This Week in Tech 449 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. Patrick Beja joins John C. Dvorak and Jill Duffy from PC Magazine. We'll talk about South by Southwest, anonymous apps, are they bad for the internet? And should the United States relinquish control of DNS? It's all ahead on TWiT.
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Bandwidth for This Week in Tech is provided by Cachefly at cachefly.com. This is TWiT, This Week in Tech. Episode #449 recorded March 16, 2014
Left, Right, and Sunday
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John C Dvorak: We're celebrating show 600 of the noagenda show today. In fact, I just left finishing the show.
Leo: Congratulations! Now that you're two shows a week, you're going to really up those numbers now.
John: We're poppin' them fast, yeah.
Leo: That's awesome. Thank you John, for being here, channel Dvorak and noagendashow.com. Patrick Beja is also here, formally of the Fillius club, now just Patrick Beja.
Patrick Beja: You know, just Patrick Beja. Well, you know there's Lon de vu teg. But that's for people who speak French, who are sophisticated enough to embrace the language of love.
Leo: And who do you work for- You have a job...?
Patrick: Yes, I do.
Leo: Who do you work for?
Patrick: I work for a video game company called Lizard, so I will be abstaining for commenting on any video game topics.
Leo: Are you coming to America for GDC?
Patrick: No, no I'm not.
Leo: You should!
Patrick: I'd like to, but this is really PR, so we do more public facing stuff.
Leo: Right, right. GDC is where developers- I also want to welcome someone new, Jill Duffy is here from PC Magazine, first time on the show! Hi Jill.
Jill Duffy: Hi everybody.
Leo: From New York, New York. It's good to have you, a gamer, so you can talk about World Of Warcraft.
Jill: I wouldn't call me a gamer too much, I did work with the GDC group for a number of years, and was with Game Developer Magazine and Gamasutra. But I know a little bit more about the development side than I know about the actual entertainment side.
Leo: That's an interesting point, I guess you could develop without actually playing them. I always actually thought people who develop games play them. Why are you watching the show, John?
John: I went to the thing to find a live pop out chatroom, you push the button. I'ts not here.
Leo: We broke the internet. Try irc.twit.tv in your browser bar. See that bar at the top, that's where you enter in addresses for the internet, just try irc-
John: Ircdot-
Leo: No, no...
John: You said dot...
Leo: Yeah, I said dot, that's a mistake. It's a period, ircperiod-
John: Okay p-e-r-i-o-d...
Leo: No, no... Just type in, just put a "." there.
John: A dot, okay. You got a pen?
Leo: Alright, that's a good question. I bet John does in fact, after every period, when using his typewriter, add two spaces.
John: You know, that's a funny thing-
Leo: It's a hard habit to break.
John: It takes about six months actually.
Leo: So you haven't done it in a while?
John: I haven't done it in about ten years or more.
Leo: So on a computer you don't care about it anymore.
John: It just doesn't look right. In fact, thinking about it, I'm not sure why it was ever-
Leo: Why did we ever do that?
Patrick: That's what I was going to ask..
Jill: Mono-spacing.
Patrick: Where does it even come from?
John: It comes from a typewriter thing.
Jill: It's mono-spacing. Typewriters used to have different amounts of spacing between the characters and once we had computers where we could have different type faces and things like that, the spacing is automatically corrected. So you have things like ligatures are easier to type because of spacing issues so, no more double-spacing.
Leo: We now have proper kerning.
Jill: Although I believe in Microsoft Word you can change it so that if you are one of those habit double-spacers it will always take it out for you and for cranky editors, there is the fine 'replace all' function.
Leo: I actually remember reading an article, this is really nerdy... About where the two spaces after a period came from and it actually goes way way back, as I remember. James Fillici, the author of The Complete Manual of Typography, says that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing, and he actually refers to Monks and manuscripts and things like that. This is a really, this is from creativepro.com and it's about double-spacing after a period. Here's 1774, Caslon, nice font type face. In the first printing of the United States Declaration of Independence, two spaces. Wow, look at that. Big space between the periods. I don't know how we got into this, it really doesn't have anything to do with-
John: I don't know.
Leo: Here, from Bimbo, remember Bimbo?
John: Oh yeah, Bimbo.
Leo: You know, somehow this kind of just stayed in my mind, I remember reading this. Anyway,
John: Did you just find out about this recently? You only use one space, is that the deal?
Leo: Yeah, I been typing two spaces and now- I actually did get in trouble, when my kids were little, because of the fourth grade teacher- Okay here's another one. In the old days, when you'd begin a paragraph, you'd indent. You'd tab in one.
John: Five spaces.
Leo: And then nowadays you don't do that anymore, right?
John: Rarely.
Leo: And so Henry's teacher expected him to tab in. And I said Henry we don't do that anymore. And she graded him down because he didn't tab in. Talk about antiquated.
John: Yeah, no I would've sued her. That's what I would have done.
Patrick: You know Leo, I really love coming on this show because usually on the internet, I feel like I'm the older guy, I remember a time before the internet-
Leo: Oh, no. John and I are the older guys.
Patrick: Thank you for making me feel young.
Leo: Speaking of which, 25 years ago on March 12, 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, well he wasn't a Sir yet, Tim Berners-Lee had a twinkle in his eye.
John: Yeah, and then what?
Leo: He conceived of something he would later call the World Wide Web. He wrote a little memo to his-
John: I remember that.
Leo: To his fellow physicist. I am stunned by the number of people who confuse the World Wide Web with the internet.
John: I used to complain about this but now I just gave up. To 99% of everybody, the World Wide Web and the internet are the same thing.
Leo: Not true, obviously.
John: No, it's not true because your email isn't done on the web. Well, most of the time it is done on the web.
Leo: Yeah, if you just type in 'Happy Birthday internet' you get all these results from people that think the World Wide Web was the internet. Not true, the internet is actually closer to fifty years old.
John: Yeah, 1969 technically.
Patrick: But to be fair, it's with the web that it really took off and it's really the UI for the internet. So, it is fair to make it the most important and momentous occasion of the internet.
John: And we're in the golden age of the internet and the World Wide Web. Ten years from now we're not going to be able to do anything.
Leo: It's going to be worse.
John: Porn is out, spam is in. Phoney-bologna ads that- My favorite ads and you get these great ads because they're so talented at targeting you, ads for stuff I just bought five minutes ago. On every page.
Leo: Hey, people who buy Depends undergarments often buy more Depends undergarments. And they just show you the same ad again.
John: I've never seen an ad for that, have you?
Leo: No, I don't know what you're talking about. So, I think we can talk about the Malaysia flight. There's a tech angle to that.
John: No, there's not.
Leo: Well what's interesting is that in this day and age, in fact, I had an airline safety inspector from Major US Airline and Studio a couple of days ago, by chance- I won't say his name or the name of the airline, it's a big airline. I said are you guys fascinated with this? And he said yeah, it's kind of hard to understand what happened. In this day and age, for a plane of that size to disappear with all of the technology, now we know that somebody turned off the transponder.
John: Yeah, but there's all kinds of other-
Leo: 8 cars were turned off, and interestingly enough, the transponder was turned off, then he said goodnight to air traffic control, then he turned off 8 cars. It's unclear of the timeline. Radar-
John: The whole thing is unclear.
Leo: Are you guys going crazy on this on noagenda?
John: We've decided that most of this is comprised of lies and the plane is probably parked somewhere with a bunch of dead people in it. That's kind of how we finished our analysis.
Leo: Whoah. Why would they be dead?
John: What are they going to keep them alive for? It'd be great if they were all pleased as punch and they were all alive on some remote island or something but I don't know, something is crazy about this story. We just have to wait, I think the speculation at this point is out of control.
Leo: It is, clearly. Don't we love mysteries though, I mean it's like straight out of Lost.
John: Yeah it is. But this is like, it's too much. It's too much to take.
Leo: Alright, alright.
John: Oh, I got you off the track. Great. I'm doing my job, chatroom.
Leo: Where could the plane be, what could have happened to it? Alright, this is a very weak week.
John: What about the Icon story?
Leo: Carl Icon, what's he up to now?
John: No, no... The I-
Leo: Oh, ICANN, alright. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will- And this is why we have a French man with us- Will no longer be under the aegis of the United States of America. And I think you have to blame this a little bit on the Snoden revelations and the fear around the world that the US is perhaps not a benign government. On the other hand, this has been going on for a couple of years with Russia and other countries trying to say no, we should run-
John: We should run, you guys stink.
Leo: You want Vladimir Putin running the internet... Patrick, give us the Perisian point of view.
Patrick: Well I don't know that it's the Perisian point of view, but my point of view is definitely in line with- I think we talked about this on the show before, but in line with what you just said. There's definitely concerns about one country having such a prominent role in running the internet. But on the other hand, a lot of people are saying we don't want the US to be doing it. Maybe partly because of the Snoden thing, but also it had been in the minds of people before that. And the thing is personally, I think I would rather have the US running it, as opposed to an assembly or multi-national body where China and Russia and other countries that are less reliable than the west in general have their say. Especially in the internet and where the war about free speech and surveillance is happening now.
Leo: Let me give you a little bit of the background on this, and then I have a statement that Vince Cerf emailed Arstechnica. He's one of the fathers of the internet, and certainly somebody we respect and admire, and a former chair of ICANN through 2007.
John: What did he say?
Leo: So in the early days of the internet, it was invented kind of here, Bolt Beranek Newman, under Darpa, SRI, Stanford- And there was a guy, John Postle at the University of Southern California- It was one guy in his office, and if you wanted a domain... Rather a number or a set of numbers, you'd go to John and John would say let's see. I'll give you 64.0.- You want a B block, an A block? What do you want? I think I got-
John: Yeah, those days are over. That's the way it should still be.
Leo: It was enough. And then John passed away, but even before then, Ianna, which was the organization that he ran gave way to the ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Signed Names and Numbers, kind of under the aegis of the US department of Commerce. More recently under the NTIA, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is a division of the department of Commerce. The key is the domain name system. In 1997, the domain name system was transitioned from basically a government project into this private hands as ICANN, although under the oversight of the United States. ICANN meeting coming up next month in Brazil. Brazil and other nations very upset about the NSA. Brazil, in fact, threatened to build it's own cloud, it's own internet. That'll work.
John: To stop your story here, does anybody think, let's assume it was run all along by Russia, does anybody think that the NSA still wouldn't be collecting the same data? I mean, I just don't buy that this connection between.
Leo: It didn't give them any side track.
Patrick: No, it's just that with the NSA story, there's obviously a little bit more concern about the US basically running the internet, as some people understand it. I think there's also a lot of American guilt in that somewhere. It's like oh right, you know we have this imperialistic attitude towards the world and maybe we shouldn't be running the internet and I think this is one example where we're actually happy to let you handle this, just do it, it's fine. Yeah again, at least for me. But there's a little bit of that, don't you guys feel that sometimes that sometimes Americans feel like they have to be more respectful of the rest of the world and of-
Leo: Oh, that's interesting. We got to bend over backwards.
Patrick: Yeah, a little bit. I don't know if it's accurate but it's a feeling I get sometimes, and sometimes it's justified. I'm not saying it's completely unnecessary. I think there is a little bit of over boasting or over- Obliviousness to the rest of the world sometimes, but in this case I'm not sure.
Leo: So, Vince Cerf was the chair of ICANN from 2000 to 2007, he is now a fellow at Google. He was co-inventor of TCPIP, he sent a statement to Ars and said the announced change would ultimately eliminate the contract between ICANN and the NTIA, the contract between ICANN and the department of Commerce in the US. And leave it to ICANN and the internet community to create a transparency and an accountability regime that's rooted in the multi-stake holder model of administration. Basically, this is a major step toward implementing a global system of internet administration where there's no one country-
John: No, it's going to go to the UN and the UN is going to implement all the crap the UN does, including all of its kind of freedom of speech limitations because of their edicts about hate speech, and you're going to see sites disappear. Oh that's a hate speech site it's gone.
