 And we're live on the new set. Again. Whoa. This is like the third set in the last two months? Month? Two months? Are you counting the between two ferns kind of sets? Yes. Yeah, definitely. So fourth? Okay, so we had the original set. Yeah. Then we had between two ferns. Temporary. We had between two ferns deluxe, but I don't think that necessarily counts because it was like between six ferns. And then we had like the we're in a corner and it's weird and then now we're here. It was like the tech linked sideshow. Yeah. Like tech dinked. Get out of here. Relegated to the corner. Now dedicated hex wall. Yeah. Red versus blue with an orange chair. This is the new set. The orange chair is a little clashing. The white and gray chair works pretty well. Maybe we'll try to swap that one out. Who knows? It'll probably never happen. Doesn't matter. This is the new set. The new Nau Wann Shet. Bizarre world. Yeah, it's weird. It's also very weird because we've had the Wann Show in the other corner of the office near where the workshop is for the longest time, not the entire time that we've been here because Wann Show was technically in some weird spare room for a little while and all this kind of stuff. But for many years, it's been in the same corner facing the exact same direction. And now we are almost as far away as possible from that point at the complete other side of the office. Should be quieter over here. It should be a lot quieter. And I think the sound absorption stuff in general should be a lot better. I wonder what the Twitch chat is saying. Let's do a straw poll, actually. I'm going to set up a straw poll. Straw poll dot me. I want to ask people whether it's thumbs up or thumbs down for this set versus the other set. Do you prefer the old area? Do you like the new area? New set. Better? Worse? Worse? Wait, third option? I-D-G-A-F. I don't care. F. Whoa. I don't care, Fatso. Hey. That's mean. I resent that. OK, what the heck? What just happened? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to refresh. What is that? There we go. All right. I want to see what Twitch chat has to say. There we go. I missed the old set. I expected that. I expected a lot of people were going to bring that up. We fear change. Yeah, a lot of people do fear change in general. What do you think, Ed? New set, old set. Which one? I'm working on throwing a light at you guys. Ed's trying to give us another light. I think it looks mostly OK. It's a little weird. Yeah. Yeah. Get out of there. You're blocking us. OK. Let's see. Way to go, Ed. It's like you work around cameras or something. Some people just aren't camera aware. You know? We got lots of sweet... Oh, wait. Are you still talking about straw poll? I am. OK. Here we go. We've got nothing. Never mind. We've made it. So a lot of people don't care. The majority of people, if they care, think it's worse. But that's not super surprising because, again, people fear change. We're going to ask you next week. We're going to ask you next week again. We're going to maybe keep this poll going. Also, the lighting is really not perfect yet. But we'll see how it goes. I'm interested in what people think. I think it should be darker. Oh, just mood lighting. Get some candles. Yeah. The flickering. Yeah, that's Phillips Hue tech candle. OK. But now, on to the actual show. What do we have? Lots of sweet topics. Tons of topics. We finally found out for sure what happened in the unfortunate Uber accident from March where that woman was killed. We also now know that Apple knew that the iPhone 6 would bend. They knew it was going to bend before it launched. Now we know that. That's sick. That is actually pretty interesting. Also, Nintendo bans all online access to Switch devices owned by hackers. This is on an account basis. We'll talk more about that later. And there has already been GDPR complaints made against Google and Facebook in the least surprising news ever. This is the deadline day for GDPR, so you should stop getting mass emails about it pretty soon here. God willing. I'm sure you probably received a lot. By the way, we're updating our privacy policy. I didn't even know I subscribed to you. Unsubscribe. I did a thing with the forum, which is it's going to annoy some people for sure. But instead of emailing everyone, I mean, so the next time you go log in, it's just like, hey, I saw that and it confused me at first. I was like, I typed the wrong thing in and I loaded again. I was like, I'm going to have to scroll down. See, my problem is I did the same thing. So I think a lot of people are going to be pretty confused. You got to scroll down and click the agree button. Sorry about that. Roll intro. A little confusing. Let's press the button. Let's go. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a beautiful lagoon. Hold on. Never leave. Hold on. How do I? I can't just. Okay. What's wrong? Will that do something? Yes. Yeah. That will give you swam, but yeah, I'm dead. Thanks Ed. I'm going to be off in the intro. Maybe that's why I left. Savage jerky Savage, just like Ed Moss backpack, the black pack. Yeah. And then a bloody game. A game in. Keep. And we're back. I'm happy that I fixed the fix the intro. I wonder if that's the only time that it's been broken and then came back to life eventually. A new intro for a new beginning. Speaking of. What is that doing? The reddening. He's messing with the light. Whatever. Keep it going. Speaking of not new beginnings, old, old, old happenings. What just happened? You may remember. What have you done? I don't know. Can I keep going? I fixed it. Yeah. So we're back in time to September 2014 when the iPhone 6 came out and. And unbox therapy was like biggest video of all time. Drop. OK. Yes. Yeah. So there was a bunch of viral content of videos and pictures of people were like, look at my night and I snooze shiny iPhone all bent to the shape of my legs. My hipster jeans are so tight. And then all the iPhone haters like me were like, and then you're like they've got an Android phone. They don't always design things good. It's a brick. It doesn't bend. And then Apple basically said like this isn't a design flaw. It's designed good. It's just there's like some bad apples out there. You know, we get a million of these things. Get it. But now information contained in internal Apple documents filed under seal in a class action lawsuit show that Apple knew that the iPhone 6 and 6 plus were susceptible to bending prior to the phone's launch. The company found in an internal investigation that the iPhone 6 is three point three repeating, of course, times more likely to bend than the iPhone 5S. And not surprisingly, the 6 plus is seven point two times more likely to bend than the iPhone 5S. That's kind of a weird statistic, because like the big one's more likely to bend than the small one. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say that makes sense. So then the phone launched and everyone found out they were bending and that was bad. And then in early 2016, many iPhone 6 and 6 plus devices started to exhibit symptoms of what's called touch disease. So you would get like a flickering gray bar at the top of your screen or your screen to be working only intermittently or not at all. And then it was determined by various third party repair people that that was happening because the integrated circuit responsible for transiting the touches to code was getting lifted off of the board because your phone got bent. So then the chip would get lifted off a little bit. So then people started complaining about that. And Apple didn't say anything. They didn't confirm that, but they quietly started to put what they call underfill underneath the chip so that future phones that got shipped would actually be stronger. But they didn't say that to the public. They did not publicly acknowledge touch disease until November 2016, even though it was May of that year that they started fixing all of the chips. And they only acknowledge it in November because there was like widespread news reports about the issue. And at that time, they said that they were going to start replacing touch disease phones for a mere one hundred and fifty dollars. And that had previously been a three hundred and fifty dollar charge. And in its public announcement, when they said they were going to do all this, they didn't actually say that they changed, that they started fixing them. Yeah, they didn't say that. Yeah. They just said they're going to replace the touch disease ones. Yeah. It's like I can't say I'm surprised, but it is really interesting news. It's probably going to hurt some at least some amount of the Apple fanboys. But the Apple fanboys and hasn't been doing very well over the last few years. Well, this is the thing. It's just another episode in a series of trust betrayals over the last while, whether that's iOS rollouts that had all these bugs or whether it's what else did they do? Saving schemes or. Well, the ten came out and while a lot of people do like it, there's a huge amount of issues with it. Taking away the headphone jack pissed a lot of people off, including loyal fans like like they I know this is coming from a PC fan and like an Android fan, but I feel like sentiment really isn't there lately. Like back when I used to work in a computer store, there was like you'd have the Mac people come in and they were really hardcore. And I worked with people that were there that were Mac fans and they were really hardcore. And it was kind of hard to debate because it came down to both sides were giving logical arguments. It just was that one side put more weight on one thing. Yeah. The other side put more weight on a different thing. Sure. So that made it something like different things. It was fine. It was an interesting battle. Now it's kind of getting a little worse because the stuff that they used to trash on like like PC stuff or Android stuff for is starting to happen on their side as well. And then I think that Google's closing the gap now that we have a flagship device that kind of represents Android being the Google Pixel, then it's kind of easier. Although Apple's still ahead in that. And this we're talking about phones here. Let's acknowledge as a Windows user, Windows sucks, I'm like this close to switching to Mac. What what what version of Windows do you run? I don't think I have the spring creators update on my 10. Oh yeah. That might that might be why I shouldn't have to use like 2004 software. I know to get a good experience. I'm just saying like like 2018 stuff should be the best stuff. If you can make it work without being a pirate, you can get the embedded systems Windows 10 version. It's far better. Or I would recommend the same situation embedded systems, but you don't have to be a pirate to get it. Windows 8.1. It's just a lot better. Yeah, it's one of my favorite things is when you're like, hey, I want to disable Windows update and they're like, or no. It's like what? That's not how a computer is supposed to work. Anyways, I think we're probably good for that topic. No, there's more interesting things about it. So in a court filing in the class action case, Apple's lawyers wrote that its rigorous and comprehensive reliability test data proved that enclosure bending and twisting cannot cause the the touch disease issue unless the phone had already been repeatedly dropped on a hard surface. And I think that's so interesting because what what it says to me is like, look, we made a design choice, but that choice, like sure, it might cause bending, but it's that choice is not going to brick your phone and cause this touch disease unless you already screwed up by dropping it a bunch. It harkens back to I believe it was the iPhone for circa 2010 where you're holding it wrong. Well, I don't know, it was they couldn't get good quality because there was a band of aluminum around the outside. So calls were dropping and their official response was making phones is hard. We're really good at it, but no one could make a phone that's perfect. So we're still the best. It's just phones are hard. So what they what they're doing and they need to do this is they need to continue to promote this and propagate this this like fiction that we all buy into where Apple has superior engineering. As soon as that myth erodes, then what do they have? Yeah. So I think this is very on brand for the lawyers to have this this statement that stance. Yeah, that makes sense. We're moving on to a hard topic now. It's something that's difficult to approach in general. And people have talked about it, people have mentioned it in in Twitch chat already asking why it wasn't like the first topic. It wasn't the first topic because I just didn't necessarily think we would lead with this. I want to bring something slightly more upbeat to the table. We have had this man on the WAN show in the past. He's one of our guests quite a long time ago when we used to bring a lot more guests on. But John Total Biscuit Bane has passed away. He has succumbed to a four year battle with cancer. He's just 33 years old. In the