This Week in Google 244 (Transcript)

Show Tease: It’s time for TWiG, This Week in Google. Gina Trapani is here. Yes, the Changelog is back! Aaron Newcomb is with us. We’ll talk about HeartBleed; what you should do about this horrible internet disaster. And, whether you need an antivirus on Android. Turns out, the answer is not what you would expect. It’s all coming up next… On TWiG.

Netcasts You Love… From People You Trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by cachefly.com. This is TWiG, This Week in Google, episode 244, recorded April 9, 2014

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Leo Laporte: It’s time for TWiG - This Week in Google, the show where we cover Google, the cloud, the Googleverse, the Twitterverse, the Facebook verse, the . . . blankverse. Gina Trapani’s back. We missed you Gina!

Gina Trapani: Well it’s great to be back. Hello.

Leo: Thinkup.com now in her new Brooklyn office. No more paneling! I’m sad.

Gina: I graduated from mom’s basement.

Leo: Did you bring the Jets blanket or the Hummel figurines?

Gina: The blanket stayed at Mom’s, unfortunately.

Leo: Aaaaw.

Gina: I’m like a grown-up now. It’s really exciting. My own four walls, it’s amazing. Great to be here!

Leo: We missed you so much! But, we’re glad you’re here. I’m going to ask you about your phone in a second. Aaron Newcomb is also here.

Aaron Newcomb: Yep

Leo: NetApp. Also a regular on many of our shows. You did FLOSS…

Aaron: FLOSS Weekly. This morning, yes. We talked to the guys on Mifos, they do the micro-payments.

Leo: Open source micro-payments.

Aaron: Open source micro-payments.

Leo: Are they using Heartbleed.

Aaron: We get into that a little bit. We just kind of laughed about it because I didn’t want to get into the details, because I didn’t want to derail the show on Heartbleed.

Leo: Well you can listen securely now.

Leo: Heart Bleed is ironic, because this was the week XP came to the end of its life and we thought XP apocalypse would happen and almost half a billion people continuing to run XP no longer getting updates. That means we’d have hackers’ exploits… Nothing’s happened yet, but I think we’ve not heard the end of it. Nevertheless, the big security story of the week has nothing to do with XP, it has to do with Open Source. Turns out, there’s been a highly exploitable flaw in the OpenSSL library that’s used by two thirds of all Web servers out there right now. Anybody that uses Apache or Engine X is likely using OpenSSL.

Aaron: Yes, absolutely. In fact we just interviewed the Engine X guys about a month ago. On FLOSS Weekly. Last week they came in and gave us an overview. I saw that and I was like, “Oh I feel so bad for them because they have such a great product.”

Leo: It’s not their fault.

Aaron: It’s not their fault, but it’s - pretty much anything that uses OpenSSL is at risk.

Leo: And the thing is, what they’re at risk for is so significant. Because, basically, it allows a leak of data from the server itself. And it leaves no trace. And we know that this hole has existed for two years. So that means that for the last two years, any bad guy who knew of this hole could extract data from a server 64 kB at a time.

Aaron: Directly from memory.

Leo: From memory - so that means… Now he can’t say, “I want Aaron Newcomb’s credentials,” he just gets whatever he gets.

Aaron: He gets whatever he gets. But then you take all that data and parse through it. This is after the decryption algorithms have run on things like your passwords and sensitive information that is going back and forth from the server. After that decryption is gone through, then it gets loaded into memory and you’ve got all this data just basically sitting there, open for someone to come in and pull out and digest.

Leo: So since it’s from memory . . . So we were having a discussion in Windows Weekly and I will ask Steve, but he’s not around right now. By the way, Google was bit by this. Twitter, Google, Yahoo, pretty much everybody who uses LAMP Stack was bit, right? And presumably they’ve all patched it. Google’s patched most. Yahoo’s patched most, not all, of their services.

Aaron: It takes time to patch that many servers.

Leo: Because there is a fix, but you have to make sure that library’s being used by your servers everywhere.

Aaron: Yep

Leo: You said something interesting. So it reads what’s in RAM, not what’s in the database.

Aaron: Right.

Leo: So that’s important, because it’s decrypted; but it also means that … and somebody was asking, “What about two-factor authentication? Has that been compromised?” So in order for two- factor to work, you and Google share a key, a secret number. Locally on your phone, it’s hashing that secret number with the time to get a six digit code. Google hashes the time with the same secret number, knows what that code should be, your times are synchronized and so that number should match. If they match, then Google says, “Ah yes, you’re you.” So that is a secret number that Google knows. Is that stored in RAM during that handshake? We don’t know.

Aaron: We don’t know. Quite possibly, whatever you type into the keyboard and press enter, when you type in the number, that’s going to be in memory.

Leo: That’s only good for 30 seconds.

Aaron: Exactly.

Leo: It’s the secret number that we need to know and is that being leaked?

Aaron: So I would say no, but I’m not the expert. I would defer to Steve Gibson on this. But I would say no, because they should be taking that key, that hash, and then using that along with something else; like you said, time, or your mother’s maiden name, or the number of digits of pi up to a certain point and that point is random.

Leo: But it’s symmetric and it has to be a shared number and that shared key. And that shared key, if that’s leaked by Heartbleed, then you’re screwed. Two-factor’s not even going to protect you.

Aaron: Well, if you know the key and you know what the algorithm is for generating the number.

Leo: While everyone uses Google authenticator. We know what the algorithm is, right? We know what it is for Google, anyway and Outlook and Evernote. Twitter doesn’t. Twitter has its own. The ones that are sent to you by text message, that’s probably okay.

Aaron: Should be okay. Absolutely.

Leo: Because that’s a mystery.

Aaron: Right.

Leo: So it’s nasty.

Aaron: Unless you happen to be logging in at the exact same time from the exact same…

Leo: Then they’ll have that six digits.

Aaron: Right. But that’s very unlikely.

Leo: Or whatever digit.

Aaron: Yep.

Gina: Bruce Schneier’s piece on this really kind of pulled me up by the bootstraps. Of course we had to patch our servers at ThinkUp. We’re a new company and we’re actually using a version of OpenSSL on our front end servers which is not affected. So not every version of OpenSSL was affected. But our backend servers were, so we had to patch. But Schneier’s piece on this was that this vulnerability has existed for two years and that the attacker leaves no trace, just assume that everything has been compromised

Leo: He says on a scale of 1 to 10 this is an 11.

Aaron: Yeah. Absolutely.

Leo: And what Tumblr said on their site was, “Take tomorrow off work and go through all your sites. You only have to worry about ones using SSL, but go through all your sites and change the password.” But there is an additional piece of information you should know. There’s no point in changing the password until they fix the flaw, because it will just leak again.

Aaron: Exactly.

Leo: What you should do is, wait until a site announces, as Google has, “Okay we fixed the flaw and today’s the day you should change your Google password.” What unfortunately is not happening - I keep going to Bank of America - they’re not saying anything. No bank wants to talk about this.

Aaron: Right.

Leo: They’ll just raise more concern that they can solve and people go, “What happened? My heart is bleeding? What should I do?” And that’s a problem, because I don’t know if my bank has fixed this.

Aaron: I haven’t logged into my bank since I heard about this. Now it doesn’t matter, because it’s been going on for the last two years and if somebody’s got this, they’ve probably got it now. But what does matter, what was kind of a big deal about this, was that people started talking about this before the fix was ready. So they were generating a lot of anxiety about this. I know that there were some pushback against some media outlets talking about this thing. You know, why was this made such a big deal about before we had the fix put out?

Leo: There are Heartbleed tests online that you can use to test it. The OpenSSL test suite has been updated to test for that. Chat room what’s the link for that?

Gina: LastPass has one. lastpass.com/heartbleed.

Leo: I would trust LastPass. By the way, they fixed theirs very quickly, but that merely means you can use LastPass to fix your passwords. But you can’t . . . So the SSL server test does now have. . . This is from Qualys. So you can say “Bank of America.com - have they fixed it?” And it will actually have a Heartbleed . . . So it is not vulnerable according to this to the Heartbleed bug.

Gina: I assume that these checkers are just examining the headers of the website request to see whether or not the particular version of OpenSSL is being used, but those headers are very easily unset or re-hidden. We changed our headers so you couldn’t detect exactly what version we were using for security purposes. Security through obscurity, that is. So these checkers, unless they’re doing something different, Aaron correct me if they are, they’ll tell me if they know for sure if this site is running this vulnerable version of OpenSSL. But they can’t tell you for sure for everybody.

Leo: Yahoo.com was tested as vulnerable according to this - “detected server software of ATS -server software’s unknown.” Oh, that’s why they say it’s vulnerable. They don’t know.

Gina: They don’t know. Right. So Yahoo really has said they deliver on their headers which is totally configurable in Apache and Engine X. What software is this Web server using? You can change that name to anything in your config files. Ours said Thinkup Web server, and that’s like what I said, security through obscurity, but these kind of checkers that are just looking through the headers, they just don’t know. They don’t know what version of OpenSSL is running.

Leo: Even though Qualys is saying, “Oh yeah yahoo.com is not vulnerable to Heartbleed,” this is an conclusive right? Or is it?

Aaron: It’s not definitive in any way.

Gina: It’s not definitive. Yeah.

Leo: That’s not so good. That’s not so good, because my bank is never ever ever going to say, “Oh we fixed our servers.” So maybe I’ll wait till they say, “You should change your password now?” They’re never going to send that out either.

Gina: Well you know I just tried to log into Tumbler earlier today and I got the message that said “we detected unusual activity on your account, please change your password.” And I assumed that this was Heartbleed related. In fact we had a Tumbler engineer on All About Android last night on Android team. So I went and changed my password. So will your banks do that? I hope so. I would expect that any time my bank suspects that anything has gone wrong with my account, that they would ask me to update my credentials. I think the reality is that these bugs are always going to happen. I think that the real test of an app or a company’s mettle is how quickly they acknowledge that they were affected, and that they fixed it, and they lay out a clear plan for users to recoup their information.

Leo: Be honest. Banks are known for being . . .There’s one other thing. Now we talked about this on Security Now. I don’t know whether this is necessary or not but Steve said do it, so I’m going to show you this, too. If you’re using Chrome, you going to go to your Settings; Show Advance Settings, which is at the very bottom; and you’ll see SSL Certificates right at the very bottom. One thing that most browsers do not currently do is check for server certificate verifications. So this is important, because part of the fix is to get a new certificate issued. You can presume Google presumes the certificate has been compromised. We don’t know, by the way. We don’t know. But they’re going to presume it’s been compromised. What you don’t want to do is continue to use the broken certificate, because that could allow a man in the middle. If it has been compromised that could allow a man in the middle. What you want to do is check the box that says Check For Server Certificate Verification. That means Chrome will go to… There’s two different databases – and say “Is this certificate revoked?” And if you’re getting a bad certificate, the browser will say “Whoa, not supposed to do that. That’s a revoked certificate.” It’s not on by default, because, Steve says, there’s some overhead to check these two databases, so it can slow it down. So by default doesn’t do that. Turn it on, at least for now.

Aaron: I’m turning it on right now. That’s a great tip!

