This Week in Tech 448 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the Daylight Saving Time edition. Coming up, did News Week really catch Satoshi Nakamoto? Google balloons vs. Facebook drones, and is Android really more dangerous than any other operating system? It's all coming up next, on TWiT.

Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Tech is provided by Cachefly, at cachefly.com. This is TWiT, This Week in Tech. Episode #448 recorded Sunday March 9, 2014

You've Been Goxed

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Leo: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. The show that covers the week's tech news. A massive studio audience, inflated by a bunch of wegians, is that right? No? Where are you from, sir?

Audience member: Scotland, but no, it's weegies.

Leo: Oh, weegies. Weegians is another planet. We have a bunch of people from Glasgow, Scotland, they're in a program called-

Audience member: Cross Creative.

Leo: Cross Creative. And then there's other people wondering how all these Scottish people got in here, so we're having a great time. We also want to welcome Ron Richards, great to have you Ron.

Ron: Thanks.

Leo: From All About Android.

Ron: Good to be back.

Leo: Where else are you from?

Ron: By day, I'm at Image Comics.

Leo: Oh you're a comic book guy?

Ron: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Leo: That's good.

Ron: That's what I've been doing.

Leo: And Ronxo on the Twitter chat thing. Whatever that's called, The Twitter..

Ron: The Twitter, yeah. And the Instagram.

Leo: I'm not really hip on this stuff that young people use.

Ron: It's just a fad, it's not going to stick around.

Leo: Hey, look at that! It's Aaron Newcomb, good to have you from Netapp and also a regular on Floss Weekly and All About Android and more and more of our shows, it's always great to have you.

Aaron Newcomb: That's right. Yeah, it's good to be here.

Leo: We're going to get you- You do a lot of making projects, so we're going to get you on Know How too I think.

Aaron: Well I've got a bunch of them just all lined up, ready for you.

Leo: Yeah, that's fine. I'd love that.

Aaron: Absolutely. In fact, I showed on of them off on a review I did for for BYB. I think it's coming out maybe next week, so you'll see one of the little projects I'm working on.

Leo: Last time you were here, you brought a radio, it looked like an old-time radio, but inside it had, what? A raspberry pie, and it was streaming internet radio on it, and it was such a good idea.

Aaron: Yeah, exactly. It's an old FilCo radio, it hooks up to my media library at home and streams all the old-time radio. It's a lot of fun.

Ron: You do all of the things I wish I had time to do. I'm so jealous of those kind of projects.

Leo: That's what making is all about, it's stuff nobody will ever do. Because, who has time?

Aaron: Right, exactly.

Leo: Except, NetApp doesn't demand much of Aaron. It's nice to have you. And of course, John C. Dvorak. Channedvorak.org and of course, noagendashow.com.

John C. Dvorak: Noagendashow, we did a show today.

Leo: This would be the second show of the week.

John: Yep. We did one on Thursday at 9-

Leo: And Sunday. What did you and Adam Curry talk about this morning? I bet you had something to do with some guy named Satoshi Nakamoto.

John: Actually, we didn't.

Leo: Really?

John: Yeah, I don't know why we didn't talk about that.

Leo: Okay, how long before News Week recants? So here's the story, and I don't know if they will or not-

John: It's pretty peculiar.

Leo: It's a little peculiar, News Week, for the first time in a long time, is going back to the print. They gave up the print a couple of years ago saying they can't make any money on it. This was one of the two news magazines everybody got. There was the News Week Family or the Time Family.

John: Don't forget US News and World Report.

Leo: And then there was the weirdo down the street who got US News and World Report. And we were a News Week family, read it religiously my entire childhood. It was a classic great news magazine.

John: That explains it.

Leo: Yeah, liberal. Time is a little more conservative. I don't know what US News and World Report was, liberatarian?

John: I don't know what it was either, it was just....

Leo: In any event, News Week decided to go back into printing and did it with a bang. A cover story in which they claim they unearthed the real Satoshi Nakamoto, who oddly enough, lives in Temple City, California in southern California under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

John: Yeah, that was a stretch.

Leo: Apparently, all you had to do was look in the phone book and you would have found him.

John: Well sometimes that's a lot easier said than done.

Leo: Liam McGrath Goodman wrote the story the story with a lot of, that she claims and Newsweek says, a lot of help from forensic something or other, people who are specializing in this kind of identity research. On the face of it is a fairly believable story. There's some odd bits.

John: She stands by her story, says CBS.

Leo: News Week stands by their story as well. But a lot of people say this is crapolla. Gavin and Dreysin, who we've interviewed is the head of the Bitcoin foundation, didn't exactly deny it. Basically he was very sorry he gave the interview to Laya. I would say there are 3 camps on this. There's one camp that says it's just wrong. It's just false, there's no way this is true, there's another camp who says it could be true but they should have never doxed the man. That's what Gavin said, that they in effect, having outed him made this guy's life untenable. And it's true, he's now being hounded. And then there's the third-

John: You could have fun with that though. This is the disappointment, I mean if you're going to be hounded like this out of the blue- I don't know if anyone saw that Woody Allen movie where he's in Italy and is all of a sudden famous for no apparent reason, and then he's not famous and he's urked by it. You could have a lot of fun with this, you could sell some product, get some publicity, you could wear a sign, like a Pepsi thing-

Aaron: Marketing, marketing.

Leo: Yeah.

Ron: Hilarious.

Leo: So okay, then there's the third camp and I think I might be in this camp, who believes it.

John: You believe it?

Leo: Yeah.

John: Oh okay.

Leo: So, you should read this story. I think a lot of people talking about the story didn't read it. Laya McGrath Goodman talks about walking up to the end of the sun baked driveway and there is Satoshi Nakamoto, two police officers are with her because he immediately called the cops when she showed up at his doorstep. The police officer from the Sheriff's Department of Temple City says, "What do you want to ask this man about? He thinks if he talks to you he's going to get into trouble." She says, "I don't think he's in any trouble. I'd like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto." The police officer responded with, "What? This is the guy who created Bitcoin?"

John: I don't believe that any police officer would have known about this.

Aaron: Exactly. Exactly right.

John: That's a problem with me.

Leo: And then he knows he's rich because the police officer also said, "...it looks like he's living a pretty humble life." If he is the Satoshi Nakamoto, it's believed he has about $400 million in Bitcoin, at least the address associated with Satoshi Nakamoto has that much Bitcoin. I think it's possible, I mean a large number of real world people know about Bitcoin, maybe even know the name. Because I've talked about it a lot on the radio in LA, a lot of people have been talking. It's an interesting story.

Ron: And they've used it as a plot device on The Good Wife on CBS, I mean I feel like it's on the fringes of mainstream awareness.

John: It's used in Almost Human, it's actually the coinage they use in the show.

Ron: Yeah, you're right. They have the little USB drives, yeah.

Leo: Now it's a little odd, Nakamoto's living with his mother, his 92 year old mother.

John: That's Asian.

Ron: He's 64.

Leo: He's 64, apparently showing none of his $400 million value, but there are some-

John: He sure doesn't want the mom to get a hold of the money.

Leo: It's all circumstantial. But it's good circumstantial, like for instance, he did work for the federal government in a related field, he stopped working for them right after 9/11 in 2001. He was somewhat liberatarian, he had done a lot- He hated government, he hated taxes. He is a math wiz, according to a lot of people. Graduated from Cal Poly in Pamona, California with a degree in Physics. So, he's got the means, he's got the motive because he's anti-government, in one point in the story they say that he's spent a lot of time buying his trains internationally, he was really frustrated with the tariff system, the amount of customs-

Aaron: And didn't she stock him on the train forums or something? In the article I think she said that she was corresponding with him about trains trying to figure out is this the guy, is this the guy? I thought that was kind of odd, but okay.

Leo: The other thing-

John: That's a good story for her.

Leo: It's a good story for News Week, what a great way to come back into print.

John: She's actually an interesting character.

Leo: Do you know her?

John: Well, I went into the first connection on LinkedIn if that means anything, but I never met her. She was one of the people doing stories about the child abuse on Jersey Island. And she was actually locked up probably a year or two before that, a friend of Glen Greenwalls was captured and kind of-

Leo: His boyfriend.

John: His boyfriend, this happened to her. Only she was in there for hours, or days or something.

Leo: So she's, you would think, a good investigative reporter.

John: But she seems to me, and I think the reason that it's kind of noagenda-ish but I get the sense that she is really not about pedophelia or even this, she's got something to do with banks. She is like targeting- And I think that's why she got onto this, because this is a banking issue.

Leo: She's interested in covering finance.

John: And I think they stopped her in England because the banking of the Jersey and Guernsey and these other channel islands, which aren't even owned by England, there's crazy protectorates of the Queen, specifically, are banking havens for people to hide their money.

Leo: Right, what do you say Weegies? They're nodding, we know all about that!

John: They're going to be their own country if they're not careful.

Leo: When she confronts this guy, who by the way, he's changed his name legally to Dorian S. Nakamoto.

John: Yeah. It makes sense. He looks like a Dorian, doesn't he?

Leo: But there is some question, if you really are Satoshi Nakamoto, and you went to great pains to be anonymous, doesn't it seem likely that you would still use your name, or you would have used your own name when you invented it?

John: I don’t know.

Leo: He did give an interview, so he never tells Goodman, I am the guy, he says, “I don’t do that anymore.” Now he is saying, he talks to the AP, he gives them an interview, saying, I meant I don’t do any of that kind of coding anymore, he tells the AP, I never heard of Bitcoin until my son told me that a reporter contacted him three weeks ago, he said, I’m no longer involved in engineering, I’m no longer involved in Bitcoin, he’s denied it all to AP.

Ron: But he took the meeting to get a free lunch!

Leo: Well, he wanted the lunch! (laughing)

John: He’s a cheap guy!

Leo: Well, he hasn’t had a full-time job since 2001, Gevin and Greason, estimated, looking at the code, that this was a two to three year, in private, job to write the code, he would have had to start in 2004 or 2005, maybe even as long ago as 2001,

John: I think he’s hiding something. I’ll be in your camp. I think this is the guy, I think he’s hiding something. There’s something he doesn’t want to get out, he’s probably hiding a huge stash of money…

Leo: He’s got $400,000, we think.

John: Something is fishy about this whole thing. It was never even actually speculated upon in the story.

Leo: It’s completely reasonable at this point that he says, “No, it’s not me,” because he is really him.

John: Now they’ve actually got paparazzi on him.

Leo: He graduated from Cal Poly, changed his name to Dorian Preditoshi Nakamoto, and hasn’t used the name Satoshi since then.  So maybe he thought he was being coy by using Satoshi.

John: Hiding in plain sight! Not a bad idea.

Leo: She did a lot of background work on this and really tried hard but I don’t think she found a smoking gun. It’s all circumstantial. And it’s very circumstantial, his name is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Ron: In the article it says that in 2008 there was a nine page proposal on the Internet about electronic cash that was attributed to the name and email of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Leo: That was the originating message.

Ron: Yeah.

Leo: Go back and watch our Triangulation interview with him because he talks about, he’s the only guy that has corresponded with Nakamoto by email, he talks about how the reigns were handed off to the Bitcoin foundation,

Ron: Bitcoins can be divided up by eight decimal places with the smallest units called Satoshis!

Leo: Yeah, but that was later.

Ron: Still, but even then, it’s Satoshi! (laughs)

Leo: How many Satoshis would you like? I think he has the means, he has the motive, but what you lack is the smoking gun that says he’s the guy.

John: He’s stayed hidden this long! The guy’s no slouch about it.

Leo: What camp are you in? John, you think it’s true?

John: I’m taking your side. Yep.

Leo: How about you, Aaron?

