 of France. And then the chicken told the guy on the side of the road, that is why I cross it. Oh, now it makes sense. It makes total sense. No, it doesn't. All right. I would ask everyone to hold their applause to the end of the show. Well, no, they they could applaud now. Right. Once, once now before the show begins, and then please hold your applause to the end of the show. No disturbances like presidential debate rules will have no no remarks from the audience during the recording of Daily Technicians. Unless you're in the pre-approved chat room, in which case you can come and type quietly. Which, by the way, if you're listening or watching this and you're like, where is that chat room? It's there 24 seven. If you're watching live, you get to talk along with the show. But if it's the show's not live, there's still people in there you can hang out with at irc.chatrealm.net, or you can also access it from diamondclub.tv. You should do that. It's why I turn off chat when I remember on the YouTube channel. All right. Shall we begin? Let's. Daily Tech News Show is powered by its audience, not outside organizations. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 29, 2016. I'm John Merritt, joining me today. Mr. Tuesday, they call him all across Europe. Patrick Beja. Mr. Tuesday. Is that a more tame version of a calendar? You know, the sports calendar thing? We should do a Daily Tech News Show calendar. And if we do it, we have to wear swimwear, right? Sure. Like those old-fashioned ones, you see, from the 20s? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the stripes. In that case, Mr. Tuesday is absolutely the one I would want to get. And we're using all of this sex to sell you on the idea of our conversation about zero rating coming up later in the show. Actually, I think this is... Interestingly, interestingly, zero is probably the kind of rating we would get with such a calendar. That's always... It makes us... You're absolutely right. Zero rating. And regarding to Direct TV now, kind of kicking off the conversation, but we're going to talk about India, we're going to talk about Europe, and all the different attitudes towards zero rating around the world. And if you're like, I still don't understand what all this means, we're going to help you understand that as well. But first, let's do some top stories. The UK's Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 received Her Majesty's Royal Ascent Tuesday and became law. ISPs will need to store your browsing history for all your customers if you're in the UK. For 12 months, that will be implemented sometime between now and December 31st. Police and government agencies will not need a warrant to view those histories. Police and intelligence agencies may now obtain a warrant to access computers, networks, mobile devices, and servers and copy data off of them in pursuit of criminal investigations. A warrant for both data collection can be obtained for those not living in the UK. The Investigatory Powers Commissioner and Judicial Commissioners will be appointed by the Prime Minister to oversee the process and make sure it's all going well. More than 130,000 people have signed a petition calling for the bill or the act as it is now to be repealed. And that means Parliament will need to address the petition. It doesn't mean they have to change anything. Well, they probably won't. But Tom, you're usually the calmer voice in the conversation. But surely, even you have to admit that this is, at the very least, quite extreme. And I'm measuring my words very carefully because I could use other words. A lot of this has to do with how much you trust the judiciary and the warrant process. If I believe that warrants will only be issued in cases that actually need this kind of investigatory power, then most of the act is reasonable. That itself is a question, though. A lot of people are saying, yeah, but a lot of these commissioners will just sign off on anything. So there's a debate to be had about that and how do you best hold people's feet to the fire and make sure the judiciary is acting responsibly and that requests are necessary. There's a whole lot of discussion to be had around that. The part that I don't really see as defensible in large part is storing my browsing history, not mine because I'm not in the UK, but storing the browsing history of every UK customer for 12 months and allowing the food service to go in and take a look at it when it thinks it needs to. There's definitely that. And honestly, the concern in the conversation about the way the warrants are going to be issued is valid and would be, as you mentioned, worth a very serious talk if that was a teenager doing things and you were their parent. You would sit them down and have a serious discussion. But the storing of the browsing history is a huge concern. And pretty much if we had written the kind of law that we would have deemed nightmarish five years ago, that's the kind of law that we would have written. We would have said, oh, imagine maybe one day we'll get to that point. Well, guess what? We are at that point. And another important thing to remember is this is a concern today already, but the more the more pressing issue is really what happens down the line in five, 10, 15, 20 years because I can guarantee you that no government is going to take the responsibility of repealing this kind of law unless you know it's someone that actually runs on that platform specifically. Because if you do, then you take the risk of the next random attack, which is inevitably going to happen is blamed on you for removing it. And so we don't know what kind of governments are going to be in place in again, 10, 15, 20 years. So yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are two other reactions to this. One is the very sensible reaction of yes, but I want the police to be able to find metadata about people who commit crimes, people who commit murders, you know, people who do things that are against the law. This is not a rigorous enough system to allow for that and prevent abuse. I'm personally not against the idea of a lot of the stuff being allowed with a rigorous system that checks abuse of this. What