Leo: And you can do it in Firefox. Safari, if you’re a Mac user, is a little more complicated. You actually have to go into Keychain Access to the Certificate section. Well I might as well do it. I think we probably have a few Macintosh users watching. Your Chromebook is sufficient just to do it in Chrome. You have to go into Certificates and Keychain Access. In the Preferences. These are the two different databases it searches – OSCSP and CRL - these are certificate verification servers. What you want to do is hold down your option key and select require for all certificates. You can’t even get to that without holding down the option key, because I guess they just don’t want you to slow down, I don’t know. But, basically, from now on, it will go and check those two databases OCSP and CRL for verification before it accepts a certificate. It should be probably in this day and age a default behavior, but I guess it slows things down.

Gina: I just got an email from IFTTT saying, “There was a major vulnerability. IFTTT is no longer vulnerable. We have no evidence of malicious behavior, but we’ve logged you out of IFTTT across all the apps and we encourage you to change your password.” That’s a really good way, I think, to handle this.

Leo: Holy cow! But that means everybody watching is got to go through all of their https site passwords and change them.

Aaron: And I’ve standardized. I think I’m going to switch to LastPass, but I use

Leo: I use LastPass.

Aaron: I use PassProtector right now, because it’s free and it works, pretty much everywhere. You know now all those passwords that I felt so safe and secure about because are all scrambled and run through an algorithm and mixed up and I didn’t have to ever remember what they all actually were, now I have to figure out a different way to go through and change all of those passwords. It’s easy to do, but it’s just kind of a pain in the butt.

Leo: Yeah, if you’re not using a password keeper, sheesh! This is an opportunity to start using LastPass. We know LastPass is secure. Start using LastPass, set it up, and now go through every site and LastPass will remember it. Ask it to generate a password, say, “I want a new password” generate it, LastPass will remember it, and you’re now clean.

Aaron: That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Especially since they now have the integration with Android for Chrome and some other apps.

Leo: Isn’t that nice?

Aaron: That’s awesome.

Leo: By the way, it completely broke – what was it? It completely broke something. Oh, the camera on the M8.

Gina: Oh did it?

Leo: Yeah. So it was one of those things that nobody knew about. I’m sure LastPass has fixed it, but if you get weird crashes… So the camera kept crashing, and I was searching on the web and what I finally figured out, is that LastPass was trying to pop up to check this thing. So you have to go into LastPass… They have settings for every app… And say “don’t” and the camera works fine. It’s a weird fix it, but I’m glad I found it because I actually thought I had a bad M8.

Aaron: There was no indication?

Leo: No because this is what happened…

Aaron: It just kept crashing crashing.

Leo: New phone, new software feature, so no one had a chance to test it and that’s always the drawback to being a new product -

Gina: The canary in the coal mine.

Leo: And I passed out. So it’s a good thing to know, so I guess I’ll pass that along. If you get weirdness. But I do love it, because when LastPass sees a password entry form, will pop up and say “Do you want me to fill that out?”

Aaron: Awesome.

Leo: All right, we’ll take a break and then come back. We’ve got lots to talk about. In fact I want to ask Gina – I hear you got your M8.

Gina: I did! I did.

Leo: You pushed by. And you and I have different versions, because you have the Google Play edition.

Gina: I got the Play edition. We should talk about it.

Leo: You guys last night played with the Galaxy S5 as well. I’d love to get that impression. Although, I hear you were kind of negative

Gina: You know, I am a sucker for design, which is why I have the M8.

Leo: I completely agree with you!

Gina: I didn’t like the looks of the S5.

Leo: It looks just like the S4!

Gina: Yeah, they are pretty much the same.

Leo: So I was going to review it this week, but I felt so bad for Jason. I said ”Please, you have this.” So he’s got it for a week.

Gina: We have the un-boxing.

Leo: Yeah, well I unboxed at first, but you had it…

Gina: We had a re-un-boxing.

Leo: Yeah but, I guess we were embargoed, so we couldn’t do it until midnight. It was very complicated.

Gina: Right. Yes, so it was a little bit complicated.

Leo: You were the first to do it.

Gina: Jason had a late night last night.

Leo: Yeah. Our show today brought to you by Nature Box. You want a snack? It will make you feel better. Jason, have a snack. Look, we’ve got another Nature Box. They have three sizes. I think this is the small size. The whole idea is, come this time of day, in the early afternoon. Lunch is long gone, a distant memory. And dinner is too far off to be forgotten. But maybe you’ve just got a little hankering for something. Wouldn’t you love a Nature Box? How about a Cherry Berry Bonanza? That’s pretty good. These are all nutritionist-approved. The things I love about Nature Box is, these are healthy snacks that you can eat and not feel guilty about. This has, what does it have? Cranberries, tart cherries, blueberries. That’s it!

Gina: Oh my God, I’m ordering one of these for my office.

Leo: Sounds good.

Gina: That’s it. I was thinking about it last night and – forget it. I’m so ordering one.

Leo: So here’s the cool thing. You should get it for Thinkup. So, there are never any high fructose corn syrup or trans fats in these things. They are always all-natural ingredients. They’re just delicious. You can, if you wish, narrow it down at naturebox.com/twit and say “I want vegan or soy-free. I’m gluten conscious, I don’t want any lactose, I’m nut-free, non-GMO” - all of that stuff. You can also choose by taste, savory, sweet or spicy. Or just say, “Come on, hit me with a random selection, like barbecue kettle kernels, french toast granola, chile lime pistachios, Cherry Berry Bonanza.” They’ll put a box together. Here’s smoky barbecue peas. Which one suits you, Aaron, you can pick one.

Aaron: Ooh. I’ll take the barbecue peas, please.

Leo: See, Aaron brought us doughnuts this morning. Oh no! I would love to have chipotle maple almonds. Come on! Sweet, savory…

Aaron: I could eat either of those actually.

Leo: You could have anything you want, because, you know what? There’s more where that came from. I get a Nature Box every month. You can get a three, six, or 12 month subscription. And if you go to naturebox.com/twit, 50% off your first box! Naturebox.com/twit. Okay, he’s trying the chipotle maple almond.

Aaron: The chipotle maple almond.

Leo: You know almonds are good for you. No high fructose corn syrup. No partially hydrogenated oils. Zero trans fats, no artificial sweeteners, flavors or colors.

Aaron: This is good!

Leo: A little sweet, a little hot…

Aaron: Not too spicy…

Leo: A little sweet, a little heat - -

Aaron: It’s just a little smidgen you can taste.

Leo: Mmmmmm.

Gina: Aaaaw, you guys are killing me here.

Aaron: And they sound good, too. Crunch crunch crunch

Leo: Wow, is that good.

Gina: Healthy crunch.

Leo: We give these guys always way too much add time, because of eating their staff while we’re… A half hour ad as we eat. Mmmmmmmm. All right, moving along. Thank you Nature Box.

Aaron: Snack time’s over.

Leo: Nap time’s coming up.

Aaron: That’s right.

Leo: That’s what I look forward to. Uuuum, how do you like it? M8? You had the original HTC One, as did I.

Gina: Yes, then my daughter threw it on the floor a few too many times and it died. It died on me. It died dead.

Leo: These things happen.

Gina: Yep, they happen. So I ordered the M8 from the Google Play store, and got it day before yesterday. Of course the HTC One has a micro SIM and this has a nano SIM, so I had to go down to the T-Mobile store and get a new SIM - where, the T-Mobile people nearly passed out. They said, “Where did you get this phone? This doesn’t come out till Friday.” Uh, just ordered on the web. No big deal. So they transferred my number over, and you know, I like it a lot. It’s big. It’s bigger than the regular HTC One, and it’s got these kind of curved softer edges with this lip which the regular HTC One didn’t have, which I don’t like as much. The two things I really do like: I like that the buttons are now on the screen rather than on the device itself.

Leo: Yes! That bugged the heck out of me on the old one.

Gina: Yeah, I like that a lot. That’s closer to the Google Android experience. Now this is the Google Play edition, which means that I’m running kind of the Google Android experience, but the one thing this phone has different is these dual cameras. Right? So they did ship this Google Play edition with the HTC Photo in it, which can to the focus magic.

Leo: That’s the most important part of Sense 6 you want. That’s good.

Gina: Yeah. Exactly. So I played around with it a little bit. I took a few shots of my daughter who’s always moving so I always seem to get the background focused and her blurred, so I tried changing the focus and - it’s okay.

Leo: It’s not super good?

Gina: It’s not super good. Like I noticed around her head you can tell that it’s not perfectly aligned, you can tell that there’s a seam. And it felt like a filter. I thought that it would feel less like a filter and more like a genuine … This thing on the front is going out of focus. There’s that 3-D, where you can tilt it and see kind of a 3-D object.

Leo: That’s just weird.

Gina: Which also seemed kind of gimmicky to me. So, unfortunately, the dual camera stuff did seem more gimmicky than I would have liked.

Leo: Let me show you. These are pictures I took in our studio of Chad. This is the normal one. This is with background decolored, desaturated.

Aaron: That’s kind of cool.

Gina: That is nice.

Leo: And these are special effects they do in the backgrounds. Forget that. Okay now this is faded background.

Gina: There you go. So notice around the edges, around his hair. It’s not quite perfect.

Leo: It’s pretty good.

Gina: It’s pretty good, but it’s not that’s not as good as if you took that with a real SLR and had that real depth of field.

Leo: Well yeah.

Aaron: But it’s good enough for online.

Leo: Look at Greg’s arm on the left there, when I take it out of focus, the arm’s . . . But when you think about it, the depth of field is very shallow, right? So his arm would be out of focus. I don’t hate it. What is good about this, is the macro camera is excellent. So the close-up pictures are quite good. I don’t know. I’m thinking this is a pretty darn good… It’s four megapixels. You know one trick, and you can do this, I think, if you have the Sense camera. There’s a setting for maximum ISO. One of the things this camera does in low light is turns the ISO way too high, so it gets very grainy. I set it down to 400, so it won’t go above 400 now, which means you aren’t going to get …. Low light won’t be as good as may be it used to be.

Aaron: It makes sense that the default settings were set that way, because that was supposed to be one of the. . .

Leo: It’s a selling point.

Aaron: They want that aspect of the camera to work really well, because since they only have four megapixels they can claim really good lowlight pictures.

Leo: So some of these are lowlight pictures and you see there’s a lot of grain. This is before I set it down to 400. So, I just find that a little bit displeasing, all that grain. So, I just – I grin and bear it.

Gina: The Play edition doesn’t ship with the HTC camera, but it does have the HTC edit. I’m sorry, my videos getting bad. It does have the HTC edit features, so when you tap the edit button when you’re looking at your gallery, it lets you use the HTC edit. Those are available for photos that you take while you’re taking video, which I do a lot. I’ll take video of my daughter and then just tap the screens for a still. And it doesn’t seem to be using the dual camera there, so you can’t do the focus and the 3-D thing.

Leo: I’m trying to think what else in Sense you would be missing. I don’t think there’s anything else. There’s a ZOE app on here - it says coming soon. I think they are going to offer the Zoe capability to all cameras. It’s going to be in the Play store.

Gina: It will be in the Play store. That will be really great.

Leo: Here’s another example. If you look at the straw hat in the middle and you focus the background, apparently the brim of the hat is also… That’s a little disconcerting. And the guy’s shoulder on the far right gets blurred. You’re right. It’s not perfect.

Gina: It feels like a filter.

Leo: It’s a filter. Look at his shoulder. There’s no reason that should…

Gina: My impression with it was that these are two different images with different focuses and that you are switching between them, but it’s actually much more of a software affect.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s interesting. You can clearly see the region select there.