Aaron: Yeah, I think it’s true. His brother apparently implied it in the article, he said, “He’s a jerk and his life was a complete blank for a while, you’re not going to get him to admit it, he’ll deny everything, he’ll never admit to starting Bitcoin.” That’s what his brother says about him, so, to me, if that’s his brother saying that, then obviously his brother knew something, right? I think absolutely it’s him, he just doesn’t want to admit it.

John: For some reason!

Leo: It’s for sure that if there’s another Satoshi Nakamoto or it’s a group of people, they’re not going to step up and say, “Oh, no, it’s me!”

Aaron: Right, no.

Leo: So there’s nobody who’s going to confirm or deny this.

Ron: Given the weirdness that is associated with Bitcoin, the recent hacks, the Singapore murder,

Leo: Is it a murder or is it a suicide?

Ron: I don’t know!

Leo: Another great mystery!

Ron: All these weird little mysteries are associated with Bitcoin, I don’t blame him for trying to deny it,

Leo: You could get killed!

Ron: Yeah, exactly. I can’t imagine Newsweek would print and run this if it wasn’t extremely vetted, I mean print journalism still has some sort of…

John: Ah, isn’t that owned by Bloomberg?

Leo: Is it owned by Bloomberg?

John: No, I guess it’s Businessweek that is.

Leo: Michael Istachoff worked there, it used to be the Washington Post.

John: I don’t know who owns Newsweek.

Leo: But it was for a long time considered a very reputable source

John: Really?

Leo: I don’t know if it still is; Yes, I know you read U.S. News and World Report! Who read that? That’s weird! I think it was political, I think, from what we know about this guy he was the kind of guy that might have done it, How about you, what do you think?

Ron: I don’t know, I think it could be, but I agree with you that there’s something fishy here.

Leo: Was it wrong of Newsweek to put a picture of his house on the article?

John: That’s a little bit much!

Leo: Was it wrong of them to even try to find out who he is?

John: That house looks so generic, it could be anywhere in southern California.

Leo: No, it’s in Temple City, I’ve got the address if you want it!

John: No, that’s all right.

Leo: Let’s go down and visit him.

Aaron: Obviously the reporters know where it is now; they were crowding around the house immediately.

Leo: Worked for Hughes Aircraft in defense and electronic communications out of college, he apparently was brilliant, the kind of guy who would show up at an interview, according to his brother, and tell the interviewer he’s an idiot, and then prove it!

John: Ha, I like that!

Aaron: Bill Gates’ style.

Leo: The company he worked for, L3 Communications, this was part of RCA, was doing defensive electronics communications for the military and government aircraft and warships but it was classified says the president of the company, and I can’t really talk about it. His ex-wife said, “He didn’t talk much about his work, sometimes took on military projects, independent of RCA, moved back to California in ’87, where he worked as a computer engineer for a communications and technology company or companies in the Los Angeles area.

John: Maybe the whole thing is some sort of NSA scam and he was contracted to do it.

Leo: He worked for the government

John: And he won’t say anything, he’s a government guy, contractor, God knows what’s going on with this Bitcoin, I don’t trust it.

Leo: A libertarian, Nakamoto encouraged his daughter to be independent, start her own business and “not be under the government’s thumb” according to his daughter. He was very wary of the government taxes of the people in charge, he would keep his office locked, says his daughter, and we would get into trouble if we touched his computer. He was always expounding on politics and current events, he loved new and old technology, he built his own computers and was very proud of them, he could be anybody in our audience! He moved back to New Jersey and worked as a software engineer for the FAA in New Jersey after 911, doing security and communications work. Very hush, hush! After that contract ended, back to Temple City. And then no job, ever after that!

Ron: That’s weird!

Leo: Because he was working on Bitcoin!

Aaron: I mean, it says in the AP interview, the nearest Nakamoto has come to working on a financial system, he said, was a project for City Bank with a company called Quatron, which provided real-time stock prices to brokerage firms. I mean, that’s pretty, if you’re doing software engineering in that kind of an environment, that’s a pretty good background, I would say, to come up with a

Leo: I don’t know how much he had to be an economist or financial expert, he had to be a math wizard.

John: Yes, it’s a math thing!

Aaron: But if you’re writing applications for this vertical, for the financial vertical it’s some experience.

Leo: You need to understand what currency is, why, for instance, you’d want a limited money supply, which Bitcoin has, why, he did some brilliant things, makes it more difficult to generate Bitcoins as the CPU power doing it gets more sophisticated, he really did some interesting things, although Andreson says that 70% of the code has been rewritten since. It’s the kind of thing, more and more as I think about it, that would be written by a crazy loner.

Aaron: Yeah, absolutely.

Leo: Right?

John: Lived with his mom.

Leo: Lives with his mom.

Ron: Yeah!

Aaron: I mean, for me, when I heard this, I thought this fits the profile for me anyway, exactly as I think this person would be.

Leo: His daughter says, “He’s very wary of government interference in general; when I was little there was a game we used to play, he’d say, pretend the government agencies are coming after you! And I would hide in the closet!”

(All laughing)

Leo: The most damning testimony comes from his kids. Right? And his kids and his brothers. Family. Basically his family turned the guy in. 

Aaron: Except his mother.

Ron: Newsweek is owned by IBT media now, which is International Business Times. 

Leo: Oh okay. 

John: So there you go.

Leo: I did read on Secret though, the guy said, 'I work for Newsweek and we are about to recant the story.' Take it as you...

Aaron: People lie so bad on Secret.

Leo: Anyway, I think it's the story of the week and fascinating. I don't know if it matters in terms of...

John: What factoid is in there that would cause them to recant it? Was she lying?

Leo: Well for them to recant it, she would have to say 'yeah I made it all up.'

Aaron: 'I made this part up or something.'

John:  I don't think so.

Leo: And I think you can demonstrate that. Newsweek very clearly defended her and said, 'we stand by this story.' Fascinating stuff. Now meanwhile, the CEO of Bitcoin Exchange in Singapore found dead. That was a while ago, it's only surface now, February 28th. Police in Singapore say that they believe there was no foul play. Autumn Radtke was in fact an American, 28 years old.

Ron: No foul play but the death is unnatural, which means an accident, misadventure or suicide. 

Leo: Suicide probably right?

John: Yeah, bull crap.

Leo: Last month she linked to an article on Entrepreneur suffering depression. 

John: The old classic. 

Ron: You think it was murder.

John: Somebody killed him. Who knows who it was. It could have been anybody. Mobsters, Russian mobs, who knows. 

Ron: See with Bitcoin you don't know. That's the thing. That's was so weird about it. 

Leo: This is the best damn story we've had in years!

Ron: It's amazing! But there's no basis in anything you can trust.

Aaron: It's like a movie. It's like we're watching a movie in real life.

John: It'll be a movie. 

Aaron: It will be, absolutely. 

Leo: Mt. Gox of course, one of the most well-known Bitcoin exchanges, claimed a massive loss due to hackers. Went bankrupt, declared bankruptcy and holding a lot of Bitcoins, other people's Bitcoins.

John: Expect somebody else to wash up dead on shore.

Leo: Bitcoin community maybe not so happy about him. On Sunday, hackers took over the Reddit account and personal blog of Mt. Gox's CEO Mark Karpeles, to post an angry screed alleging the exchange he ran had actually kept some of that money.  And now they have a new term called, 'you've been Goxed.'

Ron: Jeez.

Leo: Well just because you can hack Reddit, doesn't mean you know anything else. They did post a 716 megabyte file to Karpeles’ personal website that they said comprised stolen data from Mt. Gox’s servers and included a spreadsheet of a million trades, a file that purports to show the company’s balances in eighteen different currencies, the back office application that shows all of this. I don't know, interesting story.

Ron: The whole hack, the Mt. Gox's story, that is a lot of money. 

Leo: They are not the only Bitcoin Exchange to have been...to have lost money and gone out of business as a result. 

Ron: SO they say it's roughly, at the time of the filing, it was roughly 474 million and about 28 million in cash is unaccounted for. Like how does that amount of money...That's what freaks me out about Bitcoin.

Leo: It's just bits, it's easy. It can take seconds to transfer that. i can't get into my wallet, they may have some of mine, I don't know. 

John: They probably do.

Leo: Bastards! It is a great story. It is not exactly a tech story but it is. it is a new world story because it is a non-governmental currency created by computers for use on the internet in an anonymous fashion and since the only anonymous form of money today is cash and is rapidly being phased out, it makes sense that somebody who doesn't like government.

Ron: And it opens up all these things about taxable and whether you know, if you got all this Bitcoin, do you have report that?

Leo: Who here has any Bitcoin? I got seven, how much do you have?

Aaron: I almost bought some and I didn't.

Leo: I never bought any, these were donations. Thank you everybody. How much you have?

John: I don't have any.

Leo: What!

John: What would I want a Bitcoin for?

Aaron: They are worth about $650 each these days.

Leo: It goes up and down. You know whose got a ton? Steve Gibson. He did Bitcoin mining early on, like the first day and Ching! 50 Bitcoin in his pocket. Worth at one point more than $75,000. He should have cashed it in.

Ron: Just really the wind of the Bitcoin has passed. 

Leo: No, the Winklevoss think $40,000 is what the Winklevoss say. 

John: I'd sell there.

Leo: By the way they are buying their trip into space by Virgin Galatic with Bitcoin. 

John: The trip they are never going to take.

Leo: You think that'll never happen?

John: Yeah that's what I am thinking. They have liability problems, insurances are going to be ridiculous, cost more than the flight. 

Ron: The future is Dogecoin isn't it? Haven't we moved on from Bitcoin?

Leo: Apparently we are Dogecoin mining on every computer in the building. No we stopped doing that. We’ve got all the Dogecoin we need. It's my retirement plan. I'm going to walk out the door here and they are going to say, 'here is 50 Dogecoins, good luck.' We are going to talk more. 

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Do any of you suffer from SXSW Fomo?

Ron: Not that I know of.

John: I am flying right out of this show, I'll be down there. 

Leo: I can't look at my Instagram, my Twitter, my Facebook. Everybody is drunk on that apparently. And Secret's full of drunk....

John: What is this? Why are you hanging out on Secret all the time?

Leo: Do you use Secret?

John: No. 

Leo: It's not the first of its kind but I think for some reason, it's the best. It's an iOS app that allows you to share anonymously. But the reason it works better than something like Whisper is because it looks at your contacts and then anybody who shares from your contact list is a friend, anybody who is a friend of theirs is a friend of a friend. So it makes you go, 'Oh! I wonder who said that?'

Ron: And there's an ability of commenting and discussions.

Leo: Commenting is good, it's also anonymous and each get a unique icon so you hear a lot of things in comments like. 'hey wine cup, that's a good idea.' Because people are talking to the icons. And if then it's you in the comments. there's a crown, so you know...

Ron: It's the original post.

Leo: I thought for a while it'll be a great source because everybody in Silicon Valley is using it. It'll be a great source for like...

John: I'm not using it! What do you mean everybody?

Leo: Everybody who is younger than 25. 

John: Oh those guys and they are so important with their gossip, God knows. 

Leo: Turns out a lot of my friends are popping. 

Ron: It's like Twitter back in '07.

Leo: I really don't want to know that! And then there is a lot of phony stuff like this guy you know, people say 'I work for XYZ company, we're about to be sold' and it's all B.S.

Aaron: Right, right. 

Leo: And then there is great fascination with Mike Errington, Kevin Rose. Maybe it's just my Secret stream, yours might be very different. Why did I bring that up? Oh South by South West. We went three years in a row, it's a lot of fun. It's a great party but I don't think there's a lot of...

John: It's a party. It's a big damn party.

Leo: Snowden is going to be on the panel via Skype.

John: Half of them left, because Skype was breaking up.

Leo: oh that never happens here. Happens all the time, no I am being factious. 

John:  It's getting worse.