happens is when you make it easy, which it's like, yeah, okay, if I'm in pursuit of someone who blew up a subway station, I want to be able to get information quickly. That's usually the justification for this. But when you do that, then it becomes a little, everybody who's ever worked in any job is experienced mission creep, right? We're like, well, he didn't blow up a subway station, but he did shoot someone. So let's use it for that. Well, he didn't shoot someone, but he didn't threaten someone. Let's use it for that. Well, he didn't threaten someone, but you know, he wasn't very nice to the cops on the beat, you know, and it can just keep going if there's no checks and balances. That's why we have needs for warrants. That's why we have a system like that. So this charter is just very faulty. And the fact that, again, I mean, maybe storing browsing history on people would be okay if you had iron clad prevention, which I'm not even sure how you would get in some sense, but it's the opposite of that. Pretty almost anyone involved in government can get it browsing history. Now, when I said there are two reactions, the second reaction is I always assumed that everyone could see my browsing history anyway, because it's the internet, which is a perfectly wise assumption. And so, therefore, I use VPNs and I take other methods to obscure my browsing history, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Great. That's fine. And you should do that, especially now in the UK. But that doesn't justify the law. Yeah. I think you said pretty much everything. I don't want to draw this out too long. But for the people who think, well, I want the cops to have easy access to the criminals data. I understand that sentiment, but I have a sort of extreme thought experiment that I usually go to, which is, of course, we always want the cops to have an easier job identifying the guilty. But you know what would make everything super easy for the cops? It would be to read everyone's thoughts. Let's say we invent that kind of technology one day, should we have everyone's thoughts catalogued and stored for everyone to access at any time because it would make the cops job super easy, right? So of course, I think no one would agree to do that. But I think it expresses the fact that there are some limits to what we want to agree to enable police enforcement to do for the sake of being more efficient at their job. Yeah. My biggest problem is balance. I don't have a problem with giving police access. It's with checks and balances. And they did a little bit to balance this out from the original version. The original version was even more overreaching than this. They put in an investigatory powers commissioner. They put in a few other safeguards, but I don't personally believe they did enough. All right. Let's move on from that hot potato and talk about Bloomberg sources that say Amazon is developing an Amazon Echo-like speaker with a seven-inch touchscreen. While it would still be operated with voice commands, the screen would display things like weather and calendar appointments. It would also supposedly have better speakers than the current Echo. Yeah. And maybe it's not a touchscreen. Now I'm looking at the Bloomberg article. I'm the one who wrote touchscreen, and it may just be a regular screen. But even so, this is in advance. The ball is in Amazon Echo's court right now with the Google Home out there and getting good reviews. People saying they're loving Google Home, and it does a few more things than Amazon could do. Echo's big advantage right now is that it's been out long enough that it has more apps or skills as they call it available than Google Home does now. But that advantage can erode away very quickly as people start to develop more apps for the Google Home. So what do you do next? Well, this may be it. Putting a screen on the Echo just on its own isn't enough, but if they design it right where it says, hey, here's a little visual aid to go with the things that I can tell you. I could see that being very compelling. It also depends on the price. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because the Echo started as an interesting item because it didn't have a screen, and it was only voice. So the fact that they're adding one, while it makes sense, is sort of putting it in a different category almost just by virtue of having a screen. And the price thing is really important as well, because if it becomes priced high enough that it's kind of the same price as a tablet, then you kind of think, well, is it, you know, I think for certain uses, it's definitely specific enough that it would be used like that. But then you're going to start to want to touch it and to pick it up and to use it for other things probably. So it blurs the lines between the categories there, which I think it might not, you might not want it to be a touchscreen. But if I can turn to my Echo and say, show me my calendar, if I can turn to my Echo and say, tell me the weather and show me the radar. There are legitimate reasons why you'd want to look at something that just can't be told to you. You don't want someone to describe the weather radar to you. Or if I'm in the kitchen and I want to watch a baseball game and I've got MLB.TV plugged into there, I can say, play the Cardinals game. And then it just comes up. I can do that right now with audio. It would be nice to have video as an option as well. I mean, it's definitely nice, but I'm always mindful of the things that come after that. When you do have something on your screen that you do want to touch and you want to interact with in a way that would make more sense than just by voice, things like that. But we'll see. Yeah, especially in the kitchen when your fingers are covered in garlic like I mine are most of the time. Wednesday, the White House in partnership with Stanford Poverty and Technology Lab and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And yes, that Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's wife, will co-host a summit on poverty and opportunity on the Stanford campus. The two-day invite-only event will include an interactive demo by Palantir, a Peter Thiel-backed company, on how real-time data can reduce incarceration, hospital use, and homelessness. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Y Combinator Sam Altman will hold a lunchtime conversation about universal basic income. 275 people from the industries of technology, philanthropy, community service, government, academics are invited, betting nobody's poor. Probably not. There are a bunch of interesting ideas in there. And I don't know if we want to discuss this as a whole. But the idea of universal basic income, I think, might many Americans had explode. But it's a really interesting one that's gaining ground. It's getting debated a lot on places like Hacker News. It's something that folks who are into technology find very interesting, whether they're for or against it. It's very popular in the tech community. So it's no surprise to me that that's something that's going to be built here. What is interesting about this to me is the technology community is increasingly being accused of being out of touch, of being arrogant, of being a bunch of rich people who don't care about the consequences. So this, on the one hand, seems like a step to say, we need to reach out and help make people's lives better. We've been saying technology makes lives better. Let's do more to do that. On the other hand, it's also 275 rich people getting together and talking about how poor people should live. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think to a large extent, a lot of the progress and social progress has always been discussed by intellectual and academics. And, you know, it doesn't, it's not always the case, but it's not surprising if that keeps happening as long as everyone is included in the conversation as well. But yeah, we'll see. This is an interesting initiative because it's not the kind of thing we're used to seeing from the tech community. Yeah, I'm still fascinated with the fact that when I really started using technology in the 90s, you know, when the internet was becoming popular, when the web was invented, I saw it as something we outsiders could use to help change the world or even make our own world. And that ethos survived for a long time. It seems to be going if not gone. And it is interesting to see what used to be, I considered, the outsiders who ran the internet pointing their fingers at the people who run the internet now and saying, you guys are the problem. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's there again, many, many different things to discuss here. But I think the internet and technology have changed the world and are still changing it. We might have been blinded to the negative consequences of those changes, but it would be doing ourselves a disservice to forget about the positive consequences as well, which are incredibly, incredibly important. Yeah, I don't think anyone's forgetting those yet. I think mostly it's people rubbing them into everyone's face and saying we you deserve our respect because we created technology that made your life better and you should be nice to us. Yeah, okay, more to discuss at some point. Yeah, more later. Facebook Messenger has added 17 instant games, including things like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Words with Friends Friendsy. The games are built in HTML5 and load in seconds in your message thread. Friends can compete for the highest score, though they won't play head to head. Look for the game controller icon next to the photos and stickers button in Android and iOS. Yes, the ability to play Pac-Man in Messenger with my friends. I want to poke fun at, but honestly, is going to be really popular, I think. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, these kinds of things have been happening for a long time in Asia with apps like Line and others that include a lot of sub-apps and games and things like that. It's not that surprising to see Messenger going that route as well. It's starting to become a full ecosystem on its own. We mentioned this a while ago as it kept growing. But yeah, I mean, why not? I don't really see a negative here. Yeah, and I'm very supportive of the fact that they're using HTML5. That means that these games, even though there's only 17 of them, can be played in your Android app as well as on your browser because it's cross-platform language. And as you know, I'm always in favor of those kinds of cross-platform standards that don't need permission. So I applaud that as well. There's a number of discussions happening right now arguing that the next huge gaming platform is going to be HTML5. And that would be interesting to see. Uber defended itself in Europe's Court of Justice Tuesday against charges of running an illegal taxi service. Uber, of course, has always claimed we're a digital company. We just hook people up with each other. Barcelona's main taxi company brought the case saying, no, Uber, you're not. You're a transport company, and you're trying to get out of following the stricter licensing and insurance rules that you need to follow as a transportation company like we do because we're a taxi company. Lawyers for Spain, Ireland, and France argued that Uber should be treated as a transport company. The Netherlands, which is where Uber has its European headquarters alongside Estonia and the European Free Trade Association, argued that Uber is a digital company and merely connects passengers and drivers. This is such an interesting discussion. I honestly don't know what the right answer is. I usually have lots of opinions, and I mean, I certainly have opinions here too, but I don't know what the right answer is. And what scares, concerns, interests me about all of this is that I'm sure in the case of Uber, it could be defined somewhat narrowly. But if Uber is deemed to be a transportation company, I wonder how that kind of thinking applies to other similar companies. The immediate one you go to is Airbnb, of course. But if you go a little bit farther, where do you draw the line? So this is a fight for Uber's almost survival at this point. And they're going to fight tooth and nail, of course, but I'll be interested to see how it goes. I I'll be honest, the ride sharing aspects