 We're going to talk about the election today, but don't worry, we're not going to tell you who to vote for. We're not going to recommend a candidate. We're not going to weigh in on Proposition 61. I think we are. I think I'm going to recommend everyone vote for Snuffleupagus. Is that how you say it? Way to get political, Patrick. Well, I know you're a fan of the kooky monster. He's kooky, all right. Actually, Eileen is a huge Cookie Monster fan. She's one of her biggest favorite things that she got in South Korea was this Korean beauty product that came with like a cookie monster stuffed animal with it. Well, don't get me wrong. I get the appeal of Cookie Monster. His message is simple. He's relatable. You want Cookie? Yeah. I'm with Cookie. Me want Cookie in 2016. It's okay. He'll get it in 2020. Yeah. Maybe that's who I'll vote for. Cookie Monster. Yeah, so anybody watching the video. This is a particularly interesting test today for the video folks because I have prerecorded an interview with Dan Wallach, professor at Rice University about voting technology, polling places, registration systems, precinct counting, all of that sort of thing. We're going to play that in the show. And so he won't be here and we don't have captured video of him. It's just audio. This, if we can do it more often, will allow us to get more people on the show, people who just can't be around at 1.30 p.m. Pacific, usually. But we want to see what you guys think of it. So even if you're on the snuffle up a side, the Cookie Monster side, whatever side of the political spectrum you are, brown or blue. Let us know what you think. And meanwhile, we also are going to talk about all the top stories of the day, which man, lots of announcements. It's very announcey today. And then tomorrow it's going to be even more announcey because of Microsoft announcement, which we're kind of previewing today. I didn't see that additional rumor for Apple. Oh, up there in the right before the top stories. It's not a rumor. It's an actual image that they found in Mac OS Sierra. Where is it? Click on the second link, the TechCrunch link. TechCrunch. Because I'm like you, I'm waiting for the. The laptops. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, there you go. You ready? I was born ready. Of course you were. Silly of me even to ask. I know. Here we go. Quality content thrives for the support of those who benefit from its creation. If you gain value from the Daily Tech News Show, consider joining others like me who provide support. Learn how to help at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 25th, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt alongside Patrick Beja coming to us live from Finland. The land of the Finns. And of the eternal darkness. It's been, you know, my wife had been a warning me about the period of around November. And she hasn't lied. She calls it Mordor. That's a Quenya name, I believe. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. So it's starting. It's getting there, huh? The official winter here at this point. No, but it's already the dome of gray. It has covered the country for a few, a couple of weeks. And it's trying. I'm going to try and be cheery as I usually am on the show. But if I get down all of a sudden for no reason, it won't be because of you or the topics. It will be because of Finland. We're going to brighten your soul with some Microsoft news, with some Apple news. And with Dan Wallach from Rice University explaining how elections can in fact be hacked news. I don't know if that one will brighten your soul. Google announced a 55 inch 4k digital whiteboard called the Jamboard, which Parks and Rec fans will find especially hilarious. It lets people collaborate remotely. It'll be just $6,000 coming in the first half of 2017 for G Suite customers. And a picture. This is not a rumor. An actual picture found in the Mac OS Sierra 12.1 update shows a MacBook Pro with a mini display above the keyboard and a touch ID. Is it real or is it just a picture? I guess we'll find out Thursday at the Apple announcement. Now here are some more top stories. Xiaomi had a bunch of announcements. Two new phones and a VR headset on Tuesday. The 6.4 inch Mi Mix is getting all the pundit love. It has an almost bezel free front, Patrick. No bezel. It makes my hipster heart flutter. But it's cool. It's actually something we've been waiting for. 91.4% screen. It uses ultrasound for its proximity sensor. A piezoelectric speaker that uses the metal frame for sound. So it gets rid of those. It moves the camera to the bottom of the front face. And that's the part where you gotta have a little bezel. Has the same Snapdragon 821 chip that's in the Google Pixel. And it goes on sale November 4th in China. Starting at 3,499 yuan. Which is about 516 bucks US. Xiaomi also announced the 5.7 inch Note 2. The Mi Note 2. Yes it's called a note. And it's the same size as the note. And it has a curved screen like the note. And it's coming November 1st in China in silver or black. Starting at 2,799 yuan. That's 413 US. Xiaomi also announced the MIUI VR store for VR apps. And a new. It's second VR headset. The Mi VR headset for use with its newest phones. Has a motion sensor. 16 millisecond latency and nine axis motion controller. And cost you the equivalent of 29 bucks US. Don't forget MI is spelled MI. If you're searching for these on Google. You know the bezel less phone is pretty impressive. You joked a little bit at the beginning. No bezel. It is a way to, we always want our phones to be smaller. Right. And you still want the screen to be bigger. You mean thinner not smaller. Because obviously people like big screens. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Well that's the thing. You know the depth of the thing in your hand. This is actually bringing, well it's a small bezel. It's cool Tom. Stop being a buzzkill. It's cool. Is it small batch bezel less phone art? I just, I don't know. It looks really cool. I'm not going to deny that. It really does. And a lot of people are maybe overreacting by like saying Xiaomi has trumped the or Clinton to the phone. The next iPhone because it's got the bezel less and it's got the camera and the piezoelectric like everyone's like this is what was going to be in the next iPhone. Xiaomi scooped them. I don't know how true that is. Well, and if it is it's okay because Apple will invent it at the next September. It's not like it's not like pre-existing features have ever stopped Apple from being proud of that. Exactly. Google has confirmed it has acquired virtual reality startup. Eye fluence that lets you use your eyes as a tracking device like a mouse. Eye fluence not only tracks what you're looking at, but also tries to determine if you're interested or bored by what you see. It also aids in what is called the foveated rendering which renders scene selectively based on where you're looking. That's just really cool technology. Yeah, they do foveated rendering in the PlayStation VR and that's something that a lot of enthusiasts are very excited about because it allows you to get a higher resolution picture out of older equipment out of less fancy equipment because it only has to render a part the part that you can actually look at and stuff in your peripheral vision, which is blurry anyway, just isn't rendered as good, but you need really good eye tracking. And some people have complained that even in the PlayStation VR, you can tell it's rendering still when you move your eye. It's just not quite fast enough. So of course Google would like to have this in their day dream VR and have somebody who knows how to do it really well. It's interesting. I didn't realize it did it. It tracked your eye in the PlayStation VR. Does it actually track your eye? That's impressive. I didn't realize, but I did notice that it does render better where you're looking. I thought it was just rendering less well on the corners of the screen, on the sides of the screen. But yeah, this is really cool. And also being able to determine if you're bored or interested by what you see, Google having that kind of technology would be pretty impressive for everything they do collecting data about all of us. Oh yeah, when you're watching a YouTube video and the ad pops up in your day dream VR experience and your eyes narrow and it's like, oh, yep, don't give them that ad again. Your eyes get all wide and excited. Like, oh yeah, that's the one. That's the stuff. Serve that one up. Definitely, they're going to try to use it for that. And just another example of Google getting even more serious, continuing to be serious about virtual reality. Tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, 7 a.m. Pacific, Microsoft will hold a press event in New York City. Best bets are we're going to hear about an all-in-one and more details on upcoming Windows 10 updates. Windows is expected to get two major updates in 2017. We may find out those dates. The first is expected in March. Trackpad control and customized gestures are already in the preview edition, so we'll probably hear more about that. Also expected are a feature to reduce blue light, a home hub feature for controlling smart devices, and the holographic shell. So expect discussion of how the HoloLens works with PCs, of course, where we'll see more HoloLens demonstrations I would expect. And possibly some people are saying we might get a Microsoft smart speaker similar to the Amazon Echo. The all-in-one surface is expected to be an iMac competitor with a 24 or 27-inch display on a hinge that can lay flat on a desk. It's also expected to have a touchscreen and stylus support, be able to create 3D objects and holograms, perhaps have a built-in Intel RealSense 3D scanning camera so that you could scan something manipulated in software and then print it out on a 3D printer, for example. Keyboard and mouse for surface PC leaked in FCC filings recently, so we'll probably see those as did a new Microsoft Paint that could create 3D objects. So again, creating things for 3D printers or for the HoloLens, potentially. A lot of seemingly very cool technology. I'm wondering how much of this will be used by consumers, but it definitely seems like things professionals could use. So maybe, I'm actually very curious to see what they're going to show and how they're going to show it tomorrow. Yeah, and Microsoft is always straddling the line between consumer and enterprise. I imagine they'll have a pitch for everything for both sides of this equation. The all-in-one surface is an interesting duck in that respect. All-in-ones, sometimes you can think of as desktop machines for your corporate enterprises. And certainly, there's something to that with having a scanning ability and a lay flat ability might be good for conference rooms, things like that. But when you think about it, an iMac competitor, you think home use, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if it does all of these fancy 3D renderings and intel sense and eye scanning technologies, I'm just saying nonsense now. But you know what I mean, all of these I'm not sure would be useful to someone who's looking to buy an all-in-one computer to check their email. We will find out at the announcement tomorrow. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security held a conference call with 18 major communication service providers to discuss strategic principles regarding Internet of Things devices in the wake of the Mirai-based denial of service attacks on Friday. Surveillance camera part maker, Xiong Mai, issued a partial recall of its devices Monday and Dahua technology has also announced firmware upgrades and exchange program for older cameras. I should have asked you how to pronounce that second company before I did daily tech headlines this morning because that's not how I pronounced it in the headlines version. And I think you got it right. This is, I can't tell how much heat and how much light is here. Obviously we in the wake of the denial of service attacks on Friday would like companies to get serious. So getting companies together and talking about getting serious about Internet of Things security is fantastic. And I applaud that. How much of that can happen because the government did a conference call with 18 companies? I don't know. I mean, I don't want to just throw cold water on it, but I also don't want to get like, ah, we've solved the problem sort of feelings going. It's funny, you know, we always have the, we always can see the great oceanic divide between us when we get to these kinds of stories because as much as I dislike the idea of the government telling tech companies what to do, especially in the realm of security, I think that these things need a push in order to be made properly. I mean, we've seen a lot of these issues. We've seen them predicted. We've seen them happen, and I can guarantee you that a couple of weeks from now, a lot of people will have forgotten about that DDOS and some manufacturers will go back to not caring so much about the admin name and password being the same on all of their devices, you know, things like that. So I do think that in the same manner that you need government to sort of say what kind of fireproofing you need on the blankets you're going to put on your kids, it would be good to at least have them look at this and say, well, these are the minimum security specs that we require for such and such devices or at least the recommendation. Yeah, I guess if it was the regulatory agency sitting down saying we're going to create some security standards that maybe the Federal Trade Commission is saying you must abide by, I'd feel a little more confident. Homeland security, first of all, obviously has an interest in protecting our borders from cyber warfare, but it wouldn't be my first choice to sit down and create technical specifications for companies to follow. I agree with that. I also have to wonder how much the Department of Homeland Security thinks this might have been a rehearsal for or, you know, testing, a stage testing for a more serious... Yeah, absolutely. It could be something like that. So it looks like Patrick froze for a second there. I don't know if that was... Oh, sorry. ...because I said Homeland Security three times. Now you're back. You're frozen. Oh, well. We'll get you unfrozen in a second because we're going to have a new Wi-Fi standard that we can immediately switch to. On Monday, the Wi-Fi Alliance launched the certification program for the 802.11 AD standard that you will hear called YGIG. The standard certifies for interoperability with other YGIG devices, as well as making sure that there's an easy way to shift to standard Wi-Fi. So kind of a graceful degradation to Wi-Fi signals if no YGIG signal is around. YGIG can transfer at speeds up to 8 gigabits per second, supplementing the crowded 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands with a 60 gigahertz band, which cannot travel long distances or penetrate walls, but provides directional low-latency connections. So it combines all of those to deliver that 8 gigabit per second speed. So I was super happy about this until I heard the last part of the equation, which not only can it not travel long distances, but it can also not penetrate walls. Well, it can penetrate walls, but it can't penetrate walls in the 60 gigahertz bands, so it's doing a little like multi-out magic to figure this out. Right, but if you're on the other side of the wall, it's not going to be 8 gigabits per second because you don't have a 60 gigahertz, right? You know what? I don't know how good it is at that sort of thing. It's I don't know enough about why gig per se, but that seems to be a logical explanation. However, people are so excited about this. I think it's got maybe some other mitigating factors that allow you to get around. So maybe, right, maybe I misunderstood. Maybe it chooses the one it can use and if you're in the same room, it will select the 60 gigahertz band and if you're too far, it will use the others so it can penetrate walls, but it will still offload some of the traffic to the 60 gigahertz and relieve a little bit of the other ones. Yeah, so it's good for in-room links and the other thing that they say in the CNET article is that because it's highly directional, why gig signals fade fast, meaning you don't have to worry about other people sniffing up your traffic because today's Wi-Fi passes through walls and floors, so there's that other advantage to it not going through. Well, Uber-owned Auto has completed its first self-driving truck shipment and 18-wheel Volvo semi-carry the shipment of Budweiser beer 100 miles from a way station in Fort Collins, Colorado to Colorado Springs without human intervention. A human driver had taken it from Anheuser Anheuser Anheuser Bush and there you go from the Anheuser Bush plant in Love Land to the way station and remained on board during the autonomous leg of the journey. That's the driver we're talking about. A Colorado state patrol vehicle also followed the truck to monitor the journey. Anheuser Bush is St. Louis Missouri's pride and joy but is now owned by InBev a multi-company country corporation. However, it's not really the beer that's on board. Certainly Anheuser Bush likes that everyone's talking about Budweiser in this