Leo: I don't think so, I think that the-
John: Okay, I'm losing a bet when you say that.
Leo: You want to make a bet?
John: It's too late, I already made a bet.
Leo: What was the bet?
John: The bet was with Adam.
Leo: That I would say that?
John: That you'd defend this crazy notion that should be-
Leo: It's not going to the UN.
John: I agree with our French fellow here, he's got the right idea.
Patrick: It's amazing.
Leo: It's not going to the UN.
John: It's a UN operation. You watch, by the end of the day.
Patrick: Well even if it's not the UN, the problem is you're going to have, if you start giving it to someone else in the US, of course the situation is not ideal. Ideally it shouldn't be run by one country, but still if you go to someone else, you can't go to another country, you have to go to everyone. So even if it's not the US, you are going to have China and Russia, and you're going to have two- First of all, it's a bureaucracy, sure but that's not my main concern. My main concern is that you're going to have to listen to China and if China has, you know, a bunch of economy deals with your country, of course you're going to want to please them somewhere else. And as the NSA scandals have proven, this horrendous invasion of privacy, people don't give the weight to the internet that they give to real life, even though we all know in the audience on TWiT, that it actually is as, if not more, important. So I do worry that the internet stuff and the free speech aspect is going to go by the way side because we have to protect the factory deals and the exchange deals and all of that, so if China won't stop and say-
Leo: I don't think that's going to happen. The department of Commerce has even said we're not going to give it up to the UN or another country, the IETF has worked very well.
John: Where have they said that, that they're not going to give it up to the UN?
Leo: Right here, commerce officials indicated they wouldn't give up oversight, this is from Recode, of ICANN to another government or intergovernmental organisation which would include the United Nations. Whoever takes over would be required to maintain the security and stability of the internet domain name system.
John: This doesn't make sense.
Leo: Meets the needs of global customers, and according to a Commerce department statement quote, "maintain the openness of the internet." This makes perfect sense. No one country should be responsible… In effect it’s a consortium not just of countries but of stake holders and it’s how the ITEF works – The internet engineering task force, which frankly is arguably more important because they determine the protocols that run over the internet. It shouldn’t be run by the US department of commerce, it shouldn’t be run by any country and it certainly should be run by the United Nations.
John: This has been a decade long, this fight. I remember I’d been down to Icon a couple of times. They ship you down there and they lecture you about how horrible it’s going to be because you’re going to have exactly what Patrick said almost to the letter. You’re going to have these vested interests and they say no we can’t do this and we can’t do that because you’re demeaning us, you’re demeaning China in the case of his argument. We can’t have these kinds of sites, they have to be shut down and we have to do this and that and take them off of the domain system. I agree with all of that.
Leo: Well if that happens that’s scary and you’re right, that is something we want to watch out for.
John: I think the American’s having it are so paranoid and conscientious and I think we’ve done a really good job of maintaining this thing. You don’t look at the internet except for the NSA which is just buying on just streams – you don’t look at the internet and say this has been poorly managed; I’m surprised it’s even up today. It’s been very well managed. It’s actually astonishing how well it’s been managed but oh let’s fire the guy and fix it. It’s not broken but let’s fix it. That’s what I see.
Patrick: John is agreeing with me too much and it’s scaring me a little bit so let’s take the other side of the argument. The internet is made of things and it’s astonishing that they work and yet they work very well. You mentioned Wikipedia – I think someone did and anyway Wikipedia is one example where if you describe it you think it’s never going to work. It’s a bunch of people that can go and edit pages all at the same time all the way they want to and we’re going to build an encyclopedia out of it and it would have seemed ridiculous – it did seem ridiculous a few years ago. Actually it worked, so maybe the stake holders and the people who know how to run this thing will find a system which is not necessarily involving the special or particular interests of various countries and will manage to devise a system that will make it collaborative and decentralized and efficient. I hope they will. I’m just worried.
Leo: Jill, any thoughts?
Jill: I don’t want to jump on Patrick’s analogy too much but I would say that Wikipedia is not a great analogy because it does have a lot of bias in it; mainly male bias, women don’t contribute to Wikipedia and there is a whole culture in history as to why women don’t contribute.
Leo: Really that’s true? There aren’t a lot of female editors on Wikipedia?
Jill: Oh please, can you believe that! It’s like 1-2 % it’s so small and there are…
Leo: And why would that be? Is that discrimination or is there less interest in doing it?
Jill: It’s a very, very, big can of worms to open right there. I could go through the culture of editing and having people respond to your edits, the way people are treated, the way women say I don’t want to get into this because I see the way that it happens and what goes on there; the kinds of communications that people are having on there. I don’t want to even start with that.
John: Can I interrupt you for a second because I think you’re missing Patrick’s point. I don’t think Patrick was discussing the politics of Wikipedia and why or why not women get on it or anybody else for that matter. I think he was just trying to say “here’s a crazy idea that kind of works that we stumbled upon that did not look like it was going to work and seems like it is”.
Jill: What I want to say about the analogy though is that sometimes because of our own perspective we don’t see what’s missing. So we may not see as Americans or as Westerners what is missing from the perspective of just having Westerners or western countries manage this. So I’m not saying that is doesn’t work and I’m not saying that we haven’t done a good job so far, but could it be better - of course.
John: It won’t be better and it’s my experience as one of the older guys on the show. My experience: any time anything is changed like this it just worsens. It’s like when they bring in the new boss. The new boss is not as good as the old boss, he’s crappy and it just deteriorates and deteriorates over time and we’re going to see the same thing so I’m telling you that this is the golden age of the internet; be happy, because you’re not going to see it this good in the future.
Leo: Women typically perceive Wikipedia to be of lower quality than men do. This is from Wikipedia’s own article on systemic bias. Less than 15% of contributors on Wikipedia are female. 8.5% of editors are women as of a 2011 study.
John: So women hate the Wikipedia?
Leo: What’s interesting is that the bias shows up in the way Wikipedia is perceived on a gender basis. Thank you Jill, I had no idea.
Jill: The most common page that people point to whenever they say the top 100 Female American writers and they’re like so the top 100 American writers are all men? Like we weren’t allowed to be on that list?
Leo: Because that’s American writers and you’re female so let’s get this clear. That’s a very good – alright. There is a fairly large story and we’re going to cover that in just a second about Github. Github’s first female developer; a woman who was in fact pretty outspoken about the lack, or at least the attempt to have a lack of gender discrimination on Github - Julianna Horvath has departed Github and we’ll talk about that. I’m glad that you’re here Jill to represent the – is it sexist to say the distaff side? I should probably look that up.
John: The distaff side.
Leo: Does anybody even know what that means?
John: I do and it’s very insulting Leo.
Leo: It must be. I’m going to have to search Wikipedia to find out what that means.
John: Well you won’t get a woman’s perspective if you do.
Leo: It’s a staff for holding the flax toe or wool in spinning, or the 2nd one – a woman’s work or domain. It is sexist. I apologize.
John: I told you.
Leo: At least there are 100 top female writers. That’s the good news. And 100 top male writers.
John: I think these kinds of things are all bull crap. Top this, top that, says who?
Leo: Lists say so.
John: We’ve talked about lists before.
Leo: We have, it’s all made up.
John: They’re all made up.
Leo: Did I tell you that I got nauseous earlier today?
John: Yes, you were as sick as a dog I understand. You put what, a virtual reality thing on your head?
Leo: I had an oculus rift on and then we were interviewing these guys (this was right before the show) who did this amazing kind of mocap suit.
John: What’s a mocap suit?
Leo: Motion capture.
John: Oh mocap – with the little dots on it?
Leo: Yes. It’s at yei technology and they have a kick starter, but it’s not. They’ve raised almost a quarter of a million dollars 2 weeks ago where you put this really interesting – what is it - 9 sensors on your elbows, your tummy, your hips, your knees, your feet and head. Then you can play a game and shoot and stuff and crouch and everything which is kind of cool. It’s kind of like Connect. There is the video of it. See that’s what you’re doing. But it’s Connect without a sensor because they don’t need a sensor because it’s smart. Then they put the oculus rift on my head.
John: You have monocular vision though.
Leo: That wasn’t it, I just felt – it took me about 10 minutes and then I just had to take it off. I was nauseous though. Have you used anything like that?
John: Not that made me sick.
Leo: Jill, have you used the oculus?
Jill: I can’t, I’m one of those people that gets too much vertigo. I can’t even play a lot of 3D games.
John: There are people that can’t go to a 3D movie.
Jill: I’m not good with 3D movies either.
John: Or the opposite, you can’t go to a 2D movie.
Leo: 2D movies make you sick, that’s because Hollywood is degenerate.
Patrick: I tried the oculus rift and I’m one of those people that do not have the – vision, so it doesn’t do anything to me. I was with friends and they were trying it and going like oh my goodness, whoa! They were expecting me to do the same and I was just sitting there like an idiot and it didn’t do anything. I was just looking around so I’m very sad I’m not one of the people that can enjoy the oculus rift.
Leo: You could do the thriller movements.
John: That looks like a lot of fun.
Leo: It was actually. It was really cool until I got nauseous. Our show today brought to you by gazelle.com. Gazelle is a great place to go when you want to get rid of old technology and get ready for new technology. A new phone in your future – maybe you’d like to get rid of your old iPhone. Let’s just take a look right here. What is an iPhone 5 from AT&T, 64 gigs, what is that worth? What’s your guess John?
John: $205 or $255 unlocked. That’d be my guess.
Leo: They give you instructions on how to unlock too, that’s really cool.
John: So why would they do that? So you have to pay another $50?
Leo: I know, it doesn’t seem like a good idea at all. They say it’s easy and here’s how. The reason they can sell it for more money.
John: They can unlock it themselves.
Leo: No you have to unlock it because you’re the customer. You have to go to AT&T.
John: So they’ll give you $50 if you unlock your own phone essentially.
Leo: Yes because it’s worth more. Gazelle is awesome they will even buy broken iPhones, iPads. You can get cash for your blackberry. How many places can you get money for a blackberry, HTC, your LG phone, your Motorola, Nokia or your Samsung? You got a Galaxy? You know I think a lot of people have maybe a galaxy S4 and maybe they’re getting ready for the galaxy S5. Here’s a nice thing. Now I know the S5 is not out but this quote is good for 30 days. So get a quote on all your gadgets and then hang on, you have time. You have 30 days to take advantage of it. Get a new phone, transfer the data over and then when you check out they will send you a box, they will pay the postage. Throw it all in the box. They will send you cash, you can get a check or PayPal credit, get paid fast or if you’re an amazon user get an amazon gift card. They bump that up 5% which is nice.
John: That’s a good deal.
Leo: GAZELLE that’s gazelle like the antelope. Gazelle has paid more than 100 million dollars to over 700 thousand customers over the last few years. Gazelle.com; sell your gadgets today at gazelle. You know I don’t know if you can use that in France you may have to be in the US to use that.
Patrick: Yes I don’t think we have gazelle in France. But it’s an awesome service.
Leo: It’s a great idea. So Jill, do you know Julianne Horvath?
Jill: I don’t know her, no.