where it's someone who says, I am in my car right now going to this place. If there's anyone that also needs to go to that place, I will, you know, pick them up for a few bucks, which is actually what Google's carpool service in San Francisco is doing. I don't you mean the thing Uber never actually is used for that, right? But what it originally was supposed to be used for, of course, that is a digital company. If Uber saying, okay, drivers, you have to accept rides when we give them to you, and you have to meet these certain standards, and you have to do this and that to be Uber X. If if Uber is not the ride, the transport company, then each driver is the transfer like somebody is a transport company in that situation, because it's not just mom on her way to the grocery store willing to pick up somebody. You know, I think the real issue here isn't really whether Uber should be considered a transport company or not. The issue is we're trying to make Uber fit in the context and rules that were designed for transport companies at a time when something like Uber didn't exist. So I think a more productive way of looking at it would be instead of trying to decide what if it's a transport company, it would be to define a specific status for that kind of service that these companies provide, which might not fit within the confines of an actual transport company from 1970. Yeah, no, absolutely not. I think that's a very good point. And VBaster in our chat room says, as soon as the autonomous fleet is ready, remember Uber is one of the companies researching that on the streets of Pittsburgh right now, that argument from Uber isn't valid anymore. Like if you don't have a driver, it's not a ride sharing company. No, but then the one of the main issues they're having is their relationships with the drivers, of course, whether they're employees. That's a good point. A lot of those, a lot of those issues of background checks and sort of thing, those go away, becomes more about simply insurance at that point. Unless how much background check do you have to do on the CPU that is driving that specific car? This algorithm is known to drop you off at the wrong place. It's got a bad record. Korea's ET News has sources that tell it Samsung will add autofocus to the front facing camera in the Galaxy S8, expected in March 2017. Supposedly it will use an encoder method with coils at the side, meaning it will not add thickness to the phone. The voice coil motors, I'm not sure what the voice coil motors are, but they are in the rear camera, the ones in the rear camera sit in the center of the lenses. Yeah. So the voice coil motors are the things that do the autofocus. And what they're doing is instead of using voice coil motors, which sit in the center of the lens, they will use an encoder method with coils at the side for the autofocus, meaning you can take a selfie with autofocus. All that, yep, that's what that is. And a lot of like Boy Genius report reported on this today and said, yes, a feature that iPhone won't have the ability to take a selfie with autofocus. Frankly, that is in this selfie culture, probably a more compelling feature than many of us would like to admit. Well, do we really need specific autofocus on a selfie camera? Not even, I mean, how often are our selfies out of focus is my point. I think they're pretty much always in focus. Well, I am not a professional selfie taker, but I can tell you there are people who struggle with their selfies and take them over and over again and reposition and, you know, have problems. So having autofocus instead of tap to focus is big help when you're trying to make yourself make your duck face look perfect. All hail the encoder method that makes the coils work on the side instead of that like they do in the voice coil motors. According to sources, according to source. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, submit stories and votes on them helps us put together a better show. And we appreciate it greatly. Get on over there and do some vote in yourself. Daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. All right, we're going to take you on a journey of zero rating to catch up those who haven't heard AT&T announced its streaming internet TV service direct TV now. It will deliver 100 plus channels for $35 for a limited time or 60 plus channels for $35. If you want to get the cheapest tier, although why you do that at launch, I don't know. The big deal is that it will not count any of that streaming video against your data cap if you're an AT&T wireless customer. So again, if I'm on AT&T on my phone and tablet and I install direct TV now and sign up for its package when all the video I watch won't count against my data cap. So that's what's called zero rated. In fact, AT&T entertainment executive Brad Bental said late Monday, the company might bundle direct TV now into its wireless plans. So similar to what cable companies used to do and still do with your triple play bundle, you might have a double play bundle of direct TV now and your data package all for a blow low price. If you don't understand zero rating, it can take several forms. It's the practice of basically not counting data from certain services against your data cap. So what AT&T is doing and what Verizon does is something called paid zero rating. They say if you want to pay us AT&T, we will not count your services data against the customer for lots of enterprise level. Lots of advertising agencies do this so they can deliver high quality ads to people and not have the people block them because they count against their data cap. AT&T has several customers. And so what they're saying is direct TV now is paying us even though we own them for this same service. There's also preferential zero rating. That's where providers pay to have or where your company's own service or that of a partner is exempted. So with T-Mobile, binge on is preferential. Nobody's paying T-Mobile, but they've got partners that don't count against your data cap. Facebook's free basics was the same thing. They were giving free data free, not charging data for things like Wikipedia and stuff like that. Then there's unpaid zero rating. Nobody