Amidst all the complexities that we encounter when we try to do budgeting and planning for elections, it's sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that what we're trying to do is quite simple. We're trying to figure out what we're going to do. We're trying to figure out what resources we're going to need to do it, what each of those resources will cost, and the grand total. That's what it's all about, and it's not that different from planning anything else, from planning your home budget, from planning child's wedding, all those sorts of activities are similar. You cannot prepare a budget unless you have a plan. You need to know what you are doing. You don't have to know exactly what you are doing, because often you can't. One of the mistakes that I've seen made from time to time in different places, and particularly when elections are being run in a country for the first time, or they're moving to free elections for the first time, is for people to say, we can't really start planning until we know every element of what the election will be like as prescribed in the law. People sit around waiting for the law to be passed, and then, and only then do they start doing planning. You lose a lot of time by waiting for everything else to drop into place before you start planning yourself. One of the most important opportunities you have is actually to start with what you know, to make plausible assumptions, sensible assumptions about the things you don't know, and then put together a plan based on all of that, which you can change at a later date as the details coming down from the political level become clearer. But if you don't start planning until every detail is delivered to you by the parliament, you are losing your greatest asset, which is time. So to start that planning early and being prepared to make assumptions, make guesses and proceed from them is a really important thing to do. Eventually you need to know exactly what you're going to do, but you don't always get there through a nice straight line process. You often have to deal with uncertainty in the early stages and hope for things to get better. Having said that, the better you understand what you're going to be able to do, the better your chance of making a persuasive case to the parliament, to the government, and ultimately to the community for the funding you need. We saw in the role play that we've just done how difficult that can be if there are points of detail that you can't really explain when the time comes and people start asking you hard questions. And it's really, I think, important also to be able to tie your explanations back to the benefit that is going to be given to the community by going down a particular route. So if you want to argue for, say, biometrics, you need to be very clear what's the reason you're trying to do that. How are the voters, the individual members of the community, the political parties, the candidates, going to be better off because you choose this particular option rather than some other way? And I've often seen what I thought were cases where ENBs went for technology without asking that question, but because they wanted to be seen to be cutting edge organisations or their governments wanted to be seen to be up with the newest technology and the like. But that's not an electoral explanation and it's not an electoral justification. So it's very important to be really clear in your mind what it is you're trying to achieve in the big picture sense. Then it becomes, if you get the principles right, the details become easy. But if you're not quite sure what's the principle that's driving you, why you're trying to get to this end state, then it's much harder to get the detail right and you wind up with contradictory arguments. The other thing that's really worth bearing in mind as a basic notion is that when you are an independent EMB and that's becoming a more common model around the world, your budget is one of the last opportunities that the politicians and the governments have still to use as a lever to influence how you do your work. As long as they have control over your money, they can influence you. And so the better you are able to justify your plans and your budget, the better you are able to perform your job in an independent way. But you can lose independence if effectively it winds up with the government controlling your money because you haven't been able to make a persuasive enough case for what you want to do. So those are some basic thoughts. And let me move on to talk a little bit about risk management now. There's a whole risk management industry out there. There are people who would come and do workshops for you on risk management if you give them the opportunity. We live in an imperfect world. Circumstances change, things go wrong. Even the most experienced people can't anticipate everything that's going to happen. The more experienced you are, the easier it is, but you can still be surprised. So it's always important in any plan to have a backup plan. If your biometrics don't work, what are you going to do? If your biometrics don't work at a polling station on election day, what are they supposed to do? You can turn risk management into something complicated, but it's really just thinking about a few key points. What might go wrong? How likely is it to go wrong? If something goes wrong like that, is it going to be a big problem or is it going to be a little problem? Is it going to be something that affects you nationwide or is it just going to be something at one out of 10,000 polling booths? What are you going to do when something goes wrong? What's your plan B? What extra resources might you need to solve the problems if they come along? And where are they going to come from? Now, I think we took away from the budgeting activity we did yesterday, it's good practice to have a contingency in your budget, maybe 10% that's sitting in there that you haven't allocated to anything else, so that if something does go badly wrong and money is the only solution, you have it already there. You don't have to lose more time by getting into a process of arguing for an extra allocation or trying to mobilise donor funding to solve your problem or something like that. And but even if you haven't made some sort of contingency fund set aside, in effect then your lowest priority activity becomes your contingency fund because you're going to have to cancel some activities you thought you were going to do to throw the money to solve the problem in something that's more urgent. So there are different ways of dealing with this. And of course, if you're going to do that, you have to find money that hasn't already been spent or committed, which is harder if you get closer to the election. So again, a contingency is always a good thing to have. And that really is what you need to think about about risk management. Be prepared for trouble and have a plan B. Just talking about classification of costs. That interesting discussion we had on the first day about ongoing costs and election costs and the like. There are so many different classifications that people have come up with over the years that it gets quite confusing. Almost every book that you will find that people have written about election management or election costs will have a slightly different classification. But I think it's important not to get hung up on definitions and arguing about definitions. There's no such thing as a right, correct classification or a wrong one. There are more or less useful ones. And what's useful to an EMB may be quite different to what's useful for an academic researcher trying to compare things in different countries and it may be different again to what's useful to the finance ministry or to the government. So it's important to go back to that set of questions which were on the slide we saw earlier in the workshop. What are we trying to do when we break down costs, when we classify them? Are we trying to find out why our elections are getting more expensive over time? Are we trying to figure out why elections at the federal level cost more than elections at the local level? It's usually the other way around actually. Are we trying to figure out why elections cost a different amount of money in different countries? And again, once you know why you're asking the question, that can tell you how you can most usefully classify your data. And so that's something to take away and think about in the context of all of your own countries and organisations about where these classifications come from and what use they are. So I think I've been trying to emphasise that at the bottom line what we are doing is relatively conceptually simple. Why does it get complicated? And basically the complexity comes from the fact that different countries, different donors, different EMBs all have different rules.  