story, but it's the fact that an 18-wheeler without incident drove 100 miles without needing human intervene. There was a human there in case they needed to intervene, but they didn't need to. And I love in this kind of approach the Colorado patrolman is quoted as saying like I really enjoyed seeing him go the speed limit and stay in his lane the whole time. You know it's really kind of mind-blowing to me that we're already at this stage in Automated Vehicle and I'm sure it's going to get old for many people very soon for people like me to say oh my god we're already there this is not Google's weird little car driving around and it's a closed circuit thing. This is an actual truck driving on actual roads alone. And yes you can say there are different conditions in different countries in different cities and blah blah blah and this is not a car driving itself from your home to work but it's an actual vehicle driving itself from somewhere to somewhere and if you had told me three years ago this was going to happen I would not have believed you and I just think it's remarkable and yeah so it's probably one of the last times I'm saying this because it's going to become more common but still or maybe it won't it will never stop being amazing it's like the internet. I will always be the old dude who looks at youngsters today and thinks back in my day we had to drive our old cars to get to work and to get our That sounds dangerous grandpa Yeah and this isn't the first self driving there's been demonstrations in Germany there's been demonstrations in Florida but this is certainly I'm going to say the largest one maybe I think those have all been lorries and freight trucks rather than semis this is a full on 18 wheeler even if it's not the first 18 wheeler it's certainly a significant step for auto OTT and as you say Patrick it's becoming more common to see these sorts of things Apple reporting their revenue right now as we speak third straight quarter of decline for Apple 46.85 billion and earnings per share analysts expected revenue of 47 billion and earnings per share of $1.65 Apple sold 45.51 million iPhones beating estimates so yeah this is not the greatest Apple earnings announcement but also we didn't expect iPhones to be huge sellers at this point either so it's essentially the disappointing Apple announcement everyone expected Well I mean maybe the exploding Samsung phones helped the iPhones a little bit there but still the decline that's got to sting a little bit and there are I'm sure there are lots of questions you know I think a couple of years ago when people started saying oh these jobs isn't there anymore that's the beginning of the decline and I think that was completely premature especially since they were doing so much better than they were doing before I think at this stage there are these questions are becoming somewhat legitimate I don't think all of a sudden Apple is becoming irrelevant of course not but they haven't had a significant product launch in a while and their sales are declining and it's a little bit of a concern at this point it's legitimate to start asking those questions. Alright thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit and can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com we had a lot of people in our audience talking about the elections talking about what are the possibilities you know we hear a lot of talk about whether votes could be rigged whether votes can be counted on and other people just wondering can we ever have electronic voting is it good to have technology in the voting booth so to get some insight into what the risks are I talked yesterday with an expert in computer security in voting systems. So let's talk with Dan Wallach he is professor at Rice University's Department of Computer Science and a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. He's testified before the US Congress about voting security. Thanks for being willing to take some time to talk with us today. Pleasure to be here. So the big question that I think most of the folks in the Daily Tech News Show audience have is what kinds of voting systems are vulnerable to an attack and how many of them are there out there? Well those are good questions first we need to understand what kinds of attacks are we facing we might be facing attacks against our voter registration systems perhaps trying to delete voters who from the database and then they show up to vote and their name isn't there that kind of attack has nothing to do with the voting system and everything to do with the registration database and of course those are online in most states so that's my number one concern after that there are two kinds of technologies there are the voter the voting systems themselves the things on which you cast your vote and then there are the vote tabulation systems the computers that add up all the votes and give us the totals I am most concerned about the vote tabulation systems perhaps being hacked even though they're supposed to be offline they should not be on the internet but in some places they're like well it's behind a firewall well that doesn't really mean much against a nation state attacker so I'm concerned that somebody might be able to tamper with the vote tabulation and that's now depending on the voting system itself that might be catastrophic or that might really be annoying if the voting system itself is hand marked paper which is typically stand by a machine then we have the ability to do recounts we have the ability to do sampling and audits and we can make sure that the paper records and the electronic records line up so even if the voting tabulation system were tampered in some fashion it reports that Britney Spears is the next president of the United States we