notes, but I'm going to go off notes is talking about how he contributed a lot to gaming as a whole. He was really big into the Starcraft 2 scene. His his YouTube channel was pretty massive in terms of reviews. If you're in the PC gaming community, you probably know of him. You've probably seen one of his game reviews, especially indie games, especially indie games. That was very cool because I really liked indie games for a long time. Very few people in the audience might remember this, but I used to have any game reviews from PAX. They got like no views compared to the rest of our content. So I stopped. But still, his wife, Jenna, is still around and has stated that she's going to continue the Co-Optional podcast as well as her own YouTube channel. So if you want more of that flavor of content, be sure to tune in. And unless you have something to say, I don't think I'm going to keep going. If you want, check him out. The YouTube channel is still there. His Twitter is still there. You can still watch all his old reviews of indie games if you want to check different things out. And if you did that, if you consume that content today, you'd still be supporting those who survived him, like his wife, Jenna, for example. Check out her YouTube channel. Keep watching Co-Optional podcasts. Do all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So rest in peace, John. Rest in peace, John. And moving on because I don't want to. No possible segue. Literally not. There's no possible segue now. No. So here's a story that we reported on when it first broke in March. The accident that happened in Arizona with a self-driving Uber that, again, this is actually also kind of dark. It was the first pedestrian death in a self-driving car case. So there's been a report published by the National Transportation Safety Board. It has all the details of what happened, what parts of the car's systems failed, the human error, the software, all of it. We know now, finally. So there's really a play by play in the report, which you'll be able to click through. It's source number three if you get access to the WAN doc. Or if you go to the article that Luke has on the screen, you'll be able to click through as well from the first paragraph. The WAN doc will be available on the forum after the show, by the way. And this was posted on the forum, by the way, by Sparta Man 64. Thank you. So for those of you who don't know, there was a self-driving Uber cruising down a, I believe it's there's two lanes. It's at night. There's two left turning lanes and then there's a bike lane on the right. And basically it's nighttime and a woman crosses the street, not at a crosswalk, which is pretty much irrelevant, walking her bicycle. And the car strikes the woman and she eventually died because of her injuries. There's also dash cam footage that was released that shows what the car is heading towards and also inside of the car and the view inside of the car. You can see an Uber employee who's supposed to be responsible for taking over in tricky circumstances who appears to be looking down possibly at a smartphone and no one knew if this person was being negligent or what. But now we have more details. So this is just crazy. So apparently what happened was shortly after the story broke, we learned that there was a statement from the producers of the LIDAR systems that they believe that they had checked and that their systems had performed properly. And the report confirms that. So what happened was as the vehicle approached, I believe her name was Elaine, at first the vehicle detected just an object. This is at six seconds away from collision. Then as it gets closer, it's decided, okay, that's a vehicle. And then finally that's a bicycle. But here's the problem. Hold on. At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision. According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the car is under computer control. To reduce the potential for an erratic vehicle behavior. So the car sees that, oh, this is going to be crazy. It's going to need some tricky steering for us to avoid this. I'm not allowed to do that. The driver has to do that. So I should probably notify the driver. There are no alerts set up. The system is not designed to alert the operator. Wait, it gets worse. So then you're thinking, okay, but if there's someone in the driver's seat who's... I was just going to say, this is still a problem because the car shouldn't have to alert the driver. They should be paying attention. Well, it still should alert the driver because you could be... Yes, but it shouldn't have to. It shouldn't have to. It should, like, okay, no, it should have to, sorry. But the problem should have still been solved. Right. So presumably the person sitting in the driver's seat, they're thinking, oh, this looks weird. I should take over. Yeah. But you would still like to see... You might be thinking, is this a situation where the car is going to do it or not? It'd be nice if the car was like, bang, bang, bang. And then you're like, yeah, okay, I'm going to take over. But it gets worse because the driver is actually responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review. That's what she's looking at. She's looking down, not at her phone. I mean, this is as per her statement, she did have a personal and a business phone in the car, but she claims she was actually just looking at the interface that she is supposed to be looking at. So now you've got a situation where Uber is paying drivers to sit in the car and look at it and not look at the road, basically. And then the car is not going to go ding, ding, ding, look up. And then it plows into a pedestrian causing that person's death. Like you should have seen that coming. That is silly design. That is like negligent. That's a bad system. Presumably when the engineers are working on this system, they would be... You would pay most attention to this kind of case. This isn't like an edge case. This is the critical what could happen case. Your takeover driver is constantly not looking at the road. That's not... That can't work that way. You could even like... You said something along the lines of like, oh, they have to make note of different events and stuff like that. I feel like you could just have a log where you have some form of like controller that's on the steering wheel while you're like, this type of event just happened. This type of event just happened. Just keep constantly keep notes and then fill it out later. You have cameras and stuff. At the very least it