Leo: I think Microsoft has not been the best steward of Skype, I'll agree with you on that. Yeah I don't know. I feel like I am missing out on some good parties, but I don't think there is lot of new stuff.

Ron: A friend of mine who works at an ad agency in New York was like, 'Oh, some of my co-workers are there. I am kind of jealous. Seems like a great place for advertising and marketing', and all that stuff, and I said that I hate to be that guy, but that's kind of why I stopped going. Like 5-6 years ago, it was the place where FourSquare got noticed, Twitter...it was this moment of energy and excitement and hear about new kind of apps and new kinds of uses for them and now it's marketing activation and pop-up shops and things like that.

Aaron: They got too successful and everybody wants to go now so they are just catering to the crowds.

John: You see the prices for the tickets?

Leo: Is it really expensive?

John: Couple grand.

Leo: Really!

John: Yeah for the all-purpose platinum.  

Leo: It is very much about the marketing. Samsung has the blogger lounge...

John: Fantastic, the blogger lounge, that's where i want to go.

Leo: And social media is full of it and a lot of people say how do I block South by? Anybody that has an SXSW tag block that. Vine, lots of videos. Although, I really was more interested in Khloe Kardashian's first Vine. Apparently she posted a video of herself getting rubbed down with lotion while topless. 

John: Where is this?

Leo: I am looking for this right now.

Ron: It's at the bottom of the page actually.

Leo: Is it? Can I play it?

Ron: well I did my research. 

Leo: SO when you go to appear on a television show and I have done a few TV shows and I think this is not...but anyway she is going to be on Chelsea Lately. Apparently the makeup artist is rubbing her down with lotion. I never had that on Live with Regis and Kelly. 

John: Don't they do that here though?

Leo: Yeah.

John: Yeah that's what I thought. 

Ron: There you go, all the way at the bottom.

Leo: So there is no real...this is weird

John: But that blond doesn't even work there. 

Leo: I think this is all part of Keeping up with the Kardashians. She only has 22,000 followers. 

John: You think its a publicity stunt Leo? Oh I would have never thought of such a thing. 

Ron: What I found interesting that this was her announcement that she was no longer on Keek, but is going to move to Vine. 

Leo: IS that how you pronounce it 'Keek'? I have been saying 'Kick.'

John: Keek?

Leo: it's a messenger app. It's the one that didn't get $16 billion from Facebook. 

Aaron: but my kids have that on their phone. 

Ron: keek.com. It's basically a Vine.

Leo: She was on Keek?

Ron: And now she is moving to Vine. 

Leo: Julian Assange tells SXSW audience, NSA is a rogue agency and then Skype dies. Co-incidence? He said that, "people power is the key to rolling back the power of the National Security Agency and other surveillance agencies." Everybody knows he's a big fan of Wiki Leaks. And he cannot leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He is holed up because he can be arrested immediately. 

John: Sneak him out somehow. Here is the way i would do it. You get a stunt double of him. He kind of sneaks in so nobody notices and the guy looks exactly the same. You bring out Julian Assange to get one of his public speeches just behind the door with a microphone with a group because he's got something to say. And then he says, 'I need some water,' he moves out and the stunt double takes over. And the stunt double is now looking. And they dress him up in some sort of wig and they shave his head or whatever and they sneak him out as one of the people that works there and they rush him to the airport and he's out of there. 

Ron: How does he get to the airport?

John: In a car. 

Leo: It's not the issue. It's where the hell does he go?

Ron: yeah exactly.

Aaron: He's going to have to use his passport sometime. 

Leo: He can go to Ecuador. He says it’s like being in prison being in the Ecuadorian embassy. 

John: he should have escaped by now. 

Leo: he's not apparently trying, the food is excellent.

Aaron: Yeah that's what I was going to say. 

Leo: He says that the British Security spent $8 million. He's been there since 2012, June 2012. Spent 48 million surveying him so that he won't do exactly what John says. 

Ron: You really got to wonder what the Ecuadorians are thinking, 'God this guy just won't leave. We let him in, it was raining.'

Leo: I think they are making it less appealing.  He says in the  SXSW interview, “It is a bit like prison."

John: I hope they let him shower. 

Leo: He says it is very bureaucratic. 

Ron: he always uses the last of the milk. He puts the empty carton back into the refrigerator. 'Who ate my Chinese food leftovers? Assange!' Worst roommate ever.

Leo: Now a member of Congress says, because when is it today or tomorrow the interview of Snowden?

Ron: Tomorrow at 11.

Leo: Kansas representative Mike Pompeo, just begging to be mocked. He was probably mocked in high school, says don't do it, back out of that SXSW interview. He is deeply troubled by this interview. It will be Monday 11 A.M Central Time with Christopher Soghoian who is a really great Security guy. He is the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. I am trying to get Chris on Triangulation. Christopher Soghoian, Snowden, moderated by Ben Wizner from ACLU. Snowden is expected to answer audience questions, a virtual conversation. That would be worth it to go to SXSW just for that. 

Ron: And they are not going to kill it despite what this Congress man says. This is why, his is an attraction for people to come to SXSW.

Leo: But the Congressman did a press release calling Snowden a traitor and he should not be given a chance to speak. 

Ron: This is just posturing on the Congressman's side. if the government really wanted to kill it...

Leo: They could. 

John: They might kill the Skype connection. 

Leo: One thing you don't want to do if you are SXSW, you are not supposed to use Uber according to the Austin Police department. Only use permitted transportation services, they say. Apparently Austin Police thinks Uber is illegal. 

Ron: Because they have got this ridiculous restriction around cars. 

Leo: Every city does.

Ron: If you want to hire a car in Austin, you need to agree to a 30 minute engagement window and it is a $55 minimum fee. And the whole point of Uber X is to get from Point A to Point B for $7. 

John: Apparently the rates for Uber in Austin right now are way like in $100+...

Leo: Surge pricing. Do you use uber a lot?

Ron: I don't have a car. I live in the city, I Uber lift my way to get around the city. 

Aaron: You guys have probably talked about the Uber lawsuit. What do you guys thing about that?

Leo: The lawsuit by?

Aaron: The woman that is suing because she said they gotten into an accident, the guy was looking at  his phone, and it's Uber's fault apparently that he was looking at his phone. 

Leo; I remember the last time we were in SXSW we took petty cabs that was sponsored by Uber.

Ron: That's how Uber is getting around it, so they sponsor petty cabs and they are making Uber X free as a promotional way and then Uber Black has the $55 minimum so that is how they are getting around it.

Leo: Speaking of lawsuits, Aereo is shutting down in portions of Utah and Colorado because they were denied a relief from a preliminary injunction by the court, the district court there. Broadcasters are suing to put Aereo out of business. Aereo is a company that makes these dime sized...you rent a dime sized antenna and then a ray and you can get over the air broadcast on your iPad. It's really cool. Works very well. The Justice Department has filed a brief is siding with broadcasters at the Supreme Court. This is another case, a Supreme Court case, saying Aereo is clearly infringing on the copyrights of the broadcasters. A lot of copyright experts say that is complete bogosity, makes no sense. Supreme Court will hear that case next month. 

John: Also how is this any different from Sling?

Leo: Well that's what Aereo says and I kind of agree with them. They say you are just renting this antenna,'why can't we rent you an antenna.' The Antenna picks up the broadcast. 

John: well that whole thing is a scam. it is designed to a have  great argument but if you look at it  in reality, it is like common. These guys have just found a trick to get around the law. 

Leo: But nevertheless, it does get around the law.

John: Yes it does. 

Leo: I admit that it is a trick, but it works. I don't see how you can say...well the federal court in Utah caused the shutdown. In fact, somebody sent me this email from Aereo saying, 'we have to shut down the service because the district court in Utah says it's illegal.' They are going to have a Court case, a preliminary injunction.

John: I am all for it because I think it'd be cool What I would like to see is they have these antenna all over the place so I can just get New York, local stations and then switch to Chicago.

Leo: That would be wrong. 

John: And then switch to Chicago.

Leo: That would be wrong.

John: That would be my antenna, what my situation is that I live in New York and got my antenna on down the block or I have my antenna in New York and I live in California. It is still my antenna.

Leo: They do not do that and the reason is……….

John: They should do that

Leo: I agree, but the reason they do not do it is because then you are a resident in that area and you are renting an antenna. (Both John and Leo talking over each other)

John: What difference does it make, Okay I ……… there are arguments I know what you are saying, I just do not, I am not at the top of my game here so I can just nail you.

Leo: What are you on?

John: No I am on aspirin. Does not take much with me I just do not drink. (Too much shouting over each other) Anyway, I do not see the difference. I think that it the species part of the argument. Find down the street and if I am running an antenna and these guys are running it down the Internet, what if I move a block further away, and then another block further away, now I am at the border of the city where I could not get any reception and I move a block away. So are you telling me that if I move one block away is legal and a block is illegal. This is bull crap.

Leo: Yes, you are right this should not make any difference and I think that the Justice Department is really showing that they are in the pockets of broadcasters to make this brief you know I know copyright I am the Justice Department and I say that is a violation of Copyright.

Ron Richards: Because it is an established…….

Leo: You are still watching the ads right?

Leo: It does not affect the ads right?

Ron: No it does not.

John: That is the thing that gets me.

Leo: It is double dipping.

John: If you are watching the ads, you are watching the ads and now they will make the argument that, what the argument is that it should be racketeering. It is the networks that do not like this idea, because they say the following You are in New York and we are giving New York ads, and if you are living in Connecticut or let us say California and you are watching New York ads it does not do us any good, but it also hurts the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS because they are losing money because they cannot sell ads. So this is a scam, it is a racketeering deal. I do not know, am I wrong here?

Aaron Newcomb: That is why the local cable companies carry the local stations right?

Leo: I think what it is that that CBS and FOX and the other stations that and networks that are suing want the cable revenue. They want both the ad revenue and the cable revenue. FOX has said that we will just take our stuff off broadcasting if that is what happens we want the cable revenue. They want the ad revenue and the cable revenue. But this was the old, right remember you put the antenna up you get TV, you do not pay for it, you watch the ads that is how it works. It is like me saying I want to charge……………hey this is a good idea, exchange your ISP for our access. If you want to rent Twit Comcast you had better give me some money.

Aaron: Yes. It worked for Netflix.

John: This Netflix thing is exaggerated.

Leo: But we have had a good conversation crowd in here, we had a guy here couple of weeks ago Dan Raeburn who is the stream media guy made a very compelling argument why. This is just business as usual, you pay for A sync, Peering is A symmetric and……………

John: It was Peering…… I talked to the CEO of Roccu with whom I chat occasionally and he says that this was in the works for a year.

Leo: And that Roccu was originally a Netflix guy.

John: And he says that this is a bull crap story, he says that this is not about network neutrality but about peering.

Ron: It is coming about on the heels of the Time Warner thing and kind of targets on Comcast I think, is……

Leo: Speaking of bogus stories I have to apologize because we talked last week….

John: You got to write about something.

Leo: You have got to write about something. And that Gregg Kaiser apparently likes to write about Apple for Computer World, and I trusted him right because it is Computer World. That is trustworthy.

John: You trusted.

Leo: I trusted, I do not them anymore, because he wrote an article in which he asserted that Apple was as bad as Microsoft because they were not going to support Snow Leopard any more. It is wrong. This is wrong; Apple did not retire Snow Leopard from support. His article which we talked about last week, said Apple retires Snow Leopard from support leaves 1 in 5 MACS vulnerable to attacks. His evidence was the Apple did not update Snow Leopard for the Go To Fail bug that is because it was not in Snow Leopard. Apple says no, what are you talking about?

John: It is a scandal.

