would have like, like you would have a red light district. It's like a red tube. Yeah. Well, yeah, kind of except that the whole page turns as like red fonts and red colors. It's a nice little, like your screen just like turns a little bit blush colored and you're like, oh, I'm heading into a red light district, guys. Turn around. Turn around. Yeah. Um, actually, Alexa flexes its TV muscles. Amazon talks to dish. Cutlery gets jealous. Don't hit the Rhino Facebook. Two billion strong and growing from the Flintstones, vitamin commercial. Two million strong and growing. Rare not common rare. Earth metals do not grow in trees. This conception. They're actually not as rare as you think. The problem is they don't, they're not naturally in or deposits where you can just mine. Right. More hard to get at. Yeah. Well, you would need to pile in a bunch of rock and sand and get like less than 2% anything worthwhile. But they still aren't laying about everywhere. Yeah. They're laying about just in trace amounts. All right. Facebook is Jurassic Park. Sensor book. I don't know. Ashley, do you have a favorite? I like that you haven't driven a Ford lately, but that's pretty funny. But, um, I don't know. Uh, that's a tough one. I mean, Sensor book is the top vote getter right now. And I'm okay. I was going to say Sensor book was a good, that was a good one. I mean, I guess Sensor book is it. Right. That's it. That is kind of what we're talking about. Yeah. That's the line. They're walking. Yeah. Indeed. Yes. Indeed. All right. Yeah. I started doing that nerdy show like five weeks ago. Oh, cool. How's it going? It's really fun. Um, I, I'm sort of the, I'm definitely the baby comic book reader, like the two guys who do the show, one of them's been reading comic books since he was a kid. And the other guy is, um, he's an actor who, uh, his, he's a legacy comic book reader. So his dad passed down like his comic books to him. So he's also been around comics his whole life. Um, but it's been really fun because they get excited about hearing my perspective as a totally fresh pair of eyes. And so we have a lot of really, uh, really good conversations about, you know, what goes on in the comics and all that stuff. I, here's my problem with doing book clubs. I'm curious if you, if you're seeing this, I, I've lost the ability to choose what I want to read most of the time. So we do a vote every week. Uh, the three of us pick out three books and we each pick out one book and then Nerdist posts a poll and says, uh, you know, here you go. And so we tend to pull from that, um, as opposed to it being sort of, uh, a little democracy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little easier with graphic novels too. Yeah. It's absolutely easier. It's much faster. Not as much of a time sink. It's not as much of a time sink. You're not reading a book a week because there's also alpha book club and they're reading, you know, Thrawn and then they go over it over the course of like a few episodes. Um, but, but I like this because it's like, first of all, I mean, it's so visual and so much fun to be able to read these comic books and, and sort of meet these new artists and, and these writers and it's, it's great. Like I get to, this is a whole new kind of world for me. And it's like the one last bastion of geekdom I haven't really deeply explored. Yeah. And so this has been really fun for me, um, to, to kind of check things out. I really, I'm enjoying it a lot. And like I said, the graphic novel sort of aspect of it makes it, um, much easier A for people to keep up. Um, and they can join in any particular week. Like they don't have to, you know, Oh, I didn't read Thrawn. So I got to wait a month. Like they can, they can jump in any week. They see something that they're even remotely interested in and they can skip out any week that they're like, well, I don't want to read that. I, right now, comic book wise, I'm reading Walking Dead still. Uh, and all the, all the Star Wars comics, I can get my hands on, but we just did Star Wars volume one and I loved it so much. So good. Is that the old, is that the one based on the, the new hope or is that the more recent? This is the one Marvel started doing. That's right. The Dark Horse stuff. Yeah, they picked up. And then, so this is all canon, but it's, and it's like between Luke blowing up the Death Star and Empire Strikes Back. So it's between a new hope and Empire. And it really kind of flushes out the, the friendship between Han and Leia and Luke. And it's, it's really good. I, I always liked the Dark Horse stuff because they always managed it. And this is the thing back in the 80s and 90s, late 70s when these movies like