needs to go ding, ding, ding. Stop looking down. Just crazy. So now after that accident happened, Uber suspended its self-driving testing in lots of different places. A HUD would work. Yeah, someone just said a HUD would work. Yeah, you could have something on the freaking... Yeah. I feel like the driver should definitely be able to be looking up. The fact that they have to look down is really stupid. There's got to be some... Whether it's a simplified controller or it's one of those like dial things that are super-popular in cars so that they can at least still be looking up and just have it post up onto the windshield. Sorry, continue. Just the upshot is that Uber has now pulled its self-driving program out of Arizona, laying off 300 people. And as far as I could tell, I think that all of its self-driving operations now are happening out of its advanced technology center in Pittsburgh, like its own compound or campus and no longer in test cities. Okay. So, that's going to hurt? Yeah, probably. I think one of the biggest things that's going to hold back automated driving and automated almost anything is companies being careless with it and having stupid things like this happen. And I hope that the companies that aren't being careless with it, and this isn't me Elon Musk-drupping, there's definitely more than one, keep pushing forward, I guess. Well, almost every high profile company has had some kind of story about this, whether that's Tesla or Waymo. And there's been a bunch with Tesla too. It's a fine line though, because they're all trying to push to be first to market. There's going to be a huge first mover advantage. And there's something to consider that is like there will always be some amount of failure rate and it's comparing that failure rate versus the failure rate of human drivers. And as long as we're beating that, then good. But like, it needs to, every single time that it does happen, because it's an automated system, we can go in and look at what happened. With a human driver, it's much harder. Yeah. It's much, much, much harder. And you rarely have a camera looking in the vehicle at the driver's, you can't tell anyone. You can actually diagnose these problems. And yes, ideally. Solve them. Reiteration should be improved. Or yes, yes, exactly. So not necessarily even solve it, but like make it less likely to happen at the very least. And that's on a system level. Yeah. Like if you get into an accident, you may never repeat that mistake again, but that doesn't affect how I drive. It doesn't improve humanity. Yeah. Right. But it's kind of like cars versus airplanes. People feel unsafe on airplanes, even though they're much safer. But it's about control. You don't control the plane. That's fair. A lot of the time though, like, okay. So I've always found it, you brought up the cars versus airplanes thing. I've always found it interesting that everyone's like, oh, have a safe flight, have a safe flight. Everyone seems so concerned. I'll try. But then like, if you jump in like a taxi or they send you away in an Uber or something, like, all right, get out of here. Like people say drive safe. Yeah, that's true. People do say drive safe. I just think it's like the like have a safe flight thing is like a like a guaranteed. Yeah. I don't know. And what are you going to do about it? Yeah. What is it? I'll put my seatbelt on. I will listen to that demonstration. Do you? I'll put that mask on before I put it on my kid. That's the extent of safe flight that I can guarantee you. Where's where's your flotation device? Oh, underneath my seat. Usually. Nice. Sometimes it is the seat cushion itself. I like when they have that little straw and they go the little what they pretend to blow in it. Oh yeah. If it doesn't inflate itself, you can manually inflate your your thing. Have you ever flown with Air France? No. They have a video. It's the in the preflight check thing plays as a video and the video is like the people demonstrating our five Victoria's secrets models and they're all being really cute and funny and it's very effective at getting your attention. That's actually pretty funny. That's a that's a I mean if it makes if it makes more people watch like you know maybe it's not a bad thing. Who knows? It's so it's the same. It's a French thing you've seen. Of course they did that. Yeah. So speaking of course they did that. I'm going to talk about Floatplane for a second. It's a wonderful platform. You should check it out. I heard that if you if when you go to watch Floatplane if you pop some popcorn and like dim the lights a little bit and stuff that it will increase the viewership experience. So I would I would recommend doing that. The Linus Tech Tips channel on here has been going ham. So if you want to check it out you've got Linus Tech Tips Tech Quickie and Tech Linked all publishing all under the same freaking channel which I don't think was in the agreement when we first started this. So but if you want to check them out there is tons of videos. Also there's Bitwit Ultra who's uploading fantastic stuff and Tech Deals who uploaded by far the longest video that we've had on Floatplane which was like that stress. Did it stress the system. It stressed me a little bit but everything was OK. Everything worked fine. It was great. We didn't even didn't even let didn't let us know it was coming which was actually cool. Oh yeah. Because I heard through another person like oh wow there's this super long video on the platform and I was like it worked. You don't say. That's cool. Exactly. Exactly attacks like again about control. It's in the past but you still have to experience that. I'm happy that Transcode didn't work at all. But yeah anyways Floatplane is great. Three bucks per creator so far because everyone has decided to have the same price. You can check it out Floatplane.com. You can watch videos. They look great. They sound great. The comment section is much less cancer than it is on YouTube. Things are good. So yeah check out Floatplane. And now for the rest of the sponsor stuff we've got Bloody Gaming. Can you say your thing. Bligh game and there you go. See I think that's actually pretty good. I'm like pretty bad though. That's like the worst person in England who sounds like that. I can't do accents at all. And it really is really good. Riley's really good. That would make sense. I could see him being really good. There we go. Here's my notes. Today we're talking about the Bloody Gaming B975 keyboard which isn't this one despite this being a bloody keyboard. I