Leo: Yeah. It’s computational. It may be the stripes in the shirt confused it. I would bet that that’s what happened.

Aaron: Combined with the shadow probably.

Gina: Did they really need to build a whole other camera in the back of this phone in order to do this? They seem like effects that they could have achieved with one really good camera.

Leo: Well, in fact, the Nokia does. The Nokia camera app, which has a single sensor, arguably does it better. So, yeah I would say so. I do like this phone, though. You’ve got to like the build. It’s heavier and big your than your old one, right? Oh, we lost her. She’s just slowly degrading.

Gina: Sorry about that. My video is degrading. Now it’s better.

Leo: You’re fine. It’s better.

Gina: As long as my audio is good. I love the phone. Just to be clear, I really do love it. It’s beautiful. It does push my personal limit of size. I wouldn’t want a phone bigger than this. It does feel big, but the build is gorgeous. I’m really restraining myself from buying that really cool case with the dots.

Leo: No, don’t buy that. That’s dumb.

Aaron: You don’t like the dot case? I like the dot case.

Gina: I do like the dot case.

Leo: I don’t get the dot case, but by all means knock yourself out. Why are you trying to restrain yourself if you like the dot case?

Gina: Well, because I risk some domestic discord around this particular financial decision, so I don’t know if I can…

Leo: Oh come on, the dot case, how much is the dot case?

Aaron: It’s like 100 bucks isn’t?

Gina: Well that’s true. I guess once you sink 700 bucks in…

Leo: Honey, you have to have the dot case.

Gina: It’s only been three days, but the battery life so far has been great. I forgot to plug this in last night and I am still at 50% right now.

Leo: I’ve been getting 15 hours pretty consistently.

Aaron: That’s great.

Gina: Yeah. Which is another thing I really needed, and the HTC one was kind of killing me on. So I’m very pleased about that.

Leo: That may not stay that way. Remember, that’s just, brand-new phone factor.

Gina: Yeah, that will most likely not continue.

Aaron: And it may be better for Gina then it is for you, Leo, because Gina’s running stock Google on hers.

Leo: Well it’s very user-specific depending on how you use it.

Aaron: How much you use the display and…

Gina: Definitely. I had gone really far and installed a bunch of apps particularly for - - - and so I’ve done a clean sweep and just tried to remove as many background processes as possible.

Aaron: Do either of you use a screen protector?

Leo: No.

Gina: No

Aaron: Because the curved edges to that phone are going to make screen protectors look a little goofy, because they won’t cling to the edges. So you get a have to get one that’s cut down if you use one that’s cut down it won’t look like it’s really protecting the edges.

Leo: You mean the bezel on the edges?

Aaron: Yeah, the bezel on the edges.

Leo: That was the bevel.

Aaron: Yeah the bevel. That was one of the problems with the Nexus 4. I got Nexus 4’s for my wife and my son for Christmas and I went to put a screen protector on them because they need them and I was like, “Why isn’t this fitting on them? Oh, yeah I forgot, the corners are beveled.” The edges, so…

Leo: Nothings perfect in this world, alas.

Aaron: But it feels good in your hands.

Leo: So you weren’t here, Gina, you were on Skype. So you actually didn’t get to hold the Galaxy S5. What was the consensus on that last night?

Gina: You know, we were really kind of checking out the hardware part of it, we were checking out the dimpled back and that metallic kind of edge that went around.

Leo: That dimpled back is silly.

Gina: Yeah. That was our consensus. We’ve been told that we’re really hard on Samsung devices. I don’t think any of us are really huge fans of the Samsung builds, and we were talking about how all the buttons were reversed, as usual, and how the camera kind of protrudes a little bit.

Leo: I am now… It’s so funny. Talk about 180° turn for me. I used to want a physical home button; now I don’t. I have now completely gone over to the Google idea of having soft buttons at the bottom of the screen. Remember, I hated that idea? And you admit that there is wasted space. From here to here, wasted by the buttons and by the HTC logo, that maybe could be better used. However, I just think that’s so much better than this wonky home button. It’s just the click and all that stuff.

Gina: It’s a little cheap, right? Yeah. Samsung fans are going to love it.

Leo: Are they? I feel like this is a cultural gulf. Seriously.

Gina: I agree.

Leo: Some people will like it - it just feels cheesy to me. I really don’t like TouchWiz. They’ve improved it in the sense that there is more free space on here. A lot of the Samsung apps are optional, which is a big improvement. But AT&T, this is an AT&T phone. Still, ten AT&T apps? Come on. You don’t get any of that stuff on Google Play, do you?

Aaron: No. That’s why I put Google edition on my S4. Get rid of all that.

Leo: So here’s all the Samsung apps. The nice thing is I can uninstall them, I don’t have to install them. So they’ve got more than 10 gigs free on a 16 gig phone. That’s a big improvement. The camera on this is a significant improvement. 13 megapixels. It’s using Beauty Face right now, and look how beautiful I look.

Gina: Look how beautiful! We were very happy we had some good Leo pictures on the phone.

Leo: Oh yeah, I left some pictures on there. Yeah. That is Beauty Face! Man, that’s gorgeous!

Chad: Oh no, my phone.

Leo: I heard that, Chad.

Chad: Beauty Face. I mean, that describes the whole camera.

Leo: They got rid of the golf mode. I can’t understand why they would do that. What are we going to do? Isn’t that terrible? So, they do have Auto, Beauty Face, Shot and More. I don’t know what Shot and More is.

Aaron: It’s golf mode.

Leo: Oh it’s back! Browse the various effects available for burst shots. I see. So now, I can hold the device steady until it takes the picture. Now I have all these best face, best photo stuff. It doesn’t look any better to me. Let’s see. How do I get out of this now? There we go. What other modes? You got Dual Camera. I still think that’s silly, but the M8 has that as well. What’s Download? Why is that a mode? Download mode? Oh, I can get more. Animated photo shot and sounds. Ah, again, this is how they save a little space. You know what? I think that’s a good response from Samsung. Not everybody’s going to want golf mode, but if they do, I guess you can get it. It’s a fast 13 megapixel camera. I actually think that the camera on the M8 is more pleasing. I think you made the right choice Gina.

Gina: I’m pretty happy with it.

Leo: Is there an N6 imminent?

Gina: There’s always the next thing, right? Do we think IO is going to – I think IO is going to yield a watch, I don’t know that it’s going to be a phone this year, but it might be both. And who knows about a tablet.

Leo: One other thing, I bet you can do this. The Fitbit app works with this phone. I don’t know if they mention that with the M8. You know, there’s the Samsung Health out. But the Fitbit app works with the accelerometer on this phone, so the same thing that the S Health does on the Galaxy will work on the M8. But you have to download the Fitbit app and you can see your steps. This is me for today. So, that’s nice. Other apps besides Fitbit apparently will work. I’m on 5,622 steps today. Only 5000 more to go. So you like it? You’re happy.

Gina: I am, I’m pretty happy. So now does the Fitbit app, you still have to sinc with the stupid dongle, right? You’re no sincing directly to your phone.

Leo: No.

Gina: Oh, the phone is calculating your steps.

Leo: The phone is the dongle. You no longer need the bracelet. The phone is an accelerometer you just have to carry it wherever you go and jiggle it.

Gina: Yeah, because of the singing. I always have a dongle plugged in some other computer and I never do the sincing.

Leo: Silly, silly.

Gina: (video quality bad) I’m getting it my video fixed

Leo: Download Fitbit why you’re doing it.

Gina: Yeah, I’ll do that.

Leo: So, interesting. I was listening this morning to TNT. Of course, Comcast is testifying now in front of Congress why it should be allowed to merge with Time Warne, and considering that they pretty much bought and own Congress, I don’t think this is going to be a difficult thing. They seem very confident. Meanwhile, Google is saying, “Maybe we should get in the mobile phone business.” Comcast announce it wants to do a Wi-Fi ISP. Google is also getting close to competing with wireless carriers. Apparently, they’re considering offering in areas where they offer Google Fiber wireless service. Maybe that Google Play phone then would really start to sing.

Aaron: Yep.

Leo: Remember they were in the bidding for the 700 MHz spectrum released by the television stations a few years ago. They bid high and what else did they bid? They bid some like mathematical bids, because they weren’t serious, they just were trying to get the FTC to make rules about the spectrum for whoever bought it - that it would be open. Verizon ended up getting it and Verizon’s theoretically hobbled by net neutrality agreements it made when it bought that. But at first they ignored them and the FCC has no will to enforce it, so it doesn’t really matter.

Aaron: It’s really a disappointment. When that spectrum came up, everyone was like, “Oh this is great. It’ll go through walls. It’ll be really nice low-frequency, you’ll be able to do all sorts of stuff with it.” And then nothing has happened with it.

Leo: People have talked about getting Google into the wireless business since 2006. And I wish they would do it. So maybe it has to do with the idea of putting Wi-Fi everywhere? Wi-Fi in all 7000 Starbucks stores is from Google. Apparently this summer it’s going to offer other store owners around the country Wi-Fi. But so is Comcast. Now they’re in a race right?

Gina: Yes but that’s their goal. To get everybody online.

Leo: Yeah, because they make money when people are online. That’s information from The Information, Jessica Lessin’s new site.

Leo: Oh! I was so surprised. I saw Google stock went down and then I realized oh it went down because they split the stock. It confused the heck out of people.

Aaron: Yeah, it did me. I was like what? What happened? What’s the news? I was frantically getting online.

Leo: Google stock $500? Oh they split it.

Aaron: Yeah, it was a split.

Leo: That’s good! I don’t know why it confuses investors. So it’s $564, but because that’s half the price, it’s equivalent of like 1200 something. Stock has rebounded and in fact is doing quite well. It’s up $9 today.

Aaron: It’s good for them, though, because when stock price gets too high, people shy away from buying it. So, I’m surprised they didn’t do it sooner. Stock’s been going up and up and up and they had to have been feeling the pinch from people just saying, “No I don’t want to buy a stock that high. Seems like it hit its peak, right?”

Leo: I wish we had somebody who is in on all this stuff, understands this finance stuff. Because in addition to splitting the stock, they put 330 million new shares of Google into play, but these are non-voting C shares, so they’re a little less than the A shares. That’s what you’re buying on the stock market. A few bucks less. But the reason you want these C shares, these non-voting shares, is so you can give them to employees without diluting the voting stake of the founders, Page and Brin. Larry Page and Sergey own 56% of the vote through those B shares. Those are not traded publicly. And each B share is 10 votes. Eric Schmidt has 8.2% of the B shares.

Gina: This offers more value to employees, but guarantees control by the founders. Sergei and Larry, if they agree, if their votes go a particular way, override everyone else’s.

Leo: That’s right, because they get 10 votes per share.

Gina: Right. And they’ve got 56%.

Leo: The C class stocks, oh it’s so complicated. I don’t understand all of this. Anyway, if you do, thank you. Good luck to you. You’re a better man than I am. But it makes sense, right? So they did this split, but they also created this new class of non-voting shares. Put a bunch of them onto the market, but also they’re going to keep a bunch so that they can reward employees without diluting their power. Makes sense.

Gina: Yep.

Leo: If Jeff were here, he’d probably do 22 as a number. That’s how long it took Project Loon balloon to circle the earth. Apparently that’s a record.

Gina: That’s incredible.

Aaron: That’s really fast for a balloon.

Gina: For a balloon, for thing that looks just like somebody’s sheets flew off into the sky.