really has a problem with unpaid zero rating. That exempts a certain kind of traffic from a data cap without respect to who is providing it. You don't have to be a partner. It's not a company. The only example I could come up with is an internet exchange in Australia used to do this for locally exchanged content. So a college FTP, local gaming services, if they were exchanged through the nonprofit internet exchange point ix.asn.au, they were zero rated. They didn't count against anybody's data caps, but there was no packet inspection on those. It was just like, oh, we know this traffic is originally locally, so we're not going to meter it. Patrick, there's varying degrees of acceptance of this from the U.S., which sort of has taken a, well, we'll go case by case to Europe, which says we're prohibit in most circumstances, although there may be some case by cases where we'll allow it, to India, which just flat out said, forget it. No, you're not allowed to zero rate in this country. And I think it's really important to understand why zero rating can be problematic. The issue is it goes against one of the fundamental strengths of the internet, which says everyone is on equal footing. Everyone plays with the same access to any person who is connected to the internet. When you zero rate a service, then you make it preferable for your customers to use that service rather than another one. And that means that an established service who can afford to pay to be zero rated, can do that. And one that cannot afford to pay, so a startup, a disruptive company, might be at a disadvantage. So this is a very potentially, again, a very serious issue in the fundamental strengths of the internet. And of course, we have incumbents that are now very powerful, that are trying to make a buck out of it. And at the same time, maybe solidify their position in markets that are parallel to the ones they're running with the ISPs. So in Europe, as you were saying, we are usually kind of anti-zero rating, I would say, unless it is very specific circumstances, which does happen for TV service, maybe music streaming, it does happen sometimes. It's frowned upon, I would say, but what are you going to do? It's kind of the attitude we have to take towards it, although the European governmental instances have been pushing, some of them at least, have been pushing for more net neutrality and competitiveness. And in India, as you mentioned, basically it was very interesting thing that happened. It was Facebook and Zuckerberg who came in and were saying, we're going to give you the internet for free. Well, only parts of it, because we can't give you the entire internet, but that's cool, right? And India was like, what? No, we want the entire internet. What are you talking about? So there are different degrees of dangers in zero, well, concerns in zero rating. And what really concerns me here is how it starts and how it ends. And I think not to get too political, but we've seen people that are advising and potentially going to be named in the Trump administration who have expressed views that are anti-net neutrality in many cases. So I would be wary of these kinds of practices, because they can lead to anti-competitiveness. I think it's fair to say that can be seriously harmful to disruption, which is the strength of the internet. I'm going to surprise a lot of people, I think. I don't have as big of a problem with zero rating as you might think. My biggest problem with zero rating is when it requires deep packet inspection. When you're like, I have to now break into your packets and see what they are. I'm not okay with that. Anything that requires that is just not okay. But if there were a way that you could do it, I don't, in principle, have a problem with a company saying, you know, we have all kinds of economics around transit. And certainly, it costs more for Netflix to deliver video than does for diamondclub.tv. But that doesn't mean that we can't do it, right? So it's not like we're shutting down people from delivering internet. It just costs against people's data cap. And yeah, it will nudge them to use the things that don't cost against their data cap, but it won't stop them from ever visiting things that count against their data cap. There are plenty of things they will continue to visit. And really, the problem is data caps. It's not zero rating. The only reason you can have zero rating is because you have data caps. And that's why we're talking about wireless. You don't see direct TV now coming out and saying, hey, we're going to zero rate against wired connections because as much as there are more data caps in the US than there were a year ago, it's still very unpopular and not everyone is using them. And even where it's being implemented, it's being implemented at the terabyte level. So a lot of people are like, well, okay, I'm not going to get AT&T DSL just because they zero rate direct TV. Now it's just not a compelling offering for them. So the problem really is data caps. And the reason you have data caps is because they've come up with a way of monetizing things. So part of me thinks, well, if you're going to say zero rating is not okay, then why are data caps okay? I mean, it's also another arbitrary system that sort of discourages people from using certain types of high bandwidth experiences on their mobile device because it will use up more data. Well, I'm not a fan of data caps either. But I can understand that in some cases, if we want to go, let's go one one level deeper, a dream within a dream, within a dream. The reason the real reason for data caps on mobile is that there isn't enough competition in that field either. You know, in countries where there is heavy competition, you don't know the case. I don't know that we have more competition in mobile than we have in wired internet here. And we have more data caps in mobile than we have in wired internet. I think it's, well, I think it's partially cultural. I mean, Sprint provides unlimited, T-Mobile provides unlimited. It's AT&T and Verizon are the only ones that have hard data limits. And they're getting pressured to reduce them because of competition. I think it's more that people got