And they're usually applicable to every government organisation across the board, and you have to take them the way you find them, you can't necessarily change them into the way that suits you best. You may have only a limited degree of flexibility to set up your own processes, ideally for yourselves. Sometimes, for example, and this was true in Australia for a long time, we were required by the government budget process to break down expenditure into broad categories like staffing, like buildings, like travel, like training, information technology and so on. And we give them a figure for each of those for the year. And so people could look across government departments and see who's spending most on training and who's spending least on information technology and the like. Partly governments like that, because if they want to cut expenditure in this era of resource constraints, sometimes the easy way to do it is simply to say, well, every agency has to cut its travel by 10%. Or we're going to put staff ceilings on every agency and you can't increase your permanent staff by more than 2% this year. So they're not thinking about individual bodies. They want to be able to deal with the entire bureaucracy in the country as a single block and come up with a nice, simple way of saving money for the national budget. But in other situations, you may find that you are required to put your budget forward as a series of programs or projects. So from an EMB context, you may have a budget for voter education. You may have a budget for registration and a budget for election day and all those sorts of things. Which sometimes is good for governments too if they're trying to save money but they're prepared to look in more detail at what you're doing because they may well say, well, okay, we've decided we're not going to fund voter education this year. You're not going to get any money for that. So they're thinking about it in terms of an activity or a function rather than a generic category of spending. And the scheme that's most useful for the finance ministry may not be the one that's most useful for the EMB. So if you're an EMB, you may be trying to track your funds not just on looking sort of across the spreadsheet in terms of how much you're spending on travel but down the spreadsheet in terms of how you're looking at individual projects or activities or functions. And that makes it a little bit more complicated. The next point I think that has come out in our discussions and some of the things we've done is the way that the simplest model of budgeting that people often think about is not necessarily realistic. You'd like to think that the way it works as I said right at the beginning, the easy model, you think about what you want to do, you figure out what it's going to cost. You ask for the money, you get it and you spend it. But in the real world, it tends to be much more iterative. You may be told that there will be, there are resource constraints across the government but you don't know how much. So you might put together a bid to the government and they may come back and say we're only gonna give you 90% of that.  Do we cut our travel? Do we cut our training across the board or do we cut our whole activities? And then you might go back to the government and say this is what we're planning, we're not gonna do any voter education this year. And they say, oh, we didn't mean that. We still want voter education, go away and come up with another plan. And so you wind up like a game of ping pong with your budget kicking back and forth between yourself, sometimes at the ministerial level, sometimes at the official level, until finally you come up with some figure that's agreed and you're working with. And that's a pretty typical sort of model in my experience in quite a few situations and quite a few countries where you have to be prepared to not just have one meeting after which you'll get a decision, but go through a process that may take several months to put it all together. Sometimes they want you to budget from the bottom up as if you had no money at all and they ask you to justify every item in your budget. Other times they will say, we'll give you what you got last year plus 5% for inflation, minus 1% because we expect you to be more efficient through use of information technology and so on. There's your figure. If you can live with it well and good, if you want to do something big and new, you'll have to come up with a new policy proposal such as for biometrics. So there are a lot of different domestic models that can come along with that. Another thing that's worth bearing in mind is that sometimes if you're pretty sure that you're gonna get a 10% cut, you might come up with an original budget which is 110% of what you were hoping to get, knowing that when the cut comes, you will sort of cry tears of blood and then go away and smile outside the meeting because you actually got all the money you wanted. But sometimes finance ministries are onto that. So you've got to be a bit careful when you play that sort of game because if you overestimate too much, your reputation for financial credibility can be damaged and people might think they know what you're doing. Penultimate point I'd like to make is that we've been talking very much about budgeting as a process that goes on between the EMB and the government or the finance ministry. But in fact, there's gonna be an internal budgeting process within the EMB as well. And that may well mean that each individual area of the EMB, whether it's the voter education branch, the operations branch or whatever, will also be asked within the EMB to come up with bids for how much they think they're gonna need that year, which will then have to be tested against the external environment. And you often find a situation where you didn't get as much as you thought you were going to do. So you then go into a discussion about what you can manage with. And this is often the situation when you're talking about something like, how many polling stations can we afford to have? And if you haven't started with a benchmark figure of how many polling stations there are gonna be in the country, you ask every individual field office how many they want. Sometimes the total is more than you can possibly afford. And you then have a parallel sort of iterative process within the organization when you go back and say, sorry, the total that everyone bid for was far more than we're gonna get. So we're gonna have to make cuts go and do some more planning based on reducing the number of polling stations you're gonna have in your area by 10% or something like that. So within an EMB there's also gonna be budget discussions, budget negotiations going on. And again, the better people, better that people understand what they're trying to do and know their work, the more sensible those debates are going to be. And I think the last point I wanna make is we haven't really talked about this, but it really flows from what I just said, is that you need to have some sort of consistent system within the EMB for managing finances. And it's these days it's almost always computerized. If you go to 50 field offices and say to them, give us your budget for the year and every one of those field offices comes up with a differently structured budget without enough guidelines, you're never gonna be able to put it together into a single figure that you can then take to the government. So you typically will need to have a spreadsheet design that is consistent across the organization which asks people to estimate on a systematic way that's comparable across different field offices, for example, so that you can sensibly combine those figures into a national total. And very often this will take the form of a full-blooded financial management information system which isn't just used for estimating, but