Leo: So github, we should explain first what github is. It’s a very widely used source control software right. So if you are working in a group of programmers you can all work on the same project, you can check out the latest work, check it back in after you have made your changes. It keeps track of version control and all of this. Github is an open source project but it also has a website and a commercial site GitHub.com. A lot of people use it. It is a great piece of software. I always think of it because I like open source kind of as being hip and cool and with it. Apparently it’s not the best culture for women. She has worked for GitHub since 2012. She says it was fairly small then. She said at the time the culture was supportive of the women on its staff. She was the only female designer or developer on the team. I remember that she defended GitHub. There were complaints but she defended GitHub. She says now I had a really hard time getting used to the culture the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men I worked with respected and valued my opinion. She wrote this in an email to tech crunch. I loved the idea of GitHub because it was a place people went to make things for people who make things. She says it was a boys club. She felt she was being treated differently internally due to her gender and now she’s quit any thoughts on that at all? I think this is something we need to address in general in the tech industry.
Jill: Absolutely, Absolutely.
Leo: This goes along with the Wikipedia story where women feel like it’s too aggressive of an environment. It’s not a place they want to be.
Jill: Yeah. I mean she didn’t go into a whole lot of detail about exactly what was said but she did give an interview with I believe it was Tech crunch and kind of mentioned that one of her bosses or one of the co-founders wives said lets go out for drinks I want to talk to you and during this conversation she said it got to be a little bit personal and it got to be a little bit aggressive. The wife was sort of asking her for a lot of details about what she was working on and she was insinuating some things about her work and I don’t know I have a hard time thinking that that’s all that happened. I have a feeling that this was a building problem that was going on and on for months and there must have been something that made; you know the straw that broke the camel’s back but we don’t quite know what that is. And then Julianne Horvath tweeted at one point my only regret is not leaving or being fired sooner what I endured as an employee of github was unacceptable and went unnoticed by most. I think that unnoticed sort of speaks to what I was mentioning before you know this bias that men don’t always see or know about. It’s sad that she was there for 2 years and that she was… I mean 2 years at any company is a long time. You get to know everybody there and you become part of the culture. I hope that she wasn’t unhappy that whole time but I would like to know a little bit more about what went on. It’s hard for women to speak up about these kinds of things because of the retribution. I think that at one point she got the death threats and rape threats online as all the trolls like to throw at women but I kind of wish she would speak out a little bit more about what happened. I think any woman in that situation is going to be afraid of their reputation and their career prospects going forward if they become the center of attention and the backlash that happens back and forth with the unemployment.
Leo: And now by the way on Secret there’s a bunch of character assassination against her which is sad. Secret has really become kind of the place you go if you want to defame somebody anonymously.
Jill: I think there was something on there that she was notorious for not accepting criticism of her work. I want to know, what was that criticism, what was the nature of it, how was it expressed?
John: It would be nice to know and I think this by the way – this kind of thing is going to be out once the United Nations takes over the internet.
Leo: I wonder if Wikipedia is an aggressively sexist environment or just an aggressive environment, which isn’t hostile to anybody.
Patrick: There is no question that the internet is a sexist environment.
Leo: And hostile and full of trolls.
Patrick: Yes, it’s full of trolls, it’s full of people who like to criticize and hate for just the sake of it and because of anonymity and all of it. That’s no question but specifically about women; we all have a few tech industry actors that are women and friends. We have friends that are women, Veronica Bellmont and others. All of them tell you the same thing and you can see on the places they interact with people on the web. It’s horrendous, it’s terrible, you have specifically on the matter of sexism, and you have some absolutely unacceptable things that are happening. You were talking about rape threats and death threats and guys don’t have to deal with that and I think there is a sort of society acceptable sexism thing on the internet; the same way that we had maybe at the beginning of last century – society acceptable anti-Semitism or racism.
Leo: What’s different here is because it’s anonymous you feel that racism went under a rock. It wasn’t acceptable socially anymore, but it didn’t go away and now that it can be expressed anonymously; sexism, racism, anti-Semitism are being expressed much more vigorously because people are anonymous.
Patrick: Maybe a little bit but she’s talking in her article on Techfront about – Yeah that’s not even the worst part. The anonymous thing everyone has issues with but it’s not even anonymous. It’s like you’ll make a horrible – or even snide comment. Let’s not even go into the very outrageous. A snide comment about some girl who dresses that way or this way; and you’ll do it and if someone is shocked by it the reaction of most people is going to “I’m just making fun”. If you would say something about a black person in the 50’s or 60’s or about the Jew in Europe in the early 1900’s and my understanding of the situation (and I’m not a girl so I don’t have a very good grasp on this) but on the internet it’s now ok to do these things to girls and it’s completely accepted. It’s shameful and it’s really something that we have to take a stand on and we have to talk about it and we have to change the environment because it leads to real problems. Like you were saying earlier 49.99% of the population and it’s unacceptable.
Leo: That’s kind of the point, that it’s a big loss if half the population feels uncomfortable participating in something.
Jill: And you know that I think, I have seen some studies show that the same culture goes back into the classroom in stem classes where you have men who came up learning this stuff, men who ended up teaching it and you have 80 to 90% male classroom and you put a woman in there they very often dropout especially at the collegiate level. They get a few days into this class and they do not like the way that people communicate with one another, they do not like the way that they are talked to, they do not like the way that they are dismissed and they leave and they go over to the other kind of sciences like biology and psychology and some of the softer sciences because there is a more equal environment there to learn.
Leo: Here it is related story an interesting discussion going on the ethics of anonymous apps, and Secret recently brought this in P.Marcus on Twitter started the conversation, lately he has been really interesting to see him use Twitter with numbered posts. It is as if like he does not want to write a longer piece but he ends up writing a longer piece of 140 characters at the time. He starts I never really like to criticize any start up and I won’t thread by name but there is an important topic that must be discussed. He is asserting that software can condition human behavior. Software design, how software design deeply influences the human behavior that results, and he says there are programs especially now that are being created that encourage negative behavior, tearing people down and making fellow souls sad. Such experiments start out as naughty fun, end with broken hearts and ruined lives and in the end everyone regrets participating in them. Clearly secret is what he is talking about.
John: This goes back to the old Compuserve days, where you had these groups together and then you would always tap into these characters that are coming and you would have these debates and if they ganged up on you and we had all kinds of issues, and it happened plenty of times, women had already been involved at the time and you had to go through this. It was like some sort of right of passage, as a matter of fact and you would get criticized ridiculously, told you are an idiot.
Leo: It was really horrible.
John: And it was really horrible, it was men only by the way and then the women walked into later and they did not like it and of course, we did not like it either, but you know this is just, I do not want it developed to the bullying being Oh God you are being bullied and I just go back to like somebody saying bad things about you. They are not coming over and knifing you and it is like the old stick and stones thing that we used to hear when we were kids and it seems to have gone by the wayside, everybody has got to be nice to each other, I am just not buying any of this.
Leo: Do you reject the notion and it does sound like saying games make you violent, the notion that software can somehow condition your behavior and may be make you act worse than you would act otherwise. Is that not gross?
John: I think that is could bring out the worse in you, because it is the different art of the brain, the different part of the brain works when you are typing out a message and you are saying things that are not necessarily, writing out is different from speaking it is a different part of the brain and you will say things in writing to somebody than you would say to them in person. Some body in the chatroom said,’Words hurt, Dvorak.’ Yes if you are twelve.
Leo: No, they cannot and I think that, no I think that they cannot.
J: Well apparently thinks that it does and they cannot and yes….
Leo: They do not hurt, sticks and stones etc they do not hurt in the same way that a punch in the nose does.
John: Or a knife.
Leo: But it can be devastating or a knife.
Patrick: There is a difference between a couple of tweets or a few messages on the message board, and I am come back to the question of women and the barrage of hate and threats and drooling that women get when they talk about something. I do not think that it can be quite equated, both are not really the same. I maybe I am not the best person to talk about this but especially if a woman is the worst, especially if a woman starts talking about this specific issue which makes everything worse.
Leo: Get this secret has now changed its algorithm, so that when we detect a first name we display a reminder not to defame people.
John: Ahhh now that is sweet. I made that commentary a moment ago the chatroom is all over me.
Leo: They are being mean to you. They are trying to hurt you.
John: Oh Dvorak is an old fart he should quit when……… when he is gone that is great.
Leo: They are being mean to you.
John: And this is the kind of a-holes that are out there and who watch these guys go into this and it is astonishing to me. But this is what happens all the time and it is one of the reasons why I do not even look at the chat-room agenda. But it is like if JCD had hit his head on the glass ceiling he would not say such stuff. Quit you are old. I mean this is the kind of thing, I mean you cannot have an opinion anymore because you get shouted down by the masses and usually a mass of anonymous jerks, and I do not say that the chat-room is full with them but they are in there. And they are all over the place.
Patrick: We are used to this and to various degree we are public people……….
John: Where is this chat-room maniac that should be kicking off all these people of the chat-room. This chat-room is notorious, so get these guys off, you see them you can spot them get them off. I am all for it.
Leo: There will be nobody left. (All laughing in the studio).
John: Jill speak up, why are you quiet, they said.
Jill: I am not in the chat-room I am trying to focus
Leo: Do not be in the chat-room, trust me.
John: It is not worth it.
Jill: I will say I do not agree with everything Dvorak ever says but I am not going to call in ageism here either because that is being just as bad as being sexist.
Leo: Do you use “Secret”?
Jill: How old you are has nothing to do with what you know.
Leo: Do you use “Secret”?
Jill: No, no that kind of stuff is just not really for me.
Leo: I cannot resist it is a very bad habit.
John: What do you mean that you cannot resist let us face it.
Leo: I have no impulse control.
John: None.
Patrick: It is like peoples magazine like gossip magazines right?
Leo: Yes.
Patrick: It feels like a fad too, I do not know that it is going to be around for very long.
Leo: A lot of what you see on “Secret” is garbage, like made up stuff, fake leads and so on and so forth but it has taken Silicone Valley by storm. You are better of out of it. I am going to delete it tomorrow.
John: Delete what?
Leo: Secret.
Patrick: It is very Silicone Valley centered.
Leo: It is very Silicone Valley centered. But that partly is who is in my address book.
John: Is this the f company or is this the new version.
Leo: Ahhhhhhhhh, that was a great site
Leo: Phillip Caplin said if you could create a site with all the contents generated by the users and you just sit back and collect the money then you are golden.
John: Yes so do slot machines.
Leo: It is very, it is a good way to go. Veronica Mars is back, Christian Bell’s tv show they went to Kick Starter to raise money and some people said really you need to raise money for a Hollywood movie on Kick Starter but I think they demonstrated there was an audience and the movie has been made.
Patrick: I played a part in it and actually this should be interesting to Jill as well because coming back to the women’s thing it was one of the first TV shows that I saw where there was a strong woman character that was not in there, you know that was not there because she was sexy or pretty or anything like that she was just a strong female lead and it was well written, clever, it was a teenage show but still it was very efficiently made and I was very happy that I could help Rob Thomas………
Leo: He is the director, the creator?
Patrick: Yes he was the creator.
Leo: He raised 5.7 million dollars and they made the movie.
Patrick: And then they DRMed.
Leo: And then they said oh by the way we are going to release it on Flipster using ultra violet and the community web and what the hell, they backed out. To their credit Warner Bros they have backed down and they said that we are going to sell it on Amazon and iTunes without, well actually don’t both Amazon and iTunes have DRM?
Patrick: No they do but they actually pay you back for the portion I think of the Kick Starter that you have had to pay for that for the digital download, so they give you back 10 bucks basically. But you know it is good, it is.
Leo: It is annoying because if you pay for Kick Starter for the Veronica March movie and they give it to you on Fooster via with ultra violet copy protection well that is a little frustrating. Buyer beware on Kick Starter frankly I do not know. I always felt weird that they raised money for a Hollywood movie.
John: Yes it makes no sense.
Leo: By going to real people and saying hey, give us money.
Patrick: But the thing is that the movie would not have existed, if the Kick Starter campaign had not been successful.