used to being charged with a cap for voice on the phone for years, both on wired phones and wireless phones, that the data companies were able to say, oh, well, we're also going to do the same with data. You're used to that. So the reason I have a problem with zero rating more than even data caps, which I agree aren't great, is that it's hard to imagine what hasn't happened yet. And what zero rating does, I think, is restrict the possibility for a really disruptive thing. And if you think back, you know, maybe 10 years ago when YouTube was first coming out, the idea of transmitting video on the internet was kind of ludicrous. Initially, you had tiny postage stamped sized videos of, you know, dubious quality. Yeah. And that was something that was really, you know, if we had had these kinds of zero rating for some things, YouTube would have never had access to customers because it would have been so bandwidth intensive, it would have been cast aside. At least, you know, imagine the scenario like that. And if everything had a data cap that YouTube was difficult to use with, then zero rating would have given a competitor an advantage. But it's a bit of a false analogy because we didn't have those data caps when YouTube was launched. Also, if YouTube, if we had those data caps and there was no zero rating, YouTube wouldn't have been able to take off because it just used a lot of data. Zero rating would not really have been the issue there. I don't know. I mean, I think zero rating in this case, let's say there's a competitor to, well, we go back to the same analogy. What I don't like, again, is that zero rating restricts some things, restricts the fair playing field that the internet has been since its inception. And it's a data cap that does the restricting, though. Zero rating is just taking advantage of a game that the mobile carriers have played. They said, we're going to restrict everything. Oh, and now we're not going to restrict this one thing. And I know that's what's bothering you here. What, here's a scenario I would like to see, and why I think competition helps. T-Mobile has unlimited. It also has binge on where it exempts things from whatever data limits it does have. What if they add direct TV now to binge on? They're just like, hey, we're just going to do it. AT&T, you don't even need your permission. Guess what? You're now in binge on. Hey, everybody, come to T-Mobile. Direct TV now won't get your cap either. Also, we're the only customers that have unlimited. It'd be exactly the kind of thing John Legere would do. And it would undermine AT&T's value of zero rating and thus show that zero rating isn't really a big advantage and kill it before it gets started. That's a lot of ifs. A lot of ifs. And I'm not comfortable with that many ifs for something as important. But who knows? Yeah. Well, I hope you got a little better understanding of what zero rating is. And I hope Patrick and I were able to give you some of the advantages and disadvantages of this. I'll probably go over this a little more in our weekly email that goes out to the patrons at the $5 level. So look for that as well, because we've got some more notes about it. But we have to move on to our pick of the day from you, Patrick. You have discovered that a piece of beauty has been unleashed from its cage. I hope you agree with my assessment that this is indeed a piece of beauty for those who don't know. So let me ask you this, Tom. What is the most beautiful screensaver you've ever seen? Well, you're going to think I'm only saying this because I looked at your pick already. But I think there's a better than 50% chance that even if I had never seen your pick, I would have mentioned that Apple TV screensaver because it is just beautiful. Sometimes Eileen and I find ourselves just sitting on the couch watching the slow Bay Area traffic going over the bridge or the aerial view of downtown New York City. It is exactly that. And I found myself doing this as well. The Apple TV screensaver for those who don't know is landscape views or city views, cityscapes filmed at a high rate, which is then slowed down. So you have a very smooth image but slowed down and everything is well just very slow, the movement of the camera, the movement of the things in the screen. So it makes for relaxing and beautiful screensaver. And guess what? It's now available even if you don't have an Apple TV. A couple of projects on GitHub made it, basically I'm guessing it just hooks to the video itself. It's just streaming video as your screensaver for Macs and for Windows PCs. So you can, you'll have the links in the show notes, I'm sure, but it's called ARIEL, A-E-R-E-A-L screensavers. And you'll find both projects on GitHub, very easy to install and instant beauty for all of your screens. Yeah. I mean, granted, a lot of people in the chat room are having the reaction I had when I first saw this, which was who uses a screensaver? Man, this thing is so pretty. It might just make you use a screensaver. I know you don't mean to. They're really pretty. I hadn't used a screensaver for maybe 10 years. And I just put it back on because sometimes I like looking at it seriously and it sounds silly. No, it's true. Try it out. I'm right there with you because it is just mesmerizing. Yeah, go check it out. ARIEL, like Patrick said, A-E-R-E-A-L. We'll have it in the show notes. A couple of messages of the day. Ian was catching up on YouTube subscriptions after returning from three weeks in Australia and New Zealand, was watching the Unbox Therapy channel and a video called How Alexa Saved Christmas Used Our Daily Tech Headlines Flash Briefing as an example. So I went and watched it today. It was kind of cool. It happened to be a Daily Tech Headlines episode about the Amazon Echo, hooking up with AT&T for text messaging, which was apropos, probably why they used it. But that was really cool. Thank you, Ian, for pointing that out. And then we got an email from James C. Smith in Irvine, California. I think Tesla's self-driving tech is further along than you give them credit for. Check out their demonstration video. I realize it's a demo where they show the good parts, not the bad. I also realize