when the budget is passed, it will make its way down into the system again and can be used to control expenditure. And in those sorts of circumstances it's always worth bearing in mind that an election is a decentralized operation and therefore spending has to be decentralized even if it's only for things like paying polling officials, you will never be able to get polling officials paid on time if the chair of the electoral commission has to sign off on every payment. So inherent in the work we do is the need for having decentralized management of money that people out in the field offices can actually spend on the things that they need to spend on to get the election into place. And that means that once the organization has a budget allocated to it from the government, it is then gonna have to divide that up into internal buckets of money which the people right through the organization are delegated to spend. Once you delegate responsibility like that, you need to have tools that you give to the staff to be able to know how much money I'm entitled to spend, how much I've already spent and how much I've got left in this financial year. So sitting underneath all of what we've been talking about is this need for a quite effective mechanical system that will enable the funds that have come through to be managed efficiently and with control. If you don't have that, everyone will spend everything and you'll blow your budget by 200% and they'll take it out of next year. Okay, well I shall hand back to Yvonne. Thank you very much. Thank you.


The residential sector is currently one of the main contributors to the global energy balance. However, its energy demand is highly unpredictable and difficult to control due to the lack of flexibility in the power grid. To address this issue, demand management strategies are needed to optimize the energy resources of customers and their energy consumption patterns. Demand side management, DSM, is a proactive approach that seeks to make users more energy efficient over time. This paper reviews the existing literature on optimization methods for DSM of residential consumers, categorizing them into three axes, individual user optimization versus cooperative consumer optimization, deterministic optimization versus stochastic optimization, and day ahead optimization versus real time optimization. Based on these classifications, the paper provides a comprehensive overview of the key features of various approaches and techniques, and discusses potential future research directions. This article was authored by Antimo Barbato and Antonio Capone. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Growing up on DTNS, YouTube clamps down on some music monetization, Amazon's choice continues to confuse, and how our digital camera is going to survive the smartphone age. Hello, Friday. This is so good to want to be 19 from Studio Feline. I'm Caroline. It's ArtProv. Friday. I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are also lucky enough to be joined by Aunt Pruitt, new host at twit.tv. We didn't have that title for you last time you were on the show, Aunt. Welcome. I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Yeah. Things have changed just slightly, right? That's great though. It's great. Congratulations. And thanks for joining us on this Friday, because I know you got a big road trip to take pretty soon. Yeah. Just a little bit of a road trip. There's only about 2700 miles, I think. Oh, that's nothing. Yeah. You just drive. Just do a straight shot. You know? Don't even need to rest. Well, yeah. Nice pack show today. Len is going to be illustrating throughout the show. We'll check with him at the end of the show to see what he has drawn us. It's always fantastic, so I look forward to that. And also, before the show, if you aren't a patron yet, patreon.com.dtns is where you can go to get our extended show, Good Day Internet. We were talking about cigars and teacher behavior, and, you know, Roger was complaining about something. It was a good time. So, patreon.com.dtns for the wider conversation. But now, let's start with a few type things you should know. The Bluetooth SIG issued a security notice about key negotiation of Bluetooth, also known as a knob attack, which interferes with Bluetooth pairing procedures, shortens the connection's encryption key, and then allows easier brute force techniques to spy on data transfer between devices. Effective devices use Bluetooth, BR, EDR, that's also known as Bluetooth Classic. And knob only works if both connecting devices have the vulnerability. Apple and Microsoft have already rolled up patches, and the Bluetooth core specification now requires a minimum encryption key length. Research firm, Canales, his latest report shows wearables priced between $200 and $299, or $300 to $399, now represent 80% of all shipments, 60% of all shipments, rather. In Q2 of 2019, over 60% of the 4.7 million global Apple Watch shipments went to North America. The 32% bump over the 2018 quarter. And over in shipments, besides Apple Watch, Fitbit was in second place with 1.9 million shipments. Samsung, Garmin, and Fossil made up the rest of the top five, although none of them beat the others category, which shipped 1.3 million units, those are global units. On September 17th and 18th, the European Union's general court will hear challenges from Apple and Ireland in a three-year-old, 13 billion euro tax bill battle. In August of 2016, the European Commission ruled that Apple had on fair advantages and ordered Ireland to recoup that tax sum plus interest. The Irish government has said it profoundly disagrees with the EU's decision. Let's talk a little more about Apple and lawsuits, something that Apple knows quite well. So another Apple lawsuit news today, the company filed one against a mobile device virtualization company, Corellium, which describes itself as the first and only platform that offers not only iOS, but also Android and Linux virtualization on arm. In the southern district of Florida where the lawsuit was filed, Apple accused Corellium of copyright infringement for illegally replicating iOS as well as some iPhone and iPad apps. Apple argues that Corellium posed its virtualization product just as a research tool to help discover security vulnerabilities, but that, quote, Corellium has simply copied everything, the code, the graphical user interface, the icons, all of it in exacting detail. And it seems that Apple has a pretty solid argument here. Is Corellium something that you would never consider using? You ever do any development? If I were into development, I would because I see a place for something like this. But for Apple to say that they flat out copied it, no, I'm wondering, who's the source? How do they get this? Because you can emulate a lot of different things in code, but not necessarily lying for lying the way the original source code may be. So I think that's some pretty bold statements from the Apple council there. Yeah. Well, I mean, for Apple to have done this, they probably have significant evidence, at least to argue, listen, that Corellium has gone too far here. This is something that they would have had to get permission from. You can't just rip off something that we've put together without consulting us at all. Apple's the only company, at least at this point, that's accusing Corellium of this. But I could see other companies jumping on board potentially. I mean, it's Apple's also a huge company with a lot of legal weight behind it. Oh, yeah. Right. So yeah. I mean, it's interesting. And Roger and I were talking before the show that there are a lot of really great reasons that virtualization tools exist. You can test app development. You can look for security flaws. This doesn't necessarily mean that this is not a legitimate product. However, when you cross Apple, you tend to get into hot water pretty quickly. In many respects, Apple will probably win this case if they can prove that the company, Corellium did indeed, didn't even have to steal the whole thing. They just need to have been proved to lift some of it. I think the bigger question is, there is a market for tools like this. Would it be in Apple's interest to rather cooperate and just make a deal with Corellium instead of just trying to sue everything they think is? Because Apple has a tendency to look very poorly