Leo: Like a jellyfish or something. So I guess the plan was 33-day revolutions, but they must’ve gotten some good winds. They enjoyed a few loop-de-loops over the Pacific Ocean before heading east on the winds toward Chile and Argentina, then made its way back around Australia and New Zealand,. This is from the Google + Project Loon account. Along the way it caught a ride on the Roaring 40s, that’s the strong west to east winds in the southern hemisphere that act like an autobahn in the sky. Where balloons can quickly zoom over oceans. See that’s the problem. You’re sitting there in the stratosphere, you’re at the mercy of the winds - you can move up and down, but you can’t move them in any direction. And at some point you’re going get over the ocean, where they’re not doing anybody any good. So they want to get over the ocean quickly and get back to land. They are navigating the stratosphere at winds 12 miles above the surface of the earth. That’s far higher than planes or anything else. That’s cool.

Aaron: It’s really cool. I’m looking at the flight path, though, and it looks like they circled Antarctica.

Leo: It’s not equatorial.

Aaron: It’s not equatorial, but maybe they were doing distance. So I don’t know.

Leo: They went a long way. They started in New Zealand. It’s actually starting its second lap right now.

Gina: And they did in the third less time than they thought it would go. That’s a lot.

Leo: Yeah, they’re moving! 311,000 miles and the wind ranges from 2 knots to 75 knots, which is very fast. So what they’re doing… All of this is a test to see if any of this is feasible. I’m guessing that this is good news; that it’s doing well. And it avoided the polar vortex, you’ll be glad to know. And beat all odds. Record-setting trip around the earth. Or at least Antartica. Do you want to do a Changelog, Gina Trapani?

Gina: Yeah, let’s do it!

Leo: All right, well before we do, we’ll do a little Squarespace ad and then the Changelog is coming up next. Gina is back. Are you going to do two weeks’ worth?

Gina: No. Just going to do this past week. That’s it. Where being very Zen. We just let go of the things we missed.

Leo: If you weren’t there, it doesn’t matter.

Gina: And embrace the stream of the new.

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(Trumpets. The Google Changelog!)

Leo: Gina Trapani!

Gina: Google Play is getting social. Google is adding a new “people” section to the Play store app on Android. To get to it, tap on the hamburger icon and you select people from the menu and there you’ll see activity recommendations from your Google+ friends within the Google play store like apps your friends have reviewed, and even recommendations for others to follow on Google+. This follows the new activity feed on the web which I didn’t mention in last week’s Changelog, because I wasn’t here. Which shows you your reviews in your +1’s in the Play store and that you can get to on play.google.com/store, My Play Activity. Just kind of a nice way to see recommendations on what your friends are using in the Play store. Personally, I would love to see you know what are all the apps that Leo is running right now and how often. So I feel like this is a step toward that. Remember Google Keep?

Leo: I still use it, yeah.

Gina: Awesome.

Leo: And I’m an Evernote guy. Just once in a while, Keep is just a really handy thing

Aaron: It’s always there, easy-to-use.

Gina: How do you decide when to use Keep and when to use Evernote?

Leo: If I want to keep it, I use Evernote. And if I just want a grocery list, I use Keep.

Gina: Well Google gave the app an upgrade this week. New features, and a fresh design. The new version lets users search for text that’s printed and images.

Leo: It scans the text

Aaron: Evernote does that, too.

Gina: Yeah, it’s very nice. And you can easily copy existing notes and you can restore deleted notes from the trashcan. And the app just got a design refresh to the latest and greatest. There’s also a new action bar that changes colors depending on the color of the note. We actually had this great discussion with the Tumbler Android developer last night on All About Android and he was talking about how this is kind of a new trend in mobile design where you have contextual clues, based on the content. So he was saying on Pocket Cast the scrubber is the color of the album art. It picks a color form the album art, so you have these contextual clues about the content. Free Keep is doing a similar thing, the action bar changes color based on the note. And finally, this isn’t really a change log, because this hasn’t actually shipped, but I wanted to mention it. Screen shots that are allegedly a new Gmail interface that’s floating around, geek.com published them first. They show a pretty radical redesign. Some new features. New folders added to the social and promotion tabs. They’re called travel and finance. You get the ability to snooze messages. Kind of say, “Hey, mark this one in red and again in a day or two.” Marking messages as done and the new design is kind of flat with round avatars. It kind of looks like Google’s answer to Mailbox actually, which Dropbox owns and which just came out for Android. I don’t know if we’re ever actually going to see this designed, but it’s pretty different. I’m interested to see someone who makes a to-do list app. What this kind of marking has done, you know, snoozing ability is in Gmail. I’d like to see that come to fruition.

Leo: Very cool.

Gina: And that’s all I got.

Leo: It’s quick. It’s easy. It’s the Google Changelog. And now it’s over. Did you see the US Air Force – we covered this this morning on TNT - Tech News Tonight – US Air Force is (I’m not sure I’m happy about this) testing Google Glass and building apps for battlefield use. I don’t want to see a bunch of glassholes marching into battle. Doesn’t seem military grade, does it? Really?

Aaron: Well, it’s basically just a heads-up display. I mean it’s what pilots use. I don’t know.

Leo: Okay, Glass. Take a picture that guy over there. That’s the enemy.

Aaron: Okay Glass, show me my closest target.

Leo: I could see a heads-up display. This is not a heads-up display. It’s a second screen above your eyebrow. The Air Force says its positive attributes are low-power, low footprint, sits totally above the eyes, doesn’t block images or hinder vision, so I guess that’s what they want. That’s Second Lieut. Anthony Easton, a behavioral scientist on the BATMAN team. That’s the name of the team testing the Glass at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. That’s the 711^th human performance wing.

Aaron: Let’s hope battles only last six hours.

Leo: Well, that’s one issue. And you’ve got to carry an Android phone, although apparently I hear that the troops now are very smart phone-enabled. They like those smart phones. Get lost in Kandahar, you fire up Google maps, you say “Where’s the base? Help me home.”

Aaron: Navigate.

Gina: Is there a Starbucks nearby?

Leo: You might want to play a little ingress why you’re out there guys, just suggesting, you could take over some bases.

Aaron: I like that picture you’re looking at, too. You’ve got the…

Leo: You’ve got three humans and a mannequin.

Aaron: The humans, which are little nerdly, I would say. Plus the guy in full battle dress.

Leo: But the guy is a plastic dummy.

Aaron: Yeah.

Leo: The Glass is not a silver bullet for many of the Air Force’s needs, according to the Air Force. They obtained two pairs of Glass for the Glass Explorer Program. They tweeted “If I had Glass, I would kill the enemy.

Gina: They did not!

Leo: No they didn’t. No they didn’t. The New York City Police Department is evaluating
Glass for their intelligence and analytics unit. “Well, should I frisk that guy over there? What do you say, Glass?” Virgin Atlantic is testing Glass. We don’t know how. Not for pilots, I pray. The U.S. Navy is testing smart glasses, but not Google smart glasses. They’re doing goggles.

Gina: The truth is that Glass is interesting and could be potentially useful in any job that involved being out in the field in some capacity, right?

Leo: I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re saying combat. They might be saying the quartermasters could use it to take inventory. We don’t know. The Glass Explorer Program includes people from all walks of life including doctors, firefighters, and parents. Anyone can apply to become a Glass Explorer. If he or she is a US resident over the age of 18. I think Google wants to do distance themselves a little bit. “We’re not doing Defense Department research. They borrowed them. They bought some.”

Gina: We’re just the tools.

Leo: We’re just the tools. So I think maybe that story’s a little overblown. Of course they’re testing them. In fact if they weren’t, it would be like, well why not? Google did try to trademark the word glass. USPTO, uncharacteristically uncooperative, said, “Wait a minute. Hold on there.” The trademark examiner responded to Google with two main objections. One; that the trademark’s kind of similar to other existing or pending computer software trademarks containing the word glass. Isn’t Smart Glass a Microsoft trademark? Creating a risk of consumer confusion. They also say glass, you know, it’s just descriptive. Words that merely describe a product are not trademarkable. Absent a showing of acquired distinctiveness. For instance, a company that makes salsa can’t say they trademark the words spicy sauce. That’s a description. I mean, this is not like a slap in the face to Google. They’re disputing it. They’re going back and forth. In fact, they say, “By the way there’s no glass in Google Glass, so it’s not descriptive at all.”

Aaron: Yeah but think of all the glass companies out there’s. Somebody out there’s probably trying to

Leo: It’s very generic.

Aaron: If you’re going to pick a really generic brand name like this, don’t expect to get a trademark.

Leo: Right.

Gina: Yeah and they trademarked Google Glass.

Leo: Oh so it’s not that they don’t have Google Glass.

Gina: They have Google Glass, they just can’t get Glass. I’ve got to say, the patent office is right here. Not that I’m a lawyer, but this is just common sense.

Leo: I saw this and I thought it was kind of interesting and I want to get your take on this. I saw this article that said the top paid app on the Google Play store was uncovered as a fake. Not exactly. It’s a program called virus Shield. $3.99. I guess it’s a fake, because it’s an antivirus program, but it doesn’t do anything. It merely changes the shield to a checkmark. You’re protected! Chris DiBona posted on his Google+ - we know Chris very well he’s the host of FLOSS weekly, he’s the director of open source at Google - He wrote and I think it’s still somewhat true, “No major cell phones have virus problems in the traditional sense windows and some Mac machines are seeing. There have been some little things, but they haven’t gotten very far because of the users sandboxing models and the nature of the underlining kernels. No Linus desktop has a real virus problem either.” He says virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you BS protection software for any mobile operating system, including blackberry ans IOS. They are charlatans, says DiBona. And scammers. “If you work for a company selling virus protection for Android, Rim or iOS, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

Aaron: Chris doesn’t hold back.

Leo: Wow.

Gina: Yeah, I love that about him.

Aaron: He says what he thinks.

Leo: Wow. To be fair to Chris, this is from November 2011. But I don’t think things have changed significantly.

Aaron: Not as far as viruses are concerned. Certainly there are vulnerabilities. We’re seeing those currently, but it’s not necessarily a virus problem. There are a malware issues, certainly, because you can download an app, especially if you don’t download it from the Google Play store, you know, a reputable Play store. If you just buy it online and sideload it onto your phone, guess what? You’re putting yourself at risk. So don’t do that.

Leo: Sideloading is very dangerous. Don’t uncheck that box, check it, I guess.

Aaron: But not viruses. That’s my point.

Leo: Yeah, I kept thinking, viruses are going be an issue on these platforms. They’re everything as a bad guy that you would want. They’re always connected, they’re always on. Now I don’t see Virus Shield in the top paid Android apps.

Aaron: They removed it.

Gina: Yeah they must have.

Leo: Because it doesn’t do anything.

Aaron: If you do a search for “virus”, there’s probably still tons of them out there, you know, and people load them. Because they think, “Well it’s a platform, I need a virus scanner I need virus protection on it.”

Leo: We’ve recommended Lookout. At best with these do, they don’t do the same thing that an antivirus does on the desktop. They go through a database of known malware and see if you’ve got it. And when you download a new app, they check it against that database to make sure it’s not known malware. But you know even by that by itself it’s fairly useful. Google has built in that capability, right? The first time you download an app on a new Android phone it says would you like us to check for malware in the future. Of course I am sure you all said yes. Is what Google does sufficient? I don't think it is much different for what any of these other ones do. Look at all these Norton, Macafee, Eastset, they all offer lookout. Their all, these are all anti-virus programs for Android. Sofus I mean these are good companies they're not scammers.