don't have it here today but wait no this is the B945. There we go. Which has the I can't even show you because under my laptop. Wait yeah I can. The numpad is on the other side. So like this is where WASD is and then this is the numpad. I think that's way better for gaming. It depends on. So it's actually kind of interesting especially if you don't use the numpad that often for like transactional data stuff. But you might want it for macros. It's an interesting idea because you wouldn't normally have your hand on that side of the keyboard. But if you're doing like accounting and stuff you would much more often be full keyboard. When you're gaming you're very often just one hand so having macros. Yeah you just have all those that much more real estate for your macros. And then you've also got this added benefit of having your mouse closer more ergonomic less shoulder strain. So yeah shoulder strain is a big deal. It's like you're using a poker or like a 60 percent keyboard but you're not. A lot of people will go with 10 keyless keyboards and then get a separate 10 key so they can put it on the other side of their mouse so that they can be squared up shoulder down to mouse everything's OK and then go over for numpad. But this is really easy to. Yeah just a different idea. But we're talking about the 9 7 5 which is standard full size for those that don't want to switch form factors like me. Double shot ABS keycaps less gamer front text kind of stuff and much more clean look. It includes a wrist rest with two colors black and red and still has a 25 percent off deal with promo code tech tips. Check it out on Amazon or in the links below if you are on YouTube. Then next up we have the Moss backpack black back the black. Oh it is literally called the black pack. Yeah I wasn't. I thought you just were repeatedly making the same joke. You can't trust anything I say. That was fantastic. I joke too often. I was like it is it is black. Yes it is in fact not on the inside. Yes OK. This is one of my favorite thing about this backpack is that is bright orange on the inside. I've had this with a couple bags. It's it's way more important than you might realize at the beginning because you can find anything immediately. There's a power cable in the bottom. It's right there. You can see it so easily. It's actually great. I love backpacks that have bright orange insides because almost nothing else is ever bright orange. So if you need to find anything it's super easy. It's also reflective. So you notice how it like glows a little bit. Just it helps. I don't know. I don't know. I like it a lot. Don't worry about it. I'm into backpacks. It's a thing. So you have the ability to plug your backpack in. Where's the external access bit. I know it has it because I watched their video but I don't know. Here it is. So in the side of the backpack you can pull out a power cable. There it is. This can plug directly into the wall through a side access port so you don't have to completely open your bag. You just open where the power cable is. Then on the inside of the bag. So you can charge your laptop or whatever else. Doesn't it come with. I thought I saw in their video that it came with a battery bank or something. I don't want to say it does if it doesn't. Is it in the notes? You know what it does have is a there's a waterproof pocket. There's a pocket over here just for your water bottle. So you put your water in there and it's completely sealed off. Everything's safe. And if your bag's too full you can pull that out and just have the water hanging on the outside. That's cool. I like that. So the power cable is a standard power plug for like your laptop or something. And then two USB ports which is actually pretty sweet. I like that a lot because then you can charge your laptop and you can charge your mobile devices. It has a pass through right here into the front. So if you have your phone lodged up in the front or something then that will work. But yeah you can charge your you can charge a battery battery bank. You charge your phone and your laptop all by plugging your backpack into the wall without needing to take anything out of it. That's super cool. If you have a commuter or something like that you just want to come home and plug the bag in. You don't want to take all your stuff out. That's fantastic. They call that a Reach C power adapter. Pretty cool. It's a 60 watt USB type C port for a MacBook or other type C device. That is sweet. But yeah great backpack. Feel free to check it out. Also last sponsor is Savage Jerky. Sauvage. Savage Jerky. They've been on the show a million times. You guys kind of know what it's about but I'm going to go over it anyways. Jerky is made with the best ingredients without nitrates or preservatives. Their goal is to create a snack that's full of flavor and just it isn't supposed to be bad for you either. That's cool. People seem to like to scratch a bacon. Apparently that's quite popular. I like pretty much everything they have. Every one of these bags is open because they always get eaten. They do. You find the box and then steal them. My favorite personal one is Moho but again I like literally all of their flavors so that works for me. You can use offer code LTT to save 10% off their products which is cool. And they also have one of them. I'm not sure where it is. Ivan keeps eating it so it could be gone. But one of theirs is made with the hottest peppers in the world. The Carolina Reaper. They have a Reaper Jerky. Oh yes that's pretty dang hot. It'll probably kick your butt. So if you're into that feel free to check it out. And we're back. Oh we're going back. What are you going to do now? Oh let's talk about Alexa. Oops sorry I said it. Amazon Echo. Oh no. So there is a family in I believe Oregon, Portland. And they were hanging out and suddenly a phone call came in to the husband and it was one of his employees who lives in I believe Seattle. Many many miles away. And the guy was like quick unplug all your ALEXA devices. You're getting hacked. And what had happened was for whatever reason the Echo started recording at a time that the inhabitants of the house did not know it was recording and recorded a big conversation they had. Then it proceeded to send the audio files to a random person in their contact list. And so this guy called and the husband's like what are you talking about? You're just joking. Like yeah right. Haha good one. And the guy's like no you were talking about your hardwood floors. Like I heard it and they're like oh god. And