Leo: It was not the entire amount of money needed to make the movie, it might not be even close, it has told Hollywood hey look there are twenty thousand people, no actually ninety one thousand people who were willing to give us actual money to make this movie.
Patrick: It was the same Zach Graff’s movie, there was a big, big deal made about the fact that he was, even more that he is actually a film director who had a successful movie before, and I do not see what the big deal is if people are willing, if people are not completely idiotic and they know what they are getting into and they are willing to give money to the guy, to get his film off the ground.
Leo: It is their money.
Patrick: Yes. I mean I have a Patreon.
Leo: Do you use a Patreon for a news show?
Patrick: The Patreon is for La Rendevous Tech, and I am very thankful of the people who are giving money but I think it is difficult to do for a new show because I really think that you have to have a community behind you that trusts and knows you and knows what to expect.
Leo: This Patreon thing I think raised 20 million dollars, the idea is very focused on the arts, although Kick Starter was when it started. The idea and what is unique about it that you subscribe in effect, you say not only am I going to give 5 dollars now but give 5 dollars for every episode. So that has worked out for you.
Patrick: Yes. It is not, it is a little bit of a different situation than others who are using Patreon. I do less shows than I am not, it is not my sole income, but it has worked out enough that it is a very decent supplemental income. So it is really an interesting model because as you were saying that it is sort of like a subscription and it is also like a content contributors to get a reliable source of revenue, whereas with Kick Starter a few people tried to Kick Starters for different creative projects but the problem is that you need to get one big chunk of money to get it off the ground and then that’s………..
Leo: It is a one off and that is it.
Patrick: And then you do not know what is going to happen you know in the next year or whatever and you have to do it all over again. Whereas Patreon has this, it is actually Jack Conte from ……………….
Leo: I am glad that Jack is doing it. Doug Brushwood told me that he is doing it and he is and he has raised money on Patreon.
Patrick: Yes he and Tom and Brushwood and Bob Johnson and a bunch of people.
Leo: What he said was that the numbers are deceptive because you give an amount, but you can also set a limit for how much in total you are willing to give. So he said the amount you give is like half of what you see on the page. Is that your experience?
Patrick: Well for me my show is on twice a month so it is a little bit less for this second episode although I have not invoiced yet. I have not activated it yet. It is just this month and it is possible that I do not get half of what people promised, but yes for the second episode people can set a limit and the limit can be equal to what they want to give for the first episode of every month. So in the case of Tom and Brian they are doing it for Court Killers and they have four episodes a month, sometimes they have to go through 1,2,3,4 episodes, if some-one sets a limit to one or two or three, the next one is going to get less money.
Leo: I see a lot of people doing this. I think that it great because it gives you another choice for monetization, the more you have the better, obviously.
Patrick: And it allows people who appreciate you as an alternative to advertising in a sense, although it does not have to replace it in a sense completely. But it also allows people you know who enjoy your content enough to support you. And there has not been enough and especially for pod casting there has not really been an appropriate way of doing that until now. And I think that Patreon might be part of the answer to that for some people and I am very happy that they are raising money. I am terrified now that they will go under and take all the money away from me.
Leo: I guess they are not going to, given the number of shows here and the amount of money that these shows are raising. John is they guy to talk to because No Agenda has a very interesting model.
John: Yes.
Leo: And it has worked.
John: It works great.
Leo: But you are going direct, you are not using a third party? They do take a cut.
John: No, no, no why would we want to use a third party service when they can take about 8 percent.
Leo: Eight percent is not bad.
John: It is not good.
Patrick: Well it is interesting that we have tried different pod casters at least in France we have tried models that would do it yourself basically and just have ---a bunch of Paypal buttons on your websites and people could subscribe that way and I has worked for some, maybe not as well as it does on this system because of going through that proxy and then having them handle the payment and the managing of everything I think that people got used to crowd funding in general and for some reason it is easier for people to commit with a site that can be somewhat equated to Kick Starter.
Leo: Do you find that you have to beg for money a lot John, spend a lot of time asking for money?
John: Here is the problem that people have with podcasts if people want to make it listener supported and they have a huge reluctance to ask for money.
Leo: Yes I do not like doing that.
John: Yes and most people don’t and in general people are in a position where they used to work for somebody or to put it bluntly they have slave mentality and they feel that they should either be paid by someone or they should be subservient to some-one. They do not have the wherewithal to take this leap of faith and say look here is what we are providing and look we need to provide it and we want you to be the person that helps us do this and we are going to do this end around the advertising model and other models and the problem that most pod casters have is that they cannot do this sincerely. They cannot sincerely, they put a button up, Oh God, they feel guilty maybe and then get 5 bucks and don’t ask again because they already gave us 5 bucks.
Leo: They feel guilty, right.
John: So if you are not into it at the right psychological level you cannot be successful so falling back onto Patreon is just a cheap trick. It is just like Oh God let them do the work and I will just……..
Leo: I do not want to ask.
John: But you have to ask.
Leo: Would ask on the show?
Patrick: I am going to disagree with you John and I did ask and it is maybe a little bit more challenging even in France where money is a bit more dirty and you do not talk about it and you should not want to be making money because that is what evil capitalist people do so I did have to sort of challenge myself to do it and I did ask for money……………..
John: I would have to hear what your pitch was to evaluate the sincerity factor.
Leo: Did we ask for money in the early days of TWIT.
John: You would not make the money that you are making?
Leo: That is reason why I did not do it. We made about 10,000 a month or something like that,…….
John: But that is not…..
Leo: And I was not willing to beg, and that would not have supported more than one show a month.
John: And it is not begging by the way.
Leo: It felt like it.
Patrick; I do not think that it is begging.
John: Well you were not doing it right.
Leo: No I was not.
Jill: I would say did anyone ever see Amanda Palmer’s Tech Talk…………
Leo: I love it.
Jill: It is a little weird, it is a really wonderful thought experiment about this whole issue of how do you ask for money, how do you get people to support you directly rather than having to have an advertiser and a sponsor as the middle man and it is a really interesting piece.
Leo: It brought up a lot of stuff for me, especially when she went to the house of the poor people and they were sleeping on the floor so she could sleep in their bed was like yes I do not know, you know she and what is interesting about her is that before she became a rock star with the Dresden Dolls she would stand in a bridal gown on the street corner…………..
Jill; She was a statue performer in Boston.
Leo: (Imitating a statue handing out flowers) and people would throw money in the bucket and she got very used to asking for money. Something we are not used to.
Jill: Yes. You know I was on a really interesting panel earlier this week and there were some people on it from the advertising end of mobile apps and one guy had a point that the best way to incorporate ad and any kind of sponsorship is to remind people with some kind of transparency look what we are doing is costing money to put on, we need to make the funds………..
Leo: We do that all the time.
Jill: And that little bit of human touch to say that we want you to know this is the way that it works so please listen to our wonderful sponsor. It goes a long way.
Leo: That is just being honest.
John: Right now this week Kate Cudie got all these guys coming on……….
Leo: This I hate, sitting there and you are watching a perfectly good piece on Bob Seger and all of a sudden they stop and some bozo…………………
John: Or two in this case,
Leo: Two bozos saying give us money. This I hate.
John: So you just stopped listening to Kate Cudie just out of protest?
Leo: Yes, during pledge week, rest of the time I watch.
John: So you are just a taker.
Leo: Only from the Cohen brothers.
John: Seriously they do get plenty of money.
Leo: I know they do.
John: They used to get plenty of money from the Gates Foundation but Bill and Melinda decided that the show was boring.
Leo: Are you talking about the NEIL MACLAREN NEWS HOUR,
John: NEWS HOUR it is not Neil Maclaren anymore.
Leo: It is interesting that Neil Maclaren still owns it,
John: Yes I know he owns it.
Leo: So it is called the News Hour,
John: So the Gates Foundation said, I think Bill said but I think it was Melinda said this show sucks, it is boring, cannot you jazz it up a little bit, wear some colorful clothes or something, they pulled their money and PBS had a big meeting and said we do not care and we are going to fix the show and when you are satisfied,,,,,,,,,,
Leo: You can give us some money.
John: They have yet to come back. They pulled their money and PBS had a big meeting and they said, “Okay we're going to pull the show and when you're satisfied, give us some money”. But they have yet to come back. But they have jazzed up the show. Anyway a little story that nobody cares about.
Leo: I feel like I like our model. But I think that what I do like is that there are many models, and the more models the better.
John: I don’t believe an incorruptible news show can be done with your model.
Leo: I agree. We're so corrupted.
John: Well you're not that corrupted but you are corrupted, because you take advertising. You’re not going to say anything bad about the advertisers.
Leo: My original plan was not to take advertising for that very reason, not so, so much that I felt it would corrupt us but that I wanted to be above suspicion.
John: Right nobody cares that much about it in general. But if we're going to do the kind of show that we do… we each have a lot of insulting things to say. And I would say that we couldn't do it if I had advertising. It's happened to you that every once in a while you have some jerk on your show that says something and I can see you cringe.
Leo: Actually Brian Brushwood and Justin Robert Young took NSFW off of our network and are trying to support it through the patron ad model because they wanted to be able to be nasty. And I wouldn't let them be nasty.
John: I don't see why they have to be nasty on that show.
Patrick: It’s called Not Safe For Work.
Leo: That was my mistake. I suggested that name and that was my mistake.
John: Point well taken.
Leo: They had ads when they were on our network but they didn't want to have to modify their conversation.
John: Well they just talk dirty I think.
Leo: Yeah dirty.
Patrick: For a show where you’ve taken an ad model, if you grow enough you are going to be making a lot more money than you will, I think, on a crowd funded show. So it is a little bit different, and every show is different and every show is special and wonderful, but there are different factors to take into consideration. I don't think patron is going to be supporting shows enough that you could've grown, Leo, your operation into what it is now.
Leo: We built a $1.5 million dollar studio and that isn’t going to happen from donations. Yet we did raise $250,000 of that from selling bricks.
And I bought a brick.
Leo: I know, I like the bricks.
John: You made what in bricks? How many?
Leo: We made $250,000 from selling bricks.
John: $250,000 in bricks?
Leo: Yeah, 1800 of them.. And you're not getting your money back. Somebody actually said, “I want my money back”. And I said, “Well okay, you bought a brick. I can't really take it out of the wall. I'll be glad to send you your money back.”
John: No. When you buy a brick, you buy a brick.
Leo: And then somebody else said, “Well I’ll take his brick”. So how do you do that, chisel out the name and put a new name in?
John: No, no, no. A brick is a brick. You’re done.
Patrick: That is the thing. It’s not about begging. You’re not begging people to buy a brick. If they think what you do is valuable and if they enjoy it enough that they are willing to give you money for it, then you have the money. And it’s about begging, it is about asking people if you think it is valuable then I’ll take a couple of dollars if you have them to spare.
Leo: If you really wanted to sell naming rights to the studio.
John: Now you’re talking. You might as well go to them and make it an auction.
Leo: Would that be weird if we did that?
Jill: I’ll take that dumpy table right there!
Leo: From the Jill Duffy Memorial Studio in beautiful downtown Petaluma, CA.
John: That’s the way they do it on network TV.
Leo: And now, from the SO studio.
John: And they also say, “This sports update is brought to you by…”. They say sports scores and Samsung paid for it.
Leo: We couldn’t get anybody to do that. Nobody wanted to buy it.
John: You needed to set up some sort of a buzz and an auction.
Leo: The problem with an auction is that if you get a bid for a buck and somebody doesn’t bid over that you’ve got to sell it for a buck.
John: I’d bid $2.
Leo: Then for the rest of my life I’d have to see the John C. Dvorak studio.
John: No. You do like the stadiums, you do it for a one year contract.
Leo: Oh! One year.
John: Yeah, one year. Then that makes it look like you are moving around.