Leo: Yes it is a scandal, no what are you talking about Willis so I am sure that Gregg will have something to say about it but according to Rene Ritchie at imore.com, Gregg if you want to defend yourself come on the show. But according to Rene Ritchie at imore.com is that it bogus because Apple is continuing to support Snow Leopard, fears not. On the other hand on April 9^th it is the end of XP and Steve Gibson shockingly on Security Now on Tuesday said I know that is not a big deal. What, you are the security guy in fact what Steve said was I was never able to get that service pack 3 running so I am running XP service pack 2 and I am safe. He says overblown and he says the key is to not to run it as an administrator. Run it, as a limited user XP is safe as anything else; do not worry about those patches from Microsoft. I think that we will find out April 9^th.

Aaron: Yes. (All presenters talking over each other)

John: Gibson is pretty good.

Aaron: Pretty Good!

Leo: Pretty Good. He is the best and on the other hand he knows what not to do, normal users maybe do not. So we will talk……………

John: Someone in the chat room says,’’ Steve is so cheap’’.

Leo: You know what it is he likes old stuff, he knows he has kind of tried it and banged on and he feels like he is more likely to be safe with an operating system that has been around for 13 years than with a brand new one.

Aaron: But who is building exploits for XP?

Leo: Everybody is. Are you kidding? Do you know how many XP machines………..take a guess XP machines do you think there are in the world?

Ron: Millions. Yes I would say millions.

Leo: Millions.

Aaron: I would say it is one and half.

Leo: How about half a billion.

John: Sounds good.

Leo: Thirty percent of all people running Windows are running ding, ding, and ding XP.

Aaron: Right.

Leo: Almost 500 million computers are running XP today. That is a lot of computers. If, you are a bad guy?

Ron: And the vulnerabilities are well documented too. That is the thing right.

Leo: And they are going to be even better documented when Microsoft starts patching them.

John: Right, Right.

Leo: Because then Microsoft will release patches for the other versions of the operating system and that is an alert and hey, by the way there is a problem with the DNL and you might want to look at it.

Aaron: And Steve is not out there and clicking on everything he gets through emails that he gets.

Leo: Yes that is right. He knows what not to do.

Aaron: He knows what not to do. There are average users and they are still running XP because they are going to be clicking all day long.

Leo: Like maniacs. Today I got a call from a guy called Thomas,” My mom is running XP.” It takes her three minutes to load a web page. She is running IE6; the latest version on XP is IE8 and is just as bad practically. Help me please help get her to Windows 8. I like Windows 8 how do I get her to move.

Ron: Just upgrade her.

Leo: Yes just do it. And then she is going to say,” I gave you birth 32 years ago and you do this to me, what is it with the charms, the charms-----how do I turn this thing off.

John: She might not even notice.

Aaron: Yes

Leo: She will notice------are you kidding! Are you kidding!

Aaron: I got called in to help an older lady because she had Windows 8 and she had Windows 7 and she was totally lost. I said you know what just take her back to the store and tell them to put Windows 7 on it.

Leo: She has got Windows 7. Could tell her to get an iPad or Chrome Book.

Ron: Yes that is true.

John: My wife who grouses about everything, and every upgrade known to man, complains bitterly, loves Windows 8.

Aaron: Really!

John: Yes.

Leo: What does she like about it?

J: She has a theory about it that I think is fascinating. Windows 8 is largely done by that new woman that moved out………

Leo: Julie Larcen Green. (all presenters talking over each other)

John: There is a lot of ribbon. Is that who – she has a lot of influence, she says that it is a woman’s influence that makes it, she says it was a woman’s influence, she can sense it, and she says it is wacky, it makes no sense, but it feels right.

Leo: It feels feminine.

Ron: Mmmmmm(Lots of laughing and talking over each other by the presenters)

Leo: Tell Stephen Synakowski that. He will probably totally agree with you.

Ron: Maybe that is why I cannot figure it out and I cannot figure out women either.

Leo: That is the problem.

Aaron: How does it work?

Ron: It works in the opposite, you tell it to do one thing and it does the opposite.

John: This was her theory, I felt the same way.

Aaron: I am always looking for the start button. Where is the start button?

Ron: Everything I think is wrong, and I do not know.

Leo: In Windows 7 it was simple, you started it and it went. Now where is it? Wow

John: It is a theory.

Aaron: I think that it is good.

Leo: It is the feminine side, and what about IOS7 does she like that? That is pretty girlie too?

John: I know that she does not like the Android.

Leo: That is very manly.

Ron: That is very manly.

Leo: Yes that is very manly.

John: Yes, that it very manly and it is no good.

Leo: It is wacky but it feels right. Our show today brought to you by stamps.com and you know it does not feel right going to the post-office. They are such a pain in the behind, you have got to find parking, there is all the new people buying new stamps, new postage right? Why do that when you can print stamps, you can print stamps, right now at Stamps.com. All you have to do is go to Stamps.com right now, and I am going to give you a no-risk trial in a second. Now your computer, no special ink, no postage meter necessary, print all the postage you need on demand when you need it, 24/7, never go to the post-office again. You can print right on the envelope so if your business does invoices or mailers it goes right on there, with the return address, the logo and it even gets the addresses to whom you are sending it to QuickBooks, if you sell on SE or Ebay, Amazon, Paypal whatever stuff you use it will pull the address from there. If it is an overseas address it will fill out the international forms, this is the easiest way to become a professional fulfilment app. That is where the professionals use Stamps.com, it is more powerful than a postage meter at a fraction of the cost, as much as 80% less than a postage meter, and you do not have to got to the post-office there is even a button on Stamps.com and you press that button and the post-office says quick send the mail carrier to Leo’s place they have got mail. Stamps.com, I love it so much that I want you to try it. There are discounts on Stamp.com that will save you money, discounts that you cannot even get at the post-office. Certified mail return and receipt and Internet and national customs forms all filled out automatically. It will send , it will send if you are doing a priority or a priority express, it will send an email to a recipient with the tracking number, really it looks pro. It is pro, here is your no risk trial offer, visit Stamps.com, click the radio microphone in the upper right hand corner right there, make sure that you do this because I am going to give a better deal than the one you see on the front page there. Enter TWIT, is the offer code you will get the digital scale for free you will get the 55 dollars in free postage, you will get a supply kit and a four week trial, at Stamps.com. So make sure that you go to Stamps.com before you do anything else click the microphone at the top of the home page and type in TWIT. We use it you could too, Stamps.com right now. So why go to the post-office, before you get to the post-office, you could be using Stamps.com. Nikos Marves Genavales, did I say that right?

Aaron: Yes.

Leo: I practised that all night last night and I was really mad that we had set the clocks ahead and lost an hour practising Nikos Marves Genaveles.

Ron: Ah yes.

Leo: He is a red hat guy who discovered the Go To Fail bug, but oh you know this is crazy, although Bruce Schneier is if the opinion that it might have been a hack.

Ron: Really.

Leo: This is the bug where a single line “Go To Fail” was duplicated within an open source code on the Mackintosh that completely by-passed the SSL security certificate check and it just meant that any certificate would be okay. Meaning that the man in the middle could be attacked is completely trivial on IOS and on the Mackintosh has fixed it. But Nikos who works for Red Hat says,” A bug in Linux could allow a hacker to create a certificate that would bypass normal authentication. Red Hat had to send out an immediate alert, suggesting that all those who Red Hat updates; it is very similar to the Go To Fail problem. Now schnier said if I was going to create a, if I wanted to create a security flaw in an operating system, that would allow let us say that I am a Federal Agent, and you can see that I am interested in what people are up to-----to bypass that and do that I would do it in a couple ways. One that would preserve amiability, it could be a typo, be trivial to create, you know that I have spent an hour at the key-board going there and put Go To Fail and Schneier says that I am not saying there is no smoking without a fire and there is no way to prove who did it or whatever. Though he did point out that Apple any normal-------you guys are progamers, and any kind of auditing procedure, normal auditing procedure a company should know who committed that code.

Ron: Logging and version control, yes, yes.

Leo: Have we heard from Apple? No. Not a word. Not that that is unusual for Apple.

Bruce raises a point and I think that he is right. Apple who did that and why? Prove to us that it just an error? Not some malicious attempt to add to reduce the security of OS10. In this case very similar, another Go To.

Ron: Would not Linux have that same kind of version control? No I know that it is kind of out there in Open Source but isn’t it like all those guys that have been…

Leo: Yes.

Aaron: Yes, it is out there in the repository and you get the repository somewhere and people are testing it out again and again and finding out that sometimes these things can be put into codes as a way to test certain things out. So you put this in deliberately at the beginning because I want to see if this works, but what I don’t want to do is go through the authorization part. Right. So we will just skip that little thing and then here is that…..

Leo: I do not think that this is the issue. Why break a new TLS that is used not only by Red Hat but also by everybody. And you could see who committed on the ganup project to do this, but……

Aaron: Yes but I mean especially with Ganup, you know that is meant to be the ultimate open source, you know open for everybody type of utilities, and the fact that did not get tested? I mean that it really crazy.

John: It does not sound right.

Aaron: Strange, get him on the show.

Leo: So it is not just Red Hat but this really is probably more wide spread than the Go To Fail Bug and we will and by the way the ultimate upshot is that you cannot trust SSL Certificates, because they are all trusted. And it is used by a lot of apps. It is used all over this library is everywhere?

Ron: Yes, yes. I mean Mackintosh kind of exposure like that is bad. But the Linux one you know used on various kinds of applications and servers and all that sort of stuff and these new libraries use. I mean that people implementing TLS are using that. Oh I am going to use it in the library that is why it is there.

Aaron: That is why it is there for that purpose.

Ron: Go update your systems people. It has been indentified, fixers are out.

Leo: It is easy to fix this kind of stuff.

Aaron: That is why you regular, it is for security you do regular updates for security patches that are for sure.

Leo: I love this story. The US government is really mad at Sprint because they have been overcharging for wire taps. That is just not right. They inflated charges by 58% that is more than 21 million dollars in over payment. You know Sprint; I guess it is reasonable if you are Sprint or Telco to charge for more for a wiretap. Right we have got to get a guy in there and we have got to look.

Ron: Where are we going to get a guy hiding in there?

Leo: A wiretap is not cheap.

John: Who is to say what is overcharged, that is what they pay. I would say you asked me to do something and I would say here is what it is going to cost and I.

Leo: The government complains…

Ron: This is our wiretap rate scale.

Leo: Prices go up

Aaron: I do not want an extra charge

(A lot of talking over each other)

Leo: There is the question that they over charged us they baked false claims, ask for a reimbursement. Under the law the government is required to reimburse for reasonable costs, but the invoices, well Sprint said they fully complied with the law, but the government is asking for triple damages and civil fines, Jesus, admitting basically that we want quite a lot boy we have overpaid. We have really, really, overpaid.

Ron: Tax dollars are worth it.

John: I am against wiretaps.

Leo: Holy, Holy Cow And the good news is that the secret court has rejected the government’s request for longer meta date retention, hey at least the secret court is giving us a little oversight here. The US wanted to keep data beyond five years, the secret judge at the secret court said,”No.” Actually he is not secret.

John: How can he be secret?

Leo: No his name is Reggie.

John: Reggie says no, okay thanks Reggie.

Leo: You know if you are a Fisk judge I would say that you would like keep that a secret. Wear a hood or something.

Ron: Or go by Satoshi.

Leo: Call yourself Satoshi. That was judge Reggie.

Leo: Hey, Reggie, Reggie Walton. Thank-you Reggie. I guess this is the one case where you want the judge to be public. And by the way more detail on the balloons versus the drones.

Ron: The battle of the skies, the Sky to provide free Internet access.

John: Yes.

Leo: Google Loon remember they lost a bunch of those balloons in New Zealand. Tray got some great pictures-----Tray Radcliffe got some great pictures, provided through Internet access with balloons in the stratosphere and just float there and they sort of reflect the Internet.

Ron: They beam them down.

Leo: It is not intended for here but areas where they cannot get wire.