so then they contacted Amazon and Amazon put an engineer to investigate right away and eventually a statement came out. First the engineer said like there will be a fix. It kind of made it seem he didn't just brush it off as user errors like we're going to fix something. But then the statement comes out and it's kind of it's not user error. But the system acted kind of as intended. So here's what the where the heck are we here? Here's the events what happened. Echo woke up due to a word in a background conversation sounding like the hot word. Then the subsequent conversation was heard as send message request at which point the echo said out loud to whom. Now if the volume was turned down and they were far away then they wouldn't have heard that right. At which point the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer's contact list. So they kept having this conversation and the echo was just kind of picking out where it's like I think it said send message. I think it said Craig. And then and then it carried out that that request. And so as unlikely as a string of events like that is Amazon is evaluating the options to make the case even less likely. At the same time like you have you have a smart home device. How often have you had it spring up and do something weird lately seems like more than before. Quite a bit quite a bit. So I've got my my Google Home Mini. I've went into the settings and turned on the settings so that when you hail it it goes biding which is off by default. Normally it just would light up and I had people across the house. They'd be trying to hail it and maybe they're not very experienced with it and they wouldn't know whether or not it had heard them. So I put on the feedback device. But that's also super helpful too because if I'm watching a movie and the movie says something like no you go and that sounds like yeah hey then I'll hear it and I can just say never mind and it'll it'll turn off again. But I guess what's happening here is the way that these that this that machine learning works basically with this kind of thing is there's a probability that when I hear something it'll say OK that's a that's a point eight out of one. Let's say there's an 80 percent chance that they just said what I think they said and then there's a decision threshold. So the engineers will say anything greater than a point seven five is good. And so that counts as we're going to call that a positive. So you can shift that decision threshold based on the stakes of whatever you're talking about. So if you're talking about a spam email for example calling something's letting in spam when it's not spam that's not that high stakes because then you log into your email and you have a you have some spam in there you're like oh that's annoying. I'm just going to delete it. But calling it an email that is not spam spam is can be catastrophic because then you don't get back to the client or you miss an important appointment or whatever. So what they need to do to fix this I think is they're probably going to have to adjust the decision threshold so that they get less false or fewer false positives. But then the flip side of that is you're going to be like to be more frustrated. Hey hey and it's not going to hear you when there's music playing or something like that. So they just need to dance around that. Yeah it's it's that's an extremely delicate and difficult thing to do especially because there's going to be so many different environments that it's going to be used in. There's going to be so many different accents vocal levels. Some people are quiet. Some people are loud like it's they're probably going to have to personalize it on a per user basis just have it learn each one learn its own owner. Yeah that'd be cool. Well I mean I know that the Google one does that already for my voice. They have a voice matter. So it's like when I say call mom it calls my mom or plays good music to me is different than good music to my wife who just listens to dead most and that's it. Strobes a good song. She learned that on the piano. We got a piano. She only learned that song. It was like it was not easy. So it took her like months. That's all she played and then she figured it out and then she never played piano again. I was like you need to you would learn the song faster if you just learned easy songs first. That's fantastic. Speaking of fantastic or not essential is up for sale like the phone company. It's a rumor. It's a rumor. They haven't officially announced it but it's come the story is coming from those in the know. Yeah I hate rumors so I'm not really that interested but apparently the next phone also rumor has been canceled also rumor. So I don't know. Do people care. A lot of people seem to care. I saw a lot of comments in the forum that were like I didn't buy it but I was interested in it and I was about to buy it or I was planning on buying the next iteration because I actually didn't really know much about the essential phone. I was looking at it today and I was like that thing's sick. Yeah it's sweet. So I actually kind of recommended it to a few different people or at least the idea of looking into it and comparing it for their own option. But I don't I don't know general public wise like how much people they didn't do a whole lot of advertising. They didn't have a little had a lot of fanfare maybe in tech circles but for the public not sure it looked pretty bold. I mean this was the first phone with a notch. It came out before the iPhone 10 and the notch is smaller. It's almost completely completely bezel. It's a nice looking. I care I care Samsung or Apple only or I don't care. Samsung or Apple only. What about like Google phones. That would be I don't care. Or I care. One of the two. The Samsung or Apple only option is like a weird way of me being like I'm not really that into phones. Oh OK. Because I see when people don't really know phones to that that much. They're like oh I don't know if I should buy an Apple or a Samsung because they just don't even like the Android category is seen as Samsung. You know what I get a lot especially when iPhone 10s were new. This would be sitting on the table. Is that an iPhone 10. No it's not. Oh what is that thing. It's an LG V30 interest lost an LG. I have a guy get roasted at the bar trying to wheel some lady and get wait what got roasted like she's like what kind of phone is that. It's like it's an LG. She's like what. What like iPhone or die. Like delete your Tinder you have an LG. Like I don't actually really want