regulatory approval will be a huge hurdle. But still, this is much more than just highway driving like you gave them credit for. Hey, you know what? James C. Smith, this is just a demo and they only show the good parts and also regulatory approval. No, he already anticipated that argument. No, it's a fair point. It is an impressive demo. Yeah, for sure. And Uber is out there with self-driving cars picking up passengers in Pittsburgh. And so is newtonomy. And Google has still got their self-driving cars out there doing things. So I get it. Like there are some impressive things happening. There's a big difference between a pilot program or a demo and actually being able to say, we can put this in practice. It is reliable enough to just let it work with the public. And so even as impressive as these demos are, I'm still skeptical about the end of the year. We'll see. Thank you, Patrick Beja, for joining us as always. What you got going on to tell people about? Well, you know what? Last week, I was all about the politics and the Phileas Club show where we talk about politics and we had a President Trump special episode, which surprisingly was very well received by people of both political convictions. So go and try it out if you're curious. But we just recorded today a new episode of Pixels, the gaming show I do every couple of weeks. And we went over the numbers and trends for the end of the year. We had a few reviews of some of the most impressive games that just came out a few weeks ago. So if you're interested in gaming and gaming news in general, go check it out. Both are available at Frenchspin.com. And my name on Twitter is not Patrick. You can find all of that there to Frenchspin.com. All righty, folks. Well, I want to thank Russ Snigkovsky. And I want to apologize for messing up pronunciation of his name, probably. Steve Roger Prig, Eileen Petrugorobi, and all of the patrons who have easier to pronounce names or don't who support this show. It's because of you that we're able to make this show every day. So thank you. For instance, Russ is brand new, but Steve and Eileen have been patrons for a while. So it takes all of you to make the show happen. And we can't thank you enough. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Now, there's one more thing we'd like to hear from you. If you think there's a particular story that was underrated this year that didn't give enough coverage, we want to do a special about it. So send us an email, subject line, underrated. What story are you like? Hey, wait a minute. Nobody's still talking about this. And it was really important. Send us your underrated stories, please. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com and use the subject line underrated. We're going to put them all together in a special for the end of the year. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Subject line, underrated. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at AlphaGeekRadio.com and at DiamondClub.tv. And our website is DailyTechNewsShow.com. We'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. Hey, this show is part of the rock band. It was right before this. Hey, this show is part of the rock band. Yeah, it was completely intended. I think I just wanted to call attention to the fact that he didn't remember. Hey, no worries. What's up? I don't even remember. It was probably something very silly. I thought you were going to say like, hey, something just came up. I got to go. Yeah. Hey, I know what did we talk about, that exploding phone thing enough? I think we should talk about that more. No, it's seven. That's an underrated story. No one brought it up. All right. Cool. Titles? Yeah, let's do zero cents. I like zero cents. There's no privacy, please. We're British. Zero cents. Cookies, please get out of my browsing history, bro. Samsung brings its phones into auto focus. Stop surveying me, bro. Stop surveying me, bro. I hate that term, bro. It's just so overused. Oh, there's another bro. So many bros. Rating. Watch it as it goes. Zeroing in on zero rating. Tell old cable, let my data flow. British loses its class when it's snooping. I command in your messages. Why not? A game of HTML5. In the game of HTML5, you play cross-platform. Shoot this messenger. I thought you said zero escaping. I am a fan of zero escaping. Auto-focus your duck face. That's pretty good too. And it could be an opportunity for so many mispronunciations. It almost sounds like an insult because it's so close to that. Hey, auto-focus your duck face. Zero cents is running at the top. It's running away with it right now. You're right. It's a good one. I like it. I'm abandoning you because my throat is kind of silly. Go rest up. Drink some chicken soup or whatever you French people do. I'm not there yet. Oh, by the way, in the Facebook games video, there was a French woman who is not at all French. Oh, really? No, absolutely not. The giveaway thing is the striped shirt. Yeah, we don't do that. No, not anymore. Wait, you used to. I remember getting a resume from a French woman when I was working at the pier to work at the store. She had a striped shirt. I think she might not have been French and tried to impress you with that. Or that store made her wear that shirt. She could have been Belgian. I wouldn't have known. That's it. She must have been Belgian. Exactly. I'm not French. She's Belgian or she's Swiss. Oh, right. Well, I don't know. You're not American. You're Canadian. Who can tell the difference? Yeah, I can't. I can't tell. It's very obvious. It's all in the it's all in the how nice they are to you. Yeah, that's actually not true. I know some of the Canadians that Tom knows and I don't remember them ever being nice to me. All right, I'm going. All right. Feel better, Patrick. Bye. Bye. What are you talking about? Back at Tech TV. You talking about Phil? Phil's nice to you. No names. No names. Now you've got, Dark Redeemer did that. There goes my zero rating. Now I've got food fighters stuck in my head. Patrick is giving hugs to the chat room. So yeah, Roger and I were talking before the show about the CW four night crossover event. That's really a three night crossover event because I don't