John: Africa.

Ron: Yes developing nations.

John: Just put a couple of missiles on them just in case.

Leo You never know, you might want to. FaceBook is now going to buy a company Titan Aerospace for space that produces solar power drones.

John: And it is just going to fly around in circles.

Leo: FaceBook wants to bring internet access to parts of the developing world that have not built up the infrastructure for ground based web access and this is part of the internet.org thing that Mark Zuckerberger has been contributing to.

Ron: If you look at the comparison of the Google Moon project versus what Titan has done, it seems like Titan is the better bet. I mean it stays up in the air forever.

Leo: Fixed wings are more reliable.

Ron: Exactly it has got the same altitude, but the data speeds are way more superior. The balloons are given 3G, but this Titan stuff is giving one gigabyte per second for data speed, so….

John: But this is so far away, it is not going to come down.

Ron:  Covers a thousand square miles. 

John:  That is the radius of the coverage but the speed will deteriorate over a certain..

Leo:  It’s a gigabit but if a lot of people are using it, that could be a lot less.

John:  The whole thing is a scam.

Leo:  An experiment.

John:  Yeah, the same thing.  Scam, experiment.  There is something else going on.  It’s like what’s his name.  The guy goes out looking for the Titanic but he’s actually looking for a Russian sub.

Ron:  James Cameron?

John:  Yeah, remember that?  He was working for the government and the Titanic thing was just a cover. 

Ron:  So all those specials that they filmed; that was a cover up?

John:  I’ll show you some links.  It’s not like he didn’t do anything.

Leo:  What was he doing for the government?

John:  It was something to do with some sub…

Leo:  While you’re down there would you cut one of the cables? Was Nova Scotia up to no good and he had to check it out?

John:  Yeah, well whatever.  You happen to have Fuji XM1?

Leo:  I don’t, but I hear very good things about it.  Do you want to try it out is that why you’re asking?  If I get you one, would you review it for Before You Buy?

John:  Yeah, yeah. 

Leo:  I had the Fuji X100 but it was kind of a Diva camera.

John:  Not the XM1 is supposed to be pretty cool.

Leo:  Yeah, it’s APSC.

John:  Right.

Aaron:  Is the XM mirror-less?  16 megapixel. 

Leo:  But it’s not the micro 4/3. 

John:  No, micro 4/3 is at the end of its life.

Leo:  What do you mean it’s at the end of its life?  It’s just begun.

John:  Just begun?  What world are you living in?

Leo:  It’s like 3 years old.

John:  No. 

Leo:  MFT?

John:  4/3 is…

Leo:  4/3 is ancient but Micro 4/3 isn’t.

John:  Yeah, but it is still 4/3 thing.  You remember those cameras that were these dinky little plastic cameras that was like, 120 or some film? 

Leo: It’s the same size as that?

John:  Yeah, it’s the exact same size.  It is too small.

Leo:  Can we make a note that we should get John this Fuji XM1?  But you have to do a review for us on Before You Buy.  I want a cranky review.  You could do it with the guy with a beard and the plaid.

John:  People keep thinking that I am the tech grouch.

Leo:  You are the tech grouch.

Aaron:  Oh you’re not?

Leo:  So can you get us the tech grouch so that he can review the Fuji XM1?

John:  If I can find his costume.  It’s in a bag somewhere.   I can do that.  I think the tech grouch needs to be revived. 

Leo:  Chancellor of Chicago made a good point on these drones.  “Tell these other countries:  Oh the internet we’re going to give you comes from the US.  You don’t mind do you”?  That might not be a very welcome either.   Daylight Savings Time.  There is a bug in IOS 7!  Can Apple not figure this out?  According to Cult of Mac, John Brownlee, if you open your calendar in IOS 7 device the time of your operating system is correct but the line marking the time in calendar is an hour behind. 

John:  Oh No!

Ron:  I was just verifying and everything is working correctly on my Android phone.

Leo:  Could we just stop doing the time change?

John:  I’m going to have to look it up now.  Because 120 isn’t…

Leo:  Do you remember Ben Franklin?  What was wrong with him?  Why did he propose this?

John:  He was drunk all the time.  I met  this  guy, Nick Dewolf, who is now deceased but he was the great, great grandson of Ben Franklin.  And I met this guy and you would swear you were actually talking to Ben Franklin.  He looked like him; same bald head, same hair.  And he was an Inventor.  And he was a great, great guy.  It’s not 120, it is that little format one.  Chat room.  Give me the number on that?

Leo:  And while you’re in Chat Room would you Photoshop John C. Dvorak’s face onto an image of Ben Franklin because I think this guy…. let me see here.  This to me…

John:  110.  It looks just like me. 

Leo:  It’s the same person.

John:  Yes, it’s 110.  You’re right. 

Leo:  110 cartridge. 

John:  Yeah, 110.  That little bitty one.

Ron:  Yeah, I remember.  I used to have one of those.

Leo:  So I think, I propose and I think we should ratify this right here.  We’ve got a bunch of Scott’s people - they count. 

Ron:  International audience.

Leo:  Do you guys do the time change?  Can’t we just abolish this?  Yes, right? 

John:  This has been an argument forever.

Leo:  The Swede’s say yes.  They like to save time.

John:  No.

Aaron:  It’s never going to happen.  Should we, or can we?  Those are two different questions.  Should we?  Yes.

Leo:  You know we can?

Aaron:  We can’t.

Leo:  What?  I’m not saying eliminate time zones. 

John:  Let’s just have one time zone, period.  Why do we have all these different time zones anyway?

Ron:  It should be the East Coast - it should be New York.

Leo:  Okay, everybody.  Did you check and see if your calendar is messed up?

Ron:  I’m on Android.

Leo:  Oh, you’re on Android.  Of course you are.

Ron:  Everything works like it’s supposed to.

Leo:  Some people in the Chat Room say they are not having trouble.  And Pizza Box says; let’s get rid of seasons too he says!  Exactly, one season!  All year long.  Summer all  year long, and no we can’t fix that.  We can stop the madness of turning the clock.

John:  One time zone.

Leo:  No.  Let’s start….

Ron:  I’m very pro one time zone.

Leo:  Really? 

John:  What difference does it make?  It’s all made up.  It’s arbitrary.

Ron:  Time zones were created when the trains would arrive.  I looked this up.  It was in the 1800’s. 

Leo:  Wouldn’t that make it harder to figure out when the trains would arrive?

Ron:  No because the idea was that the trains were traveling across the country…

Aaron:  The station houses all across the country couldn’t figure out the train times.

Leo:  So, if we were on UTC it would be 7 minutes past midnight right now.

Ron:  I’ve got to go to bed. 

Leo:  No!  You go to bed at 4 AM.

Ron:  Exactly.

John:  So what is the big deal?  They think people can’t figure this out? 

Leo:  You know, remember the last time when they changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar?

John:  I remember that.

Leo:  People thought they had lost days of their lives.  They rebelled.  They said, “We are going to die a week sooner”?

Ron:  Yeah.  They literally lost a week.  They went from like March 7th to March 20th?

Leo:  Remember that?  Imagine If we got rid of time zones people would go crazy.

John:  The public isn’t that stupid.

Leo:  And another thing.  Why are we not on the Metric System? 

John:  Because it sucks.

Leo:  Okay.  John, you are not consistent at all.

John:  I’m very consistent.

Leo:  You are inconsistent.  We are going to take a break and find out what the secret is behind Apple’s success in their stores.  It’s not what you think it is.

John:  Huh.  I wonder what it is.  I’m going to stay tuned.

Leo:  Please stay tuned.  And then get Khloe Kardashian topless a little later on.  No we did that.

Aaron:  Again?

Ron:  We could do it again.  It’s okay. 

Leo:  Hey we had a good week this week on Twit.  Would you like a house ad, John?

John:  I love the house ads.

Leo:  Money well spent.   Elgan is here.  Mike, what is coming up in the week ahead?

Mike Elgan:  SXSW to begin Friday and continues through Tuesday in Austin, Texas.  A ginormous tech show, CeBit Global Conference runs Monday through Friday in Hanover, Germany.  Back to you, Leo.

Leo:  Why aren’t we in Hanover?  Isn’t CeBit like…

John:  He said ginormous.  Shouldn’t you dock his pay?

Leo:  It should not be allowed?  Ben Franklin would never have allowed it, ladies and gentleman.

John:  That’s right.  Hey send me a copy of that. 

Leo:  A new world record in Photoshop editing! 

Ron:  That was very fast. 

John: Yes.  Send me a copy.

Leo:  You know why?  Because he looks exactly….

John:  It’s just because it is my head on his body.

Aaron:  But even down to the side and the shading and everything?

Leo:  I’ve never noticed that before.  I’ve worked for you for years and I never noticed that before.

John:  It’s because I am Ben Franklin. 

Leo:  You are Ben Franklin!

John:  Send me a copy of that please.  I can use it.

Leo:  We will.  It’s your new Facebook Avitar. 

John:  I don’t use Facebook.

Leo:  Oh yeah.  We had this conversation.  I wish I could not use Facebook.

John:  You can.  Just stop using it. 

Leo:  You guys use Facebook Ron?

Ron:  By use it, I’m on it.  But I don’t go into it.

Leo:  You have it, though.

Aaron:  I have an account, but I don’t really use it.

Leo:  I go on there once in a while.

Aaron:  I auto post to it, but I don’t go on it.

Ron:  Some people like Facebook.  Some people do.

Leo:  Like Mom. 

John:  Old ladies. 

Aaron:  Like my Mom, I guess that’s true. 

Leo:  Our show today brought to you by audible.com.  Everybody loves books from audible.com.  If you missed Triangulation where Daniel Suarez on talking about his book Influx.  He’s the guy who wrote Daemon and Freedom (TM)?  And then Jeff Gurner, his reader, the guy who reads all his books on Audible joined him and the performance was amazing.  They were talking to Jeff and then he goes into the book and it’s like he comes alive.  It really was amazing.  Remember Carmine Gallo, John?

John:  You’re saying the word amazing too many times.  Astonishing, fantastic, there’s a lot of words you could use.  Carmine. 

Leo:  Carmine Gallo.

John:  On one show I called him Carmin. 

Leo:  That’s a color; Carmine is a girl.  He has been writing lots of books.  His newest book is Talk Like Ted.  Remember him from Money Machine on Tech TV.  The Nine Public Speaking Secrets of the Worlds Top Minds.  You can get that.  We’re going to have Michio Kaku, the great Physicist, the string theory fella, on Triangulation in a couple of weeks.  His new book is out, The Future of Mind; the scientific quest to understand and enhance the power of the mind.  That sounds good.  I’m intrigued by the mind.  Jeff Hawkins wrote a great book that I listened to on audible.com.  He is the founder of Palm, you may remember him.  But before he founded Palm he was a Neuroscientist.  His book on intelligence which came out a couple years ago was about how the brain works.  He’s actually started a new company called Newmenta.  He’s attempted to create chips that work in massively  parallel fashions as the brain does.  This was a great book.  I can highly recommend it.  The problem is picking two.  You’re going to get two books when you visit audible.com/twit2.  You’ll be choosing form 150,000 wonderful books.   Brand new suspense, thriller, murder mysteries.  Lots of science fiction.  But also classics.  There is The Silence of the Lambs.   Clive Cussler is on there.   These are new books from Randy Wayne, Clive Cussler, Shawn Maquire, Benjamin Black.  Classics, history.  I read a lot of non-fiction.  This is interesting; The Rise of Superman; decoding the science of ultimate human performance.  The man Without A Face.  Timely stuff.  The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, by Masha Gessen.  So pick a couple because you are going to get them for free.  You’ll be signing up for the platinum account.  That is two books a month.  This is really good, I just listened to this book.  Enders Game Alive.  It’s a dramatized audio play.  Orson Scott Card did the adaptation of this classic novel and it really comes alive.  I watched it right before I listened to it.  I often say watch because I feel like these audio books just come alive in my head.  I feel like I am watching them as they happen.  Go to audible.com/twit2.  You’ll be able to pick two books because your first month is free, your first two books are free.  Cancel in the first 30 days and you’ll pay nothing and those books are yours forever.  You’ll also get the daily edition of the New York Times, the audio edition of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, as part of your deal.  It is always a challenge though to limit…  I’m listening right now to a classic SciFi by Peter F. Hamilton.  Do you like him?