Aaron: Their not scammers but I think they are playing on a fear that we have, right.

Leo: I should also point out, almost all of these are free. Macafee is free, Lookouts free.

Aaron: I wonder for the average user I wonder if they know the difference between malware. You know we talk about malware and things like that. They don't know, they say it’s a virus.

Leo: They call it a virus. The first thing that I'm is, frequently when someone gets a smartphone, they say should I have an anti-virus? Because they know it’s a computer. Most of these, like here's Norton it’s free but for 30 bucks a year you can get the Premium version which you know offers more protection, it says. This is often the case it says remote lock and erase. But that is built into Android now, too.

Aaron: If you’re running Google edition, you can just.

Leo: Yeah even one my M8, you can download it. You have to download it but what is it called the Android device manager?

Aaron: Device manager, yeah.

Leo: It works, I would guess it works on any Android phone, right? I immediately downloaded and installed it. It looks just like Find my IPhone on IOS. It knows where your phones are. It pinpoints them, it allows you to ring them, lock them or erase them.

Aaron: Really helpful.

Gina: It is kind of alarming though that one of the top paid apps that was a virus scan, that it wasn't caught.

Leo: Did nothing.

Gina: It makes me worried that there is probably a lot of malicious software out there that's not one of the top paid apps. Malicious not just not doing anything is what this thing did. I mean they take your money.

Leo: Well I guess what I tell everybody is you probably don't need an anti-virus. You should turn on the Google scanner. You should not say I can download from anywhere but the Playstore and with having all that being said Google does not vet every app on the Playstore. Not like Apple does. It's a false sense of security on the iTune store if you say, but see Apple it checks every app. They literally have to look at 10's of 1,000's of apps every day, stuff gets by all the time.

Aaron: Sure.

Leo: Same thing happens on IOS.

Gina: No doubt.

Leo: So it’s a foolish thing to assume well because it’s in the store its safe, on either platform. Take software from known good sources. Least this wasn't malicious. It wasn't like this software did something bad.

Gina: Right, not like it did something bad.

Leo: It just took your money.

Gina: Yeah it took your money. That's pretty expensive, I mean for a $4.00 app being in the top 10 that is a lot.

Leo: Yeah, that makes me think a lot of people bought it. Have you heard the rumor about Android Silver, this doesn't sound, this sounds bogus.

Gina: Yeah these are apparently slides that were leaked internal slides that were leaked. One of them was dated over a year ago. So this might be really old information. Yeah, Android Silver is a rumor reportedly. It’s a new program that Google basicly blesses 4 or 5 handsets which run a pure version of Android or Google experience with very few customizations. They're set up in kind of a special area in stores. Employees are trained by Google to sell these devices to customers, to normals. To help them set up their Google account, transfer their data. It’s supposed to be kind of like the premium easy Android experience. We were talking about this on All about Android last night. It seems like if this is true, which it may not be. Again this is kind of dated information and these are leak slides. It's just a rumor. But if this is true it seems like this would be Google's way of exposing the pure Google experience to regular consumers. The way that they do in the Nexus line for power users in the Playstore.

Aaron: Maybe, I was looking at it as more of a, it does really reference the consumer in the slides and things. But I was looking at it more like, okay this is how they're going to pitch this to business users or businesses. It’s not just that you get the phone but you get the phone plus support which is what a lot of businesses need. They want to be able to have their users, I think one of the things it has in there was replacement options. So maybe they were charged for this, so they charge a company maybe an extra 5 bucks a user kind of like a license thing and they get all of these additional benefits, like support and replacement devices when they are lost. So to me I looked at this and said oh this is a business enterprise play clearly. But it doesn't really say that in the slides. Plus it is a year, a year ago Android was still suffering. You can make an argument that they are getting over it now but they were really suffering from the fragmentation issue. Because of all the different platforms out there. You know now people are fairly standardized at least on Jellybeanish type or getting close to Jellybean standardization out there. This may have been a way for them to try and address the fragmentation problem, a year ago. Now its kind of like we over that, we're not too worried about it. I don't know.

Leo: These things change, boy I tell you I am reading Fred Volgelsteens book, I've mentioned this a few times before. Stop me if you have heard it. He's the wired writer who wrote the book Dog Fight about Apple and Google. It is great. What you learn from it is, well first of all it has a lot of behind the scene stuff I didn't know. As we are covering all this whole thing, starting from the release of the IPhone in 2007, Google's response to that. There's fun stuff like the fact that Andy Ruben when they first bought Android to create either a Google operating system or Google phone nobody really knew. Andy Ruben drove a Ferrari because he had made some money and he wasn't allowed to park it in the Google parking lot because at that time Google did not allow fancy cars in their parking lot. Even Larry and Sergei drove a Prias. But you also learn that Google was very ambivalent about the whole thing. That Larry and Sergei wanted to build a phone, Eric didn't. Eric said, no we should have, Google should be everywhere. They were doing really well on the IPhone at the time. So Andy Ruben so as not to make waves kept the Android project basicly secret. They even had their own cafe built in that area of the Google plex. So people working on Android wouldn't eat with other people and other people wouldn't eat with them. But when the time came to release a phone and they went to Vic Gundotra running the apps for mobile. They went to Vic's team and said ok hey we would really like Gmail, Calendar, Maps for our new Android phone. They said you’re not on the road map, we didn't know anything about this. It will be 2 years before you get anything. So there was a lot of ambivalence at Google on what to do. So if you project from this book to now it wouldn't be at all surprising to me that a year ago Google thought this was a good idea. But now they don't. There was a lot of back and forth. This is a great book.

Aaron: What's the name of that book?

Gina: Dog Fight?

Leo: It's called Dog Fight. I am listening to it on Audible but you can get it in the bookstore.

Aaron: Oh good, I was just looking for it on Audible, so you answered my question.

Leo: Yeah it’s on Audible. Fred Vogelstein he writes. I know you guys read the excerpt that was published in Wired. Which was the story of the Apple engineer going to the IPhone announcement that Steve Jobs was doing and how he was taking drink every time a demo worked. It was supposed to be a 90 minute demo of all the features in the IPhone and this was a very early prototype. It barely worked. They had what they called the golden path you could do email and then surf. You could surf and then do email. Steve had to walk this very fine line during the demo. Do it exactly right because at any point it would crash. There were only 10 IPhones at the time. They had 4 of them on the stage. So if one failed he could immediately go to number 2. They programmatically painted 5 bars on every one of the phones for reception. Not because they were worried about reception because AT&T had put a cell site on backstage but because the radios crashed periodically. What they didn't want you to be doing is looking at the phone and see the radio go bzzzzzipp. They didn't want you to see the reboot. So everything was painted 5 bars. That's all in this book. It's really good.

Gina: Wow that sounds amazing.

Leo: It is. Now Chad started and got bored.

Chad: It’s so funny because part of me thought that it was because all of these stories have been told in other books.

Leo: No they haven't.

Chad: Because he kept quoting. He quoted the Isaacson book and he quoted. I was like I really should go get this from the store because I am tired of him stealing from. Now hearing you talk about how all of this is fresh, I really want to go back.

Leo: There are a lot of stuff we didn't know. We had no idea for instance about the ambivalence within Google about making a phone. I have that 1st Google phone, the G1. They actually had to pay, when they created.

Gina: The G1 reeked of ambivalence.

Leo: It did, didn't it. It had a slide out keyboard. They were so unsure about the idea of typing on the screen. So they said we better put a keyboard in this. I thought it was full of really interesting stuff. I covered this Chad. I was here at the time.

Gina: It's so interesting that they were ambivalent about it, wow. Because looking at it now of course hind sight is always 20/20. It’s like of course this is their biggest business.

Leo: O sure, yeah.

Chad: Between this book and the Twitter book I really like any sort of romanticism that I had around the tech industry completely gone. No one knows what to do it seems like. Everyone's like this is really difficult. Everyone's head is just hitting the ceiling.

Leo: It's messy.

Chad: Yeah it's really messy. It's kind of.

Leo: Making the IPhone was a very difficult task. Nobody had ever done any of the things that Steve insisted on. A lot of credit to Steve Jobs because he basicly forced this thing to happen.

Chad: Yeah you really see you need a visionary to truly say, I don't care if you don't want to spend 6 weeks of your life working on something you think is a detail, it’s a feature for me.

Leo: A forceful visionary. It’s very interesting. Anyway so it could very well be Android Silver was somebodies good idea and it doesn't mean anything. It could have been slides made and doesn't mean anything. Remember did something called signature because Windows computers were so crapped up they tried manufactures to do the Window's signature edition without any crapware. With better servers, a lot of what this Android Silver was, and nobody bit. Nobody, Phiseo made some, nobody made any. It was a flop. Android TV in the news and of course Amazon is kind of pushing this along by the release of their Fire TV. I reviewed it yesterday on Before you Buy. I've been playing with it. It's pretty cool. I like it. It’s another set top box, you know I don't know how many you need. 800 ways to get Netflix. But I like it. It has one feature that I really like, which is it has a microphone on the remote. You don't do ok seary, ok google. You don't say anything, you just say a couple of words. The title you are looking for. Now unfortunately, some have slammed Amazon for this, this only searches only Amazons own properties. It doesn't search Netflix. I think that's probably because Netflix doesn't give them a way to search. I don't know if there is an API, I know there's not a API, a public API for searching Netflix data. So I am not sure I blame Amazon for that one. But it does a very good job. It has understood me every time. It has games.

Gina: Is the microphone always on or do you have to click a button.

Leo: No, well that's an interesting point by the way. You click the button. It’s very much like Serie, you click and hold it while you are talking and then you let it go when you say search. But according to R's Technika Amazon keeps the voice recordings, to learn your voice and how you speak to improve the accuracy of results. Deleting voice recordings might degrade your experience. I don't know where they keep them, they must keep them on their servers. But there is an entry that will allow you to delete it, I guess its in the settings, in the voice control options. It works pretty well. They say they keep all users, oh that's Apple keeps all users voice data for up to 2 years. Google Now and Connect probably do the same but there are no deletion options.

Gina: So it's delete my current voice recordings. It's not don't store them.

Leo: Right, no.

Gina: So you have to keep going back and saying okay I delete.

Leo: So if you search for Debbie does Dallas and you don't want anyone to know you searched for that you could delete that right there.

Aaron: So kind of like you history.

Leo: It is history.

Aaron: Voice history as opposed to browsing history or something.

Leo: That is an interesting question mark. So what do we know about Android TV? Well it is going to be kind of similar. Like the Amazon Fire TV it's going to have games. Because you know the Amazon product is an Android device. It is a quad core qualcomm 600 processor. We know that from the I fix it tear down. With a dedicated GPU. Its got 2 gigs of RAM which is a lot for an Android device. That helps with the speed and performance. So I imagine Android TV from Google will be very similar. But what do we know? The Verge has leaked screen shots I guess.

Gina: It’s still unclear how this is different from Google TV?

Aaron: I don't think there is any pass through. Right, the Google TV, a lot of that was about cable pass through.

Leo: Which I loved.

Aaron: Which I hated. I don't use it.

Leo: But my Xbox1 works the same way. That means I can be watching something and overlay on top of it.

Aaron: I don't like it because I am a cord cutter, right. So it doesn't do me any good.

Leo: You don't have anything to pass through it.

