 Subscribe to the Philius Club. It's going to be a good one. Uh, oh, so I wanted to ask you about, um, when we get to the discussion, I will open by defining gray market, sort of in general. And then, and then hand it to you to be like, and there's a particular example going on with gaming. And then you can, you can kind of pick it up from there. Sure. Um, I think it would be good if we have a little bit more of back and forth than we did. And I can't remember. I think it was, yeah. And I think we can't because I, unlike E three, uh, where it was like, tell me a thing. Now let's move on to the next thing. This has got more opportunity for like just discussion. So, um, sorry, uh, Chrome just updated on me. All right. Uh, do I need to give you. Yes. Permission. Or why do you let it do that? Don't let Chrome push you around, Roger. No, it's actually smart dev auto updates. I think it's safer. All right. Uh, I am ready for the show. Patrick, are you? I was born ready. Interesting. Why have you ever said that before? That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's useful to know you should say that all the time. Here we go. This is the Daily Tech news for June 28th, 2016. Happy birthday, Elon Musk. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today. Mr. Patrick Beja is with us as well, uh, fresh off discussing the Brexit on the Phileus club. So he's a little fired up. I'm, you know, we started discussing it before. Before the show, um, as well. And I got very fired up. But the Phileus club was super interesting. It started off like very, uh, neutral, you know, almost contempt in a contemplative way. I don't know if that's a word in English. And then the emotions started to, to rush in and we got really fired up. So it was a very interesting show. But now we're here to talk about tech. Yeah. We've got a fiery up topic, a fiery up topic. If that's a word, now it is. The idea of reselling game download codes on the gray market. We'll, we'll tell you what a gray market is. Well, we'll talk about this. It's not used games. It's games that haven't been activated yet. Right. I have that right. Don't I? Uh, you do. And I believe you do because is it your birthday today? No, it's Elon Musk's birth. It's Phileus. Yeah, it's also mine. Yeah. Oh, well, oh, happy birthday. Let's show the gray market as a birthday present. Fantastic. We will talk about that in a minute. Let's start off with our top stories. On Monday, Airbnb filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco in the US district court over new registration regulations passed by the city's board of supervisors earlier this month. The regulation, which goes into effect next month, would require all listings to be registered with San Francisco's office of short-term rentals with fines up to a thousand dollars a day for non-compliance. Now, here's what Airbnb is saying. They're like, Hey, there's a thing called the communications decency act, which says that the law cannot hold an internet platform liable for user-generated content. What you're saying is because people on our platform are posting rentals that we are liable to register those. It's not up to us. Maybe they're maybe our users should do it. Uh, but you didn't know we, you can't make us do this. And hearing on whether to issue an injunction on the law scheduled for August 1st. You know, I believe in France, Airbnb passed an agreement with the government. If I'm not mistaken, I would hate to be misreporting on this, but I'm fairly sure they have an agreement where they do signal the listings that make more than 5,000 euros a year to the appropriate authorities because they have to pay specific tax and tourism tax for this. So if I'm not mistaken, Airbnb is agreeing to do it in France, but fighting it in the US, which I guess would make sense. They adapt to the country they're in. Yeah. And the key here is the registration requires a short term rental website to post registration numbers on listings. And that's particularly what Airbnb is taking exception to. They're saying, well, now you've made us liable for something that, Hey, maybe those renters should go get a registration number. That's fine. That's your law. But you can't make us enforce that. That's the communications decency act gives us safe harbor there. It's an interesting twist on the CDA. Right. OK. I guess in France, it's a little bit different. It's just signaling those listings that made more than the threshold. So it may it's maybe a little bit less of a burden and it doesn't apply in the same way. Yeah. And the city attorney for San Francisco says it's not regulating user content at all. It's regulating the business activity of the hosting platform itself. And that's that's what a judge is going to have to decide is making that registration number a required field. Just saying like, hey, you can't also sell things fraudulently on eBay. That's not regulating eBay's content. That's just the law. Or is it like, well, you know what, that's it shouldn't be up to Airbnb to police this, whether they have a registration number or not. It would seem like a stretch to equate this to user generated content. I can see where they coming from, but it doesn't seem like the safe harbor would apply in this case. It is a way to use something else to fight the real issue, which is they don't want to have they they have said, and they're not being cagey about this, they're like, this is burdensome to our business and reduce our profitability. All right. Facebook has released two extensions for the Chrome browser safe to Facebook and share safe source links on Facebook to read or do later and share opens up a post creation box. So this is kind of a big deal today. And it's one of those days where I'm like, I see this when it first comes out. And I'm like, well, that's kind of interesting. And then everybody's talking about it. I assume it's because it just makes it really easy to use Facebook like pocket or read it later. Yeah, I mean, I would be more in line with your initial thought, which is, huh, this is interesting, not, it seems like something that would become a story on a day where there aren't many big stories. What are you trying to say, Patrick? I'm trying to say it's really interesting. Actually, I read into it and oh, my God, you can save pages to your face. I mean, we'll read later. And the fact is, like, this is one of those days I call them wide and shallow news days where if I look at tech meme, if I look at Google News, if I look at Reddit, if I look at our own subreddit, I see wide differences in the stories that are up there, whereas on normal day, you'll at least see four or five that are the same everywhere. And those are the biggest stories. This is one of two stories that was everywhere. So everybody is excited about it for some reason. I can't explain it exactly. But, you know, everybody uses Facebook and maybe that's all all it takes. OK, I'm not convinced. Microsoft Windows head Terry Meyerson told the Verge the company will change the dialog box for Windows 10 to make it very clear what your options