Aaron:  I love him.  I’m listening to Great North Road right now. 

Leo:  That was a little long and didn’t really go anywhere I think, but before he was really super famous he wrote a series, a trilogy I think, of Greg Mandel.

Aaron:  I listened to those too.  They were really good.

Leo:  I had never listened to those so I went back to the first one and read it.  It’s great.

Aaron:  Yeah.  Really good. 

Leo:  It’s about a guy who when he was in the military the government installed a gland in his head that gave him ESP and he can make it pump when he needs to.  It’s wild!  I love this stuff.  So that is a good choice too.  There are so many.  Great North Road.  Pandora Star.

Aaron:  Pandora Star was great.  That was where I started.

Leo:  That might be my favorite.  37 hours.  Wow.  You get that as one of your two books.

Aaron:  Also the James S.A. Corey.  I know that is a pseudo for…

Leo:  I don’t know his stuff.  James S.A. Corey? 

Aaron:  Start with Leviathan Wakes, that was the first one.

Leo:  Sci Fi?

Aaron:  Yeah, it’s Sci Fi.  It’s a team of authors that team up and I think they write one chapter each.  They go back and forth.  I don’t know how they tie this story together so well.  They must script it all out ahead of time.  But it is really good.

Leo:  Do you see the difference of style as you go through it?  I mean does it change?

Aaron:  You kind of do, but what they do is that each chapter is from a different characters perspective so it works for them.  If you haven’t read the James S.A. Corey, I forget what the authors names are, but if you haven’t checked it out I highly recommend it.  They have three out now in the series and they follow this guy that is kind of like the hero.

Leo:  Audible has a wish list which is really nice because you can add stuff to your wish list.  I recommend you do that.  As you see mine is rather long.  So that when you get a credit you can try it out.  I keep waiting for Salem’s Lot, it comes and goes.  I think there is a deal with the publisher and right now it’s not available but every once in a while it is.  That is a classic about the witches by Steven King.  Anyway, I highly recommend audible.com.  You try it today, two books free.  audible.com/twit2.  And choose a couple books from their 150,000.  They are absolutely free.

Aaron:  That’s how I got started.  I used the Twit code and got my two free books.  And now I’m absolutely hooked.  The only way I read.  Or listen. 

Leo:  Some people get mad at me when I say read, but it is reading.  I call it reading my books.

Aaron:  Yep.

Leo:  Android accounted for 97% of mobile malware in 2013.  This is F-Secure.  But only 1.1% of those were actually in the Google Play Stores.  Lesson?  Only download stuff from the Google Play Store.

Ron:  Verified sources.

Leo:  You can uncheck the box, or I guess you check that box, but don’t, or if you do just don’t download… it’s dumb to download random wallpaper apps from Russia.

Ron:  Right.

Leo:  That would be a bad idea. 

Ron:  Just because you can get an APK doesn’t mean you should install it. 

Leo:  Yeah.  If they are from Scotland that is okay.  There are no hackers or bad guys of any kind in Scotland.  It is completely safe.

John:  Is there a bagpipes app?

Leo:  Oh I’m sure there is.

Ron:  There is someone nodding from the audience.

Leo:  Do any of you play the bagpipes?  He’s got a recording with him!  You never know!

John:  I think it is some law. 

Leo:  They are all carrying cassettes!  So let’s stay away from the haggus wallpaper because that is disgusting. 

Ron:  Stereotyping again.

Leo:  How many of you have ever eaten haggus?  All of them.  See, it’s not a stereotype, it’s real.  How many of you have ever had flavored potato chips?  Those guys in the back, you’re from Canada aren’t you?  See?  I can identify people right away by what flavor of potato chips.

John:  I’m telling you stereotypes work.

Leo:  That’s why they are stereotypes.  Live is easier with a stereotype.  So, should we worry if we use… iPhone by the way, Blackberry Palm and Windows Phone all fewer than 1% of the malware infections.  97% of mobile malware on Android.

Aaron:  Because you can’t side load  on those platforms.  It is harder to side load.

Ron:  I think these numbers are a little deceiving because #1 you can’t side load on those platforms so they are completely closed and secondly the second largest group here is Symbian and if you look at the growth of Android versus the growth of Symbian, Android is booming while Symbian is dying so of course you’re going to see more malware on a growing platform. 

Leo:  The real issue is AOSP stuff right?  Because they don’t have the Play Store so that would explain why 42% of the infections are in Saudi Arabia, 33% in India, only 5% in the US.  It’s in areas where you’re getting the cheaper AOSP Android only and not Google Services handset.

Ron:  You’re getting an Android device that is running ASOP stuff that is open and they are the third party kind of app stores where people are downloading things willy nilly and especially internationally.  How many of them are jam packed with malware because those protections that Google or Amazon…

John:  So what is this malware doing?

Ron:  That is a good question.

Leo:  Well there are a lot of things it could do.  The most recent…

John:  A lot of things it could do, but what does it do?

Leo:  The most Malware would sign you up for paid SMS accounts.  So, these were on the Play Store and Google killed them immediately, but if you downloaded it… one of them was the Secrets of How to Lose Belly Fat.  And it would sign you up kind of surreptitiously for paid SMS service, and then send you a bunch of tips via text message and $50 later, you’ve been screwed.  The funny thing is these programs used…

John:  Who’s billing you for the 50 bucks?

Leo: You know, Tridindadi and Telco.

John: And Trinidadi and Telco is getting their money by sending you a bill in the mail?

Leo: No, no, no. Your phone company ends up…

John: The phone… Hold on a second.

Leo: Sprint.

John: You’re telling me the phone company is in cahoots with a specific criminal activity. The phone company and the criminal are working together.

Leo: No! Not in cahoots! No! There are legitimate paid SMS services.

John: This doesn’t sound like it’s legitimate. They tricked you! Why doesn’t the phone company.

Leo: Why do I feel like a phone company executive testifying. You’re Honor!

Ron: But that’s not the only one. There are other Malwares that allow… that hijack your number and send SMS’, if they’re from you, through a CNC server. There…

John: How do you get billed through this?

Ron: That’s a good question, I don’t know.

Leo: The phone company!

John: The phone company is in cahoots with what’s essentially a criminal.

Ron: Cahoots is not… it’s what it’s…

Leo: It’s the wrong word!

John: It’s a generous term! They’re the collector!

Ron: True, but…

John: They’re the collector. They’re not going to say “hey, you don’t have phone service anymore if they don’t pay this bill!”

Leo: Maybe they should not…well I bet you could call AT&T and say, “Hey, are you in cahoots? Because give me my money back.” And then AT&T would say, “you’re right. That was malware.”

John: That’s not what happens though!

Leo: Oh I bet it does!

John: Most of the time they say well we can’t do anything about it. International contracts, this is a treaty issue. There’s nothing we can do. We can’t stop this.

Leo: Maybe you’re right. I don’t know.

John: It’s a complete and total scam, and the phone companies are in on this and it’s a shame!

Leo: Damn it.

John: It’s true. And you can make fun of me and say, “Oh this is Dvorak” But this is a complete rip off, and the phone companies are behind it!

Leo: I agree.

Aaron: Well it should work the way it works on your Visa card, right? If you get scammed you can call them and say…

Leo: That’s an interesting point. Cell phone billing doesn’t work the same way, does it?

Aaron: Right, it doesn’t go through a visa, or standardized company.

Leo: Well you’ve got a point John. I never really thought about that.

John: I’ve bitched about this for years.

Leo: Yeah

John: This started with the Modems back in the day. When they used a great code that… when you had a modem… You’re probably too young to remember them.

Ron: No! I remember it!

John: And they went beep! Making all this racket, and then the way the code was, it turned off the sound of the modem, hung up, and then redialed some chat line in Romania.

Leo: So you’re going through Romania.

John: Which was a $100 a minute, and you have these thousand dollar bills and the phone company “We’re sorry, but it’s a treaty obligation. You have to pay!”

Leo: Wow.

Ron: I remember hearing about that, yeah.

Leo: I think you’re right. I don’t disagree with you actually on this one. Mark Pen, you may remember that name. He was a pollster for Hillary Clinton during her failed primary bid in 2008. Fired, in fact, halfway through the primary campaign, because of her poor showing. He then got a job doing ads for Microsoft. The scroogle ads are Mark Pens.

John: That name rings a bell.

Leo: Yeah. So are the honestly ads, which you might have seen more recently.

Ron: I just saw one of those.

Leo: Honestly! Windows isn’t so bad. Honestly!

John: That’s such a horrible campaign!

Ron: That is such a bad to take!

John: It’s awful!

Ron: Really it’s not that bad!

Aaron: It’s not that bad, honestly! It’s okay!

Ron: I just saw one of those on a bus in San Francisco, literally on the way up here.

Leo: They’re spending millions. You see them everywhere. If you go to Microsoft.com/windows/honestly, you can see all of them.

Ron: Here’s a problem I have with Microsoft, and I haven’t had a platform to complain about this. So I’m going to use this, if you’ll allow me.

Leo: Go ahead, my friend.

Ron: Every day, I walk through the many stations in San Francisco, and for months they were covered in surface ads, and now I’m sure we’re going to see these Honestly ads coming up. And I can’t imagine the cost to wrap the Subway cars, and all that sort of stuff that they’re doing. If Microsoft really wanted to get their products in the hands of people, why wouldn’t they take the advertising dollars and either apply it to the cost of the Surface and make it cheaper, or give it to schools for free? And don’t do any advertising. Why do they need to do these awareness campaigns that cost millions of dollars…

Leo: On the other hand, if Microsoft would like to spend millions of dollars in advertising on the TWiT network, I would be glad to start saying nice things about these crap ads.

John: (laughs) crap ads!

Ron: No but I’m serious, if they really want to penetrate in the markets that they want to, why wouldn’t they put this advertising money in making the device…

Leo: Advertising works, my friend!

Aaron: Only a few people would know about that kind of stuff.

Leo: Right. Here’s some of the…

Aaron: It’s marketing.

Ron: You mean to tell me, if they made the Surface a $49 device…

John: Oh yeah, I’d buy one!

Ron: …That would get covered.

Leo: They need to make money, they’re in business! Are you crazy?

Ron: But how much are they spending on it?

Leo: That’s nothing!

Aaron: They’re losing market shares.

John: Here’s some of the honestly memes. “Honestly, I don’t love change. Honestly, I couldn’t find a reason not to buy it!

Leo: Isn’t that a great ad for a windows computer?

John: Honestly, I needed a laptop and a tablet. Honestly, I wanted a phone that shoots Epic video. Yeah right!

Ron: I like the honestly I’m afraid of change. That’s the best one!

John: I don’t love change.

Ron: I don’t love change!

Leo: I really do like, Honestly, I couldn’t find a reason not to buy it. Instead of triple negative. I couldn’t find a reason…

John: Negative enough to confuse you! I couldn’t find a reason not to buy it.

Leo: Alright, so the guy behind these and scroogled ads is now a chief strategy officer of Microsoft. He’s been promoted to the executive suite. He’s going to do data driven strategy for the future of Microsoft. Mark Pen, congratulations. Honestly.

Aaron: Did you see the picture in the New York Times article too? It’s not his best side. Honestly, It’s not your best side Mark Pen.