want to say that either because I haven't seen the flash show. Well, I'm expecting them just just from the promos. The one thing that I did notice was Supergirl was the only character from Supergirl in any scene, but the characters from legends are in every scene. So I'm assuming that that's not all from legends episode that it's from all three. But yeah, man, it was a good episode. I was actually a good episode of Supergirl. If it had not been billed as a crossover episode, I would have had absolutely no problem with it. In fact, I was telling Eileen that if they had just said it's a three night crossover and then ran Supergirl and everybody's like, well, why aren't they including Supergirl in the crossover? And then you get the little like thing at the end from Barry and Cisco, then I would have been like, oh, that's really cool. But as it was, it just fell way short of what they promised. Yeah, we'll see how the flash unfolds. I have a feeling that all the good stuff will just happen on legends tomorrow. Well, that's the last one of the week. So obviously, that's going to be the better. That's the weakest show that they have right now. And I can totally see them trying to use that one. No, I think they're definitely putting legends in all three of the other shows to get people to get interested in. And it wouldn't be too weird because a lot of the characters are either from the flasher from the arrow. No, totally. In fact, Damien Dark is, and I don't know if this will play into the crossover event, but Damien Dark is in legends because they go back in time that can go back before the events of Arrow. He's almost a regular in this season this year. Yeah, my wife likes him. He says he's a good villain. Yeah, he was good and justified, too. I'm kind of getting annoyed with Arrow as a show. There's a lot of whinny-ness to it now. Oh, I feel like it's less whiny than it was last year. Wow. Last year, that's all it was. It was like, I get it. Just move on or something. No, I feel like this year they've started to actually move on. But enough. Yeah, I really screwed up that ending thing. I just pasted their names into... Did you see that in line 43? That's why I was so stumbly. I thought you put it for a reason, so I wasn't sure. No, it didn't make any sense. I just accidentally pasted their names in the middle of a sentence. Usually I replace that sentence. I was trying to say Eileen Petringaro. So I had Petringaro be because it was just run-on. So help me look for that kind of stuff. Yeah, I wasn't sure when you pasted that in. I thought it was like, oh, I should have asked you. Yeah, that's all right. First, I thought I hadn't pasted their names in, which is why you saw me leave the screen for a second if you were looking. So I went to grab my other laptop to see if I had written it on there. Oh, yeah. Usually I'm just concentrating on what's trying to find the correct screen for what you guys are referencing. At the end of the show? Oh, no. I mean, during the show. I didn't see you disappear at the end of the show. Yeah, it was while Patrick was talking about frenchspin.com. I jumped over. Tindex says all the CW shows are whiny. Well, partly I blame that partly because it used to focus on a young, not young adult, but what do you call it when someone's in their 20s? Yeah, millennial. But they focus on that demographic, like the attitude or, I hate to say this, but their attitude is, I'll look, is still kind of high school-y, except they're older and they're generally out of the house or independent living, but they're still drawn to that kind of like... That angstiness. Yes. I'll be honest though. I think the reason I still enjoy these shows is my expectation was set for it to be Gossip Girl. And Arrow didn't like that the first season, and it's moved so far away from it that I'm still enjoying it. I hated the first season, so it was so boring to me. I couldn't care less about any of the characters, like, you know, whatever, if you fall off the face of the earth, I could cry. It's not, they're not serious. Another reason I like it, especially Flash and Supergirl, is they're not serious. Sometimes you need a break from Westworld, Game of Thrones. No, yeah, they're not overly gritty and they're not broody. That's the thing, I was complaining about superhero movies. Like, so many of them are so broody. It's like, you know, whether, even the Avengers, you know... Oh, DC, DC in movies is the worst. Yes, which is why I don't want... I watched Superman vs. Batman, and I was so... Like, I kind of knew going in, but I was just really blown away about how annoying everyone was, especially Batman. He was like a complete jerk. Like, I get it that he's been through a lot, but he was very emotional, which is very odd, considering that Batman has been known to be the cool, collective, somewhat detached one of the Batman. I wonder if Batman's voice would work on a lot of voice-operated devices, like, if you talk like Batman. I'm like, well, I can't say it. Alexa, take me to the Batcave. Ordering Batcave. I've added Batcave to your shopping list. Lately, she has been putting things in my cart when I say add them to shopping list, and I'm like, is this a voice recognition error or a subtle new way of getting me to shop for things? Because it didn't use to do that, and I don't think I'm slurring. No, probably. I'll be like, add chocolate chips to shopping list. I'll be like, I've added chocolate chips to your cart. I'm like, no, don't do that. Is that what I wanted? Just saying. Just saying. All right, I'm going to do something unusual right now, Roger. You're going to read the thing? Are you ready? Do we want to stop anyone? Probably because of that. Don't tell them what the thing is. I'm going to stop the video, but I'm actually going to leave the audio going for a little longer. So if you are listening live on AlphaGeek Radio, or if you're a patron who gets the RSS feed of the full show, and honestly, if you give a crap about what Roger and I are going to say for the next 10 minutes, you'll still get the rest of it. Otherwise, thanks everybody for watching, and we'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Scott. See you then.