Aaron: I've got nothing to pass through it. It’s not that I don't like it. It is a cool feature but I don't use it.

Leo: I got my TIVO hooked to the cable, passing through the Xbox1 and it all goes into my TV. That means I can without changing anything, just route all sorts of stuff. So Android TV won't do that, that makes sense.

Aaron: That's what I read anyway.

Leo: Fire TV is not a pass through.

Aaron: Also I think the interface, even though it’s going to be Android, I think the interface is going to be quite different from what I have read on Gigaome and other places. A simplified. What I was kind of hoping was that they would just morph Google TV into like Jellybean. Instead of having a platform that you have to design specifically for you just design through Jellybean.

Leo: Oh wouldn't that be cool. Have a leaned back experience in Jellybean available.

Aaron: Exactly. That's what I was hoping for but we'll see. This doesn't look like this is it. They want to keep it really simple. Allow people to, like you said, kind of type something in or speak something in possibly and just have it come up.

Leo: That's what's interesting in this slide from the Verge, if this is accurate, there is a microphone and a Google now style search bar. So I would expect that in there.

Aaron: The real question is, How does this affect Cast? And what they are going to do with that?

Leo: Oh Chrome Cast.

Aaron: Yes, Chrome Cast which is one product. But I was talking to one of the product managers down at Google about this the other day. It seems like everything is going to be Cast. So Chrome Cast is one product and then Cast though is like the over-arching brand. So there will be Chrome Cast, TV Cast, Something else Cast, Cast, Cast, Cast.

Leo: But this won't be Cast?

Aaron: Right, it doesn't appear like it is Cast. So how does that, I don't understand. It seems to be very competitive with everything that they have going on right now. Now there is going to be Google TV, there is going to be Chrome Cast or the Cast family of products and Android TV.

Gina: I don't think Google TV is to long for this world with Android TV. But it is true, we were talking about that a little bit last night. How does this fit with Chrome Cast. It seems like they are still setting up for that Chrome vs. Android dichotomy there. But one of the good points that Jason made last night, was that they announced that a feature for Google IO that allows, that give API's for developers to search API's into content, into apps. So that gives something like Android TV the ability to do for streaming content what it does for web pages. In that you could do a search on Android TV and it could search within apps in one interface. You know the Netflix, the HBO go and whatever all the different kinds of apps. So that's what I would really like to see. That way it would different from what the Fire TV's doing right now which is just searching, at least with voice search anyway, just searching the Amazon library.

Leo: You know one interesting think Kosh has made his Allcast work with Amazons TV, Fire TV.

Gina: So you can cast to Fire TV from Allcast?

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: Right because the cast capabilities are built

Leo: It's Dial. So Amazon Fire TV supports Dial. Which is the standard, the open standard that Google Chromecast sort of uses. It’s like Dial Plus.

Aaron: So that's why I can do things like from Youtube I can stream directly to my Viseo Costar which is a Google TV device. But it’s not really Cast compliant, so to speak.

Leo: So that's confusing.

Aaron: It is confusing. I can also stream from Chromecast, from almost any Chromecast compatible I think I can stream to my LG TV. Which is really interesting.

Leo: That's Dial I am sure that Dial with DNLA.

Aaron: Sure its Dial. Right because they didn't have it back then when I got my TV.

Gina: Yeah DNLA.

Leo: Dial and DNLA are different things but they are related I gather.

Aaron: I think Dial is more closely related to what Chromecast does. DNLA is more like a searchable network thing, right.

Leo: It's like Airplay.

Aaron: Exactly.

Leo: What about UP & P? Oh never mind. Forget it, forget I mentioned it. Bonjour. Ok I am curious about what you guys think of this, because Courts got all hot and bothered because of Google's sneaky new privacy change on IOS. I think this is just great and a convenience. If you are logged into Gmail on IOS then your also logged into everything else. Youtube, Chrome, Drive, Maps just automatically. You sign into one you sign into them all. I think that's nice. But according to Lea Marani writing in Courts, its a sneaky new privacy change. It just allows Google to gather more information about you, because now your instantly logged into Youtube. That means you can't just use Youtube anonymously. You can't use Maps anonymously, Google is going to be collecting information on all of those tools. This comes from their unified privacy policy which they did a couple of years ago.

Gina: Right, this is the software manifestation of the unified privacy policy.

Leo: they don't do it on Android. Oh I guess they do. All you have to do is log into Android with your Google account and everything works, right?

Gina: Yep, you just say I want to access, if you have multiple accounts, I want access with this Google account.

Leo: Occasionally I will launch a new program, and it will say which Google account do you want to use? Even though I only have one. I select that account and it goes on. So you do that the first time. But now everything on my Android phone, all the Google services share with each other.

Aaron: Yeah that Sync tab, when you go into your account settings is getting longer and longer. All the things, what do you want to sync? Do you want to sync quarn, yes, no?

Leo: Do you want to sync everything? So I did notice when I went to Google.com today that privacy and terms were updated. So I guess I should.

Gina: And those are always so much fun to read. A lot to read.

Leo: You got some reading to do. I wish they would just put a little new next to whatever is new. Here is one, modified March 31st . I can't do it, I can't read it. I'll fall asleep on you.

Gina: O Jesus, I need a dif.

Leo: there you go I need a python script stat. Let's do a dif on these terms of services.

Aaron: That's a one liner.

Gina: They just need to give me a plainer version on what changed.

Leo: That's what they should do. It’s very nice on the permission on Android Play. It's very nice, it say this is new, this is new, this is new. Please tell me what's new. I don't know.

Gina: We'll take your second born children as well as.

Leo: Yeah right it could be buried in there.

Aaron: As well as your right arm.

Leo: The below terms, ok this is what changed, the Google terms of service. The below terms effective April 14th, 2014. To view previous versions click here, so you could do a dif if you want. OK fire up the dif.

Gina: Yeah there is the comparison, OK.

Leo: Is there on the page.

Gina: Yeah, so when you say under April 14th there is a link that says comparison, it is a pretty straight forward dif. With the new stuff in green and the old stuff crossed out in red. There is very little, very few changes here.

Leo: Ok good, won't worry about it. Google, I trust you. Your fine.

Gina: Oh OK here's this is green. The automated systems analyze your content including emails to provide you personally relevant product features. Such as customized search results, tailored advertising and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content sent received and when it is stored. Well we knew that right.

Leo: Please do more of that Google, that's good I like it.

Gina: That's Google Now right? The definition of Google Now.

Leo: I don't mind.

Aaron: That was almost what was in my, I know you guys probably talked about the birthday of Gmail.

Leo: We did, yeah.

Aaron: I went back to my original Gmail email that I got when I signed up, you know.

Leo: Oh that's neat. It said that right there?

Aaron: It said that, in 2006 or whenever I signed up, it said almost those same words.

Leo: They have never hidden the fact that we are scanning the email looking for advertising links. Or looking for what to send you advertising for. They've never never done otherwise. Alright Google paid 1.5 billion for Ways according to the CEO. That's official. Ooh but this is the interesting kind of between the lines thing here, it sounds like he didn't want to sell. Noam Bardine who was the CEO and co-founder of WAYS in a Linked In post confirmed the actual deal. One of WAYS mistakes he writes was the valuation of its A-round which significantly diluted the founders. Hey sometimes that happens. Perhaps if we held control of the company as the founders of Facebook, Google or Microsoft had WAYS might still be an independent company today. He was forced to sell by the VC's it sounds like.

Aaron: It looks like they should have introduced some of the B and C shares when they started.

Leo: when Google came out with free turn by turn navigation stealing our thunder the response of our Israeli investors was that we should focus on Singapore or Romania instead of the U.S. To avoid the inevitable confrontation. We had a moment of fear and took our eyes off the ball costing us valuable time. John Maloy one of the investors having lived through Paypal competing with Ebay gave us valuable experience. Something a unicorn grower would know. Help steer us.

Gina: WHAT?

Aaron: That's what it says.

Leo: Just reading, I don't know what it means.

Gina: This is a very honest or appears to be an honest admission.

Leo: It is a really honest post.

Gina: After the sale. You don't hear this kind of thing very often.

Aaron: Well normally aren't you restricted from talking about the sale as part of the.

Gina: This does seem like information they wouldn't be able to talk about.

Aaron: Yeah, at least not this soon. Usually it’s at least a year, there is a year moratorium on talking about details.

Leo: So here's where that unicorn stuff comes from. If you read the whole post. The title of the post is A Unicorn in Israel. The shock displayed by the British officers at the thought of fighting a tiger in Africa in Monte Pythons meaning of life is similar to the shock displayed by most members of the Venture capital community at the WAYS 1.15 Billion dollar exit. Israel had been written off as of only being capable of producing small exits. Security or Chip companies not global internet brands. A unicorn in Israel. So I don't know, unicorn growers I guess would be a venture capitalist who invested in Israeli start-ups to try and grow unicorns. The U.S. Market is usually considered to be 50 times of that of Israel. So if we normalize markets one would have expected .8 unicorns to be found in an Israeli to the U.S. 39 that is 50x.

So our 1 unicorn exit makes sense. This is a unicorn rich post.

Aaron: Some people really like them.

Leo: Reminds me when we first started TWIT somebody came up to us and said I got some words of advice for you. Yes sir,.... Bikini rich content. OK didn't do that. Maybe I would be a unicorn today.

Aaron: The article kind of comes away, it sounds like a little bit like they are complaining because they could have gotten more money. But it is 1.15 Billion dollars.

Leo: Well then he looks at What app and he goes crap. Maybe we could have, you know even if you've got a billion dollars it seems, maybe that's a little greedy but it seems like a billion.

Aaron: A billion dollars wasn't what it used to be.

Leo: It seems like it should be enough.

Aaron: It doesn't go as far as it used to go, come on people.

Leo: I could of had 15 billion.

Aaron: Think of Macdonald’s, look at how many billions of users or customers they have, come on.

Gina: Or maybe they just wish they were running an independent company?

Leo: That I understand, right.

Aaron: Yeah, I think so.

Leo: That I understand.

Gina: It’s not always about the exit or the biggest exit. You know it often is. Have you been watching Silicon Valley on HBO?

Leo: Ahhh, yes, what do you think? I won't say yet.

Aaron: Not yet. I haven't seen it. But it’s OK, there are no spoilers.

Leo: There's no spoilers in a comedy.

Gina: I'm going to watch to 2nd episode. It was ok. I thought some of the jokes were pretty good. There were a couple moments that made me crack a smile. A couple things made me a little uncomfortable. A couple things that I thought were just dumb. I like Mike Judge, mostly so I'll watch another one.

Leo: I wasn't a Beevus and Butthead fan but I loved Office Space.

Gina: I loved Office Space.

Leo: This was Office Space worthy.

Gina: Yes, it definitely had shades of Office Space. I love that movie.

Aaron: Yeah me too.

Gina: I think that our community frankly deserves some poking fun at. I think it is funny.

Leo: I actually loved it. I thought it was hysterical.

Gina: You did, you loved it. Oh OK, I was expecting.

Leo: There were moment, first of all there is a company that looks just like Google but you know its not Google because it is headed by kind of a Mark Benioff style or Larry Ellison style CEO.

Gina: You could recognize the characters.

Leo: You could.

Gina: Oh that's a Paul Graham/Peter Teal.