Ron: Oh wow! That is not!

Leo: Ex Clinton aide is named Microsoft strategy officer. He’s angry about something. This is when he was working for HRC. I’m honestly very perturbed.

Ron: Honestly!

Leo: It looks like the guy who came down with Scroogle.

Ron: I’m the new strategy officer, honestly!

Leo: So it’s an interesting choice because he’s a research by training.

Ron: I’ll never work at Microsoft!

Leo: He’s a data guy as a research guy by training. And apparently…

John: They know how, they’re actually by trade sales men.

Leo: Really, because they’re basically selling crazy stuff.

John: Yes.

Leo: He’s going to take over as the company’s chief strategy officer. Which I think is kind of intriguing. But Mary Jo and Paul Strata who works at Windows, told me that really it’s about data. So they’re going to do a lot more measurement of people like Ron, and say like Ron, what do you think? Honestly what do you think of Surface, and stuff like that. And then, is this the right way to determine what you’re product should be basically by focus group?

John: No never.

Leo: It doesn’t seem to work.

John: In fact there’s a Harvard business that says its bull crap.

Leo: Yeah.

John: You’ve got to study people, but you don’t focus group them. Because they lie! The public is terrible if you want to get marketing data, you don’t ask anybody anything. You just kind of follow them around and spy on them.

Leo: So the budget, the big advertising budget now, is out of his hands. Chris Capasella has that. He’s a long time Microsoft executive. The guy who managed OEMs and retailers and so forth. So the, I don’t know if scroogle will continue.

Aaron: Let’s hope not.

Leo: It’s as terrible!

Aaron: What was the alternative? You’ve been bingled or something?

Leo: Would you rather be bingled or scroogled?

Ron: I don’t know!

John: Sounds like bingled is more exciting.

Leo: He did actually… Pen did the good, I thought a very good ad campaign. The Super bowl ad campaign, remember the guy who was disabled and using the Surface. And it showed how all the different ways people are using Surface. It was very inspiring, very soft, campaign.

Ron: Oh yes! That was like last year, wasn’t it?

Leo: No it was this year, on the Super bowl!

Ron: Oh this year. I kind of remember it.

Aaron: Unfortunately I just looked up bingled in the urban dictionary. It’s to be caught naked by surprise. Chloe Gardashy and you’ve just been bingled!

Leo: That’s a good word. I’m going to remember that. I’ve been bingled several times.

John: Yes, we know!

Aaron: You’ve been bingled. Even Jeff Travis used this in one of his posts the other day. That’s where I saw it.

Leo: He said, I’ve been bingled?

John: Jeff is wishing for the best.

Aaron: Microsoft, but I’m surprised he didn’t look that one up first before he…

Leo: Hey the urban dictionary is not the only arbiter.

Aaron: That’s right. That’s right.

Leo: We’re going to take a break and come back with some exciting news about Keurig the coffee maker. They’re going to do the same thing that inkjet does with their inkjet cartridges. Can you guess what that is? Stand by!

John: Use them for printing?

Leo: No! No! Our show today, brought to you by Carbonite online backup, if you’ve got to have data on your computer that you want to save, and as we get close to tax time, I know there is some financial records that you want to save. Maybe some pictures of your kids or your wedding. There’s stuff you don’t want to lose. You better have a good backup strategy, and I’m not talking about sticking a thumb drive in every few weeks, and copying your documents over. I’m talking about something that’s really going to protect your data in the case of the worst. A fire, a flood, a tsunami. You’ve got to get carbonite. It’s automatic, so you don’t have to remember to do it. It’s continuous, it’s always backing up when you’re online. When you change a file, it’s backed up immediately. And it’s off-site, that means it’s backed up to the carbonite cloud. Where it is safe! Now, it doesn’t have to be your only back up, in fact I would suggest it not be. But it is a great adjunct to whatever you’re using currently that gives you a piece of mind. Carbonite, all your computers are backed up. They also have server plans, external hard drives, small business plans. You can access your carbonite account anywhere. Just log in on any computer, there’s your stuff. You can download it, you can email it. Carbonite has backed up 300 billion files. They’ve restored, this is even a bigger number, an amazing number. They’ve restored 20 billion files. That means 20 billion files would be lost forever, if they hadn’t been backed up by carbonite. Very affordable, flat rate plans. You pay once a year, for unlimited about of data. It’s $59.99 a year for one computer. That’s a great deal. Start your free trial right now. You don’t need a credit card. It’s absolutely free. Carbonite.com. Use the offer code TWiT to get to bonus months when you decide to buy. You’ve got to back it up to get it back. Do it right! Do it right with Carbonite! Dish and Disney, do a deal! For streaming live TV, is this a big story? It seems like it is. Dish made an agreement with Disney to open the way so that dish can live stream ESPN and ABC over the internet to Smartphones, tablets, video game consoles, and others.

John: This makes no sense to me!

Aaron: Yeah, I don’t get it.

John: They have live streams. Anytime you go on one of the stations it’s on live stream!

Ron: How is it making it available to Dishes customer base?

John: Actually they have the Dish, they have some program where you can…

Leo:  A hopper.

John: No they have a program where you can run it on laptops, IPad, and Phones.

Leo: Yeah. I think the issue for cord cutters is we can get pretty much every bit of music and older TV content, but what about the live stuff? I want to watch football… That’s on CBS unfortunately but…

John: I don’t see why you can’t stream it.

Ron: As long as you’ve got the internet surface.

Aaron: It depends on what you’re watching.

Ron: I watch baseball through an old beat up TV. I watched the World cup through ESPN from ESPA

John: That’s streamed! That’s streamed.

Ron: Yeah, what isn’t being streamed that they’re getting from this?

John: Yeah, I don’t get it. Disney Land parades? I mean what’s going.

Ron: That I would pay for!

Leo: They did stream the Superb owl but you had to be approved… Oh I guess, did you or did you not have to prove that you were getting it normally? Did you have to log in to your…

Aaron: I didn’t try to log into the Super bowl this year.

Leo: I can’t remember.

Aaron: Last year you did. You had to be a Comcast subscriber.

Leo: That’s getting to be a nightmare. The Academy awards was only available in certain markets. It’s like they hadn’t planned for it, and it didn’t work even in those markets. I think that the key for cord cutting is going to be these big signature live events. You don’t want to watch later, if you don’t watch the academy awards, or the super bowl, you’re going to get spoilered immediately.

Ron: Spoilered.

Leo: Spoilered. I like that! My new word.

John: It’s the name of this…Spoilered!

Ron: Better than being Bingled. This is the chief commercial officer said that what dish is offering will target people ages 18-34 who live in apartment buildings, don’t have multiple TV sets and are looking at something that is a lower price, that is lower priced and doesn’t come with a traditional pay TV commitment. We already have that though!

Leo: Its 100 bucks a month for cable!

Ron: Yeah!

Leo: Maybe we do, maybe it’s not a big story.

John: So I missed the Persons of Interest, because I normally DVR everything, so I went on the internet to browser, went to CBS, they have all the shows, clicked on persons of interest, ran it through a NUC, into my projector.

Leo: You bought one of those NUCs?

John: I have a NUC.

Leo: Yeah, an Intell NUC. New unit.

John: Yeah, new unit. I got the hot one.

Leo: Computing. Is it like cool?

John: It’s very nice!

Leo: It’s like the size of an Apple TV. The size of a hockey puck right?

John: Very small. And it’s got several USB threes on it and so I…And it’s got an HDMI out, it goes right into the big screen. You hit full screen, boom, you’ve got HD TV streaming right over the internet. It’s fine!

Leo: But you’re very geeky!

Ron: I was about to make that point! This is for people who don’t know how to do that stuff. Like Dish network! That’s an established company, I trust them, and I will pay them to stream the content that I want, and I don’t need to have cable. Even though they’re probably paying Comcast for their internet anyway. It doesn’t make sense.

Aaron: It doesn’t make any sense. When I want to watch the Super bowl or something, and they tell you, “Oh if you’re not a Comcast subscriber you can’t watch.”

Leo: That drives me nuts!

Aaron: When it gets to that point, offer me… I’ll pay 99 cents or 2.99, or whatever!

Ron: Micropayments!

Leo: They don’t want to because they don’t want the cable companies to get mad!

Aaron: Well that doesn’t make any sense.

Leo: They need the cable companies today. They may not need them tomorrow, but they need them today! And they don’t want to piss them off. It’s worse than that, because HPO go for instance, on Apple TV you just sign onto your Comcast account. On a Roku, they say, “no we can’t do it on a roku.” You can do it on some devices, you can get the app, but Xfinity, and my Xfinity won’t let me use them to validate it. Which is frustrating. 60 minutes piece, this week talked about data brokers and ad trackers. We know all about that that. The people who are collecting your information and using it to target you. And interesting, they actually did a webpage on how to protect your privacy. Which contains absolutely no information, so…

John: Protects you right there!

Leo: It’s a Propublica piece though, which is kind of cool.

Aaron: Mm hmm. They always do a good job.

Leo: The open source model for investigative journalism. Which NUC do you have?

John: The high end one that they have on there.

Leo: This is a Haswell. This must be it. This is $379 on Newegg. It’s got a Haswell i5.

John: Yeah, that’s the one I’ve got.

Ron: That looks pretty cool.

Leo: Yeah!

John: And it’s got Wi-Fi in it. It’s got a silicon hard disk. It screams. It’s a little screamer!

Leo: home Theater PC, right? You wouldn’t use it as a desktop.

John: I used it as a desktop in an emergency when one of my machines crapped out. And it works fine. It’s a good desktop machine.

Leo: Windows 8?

John: 8.1

Leo: mm hmm.

John: When you use the add-on software, which is the…

Leo: Start menu, what is it called? Start 8.

Ron: Classic Shell.

John: Classic Shell.

Leo: That’s free. That one’s free.

John: That’s the one you want. And then you’ve got a beautiful system. The NUC is great. Get one!

Leo: Thank you John C Dvorak.

John: It’s like an emergency machine. It’s a cool little thing.

Ron: Run Lennox on it.

Leo: I got all excited when I saw that Getty images were going to use all of their images free to use until I found out the way that they’re doing it, which is completely ridiculous. I think Getty was influenced by some of these twitter accounts. What is it, the History in Pictures account? Which is a great account. You follow them and they have all these great old pictures, which they steal, basically, from Getty and other sites.

Ron: Yes!

Leo: So Getty realizing, well obviously, people want this stuff, how could we capitalize on the 100 years of images… the probably millions of images. So they now allow you to do it for free, but what you get is an embed link. So it doesn’t work on Twitter. All you can do is get a link or you can do an Iframe on your webpage. It’s kind of crappy frankly. Meanwhile, History in Pictures is going to continue just stealing.

Ron: That’s the nature of the internet isn’t it?

Leo: Nice try. You know the story of History in Pictures? I read the article in the Atlantic.

Ron: Its two kids, right?

Leo: Its two kids. Xavier is 17 and lives in Australia. Kyle is 19 and lives in Hawaii. They’ve never even met. They met virtually when they were on YouTube at 13 and 15. And they’ve created a company Swift Fox Labs. They have dozens of employees. 17 and 19 years old! They bring in about 50,000 Australian dollars a month! Creating these kind of twitter accounts. History in Pictures is hugely successful, almost a million followers. I think they actually crossed a million followers after this article.

Ron: How are they generating revenue then?

Leo: That’s what I’d like to know!

Ron: How are they bringing in 50,000 Australian dollars? Unless, I don’t know the conversion rate, that could be like 25 US. I don’t know. But it seems like a lot of money, how are they monetizing Tweets.

Leo: hmm. You’re asking a difficult question. I don’t know!

Ron: That’s a good question!

Leo: I don’t know!

John: Well I’m a subscriber!