have some ability to go back and compare the electronic records to the paper records and make sure that they match up so that would be entertaining but it wouldn't be catastrophic hit me baby one more time now if we have purely electronic voting systems which I believe somewhere between a quarter and a third of American voters will be voting on this fall actually starting right now in many places then the electronic records on the electronic voting machines for which there are no paper backups are in the line of fire we have to worry that some sort of electronic tampering could delete or modify those votes and we would have no way of finding ground truth there's no non-electronic record that we can use if we otherwise reach a conclusion the electronic records are unreliable or tampered so the voting booth itself isn't the primary target it seems like it's the tabulating and the problem isn't that the voting booth is online it's that there isn't a redundancy to check to see if its votes got tampered with at some point is that close to right um so again three phases in the voter registration phase this has nothing to do with the voting machines or the vote tabulation that's a place where we would discover very quickly that voters are showing up with the polls waiting in long lines because their names aren't on the list that will if that attack happens it will be obvious we will know it it'll be front page of the newspaper so far so good if there's a hack in the vote tabulation on the back end we won't know that till the evening of November 8th when we're trying to add the votes together and we start getting nonsensical answers the box scores don't line up so to speak exactly like that didn't make any sense of course if we are in a battle ground state where it could go either way then if the tabulation is off by a little we might say well you know the polls have a margin of error and you know you if something is within five percent of the expected total yeah it's hard to say that it that the polls were wrong or that something was wildly out of expectation and if we're in a paperless voting system with a tight margin with some induced error our ability to discover that is actually quite difficult now on those paperless voting systems how widespread are they well the answer varies again roughly a quarter to a third I'm not sure of the exact number of us votes in this election will be cast on paperless electronic voting machines but the really interesting question is how many battleground states are using these systems so I'm happy to say that the state of Florida got rid of their paperless electronic voting systems after a messy election in 2006 now all Floridians vote on hand marked paper scanned by a computer and the papers available for recounts and audits and such among the battleground states some sections of Pennsylvania some sections of Ohio and interestingly they say Georgia is a battleground state this year the entire state of Georgia votes on paperless electronic voting machines centrally managed from one location for the whole state and that means the entire state of Georgia which is they say a battleground state this year is potentially one of the front lines where attacks might be feasible and an attacker might want to go for it So how would an attack like that look would it be a network attack or would it have to be a combination of an in-person approach to the polling booths It all depends on which attacker and what motives if our foreign nation state attacker just wants to create a mess then they can do that in any state by tampering with the voter registration databases mess created doesn't have to do anything else if they want to actually cause the votes to flip in a way that is hard to detect then you either need to get into the tabulation system or the voting machines themselves the voting machines go through some kind of a process what they call logic and accuracy testing but that turns out to not mean very much you cast a couple votes for one candidate you cast a couple votes for the other candidate you add them up and they better be what you expected it's easy to imagine militia software waiting until it has a large number of votes before it starts overwriting and rearranging them in that kind of a world it would be very difficult to detect malware that was causing a very small change to the vote totals we might never find it now if we have paper ballots that seems to be one mitigation factor if we have read receipts perhaps that could be another mitigation factor on the voting end is there a mitigation factor on the voter registration end hopefully we have backups in places where people vote in their home precinct often times the sign in books are printed on paper it's hard to unprint that paper but in places where they have early voting or election day vote centers where any voter can go to any place that they want to cast their vote those typically use online voter registration to make sure that you can't just go sequentially to each of them and vote each time once you've got that system online then it's potentially accessible to an adversary alright one last question given that all of these vulnerabilities exist and it is important for voting locations to actually look at this and perhaps provide some kind of backup that is not vulnerable to an electronic attack do you think it's possible will ever be able to achieve secure online voting here or anywhere else I think so when you say online voting perhaps you're thinking about internet voting casting your vote through your web browser we don't know how to do that and there are a handful of companies who claim that they can and no they can't based on the sort of threat model that we would construct around a nation-state adversary and what