 Welcome to the DTS pregame. I'm Tom Merritt, alongside Scott Johnson, Roger Chang giving you the lowdown on what we'll be talking about in the Daily Tech News Show. Then we will do the Daily Tech News Show, talk about the things that we'll talk about in the Daily Tech News Show, and following that, we will have the post-show wherein we will review and talk about the things that we talked about in the Daily Tech News Show. This is just you practicing for FSL. That's what this says. It's exercising that FSL muscle. I like it. Wait, patrons of FSL tonight at patreon.com slash FSL tonight have a chance to get a sneak preview of the preview episode of the 2016 season. It's up there on the Patreon already, because the Archimangels are looking good, and the Los Angeles Guardians of the Galaxy moved to Xandar. Whoa. What does that mean for fans? Well, that means fans in Los Angeles are upset that Xandar stole their franchise and burning all their gear. They get the rams. Yeah, they're fine. We'll just take a little further away. Oh, I was going to say one quick thing. This Google thing, it's Keefy, or is it Kai-Fi? I was saying Kai-Fi. All right. But you know what? I don't really know. Keefy just sounds weird, but then things sometimes sound weird. According to how to pronounce.com. Yeah, I never trust that thing. Keefy. Keefy? Keefy. Keefy. Keefy. Yeah, but really. I was thinking Kai-Fi. Kai-Fi like Wi-Fi is what I'm talking about. Yeah. It doesn't work. For what their business is, Kai-Fi is sensible. Yeah, I can't find any references to them anywhere either. Oh, you're spelling or pronouncing your name. So, Jen tells me that, was it Kai-Fi? Kai-Fi in Italian means what are you doing? What are you doing? Oh, really? Hmm. Merit. However, they're not Italian. This guy says your name. Pronounce Merit. Merit. Merit. Merit. Merit. Like he's Russian. Merit. Sober Russian. Merit. Gaggula. Johnson. Johnson. All right. Jensen. I'm going to take these robot people's word for it. All right. This one. Butthole. Oh. Sorry. Where did that come from? How to pronounce .com. All right. That was super dumb. All right. You guys ready? Yep. Let's do this. Here we go. This is The Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 13th, 2016. I'm Tom Merit joining me today, Mr. Scott Johnson. Chief frog, frog pant studios. Is that your CFO? Yeah. I'm normally amphibious. I prefer water over land. If you ask me what kind of beer I like, I say bud. If I lick your back, I get high. Yeah. Oh, big time you get high. Yeah. No. Scott, of course, always here on Wednesdays, host of the morning stream of which I am also a peer on Wednesdays and the instance podcast, all of that sort of thing. Today, we're going to talk about the computer fraud and abuse act. I'm going to do my best to try to explain it. Yeah. I'm excited actually to have this because I don't know. I know that this is important. I know that it feels landmarky. All these things seem really important to me. But whenever these things happen, I'm like, oh, Bitcoin and who knows? And then I go to Tom and it all makes sense. I'm really looking forward to Professor Merritt. Well, you don't have to be a lawyer and nor am I a professor to understand the one glaring problem with it. There's lots of little problems with it, but there's one glaring one. We'll talk about that in light of not only that Netflix case we talked about yesterday about sharing your passwords, but a Facebook related case that some say would make it illegal for you to visit a website. If someone told you, do you can't visit my website explicitly anymore? Anyway, we'll get to that in a minute. BitTorrentNews.com launches Monday with coverage of the Republican National Convention that involves our own Justin Robert Young. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is shooting vaccine laden M&Ms from drones at Prairie Dogs to protect them and the ferrets who eat them from the Silvatic Plague. And here are some more top stories. Reporters who got a tour of Facebook's mobile device lab in Primeville, Oregon are releasing their reports, and it is a cool-looking lab. May not be the first of its kind, but we're getting a cool inside look, some great pictures. Here's what's going on. The lab occupies 60 racks in Facebook's Primeville data center. So a rack is like a big shelf for those who don't know data centers. Each rack holds 32 phones, and they aim to bring that up to 64 phones per rack eventually. And each rack has its own dedicated Wi-Fi signal and an EMI enclosure to shut out Wi-Fi signals from other racks and anywhere else. Changes to the app's Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram for either iOS or Android, actually both, are tested on all of these phones. There's about 2,000 phones in these racks. They test them for performance and battery life. Various models run all the operating system versions starting with Android KitKat and iOS 7 all the way up to the present versions. Each phone reboots after the test to give it a clean slate. The team not only is doing this and sharing it with reporters, but they plan to open-source the design of the racks and the software that drives the tests. Now, obviously, in lots of device testing, software testing, and other situations, this kind of it is nothing new necessarily. I mean, there are obviously different ways of testing lots of things. What's unique here is that they're saying, hey, look how we're doing it. And guess what? We're going to open-source our method, and that'll give people a chance to contrast and compare what they're doing. And at the very least, maybe add to it or take away from it or come up with some cool forked ideas on what they're doing. I think it's totally cool. And to see all of these phones, and we're not just talking about, well, here's one iPhone with iOS 7 and here's one Android phone running this version in higher. It's every model. iPhone C's, the five C's, which are the classic ones, all the way up to current models and anything that ran iOS... And not even just one of each. There's a whole rack of iPhone five C's. So you're not like, well, that, if you have just one, maybe that one has a particular glitch. They've got redundancy across the line. Yeah, it's super cool. Like, the fact that they're showing this to us is, I don't know what it is about it, but I'm nerding out a little bit. It looks like some smart people sat down and said, all right, we've got to figure out a way to test all this. Let's try to automate it the best we can. And they've got cable ties, like, all my OCD kicks in. I'm just like, yeah, dude, this is the most organized way to test phones ever. So I say good on them, and I'm excited to see what people do with it. TechCrunch has a write-up on this. The Verge has a write-up on this. Several other places have write-ups. And they not only have the cool pictures, but a little background about, you know, how they started by just having the software that would run on an engineer's phone. But each engineer only had one phone, or maybe at best a couple of phones they could try it on. And they needed to be able to try it on thousands of phones. That's not going to work. So first, they put them all on a big board, but that took up too much room. And so they came up with this rack system. And like I said, other companies provide similar services where they run it on real devices, but Facebook opening it up and showing there's off and open sourcing it, I think is really cool. And you may say, well, there's emulators out there too. Why not just do an emulator? But Facebook says, look, there are, you know, maybe 1% of the cases where it was, it actually had to be running on the hardware for us to find a particular performance, what they call a regression. Yeah, I think that's so super, super cool. I'll tell you what, they really racked their brain on this one. Hey, how about this story, everyone? Google acquired the team behind Kai-Fi. Startup building extensions to collect search and ultimately recommend content links shared on social platforms. And a Google Plus post, Google engineering director, Eddie Kessler announced that the team will work on the company's recently launched group chat app, Spaces, which I've been hearing good things about. Kai-Fi's existing app will remain online for a few weeks and will be available for data exports for several weeks beyond that. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but yeah, Google investing in the future of messaging. Well, not just that, but investing in an app that I think a lot of people assumed was just going to die. You know, Google has this reputation for putting things out there and if they don't catch on just abandoning them and killing them eventually or even killing them slowly. We have a daily tech news show space that a few people were very excited about starting and have been operating on that, so maybe this is your impetus to go join the 115 people in there. Last post was June 30th, so the activity has started to slow down, but maybe now that it's getting some more attention, that'll pick back up. I think it's interesting that what they're doing seems to be looking at an app and saying, okay, if it's not catching on, maybe it's because we're not doing it right or maybe there's a feature that we're lacking that would help it take off. Let's go and acquire that and see if we can do it rather than just ditching it. Yeah, plus I like the name Kai-Fi, if I'm being honest. Yeah, kiffy. Hey, there's a lot of Pokemon Go news out there today. We'll run through some of it for you. Otherwise, they would just take over the whole show. The game launched in its fourth country on Wednesday, Germany. Many players, however, are spoofing locations and side-loading it. In fact, Eileen, my wife, said, I swear I've got a friend in Europe that's doing this and she wasn't in Germany and it was before it launched in Germany anyway. It's like, man, she probably spoofed her IP address or side-loaded it or something. In fact, so many people are doing it in South Korea that it's causing them to have to travel to the border town of Sukcho because in South Korea, Google Maps is restricted. Because of the war with North Korea, they have restricted the Google Maps, but there is one place that is accidentally, I'm guessing, not classified as part of South Korea where Google Maps works and therefore can power the map behind Pokemon Go, so everyone's running to this border town to play Pokemon Go, even though it hasn't launched in Korea yet. We've got more numbers out. Game Tower estimates the game gets 33 minutes of average daily use. That's better than Facebook or Snapchat. They estimate it has 15 million downloads. That seems low, though, because SurveyMonkey estimates that there are 21 million daily active users in the United States, which would make it the most popular mobile game in U.S. history. The game maker, Night Niantic, announced that it will offer sponsored locations in the games. So if you're already seeing companies saying, like, hey, come in, have a coffee, play some Pokemon Go, they could actually sponsor an in-game gym or something like that. YouTuber named Travis D. Figured out a way to use Android emulator BlueStacks and do some GPS spoofing to allow him to wander around and play the game without leaving his house. Mind you, that does violate the terms of service, so Night Niantic will probably shut that down if they can. And U.S. Senator Al Franken sent a letter to Night Niantic expressing concern over the amount of information collected from users in wake of the overextension of permissions with Google, which they did fix yesterday. Senator Franken is asking, why are you collecting data? How is it used and what control do users have over it? Is it opt-in, is it opt-out, and can they remove it? Well, we had a quantifiable amount of data. We know that they were getting from people because of what they referred to as an error. And I know you guys talked about this yesterday, but this full access to your Google account, which is a thing Google lets companies ask you to get. They just weren't letting us approve it. They claim it was a mistake, but we know during that mistake what that level of access means. So I don't know if somebody could just tell Frank in that. Well, that's the question, right? Because Night Niantic says, well, we didn't use any of that access. All we wanted was your user ID and your email address. That's it. And yet Senator Franken says, well, that's fine. Why don't you tell a senator on the record that that's true in a subpoenaable form that could be used in a court of law? And that is different than you and I asking them for a press statement about it. Sure. Well, the weirdness that his Pokemon Go continues to go. We'll see if there's any more stories to get eked out of this thing in the coming weeks. Xbox Major Nelson, rather, posted Wednesday that Xbox Live will now support high-quality Twitch streaming, which it did not previously do. Users will need to link their Xbox Live and Twitch accounts. You had to do this for your PS4 as well, if you were doing that on there. But we'll be able to process their Xbox streams through capture cards or boxes. So you'll still be able to do that. Previously, the only way to get access to Xbox Live's network via Twitch was using the Xbox One app, which limited quality and did not allow any overlays or custom features. Yeah. So essentially, if you're a pro Twitch streamer and you wanted to stream your Xbox One game, you had to not use your overlays. You had to deal with this lower quality stream because it was the only way to do it without a lot of hackery. And now what Xbox is doing is saying, you know what? We'll let you output that stream to a capture card on a PC. All the PC, the PC isn't playing the game. All the PC is doing is taking that stream and putting it out to Twitch so you can put on your overlays and stuff like that and have the highest quality stream available. Yeah. Ironically, well, I don't know about ironic or not, but it brought it closer to what a PC does. And it made it into a streaming device. What's it like? Instead of making it seem like, well, the only way you're going to get this out of this is a crappy app. And for the record, that was a crappy app. It wasn't that great. So now you get to use this thing the way you're used to tying things into your capture cards, streaming it on your big rigs. This is a nice nod, a small one, but a nice nod for Microsoft and Twitch to pro gamers. I think it's great. Yeah. It's a nod to them. The average person who might want to start streaming on Twitch is probably not going to be able to do this without learning, right? Without doing some research. It's not something that you can easily do if you have a PC. You have to get a capture card and you have to know how to hook it up and all of that. But it does cater to