Leo: I was afraid Jason Calacanis would buy the naming rights. He would too. He’d give me a million bucks just so I’d have to say, “Now from the Jason Calacanis studios…”
John: Yeah, he would do it. He wouldn’t do it for a million, but he’d do it.
Leo: Our show today brought to you by GoToMeeting by Citrix. Not all your meetings can be planned in advance, things come up and meetings can be very important. We have a three E-mail out policy, if three e-mails go back and forth over a topic then we call a meeting. We say, “This isn't going to work let's get all the parties to the table”. But sometimes the parties are all over the place. That's where GoToMeeting is fabulous. People working in different offices, on the go, around the world, can get together to solve problems, to discuss ideas. I just think this is such a great tool for business. GoToMeeting from Citrix. Meet and collaborate online. You're seeing each other on screen so you're on the same page. You can see each other face-to-face, you can get eye to eye. And you can sign up for GoToMeeting from your computer or your mobile device and launch your first meeting is seconds. I want you to try it right now. Visit GoToMeeting.com and you'll see an orange try it free button, use our offer code Twit to get 30 days absolutely free. GoToMeeting. Fire it up, invite your crew, work together to solve problems, brainstorm, be creative. GoToMeeting.com. Please use the offer code Twit. And here's the part where I say we thank GoToMeeting so much for their support this week in Tech, without whom this show would not be possible.
Leo: Why did you bring my bobble head? We sold these too, but these were not a great money maker. I’m really not that embarrassed I guess to ask for money. Actually, they are nice though, see they’re solid resin. Not some cheap bobble head.
John: I think this is one of the best products you've sold. But it doesn't look like you.
Leo: No bobble head ever looks like anybody right?
John: Except for the head bobbling around.
Leo: This is based on pictures, 3-D models from pictures. Is just that nothing ever looks like anybody. That looks sort of like me.
John: No.
Leo: Did you see President Obama between the ferns?
Jill: I did yeah. Great stuff.
Leo: It was very funny. I like Zach Galifianakis. I'm amazed that President Obama would cooperate with that though.
John: I was stunned.
Leo: It’s good politics though.
John: You think? I think it’s humiliating.
Leo: Remember when Bill Clinton came on the Leno show and played his saxophone? That was a big deal.
John: And now they're doing standup.
Leo: And now, they are doing standup on an Internet show.
John: I thought it was humiliating. To be honest with you I didn't like it.
Leo: Yeah. When a French president have done that?
Patrick: Well our French president was caught on a scooter at his lovers house.
Leo: And he was wearing businesses shoes. That’s what gave him away.
Patrick: The difference between the Clinton thing and Obama thing was that actually went there to promote the health care.
Leo: He felt like this is how you get to young people
Patrick: Exactly and it was incredibly efficient. So you can argue. I guess a lot of people were arguing he should be doing serious stuff and not this. But you know, actually he made something very efficient, he managed to inform…
John: Who signed up. How efficient was it?
Leo: I don't know. They say no kids have signed up for the healthcare.
John: For good reason.
Patrick: That’s a different topic. But the bulk of the healthcare.gov traffic is coming from funnyordie.com.
Leo: Nixon, someone is pointing out, that Nixon was on Laugh In.
John: Sock it to me! Yeah, I remember that.
Leo: So I guess there's a long-standing tradition. Nixon was the first TV president. He had Admin running his campaign and so forth.
John: I guess.
Leo. Yeah. You can look it up, it's on the Internet.
John: And they don’t lie on the Internet. I’ll look it up on Wikipedia.
Patrick: Ken from Chicago is saying there was a surge of enrollment on the healthcare.gov.
Leo: Because the president was cool and hip. And I don't want no spoilers. But the ending is great I thought. Very funny.
John: Okay. It was a good ending.
Leo: Oh, let's talk about SXSW. Jill did you go by any chance?
Jill: No I went 2 years ago and after that I said, I'm not going anymore.
Leo: Why?
Jill: It’s too discombobulated and I think it’s still really best for people that are there for the music and entertainment and for the technology angle like CES was really plenty. I did not need to be at SXSW.
Leo: You were there? You weren’t!
John: Look at my twitter feed and you'll see that I was there.
Leo: You just tweeted it.
John: No, people saw me.
Leo: Very sad story. A driver plowed into a crowd.
John: It was on sixth street. The car goes down the street plows over people.
Leo: Terrible. 23 people injured. He's being charged with a capital crime, as he should be.
John: Everybody there is drunk. It's a party drunk fest.
Leo: That was one thing I enjoyed secret during SXSW. A lot of people were drunk.
John: People were posting selfies of themselves plastered. Not a good idea.
Patrick: Did you see the Snowden thing at SXSW?
Leo: Yeah. There was some news. Julian Assange did a Skype interview which failed, and a couple of days later Edward Snowden, instead of using Skype he used Google Hangouts because they are so much more trustworthy. And it was very poor frame rate but he was apparently, I don't know if it was serious, but they joked that he was on 7 Proxies to get there.
John: Why? They know where he is.
Leo: No, they don’t. He’s in Russia.
John: Oh, yeah. Our intelligence agencies have no clue where he is? Give me a break.
Leo: That’s the irony of all this NSA stuff. I think they actually don’t. They can't find a 777 airplane.
John: If they put Snowden in it, they probably could find it!
Patrick: So okay. I want to say something about Snowden. And I want to hear your thoughts.
John: Please don't say he should be shot. You want somebody on your show saying.…
Leo: It wasn’t my show. It was TNT and I’m sorry about that. I apologize to all and sundry.
Patrick: It’s not about him getting shot or whether he should be shot, I think it's the opposite. I don't know if you've actually listened to this interview. There's been a couple of others, and he is incredibly soft spoken and well-spoken and very precise about what he wants and what he wanted to achieve with his leaks. And the care he took in not making it too damaging and the way he approaches the whole problem shows how much it's not about him. You were talking about the Assange. I think Assange is a lot more controversial in the sense that he's very much his own personality and you can feel that there is lot of him in what he does. Snowden feels very different and I think that by now, it's been a few months I can't remember how many, so eight months since then. And a lot of us have been incredibly careful in how we were judging this whole affair because we didn't really know enough and the dust was still settling. We didn't know what the NSA did, what Snowden was after, what we knew and what we didn’t. And now I think we are at the point, unless there is something incredibly surprising that happens, which is always possible, but now the dust has settled and I think we can decide which side of this argument we're on. For my money, I think it's okay to say Snowden is a hero and he is an American hero and he is an international hero. He did something incredibly dangerous, not for his own sake but because he was witnessing, as he says, the Constitution of the United States being broken left, right and Sunday. We've seen how the NSA has been lying to Congress. I'm not going to go back through everything that we've witnessed in the past eight months but I just want to say it's okay now to decide whether or not we want to say that he is a hero. I think he is. I think a lot of the people from the tech community should be taking a stand on this. Now we know it's not okay anymore to say, “Well were not sure, it’s unclear and we're waiting to find out more”. Now we know.
Leo: The things that we are learning. This week the revelation was about quantum. A tool that weaponized the Internet, in effect, by allowing the NSA to automate the infection of many millions of computers with malware. Malware that can be used to turn on the camera and take pictures, turn on the sound and listen in.
Patrick: Its never ending. You would think after six months it would be like okay, now it's done. But it keeps on coming all the time and it is, to a point where it's clear, at least to me, that the NSA and possibly some parts of the Government is breaking the, I hesitate to say the law, because they've actually arranged the law so they wouldn’t be breaking it doing these outrageous things. But it's going beyond the scope of what is acceptable and what they should be allowed to do. That for me, settles it. It is clear to me that somebody had to blow the whistle and he did, and he should be commended for it.
Leo: The NSA and Britain's GCHQ wanted to add pone by keyword feature to quantum if users e-mail through Yahoo or Hotmail contain any keywords that were offensive like hummus. It would exploit them automatically.
John: Nice.
Leo: It would just be like, “Good we got them”. There are some questions about how well this might’ve worked, but the point that they wanted to do that is sufficient for the conversation.
John: They are really looking out for words like merger acquisition. Seriously, this is a blackmailing operation and also a scheme to make money.
Leo: Really that's what you think?
John: Yeah that's what I think.
Leo: You don't think they're just trying to find terrorists?
John: They are trying to find stock tips that nobody else has access to.
Patrick: Either way, it’s not acceptable is it?
John: No, of course not.
Leo: I could live with that if it were appropriately circumscribed as, by law, and they were doing it to attack an individual who was deemed as a threat to United States. But that is kind of retail and it looks like they're doing it kind of wholesale. Kind of automatically.
Patrick: That’s the whole point. When I say Snowden is very precise in what he wants, it is exactly what he is saying. He’s not saying, “We should stop spying on everyone”. He’s not a privacy nut. He’s not saying, “That should never be possible about anything, we should neuter the NSA: That is not what he’s saying. He’s saying, “We should absolutely pursue valid targets. We should have tools to fight terrorism”. It is just the mass surveillance is unacceptable. And that is exactly what you are saying, Leo. It should be okay for these organizations to have these tools and to use them in a targeted manner. We are not against spying, God knows I am very much for that in these kinds of practices.
Leo: There is also the larger issue that EffProtect, the Finish security legend that is been around for a long time, wrote that when you introduce this malware into computers you also introduce other vulnerabilities that other malicious agents can exploit. So this is really breaking things. Badly.
John: There is nothing worse than malware.
Leo: Nothing.
Patrick: What do you guys think about my huge rant? Am I wrong?
John: You are fine with the rant.
Lou: No I think it is time to say, I think it is safe to say, you can talk about technicalities like, well he made an oath that he wouldn't ever reveal any of this stuff, and he did.
John: You know the Agenda thesis is on this right?
Leo: I can figure it's the Panoptic Con.
John: The Agenda thesis says that Snowden still works for the CIA. He said on the interview with the German TV guys that he still works for the CIA. This is the CIA attempt to cut the budget because they know all the money is going to the NSA. There is a battle going on between these two agencies.
Leo: He told German television that he still works for the CIA?
John: He basically did, yes. Have you seen that interview? He said he still has his I D and as far as he's concerned…
Leo: I see. “ Technically I still work for the CIA, they never fired me”.
John: Of course not. But they kept calling what he did, a mission. I'm telling you, you need to listen to it.
Leo: Why would he admit it?
John: To German TV. Does it even run in the United States? They do it three hours and not one word runs in the United States.
Leo: No, because it's all in German.
John: No it's all in English. That’s okay. Just listen to No Agenda and you won't have to listen to Leo's theories. Which is that everything is fine. Everything is wonderful.
Leo: It’s a wonderful world.
John: The NSA are great guys. And nobody is doing any of that stuff.
Leo: What a wonderful world this would be. Jill, I’m sorry you had to be here for this episode.
John: I didn’t bring this topic up.
Leo: No I did. I’m trying to find… I’m desperately trying to find some news. We’ll take a break and when we come back we’ll find some news.
John: There’s tons of news.
Leo: Good! Would you… Get a story prepared.
John: I’ll get a run down for you.
Leo: Locked and loaded.
John: I’ll be ready to rock.
Leo: As they say in the firearm game.
John: Do they?
Leo: Our show today brought to you by Shutterstock.com, with over 30 million… Actually if you go to Shutterstock, I like doing this, you can see how many total they’ve got right now. Because they keep an actual count on the site. There are, Ladies and Gentleman, 34,793,373 royalty free stock images right now ,on Shutterstock.com. This week they added more than a quarter million new images. All of them curated, carefully selected for quality. And that’s just the photos! If you click the footage tab at shutterstock.com, you’ll see that there are well over 1.6 million stock free videos. Royalty free stock videos. Just a great selection of stuff. 22,000 new videos this week. Now you might say, “With that variety, Leo, how am I going to find what I need?” Give me a noun!