they might try to do to tamper with their elections we the computer science universe all of the researchers and all of the technologists who build things on computers we do not know how to build secure online voting we just don't know how to do it and the kinds of technologies we would need are at least a decade away from that being a reality meanwhile I like the idea of voting with paper I also like the idea of having an electronic voting machine that produces a printed paper ballot which goes into a ballot box and at that point you can have electronic records you can have paper records and you can reconcile them later on and if they disagree with one another we can invent policies and procedures to try to ascertain which we think is more reliable which we think was tampered and we can then make good decisions I like the idea of having copies more copies more backups more independent channels the better we give that advice all the time just in using in your own data more copies and more backups it just makes sense Dan Wallach thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to folks if people want to learn more about this because there's a lot more to it where would you recommend they go to do some research well it's between now and November 8 there's not a whole lot any of us can do to change things and if you start searching on voting fraud and such things on the internet you will find a lot of noise and very little factual data what I think is most interesting to look into is the world after November 8 let's pretend that this election comes off nice and clean and we don't dispute the results everything is good then what? there are two very interesting projects underway one in Los Angeles and one in Austin, Texas both of these are trying to build electronic voting machines that do paper properly from scratch the LA project the Travis County, Austin, Texas project both are trying to be very innovative in how they do security how they do usability and how they can do something at a much more reasonable cost than what the voting system company industry has been doing in the past those two projects I believe are the future and I hope they can spread well beyond Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, California Dan Waller thank you again for joining us I appreciate you taking the time pleasure to be here and there you go Patrick it is the registration system which I don't think people consider often enough that is a big target and anything that doesn't have a paper backup at this point is something to be skeptical of I think there is to be skeptical of I don't know if I would put it that way exactly but certainly what is very clear out of this conversation you've had is technology is great for many things and if you mess up a little bit usually the worst thing that happens is that your phones antenna isn't as good as it should be usually they don't explode but in this case I would say we shouldn't mess with this before every expert tells us it's ready and not having paper trails not having a paper version of the voting seems I don't want to say suicidal but it's inviting trouble we're not ready for this yet and the registration is a whole other issue which is difficult to handle without some form of electronic database so maybe this one could be discussed further but I think at this stage what comes out very clearly to be is for the voting process itself you do need a paper version period there is no reason to not have it and it's not often that I will say technology shouldn't be involved 100% in something but this I think is very clear I think for the time being that's true I never want to say never perhaps there is a development in something like the blockchain or something down the road that makes us all comfortable that yes there's good enough connections but I don't think even the blockchain is at that point where you could rely on it that's something for future research and I think that's what Dan Wallach is saying is we just really need a way to do a double check you can do a lot of chaos right now but as long as you have that double checking in the end you can be sure of your results and I think that is the most unsettling part of this is you get 6 million voters in Georgia voting on these electronic only machines there are 25 counties and the city of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania is a SNS iVotronic voting machine which has been demonstrated to be hackable 58 of 67 Pennsylvania counties entirely use electronic only voting now that means they're vulnerable your computer right now is also vulnerable to malware it doesn't mean it's been owned so the question becomes next for this coming election how secure are these polling places it's one thing to say under the right conditions it's another for a person actually to be able to walk in and manipulate those votes that happens almost never it happens in research that doesn't mean it can't happen this is not wise you don't want it to happen keep it away but it is also easier said than done it's a matter of degrees if you're a security researcher you look at this with horror and you say if you're operating a polling place if you're someone who's going to a polling place you just want to make sure that you keep your eyes open and you don't see anyone who seems to be hanging around looking to do something in the polling place that said stuff like the SNS voting machines are particularly problematic because magnets somebody could just have a magnet in their pocket and disrupt them so it's something to take seriously about is always an issue regardless of whether or not it's being done electronically it's also important I think to and I don't have the data here but to understand how much those machines that could