Leo: It was Peter Teal. So their venture capitalist guy, well really he is an angel investor guy is on the spectrum of autism. He won't look you in the eye and he's kind of aaaaaa. He drives a very narrow car. He's paying 100,000 dollars to anybody who drops out of college to form a company. That is Peter Teal. One other guy says boy he must have had a bad experience at college. He must really hate college. In fact he comes up to him says maybe we should go back to college so we can drop out. I thought it was very funny.

Gina: Yeah there were a couple moments. Like the one guy says I better put on a better shirt and then he puts on his old company shirt.

Leo: Yeah his old company shirt.

Gina: There is a scene where this is a crazy concert going on in the back yard of some big company.

Leo: Kidd Rock.

Gina: I have been to that, like I've been in that scenario.

Leo: It was awesome. I don't know how accurate it is. I mean its television. It's probably as close to Silicone Valley as Entourage is to Hollywood, right.

Gina: Yeah well of course.

Leo: But it is close enough. I mean you feel like there is some humor in. He clearly comes from good background. It’s not phony, made up stuff. It’s all real. At that concert the founder comes up, Kidd Rock and then he goes I've got 6 words for you, what was it, it was very funny?

Gina: It was I love Hooley's Multagrooved multi-integrated platform.

Leo: Yeah it was hysterical.

Gina: They got their lanyards, it was terrible. It was funny. I was like OK.

Aaron: Well I will check it out then, it sounds good.

Leo: To me I loved it. I can't wait until the next one.

Aaron: They've got a ton of material, I mean every day you could take something out of the news and plug it into the show in a funny way.

Leo: The good news is they've put the first episode for free on Youtube so you can decide if you want to torrent the rest of them. HaHaHaHA

Aaron: Oh you’re not supposed to do that. I mean I don't do that.

Leo: I guess we could play a little bit of it.

Aaron: It’s on Youtube.

Leo: There is that bit right there. Here let’s play that part. Can you get my audio?

Chad: Its turned up, one second.

Gina: Even the wardrobe is so perfect.

Leo: You know these guys.

Gina: Totally.

Leo: I am going to check my sound. I'm not, that's odd that I wouldn't have been. Come on send it out through the HDMI port. Why won't it? It just won't Chad.

Chad: Time to reboot.

Leo: Do I have to reboot.

Chad: I mean just unplug and replug, I think that will fix it.

Aaron: Just make it renegotiate.

Leo: Handshake.

Aaron: Heartbeats.

Leo: Anybody who watches, here we go.

Video Playing

Leo: You've got to love that.

Aaron: I've been there.

Leo: You've been at that party.

Aaron: Absolutely.

Leo: The people raise their beer kind of tepidly. One of my favorite parts is Hooley which is basically, here is the Peter Teal character.

Video Playing

Leo: This is tech talk.

Aaron: That is hilarious.

Leo: It has the same pretension. Here is Pitch's, so this guy apparently made a little money he sold his company to Frontier airlines what is it Auviauto. He is taking pitches from other people who want to move into his incubator which is basically his house. Here we go he is taking pitches.

Video Playing

Leo: I love the beard.

Aaron: I would buy it.

Leo: He's Googling it.

Aaron: OK I am sold.

Leo: Don't you love it.

Aaron: Now I've got to watch it. I'm going to watch it. I might be the only one laughing in the room, the rest of the family is watching going WHAT?

Leo: It's programmer humor. He's at the ice cream machine getting his yogurt in the company cafeteria and he goes uh-oh here comes the programmers. The programmers haze him mercilessly. It's Office Space though, it's the same idea with the downtrodden programmers.

Aaron: Yep, I like it.

Leo: I like it, just me maybe. I think I talked to Jeff yesterday, I think he didn't hate it but he didn't love it. But remember he is a TV critic it’s his job.

Gina: Yeah yeah. He like Big Bang Theory so you know.

Leo: He did?!

Gina: Yeah remember we talked about Big Bang Theory.

Leo: Where did you stand on that? How about you?

Aaron: Big Bang Theory, I don't watch it.

Leo: Yeah I don't either. This is good because there is no laugh track. You have to decide whether a jokes funny on your own.

Aaron: I like that.

Gina: Agreed. Emotional manipulation is always

Leo: It's like Upworthy. You won't believe how funny this is.

Gina: You won't believe what happens next.

Leo: I'll tell you what happens next is an ad for Legal Zoom and then Ladies and Gentleman. The tool, the tip and the number of the week. But first a word from Legal Zoom. Legal Zoom is not a law firm, no no no much better. They provide you with self-help services at your specific direction so you can get the legal work you need done at a very low cost. They can give you legal help through independent attorneys and self-help services. Not a law firm, much much better and much much more affordable. I mean for instance if your starting up a business you can get an LLC for 99 bucks plus filing fees. Now your white shoe attorney with the 8 different names on the front door is not going to give you a fee like that. That's how I did the LLC for TWIT. It's the papers we're still using. You can do a chapter S or C corp too. Got to get that trademark, Chad have you finished trademarking LMG Chad?

Chad: No I haven't.

Leo: It is 169 bucks, Chad. Trademark it.

Chad: It's like I already spent the money, right. I just need to go through the next step.

Leo: The step by step thing and all of that.

Chad: At the trademark office they are like, we need a specimen.

Leo: You need specimen, send them a specimen.

Chad: It’s not Legal Zoom, it’s the trademark office.

Leo: You've got to give them an example so they can file it. That's what they put on file.

Chad: Yeah exactly.

Leo: So I gave them the TWIT name and then I gave them the TWIT logo. It was just a drawing it doesn't have to be super fancy but that what’s on file so somebody can look at that and say oh yeah we don't want to infringe. It's worth it. Let's face it, the legal system is complicated, it's expensive. There are better things you can do with your time and money. But Legal Zoom is there for you. Making it so much easier and so much more affordable. Trademark, Will, Living Trusts, all the personal stuff to. You get the personal care you need and they will help you take care of all the details. Legal Zoom, they have been helping families and small business owners for 14 years, including me. A+ from the Better Business Burrow. They are great people and it is a great service that is really empowering people. I am all for that. Legalzoom.com use the offer code TWIG to save on your legal needs and get access to the network of plan attorney's free guidance. Legalzoom.com offer code TWIG you get 10 bucks off. Check out and we get a little thank you from Legal Zoom. They say thank you. That guy Joey came over and he did an LLC thanks TWIG. Legalzoom.com use the offer code TWIG. Gina Trapani why don't we start things off with you, a tip of the week.

Gina: All right cool. A cute little new thing in Google's centerface that is new to me anyway. That Google operating system pointed out. Google's App launcher on the web, that little box, you know the squares in the box. It looks a lot like Android's app launcher actually. But it is in the upper right hand corner. You can now customize that and you can move around the icons that you want. To put the apps that you use the most up top. You can relocate apps maybe that you don't use into a different page. You can add new shortcuts like Google Keep for example, if you’re a big Keep user. So you can just kind of customize that little launch, make it a little more useful. I've got to be honest I don't use the launcher very much. I generally just navigate to the app that I am just used to doing the control L and typing into my browser address bar but that button is everywhere. It's in every app, so if you just want to quickly navigate to another Google app you can do that. Now you can sort of arrange those icons very much like you would on your Android home screen. So you are seeing a little bit of the web Android unification going on here.

Aaron: Now is this the extension? The Chrome extension?

Gina: No this is like if you go to Google.com or if you go to Gmail there is a little grid of boxes on the top right. That's like their web app launcher. You click on that, it's actually on the web page. Its not a Chrome extension at all.

Aaron: Oh, because I have been using a Chrome extension to do just this for the past couple months. I use it all the time now.

Leo: Oh it’s this little grid right here.

Aaron: Yeah but look I have it. Look on mine, I guess they can't see mine. When I go do mine I have a customize or configure at the bottom. So I downloaded a Chrome extension to do exactly this. But I don't have to anymore. That's great.

Leo: New, drag and drop to arrange your apps. Right there and I can just.

Aaron: That makes it much more useful.

Leo: Yes because see I have a 2nd page and I would like to get photos up here for instance and get Google news down here. Things like that.

Aaron: I've put Keep up there. We talked about Keep up there. We talked about Keep earlier. I put Keep up there because I use that a lot. Wherever I am at I can just click the little grid and choose Keep. Cool.

Gina: Yeah actually Photo's I go to all the time. I always forget the URL is and I wind up clicking through Google Plus. So this will be way better.

Leo: That's great. It doesn't seem to be on Google Drive, is it?

Aaron: Yeah they have Drive.

Leo: Oh yeah there it is. Only on the top page. Once you’re in a document it goes away. I use this all the time. There are all these pages of stuff, I can move the stuff down that I don't want.

Aaron: Cool.

Leo: Good tip.

Gina: Yeah, thanks

Leo: Aaron you don't have to do a number. What would you like to add to the pot.

Aaron: So I've got a project is that okay?

Leo: Yeah, I love your projects.

Aaron: Oh good. So this is something really cool that I saw. Actually Make posted this, the folks over at Make magazine posted this. There has been a project for a long time called Paperduino. Which is basically taking a piece of paper instead of using a bread board. You make your own Arduino board. But using paper. Well now they have gone one step further.

Leo: Is there electronics in it?

Aaron: There is electronics in it. Yep absolutely. So I don't know if you've got that.

Leo: So instead of using the bread board you use a piece of paper.

Aaron: Use a piece of paper. So now they have gone one step further and they've created Paperduino tiny. Which is even smaller. So my next project is taking this, right now this is about 4inches by 5 inches of paper.

Leo: Is it stiff paper?

Aaron: You could use stiff paper, it’s up to you what kind of paper you use.

Leo: Oh it’s you.

Aaron: Yeah you just print this off.

Leo: Oh you just print it onto it. I get it.

Aaron: Yeah, exactly. So what I am going to do is take this and re-jigger it to make it into business card size. That is going to be my new business card.

Leo: Hand out a business card with a little circuit. What are you going to put on it?

Aaron: I don't know, we'll see. I think I am going to put a speaker and make some LED's blink so that way you can push a button and it will kind of give you my.

Leo: You actually put the components on it?

Aaron: Yeah yeah you put the components right on it. Now that will be for, what I can do is I can print out small ones. Like the ones that I give to people that I just meet on the street or whatever. But then I can print, I can actually do components on the ones I want to give to A class people I really want to remember my name.

Leo: People on the street happen to have resisters and dias in their pockets they could do it themselves.

Aaron: Well the great thing is on the back of this you can put the instructions on where to download all this stuff. It is about four dollars’ worth of components.

Leo: Now how do you solder it? Doesn't it burn, set the paper on fire?

Aaron: Very carefully.

Gina: Good question.

Leo: I burned up my paperduino.

Aaron: If you look on the back of it actually there is another. It will show you the back. There was one.

Leo: It shows you where the wire is going to go.

Aaron: Click on the first on again.

Leo: Can I flip the first one over?

Aaron: I think so. I thought there was a picture of the back.

Leo: I don't think they want to show you the back.

Aaron: I thought there was a picture. Here's what it looks like. So basically what they did was they connected everything with wires. Kind of like you would do with a bread board.

Leo: So they aren't really using solder?

Aaron: Your still using solder but you see if you look real closely on mine you can see where they burnt the paper.

Leo: It's like a wire wrap but you just have to be very careful.

Aaron: Yeah you just have to be very careful. Set your temperature on your solder gun appropriately so you don't have a problem. But I thought that was really really cool. The fact that 4 dollars of components and a piece of paper you have yourself a Arduino compatible device that you can use.