Leo: Are you? Me too! I love it! I love seeing these images. And shouldn’t Getty just say, “Hey give us credit for the images. Thank you.” And it’s a great advertisement for the Getty live collection, right? They’re trying to sell this stuff.

John: So I’m looking for a Getty image that I saw about 10 years ago, and I’ve never been able to find it again.

Leo: Well go right now, and you might be able to get it!

Ron: You can embed it.

Leo: You might be able to embed it!

John: No! I’ve looked for it to even buy. To license it. You can’t find it!

Leo: Tell me about it. What is it?

John: Okay, maybe the chat room, or somebody out there can find this image for me.

Leo: Yeah.

John: It’s a New York image from about 1925 and it shows a street… it’s a street view from high above in one of the buildings, and it shows a corner of a building and the buildings that are visible in this image are plastered from top to bottom with crappy advertising and billboards. It’s the biggest mess you’ve ever seen. I have not been able to find that image since I saw it once!

Ron: Keep you up at night?

John: Yeah! Obviously! I want to get a copy of this thing. It’s a great image!

Leo: I’m going to get rid of videos. And I’m going to do editorial images. It’s probably not a stock image right?

John: No.

Leo: Let’s see. Editorial images, of New York City, in the 1920s.

John: You can’t find it, you’re wasting time.

Leo: You’re right. It’s wasting time. These are all in color!

John: No it’s a black and white picture! Obviously. The search engine sucks on Getty.

Leo: The search engine sucks!

John: Yeah! There you go!

Leo: Why am I getting a picture of Carolina Craiova.

John: Exactly!

Leo: Exactly. That’s not New York City! Alright well anyway, you’ve got to embed it.

John: email it at John@devorak.org.

Leo: Or chat room, just give it to us!

John: Well this guy’s got a bunch of them.

Leo: The guy in that chat room has already found it.

John: But now it’s already scrolled off!

Leo: How about this one, John! Yeah? Or no?

John: I don’t think that’s it. That’s a good one though, I wouldn’t mind having a copy of that one!

Leo: Okay, okay. Let’s find another one here. How about Femoral New York? No, no that’s not it.

John: No that’s not it. Not even close!

Leo: No that’s not it. That’s like Times Square, that’s what it looks like all the time. Very good though. Nice find Jeff Needles. Oh it’s Jeff! Jeff Needles, he’s the guy who works here but we don’t pay him. It’s a great deal.

John: It’s just like the guy in the office space movie.

Leo: Yeah, we give him a stapler and a room in the basement

John: I will burn the place down

Leo: Keurig, I brought it up

John: Let me guess, they are going to have a reusable cartridge.

Leo: DRM in their cartridges.

John: OH, DRM- wait a minute, you mean a stupid lousy coffee maker, are going to DRM their little cups.

Ron:  They have created a product that has taken off with people so naturally you have other people creating the coffee in the little cups and they want to not allow others to do that so they are going to lock down the platform.

Leo: No unlicensed pods ever.

John: Unbelievable, that is the story of the day

Aaron: It's like razor blades, it’s not the razor that generates the revenue but the blade.

Leo: What happened to my hair, did you just muss my hair up and I didn't even know it pat me on the head.

Ron: People go crazy for those Keurig.

John: I saw someone buying one the other day

Ron: It is because they are convenient, right?

Aaron: It is one stop

Ron:  I don't drink coffee so I can't relate to it, but it is like one cup of coffee and it is done? Like Dunkin Doughnuts now?

Leo:  It has 40% of the market in Canada, Kraft has the Tassimo system very similar,  Nestle does the Nespresso, Starbucks has one now the Verismo.

John:  How about getting a cappuccino machine, getting some real beans.

Leo: I think your right.

John: Make your own damn coffee.

Leo:  I bring it up a lot, I mention a lot, people go I got a Curig, and I go that's nice.  It's not great coffee.  But it has pods.

Ron: How about hot water and coffee grounds?

John: Its actually very expensive process.

Ron: Is it?

John: 50 cents apiece.

Leo: That's why they are copy protecting them.  That Huver board it is fake, you knew that though.  Who didn't know that, right?  The question is Why, why make this video?  This is the video that everybody was sharing earlier this week from HUVR.  H-U-V-R a huver board straight out of back to the future.  Here come the davorian.

Ron: That is the giveaway.

Leo: That it is fake?

Aaron: Yeah, that's a clue.

Leo: No that's not a clue, they are saying remember in back to the future, they had Huver boards.  He is totally playing up the voice over.

Ron: How could you think it is real, it is obviously fake.

Leo: Well they say it is real, it is impossible to lie on the internet, everybody know that.  The question is why did they do this?  There is Tony Hawk, they paid for Tony Hawks time.

John: He's not cheap.

Leo:  Is there going to be a movie?  There must be, there is something coming, right?  There is some reason, Back to the Future 5? 

John:  That could be? That's a possibility.

Aaron: The DVD release but they just did that a couple years ago.  It doesn't even look real.       

Leo: No

Ron: Did you see that?

Aaron:  Tony Hawk is a nice touch though.

Ron: They got big bucks in this.

Leo: Just like a terrorist organization they are claiming responsibility. Moby, HOLY COW!

John: These guys worked for free.

Leo: Terrell Owens!  He's not working much these days.

Aaron: Guess not! You can almost see the wire.

Leo: Only because you know.  School boy Q is a rap artist.  Are they roto-scoping out the … how are they getting rid of that?  What is there a rod a green screen rod?

John: There are a lot of ways they could do it.

Ron:  You can see on their belts, it looks like you can see the harnesses.

Leo: O their harnessed, I just saw the harness, that is no good.  But how do they do that?

John: Cinamatic magic.

Leo:  This makes great radio!  It is obviously a fake and I am told by our chat room, let me go get that link, funnyordie has it up.

Ron: That is funny, he is hilarious.

Leo: Now they are going to raise money for charity.  Stop it right here, there is something much more exciting on T.V. Any minute now.  Cosmos is back.

Ron: Neil Degrasse Tyson

Leo: Neil  Degrasse Tyson   is rebooting Cosmos with National Geographic channel. Fox will be airing it tonight. I think it is 9p.m. Local time.

John: With Seth Macfarlane he is the one producing it, you didn't know that?

Leo: That's great, is there going to be comedy?

John: Apparently not, but maybe? Check it out

Leo: 9p.m. Eastern on FOX.  He probably just put the money behind it.

Ron: Neil Degrasse Tyson is pretty funny by himself.

John: Their just having a great old time.

Leo: So I know everyone wants to do that and run along. So we are going to wrap this thing up.  Marvel adds sound to comics, what do you think of that Ron?

Ron: Gimmick. People have experimented with that in comics but I wasn't surprised to see this announced.

Leo:  You have to watch it on a tablet, right? It isn't a paper comic?
Ron: Yes, it’s on a tablet, it isn't a physical comics but Marvel has a lot of money with Disney so their ready to experiment these things. But it's got to be a good story.

Leo: Don't do it.

Aaron: I was kind of hoping it was DC, because I wanted to hear what the Bat Man KAPOW sounded like.  You hear it in your head, but what does it really sound like?

Ron: That actually have a Batman sound, I think you got it.

Aaron: KAPOW, is that how it sounds?

Leo: I actually watched 300 last night. That was brought to light.

Ron: The new one?

Leo: I am getting ready for the new one.

Ron: Prequal/ Sequal it is actually a little bit of both. That is going to be good.

John: Have you been watching True Detective?

Leo: Yeah that's the other thing tonight we are going to find out whether that is a crap show or a good one?

John: It's a great show.

Ron: Yeah it's fantastic.

Leo: I don't know, you might not feel the same way after tonight's episode, I am just saying.

Ron: I talked to my buddy at HBO.

Leo:  It was a dream, the jury is still out on this. It is a stupid old police procedure, that looked like it was something cool.

Ron: No, I asked my friend on HBO, is this going to pay off?  He said, “absolutely!”  He is biased as he is HBO but he said pays off.

Leo: That is the key, last couple of episodes kind of weak.

John:  I thought episode 8 was great.

Leo: I feel like it is turning into NCIS.

John: No, they aren't doing anything with microscopes. I don't think you seen the same episode.

Leo: We will have to see, tonight will be the night.  Ron it is great to have you, Ron Richards is a regular in all about android.

Ron: Every Tuesday at 5pm Pacific time.

Leo: If Leo gets out of the way.  Anything else you want to plug

Ron: Yes, check out image comics at imagecomics.com where we got some great digital comics available for sale.

Leo: Will there be any digital sound affects?

Ron: No sound effects, unfortunately.

Leo: Sound effects, free comics.

Ron: Yes, exactly. There is a great podcast, check out letstalkcomics.com with my buddy Jim he does a great chat, so check it out.

Leo: Same to you Aaron, always good to have you, usually he brings doughnuts but today he brought Macafe!

Aaron: McDonalds coffee and just for me. Netap.com is where I spend my days working hard on storage marketing stuff.  Of course after hours you can find me here on the TWIT network.  Floss weekly and all about android occasionally when Ron's busy they call me up and say hey Ron's not here can you come come in.

Ron: That happened last week, I was in Baltimore, you filled in for me.

Aaron: Yeah I was here last week.  A quick plug, if anyone is interested, we are starting a new makers space in Salono county, CA area. I mentioned this on a couple of the other shows.  In Venecia my home town, if you are interested in hackers space or makers space and you live in that area, Antioch, Pittsburg, Martinez, CA, come check us out.

Leo: Love this stuff, very cool.  John C. Dvorak noagendashow.com you can catch that Thursday's and Sunday's.  Become a knight of the old republic.

John: With no agenda round table.

Leo: No agenda round table.

John: Yes,

Leo: 1,000 bucks, just money

John: yes, just, well, people love it. We have 100's of knights.

Leo: When you go to Malta you get treated extra special.

John: Malted?

Leo: Malta.

John: Also dvorak.org/na for donors, dvorak.org/blog for bloggers and channeldavorak.com for whatever

Leo: Think it might be easier for you if you just had one sight?

John: No.

Leo:  Just checking.

John: It is like you just having one show.

Leo: You can't do it.

John: You could?

Leo: I can't do it, they are like salted peanuts, I have to keep launching shows.  We thank you all for being here.  Especially to our wijis, nice to have you in the studio live and all of you who joined us live over the internet. We do this show 3p.m. Pacific.

John:  I am jumping on a plane going down south by Southwest.

Leo: No, are you really?! No!

John: Yes, I'll be tweeting.

Leo: Are you going down to see Snood?

John: I am going to be tweeting my head off, on South by Southwest.  Check me out on Twitter.

Leo: Check me out on twitter, @therealDvorak.  By the way we should take a pool on how long Skype drops Edward Snowden? After which point?

John: My guess is right off, right away

Leo: Cut him off!  We do this show 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern, 2200 UTC.  If you want to join us life we love it.  In the chat room, You can do that photo shop thing, all sorts of stuff, help John find, here is another picture of time square with ads and retro what not. Let's see, O this is the one!  This is the one John, isn't it?

John: I think it is, yes that is the one.

Ron: Is that it? Nice.

Leo: Very nice job chat room, thank you.

John: Someone need to mail that to me,  john@dvorak.org send me that link.

Leo: john@dvorak.org Everybody send him an email.

John: Hey I don't get any spam, it isn't a problem. I am not one of those freaks who write out DOT, freaked out that some scrapers going to get your email address.  I have no problems.

Ron: That's because you are still running Windows XP.

John: ctyme.com

Leo: Andyger, I would guess he is Andy in Germany I would guess, who came up with that one.  Here is another one, boy there is a lot of these.

Ron: There is a lot of them! That's newer that is the 70's.

Leo: Yeah, look at that hat.

John:  The first one is the shot, it is killer.

Leo: Very nice. Put that in you speeches.  Thank you for joining us.  Another TWIT is in the can!