be potentially vulnerable would affect the overall election if we're talking about this November 8 election because I don't know but I don't think it could change entirely the course of the election regardless I think at this stage when it is possible it would be good if the margin of the winner whoever it ends up being is so great that even those potentially hackable machines wouldn't have tipped it because if it does then that will invite many many questions at MS that we don't want which again is why you should always have paper trail at this stage I mean remember in 2000 having a paper trail with hanging chads still caused issues so you don't want to make it worse like you say if you can have an election and we won't go into electoral college and how the voting is done in the United States to elect the president but suffice to say it's based on states more than it is on the total popular vote if you can have an election where Georgia and Pennsylvania going one way or another doesn't swing the election either way then yeah you don't have as much controversy if one of these states becomes pivotal and if recounts are done and then there's questions that could get messy for sure alright let's get to our messages of the day MAWCS said something that keeps occurring to me when we talk about Samsung Note 7 recalls and can they survive will they kill the note brand I happen to be old enough to remember the Ford Explorer Firestone fiasco of decades past if I'm remembering correctly this recall and the subsequent economic disaster was the result of more than 200 people dying both Ford and Firestone survived just fine I don't even remember which brand of tire under Firestone was the problem but Ford explorers are still sold and so are Firestone tires and Ford was the only American car company not to take government bailout money in the past several years apparently this fiasco didn't hurt them that much I think Samsung could see this as a minor blip in years to come I think there's an argument to be made that it was a different world and that you didn't have 15,000 memes being created a minute but I'm also walking back my eternal condemnation of the note brand or at least my prediction that it would never happen simply because when I listened to the show yesterday and when I read the news that you know Samsung was going to put out the note 8 being faced with that fact maybe think well actually maybe the best way of saving the note 8, the note brand is to put out one that doesn't explode act as normal as you can, business as usual we have the new phone, it's awesome it does this, this and that maybe that's the best way of approaching it and it does become a blip or a big blip in years to come in Samsung's history You can make an argument that Firestone didn't survive intact you can make an argument that and Spooky Rich says Ford Pintos not so much there are counter arguments here as well but the overall point is well taken that companies can survive even worse situations Mike in Melbourne Australia said hey Tom just thinking about the recent Internet of Things denial of service attacks if the connected devices are able to be hacked and turned into botnets by malicious hackers then couldn't they also be hacked into remotely and security flaws be patched in a perfect world I could imagine a good Internet of Things virus that roam the Internet patching vulnerable devices I think I've heard of a similar thing at least once before this could be done either by white hat hackers or even state sponsored security experts and in fact yeah there was a whole big thing about the core flood botnet a couple of years ago where the government the FBI wanted to keep control of a botnet it had seized so that it could alert people that they had been infected and even just alerting people was considered to be a controversial thing because you're keeping a botnet in existence you're using a botnet and reinforcing it and the only way to take advantage of these botnets would be to pay the people who run them in which case you're financially supporting them I admire the idea and it's been batted around before but there are a lot of thorny issues especially ethically with doing that yeah it's a fascinating idea honestly and it wasn't it was discussed before ethically it's controversial but I do you know what if it was for each manufacturer's device that the manufacturer reviewed some kind of firmware for that device specifically that would go and try to contact the other devices and to get them to update properly because we know that you know if we try to face reality we know that most of those devices are not just pushing a firmware update though and yes they should totally do that yeah but I mean some of the devices aren't updated automatically right that you have to go yourself so you use the botnet yeah scan it starts to get thorny though when the company is actually using a password even though it's the default password that it's set to enter someone's device without their knowledge and yeah it is but again I agree the alternative could arguably be described as worse so I don't know finally Anthony said hey new listener here just listen to yesterday's show and I have a question you mentioned many steps we could take to protect our smart devices from becoming bots what can we do if our device already has this malicious software and is being used for these attacks I have a Samsung smart TV and a Philips Hue light set thanks for keeping me up to date on the tech news always enjoyed your segment on TMS but just got on board with DTNS what took me so long I don't know Anthony I don't know what took you so long but I'm glad to have you here and it's a great question the steps we mentioned yesterday also help if you've been infected so in