are. There'll be one to upgrade right away, one to schedule your update later and one to decline the update. And when you close the dialog box by clicking the X, it won't assume that that means you're leaving the upgrade to happen. It will mean nothing happens. No upgrade will be scheduled. I tried to explain this yesterday and some people picked on the words that I used, but essentially the way Microsoft has been doing it is to say, hey, you're going to upgrade. And if you clicked X, that took it to mean as an X means like take no action. And since they had said you're going to upgrade, take no action means leave that upgrade scheduled, which most people that that doesn't work for most people. Most people think I assume if you're asking me to do something, it would change it. And if I click the X and close the dialog box, nothing would change and I wouldn't get upgraded. And this is what has caused people to accidentally upgrade to Windows 10. Well, you're leaving out another part of the story, which is in the previous months when a similar, not an exactly identical, but similar box showed up when you click the X, it would not schedule the upgrade. It would cancel that action and that changed with that new dialog box. Or maybe it didn't show up exactly in the same way. But it's it's a little bit more sneaky than just, oh, you didn't read it. It changed the behavior you were used to. Yeah, exactly. And it was it was exactly sneaky. It's what I was trying to explain, Patrick, is that they were saying, we've scheduled you an upgrade. And if you clicked the X, then it would assume that you had read that and knew what that meant, which is not what you would expect. You would expect they're saying, would you like an upgrade? Yes or no. And if you don't answer, the answer should be no. And that's what they're changing it to. The upgrade stopped being free, stops being free on July 30th. So if you do want to upgrade to Windows 10, which, like I said, yesterday has been no problem for me personally, so it may not be for you. You need to do it by July 30th or you will have to pay. A blog post from Microsoft also was posted with just a headline saying Windows 10 anniversary update would come August 2nd, though the post was removed. So maybe that date isn't set in stone yet. It's also interesting that they're finally changing. I thought it was already, it had already changed, by the way, that click the X to cancel thing. But basically, there's always talking for no reason today because he said there's going to change. I guess I was mistaken. But so it's only a month away, right? So they're only changing it for the last month. But really, I know this is controversial, but I really think unless you have a reason to not upgrade to Windows 10, I really think you should take advantage of the free upgrade because Windows 10 is going to be here for a very long time. It's going to be, you know, long story short. Unless you know you don't want it, I would suggest you get it because you're just delaying something that. Although, as again, as I mentioned yesterday, Joey Image had a problem with it. Veronica Belmont had a problem with it. Justin Robbryoung had a problem with it. So I get why people might decide conscientiously like, you know what, my system works really good right now and I'm not going to do it. But I agree with Patrick that unless you are taking a very conscious decision to decide not to upgrade, you should upgrade because Patrick and I both have upgraded and it's been fine. And it is better to be on that path and and be on that path for future security updates as well, which will eventually stop coming to older operating systems. Right. And also it's free now for another few weeks. Yeah, till July 30th. All right, upload VR dot com reports. Twitter has hired former Apple interface interface designer Alessandro Sabatelli. I hope you appreciate the accent here as director of VR and AR. His LinkedIn profile says his job is to empower us all in the spatial computing revolution. Sabatelli most recently worked for Ixomoxy. Is that how you pronounce this? That's I think so. It's all on on using VR and AR to enhance visual experiences. The company's app Lucy gives filtered views of the world in Gear VR. He worked on contextual and localization and location based user interfaces while at Apple. It's reasonable to accept to expect this could tie in with Twitter's recent acquisition of Magic Pony, which is now Twitter's cortex division for machine learning, including visual experience. Yeah, so there's lots of pieces you can put together here. They bought a computer vision company to do their machine learning. They've now bought not bought, but they've hired an interface expert who particularly likes to work on visualizations. He worked on the visualizations for iTunes and has worked on interfaces for VR. And Twitter's been very bullish about, hey, I think there's some great uses for Twitter in virtual reality. So I don't know what to expect here, but I imagine it's Twitter trying to say instead of just throwing up a social network in VR, we've hired some really smart people to crack how that might actually be helpful. And I don't know, maybe integrate it in other VR experiences as well. And maybe even do other things than just Twitter and VR. It could, yeah, it could become something that is beyond just what Twitter is. You know, when these moves happen, when it's something that you don't really understand, it's usually either something super dumb that never goes anywhere or something really surprising that actually changes the way you think of a company or product. I hope it's the latter for Twitter. Would that be if in five years we think of Twitter as that really cool VR app that does that thing that we never expected we'd use VR for? And they're like, oh, right. And there's still the original Twitter is still around. But, you know, Jack Dorsey could just change the entire perception of that company. I'm not even saying that's likely, but it is interesting to think about because as Patrick just explained, that does happen sometimes. Yeah. And here, I think it's one of those cases where we really don't see how that will integrate with Twitter in any in any way that seems natural at this point. Maybe it could be where Dorsey is saying, look, on the back end of Twitter, we've noticed this behavior. Let's take that behavior and turn it into something in VR. It's only tangentially related to Twitter itself. According to the Journal of Defense Management, an AI dubbed Alpha bested USAF veteran combat pilot Colonel Gene Geno Lee in a series of simulated dogfights. This is a guy who knows what he's doing. He's trained pilots. He's been a pilot for a long time. Alpha was developed by Cybernetics, spelled PSIB, E-R-N-E-T-I-X, a company founded by University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate Nick Ernest in collaboration with the US Air Force Research Laboratory. Alpha uses a subset of fuzzy logic called a genetic fuzzy tree. The system allows the AI to make decisions sort of the way a human would by breaking large