that audience and that's an important audience. I agree. Nissan launched ProPilot Wednesday. This is an autopilot-like feature for their cars. It's a semi-autonomous driving function meant to assist, not replace drivers. They're making that very clear in today's climate. ProPilot's main feature is keeping the car at a fixed distance from the vehicle in front of it. So it's meant for a single lane. You're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel, but you wouldn't have to keep braking and accelerating. It would help keep you from hitting the car in front of you, even in congested traffic. Feature will appear first on the Serena minivan on sale in Japan in August. Reuters reports that Jaguar Land Rover is creating its own fleet of more than 100 research vehicles over the next four years to test recognizing obstacles, automatic braking, car-to-car information sharing, and recognizing emergency vehicles. And Fiat-Clariceller is offering bug bounties of up to $1,500 for security weaknesses in its vehicles. And finally, in our Auto Roundup, the UK launched an open consultation this week on adapting regulation to make them more compatible with driverless vehicles. So, am I the only person, speaking of the original Nissan story, that wishes, I kind of don't like this half-measure stuff, and hear me out for a second. I don't know why I want a car that kind of breaks and gasses and breaks and gasses, but doesn't let me take the hands off the wheel, or the ones that let me take the hands off the wheel and sort of Tesla my way through things in autopilot mode. I kind of feel like what I want really is either drive my car for me or let me drive it. Like, that's the binary choice I want. Am I the only person anymore that thinks that... It's perfectly reasonable for you to think that, but remember, it's a psychological thing. You're reacting to the fact that, you know what, this seems like a hassle, because somebody crashed and died, and I don't want to risk that. Let me just be in control of the car. But, it's no different than cruise control. You could say the same thing about cruise control. You know what, I don't like cruise control. If you're not going to drive the car for me, don't hold my speed for me. It's because I'm going to have to intervene here and press the brake. And frankly, that's how I feel about cruise control these days. I don't use it on any of the cars, and both our cars have it now. So, it's not unreasonable, but it also doesn't mean they shouldn't be making these things available, because lots of people use cruise control. Lots of people like to have collision avoidance, which will kick in and help avoid a collision, or keep you in your lane. There's lane change assistance, things like that. So, this is just advancing those. And I think for those of you, it sounds like it's both of us, who are like, ah, it might be more trouble than it's worth to have to deal with that. You can turn it off. You don't have to use it. That's true. I just want it to drive for me. I'm ready, man. I'm not checking. Let's do this. Let's just have driving cars that take me where I want to go. Finally, Google announced new small business plans for its Google fiber customers. I'm very much hoping when it comes to Salt Lake, I qualify for this. This is 100 megabits cost of $70 a month, 250 costs 100 a month, and gigabit service, or gigabyte service, rather, costs 250 a month. I'm paying 200 now for pretty okay internet, but I would gladly bump it up 50 for this. Each account can support up to 13 static IP addresses. The new offerings come along with the launch of Google fiber in Charlotte, North Carolina. Google fiber also operates in Kansas City, Provo, Utah, which is unfortunately south of me, Austin and Nashville, where businesses have until the 31st of this month, that being July, to sign up. By the way, citizens of Provo, Scott means it's unfortunate that he doesn't live in Provo, and that it is in fact south of where he is. Not unfortunate that Provo exists. Yeah, no, no, no. You're a fine city. You're great. I love visiting you. You're wonderful. You're right up on those mountains. Unfortunately, Provo's there. Yeah, you guys are great. No, it's unfortunate. Right, because it's coming to Salt Lake, but it's not there yet. If you're thinking as a consumer, wow, those sound expensive. That is not what Google fiber accounts cost for a consumer, but you get those IP addresses. You get a business service level agreement, which is what I, as someone who relies on the internet for my business, I'm always wanting. I want to make sure that you're never going to put a data cap on me, and that I have priority when I call in with a support request, because I'm a business account. That's what you pay for there. So it is a little more expensive, but the news here is that Google is offering these small business accounts. Yeah, and they're not that bad of a price. A lot of people are paying for this just for home service. For a business account, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, which comes with certain not guarantees, but certain, you know, there's implications that you're going to be better taken care of than just some Shmo watching Netflix on the weekend. I'll be honest. I experienced that with Comcast. When I had a Comcast business account, I definitely got service that I knew I didn't, because I had been a consumer account before that. With Verizon, one... I only ever called them twice. One time, I got top service because it was business. One time, I didn't, and I had to complain on Twitter, and then a very nice person in the audience helped fix my problem. Frontier, I want to say I didn't get better service because I was a business, but the fact that they actually fixed it at all or even called me back has to do with the fact that it was a business account. The people on consumer accounts with Frontier I was hearing weren't hearing back at all. I kind of juries out on Frontier because that was an entirely different transition-based environment that I was involved in. Well, it's the wild Frontier, Tom. Yeah. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We've got loads of people in there helping us out each and every day, like Jason Phil, PC Guy 88, The Corley, Loki Robert, Pork Chop Declown, and more. SP Sheridan's in there today. Submit, vote, DailyTechNewsShow.com. That's at the top stories. But one of these was submitted. It was actually our top, well, I think the vaccine drone that was helping out the ferrets and the prairie dogs. Oh, yeah, listen. They were being called. Close number two. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States. Same court that we were talking about yesterday with that password sharing case. Returned a case between Facebook ventures to the district court and said you need to adjust the $3 million awarded to Facebook. Now, here's what was happening. Power Ventures was asking its customers to use a little bit of their software to send emails to other customers through Facebook. And they got by a lower court convicted of anti-spam violations as well as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Well, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said, anti-spam laws. But you did violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Here's how it worked. Power Ventures would offer you a chance to win $100 if you invited 100 friends to join its service. They would then have the messages sent using the atfacebookmail.com address and come from something called the Facebook team, which was a little misleading. They used software to allow members to do the scraping and sending for them. Hence, the block on Power's account alone by Facebook would not stop the behavior. That was my first question. Why didn't they just kick Power out of Facebook? It didn't matter. They could kick Power out of Facebook, but all of Power's users could still use the software, and that's what the court case is about. Facebook did block Power Ventures IP address trying to stop the software from working, but Power Ventures would just keep circumventing that and changing the IP. So Facebook finally issued a cease and desist which Power Ventures ignored, and that's what the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act case is hinging on here, because Power users clicked a button allowing communication. It doesn't violate the Can Spam Act. They knew what they were doing. They were told, this is what will happen, click here if you agree, they agreed. So there were no false pretenses. That's what the circuit court said. This doesn't violate Can Spam, but because Facebook issued a cease and desist saying you are not allowed to do this anymore, it was considered unauthorized access of a computer system on behalf of Power Ventures. In fact, the judge who wrote the majority opinion said, it would be like if a friend gave you a key to their safety deposit box and said, I authorized you to go open my safety deposit box and get some jewels out. You went into the bank with a gun and the bank said you can't come in here with that gun. You're not allowed in the bank. You're banned from the bank. You can't then sneak in and use the safety deposit box even though you have the authorization of your friend, because the bank said you can't come in. They're saying Facebook's the bank. Facebook said you can't come in here anymore. We don't care if it's your friend's accounts that are sending these messages. It's unauthorized access. So there are problems with that analogy already, because what's happening is not that Power Ventures is going into Facebook. They're asking the friend to do something on their behalf. But the real problem here is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. A lot of people are concerned that this decision will say, well now you can look at the point to this decision, and any time I say you, Scott Johnson, are not allowed to visit tommeritt.com if you just went to tommeritt.com in your browser would that mean you violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and could be fined and imprisoned? Well that's basically the fear. Or that's what this sort of says. And to me the analogy is perhaps this. Telling me that I can't, I can no longer enter I don't know, I'm trying to go to the store. Let's say a Domino's Pizza. I'm not allowed in there anymore, because of an incident we'll never talk about. Well fine. This feels like they're almost saying and you can't drive past it or be on the sidewalk next to it because you can sort of see in there and you can sort of access it from that. Like this gets real nebulous to me saying that I can't visit a website or that it is illegal for me to do so. Yeah, I mean I guess what the judge is saying and credit to the judge, by the way who in the decision points out that an IP address is not a person and therefore you can't pin them for changing IP addresses because IP addresses can be shared by people. But the judge is saying you created the software and so even though other people were running the software you're responsible for what that software does. I think that part is actually fairly sound but whether this is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act actually hints on the fact that almost anything could be a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was enacted in 1986. It has been changed many times over the years even in the past few years. But it says on the one hand knowingly accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access in order to get to restricted government and defense data is illegal. I don't think you have a problem with that, right Scott? Right, I don't have any problem with that that makes sense to me. You are not allowed to quote intentionally access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access to get financial information. You're okay with that, right? I think I'm okay with that, yeah. Or to do that same thing to access a computer without authorization to get to a department or agency of the United States. Maybe not something military or maybe not something classified. But I just want to sneak into the Department of Energy. You're probably okay with that. That seems like a yes, a stone too far. How about this last one? We just got one last one here. You're not allowed to intentionally access a computer without authorization or exceed access to get information from any protected computer. Okay, now that's different because here's an example. Yeah. Was me letting Nicholas at age 12 a Facebook account even though he was supposed to be 13, which means he didn't have true authorization. He had my authorization. He didn't have true authorization from Facebook to say that he was 13 and get in there and start his own account. Did he break the fraud and abuse act? Well, the question is, is Facebook a protected computer? So let's look at the definition of that in the act. It defines a protected computer in terms of financial or government. If it's a financial system or a government system or a protected computer, well, you're fine there. Facebook is not a financial institution nor is it a government yet. But here's the other definition of a protected computer. Any computer used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication. Can Facebook be used for interstate communication? Yes. Ah, but then you're in violation of the Community Fraud and Abuse Act. Yeah. Let me boil it down for everybody again. If you don't access a computer without authorization that can be used for communication across state lines, you are violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Wow, yes. You're like, well, you shouldn't have unauthorized access. But these are the kinds of fallouts from that vague of wording is I say, I don't want anyone to visit my website. Someone clicks on a link, goes to it, they're in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. For instance, who committed suicide in the wake of being prosecuted or the threat of being prosecuted for violating the Terms of Service and accessing journal articles. Should someone be sent to prison or find large amounts of money for violating Terms of Service? Well, here's the bigger question. I was just looking at my phone here. I don't know, it looks like about 12 or 13 apps that specifically ask for permission to push data. Okay? So what I've got here is 12 apps, let's say, that have my permission to constantly, if not every minute or so, pull the internet for data, pull computers across state lines, communicate with them, and pull me data. Under this weird interpretation of this law, and it sounds like the most literal interpretation, so it's not like it's a weird obscure one, I'm breaking the law constantly. Just having my phone on. If it's not authorized access, right? You don't know whether you're breaking the law, although this case that we were talking about at Facebook would put the responsibility for that on the app maker. They would say it was the app maker who is doing the requesting, right? That's why they're punishing power ventures and not the individuals who sent these messages within Facebook. Does at some point this become one of those laws, like they can't walk your cat on Saturdays with Pennsylvania? Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, you look at most of the computer fraud abuse act and you're like, this is meant to protect government computers and financial institutions and a few other very reasonable things that should be protected, right? That's fine. And then it has this one little phrase that sort of makes all of that irrelevant because any computer used to communicate as long as it's not within one state, but it's the internet, right? So any computer used to communicate across state lines, if you access it in an unauthorized manner, is subject to the full imprisonment and fines of the Computer Fraud Abuse Act and we should have better laws for punishing someone for unauthorized access. If I hack into an image database to look at some pictures, I should be punished, that should be a misdemeanor, right? That should be a slap on the wrist, maybe a fine of $100. I should not have to spend thousands of dollars or go to prison because I hacked into an image database and looked at some images. Right. But if you break into somebody's banking system and forward a bunch of money to your account, well that's a whole different animal. And this is why that password decision where they said, well this person getting an employee's password and using it, even though they are no longer an employee and are not authorized to use it, is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. So I'm using so many people to be upset. That was the one we talked about yesterday. Now the court case does not make it definitive that sharing a password violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. So yesterday I was saying, this court case doesn't mean it's illegal to share your Netflix password, but it doesn't mean it is legal either. If you read the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act it is yet to be decided in the courts. Well I don't know. I am accessing the Netflix computers in an unauthorized manner when I'm using someone else's password and therefore I guess I'm violating, and Netflix is in a different state than me, right? So I guess I'm violating the act. That is unreasonable. And that's maybe not how a judge would see it thankfully, but it is a potential reading of this law. Do you think that your personal opinion, that maybe that's exactly what's happening, people are leaving it alone or putting a nice wide berth around this question because stuff is changing so quickly and since 96 you couldn't be in a more different internet world now than you were then and as this stuff changes it's silly to try to be definitive on this kind of case law yet and people are just waiting for precedent to be set. That's how it feels to me. Yes and no. I mean, you haven't seen this work its way through the courts far enough because it's only in the past 10 years that we've had the widespread use of this of the internet in such a way to cause these unintended effects but when Aaron Schwartz killed himself Senator Ron Wyden, Representative Zoe Lofgren and a few other people put together what they're calling Aaron's law which would specifically exclude terms of service violations from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as watering it down a little say look there are minor unauthorized accesses that shouldn't be punished with prison. You shouldn't ruin someone's life because they hacked into Netflix. Plus Eulahs are we'd have to take a real long look as to what those actually are and what we're requiring people to agree to. I mean that just opens up a huge can of worms about a whole bunch of other law that we don't even want to think about in connection to this. It has to do with how fairly or unfairly are customers or consumers or businesses being treated when they sign an end-user license agreement. Those things are nightmares and they would have to simplify that but then simplifying that means they're not as protected or whatever so yeah that just gets more complicated. I'm very I'm really really curious I wish I could go ten years in the future and just look back and go wow look at that landmark thing that happened because I feel like a lot of this stuff is just floating around ready to be tied down finally. Well and every time it comes up in court and someone says well yes that is a violation you'll see all of these articles pop up some a little bit reactionary but but some like the one in the Washington Post today by a well-reasoned legal expert saying you know what this is a bad precedent this may not do the harm here but it is another step towards the road of harm being done and even if you say well no one's going to prosecute a kid for borrowing a password and getting into Netflix that's not how good laws should work. Good laws shouldn't work by saying well no one's going to enforce that law. Good laws should make it very easy so that no one has to think whether they should or not but it's clear. At least as clear as possible I know the law doesn't work that well. Right but it's also it's supreme court bait in a way I just watched a couple of documentaries about very similar things where if you leave something weird on the books and you don't define it and you don't lock it down and you don't revisit it it bites you in the butt legally. Yeah you're out walking your cat on Saturday and suddenly you're in jail. Yep I gotta be careful about that too. I know right I don't know why your cat needs to walk but you should have the right to do it. Gotta catch him. You know he's the cat to catch a Pokemon. You may want to look into that. Anyway this is not something that is settled and there are good reasons to have the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. There are some modifications being suggested by the president which would loosen it and maybe you're in favor of those. Maybe you're not but I'm curious what you guys think about this what the path forward should be and of course if we have any lawyers in the audience who can clarify anything by all means feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com Let's get to our pick of the day. Marlon the guy from Trinidad has it. Google's Expeditions Cardboard App. The app was featured in Google I.O. last year and targeted at schools but it has now been made available for everyone. Marlon says I tested this app with my nieces and absolutely love it. The way it works is it allows one person act as a guide to lead groups of explorers through collections of 360 degree and 3D images while pointing out interesting sites along the way. If the guide points to a point of interest on their device the explorers see an arrow on their device that tells them where to turn to see it. I love this. I think this is awesome in a week where everyone's talking about AR finally coming to fruition in a way that matters and everyone talking about why VR is the next great thing here is yet another example of a cool application of this. I think this is awesome. I want to go on this tour. I want to see this stuff. Send your picks to us folks. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com You can find more picks at DailyTechNewShow.com I got lots of emails unsurprisingly about Pokemon Go. We'll choose a selection here. Steve Bowlin from Great Pokey Weather St. Paul, Minnesota says I'm already losing interest in the game because so many players are paying to win. They're buying lures they're buying incense and lucky eggs and that jumps some players way ahead of the rest and they then dominate the gyms. I'm a huge Ingress fan and this isn't a problem in that game where team players required to get good gear so players with money can't just bypass the game mechanics. He's not wrong. He's absolutely right. This is something games need to take into account when you're building a free-to-play game. Some games do it very well. Some games are terrible. I'd put this in the middle somewhere. I still think it's fun and casual and you can have a good time just collecting Pokemon but if you want to be a serious player and if they expand out on the whole fighting mechanics and you fighting friends and doing trades then things get real hairy and then the pay-to-win model starts to bite them in the butt so they've got to be careful and so far it's not a great model if I'm being honest. Eileen got to level 5 last night when we were walking around and she immediately went into a gym and picked her team and then she did a battle and she's like oh I don't like this. I don't like this at all. These are way too powerful and like yeah there needs to be a better, they need to take a note from Blizzard. I hate to say it about how to ease people in through levels that are appropriate to their gear. Not only that but also Hearthstone is an example. Exactly. Great at free to play. They're really good at it. There is no pay-to-win. Sure you could say I can spend a bunch of money and get those cards and you have a chance of getting cards before other people but in basic set you can still be very competitive so this was a chance for them to kind of tweak that. I don't know, I mean they've still got to make money so I don't know what the answer is. I'm not here providing a better answer of the way they've handled it so far but completely agree with that emailer. A couple others on Pokemon Go here real quick. Brett, Pokey Zombie Spencer says hey as far as longevity goes don't forget they've only got the first generation of Pokemon, the first 250. There are hundreds to come from all the games and additional evolutions for existing Pokemon and Raymond in too hot to go outside to catch Pokemon Athens, Georgia, says wow it's a good thing the kids aren't in school because this would cause a lot of problems for teachers. He says Pokemon cards are already forbidden at a lot of schools and I bet school administrators are already emailing each other about this. If the chat room prediction is correct, the crazy should die down by August when school starts back. Here's hoping. Yeah, no one expects this thing to stand on all time high forever but there has to be a certain point where this dies down and I know 2D teachers personally are very much hoping for this. I was around some 7 year old kids over the weekend, just a quick anecdote and none of them have cell phones yet but they're all huge Pokemon freaks they've got books just filled with mint condition cards and they've played all the 3DS games and they're so into it and I said to them look at my phone look what this is look what I get to do and they said wait you get to walk around and then they show up and you find them yeah and then they were speechless just staring at me like I was a wizard and I'm telling you the minute those kids figure out how to get phones and cell plans we are screwed. Yeah, no pokey stops in schools let's just make that a real ride down. Regarding the FTC punishing Warner for improper disclosure of paid YouTube videos Dee writes, we actually had a similar issue back in the mid-2000s if you remember when mommy bloggers weren't disclosing that they were being paid by advertisers in their posts about their products. Problem today is no one's established when and where disclosure occurs. On YouTube should it be in the title or the text or within the video does it need to be a 3 second card at the beginning does it just need to be said at some point in the video and that's just YouTube what about Facebook, Twitch, Snapchat etc. How does one even fit disclosure in an Instagram post or a 140 character tweet. My point is this whole industry is relatively young and figuring itself out. I tend to agree. I mean I think it's easy to get all worked up about this YouTube thing and specifically what happened with Warner but at the same time we don't really have great mechanisms for this yet and the emailer is totally right. This stuff will suss itself out over time and it may get a little ugly for a bit. There may be some people who are real trouble for doing things that seem obviously bad and unethical but on the whole we're dealing in different territories so we need to be a little bit more ready for the slow implementation of whatever this is going to be in the end. Well yet another Daily Tech news show comes to a fantastic close. Thank you Scott Johnson. What do you got going on? Well in the spirit of fantastic closes I would like to recommend people check something cool out. So I created a coloring book for adults and kids. It's based on a bunch of art I've done over the last 15 years on my comic strip Extra Life. A lot of people out there, listeners here included have bought the actual collection book and many were saying hey you should do a coloring book. Take some of these images, put them in a book forum and let us color this stuff. It's soothing, it's relaxing, it's all these things. So I did and it's up there now frogpants.com. It's right there. It's inexpensive. People really seem to be enjoying them and if you buy gum I got you covered. That's frogpants.com slash store and for everything else I'm on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Just a reminder folks, the show is brought to us by you. If you have not donated to the show you should thank someone else who has because that's why we're here. If you're willing to help us, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. You can buy a mug, you can buy a t-shirt, you can donate through PayPal or you can support us on an ongoing basis on patreon.com slash DTNS and get access to some perks like the DTNS listeners slack channel full of the analyst level supporters at DTNS. If you want just the headlines, subscribe to our new show Daily Tech Headlines. Get the tech news of the day in less than 10 minutes. That's at dailytechnewshow.com slash subscribe and just scroll down to Daily Tech Headlines or you can search for Daily Tech Headlines in your podcast app of choice. 