John: Uh, a noun?
Leo: Yeah a noun. Any noun.
John: Cup!
Jill: Surfboard.
Leo: Cup, Surfboard. I like hers better. Alright, and I’ll show you why. Now give me an adjective.
John: Large.
Leo: Large?
Jill: Glossy.
John: Glossy. You just said, whatever she says is gold!
Leo: Yeah, that’s right. Because I have a biased. I’m biased.
John: Yeah, we’ve known that.
Leo: Ladies and gent… I don’t know. Glossy surfboards. I think these are glossy photos of surfboards. I’m not sure.
John: No, these are logos you put on surfboards.
Jill: No, I don’t know! That one looks pretty glossy.
Leo: That’s pretty glossy. So here’s the beauty of this, you can search for nouns, you can search for adjectives. You can narrow it down by color. They have a color wheel. You can actually say, “you know, our page… we really focus on royal blues.” So let me focus for a royal blue, glossy surfboard. Oh! There are no royal blue glossy surfboards.
John: You went the wrong way. You should have went with cup.
Leo: Cup, I would have found one! So here’s the deal. I want you to sign up for your free account. You don’t need to give them a credit card. What you will be able to do with the free account, is get free photo and vector images each week. Yours for the taking. You’ll also get access to the light boxes. That’s nice because you can find an image, save an image. Then share it with colleagues, save it for later. You don’t have to buy it right away. If you do decide to buy… by the way, they have editorial as well as stock photos. If you need a good photo of Bill Gates, you got it. The Pope, you got it. Albert Einstein, you got it! Miley Cyrus, you got it! It’s all there at Shutterstock. Yeah, there’s the picture of Miley you want. We have the 25 image a day subscription, this is great for publications. You never run out of great content you can use. Shutterstock.com. Check out there apps on IOS and Android, beautiful Webby award winning app. And if you decide to buy, I invite you to use our offer code: TWIT314 because then you will get 20% off new accounts. That’s TWIT314. Do not use the number PI. You might be tempted to say it’s TWIT314, maybe it’s TWIT314.159 and on and on. But no it’s not PI, its March 14th, or March 2014.
John: Okay.
Leo: Yeah. Well sometimes people are tempted to use irrational numbers in the offer codes. Don’t. Do not.
John: Never heard of this.
Leo: Use real numbers please. Somebody said “mmm pie!” TWIT314 in the offer code, 20% off. Did you celebrate Pi
day?
John: No.
Leo: I had a lot of fun on twitter. I started posted mnemonics for PI and people thought I was crazy!
John: I wonder why they’d think that.
Leo: Oh how I want to drink alcohol, of course after the heavy chapters involving Quanah mechanics.
John: Alright so let’s get some stories that you wanted me to do, ready?
Leo: You found some good stories.
John: Government computers running XP will be vulnerable to hackers after April 8th. I wrote a column about this in the PC magazine.
Leo: Hackers? Who? Everybody!
John: Which said that Microsoft should charge a little, there’s half a million. I’m sorry.
Leo: Half a billion.
John: Half a billion XP machines out there. If they charged $1 month for support they could easily make about 3 to 6 billion dollars extra on the bottom line and just support this. They’ve already got a group in place that supports it, why don’t they just keep them in business? So that’s my argument about XP.
Leo: Because then nobody would by Windows 8.
John: No, no, no. These are things that are stuck in place. They’re on ATM machines, banks use XP. There’s a bunch of people…
Leo: 95% of ATMs in the US are using Windows XP.
John: Yeah. So support it!
Leo: 95%
John: Do you want your bank to change the software in the ATM machines, really?
Leo: Yeah!
John: To Windows 8?
Leo: Alright you’re right. They should have never used Windows to begin with.
John: Well there’s that!
Leo: Wow, But Steve Gibson said its fine. Go ahead and use Windows XP. He says it’s safe.
John: Yeah I think so.
Leo: Really?
John: Yeah I agree with Steve.
Leo: Oh. Didn’t you just say….?
John: No they still need support.
Leo: I’m Sorry. I’m getting whiplash. I can’t follow it at all.
John: Well, This is not.
Leo: How about BOS. How do you feel about BOS?
John: Whatever happen to BOS? They dropped the O and became BS, that’s the problem.
Leo: They came this close. Apple was looking at them, looking at them closely because BOS became with a great Jolloey Guese, Former Vice president, and then they had this other thing. The next operating system. Next App and some guy named Steve Jobs decided there was BOS, next, Box, Next? And they finally bought Next. I remember seeing DOS in Paris, Obviously a very long time ago, and I was completely amazed that it could read two video feeds from the hard drive at the same time! It was revolutionary. It was incredible.
Leo: Wow! Boom!
John: So Intel is going to 14 nanometers.
Leo: Really?
John: Yeah. Don’t you remember about 5 years ago when you couldn’t. Oh you can do, you’re going to have to have X-rays and all this other stuff, and they keep doing it!
Leo: Pretty soon you run out of Nanos. 14! 22 is the current process.
John: 14.
Leo: Wow! How, I mean, when at this point, you’re getting to the point where you’re in quannamecets.
John: I don’t know how they can do it. Maybe they’re just lying to us.
Leo: Are they still using electron beam lithography or what are they using?
John: I don’t know. I’m going to have to catch up with this, I fell behind because nobody writes about this stuff anymore.
Leo: Nobody does yeah. Nobody cares about this stuff anymore.
John: No one does.
Leo: We care.
John: We do.
Leo: We have institutional memory. Plasma damage to locate materials can really get in the way if you know what you’re talking about with this process.
John: No, I don’t know anything there.
Leo: Problems. Wow I didn’t know that. That is a good story.
John: Yeah. And of course it’s in seeking alpha. IBM denies giving client data to the US government. IBM was never mentioned in any of these scandals!
Leo: Nobody ever asked them! What do we want their client data for?
Patrick: By the way guys!
Leo: Go ahead and ask, we won’t do it!
John: IBMs Watson is now doing recipes I understand.
Leo: This is a bizarre story. So Watson is the jeopardy playing computer.
John: Scam. Scam by the way.
Leo: Yeah it was a scam.
John: Because the…
Leo: Because there was a little guy in the machine.
John: No, it’s because he could hit the button faster than anyone.
Leo: Right. That’s the game, by the way.
John: Right, because.
Leo: It has nothing to do with the question and answer.
John: Everyone can answer the question. Boom!
Leo: Yeah, they all can answer. It’s timing!
John: Yeah, it’s the reflexes.
Patrick: Wasn’t that for the first few questions, and then the other contestants complained. And then they had to implement a timer that would make Watson push the button in a humanly realistic time frame?
John: Yeah, but he still beat everybody.
Patrick: Right, because he still had the right answer.
Leo: Is Watson cooking?
John: Apparently Watson is. I don’t know. I just read about him now doing recipes or something. And I can’t imagine how this is.
Leo: Analyzed, the system analyzed, according to The Verge, 35,000 recipes and about 1,000 chemical flavor compounds so it can make educated guesses about which ingredient combinations will delight and surprise humans.
John: Humans! Humans must eat foods! Try this humans!
Patrick: Surprise, I’m sure is easy to achieve.
Leo: Wow I didn’t expect that!
John: Why am I getting a banana sauce on my sirloin steak?
Leo: So Friday at South by Southwest, IBM had a fire engine red food truck with a meal plan generated by Watson, including such surprising and delightful treats such as chocolate burritos and Swiss tie asparagus quiche.
John: Did people have to pay to eat this food?
Leo: Humans made it.
John: Humans!
Leo: Creole Swiss lamb dumpling. Baltic Apple pie, and Turkish bruschetta.
John: Turkish Bruschetta, what is that?
Leo: Only Watson knows. See now I do wish I went to South by Southwest, just to taste computer generated food.
John: There was probably a line for that thing.
Patrick: John, you were there!
John: Yeah I was! There was a huge line. What do you think I just said? There was a huge line.
Leo; There was a huge line!
Patrick: Oh right, right.
Leo: Oh there it is. Delicious what is that? What are we eating now, Adrian Jeffrey’s.
John: See if she throws up.
Leo: What does she say? IBM food truck
IBM Food truck report: We started this project about two years ago. We wanted to see this…
Leo: He sounds French so it’s got to be good.
Report: We wanted to see if food could be creative. New products…
John: Oh it’s a guy.
Leo: Software engineer at IBM. Wouldn’t you rather have a Frenchman cook for you than design software for you? Oh my god, he’s got piercings everywhere.
John: Yeah, he’s all Mr. Pierce.
Leo: Holy Cow.
Report: You have to kind of direct the computer in a certain direction, and then the computer gives you suggestions. It tells you, oh you chose Chicken, Chicken is used a lot in Korean Cuisines, do you want to make a dinner in this?
Leo: It’s called a menu!
John: This is dumb!
Leo: That’s stupid! All of that power to do that! Really!
Jill: I loved it like epicures was not good enough, so they had to take Watson out of the hospital where he was working on diagnosing patience and solving disease.
Leo: Curing censer!
Jill: No we needed to come up with a new Singaporean dumpling instead, that was more important.
Leo: I think the IBM Watson team really just wanted to go to South by Southwest and get drunk. Just an excuse.
John: That’s all anyone goes there for.
Patrick: Well okay, if we’re being serious for a second, if computers can learn how to cook, isn’t it cool? It’s better than hot pockets.
John: Hot pockets!
Leo: It’s better than hot pockets, is it?
John: Anything is better than hot pockets!
Leo: No! Nothing is better than Hot Pockets. I beg to differ!
John: Hot Pockets? You don’t even eat hot pockets!
Leo: I, If I opened on the Shanzelize, a hot pocket stand it would be huge, would it not Patrick Beja?
John: If they did not burn the place down than the French should be ashamed of themselves.
Patrick: Interesting thing. One of the biggest culinary stories of last year was that Burger King is coming back to France. It was a really big deal.
Leo: Yeah, with the Royale.
John: What happened to the French that use to burn places like that to the ground?
Patrick: I guess the kids that use to go to Burger King before it closed in Paris, grew up and are now running the place. Which is worrisome.
Leo: Right.
Patrick: Think we don’t have the same disdain that you guys have for fast-food, because we take it for what it is. It’s a cool thing that you eat when you don’t have time. And it’s also a little bit lest disgusting in our fast food restaurants than it is in yours.
Leo: No, I beg to differ. They put Mayonnaise on the fries, that’s disgusting! Can I, why don’t they use Watson to mine Bitcoins? That would be a good use!
John: To start mining Bitcoins. I’m surprised these companies don’t do that. There’s a lot of idle CPU power out there that could be used to mine Bitcoins. I don’t understand it.
Leo: Yeah. Popcorn time, I’m not sure why this got so much attention, and why people were so shocked that this application, which basically let you…. torrents, find movie on torrents, like Netflix and then watch them, got shutdown in like 3 minutes.
Patrick: 3 minutes?
Leo: What a shock!
John: 3 minutes.
Patrick: After the slew of articles it was up for 3 days and they had to shut it down, obviously. But in the meantime, I don’t know if you guys saw that email, but I got an email from XBM C who was seeing all this happen and the email was entitled something along the lines of “Want to know what the real pirates Netflix app is?” And selling their own product.
Leo: We’ve got it!
Patrick: Are you really pitching yourself as the pirate Netflix? It’s weird.
John: Because Netflix is so expensive.
Leo: Yeah, really $7.99 come on! Obviously this was not on Apple store, or Android play store. You had to get it from mega.co.nz. This is the statement, after 3 day’s they shut down. “Popcorn time is shutting down today, not because we ran out of energy, commitment focus, or allies, but because we need to move on with our lives. “
John: What? Why did they even start it in the first place?