tasks into a series of smaller tasks and considering relevant variables. It just does so 250 times faster than humans can. Runs on a five hundred dollar consumer PC, too. So it's very efficient. Cybernetics issued a press release about this back on December 16, 2015. Maybe it got lost in the Star Wars hype. But they are now publishing their research in the journal. And there's a big article from the University of Cincinnati about this as well. So a couple of things here. First of all, I love that apparently the pilot was piloting this in the simulator in a shirt and a tie. That is the definition of the like 60s command room of the Apollo missions. Exactly. Second, they're doing this and they're only in alpha. Imagine what they can do in beta. It's going to be amazing. And obviously to me, the most incredible part was the fact that it runs on a five hundred bucks PC. That is, you know, you always equate machine, you know, AI and fuzzy logic and machine learning with super expensive server farms. The fact that they're running this on a pretty meager PC, obviously, at five hundred bucks is very surprising and kind of puzzling and exciting at the same time. Well, and they could put this in what are called UC AVs because they have combat. That's the sea, but unmanned aerial vehicles very easily because it's running on such low weight processors. And the way this University of Cincinnati article described it, they would be wingmen. So you would have a pilot in charge of the mission, but you could have a few UC AVs flying and the AI could manage them so that an Air Force pilot is making the top level decisions. But the AI is making sure that all the UC AVs follow the mission and adapt to it as conditions change. However, you think we're having problems with the car by Ashie Maru issue of cars is having to decide who to kill. How is it going to be resolved with fly flying? Well, apparently it'll never be a problem. That's what people tell me. So I'm not worried about it. All right. So we're fine. Doubler Labs announced the launch of its hear earbuds, which can turn out undesirable sounds like sirens or crying babies. Think of all those plane rides you took recently and now can stream music and answer phone calls using Bluetooth. Hear earbuds also allow certain sounds in if you like. So you can carry on a conversation while listening to music. How rude a directional mic even lets you pinpoint the source of the noise you want to cancel. A setup process customizes the profile for each user. The battery lasts for about four to six hours on one charge. And the hear one ships in November for two hundred and ninety nine bucks. And they're available for preorder now. Yeah. So the idea is when you had a transistor radio sitting next to you and the music was playing, you could still have a conversation with somebody, right, as long as it wasn't too loud. When you have headphones on, even if you turn the music down, it's hard to talk to someone. So they're calling this augmented reality for audio, which basically says we let in the sound of the person talking to you. But the headphones still block out the noise that you don't want to hear. So you could have that same experience with the headphones on. And particularly what it would be good for is if I'm out running and I don't I want to be able to hear my music really well. But if a truck's coming up on me, I want to know that. I can let that I can let that sound in. A beatmaster in the chat room is is asking, is there a nagging wife button? Don't know what that says about your family. The setup process customizes the profile for each user. Think Patrick already answered your question. I so I'm using I'm actually using Bose Noise cancelling headphones, which are which work really well. And they are designed to let some sounds in. I think voices so you can hear when people are screaming or, you know, they come through a little bit, these kinds of things. The the worry I would have, I understand it's customized to the user. But what if you say I don't want anything to come through? Obviously, that already exists as an issue. But I'm I'm a little bit concerned about the fact that it would, you know, tune out sirens and the things that specifically you should want to. Well, yeah, I mean, and that that is it. That is the problem this earbud is trying to solve, actually, is to say, like, yeah, with normal noise cancelling headphones, a lot of times, sure, it allows some things through, but it won't allow all the things through that you need to. This gives you the ability to customize that. So I think it's actually a step forward on that because you know Tom, is it? Yes, OK, it is. I believe you because I trust your or should I say we. Oh, now I understand. All right, I think this is really fascinating technology. I'm curious to see how well it works. All the reviewers that have tested it say it works really well, but I haven't actually been able to try it myself. Yeah, I don't know if I'll pay two hundred ninety nine dollars just to try it, though. I had an old enigmatic headphones over ninety nine dollars. They did exactly what you're talking about. They blocked out most noise except for the conversation of the person directly behind me on a plane, for some reason, would always cut right through. Yeah, these ones work a little bit better, the Bose I'm using. But yeah, obviously, the wireless headphones issues are always there. The charge is, you know, the the battery life is always an issue. Two hundred ninety nine is not enormous of a price. If it's really high quality, you know, when you when you want like super high quality headphones, it's the kind of prices you're going to have to expect. And if the rumored cordless, jackless audio jackless phone comes from Apple as is rumored, there are going to be a number of people in in looking for wireless headphones. So that might be the one. Russia's state Duma, which is the lower house of the Russian parliament, approved an anti-terrorism law, including new online surveillance provisions. Russian ISPs must now store message content for six months and metadata for three years. MTS, Megaphone and Vipalcom have all opposed the bill and search engine. Yandex said the legislation would cost more to implement than the companies would ever make publishing incitement to terrorism online now carries the same penalties imposed on media outlets with a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. Authorities also get the right to demand access to encrypted services in Russia and the legislation will go next to the Federation Council. That's the upper house of parliament in Russia before it goes to President Putin to sign off on. And the Federation Council is expected to approve it. And President Putin is expected to sign it. You don't say. Yeah, the biggest concern there is the access to encrypted services, which as we have discussed at length with the issue of Apple versus the FBI is not a simple one at all. The other concern, which isn't really specifically tech related, but is how these anti-terrorism laws are being used to basically help who decides what is terrorism is a real concern in Russia currently. And I don't think I can really say too much more because I'm in Finland right now and Russia is right next door. So I can hear you. They're listening. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of things in this bill beyond the tech sort of stuff, but particularly Edward Snowden, who's in Russia, has said, well, this is a big brother bill. And the theory is that this will get passed and be used to put pressure on the companies who are like, we can't even afford to store that much data. That's petabytes of data. It's impossible. So it would be a lever. It would be a leverage to get them to agree to a stepped down version of this, but potentially a bill that they never would have agreed to before this past. So essentially, a lot of people are saying this is just a negotiating tactic tactic. Would make sense. It's still a concern, I would say. Yeah, it's a pretty heavy negotiating tactic. Hey, thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit, the one to kid, Loki, Robert, Steve, I.O. Captain Kipper, Strike at Rich One, flying spatulas in there today. Join them and let us know what stories you would like us to talk about. Daily Tech News Show dot reddit dot com. That's a look at the top stories. All right, so we mentioned gray markets earlier. I first learned about gray markets with televisions. So, for instance, Sony would make the Kuro television back in the day. I think that was Sony, wasn't it? Was that pioneer? Anyway, let's say Sony's make it a television. They sell it in the United States for a certain price, because that is the price that they can get in the United States. But then they also sell it, say, in Taiwan for a much cheaper price, partly because it's closer and partially because that's a different market. There's a different price that that market can bear. So very savvy entrepreneurs would go figure out like, hey, I can actually buy these up in Taiwan and pay for the shipping to the United States and still sell them at a profit for less than Sony sells its own TVs in the United States. And that would be called gray market. Electronics companies would fight against this. They tried to get laws passed against gray market items. But generally, gray market items in most parts of the world are considered legal. It is not illegal for you to resell a thing in most places. That is being applied now to game codes. In other words, you buy a digital code so that you can activate a downloaded game and before the code is ever activated by anybody. So we're not talking about used game codes. Apparently, Patrick, people are selling those on the gray market. They are. And there are a number of issues that came to light earlier. I think it was last week when TinyBuild, which is an indie developer, basically came out with a scathing indictment or at least an accusation of the key reselling site G2A, saying that they had facilitated the sale of fraudulent keys that had cost them $450,000. And to try and understand all of this, we need to understand how these sites work. So I don't know how you want to go about the description of all of this. I can start and then you stop me when there's stuff to tell me if I've got this much right. G2A is like an eBay for game codes. And they have a certain amount of policy that says we try to track down people who are engaging in fraud. And what TinyBuild was saying is we had a bunch of people use fraudulent credit cards to buy a bunch of game codes on our site. And it turns out those game codes were sold on your site. And so they're essentially accusing G2A of enabling fraud, if not outright doing it themselves. Right, exactly. So there are a few sites that do these kinds of things on the web. There are sites that do this in agreement with the publishers that just buy keys from them and resell them at prices that are sometimes cheaper than what you can get in a retail store or on Steam, which is the de facto single store on the internet. There are others, but this one is the main one. And then there are sites like G2A and Kingwin that allow users to sell keys like eBay does. And this is a big part of the problem because users are less easy to quote unquote control. And some of them do things that are more or less reprehensible. One of them would be, I'm going to give a few examples so that you see the different types of things that are happening on these sites. Of course, some people would just get a key and sell it. And that's right. Some people might buy lots of keys on sale and sell them later at a higher price than what they bought for. That's also kind of OK. Others might buy them from cheaper markets like Eastern Europe or South America. This is closer to the gray market you were describing for the apparently pioneer TVs as the chat room is informed in us. Yeah, it was a pioneer, yeah. Right. It means black in Japanese, by the way, Kuro. Makes sense. Had very deep blacks. Exactly. So, yeah, you might buy them from Poland, for example, and resell them somewhere else. And someone from the US or France or the UK would buy them and get a cheaper price than what they would get on Steam locally or at their local store. Another one, which starting to become a little bit more shifty, is buying batches of humble bundles or bundles in general, which are very low priced bundles of games that are serving as promotion or as good deals. And the understanding is that you're going to buy one, have a good deal. But certainly, even though it's not illegal, per se, if someone buys 100 of them and separates the keys of all of those games and sells them back, it perverts the spirit of the thing, I would think, is fair to say. Right, well, I feel like there's two main issues. One is fraud and credit cards. And to me, that is a separate issue from the gray market. That's just how do we make sure we crack down on people who are using stolen credit cards? Like, that is not a unique issue to this situation. But there's a trust issue between G2A and TinyBuild, where TinyBuild doesn't think G2A is doing enough to help in that. So that's one issue. The other is what you're talking about here, which is there have been systems set up to take advantage of behavior where different behavior can get an advantage. So Humble Bundle says, hey, to generate interest in all of these different products, we'll bundle them together at a cheaper price. And it'll be great as a promotional opportunity. But gray market sellers can also use that. They're not behaving in the way that the bundle was originally intended for, but they're also not breaking the rules. They're just buying Humble Bundles. That's what they're for. Yeah, which I think it's important to understand that these sites, I guess, can be used in legal ways as well, even though some people might think they're. But then you have some people that request keys and actually go sell them. Request them because they're YouTubers or streamers and they say they're going to make reviews. But then they go sell them. And obviously a big publisher can track this or even maybe