Predator, Alien, Star Wars and much others came out, Dark Horse managed to get a lot of the rights for the comic licenses for them. And so what they did in the same way that a lot of the novel writers, they managed to expand the universe. It was really cool because they explained a lot of how where the Sith came from, how the Jedi Order came about what, what happened between then, like the initial founding and what happened to the, you know, before the New Republic was founded. So it was really cool because it was really deep. And then, yeah, with all this new stuff, it's going to be interesting because I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff with, with the upcoming movies that will not jive. Right. Well, they wiped out. I mean, anything. The expanding universe is pretty much gone. Yeah. The EU is kind of wiped out. Except for, I mean, they've brought back elements of it and really good elements of it. I mean, they brought back Thrawn for Star Wars Rebels. And that was really an idea. And he's great in that. And got Timothy's on to write the new Cannon Thrawn novel, which was good. Which was a great pull. And I do think that they will revisit the Old Republic at some point, which I'd really like to see. I'd love to see, you know, that, that timeframe and maybe they'll do a trilogy in the Old Republic, a movie trilogy in the Old Republic, which I would totally dig. I really want, I have two, I have two wishes on my wishlist for Disney Star Wars movies. I'd really like a Godfather-esque hut crime family movie. Just super dramatic. Like, I just think that would be great. And then I also would really like the Coen brothers to write and direct a Western Kenobi movie set on Tatooine in between episodes three and four. I can't remember. Is that in the first, is that in the run that you just read where, where you get a little bit of Kenobi's journal? Right at the end. He gets Kenobi's journal and that's like the thing that, you know, sort of sets his journey into motion in that, this new like comic book. Right. Cause the other, I don't think she's in the run that you read, but Dr. Afra is a character that they've created in these comics. Somebody mentioned that to me during the show and they were just raving about how good she, she is. Like one of my favorite Star Wars characters now. Yeah. And I also love, I mean, Sana Solo, it's like, that's amazing. Like that's, that's really cool. And I'm dying to see how that plays out. And I loved it. Bounty Hunter. Like I just, that's really, it's great. Yeah. She sticks around too. So you'll find out more about her. Yeah. I like to think that, cause somebody was like, Oh, well it doesn't give her any runway. Like we know she will probably bite the dust at some point. I'm like, I like to think that she just, she's left him. She's filed for divorce, took off, married a nice bounty hunter. They're just having adventures. And then, and then it became Saga. Like that's, she now lives in the Saga universe, hunting down Hazel. That's, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I'm not, I don't want to comment because I know where someone's going. You know the, you know the story. And I think you'll like where it's going. That's all. I'm really excited to read it. And I, I'm, I'm just really glad. They nailed the cadence of Harrison, Kerry and, and Mark. They're, the way that they're written in those books, like you can hear them talking. And it's just so, they wrote to them as opposed to writing, you know, a comic book. And then plugging in, oh, that can be the Han character. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And they were just like, no, no, we are going to make these very, very iconic in the way that they're written. And they did a really good job of that. And they've got the Leia series and the Han Solo series. I'm really dying to read Vader. That's why I've heard so many people just rave about Vader. Really good. I'm excited. That's where you meet Dr. Afra. Ah, okay. Well, then I'll put that, that'll be, I'll move, I'll bump that up on my list. I think this week we're voting on, let's see, Ms. Marvel, volume one, Batgirl, Batgirl of Burnside, volume one, and Lazarus, which is another, another deep cuts pull. Yeah. I have not read Lazarus, but yes, obviously everyone talks about it. So. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't read it either. I haven't read, and I've read Batgirl, but I haven't read the other two. So I'm really excited to check out Ms. Marvel as well. All right. Shows published. Thanks everybody for watching. We're going to head out of here now, and we will see you tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Bye, friends. Goodbye. Bye.