to have an LG but this is a sweet phone. Like they just have quality control issues that are really good. This is like my third one just incidentally and everyone's had like the same kind of problem like it doesn't detect my Sim or something like that. I really liked a G3 of LG G3. Yeah I really like that phone. So most people don't care. Fifty one percent of people say I don't care straight up. Eighteen eighteen percent of people say Samsung or Apple only. I expected there'd be a surprising percentage there and then 31 percent of people care. That's actually way more than I thought. Well that's that's cool. The thing with the central phone was that it was like the closest to stock Android you could get outside of a pixel. And that's awesome. Amazing. Yeah. And it was way cheaper. Eventually when it launched it was 700 bucks. I don't think it could have competed against other flagships in that price range. But when they were struggling and they dropped it to 500 or even less then it was like a hell of a deal. Maybe they should have opened up with that. But then they had 300 million dollars of investment. They spent 100 million of it developing the phone. So they just needed to sell these things. Yeah essential raised about 300 million dollars from several investors like you just mentioned. Tencent included. Yeah. Tencent the least surprising group on this list ever. One dot com and Redpoint Ventures as well. It was valued at 900 million to a billion dollars a year ago. So if it is indeed for sale today it'll probably be a lot less than that. I would also assume the same. Current discussions are focused on again this is rumors. Current discussions are focused on a sale of the entire company including its patent portfolio and hardware products like the original smartphone an upcoming smart home device and a camera attachment for the phone. Essentials engineering talent which includes those hired from Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc. Google would likely be a part of the deal which is probably quite valuable. Do you think the founder of Android who made this. What's his name Ruben? Andy Rubin would also be in that. I don't know. Or is he the one selling it and getting the heck out. Maybe. But there could be one of those like don't remember the name of it right now but it's those clauses where when the company gets bought you have to like stay on in order to get the good chunk of the money. Golden handcuffs. Yeah. People call that. Not necessarily. Golden handcuffs is a used term. That's not necessarily with mergers that's just like any employee. Like it takes four years for your shares to vest or whatever so you kind of need to stick around before you get the real money. Yeah golden handcuffs is used for a bunch of different stuff. Just when it has to do with like I am staying because of money. I'm not going to do that. Apple and Volkswagen are apparently going to be making driverless cars. It's interesting two names to be in the top. The Apple making a driverless car thing has been that was guessed by Linus like five years ago or something like that. It makes a lot of sense. Since they like design the holy grail of industrial design is cars so it's a pretty easy guess but it's been a roller coaster since they did announce that they were going to make a car that was going to disrupt Detroit and just kick all the butt. But then they scaled that back to being like well it's actually really hard to make a car so why don't we just we'll make the internal components and all the sensors and everything for the self driving and we'll partner with someone like BMW because Tim Cook loves BMW or with Mercedes and then those companies were like nope because Apple wanted to control all the data or some other aspect that those companies they bailed. So it's like they're and then they had negotiations with I believe Lexus. Now they're on their like their fourth choice Volkswagen's like yeah we'd love to work with you. And they're not even it's going to be like a standard Volkswagen. What is it? It's a particular model here. T6? Yeah T6 van. T6 transporter. The frame wheels and chassis of the T6 vans will remain but Apple is replacing many components such as the dashboard and the seats the computers and sensors and they're of course putting in a large electric car battery. Now this isn't going to be a consumer product. Oh no it's not like they're just they're making these vans and you're going to be able to buy one. This is a project for them to just start getting their feet wet with self driving. It's going to be a van that transports their own employees between various Apple campuses so they can it's kind of closed. That's an interesting like hey if you screw up your engineering project you'll kill all your friends. Oh yeah. Like wow. Yeah make sure you do it well guys. That's interesting. I was very surprised to read the like not going to be initially commercially available except for literally just themselves line but that's probably a fairly sensible way of going about that. Yeah apparently it's been quite a cluster. There's no indication right now if Volkswagen will be on for anything beyond the internal van experiment. And according to the article that we cited here from the New York Times there was a bunch of it. OK sorry someone in chat will they call it the bend wagon. I love it. I don't get it because the first time of the show. How nice. I like it. I think it's good. They would never call it that. That doesn't make sense. The joke doesn't make sense. I disagree. They would call that like impeccably designed engineered with purpose wagon. It's a feature not a bug. Wagon six. I wagon. But so the all the reporting came from ex employees and they basically said that the whole project was this brutal executives. Executives leading Apple's car project had told him cook that the shuttle would be completed by the end of 2018. But that deadline will almost certainly be missed according to one of these people. And they also said that the project reportedly lacks a clear plan beyond the Vans including any near term commercial goals. So it's hey there's a big wave we need to hop on but we don't really know what to do. Steve Jobs is dead. Help us. We're not making very good company decision. Johnny Ive just wants to design fashion. Speaking of company decisions. Best segue. Amazon bans users for too many returns. Boom. CNET article apparently you buy you keep. Yeah Amazon is banning customers who take advantage of its generous return policy and closing their