not care, but an indie developer might be impacted by this. And then the biggest issue is that of stolen credit cards. If you don't know how this works, you get a stolen credit card or a fake credit card number. You buy the key. And by the time even then the credit card company realizes this is a fraudulent purchase, does a charge back. So the store or the developer that sold you the key is charged back or the money is taken away. That happens in every business. No, no, of course it was. Because credit card fraud is not unique to this. So again, I go back to the idea that this is mostly because Tiny Build and other game developers don't like G2A. Otherwise they would be working together on this. And G2A seems to be saying all the right things about like, hey, let's work together. Why don't you give me access to a database where I can check for keys that have been stolen and we can block them? And Tiny Build says, oh, sure, you'd love that, wouldn't you? So you could sell those keys. Like there's just a lack of trust. The problem is it seems like G2A is, and this is my analysis of this. I might be wrong, but I don't see many legitimate uses for a site like this. And it hurts me a little bit to say it because it's very reminiscent of what some people were saying about torrent sites, for example. And on paper, it's not that different. But I guess the difference is, in this case, G2A actually profits heavily. It's a commercial enterprise. And they're proposing things. It's true. After a wave of negative PR, they came back to the table basically after being very dismissive of these issues. They came back and said, all right, we'll work together. For example, we will give you a 10% royalty fee on the things we sell for your games. And it doesn't feel right at all because you're like, well, if the game is, I'm getting 10% on the full price of the game, the game I should be getting the 70% that I usually get if it was sold on another platform. Here's where I think I don't have the answer. But I'm going to say I have the answer. Here's the answer, Patrick. Do you want to hear the answer to all this? This is very similar to the broadcast industry and YouTube. G2A seems scammy. People in our chat room are saying that. I'm not saying they are scammy, but to a lot of people, they seem shady. They do a little bit of GoDaddy stuff with protection services and insurance and things like that. And a lot of people are like, yeah, I don't know if these guys are on the up and up. YouTube felt that way to the broadcast industry. They're like, sure, you're about sharing video. You're about pirating video. The broadcast industry started Hulu originally to beat YouTube. Now, the reason it didn't work is that YouTube was like, no, we're not really about that. We're actually about sharing video. And we can still survive if we crack down on the pirated video. Call G2A's bluff. Start a G2A competitor amongst all the different developers to allow legitimate resale of keys that you verify and that you take a cut on. Why wouldn't you want to profit a little more on a key that is being sold a second time and be able to crack down on fraud at the same time? I don't think that G2A can survive on that model at all. No, I'm saying the developers create that site to compete with G2A and drive G2A out of business. But there's already a site. There's Steam. There are other sites that they do work with. Steam lets you resell codes? No, no. But there are other sites that. What I'm saying, you've got to start your G2A competitor. Well, I would say that there are other ways they can deal with this. They could enforce region blocks in a more stringent way than they do. But Steam doesn't want to do that because they want higher numbers of users. And maybe even the logic would be get them on our platform and then they will buy things legitimately. That could be an argument. The publishers are actually using similar tactics, using those sites because it allows them, as you were saying, to sort of go around the retailers' agreements they have to not sell the games cheaper digitally than they do physically. So there are ways that they could stop these. But I think ultimately the only way to actually stop this entirely would be to, because the real problem, we talked about a number of different things. The gray market is legal and I think it poses problems, but it's not outright the big issue. The big issue is those stolen credit card keys. Well, and that's not an issue. That is not an, I'm sorry, that is not an issue of reselling game keys. That is an issue of the internet. So I don't think the developer in this case would be accusing G2A of anything if they didn't already distrust G2A. They're saying G2A is complicit in that. But the stolen credit card issue is, I mean, that's true in music. That's true in Amazon.com. That's true everywhere. Like that's not something that suddenly only impacts this. Yes, but the difference is you have keys here that turn into a product you can buy digitally. The difference with eBay is that sellers trust eBay and say, oh, we know you're working with us to fight the fraud. So that's what needs to happen for G2A. G2A either needs to be competed into behaving well or in this case, cajoled into behaving well. And maybe they are behaving well. I don't want to come down on G2A and say they're doing something they're not. They may be over there saying like, we've been behaving well. Just nobody will believe us for whatever reason. And so that is the credit card thing is just an expression of the distrust to me because it's a universal across all kinds of e-commerce. Well, I would agree to an extent, but I think that the difference is this is an entirely digital market and it is to my knowledge, the only one where you can resell a digital good. Everything else is locked down in DRMs. So once you've bought it, there isn't really a way to resell. So why don't the game companies DRM and all their stuff? Well, they do, but you have the key, which is a physical, you know, which is a number that represents a game and that you can pass around. I can buy gift certificates on Amazon and do exactly the same thing. I guess gift certificates might be equivalent, but there isn't a gift certificate website where you go and buy gift certificates. Yeah, Amazon. I go buy an Amazon gift certificate and then I resell that code. I buy it with a stolen credit card, resell that code to somebody so they can cash it in. Boom. But I guess what I'm saying is Amazon doesn't rely entirely on that digital product that you can buy with a credit card. Also, Amazon has trust with the banks and... The thing is G2A and these others are entirely built on this business, which part of it is legitimate. From what I know of the game industry, I think a lot of it isn't legitimate. And I have a problem with you equating it with YouTube because you're sort of, it's not because YouTube turned out to be the good guys or weren't the bad guys that the previous industry thought they were, that everyone else who does something digitally that is... No, no, no. You're misunderstanding