other words the way the bots can get access to you is by knowing your password so change your password if they have installed something malicious and you do a firmware update if the firmware updates doing its job it gets rid of the thing that's malicious so doing all of the steps that are proactively protecting you should also help solve the issue and if it doesn't you should go and contact the manufacturer and say hey your firmware update did not get rid of this issue and I need to I would contact customer support if that didn't work if you're wondering how to tell if your your connected devices are vulnerable there is a site called iotscanner iotscanner.bullgaard.com we'll have a link to the lifehacker article about it in our show notes and it will scan to see if your device on your network is also listed on the search engine of vulnerable devices that hackers use there's a deep scan as well to find out if you're on that showdan list the deep scan isn't a great idea if you're not going to patch your things right away because the deep scan could then list your device if it finds one that's vulnerable so do go into that with your eyes wide open but the main scan the basic scan that you do right will at least tell you if you're listed or not and that is it thank you Patrick Beja for joining us where can folks find more Patrick Beja you know what I will say knock Patrick on twitter and facebook and I've actually posted a few things on facebook now little reactions to announcements and things like that so if you want to keep up to date on that it could be useful and if you're a french speaker then you might be interested in my french language shows at frenchspin.com I have Laurent Desvous Tech which talks about tech topics and Laurent Desvous Jeu which is for gaming topics we just had an episode where I told you all about the Nintendo switch and the PlayStation VR I'm sure you would enjoy it that's at frenchspin.fr for the french version thank you everybody for supporting the show we exist because you want us to support the show it's the place to go to help keep us in business a huge thank you to every single person who supports us and please welcome Beau Colmar and Brandon Foot who just backed the show at patreon.com thanks y'all for making it possible to have the show our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're live Monday through Friday at 4.30pm eastern at alphakeekradio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com back tomorrow with Jaime Ruiz Avila the inventor of the holovect and Scott Johnson talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com diamondclub hope you have enjoyed this program alrighty then excellent good show yaps I'm going to have to do an edit of the full version for the patrons because my laptop decided to update itself and cut off alphakeek radio and the recording that I do for the full version which means that I'll have everything because I've got the pre-show and the post-show but yeah and can you clip it from the everybody well what I'll do is I've started a recording just now so I will have part one which is the mp3 from alphakeekradio I'll have the actual show mp3 that I'm working on right now and then this third recording that I'm making right now of the post-show that I'll have to stitch together titles yes please so bud drives like bud oh bud drives er bud drives er hack me baby one more time hack me baby one more time homeland secure internet of things internet of things heal thyself Finland the wind of the fins and then eternal darkness budding driverless industry get it bud yin drink and don't drive that's kind of nice an e-vote of confidence hack early hack often I think it should be a voting thing really e-voting can't hack it an e-vote of confidence that can no that's pretty good I'm looking at the hack me baby one more time and thinking if we can modify it hack my voting one more time yeah but then you don't get it hack my voting one more time vote my hacking one more time okay electronic votes don't recount the electronic college yeah maybe e-voting of confidence is the the best one so instead of the electoral college it would be the electronic college yeah hack toro college an e-vote of confidence question mark though because it's not actually confident I like the e-vote of confidence and then question mark because it's a little more succinct I vote for that I vote for kikachu what about you patrick mezia I'm I think e-vote of confidence but but I'm not super I'm not like if you you want to use hack me baby one more time I would let you do it is what I'm trying to say no I just couldn't make it work for me either though well yeah basically do you prefer tv z gone or dark redeemer oh no don't make it personal I can't choose they're both pretty so the os10 update came up and I said try again later and it tried again 10 minutes later and it just rebooted maybe I clicked it wrong maybe it's user error but I pretty sure that I said no I don't want to do this right now do it later windows does it to me all the time windows beat master says to patrick don't be ace to tex federline it's a deep britney joke what's federline roger federline is that is that an ex-boyfriend ex-husband of britney spears oh okay you're like oh that's why I don't get it yeah exactly yeah oops you did it again you voted for that man or woman or person you voted with your heart it's the worst way to vote honestly emotional vote voting is like buying a house on emotion it's not a good idea I'm actually gonna go okay we're boring you see because I have to pay attention to this edit right now that's okay maybe we should all go thanks everybody for watching let us know what you thought of having that guest segment today very curious about that and we will see you later bye