accounts. According to the National Retail Federation 11 percent of sales are returned. That seems like a lot compared to my track record of returning things. And 11 percent of those are fraudulent which sounds super coincidental but whatever. They have 300 million customers. Customers are not being warned of bans but Amazon has reinstated the accounts of those that appeal convincingly. Yeah because some of us a lot of people are really mad because they get banned and they're like I returned six things in the last year which is depending on how much you buy it could be a lot or not. And then each one of those things had a good reason. You know it sucked it didn't the things in the box weren't what was expected or whatever. So but I don't blame Amazon for not giving some kind of threshold like you need to if you return more than X per year or if you return 15 percent of your stuff then you're going to get banned. It's obviously they're not going to give those numbers out because then people will just game it and just and ride right along and return as much stuff as they can while still getting away with it. So it makes sense that they that they would do that or like buy a bunch of really really low ticket things they don't care about and then screw it the return policy on the higher stuff. I don't know. But yeah it also makes sense that if you like first of all they need to clean out this kind of behavior because it's a lot of money with you're talking about that many returns that makes an impact. That's millions of dollars on the top line or bottom line or whatever line makes sense. I don't really know finance and it also makes sense to just ban everyone in one fell swoop and then just take on the appeals as they come in. And then a human can just directly deal with it and then reinstate your account if you're worthy of that. And something they can probably do and the wording of that made it sound like they're probably doing this is like if you appeal you'll probably get back in. Well I wrote that. OK. That wasn't even copy paste. Well all right then. But I bet you it's that way anyways. If you appeal you'll probably be fine. Yeah. Like yeah well I just didn't know all problems. They'll probably let you back in because most people if you ban someone and it was like OK no that's not true because of moderating on the forum people will do terrible things and then you ban them and they're like what. So yeah I don't know actually. I think it's going to be easy for them to keep banned the people they ban who are actually offenders of this in a big way. Like the people who are buying 800 things a year returning 700 things or something like that or or just like repeatedly buying a TV and returning it so they can have. Yeah or some kind of other discernible pattern like that. Yeah I feel like it'll have to be pretty blatant for them to like keep your ban after an appeal. Yeah I know that they do. They're pretty savage with some other things. I was talking to a friend who has an Amazon. He's like an Amazon seller for a business as his business and there's they're really strict about fake reviews right. But what they're doing was like they'll actually send you a product for you to review. So you bought you bought it from them. You can be a real seller a real buyer of the product and then you get the product and then you're supposed to give a five star review. And the way that they did this was that they give discounts to every all of those potential reviewers because you don't want to like sell an item full price Amazon takes a large part of that just to get this. That's like a high cost for a fake review. You want to get your fake review at the cheapest level possible. So then you just if it's a hundred dollar item you send it give 95 percent off so it's like five bucks and then Amazon just gets a dollar or whatever and then you get your fake review. So what Amazon did is they went through and they said any item that was sold at a discount was all those reviews are gone now. So you just lost like a 30 year reviews. But I don't know I think that's completely OK because the amount of like well unless you actually just had a discount code or something like that that was legit and all those people were like super happy. Yeah I tried it for the first time. I was great. I just came to Amazon dot com slash when or whatever and got my product and I loved it. And here's a five star review that's legit but it's gone now because they're throwing at the baby with the bathwater. Yeah OK that's fair. I just something that drove me insane was I was I'm not going to disclose who largely because I don't know if they actually ended up doing anything with this guy. I know the guy was there but I don't know what type of association there was. I don't know if they were actually doing any business etc etc. So I'm not going to say the company name but one year at CES I went to a company's hotel suite to film a video and there was a dude there and he was hanging out and I was waiting for my meeting so I was just like hey let's let's talk. We're both overtired. We're at CES let's chat about stuff. Just asked him what he did. He was one of the like business acquisition guys for a company that post fake fake reviews on Amazon. There's a whole giant company. There's a huge industry of like click farms. All people do all days like create accounts and then like pages. He was like essentially one of those guys. And I remember like I may have not been the nicest person. You are a dirt. You are a single unit. It kind of pissed me off. But like these are absolutely a thing. Oh yeah. They're running around CES with badges like this was this was yeah. This is a pretty big industry so I'm very happy that they're shutting it down. I think that in some countries it's like a large sector just like tourism is a big sector in some countries. Yeah. Click farms is like a big deal in individual particular countries. Yeah. I think scams are in some parts of Western Africa. It's like we're all we're all making money just scamming North America. Those phone numbers that call you and try to get your banking info. Hackerville Hackerville Hackerville is an interesting thing. Anyways the show is over. Oh boom. See ya later. See you never. Whatever guys. I'll see you next week. Bye. Can I see him? I don't know. Better just probably better just sign up for a float playing club and then get early access to whatever it is we're doing on float playing club. Yes. All right. Bye guys. We're filling. What are you saying? Oh. What? Who did I?