Leo: 3 days! It’s time to move on with my life!
John: 3 days. I didn’t think it was going to be this much work! I’m out of here!
Patrick: They worked on it longer than that, obviously!
Leo: What were they thinking?
Patrick: They were thinking that service was legal. Well okay, that the service was not illegal in the countries where it was not illegal. Obviously, some people disagreed.
Leo: So by the way, the code is still around. You can download it, build it, and install it yourself. It’s not gone, it’s on getup.
Patrick: The thing is, it’s not doing anything illegal by itself.
Leo: That’s what the pirate bay says.
Patrick: Exactly.
Leo: We don’t store anything illegal.
John: It’s like those little antennas, those aren’t illegal.
Leo: They quadruple checked the legality and said let’s do it! 3 days later they said, we’re getting on with our lives. Thank you very much, it’s over. Amazon is going to raise the price of amazon prime.
John: 20 bucks!
Leo: I thought it was going to go higher than that.
John: It will. I’d say this is a stepping stone.
Leo: The beginning. It was $79. Amazon prime gives you free two day shipping on anything Amazon sells. Not on everything on the Amazon site, but on anything they fulfil. They also give you instant video. A lot of crappy things on there you don’t want to watch.
John: There’s some interesting things on there like Rubicon. The 13 part series that ran once on AMC, very good story. And it’s free.
Leo: You’re right. Video has some good stuff. It’s nice in conjunction with Netflix. You can also as a kindle user, borrow an eBook every month.
John; Yeah, and they also give you a free eBook once a month.
Leo: Oh what was it?
John: I can’t remember.
Leo: It was free, what the hell.
John; It was free, I picked it and now it’s on the kindle.
Leo: Any book, or do you have a specific…?
John: No, they give you like 6 choices and it’s a scam.
Leo: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin.
John: no, these are all…
Leo: Leak house, by Charles Dickens. Huckleberry Fin, by Mark Twain. It’s like that isn’t it?
John: No not at all. In fact its contemporary authors you never heard of. It’s even better.
Leo: Oh even better. So they were… they debated anywhere between 20 and 40 dollars. I thought they’d end up on the high end of the increase.
John: Oh, they’re going to have trouble with $20.
Leo: Due to the increased cost of fuel and transportation, if you read the book ’The Everything Store,” by Brad Stone, about Amazon. They completely guessed at 79 bucks, they had no idea what primary cost them.
John: What did is cost them?
Leo: Nobody even knows. Amazon is so willing to lose money on something like that that nobody even cares. They’re like, yeah we lost money on every sale, but we’ve got lots more customers! That’s how they think.
Jill: You know what I think about Amazon. I don’t think they’re so blind about their financials.
Leo: oh!
Jill: I think a store that can revolutionize the way that we do distribution and shipping, have it down to a science, have it so pristinely timed within the warehouses, do you really think they don’t know what’s going on with their financial stuff?
Leo: No, they know exactly what’s going on.
John: Good point.
Jill: They’re a big company and they own so many small companies that they are very good at hiding their money. That’s what I really think.
Leo: I think they know. I think they’re willing to lose money to put other companies out of business.
Jill: Oh they always have been.
Leo: And I think they’re also willing to lose money just to gain consumers. But I do believe that when they first came up with prime, they just really didn’t know how many people would use it, how much the shipping would end up costing them. Whether they’d make the money up in the amount of sales, I think that was a bit of a guess. Supposedly it was Jeff Bezos after much debate said “79 bucks, we’ll figure it out from there.” But you make a good point, because it didn’t change for years.
Jill: Well I think going forward if you’re an existing Prime member, this year is still 79 bucks. It didn’t change if you have an auto renewal I believe it is.
Leo: Yes.
Jill: Students actually get a discount, its half price from the typical prime membership, or if you’re in a family and have a student, you can sign up using their credit entails. Then you get a nice little chunk of change on that.
John: Where there’s a tip worth the price of admission to the show!
Jill: Yeah!
Leo: Now, how much would you pay, huh?
John: Apparently 35 bucks to come in.
Leo: Would you like to become a knight of the TWiT round table?
John: Yeah, I’d like to see that!
Jill: You know the other thing about Amazon is a lot of their products are just cash registers. Like the Kindle is a cash register for buying other products in the Amazon store. When I started looking deeply into the streaming aspect of Amazon, I really felt like I was getting nickel and dimed. Because as much as there’s a lot of stuff to be streamed for free, there’s also a whole bunch of content that isn’t free that is then advertised to you for 2 or 3 dollars to rent it. 7, 8, 9 dollars to buy it. But it’s not really clear if you need to be a prime member or not, in order to stream the content that’s paid. So it’s this weird thing that you’re afraid, if I lose my prime membership, do I also lose my ability to buy this streamed content that’s not free and part of prime? I believe the answer is no, anybody can buy it for the price that it is. But it is so like murky in the way that it is designed that you can't tell.
Leo: They have but only in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, they have a grocery store with delivery service, fresh. You can also do Prime fresh for $300 a year. You'll get your groceries same day or next day early morning on orders over 35 bucks. That seems like a lot, I don't know if I would pay $300 a year for same day delivery.
John: If you’re working at a company in the dog patch area doing web development or software development and you had 10 or 20 guys there working 12 or 16 hours a day and they needed to eat, I think you would pay that.
Leo: Don't give me food, No I want meals cooked ready to eat.
John: They probably have that available.
Leo: I want Amazon to feed me, bathe me, clothe me and wipe my butt.
John: You should go work for Google. Google does all that.
Jill: I use fresh direct sometimes and they have a similar thing where you get free delivery. I don't remember what the price is on that. But the real key there is when you have it in cities where people don't have cars and carrying a lot of heavy groceries to our homes can be a big deal.
Leo: Oh it can be huge.
Jill: So the ability to order something on line especially if like I am going to have a party. If I can get some cases of beer delivered to my house and all the food and all the paper products I need, that's worthwhile.
Leo: Why should you carry a case of beer up your 7 story walk up when you can get some minimum wage worker to do it.
Jill: Absolutely no.
Patrick: Yeah it's that and if you worried about cost it is also about the price. I live in a fairly expensive neighborhood and our local grocery store is really expensive. So if I could order from Amazon fresh stuff I would do it all the time.
Leo: Safeway does delivery here and you can't tip the guys. You try to tip them they say No we are union. You can't tip them.
John: That's no excuse.
Leo: I know I thought what kind of union is that?
John: What kind of union is that?
Leo: It is a sucky union.
John: You cannot take tips!
Leo: I thought that was a strange response.
John: Well it probably has something to do with a negotiation that took place at one point where the management people, I've done unions myself. The management people say you get all this money on tips we don't have to pay you on the per hourly basis. So they projected tips and then they get screwed by the man.
Leo: Right, so they can't ask for tips. So Jill do you use this regularly or just for special occasions?
Jill: I use Fresh Direct a dozen times a year or so I would say. Mostly for special occasions. But yeah it is really handy. There are other grocery stores that have delivery but the experience of being able to order online and have all my shopping list saved. Like that is a very Amazon experience. While Fresh Direct is what we have here that is convenient that everyone knows. If we had Amazon Fresh here, I don't know I probably might try it.
Leo: New York is next, you got to go in the major metros where there is a huge population density. It just is more effective.
Jill: You can get anything delivered here.
Leo: ANYTHING?!
John: I have heard that.
Jill: Anything.
Leo: Anything, I want a gold tooth. Amazon is, I don't understand this, Amazon media streamer. They have been going through FCC approval on this thing? It is more than just a Roku it is a set top box that has a game controller. So Netflix and Hulu, yes it is running on Android, Amazon does that like the Kendel. Apparently according to the FCC documents there is a bluetooth game controller which has a lot of buttons on it this looks pretty serious. How long until Amazon has same day delivery in big cities like New York? Just kind of bring it to you, we will have it for you in a couple hours. By the way why does Amazon use UPS? Why don't they have their own delivery service?
John: I am surprised they haven't bought UPS.
Leo: Yeah I am too. Seems that would be a way to save money.
John: Did you see the new little Roku thing, it has a little plug in deal.
Leo: They have had that for a while.
John: Well this is a new one. It has a lot more stuff going on.
Leo: Yeah I have the old one. It is kind of an interesting thing, it reboots a lot on me. You need to have a special HDMI port that has power ports, MLC port. I have one devise that does. So you plug it in and it give Roku capability to that HDMI port which is kind of neat.
John: I have been playing with, you obviosly have, played with USB 3
Leo: Yes.
John: There is a new little hard disk coming out.
Leo: They are fast.
John: It is astonishing, they go at the same speed as an internal drive.
Leo: Well, practically.
John: No, I have one, the little Toshiba guy.
Leo: You have slow internal drives.
John: No I don't. I am putting it up against and SSD.
Leo: Really?
John: No it's not that fast.
Leo: MHL absolutely. So this is a $50 streaming media stick the size of a pack of gum, plugs into your HDMI port. It does have a remote control. This new one does not require an MHL. The new Roku streaming stick instead of using MHL requires a special HDMI port. Well that what MHL is, to send power as well as video. O I see, now it has a separate USB plug like the Chromecast that can plug into a USB port to give it power. That actually is better. While MHL is a great idea it just didn't take off. It is the same specs as the Roku 1. 1080 dual media hub. I really like the Roku 3 frankly. But it is missing some of those features like the remote head phone jack.
Patrick: So what is the difference with the actual Roku box, the regular one?
Leo: It looks like the channels are the same.
John: It is pretty much the same.
Leo: It just doesn't have the head phone jack on the remote, oh and it does have dual band ABG and wifi so that is good. But they will still sell the MHL streaming stick but that is a limited market they are going to bundle it with TV's and so forth. We will take a break then we will wrap things up. So glad to have you Jill Duffy from PC magazine, Mr. John C Davorak from No agenda and Patrick Beja from Lahadute.
John: You know I write for PC magazine too.
Leo: Still?
John: Yeah, now twice a week.
Leo: Show today brought to you today by Legal Zoom. You know Legal Zoom is not a law firm.
John: I heard this.
Leo: But they are providing you self-help services at your specific direction. So it turns out a lot of things one might want to do at an expensive law firm you don't need.
John: It is a lot of just forms.
Leo: It is, you know a ton of it is.
John: It really is just a boiler plate.
Leo: I set up our LLC that we still run on, on Legal Zoom. $99 plus filing fees you can also do an S corp or a C corp. Very simple. You know if you don't have a trademark you might want to check out Legal Zoom, trademark your name or your product. Last will and testament. There are times when you say, gee I wish I could ask an attorney, like what state should I incorporate in or,
John: I think you should incorporate in the state of sobriety.
Leo: No never, that is a boring state. Is that Utah, right?
John: Yeah, that's it.
Leo: Visit legalzoom.com. This is national start your business month. John do you have a business?
John: Yeah.
Leo: You, you’re the business.
John: John C. Davorak company.
Leo: Well maybe you could sell vinager on the side or
John: You want me to finish the vinager book.
Leo: Yeah. This is national start your own business month, John.
John: Yeah national finish vinager book month.
Leo: Everybody should start their business. If you go to Legal zoom right now they have a special deal for you.
John: I forgot to bring vinegar, your right.
Leo: I know. A free 3 month trial of the new quickbooks. 3Months free that's worth 119 bucks! But you have to enter twit in the referral box, check out will also give you $10 off any legal zoom service. I love Legalzoom. A lot of entrepreneurs, something like a million entrepreneurs have used Legalzoom to start their businesses and they are very grateful that Legalzoom exists. Legalzoom.com, wills for 69 bucks, LLC's 99 bucks plus filing fees, legal plan attorneys you can consult for a fixed fee in most states. Don't put off the things you need to do, go to legalzoom.com now using discount code twit. Legalzoom.com the only way you get 10 bucks off at checkout but also free 3 month trial of the all new Quickbooks. Legalzoom.com just use the offer code twit. Thank you legalzoom, thank you. Without you we wouldn't be able to keep John C. Davorak in coffee mugs or whatever it is.