Leo: That is kind of cool. So this is basically, kind of like a bread board or a project board. I can see you could solder it. You just don't touch the tip of the soldering iron to the paper. You just melt the solder and it drips.

Aaron: Cause solder is going to cool very very quickly.

Leo: Yeah it's not going to burn, the solder itself probably won't burn the paper.

Aaron: Oh good I am glad you found those images. Yep so that's it. I thought that was so cool. So this is going to be my next project. I think for anybody that wants to do a little soldering, learn a little soldering.

Leo: I might do this.

Aaron: I am thinking we could probably use this in a makers space for a project for kids.

Leo: No kidding, yeah.

Aaron: Low cost.

Leo: What kinds of boards do they have?

Aaron: For?

Leo: I mean what kind of projects? Oh its an Arduino, it doesn't do anything.

Aaron: This is basically a Arduino.

Leo: It doesn't do anything particular.

Aaron: Right so you program it the same way you would and Arduino. So if I was doing this for kids I would probably do it with blinky lights. I would say now we are going to make the green light blink and now we are going to make the red light blink. Here's how you change your sketch and upload it into there.

Leo: You know what I am going to do. This would be really fun to do. Where do you get your stuff, do you get it at Adafruit or where do you like to getting your.

Aaron: It depends, right. So if I am getting a bunch of resisters I probably just get them off of Ebay from China and just have them ship a ton of them over for like 5 bucks or something.

Leo: Ca you get an assortment?

Aaron: Oh yeah. You can get resistor assortments, absolutely. That's the way to go actually. Because you never know what you are going to need, right.

Leo: Then you have to learn the ring code, do you know it by heart?

Aaron: Yeah you have to know the ring code, no I don't know it by heart, oh my goodness.

Leo: So you have to search through red, green, red.

Aaron: There's actually been a couple Android apps for looking up resistor codes. Pretty cool, good thing to have on your Android phone. If your a maker.

Leo: I like it.

Aaron: Take that. So if you ever see me, next time you see me in person, ask me if I got a card for you. Maybe I'll baked Arduino for you.

Leo: How much is it if you put a Arduino on it? How much is the total cost of it?

Aaron: Well this is Arduino compatible so this whole thing is four dollars’ worth of components.

Leo: That's all.

Aaron: That's it.

Leo: Per card.

Aaron: And the paper. And the printer ink. The printer ink probably almost cost as much.

Leo: 5 pieces. Oh here I am buying this right now somehow.

Aaron: Oh no you don't want to. I think you are buying a paperduino

Leo: Tiny card, double sided, hard paper, $3.00 USD for 5 pieces. But that doesn't include components. Then you have to buy components.

Aaron: Yeah you have to buy the components.

Leo: You use a thumb tack, push pin to make the holes.

Aaron: Right, to make the holes. Exactly.

Leo: See I have sausage fingers. Do you have to have really fine girly fingers? No yours really aren't.

Aaron: No. I have pretty big fingers. They are probably the same size as yours.

Leo: I don't have to look like Adrian Brody in the Pianist.

Aaron: What you do need to get is a pair of helping hands. You know they have a little magnifying glass and little alligator clips to hold your components. You definitely need that. For people my age you do need the magnifying glass. That's essential at this point.

Leo: So let me quickly look at my Gmail, because this was a suggestion from somebody. I was talking last week about how the only negative on using the M8 was that I didn't have the ModoX assist feature. He said you know what there is something that does everything the assist does on any Android phone. And he is right, I downloaded it. It is called Agent. It allows you to set up any Android phone use the accelerometers to do. Have you talked about this on All about Android or somewhere else?

Gina: I have heard about this, I don't remember exactly when we did talk about this.

Leo: I am looking for the email so I can give the guy credit. This was a really nice tip. I can't find your email I am sorry sir. So this is Agent, I have launched it and I have 5 sections. Battery, Sleep, Parking, Meeting and Drive. Some of this stuff is actually better than the ModoX. But let’s look at the Drive. So it knows if I have a blue tooth connection, it can also use, it is in beta, but it also can use motion detection to see whether I am driving. Then once I am driving it can do a variety of things, silence the phone or and this is what I have it do, read text messages out loud. I can respond with speech only and then it will prompt me for a voice response, transcribe it and send it as a text message reply. That is what Motorolla assist does in the MotoX. It's awesome. If I am sleeping and you can have sleeping activation times. I say who can wake me. But I can also say send a text that says hey I am asleep but if this is urgent text me the word urgent then my phone will actually play an alarm clock sound wake me up and then the phone call will go through. So I can say, you can control who gets this message, most people will get nothing but if you if my kids call me in the middle of the night they will get a text message saying hey I am sleeping if you text urgent my phone will ring loudly and wake me up. Or whatever you want you can change that. So right now we are in a meeting so it is on do not disturb. I can say which calendars, this is actually better than the Moto assist. Which calendars it looks for meetings with. If the meetings says busy, it will not ring my phone or it will send out a text message saying that I am busy. This is one the Moto Assist does not do. It will automatically record parking spots. Without me pressing a button because it knows I have stopped moving at that speed I must have parked. So I will always know where I have parked, without doing anything. It is a really nice program.

Aaron: What an awesome app. What is it called, I am downloading it right now.

Gina: Agent.

Leo: Agent.

Chad: If you need to search it is Agent Do not disturb and more.

Leo: Ah thank you. How much is it, Chad?

Chad: It is free. Even better, I just installed it.

Leo: Now my first question was does Agent use up a lot of battery life and he said no it doesn't. That was one of the things that I thought made the MotoX so special is that it had that special secondary low power processor to watch for things like that without actually waking up the phone. But he is right I haven't noticed a huge drop. There are some GPS functions that would conceivably leave the GPS on longer than it would normally be on. That might affect your battery life. But I haven't noticed it at all. Boy that was one of the things that was holding me back from switching from MotoX to the HGC1. I love Moto Assist so this does that and more. And it works fine on the M8. Someone in our chatroom asked if that worked.

Aaron: Wow Awesome. That's great, it’s like a, because I used to use task care for a lot of those things.

Leo: But Task Care you have to do manually kind of, you have to set it all up and it is complicated. This is basically Task Care with preset things. The 5 things you would most likely want.

Aaron: Yeah exactly. I think that is great.

Leo: Now if anybody wants wake me up you know how.

Gina: Urgent. Lisa will love that.
Leo: She is on the list.

Aaron: What if you texted and say don't worry about this Leo it's not urgent. Then you are still going to wake up.

Leo: Then I will wake up and be pissed. I'll be pissed.

Gina: Text me Shazam.

Aaron: Yeah has to be something really specific.

Leo: I should maybe change that word, huh? It is called Agent but look for Agent Do not Disturb in the Play Store if you want to search and find. Hey that's it for this week in Google. Gina Tripani it is great to have you back. Thinkup.com now open to the public.

Gina: Yes indeed. It was great to be back.

Leo: If you want to get insights. Did you get any sign-ups from last week when we talked about it?

Gina: We did. Sign-ups been going really really well. We obviously had a big spike when we first opened and then it kind of leveled out a little bit. But yeah I really appreciate all the support from the TWIT Network. Everyone has been so great. You, Jason and Ron, you have all been backers and I really appreciate it. It looks like we might actually have a shot at a business model. Who would have thought? We have a small shot.

Leo: Here is my Think up, so it takes my Facebook and Twitter and gives me analysis. Then it does it in a nice personal way, for instance 3 interesting people who have followed me. Then I have this button that says actually please hide them I don't want to see them. Here's the deal with Leo Leporte's status updates. Did you and Neel both write the copy on this?

Gina: We did. Yeah we collaborated on it. We tried to make it, you know it is analytics for humans. So it is supposed to be conversational and cool, not robotic. Not charts for the sake of charts but kind of a little stories that come out of those charts. So we are trying to tell those stories. It's not easy because everyone uses these networks in different ways but we are getting there.

Leo: See this is a good feeling. 460,519 people saw Migel Dacazas Tweet thanks to me.

Gina: Yeah, your using your network really well. You find the right people, nice job Leo.

Leo: You can thank me later Migel. Here is what I favorited on in the last year. My most popular tweet 2 years ago.

Gina: Wow, game on.

Leo: Last episode. Wow it has been 2 years. Do social tech and tech sound like good descriptions. Donna Dubensky they found her a palm, can thank me for 502,000 more people seeing her tweet. See I retweet the best people.

Gina: You do, you did.

Leo: Wow, Chelsea Corka followed me, I don't know who that is. But this is fun. That's thinkup.com if you want to sign up for that.

Gina: Yeah, thank you.

Leo: It's really, I don't know what I am going to do with it, I just like it. It's fun.

Gina: Yeah well, we want to get to a place where it sort of helps you decide you know what to do different or better.

Leo: If you are trying to use social media for a purpose, this would be useful.

Aaron: Yeah like if you were a business. This is kind of crucial data.

Leo: Very valuable stuff.

Gina: Really anybody with an audience can really make a difference and get messages out. Our hope is these kinds of insights help. Thank you for checking it out Leo.

Leo: Thinkup.com, thank you Gina.

Gina: Thank you.

Leo: We'll see you next week?

Gina: Yeah absolutely. I am going to try and get some better lighting in here. Some stuff on the walls, its going to be good.

Leo: Awesome. Tell that person next door to stop tormenting Game of Thrones or whatever was going on earlier. It is co-working space she can't be held responsible. We thank Aaron Newcomb for being here always. He brought doughnuts this morning instead of bagels by popular demand.

Aaron: Tony sought me out to thank me. I was like what did I do? He was like thank you for bringing doughnuts.

Leo: Bring doughnuts. Aaron is at Netapp.

Aaron: Yep, Netapp.

Leo: What does that little company do?

Aaron: Storage systems mostly. We do a lot of stuff really but we are known for our enterprise class storage systems that we do a lot of integration with business apps like Oracle and SAP and stuff like that. So it is Storage plus.

Leo: Storage plus.

Aaron: Storage plus a bunch more. I just came up with that, so I will take my paycheck now, thank you. No it is a great company in fact they are one of the top companies to work for just about everywhere. All of our offices.

Leo: Do you work at home or do you go into an office?

Aaron: A little of both. It's a trek, it is two hours, two and half hours down to Sunnyvale one way so that makes it tough. But they are very flexible. Very good. They treat their employees very well. They are like work from home when you want to and then come in when you need to.

Leo: That is why you are an Audible subscriber.

Aaron: Yep, absolutely.

Leo: That's how I first found Audible, when I was commuting to Copertina.

Aaron: It is great for commutes. So is TWIT, TWIT is great for commutes too.

Leo: Oh yeah that. We do this show in fact TWIG would be a good one. Every Wednesday afternoon, 1p.m. Pacific, 4p.m. Eastern time. 2,000 UTC on twit.tv if you can watch it live. We like it if you do. But it’s not a requirement by any means. That's why we make, we just want you to watch it, we don't care how. On demand, you don't have to torrent it. I don't think you can. Just go get it, it’s free at twit.tv/twig or wherever finer podcasts or netcasts are stored. Audio and video available. What else should I say, Thank you Chad Johnson our producer for doing such a great job.

Chad: No problem.

Leo: Thank you for being here. See you next time!

Aaron: Thanks to our audience.

Leo: And our studio audience. Hi, way far away.

Aaron: How is it going over there?

Leo: Didn't want to sit too close!