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 alphacogradio.com and diamondclub.tv and visit our website dailytechnewshow.com Back tomorrow with Justin and Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club, hope you have enjoyed this program. Excellent show. What should we call it? Can you hear me? I can! Hey! Awesome! I don't know. Maybe we shamed it. Episode 2808. Can you hear me? Good. The top one is the computer fraud and abusive act. Abusive? Okay. The entire internet violates the computer fraud and abuse act. Let's go for something funny. A walled garden with a moat and alligators and guys with crossbows? Yeah, but what does that say? I'm not sure what that's referring to. It sounds exciting though. It's great, yeah. Now that's what you call a cruise can't roll. Pokemon keeps going. Let's see. Bugfix required for the computer fraud and abuse act. Just make it so it's don't vote for, hey Facebook, nice rack. Don't do that one. Phone rack. Phone rack. Phone rack. Face rack. We need better laws. Bowl disclosure. We need better, we need more informed voters. The computer fraud and abusive act. Another take from Darker Deemer. Poke exit? I don't know if we're there. Let's hold on to that. That's a good one. Let's hold on to that one until we have the story of people no longer playing. That is good poke exit. I like striking riches. Baby, you can drive my car. Get it? I do. Got to cash them all. That's not bad. Yeah. Nothing really grabbing me my non-existent lapels. Well, get some lapels and I'm going to go for the computer fraud and abusive act. Better than fraud. Because the fraud and abusive act, you almost can scan it and not realize that you've changed it. I voted for Zoe brings Facebook isn't a government yet because Tom said that and it made me laugh in the show and it made me laugh now. I like it. Should we do that one? I just voted for the broad and abusive act. That's fine, you can vote for one more. I'll vote for Bacon's. Bacon is a vote for your future. Bacon in every pan. Captain Jack, it's unfortunate Provo exists. It was just one of those unfortunate phrases where I know exactly what he means. I thought you meant Provo alone. Look, Scott's very Provo. What's the deal with Provo? It's a great city. It's a big college town. It's beautiful. There's nothing wrong with Provo. It's only that it has Google Fiber already and the rest of Salt Lake City area does not. Yeah, the rest of the battle doesn't. Which college is in Provo? UIU, Brigham Young University. Wow. UNB University of Utah Valley University so there's now another one there. How's that BYU's in Salt Lake? That's U of U, University of Utah. But Provo is close to Salt Lake. It is. It's like 20-30 minutes. It's one of the big three. There's Ogden, Salt Lake, and Provo. Ogden is a shithole. Salt Lake's awesome and Provo's very clean and nice. So just to be clear, Scott not saying something nice about Ogden. He meant to insult Ogden. People who live in Ogden, they know. Ogdenville was featured in The Simpsons. It was one of the towns with the monorail. Or North Haberbook. I love that episode. That's a good memory on that. Monorail, because it had stong. It's a mnemonic. Monorail. The spoon fell off my pudding can. Let me help you with that. My good man, right? Yeah. So, because there's a chance the track could bend, not on your life, my Hindu friend. You know, a town with money is a lot like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it. No one knows how to use it. Man, you had a lock on the memories of that episode. That's really good. The other one was the Planet of the Apes. The movie, no, the musical. The Planet or the Apes is like, no, the new something musical. And then they do the whole Doctor's Ayes. Doctor's Ayes, that was great. You know, it's funny because the original, like, maybe four seasons were super subversive. And then they kind of fell into a complacency and then they picked up again and then went back down. It's hard. I'm amazed that Fox still finds it worth funding. It's because it's, you know what, I don't even think it's just pure eyeball share. I think it's all the revenue from after sales, like either DVDs or on demand, but also merchandising, right? Sure, but at some point, even that would have to decline, you would think. Like if the show wasn't very good and no one watched it, people would stop buying the merchandise, too. And it would go away. The show's going fine. It's still in top 10 every week. It's like, it ain't going anywhere. Just remember, it came out at a time where people say prime time cartoons for adults. I remember watching it on the Tracy Ullman show. It was probably shorts they did. They were great. I was still in high school. I was a junior high. There are people who've lived their whole lives with The Simpsons on TV. People who are 40 years old. No, actually that's not true. Because they would have, for their entire lives, they would have had to been born 86, 87. But when does it become the longest running television show? It is. I thought there was still a soap opera that had a beat. You know what, maybe... I think it beat everything, including so it beat Gunsmoke a couple years ago. Right, I remember that. So it became the longest running prime time at that point. And then I thought there was still a soap opera. Oh, you're thinking of... Days of Our Lives? Yeah, but according to the quick... Oh, that's prime time. I'm going to look it up real quick. Notice how we all feverishly try to find this information. So here's your prime time list. This is pretty good. Simpsons, 27 years. Oh, 27, good to know. 27, Gunsmoke 20, Lawn Order 20 and South Park was a 19. Wow. Tonight's Show of Faces. 50, The Open Mind, dramatic series of any genre. Guiding Light which is no longer on, right? Yeah. 50s or something, right? All the rest are basically sports or news shows. As the world turns at 54. And it's still on? No, 2010 it ended. Dang. Boy, that must have been a bummer. The number one at least in the United States is Meet the Press, followed by the Yes, Evening News. And then Music and the Spoken Words syndicated. Hallmark, Hall of Fame. That doesn't count. That's more of an anthology. We'll just throw stuff in. Today's Show, ABC World News Tonight, The Tonight Show at 62 years. Face to Nation 62. And it is written First Religious Program. That's why I've never seen it. I watched Joel Olstein myself. Of course you do. It's great. I watch it not only because I'm a very religious man as Tom knows, but also because I'm fascinated at the role that not just religion, but like evangelical movements and how they often cross over into a lot of the motivational and self-help kind of areas of your life. I mean, you sprinkle in God, Jesus and belief. But a lot of the stuff, if you strip out those words, it sounds suspiciously like a motivational seminar. Oh my gosh. Criminal Minds. Grey's Anatomy is still airing? Yes. What? I had no idea. Elaine stopped watching it a few years ago, but it's still on. I think my wife quit right around the time Catherine Heigl took off. That feels like 20 years ago. That was a while ago. Law and Order still on? Special Victims Unit. It's in its 17th year. SVU is in its 17th year? Yeah. Oh, they have Law and Order. Oh, that started in 2009. I'm just looking at the averages. The averages on scripted television is like nine seasons is very common. I thought seven was more common, but nine sounds like nine. Maybe you're right about that. Let's see, seven was the like, you need that to get syndication. You know what? You're right. And they stop at seven. They don't go lower. And it is the bigger number. You're totally right. I was wrong. I mean, you can get syndication with less than seven seasons, but seven seasons is the ideal. I love reading the order of these. That may not be right. That's not true, because Star Trek the original series is only two seasons. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You could still get syndication without that many seasons, but... Generally, they like it because you can really advertise the cost of buying into it. Like, mash. Mash used to be on like every night. Hey, I don't want to freak you out or anything, but Malcolm in the middle with Brian Cranston was on for more years than Breaking Bad was. Wow. Yeah, Breaking Bad was... Breaking Bad wasn't on that long. I don't consider it a long running show. No. No, and it was intentionally finished when they wanted to. You know, it's like a different... No, it's a different time now. Yeah. Well, I remember when Lost decided to finish at the sixth season and they were like, basically we really only wanted five. Yeah. That's that Nicky and Paolo in there. Well, and Game of Thrones is the same thing where they're like, we have an end. We're not going to just keep making Game of Thrones and coming up with new things to throw at you. It's not the never-ending story. But isn't it, Tom, because you can just have another set of Thrones and new games. What are they doing to spin on? That's what the head of HBO is saying to Benioff and Weiss. It's like, come on! Just come up with new games for the Thrones, you know? I'm wondering what they're going to do because with the Brexit, they don't get that grant from the EU. Brexit hasn't even been triggered yet. And after it's triggered, it takes two years. And I imagine the UK is going to go the full two years before it leaves. So you think they can squeeze out a couple more seasons? They're shooting this year, the second to last season. There's a total of 15 episodes left, that's it. Both the next seasons are shortened and it's 15 total episodes. So it's really only a regular season and a half, if you think of it in the math. So there, Brexit wins. Everyone wins. Also, I've heard spin-off talk, but I don't remember where I read that. Not spin-off, but other tales in the world of... Well, yeah, there's Duncan Egg. That'd be kind of fun. Popeye. The Adventures of Popeye. No, Duncan Egg stories. George Irvind actually wrote stories called Duncan Egg. Oh, I didn't know about that. I still would watch Popeye. Wait, like Egg as EGG? Yeah, well it's short for Aegon. It's about Aegon Targaryen and Duncan... I was thinking it could be a funny spin-off series called The Scrambled Adventures. Of Aegon? Duncan Egg, right? Yeah, but that's another thing, is they could go total prequel and have young everybody. They won't. I don't think they do a full Aegon-era prequel, but... The Hot Pie Adventures! The Hot Pie Adventures, sorry. Maybe they can extend it into the 18th century. It'll be like the age of sale and colonizing new lands and stuff with dragons. Has anyone successfully... I know there's lots of books, Tom, who translated a TV or movie a modern setting for a fantasy series that isn't Harry Potter. Oh! I know comic books, but I don't know any... Yeah, like TV series or movies? Yeah. Like Elf Punk? Oh, wait, you know what? What was the one that... Wait, do you count like... What was the Charmed? Like shows like Charmed or Bucket of Maffard? Supernatural! Yeah, but I'm talking like... Well, maybe what I'm asking for is too specific. Like I want the archetypes of knights and paladins and wizards and orcs and... Have you seen Once Upon a Time? Dressed in Files, but it was... Yeah, those are actually decent examples. None of you say it. Once Upon a Time is actually... I want to spin off, and this could just be a book, a Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, that is that world in a post-industrial age, like a computer age. So Westeros and Essos have advanced technologically. They now understand when winter is coming, they have a meteorological computer that could tell you that. Like, what does that world look like when it gets all of the technology we have today? So this is the one crux of the issue with that. I understand because I used to have a strong interest in like, what if you take all this kind of magical fantasy tropes and you brought them into a more contemporary setting where you had automobiles, airplanes and stuff like that. The problem is like, at what point does the science of the magic intersect where you kind of say, well, that doesn't really make sense. Well, I love the idea of, first of all, the seven kingdoms have now become nation states and there's, you know, there's a united nations of the planet. And then, you know, they now understand the White Walkers. The White Walkers are an endangered species kept on reserves north of the wall. The wall is now managed by the Department of Interior of Starkland. I love that idea. We visit the White Walkers reserve to find out how they are treated. Like a documentary exposing malhandling of the White Walkers. I like it. I like it a lot. There's actually a, I mean, as far as fictional universes go, the Warhammer universe, which is a lot like Warcraft, is a fantasy set thing that's, you know, horses and swords and wizards and magic. And then they have the Warhammer 40K which is 40,000 years later and it's space marines and giant armadas and ships that still work still exist. They've got technology and it's, you know, they've kind of done what you're saying. They've taken this. They have, but it's also, it's a weird, like, Warhammer 40K is kind of weird because they tried to shoehorn all the stuff that made Warhammer great into, like, a space. We want space and lasers and missiles and stuff. But the, like, with the warp and then the warp is what do you call it, the corrupted space marines. Oh, I forgot. But I understand what you're saying, but, you know, I, at some point you end up with the ideal situation honestly as you end up with something like Star Wars because that is one of the few examples where you can, you can kind of manipulate magic, the force into a tech, technological alien, you know, rich civilization and it doesn't feel out of place. You kind of just did it. Yep, that's exactly it. Like, that's, maybe I already have what I want. Star Wars is what I already wanted. Maybe that's, maybe because it feels right there. You don't have, see, the problem is trying to wedge in, like, modern conventions, like, well, everyone's got cell phones and you know. And what the key is, you're trying to do it, I think, you're trying to do the trappings of modern society instead of doing the core of the society, which means better education, freer access to forms of transit, you know, you can move jobs and stuff. I'm sure of the world of Game of Thrones is a little more less Keynesian and a little more laissez-faire in terms of their economy with everyone. I think things would change, would probably turn out a little different. Yeah. Are you criticizing the fiscal policies of the Baratheon administration? Maybe. Maybe if they harness the dragons like Clydesdales and use them for, like, events like a Christmas event, where they just pull a large carriage around, you all clap. I'd be all in. Signing out. Because really, you don't only see a use for large draft horses anymore other than show pieces. Which is kind of sad. Oh, and also Renfair. You'd people use them for jousting. Have you ever seen them? They put the homemade armor on it and stuff and they charge at each other. Wow. It's a lot of money for something that happens about once a year. I used to have a neighbor kid that would do that on his bike. He wouldn't have fake armor and a jousting stick and him and his buddy would go at each other on the street. That was always fun to watch. Alright, well, we've solved that. So I'm going to take us off the air. Star Wars. Star Wars.