John: I don't have that many coffee mugs.
Leo: What do you got there, is that a charger?
John: Look at this thing, it is a big battery.
Leo: It is like a car battery.
John: It is a big battery, I hook my phone to it, it is something you find at the airport.
Leo: We offer this for all our guests.
John: Charge your phone here.
Leo: Yeah, it says it right on the top. Isn't that nice?
John: Kind of corny.
Leo: How many quarters did you put in, 6 quarter.
John: No, it is 4 quarters, you got it wrong. It is a dollar, it turns itself off apparently.
Leo: Yes, that's right. It's like the magic fingers in the bed. Ladies and gentleman I want to thank Jill for being here and for putting up with us.
John: She's a good sport.
Jill: I love you guys.
Leo: She's a good sport. What you up to, anything you want to plug or talk about? This is your chance.
Jill: Oh yes I have to tell you about my book. I wrote a book last year. It is called How to get organize, how to clean up your messy digital life. So if you are flooded with emails, if you don't know how to find those wonderful vacation photos that are digital somewhere on your machine from when you were in Tahiti in 2005. I have a whole book giving you steps on how to do this very easily, everyday things anybody can do it. It is not for Techheads neccesarily, it is for anybody.
Leo: I wish I would have known about this before the show, I would have been asking you advise all this time.
Jill: Well you'll have to have me come back I suppose.
Leo: I need help. Is it on Amazon?
Jill: It is, it is an e-book primarily. You can get a print copy but I definitely like the e-book. Where it is supported there are video tutorials. So those would be on the Ipad version. There is a Nook version, there is the standard epub whatever you use there is a version for it. I definitely recommend the e-book.
John: Give us your top tip.
Leo: You know she writes
Jill: Password manager, I had no idea this was something I was so passionate about. I talk about it every time someone asks me about tips and apps I say are you using a password manager because if not we have to stop talking right now and you have to get that. I don't think a lot of people know what password managers do and they have never seen on before. So one of the video's in the book shows you this is a password manager, this is how it works, this is how simple it is and they are free, you don't have to pay anything to use them.
Leo: Which one do you use?
Jill: I use Dashlane which is no longer free but I was grandfathered in. Lastpass is the one we always recommend.
Leo: That's the one I love using.
John: I just use the same password for everything.
Leo: That's another way
Jill: Is it 123456?
Leo: Lovekey123
John: No, no see you'll never guess it, that's the reason it is so effective.
Patrick: It's a scam.
Leo: I get no spam.
John: It's a scam. That's exactly it, I'll have to change it now.
Leo: Last pass is a buck a month for the professional version.
Jill: Yes but you can have a free version. Dashlane, one of the things I really like about this is when you do online shopping it takes screen shots of every page as your shopping along so if you never get the email confirmation that your waiting for, there is a confirmation on the screen.
Leo: O, that's nice.
Jill: You have a screen shot of it, yeah it is pretty cool.
Leo: That actually is really cool. Alright I am going to check it out, Dashlane. And of course Jill's column every week in PC mag. Get organized. I love it, I used to read hints from Heloise and all that stuff in the newspaper. That is kind of a classic column. Like cleaning tips and stuff like that, now we got to do it digitally.
John: You read that?
Leo: I loved hints from Heloise. Did you know you could wrap tin foil around a potatoe …...
John: And use it to scrub your grill?! That is a fantastic concept. I am going to use it on tonight’s barbeque.
Leo: I couldn't say it with a straight face. Oh I am sorry. Thank you Jill for being here and putting up with us, seriously really appreciate it. We'll look forward to seeing you soon. I actually want to talk about email. We should just spend a day about how to handle your email. That's a big one.
Jill: We could do that.
Leo: Email is a failed technology in my opinion.
John: I am not going to argue the point. I think what we should do is get Jill and a couple other people and design a email program that everyone should use.
Leo: People have tried and tried to find a solution.
John: Yeah, yeah well they tried. The problem is the back end always falls apart.
Leo: If you cut a potato in half and rub it on the grill before you cook it will keep the meat from sticking.
John: Who said that? I don't think that is true.
Leo: Heloise!
John: I don't think so.
Leo: Patrick Beja you’re so realistic I got noxious. Nice to have you with us. The Phillys is no longer with us but there is the rendezvous tech.
Patrick: Yes there is Rendezvous Tech is my French tech show. I've been doing it for a while if you’re interested. If you speak French, if you used to speak French. If you are interested in getting news in French about tech because it makes it easier for you to understand because you already know the subject matter. You can find all that on patrickbeja.com. Patrium.com/rdv.tech is the place. I am NotPatrick on Twitter.
Leo: Well who are you?
Patrick: Well you see everyone says that, and wonders why I am called NotPatrick on Twitter and what I say noone ever forgets it! NotPatrick
Leo: But you are Patrick?
John: Yeah that makes no sense.
Patrick: You remember it, that's what counts.
Leo: Should I be NotLeo?
John: I've always said that.
Leo: Maybe Anybody but Leo.
Patrick: Another thing is my brothers Royalty free music service. Which every time I mention it on the show, he tells me What happened over night I got a ton of visits. So it is musicincloud.com if you are looking for some really good Royalty free music. You pay for the license and that is it for your videos, cooperate or anything like that just go to musicincloud.com. He does all the music for my podcasts so I am happy to recommend him.
Leo: Is this him playing on all of these?
Patrick: Yes, He and his wife do all them.
Leo: That's really neat.
Patrick: Well he's my brother, but it is actually really good.
Leo: He is like the pomplamoose of France. What does that mean, Grapefruit?
Patrick: I think it is spelled weirdly, it is not exactly. I don't know maybe it is. Yeah it is grapefruit.
Leo: Don't you speak French? Just teasing you. Hey, I forgot to mention, I am really excited about this. Neil Youngs Pono music project is finally on kick starter. He has been talking for a long time about making a music player instead of playing back highly compressed squeezed down all the life of it, music. The Pono which is kind of an odd triangler form facter will play back FLAK uncompressed FLAK audio. At as high a quality as 192x24. Which is considerably higher even than uncompressed CD. 192 Khz, 24 bit FLAK files. He launched this on Tuesday, I immediately got in. I was lucky too.
John: What do you get for getting in?
Leo: I got a Pono player in November, I hope. He was looking for $800,000. In just a few days he has 3.8 million. Because this is a great idea and because he is Neil Young.
John: Well there is that.
Leo: They have, you can get metal autographs. Artist signatures from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Willie Nelson, James Taylor, Morning Jacket. Tom Apple, Metalica. I chose the Neil Young one, which is sold out of. I'm excited I think this is a big deal, if you can make this happen. You can get the record companies to give him the orginal masters. That is part of the problem, these are unprotected.
John: That is not going to happen. It isn't protected, you can't do anything this way.
Leo: This would be the quality of the studio masters.
John: Yeah, they’re not going to give that away.
Leo: I want this to happen, I am so excited.
Patrick: He is planning the store to go along with it?
Leo: Right, ponomusic.com will be the store once this all takes off. He has a lot of big names involved in this thing. Laura Jones.
John: Yeah, He has been working on this for a long time.
Leo: Yeah. I am excited about this. I am going to get a little sticker that says, I backed PONO.
John: That sounds obscene.
Leo: That doesn't sound good. John did you have anything, I mean I know you don't but just off the top of your head that you would like to plug.
John: Devorak.org/blog I haven't done that in a while. You can also find me at PC magazine if you look around hard enough. Noagendashow.com I think people know about that, they should go check it out. Did you know we still get a Twit listener every month or so I have been plugging that thing and this is great.
Leo: It's not a bad show actually.
John: channeldevorak.com also Dhunplugged
Leo: What's that?
John: It is a stock market show we do.
Leo: Oh with Horowitz.
John: We are going to turn that to another model; we are going to do a Fire Wall.
Leo: Awesome. Ladies and gentleman, there, oh, thank you Chad! A couple of things, can I do some house ads real quick? Thank you Jill, thank you Patrick...
John: I love house ads, what are you asking me for?
Leo: Real quick I want to mention, http://teespring.com/twit, we're still selling the hoodies? We are. We have sold 471 towards a goal of 300. So that means in a week and three days, we're going to have to make some. They are beautiful.
John: What do they sell for?
Leo: Oh thousands, I don't know. How much they sell for? $35, we have men's and women's. the Bella women's fleece.
John: The women got a zip one?
Leo: The only difference between men and women's is that the women's has a pointy head.
John: Oh that makes it look like they are in the clan.
Leo: Oh they are witches. See that, that's the only difference. I think there's maybe more than that. And ladies and gentlemen, we did have quite the week on TWIT. If you missed any of it, we have edited it down into sixty seconds that really give you the full scope of the operation.
John: This I’ve got to see.
(Previously on TWIT, TWIT Live Specials. )
Tonya Hall: The first time I think, that we have heard from Edward Snowden since he disappeared. He's kind of reaching out to the tech community and saying, 'okay it's your responsibility to make this revolutionary change.'
This Week in Google.
Leo: Google apparently is searching for retail space in New York City.
Gina Trapani: And maybe there will be a line around the corner of people who have been locked out of their Gmail accounts.
Security Now
Steve Gibson: What we are holding in our hands, these little iPhones and iPads, they are little crypto bricks. They are amazing instances of applied cryptography.
Mac Break Weekly
Leo: Who do you think looks better in a monocle? Me or Tim Cook?
TWIT Take it to the Bank
Leo: I just don't understand 3D TV. What's the big deal?
Leo: I love my monocle. It's good.
John: Yeah. Pincenez is next.
Leo: I want a lorgnette.
John: With a stick?
Leo: A stick, there's a little stick. You raise it up to look over and say, 'oh we are not amused.' Is there a week ahead? Alright, let's check in with Mike Elgan and see what's coming up this week.
Mike Elgan: The annual Ted conference begins Monday in Vancouver, Canada as does the Game Developers conference in San Francisco. Also, we'll be doing special reports on 'Tech News Today', next week covering incredible technology projects in Egypt and also Rwanda so make sure you tune in to 'Tech News Today' each weekday at 10 A.M. PT. Back to you, Leo.
Leo: Ted is in Vancouver now.
John: It is Ted Vancouver.
Leo: It's not 'The Ted'?
John: No. I don't even know if they do, 'The Ted' anymore.
Leo: Of course, they do 'The Ted', they used to do it in Santa Monica...
John: You are making so much money off of these Ted execs, that's like jeez.
Leo: I think it's 'The Ted.'
John: In Vancouver? Ted in Vancouver would be interesting.
Leo: It's a great place.
John: No, no I like Vancouver.
Leo: Oh that's interesting, we'll follow it on TWIT, we'll talk about it. Ladies and Gentlemen that concludes the edition of This Week in Tech. We do this show every Sunday afternoon 3 P.M PT, 6 P.M ET, that would be 22:00 UTC for those of you around the world who wish to watch live, we would love it if you do. If you can't though, on demand audio and video is made available after the fact, every single episode. On demand at twit.tv, that's our website or you can go to iTunes or any of the various net cast catchers and subscribe to the show. I hope you will do that, thanks for joining us. remember give me a $1000. Like that yeah. It's the end of every show, just give me a $1000.
John: You might be surprised.
Leo: Oh please don't.
John: Really you don't want it?
Leo: Oh, please I really don't want $1000.
John: Seriously this is the kind of insincerity that doesn't work.
Leo: Another TWIT is in the can! Thank you.