on companies that they don't directly control. Exactly. And so it might not be so much of like you're stealing money from us, but you're not in our orbit. So we don't like it. And you're profiting from one of our IPs. You've done it too well. Apple literally called Corellium's virtualization exacting detail almost a compliment. And if they did it from a clean room, you know what? They got some great coders and they could be hired out as OS developers. There you go. The next aqua hire on the table, is that what you're saying? No comment. That's the case. We will revisit it on a future DTNS. But speaking of copyright, another copyright story today, YouTube announced that copyright owners will no longer be able to monetize creator videos that include short, very short or unintentional uses of copyrighted music using YouTube's manual claiming tool. They'll now be able to choose either to try to prevent the other party from monetizing the video themselves or try to block the content. YouTube said in a blog post that aggressive manual claiming of short music clips, quote, can feel particularly unfair as they transfer all revenue from the creator to the claimant, regardless of the amount of music claimed. However, the majority of claims are currently created through YouTube's content ID match system. Anybody who uses YouTube is probably familiar with that, not the manual claiming tool. So this is a minority of folks who are going to be affected. But yeah, it does sound like this was a tool that was being exploited, perhaps unfairly. And I assume you know your way around YouTube. Is this something you've ever come across? I've been flagged a time or two, and it's usually in air. But I like this idea here because it's not necessarily allowing the other folks to capitalize on all of the creator's work. But this system, it's getting better. It's still not great, but it's nice to see that YouTube and Google are trying to, you know, make this a little bit better for the creator side, because that's what it's all about. It's about the creators. Yeah. If you, as an example, if I'm out and about in the world and I see Ant on the street and I decide to interview him and, you know, a car rolls by and the windows are down and there's a song being played and there's nothing I could have done about that. You know, that's, let's say that that video goes really viral and we get 10 million views for somebody saying, well, that song, that was my song playing in that car for two seconds that you heard. Now I want all of the money. That does seem potentially very unfair. So that content creator still, it's not that they have had all of the right strips. They have the right to say, okay, well, this isn't going to work. You know, I, I don't want Sarah to be making money off of that video or that video should be blocked entirely for whatever reason that they might come up with, but not just that my money now gets transferred to that other person. You know, I can see an argument if we're, say, at a concert or what have you, and you have all of these A-list people there and they want to give you an interview just for the heck of it, just because they're, everybody's having a good time and the music's playing in the background, I, I could see it there because that is an event with an artist that's, you know, they're paid from, from their work there. But now, just like if you say it out in public somewhere, just going down the street, you know, I think that's pretty asinine that those claims come in. In, in news over on the East Coast, a federal judge issued a 153 page ruling ordering Georgia officials to stop using the state's current electronic voting machines by the end of the year. That's after municipal elections that are being held in November. Currently, Georgia uses the Diabold AccuVote TSX touchscreen machine. If you're not familiar with it, security research found it to have numerous security vulnerabilities dating back to 2006. There isn't enough evidence, at least according to the researchers that Georgia ever updated the systems and Georgia has somewhat of a notorious past with, with security issues regarding elections and voting. Georgia hopes, it says, to have new ballot marking machines time in place for a presidential primary election, which is happening in March of 2020. However, if it can't meet that deadline and that is likely, the state will be required to use paper ballots. Going back to paper aunt. I mean, it's, it's one of the safer ways to do it, I suppose. It's works. Paper just works.  It just works. This stuff should, should have been handled a long time ago because this isn't the first time we've heard about these machines being vulnerable to attack. And there's been several demonstrations of just how quickly they can be attacked and overtaken. You would think the different jurisdictions around the country would have taken heed to that and said, you know what? We need to do something about this because we really don't want to screw up our democratic government any more than it already is. Yeah. The RS Technica article that, that kind of laid out many of the issues that the state has had over the last decade plus in detail is really great.  It has also has to do with the fact that data is being transferred from a computer at a government organization. And that computer might be compromised as well. And then there's some sort of a, a disk that, that, that's transferring malware from it to the voting. There are way too many points of failure where data can either be corrupted, altered or go missing as in the recent Georgia case where they wanted, they wanted the state to cough up the actual election data from, from the voting and it just happened to mysteriously disappear, quote unquote, accidentally erased. The problem is there's no, there's, there's no baseline standard of what's considered an acceptable electronic voting machine. Is it one that also spits out a paper ballot so you can go back and then audit the votes saying like, here's my receipt. This is how I voted. Does the electronic vote match what I, you know, on this paper, there's no, there's no way to kind of audit the entire system to ensure that there is an integrity to it. And, you know, no one has, no one says like, okay, this is, this is how they should all work. Everyone, every state, every state election board can decide what constitutes an acceptable, you know, acceptable system. One would think there'd be plenty of tax dollars to help fund stuff like this, just to get it right. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It would be. Those tax dollars always seem to go to other things. And, you know, and, you know, it's, it's, it's one of those things that I think it becomes more important as elections become decided by shorter or not smaller and smaller margins, where they go back and they do recounts to see, okay, candidate A1 over candidate B, and we have, you know, approved. Because if, if you remove the, the faith that the population has and the way the votes count and the way the votes are tallied, then you have a problem because then that's when democracy starts breaking down. Well, might be paper ballots for Georgia and March. We will see in just a few short months. Get on it, state. Let's see if you can do it. Amazon's recommended items label that it calls Amazon's choice has drawn many questions about how those products get awarded such a distinction. A pitch deck reviewed by Digidae, which it claims is real, details a 2017 bidding program for the Amazon's choice badge, essentially offering vendors the ability to bid for the badge by lowering their prices, maybe spending more money on advertising, making it attractive to Amazon and the vendor both. This would give the vendor better placement in search results, which as we all know is very important when Amazon is, is, is your marketplace. In response, Amazon tells Digidae the program was never offered, but didn't really elaborate. The source tells Digidae that the bidding program did actually run briefly in 2017, but Amazon then rolled it back and Amazon's choice badges are now driven by algorithms. The company does claim that it awards product listings that have high in stock and conversion rates, high customer ratings, competitive prices and prime shipping. The algorithm sounds like, okay, something that is, is, is created. It's an editor's