my point. My point there wasn't that G2A is like YouTube. My point there was that the broadcast response to YouTube could be a useful response for the game industry. Yeah, I think, as you were saying, ultimately it comes to G2A's intentions and if they are good, it will work out. If they aren't that good, it won't work out. And I think the industry in general thinks that G2A's intentions aren't good, which is also something you were saying. So we'll see how it ends up, but I wouldn't be... From where I'm standing, I'm not sure it's gonna work out fine for G2A. All right. And yes, people are pointing out in the chat room, eBay has its problems with protection on digital resales and stuff of its own. So it's not like it's some kind of magical fairyland where everything works out well. Let's get to our pick of the day. Sarah in sunny Seattle, noticed that Mr. Robot recorded a new episode recently and turns out it wasn't a new episode. It was actually a documentary reflecting back on the past year in cyberspace and comparing what was talked about in the first season of the television show, Mr. Robot with Ashley Madison, FBI versus Apple, Sony Data Dump, Stuxnet, et cetera. They talk about the idea of taping over your webcam and how it's not as paranoid as it looks. She says it's not even too spoilery about season one. If anyone hasn't watched it yet, it might just be of interest to you. And there's an article about it from Ars Technica that she includes as well. Send your picks to us, folks. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Now yesterday, Veronica and I talked a lot about education, different education incentives going on from Google and Amazon. We got a couple of emails from people in the industry. I'll pick a few of them. Charles says he's an integration specialist for a school corporation and husband to a fifth grade teacher. And this is great news. There is a market and education for what is called LMS, learning management systems. What is going to happen to LMS is if Google gives away all of these free tools for the teachers to use on Amazon too. I know these systems have other features, but one could argue that new tools like quizzes for Google Forms is slowly taking away from this market. And the Texas teacher writes, as a teacher, I welcome these tech companies working with the schools. Veronica hit the nail on the head. Companies are not trying to control the content of my lessons. I'm an interact teacher. This is a program where a few teachers from each campus in my district go to a week long class. At the end of the class, teachers are given a grant to purchase a selection of technology for their classrooms. The focus of the workshops was not use X technology. Instead, it was promoting a high level thinking with projects that use technology. For every project we were shown multiple tech resources that can be used and some of these were even open source. So I guess what Texas teacher is saying is having Google and Amazon in there just means more choices for. As long as it's done properly and I think we have enough watchdogs to make sure that it is, education could stand to be improved in most of our countries. So let's try that. And you know what? If you have a better idea, we're listening, but let's try that because it could be good. And I've continued to get great emails from people about the self-driving car dilemma that Patrick alluded to earlier. A lot of you wrote in with very reasonable ways to change the scenario of the two motorcycles that I mentioned yesterday. For instance, many of you pointed out that if all cars are following at a safe driving distance, that the crash could be avoided entirely. Many of you also insist that a situation where a car would have to choose a path that would result in death could never happen. You're like, it just won't happen. The self-driving cars will stop it from happening. There won't be a situation where a car won't be able to prevent some kind of death. Okay, I'm impressed by the lengths people are going to find a way out where nobody dies. I think that says something really good about human nature. I really do. But my stance is still that all of those responses avoid the question. I disagree that self-driving cars could never find themselves in a situation where actions would result in human death, no matter what action they take. I think it's rare. I said that in the very first episode when I talked about it with Justin Robert Young. The whole point of the question is what you should want the car to do in that situation as rare as it is, as unlikely as it is. And if you still insist that the scenario will never happen, we'll just have to agree that I'm wrong. And then you'll feel better and have a much more optimistic view of life. And that's fine. Yeah, I really hope that this is true, that it will never happen. But let's define very rare. Like we have tens of thousands of deaths on the road every year nowadays. So we're thinking if it's a few hundred every year, it's almost ever, right? But once we get to that situation where it's a few hundred or even a hundred, it's still a hundred people losing their lives. So I think the cars, it's good to ask a question and dismissing it's like, ah, it will never happen. It is maybe not the most productive way of looking at it. But you can still respond to this conversation. We aren't going to continue this conversation at this point until we have something new to say about it, though. But no, in all sincereness, thanks to everybody who responded. It shows that you're thinking about it and you're caring about it. And that's awesome. That's fantastic, even if we don't agree. Thank you, Patrick Beja, for joining us. Thank you for having me. I was a little bit tired, I apologize if it showed. But yeah, talking about the Brexit on the Philias Club, as you said, just before we recorded this one, it was an emotional thing, I have to say. You should absolutely go check out the Philias Club folks, Frenchspin.com to find that. Pixels this week also talked about this issue of the gray market codes as well, if you want to hear more conversation about that, specifically from that gaming side point of view. Anything else to let people know about? No, I guess I would just mention the Philias Club again, because the Brexit is obviously a very big piece of news in Europe and I'm sure it made its way in the US and everywhere people are listening. And we got people from the UK, from Saudi Arabia, from Germany and myself from France and we discussed all of this. In the beginning it was very analytical and then emotions started to take a little bit of their hold on us and if nothing else, I think it gave, it painted a picture of how Europe feels and its close neighbors, how we feel on the few days after that happened. So I think it's a valuable resource if you're interested in this. Thanks to everybody who makes this show possible. We don't take advertising because of you guys. You support the show, dailytechnewshow.com slash support is the place to go to find out more about that. In fact, bosses, you're supporting the show, wanna know how we're doing. Take our survey at bit.ly slash 2016 DTNS. That's bit.ly slash 2016 DTNS. Or look, there's a link in the Patreon at patreon.com slash DTNS. Another way to support the show is an app called Podiversity. I've been meaning to mention this. It's an app that charges you $5 a month to use but it splits up the revenue amongst the podcasts you subscribe to when you use it, DTNS is in there. So that is another option for supporting not only our show but others, you can take a look at that if you'd like, podiversity.com. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can give us a call 51259 daily, catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphakeakradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And visit our website, dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow to talk about some mobile tech history with Tamer Brown and Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. Part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. I thought you did great, Patrick and you didn't seem tired at all. Excellent, I put on a brave face. You put on a Frenchy face. Well, someone said I was sexy in that survey so it gave me courage. Do they really? I didn't see that one. That's awesome. Yeah, I did the silly thing and search for my name in the comments because you can't. Yeah, never do that. But yes, at least in this case. Yeah, someone also said I was too negative. Yeah, but that's why we want you here. I don't think you're too negative. I think sometimes you bring negatives that I need to consider. That's a different, that's an entirely different thing. I actively try to look at things from the other side. And if I am left to my own devices, we'll be all Pollyanna and just tell you everything is gonna be awesome. Don't worry about everything. We would not. I'm, Kymira in the chat room is saying you're not negative, you're French. You know, that could be part of it too. There could be a cultural perception going on. Because I don't think you, the person, are negative at all. In fact, I think you're quite optimistic. I am. Show titles? Yeah, what do we got? Oh, right, right, work. Well, top is happy birthday, Tom. No. But thank you, but that will not be the title. Microsoft, no means no. Gray to play, games are the key of gray. Gray, GTA, praise on pay deals. I think there's too much attempt at that. It was a good try though. It was a lot of effort. I liked it. 50 shady gray markets. I like this one. I like that one too. Win 10, lose seven. Tweeting in VR. Honestly, the gray ones are probably the best. Gray games, I'm amazed no one put in the, oh, 50 shades of gray markets. 50 shady gray markets. You wanna go with that one? There's also 50 shades of gray markets at the bottom. Well, I like the shady because we've mentioned how some people think GTA is shady. You know, it's like CD keys. You ever been there? Oh, right, yeah, yeah. I admit I've used it once or twice. Or the cracks, we could get the cracks out of the Dutch game magazines. Well, CD keys is very interesting because what they do is they resell, not, they do sell game codes, but mostly they sell subscription keys to like Xbox Live, but they sell you like the Russian version, which is like 40% less than the American one. It's a gray market, exactly. Yeah, gray market, yeah. Totally. I've actually used it and I'm not sure if it's only gray market or if it's worse things and I don't know. I would like a guide that tells me which one is. The one point that I decided not to make on the show was you're also trying to enforce a situation that isn't in existence, which is a location. I mean, if I'm in Russia or if I'm in China, well, China's a bad example. If I'm in Russia or if I'm in France or if I'm in the United States, the internet is still there. And you can try to throw up roadblocks. This is what Netflix is fighting constantly, but it's really difficult to try to regionalize the internet. Well, the primary reason, of course, is just down to monetary revenue, right? Because each region is very sensitive to prices at a certain range. Like you cannot charge what, say, like an American would pay for a certain game and then try to charge the same, and they might like say. But that relied on the fact that an American can't pay to pop over to London fast and buy something there or pop over to Moscow. But now you can. There's only one market on the internet. But there are enough, no, you can put enough roadblocks that it's gonna be cumbersome enough that people, no, you can. I mean, it is the case. I like that, Tom. Sure. It's not even an argument, is it? It's funny, because Tom sells all these gray market CD-keys out of the trunk of his place. Yeah. Right. I guess Boulevard will slide me. No, no, I get what you're saying, Patrick. Like you can make it difficult. You can create your own roadblock such that you're simulating the natural roadblock of not being able to travel quickly. Yeah. You can geofence well enough. But my point is like, that's a losing game over the long term. And maybe that long term is a century long, but that's a stupid way to run things. And it's not tied to geography. So eventually it's going to evolve into something where people are just putting roadblocks in for whatever reason. And I think it will erode away. I think it's just a matter of time. Well, part of it is also different municipalities and different authorities levy their own amount of tax on particular products. Oh, yeah. This is all still yet to be fought out. Like the idea is like if I'm broadcasting right now in Finland, which law should apply to what I'm doing? Well, you're supposed to supply a barrel of herring for every fortnight you're online. And is Finland part of the EU? Yes. It is. Okay. It's Norway that's not. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So Finland uses the euro? Yeah. But Sweden doesn't. Sweden basically, Sweden doesn't, no. But basically Finland has the scary neighbor on the other side. So as soon as they could, Yes. As soon as they could, they rushed to every Western institution they could and they joined the EU and got the euro and they were like, all right, where with you guys? Yeah, it's my buddy France. Once they say plant their saunas with jacuzzi, then they'll have made the complete switch over. Wow. Yes. Ah, yeah. I mean, there are questions being asked by some, internal Finnish politics are fascinating because they, well, anyway, topic for another time. Topic for the Phineas Club. You should plug it. Well, people are still listening. Or is it the Phineas Club? Ooh. It doesn't, for a lot more, Canada. No, it's fascinating. Like I do think, I do, I'm not as absolutist as I was presenting myself a moment ago, Patrick. I do think that those roadblocks though are going to be in an entirely different form eventually. And they may or may not be related to locality. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but locality is, but well, as long as you have different prices that different markets can bear, it is very helpful to, it's not, I mean, it's not like, it's not exactly like the different windows of broadcasting for movies and for TVs and like, because this is, I don't know, I'm thinking about counters to my own arguments. I was gonna say, this is easily countered by piracy, but it's also the case in gaming. I know lots of people who actually go and pirate games and don't even care if they- The principle is when you have to go to effort to make the system work rather than the system just naturally wants to follow that way of doing things, it won't last. It's more, I hate to bring out the M word, but it's mercantilism. Like it will eventually be, it's eventually too much effort to continue and someone will realize that it is in fact more profitable, but not just about money, more profitable as a human experience to not have to keep spending effort to create this fake thing. This artificial- I think you're a little bit idealistic there, but- But history has shown that to be true. It doesn't happen fast, which is why it's worth continuing to try to push the artifice if you're a company that has a quarterly report. Because you're like, sure, it might not work in 50 years, but it's gonna work next quarter and that's all I care about. And even if you're talking about, even if we're not talking about next quarter, even if we're talking about two or five years. Yeah, sure. Yeah, anyway. It's like nobody wants to be inside those companies, nobody wants to be the guy that admitted reality because then they'll get blamed with the bad quarterly report. So explain to me why I feel so queasy about G2A and not so queasy about the Pirate Bay. I don't know. I'm curious about that too. I think it's because it's a for-profit enterprise. I think it's because G2A is actually making lots of money. Pirate Bay is too, they sell ads, but they just don't charge you directly. Yeah, but it doesn't, maybe it's branding, maybe it's just, you know, it feels like liberation of the- I don't know. I feel like maybe it has to do with that GoDaddy comparison, right? No, okay, no, I know, actually, sorry. G2A, I can go buy the game on Steam, on Humble Bundle. It's available for me for pay now. Often the issue with things that were available on the Pirate Bay were that they weren't available for you otherwise. You had no choice. That was the only place you could go. Yeah, so like a TV show or a movie that wasn't available in your market, it just was not available. And I think that's the difference. But it's just shopping around. It's just getting a better price. Maybe because it straddles that line. And so it's really hard to kind of place it. I don't have a problem with the gray market. I think the gray market is fantastic. I think gray market helps us stop companies from having monopolies and manipulating prices more than they need to. I do have a problem if an entity, whether it's G2A or anybody else, is engaging in fraud in order to support that gray market. In other words, if they're, even if they're just turning a blind eye to credit card abuse, that's a problem. And this seems like it was a really easy thing to fix if the developers and the marketplace cooperate and say, yeah, we'll alert you when a code is known to be fraudulently obtained and you can disable that. Actually, sorry, I thought about something else. We had dealings with them when I used to work for Blizzard. And I remember that they would sell gold and sell leveled up characters which are obtained through hacking and cause all sorts of problems for- That's a dark gray market. That's not even a gray market. It comes from hacking. It's not illegal, but it's against terms, right? Well, the thing is, it's not illegal to sell a character, but the way it was working was a goal that was gotten from hacked accounts that would get their gold or items stolen or sold. And, you know, so- It puts G2A in the position of like, I didn't ask where it came from, just fell off a truck. And you had farms of players in China, most of the time, that would hack and gather the gold and all of this. So anyway, so that's, I mean, that's also why I have an unfavorable view. That would explain your sort of lingering background. Yeah. It's a legacy memory. You know, it kind of reminds me, remember? I don't know if that's still in business, but there was a Canadian guy who lived in Vancouver. And since Trader Joe's a supermarket chain that is very popular in the U.S. It's actually owned by Aldi, but, you know, they didn't want to open one in Canada. So he went down and he would just buy stuff and he opened a store called Pirate Joe's. And he was just a store of stuff. He bought a Trader Joe's and resold. Trader Joe's sued him in court and they lost it. So- Well, that's the, you know, how the, you know what we should have used as the example for the gray market? Everybody's seen like a candy bar or something that says not labeled for resale. And that's what that means is like, hey, we were selling this as a box of 50, but it's not, you're not allowed to go buy that and then resell them individually. And the thing is, you can. I don't think they can stop you, but they put that not labeled for resale. This is not for resale to dissuade people from doing that. Yeah. I think this is equivalent to the humble bundle things, which we both agreed isn't illegal. It certainly perverts the spirit, especially for humble bundles. It's like they're sold at the bundle of 10 games for five or 10 bucks, right? So it's not even the kind of prices you would see in a box of Mars bars that are sold by the 50. So it's even more of a perversion of that of the spirit of the thing. Mars bars. I hate Mars bars. Never liked them. Oh, I have someone on Twitter that is berating me for saying that Amazon Prime, for not saying that Amazon Prime is a horrible, capitalistic enterprise because they just started the Amazon Prime Now service in Paris. So we discussed it in the latest show and someone said, yeah. With the hashtag capitalism equals nice people, ha, ha, ha, like they're making fun of capitalism. Yeah, capitalism is pretty funny. Yeah, I think it's fun sometimes. Yeah. It's that fringe of people that think I'm a horrible, leftist, commie, far, no, the opposite. No, oh, I always touch. Well, so that's the thing. When I talk about things that pertain to politics in anywhere else outside of France, actually, I'm considered a left-leaning person. And when I talk about stuff in France, I'm considered a right-leaning person. Yeah, because I say the exact same thing. I think I could give an example. Patrick would say to an American like, no, I think unions have a role. Ah, you're a lefty. And in France, he would say like, I think unions can adapt and change some of the ways they operate. Ah, you're a conservative. Exactly. Basically. Ah, yes. Sir, our trust word of the is what I'm hearing. Is that you? Oh, is this the meaning of the word? Yes, that's exactly what it is. Roger says, I'm in trouble. I have a question for Patrick if you have time. Okay, after we're off the air. Yeah, I'm gonna stop us right now. Thanks everybody for watching. We'll talk to you tomorrow. All right, we're off.