choice that's created by an algorithm probably makes sense for Amazon because you've got a lot of products to deal with. And I don't know if you've ever bought something that was labeled Amazon's choice that didn't end up seeming like a very great product, but I have. Sadly, I have too. Yeah. So whether or not this program ran where, where companies could, could, could try to bid to be Amazon's choice vendors, which some people are kind of going to go, well, I mean, you bid. And if Amazon doesn't agree, it doesn't mean that you technically get it. But if we're talking like, hey, spend a little bit more money, get a little bit higher placement, then it seems a little bit like a pay-for-play type model. So. Exactly. Even assuming that this never happened, which Amazon says it did not. It does appear that that was something that, that might have been thrown around in a, in a conference room at some point. Do you think though that for a company like Amazon to be awarding labels based on an algorithm, which algorithms often work quite well, but not all the time, um, to the point where people like you and me are getting products sometimes where we're like, this is junk. Why is this happening? You know, is, is, is this the best way to go about it? I'm, I much rather trust the algorithm from Amazon versus this whole pay-for-play thing, um, because Amazon is not the only company potentially guilty of this. They're, uh, you can look up camera of the year, for example, and you'll find six or seven different models of, of camera of the year and sometimes from the same, uh, uh, company that's touting camera of the year. And it's all because of how many times they got their pockets filled up with, Hey, make mine the best, you know, and give me an algorithm. Amazon already does a really good job with algorithms for the most part anyway. Just keep it that way. Yeah. The high customer ratings is always the thing where I go, because I just, I'm so, I'm so hyper aware of how easily that can be gained on lots of platforms. Amazon is certainly one that has seen a lot of that. Um, I, I don't even bother to try to like decipher if I think a bot wrote the five star reviews that take up the top 20 reviews on any product I look at, because it's just so pervasive. But yeah, I agree with you that, that an algorithm, again, it's what, if you, if you're going to do something that's editor's choice, what other option would Amazon really have besides just not having that badge at all? Right. Right. In a press release announcing a new Disney and Charter Communications distribution deal for Hulu, ESPN plus and Disney plus, the two companies have agreed to work together on piracy mitigation, including implementing business rules and techniques to address such issues as unauthorized access and password sharing. Tantan. No details about how those measures would be implemented were mentioned. Our technical notes that Charter CEO Tom Rutledge has complained about account sharing before criticizing TV networks for not locking down content well enough and that password sharing leads to lower numbers of cable TV subscribers. All right. Well, none of us do things like this, but if we did hypothetically, uh, it sounds as though, uh, uh, you know, Disney's is worried, uh, Disney's worried that it has probably seen enough evidence that if I have a subscription and I share my password with you and then maybe I'm keeping you from giving the money that, that the company feels is rightfully there's a view having your own subscription. But how, how does it get enforced? That could be really, really hard to track down with when if people are savvy enough to think about that because you have VPN usage and people figure out ways to block MAC addresses and then you have people that are turning off location and things of that nature. The people that are already pirate in this stuff, they're pretty clever. So I think ESPN and Disney and all of those folks are just gearing themselves up for a game of whack-a-mole. And, you know, and it's weird because Netflix has the same issue, but they honestly don't really care because ultimately more eyeballs mean more eyeballs than that. At some point, those people eventually turn into customers. They do sign up for the cheapest package and some money is better than no money. The other thing is the simplest way is just, you know, to block it is to have a system where if someone's watching your Disney Plus, whatever Hulu Plus stream, you don't allow a second one, right? Someone signs in with Roger Chang and he's watching. No one else can sign in until I'm done watching. And it's not like they charge you on the amount you watch, right? You pay the 16 bucks. It's for the month. Didn't say you can only watch seven hours a day, 17 hours a day or 24 hours a day. So if I'm done and no one else is using it, why not let someone else watch? Yeah, if you've got a big enough household where you might have somebody watching something else in the other room, there might be concurrent streams that could be happening within the same IP address. It's limited to three. You won't have to worry about geographic, you know, hurting. Like, oh, you can only watch in the Bay Area or you can only watch, you know, in and around Denver or which is what YouTube TV does fairly well, because I've tested the system. Can't have a family member in Arizona. Whoops, but my mom and I actually ran into this, not with Charter. She has Direct TV that she uses for her TV service and she lives on the other side of California for me. And a couple of times when she visited, we just logged into her Direct TV account from my Apple TV app and we were like, great, this is awesome, you know, because I don't have cable. And the last couple of times we had all these issues and she finally got on the phone with them because we thought, I don't know, there's just some tech thing going on. Like we're not getting the username right or something's going on. Right. And they said, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. You have to be within your own Wi-Fi network. And she was like, well, then what's the use? You know, like I'm paying for this and it's a pretty penny. It's over a hundred bucks a month. And I can't travel and like watch TV in my iPad. And they were like, no. And obviously the company did that for this exact same reason that they're like, you we rather restrict your own account to make sure that you're not going to just share that password with Sarah when you're not visiting. Anyway, yeah, the piracy war wages on we will prevail. Now I'm just getting to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes. Subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. So and I'm really excited that you're on the show today because we're going to talk about digital cameras or perhaps the fall of digital cameras, which has been happening for a while. Digital camera market declined about 80 percent to 19 million unit sales in 2018 versus more than four hundred million dollars in smartphone sales sold globally in the same year. If you look at Japan specifically, which is historically had a very robust digital camera market, eight digital camera makers of eight digital camera makers, only Sony only Sony saw profit growth in the most recent annual period, and that was largely not from digital camera sales, but the sensors that Samsung has been making for smartphones that's helping it do quite well. Digital cam companies have had to evolve. And if you look at some of the others, Nikon now gets over half of its business from selling to other companies, not consumers. Fujifilm has has been playing around with somewhat novelty and kind of nostalgia at hybrid cameras. They've got one called the Instax mini Lee play hybrid camera. So it's digital images, but it also is kind of a Polaroid style print out image kind of thing. Taylor Swift did a limited release of a similar model last year and sold 10 million units, which is a big part of the entire global market of 2018. Fujifilm is now selling black and white film again after discontinuing it last year. And Canon still has, if you look at Japan again, over 60 percent of the share or just under 60 percent of the share of DSLRs, but again, putting a lot of R&D money into video, AK video cameras that are highly compatible with 5G networks, the future, the future beyond. So when you when you look at the digital camera market and and where these huge companies who are at the top of the game have have have begun to shift and have have have really been struggling to to to actually be profitable anymore in this market. Why do you see it going? I think it's a couple of things and it sort of reminds me of the iPhone and the troubles that they that they used to have far as getting more sales. People didn't need to buy them as often because they just worked. And now you're talking about a physical DSLR that's not as easy to carry around as a camera. They're going to look back at the camera that they have and say, you know what, this is just good enough. It's doing everything that I need. I don't necessarily need to update, upgrade or what have you. But there's still always that niche, you know, where Canon can eventually come around and make their mirrorless side of it a little more more fascinating for consumers other than professionals. And that could boost sales. They've tried it with this EOS RP, the big time professionals hate that camera, but that camera is not for them. And Canon gets that, you know, Canon's taken a lot of heat, but they understand that that camera is going to reach more for those folks carrying the smartphone around that says, man, I really wish I had a real camera with me today so I can take this shot. There are so many times that I've been approached on social media with people saying, you know, I should probably go buy a real camera instead of using my phone because every now and in regular Joe's, if you will, they just like to take nice standard shots outside or wherever they are. That's not all blurry from the smartphone. Yes, phone cameras are great. They are really, really good. But sometimes you can really capture that memory with a nice larger crop sensor and store it somewhere, get it printed without it having any type of pixelation or anything like that. It's I mean, it's it's a very interesting market because if you want to if you want to see what's happening, I'm going to pull up this chart of basically where the the graph of where the market is. It's the digital camera market is actually dropping back to where it was before digital cameras were were a thing. And a lot of that has to do with smartphone. Now, it's not just image quality. It's the fact that it's connected, right? I want to get that pick of me and Grandma at the Grand Canyon on Facebook. How am I going to do that from a DSLR?  Convenience factor on smartphones is tremendous as is the ability to quickly add whatever you want, you know, onto your social media networks. And that's kind of been the conundrum for a lot of these companies, you know, Canon, Nikon, Sony have all implemented some sort of feature to upload, if not directly, just faster getting those photos off. And there's a camera. And, you know, part of it is cameras have been engineered from from a very camera-centric point of view. I mean, a photographer point of view. In other words, it was designed for a very prosumer, enthusiast, professional mindset. A lot of people just want to take pictures by pressing a button, not worry about aperture, shutter speed, how well I'm holding the picture. They just want it done for them, which is why so many smartphone companies have been implementing some sort of post processing feature because although the sensors are smaller, you can do so much more with the smartphone and post processing after the fact. Where I see the market going is that there has to be some of these companies that fall out or switch over entirely to a different product, whether it's software only or if it's lenses or if it's some sort of hybrid. Canon, Sony and and Panasonic have been, you know, been pretty well known for implementing video, video camera features in their DSLRs and their camera lenses. And having a hybrid is great because then people kill two birds with one stone, they can take advantage of the same awesome lens set that they use for still photos and use it for video.  The other factor is a lot of creators are getting in on on that. They realize that shooting their weekly vlog or whatever on their smartphone handy, but doesn't look as great, especially with the field of credit as it is. And so a lot of their moving to video DSLR. Shannon does a lot of her work on her Sony Alpha video. Neuralist interchangeable lens.  So complicated for a category. But they really have to think out of the box, right? It's like when German automobile makers were having a really tough time trying to come up with an electric car and then here comes along Elon Musk and pumps one out first a roadster, then a then a performance sedan and the SUV because they have been coming from the engineers mindset. And so they they're kind of in a in a walled garden where they can't see outside of the box. And that's kind of where they need to be. And I don't see that. You know, I actually expect to see more bloodletting as a lot of these consumer markets that they used to rely on to make so much of their money is just diminishing because people it's like, you know what, you know, the old photographer adage is the best camera to have is the one that's on you all the time, which is it tends to be your smartphone. I still think that these manufacturers can play the long game and and do what Canon is doing with that EOS RP. I have it back there. I have a review unit and I'll say firsthand, it's not the best camera. It's not. But I could put my hat on as if I'm like my great uncle or someone that loves to take photos and replace that camera that he's currently using. I think he uses like an old rebel or something. He would love this camera. I mean, it would blow it would blow him away. It would give him a little more detail and would give him a few more features and specs and so forth. And he would keep that for years. You know, if they could marry the functionality of a smartphone that you just dock with a lens and a sensor, you leave all the intelligence, the phone, the phone can process it. The phone can send it to your parents. It can send it to Facebook, send it to Twitter for you. I think that would make a lot of sense because, you know, a lot of, you know, any photographer knows more than half of what you pay for cameras in the glass, the lenses, right? Lens. Lens and then, you know, the sensors get upgraded. It's great. You can ditch the body, get a new one. But, you know, if you can marry those two and they've tried with not so much great success because they've always ended kind of. Yeah. But I think that's that's the ultimate marriage is that he can marry that to a smartphone without feeling that they need to do all of it, right? We need to have this firmware we need at the sensor. We have the wireless we need all of it in the complete package and it's just an accessory like everything else. Yeah. I can tell you, I have a Canon EOS R, the grown up version of the RP and I've been using it for a while now and between this and my ADD, any time I go out to a sporting event for my kids or whatever else, everybody wants to take pictures with their phones. But as soon as the game is over, they're all coming to me asking if they can get a copy of my pictures. Looking at your genius is there. But the fidelity is still resides in these. And I think that's where the you're right. We went for a period where everybody wanted the digital camera because they were just great and you could do so much. But now it's getting to be where everybody has a an OK camera in their pocket. But when it comes down to the fidelity and just the features in the pictures you can get, especially action shots, the I think I really think the SLR that the SLR are are here to stay. They just may become more niche and that's fine with me as a camera enthusiast. I'm fine with that. There are some people that still want to print photographs to put on the wall in the homes. I'm a person who wants to do that. So nine times out of 10, they're going to look to me or look for for aim. Sure. What would you grab because I want to put this up as a memory in the in the game room or something, you know. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our sub Reddit. You can submit stories. Maybe they're about digital cameras. Maybe they're about something else and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. We will not make you use paper ballots. We're also on Facebook, Facebook.com, slash groups, slash daily tech news show. All right, let's check in with Len Peralta, who has been drawn up a storm this entire show. Len, what do you got for us today? Well, you know, I have just had this problem with digital cameras this week. I visited the Jim Henson exhibit and I wanted to take really great pictures, but I also wanted to share them immediately. And this is my take on the the the I don't want to say it's a death of the digital camera market, but let's just you did use a gravestone. I did gravestone and it's a it's a millennial in front of it posing as a selfie. Duck lips. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. She's done it all. And the bikini. Yeah. There you go. So so yes. So if you are interested in this image, this is available on my Patreon. Right now, if you're a Patreon subscriber, Patreon.com or at my online store, very cool. Thank you, Len. And by the way, the last person to speak on our wonderful digital camera discussion was Amos, who I didn't introduce at the beginning of the show, but I'm glad you jumped in Amos. Also, thanks to and Pruitt for being with us today and where can folks keep up with all of your fabulous work digital camera and otherwise? Check me out over on Instagram at Ant underscore Pruitt. Very cool. You know who gets the DTNS choice label? It's real. Yes, it's not chosen from an algorithm or anything. Our patrons, you can become a DTNS member and get ad free RSS feeds, extra content each week, bonus episodes of the show and a lot more. Sign up at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you've got feedback for us, we'd love to hear it. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll see everyone on Monday. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Keep it clean You too team keep it clean what's going on it's engraving here with another video and another episode of NFL questions from subscribers That's a series where you can ask me any NFL question You want to based off any NFL team if you want to be a part of that you can send me a DM on Instagram Twitter Snapchat or Facebook with your question if you don't have any one of those and you can send me an email a team Keep it clean at gmail.com Let's get into it first question came from my boy Stallone for King. He said do you think resigning hardball is for shadowing the team's off-season plans? For example like resigning Zeus Suggs smokey the bus No, I just think they just wanted to get that in place get their coaching. Um, get the coaching staff in place I don't think it really Gives I don't think it foreshadows who the team is gonna resign just because they signed hardball because Yeah, I just I don't I don't see that so no next question came from a boy Josh Hoffman. He said I Hope all is well now with hardball Roman and Lamar I've been optimistic that they'll develop Lamar and build the pieces around them that they need to for their passing game As well as the running game then I realized this is an old story with the Ravens I just blocked out the memories. It's their killies heel They'll draft them then put them on the bench in favor of free agents as you have rightly pointed out many times I feel like if this organization is going to do these things on offense It's really going to be up to Lamar. My only confidence is that I think Lamar has the attitude that he's just going to make it happen Unlike Flacco Jackson has that something in and where he just can ref he just can't he just can refuse to lose We just refuses to lose if things don't go well next year It'll be very interesting to see the argument on whether hardball Roman or Jackson should be the one to blame. I know I'm going to blame the coaches because this problem predates Lamar by 20 years Goes back to when he was two years old unless of course the problem is fumbling Not the strip sex, but the fumbling But I doubt it would be that if it's bad news It'll be the same old story with a passing game just isn't there because it's the Ravens What are your thoughts on if we finally figure this out with Lamar Jackson? That would be Crazy it would be wild it would be Amazing it would be It would be great, man. If the Ravens could actually right the wrong and Build up a consistent a dynamic a scary offense an offense that is Consistently putting up not only yards and not only pass from the not only rushing yards, but putting up points consistently because we Just haven't had that Just haven't had that fit in forever We just have not had that and if the Ravens and that that can make the Ravens that much scarier And but I just I want them to try to build an offensive powerhouse But I don't want them to neglect the defense either Now with building an offensive powerhouse that may take away some pieces from the defense It goes hand-in-hand. Oh, it's like you can't have both But we would just have to find the right pieces that can fit into the puzzle. It's not impossible with this coaching staff My hopes are it honestly not that high with him Just based off of like you said based off of history and we can all try to block it out But it's there It's there So we'll see what happens hoping for the best Not expecting the best but definitely hoping for it So we just got to wait and see how it goes next question came from a boy tenor out Well, he said should we be scared that Bobby Ingram's gonna screw up our great titan situation? I don't mean to be rude to him, but I'm scared um We just got a hope man we got a hope because uh he with the wide receiver position Obviously nothing much really happened from that, but at the same time when you think about it When you think about it, um Titan's kind of been the same as what will not as bad, but Titan has pretty much been the same as wide receiver Just think about what what dynamic Titans have we had and developed? We've had Todd heap He was a beast Shannon shot, but Shannon shot wasn't drafted by us. Um We've had we're going to remember remember for son to shanko Who used to play for the Vikings remember Owen Daniels remember Dallas Clark? Of course there was Dennis Pitta, but Dennis Pitta was injury prone, but that's no fault of the Ravens But he was injury prone, but that was the best Titan we had since Todd heap. There's been Ed Dixon Dead, I mean We haven't really had anything special at Titan either So it's been the same situation with the wide receivers But with I think with wide receivers it sticks out more, but it ain't been nothing special at Titan either so While Bobby Ingram hasn't had success with the wide receivers if he goes to those tight ends and it's the same old story then We shouldn't even be surprised Next question came from a boy Josh Hoffman He said I want to see the young guys not be benched for the free agents But like you, I'm worried that we don't know how to develop these wide receivers They've got to get the young guys to develop with Lamar Jackson And they can stay around hopefully for a long time letting them get their playing time is most definitely a necessary component But is it going to be sufficient? We know what a coaching is needed and do we have it Just to play devil's advocate one could argue that with Lamar needing to develop as a passer Now is exactly the time to lean on some veteran proven wide receivers. What do you think was there maybe a happy medium? That's a really good question because if Lamar if he's struggling as a passer if he's still not consistent then if he has a wide receivers out there that That may be young and that may not really know how to help their quarterback out as much as a veteran wide receiver Then they can struggle to so possibility or it's a possibility that you could have veteran wide receivers and Lamar be out there struggling and you still don't get any production out of them either I would still opt for the youth movement Because I feel like with the youth movement. Yeah, there's some risk involved There's risk involved when signing all these vets to and we've seen how that's worked out for forever now Ravens still they still haven't gotten over the hump and What I what I'm wanting the Ravens to do I Just really want them to get over that hump man the hump of not Developing your own talent at the wide receiver position because if Lamar does start becoming a consistent passer then Say he starts becoming a consistent passer, but you got these one two-year Reynolds at wide receiver He'll develop a rapport with them and not to say he came develop rapport with new guys each and every year Because of course every team gets new guys every year, but he could develop a rapport them and then boom they go Because you only had him for one or two years But if you get a young guy that you actually drafted and develop them they develop a rapport like again Goes back to Joe Flacco. Excuse me with Tori Smith. I Think Tori Smith was like one of the only receivers that the Ravens drafted that Got actually got playing time with Flacco, and they stuffed and they jailed like that Like that. They always had a connection every man from jump And it just got better and better and better and better and better So you could give that to Lamar give him somebody that he can actually grow with While he continues to grow what they continue to grow and they build that chemistry That's got to be the limit next question came from a boy Tina Rome He said what are some things that separate John Harbaugh from Bill Belichick? I think With Bill Belichick, I feel like he's always just ahead of the game by at least like five five steps With John Harbaugh sometimes he can be both ahead and behind the game. It just depends on it depends on the game Bill Belichick obviously the Super Bowl's that's a that separates him from everybody the success Also being in a weaker division too With Harbaugh He has made a Lot of bad coaching decision. I mean his his coaching Just the the consistency of it the end the endgame decisions. That's what I was looking for the endgame decisions It's a big factor that separates those two Bill Belichick is is far ahead of John Harbaugh in game decisions and of course, I mean he got a lot more experienced experience excuse me But I would think that would be it so my biggest thing that separates the two of them obviously the Super Bowls but the the endgame decisions and the the aggressiveness the Yeah, the aggressiveness So that would be it for me. Next question came from my boy blue tray one He said how do you feel about Tevin Coleman coming to the Ravens? I would like it, but I know he's gonna command big money Um, and again sometimes you you you get what you pay for but you also get what you invest in So while it'd be nice if he came to Ravens because he could be that home run hitter I would much rather us draft our own running back So you can get a young guy Freshest set of legs. He hasn't been in the NFL. Yeah, he's been running around in college and stuff But get a young guy who can be yours Uh, and you can just help him grow and he could end up being your premier running back Next question came from my boy Spuddy. He said if the Ravens were to get a receiver from a free agency Who would it be if not golden tape? Also keep up the good work appreciate that Spuddy Who would it be? I would think they would get somebody like Devin Funches. Um somebody who's not gonna Well, actually he might if the free agent wide receiver group is uh pretty bad this year um I think they will go after uh Devin Funches Uh taller guy and physical wide receiver not gonna command all the money in the world, but um You know, it just depends on how the uh the free agent wide receiver group is this year, though Um, but I would say that Devin Funches, um, if it's based off of the Ravens history Um, then it will be pa gar son because he's getting ready to be cut apparently from the uh 49ers um So I wanted us to get pa gar son, but way back when But before before he went to the redskins, I think when he was leaving the coast I wanted us to get him but that obviously never happened and when he was on the redskins He did this thing, but then he went to the 49ers and it's like you I mean you ain't never hear about the guy again. So Next question came from my boy shlough. He said I just watched one of your videos And I'm not sure if you've already answered this or not, but I have a question. What were your thoughts on our new prime? What were your thoughts on our new purple pans this season? Did you like the different combinations that we had with them? I'm curious just to see what other fans thought too. It seems like I was the only one that liked the gold pans This guy, man Um with the pan. I didn't even really notice that if we had new purple pans, man, um This season I just been focused on so many so many other things.  It wouldn't be a special anymore Next question came from a boy. Fubby He said before you get into the question I just want to shout out a manny and graven for all the great videos over the years Hey, hey, thank you. Thank you for watching and thank you for being a subscriber for so long too, man. Appreciate it Uh, he said now my question, uh, what what are the chances that eric wettel does not come back and we sign cj Mosey and terrell subs and put an extension on cedario smith's contract for like one or two years Also in gravy and keep in mind that maybe we get that cap space from flacco too I don't even think that's a maybe but I think that's a definite um that Yeah, flacco is going to give us that cap space for sure. So He said the chances that eric wettel does not come back. I think there's a very high chance of that um, and the chance that we sign cj mosey and terrell subs Cj mosey, I think is a it's a much higher chance than terrell subs um But he said Sign cj mosey and terrell subs and put an extension on cedario smith's contract one two years Cedarius ain't taking a one two-year contract He ain't taking a one two-year contract that dude is getting ready to get a four or five-year deal Uh, and he's getting ready to cash out. So I think there's absolutely no chance for that to happen with the cedario smith part But for the cj mosey, I think it's a big chance for for that But at the same time I I just don't think they're gonna uh I think he's gonna test the market man. I just I don't I don't think that um, his agent I don't think they're gonna come to a deal with the ravens I don't think they're gonna come to an agreement with the ravens because I think the ravens Uh, but from from what it sounded like it sounded like they they do want cj mosey back and I can understand why I can understand why they will let him go and I can understand why they will want him back But it sounds like they want him back But just at a certain price And I don't think they're gonna go crazy and go above and beyond that price Because I think they have it set And if him and his agent want to see if they can get more, I think the ravens are gonna be like, okay Cool. Do you think So all those things to happen Eric widow gone. Yeah, cj mosey signed back. Yeah, I see that terrell sus being signed back. Yeah But the dairy smith and now I the one two-year contract. No that That's not happening at all Next question also came from a boy fobby. He said, do you think we will go as aggressive in the draft As last year seeing that we have like eight picks all in different rounds We'll see We'll see. Um, this is really ag the constant chance to make his mark Well, he will make his mark. Um, because he's gonna be the one that's running the show now Um, so I mean we'll see because this is going to be This is all him now It's him, of course He has input from everybody else too, but this is him now. This is his chance His time to shine So hopefully I hope he is aggressive and I hope when if he sees a playmaker Somebody that's really good can contribute that he feels can contribute. I hope he goes for it, man So we'll see how it goes and he said your man's jaco. So shout out to jacob aka fobby, man Appreciate you. Next question came from my boy julian kuffy He said, do you think the Jacksonville Jaguars will give up uh, jail and randy for joe flacco straight up? No He said, or do you think a draft pick will be included in the deal as well? Probably neither because they their cap spaces like I think they they like and they got bad Their cap spaces in bag shape right now So they will have to do some cuts probably some restructures and just to be able to fit joe flacco under their via trade um, so I just As much as we and we've talked about that a lot here to jail and randy for joe flacco while we would love that I just I don't see it happening Keep it clean Make sure y'all subscribe to brave and biz man. We turn it up. Do you keep it clean? Hey brave and start playing with my boy