Yeah, thanks for the intro Like you said, I'm Jake. This is Josh Satellitability engineers at IBM and today we're going to talk about how we are managing our secrets via get-ups So I already got a good intro, but just a little bit more background I'm from Michigan a very small town in Michigan and I graduated from Central Michigan University with a computer science degree I started my career at IBM. I went to red app for a little bit and then I came back to IBM as an SRE Just a couple years ago Some things that I'm really into Like Argos CD like you mentioned cloud native terraform Operators and customer resources and stuff like that Yeah, and I'm Josh. Yeah, I've been here since 2018 May 2018 at IBM from NC State University I've been rallying with Carolina and I'm just happy to be here So So a little bit of background Just to talk about our journey into Kubernetes. So the team that we Are on we started out managing just Supporting just one development team that was that had this big monolith that was deployed to WebSphere I'm sorry about that And everything was being done manual, you know, we'd When the time was right we had these jars and we just manually deploy them to the server So and all that setup was done manually just by a small team of just a few But that monolith started to grow and started to get slow Performance started to suffer. So we decided let's look at you know, breaking this up into microservices and look for a platform It's a service. That's where we went into public cloud with Cloud Foundry And this worked really nice because we were able to break up the monolith But being a small team it did become a little cumbersome, especially as we got more Developers under our support. So it went from just, you know, one application with these microservices to two, three, four, five Applications and all their separate microservices. And so it was becoming hard to Orchestrate them, right? So that is where Kubernetes came into. We wanted to use Kubernetes to help simplify this process which Simplify and not simplify, but You know, it helped orchestrate these and these different applications and helped us, you know, to be a small team and manage multiple Developer teams, but with that, we did notice, you know, a lot more resources. There's a lot more managing with these clusters You know, a lot of these resources that were necessary to be there for these applications pull secrets Rbac all these different resources that we didn't really have to manage with Cloud Foundry These are now all under control and all being done manually. We were, you know, applying these things Manually into clusters. So we had an observation or observability problem where we weren't sure what was in what cluster You know, who who needed what Rbac? We even had problems or we deployed an open pull secret wasn't there and nothing was pulling in production. So a lot of these problems and so We tried to look how can we solve this problem? How could we have this observability? How could we be able to check these things into code and to get right? You know and get these things into our cluster in a stable and reliable way and so That leads us to get ops, right? And I can go deep into get ops. I know there's a lot of you know, there's get ops kind yesterday And there's a lot more going on with get ops Earlier and later, but just I just want to talk about the like the four main principles that were developed by the get ops working group Starting with the declarative state, right? This is This is where like something like Kubernetes is really great because right you have these manifests. They're declarative by nature You can check these into source code and it's telling you exactly what you want Kubernetes to do Which is really nice and it doesn't have to be Kubernetes I can be any sort of any sort of system that you are having this declarative state defined And then second the mutable desired state. This is Right, this is get right. This is the get part of it And again, it doesn't necessarily have to be get it can be some sort of other version control but you know having this You know these the history of the commits and being able to It's fine Right get sorry about that The third part this is the part that to me differentiates from something like infrastructure as code It's the reconciliation having something like a controller that is watching your get it's watching your cluster or your other system And it's it's constantly checking. Oh, is there something new and get do I need to put that in a cluster? Is there something new in the cluster that's not in get what do I do with those? And it's constantly checking and doing that that reconciliation. So that's Really big part of get off and then the last part is the Operations through declaration. This is like to me the something that really like resonates with me here It's it's that if you're doing something like In order to like be doing get ops, right? You're you're going through the principles of get ops to do get ops, right? It's you're not applying things directly into a cluster. You are always following these principles So that if someone is manually applying into a cluster get ops is able to with your Reconciliation is able to detect that say this is not supposed to be here and it can remove it if you like have some the correct policies in place And for me, that's pretty powerful so I went a little faster there, but so we have these clusters that we want to manage these resources via get ops We did some You know experimenting some searching trying to understand what a tool for us would work and for us Argo CD was that solution With this we chose Argo because you know, we did like the user interface aspect of it You know, it's really nice and clean baby being able to kind of see these things without having to maybe do a little bit of guesswork the We wanted to because we're a small team. We wanted to have one Argosy instance and many clusters. So being able to have a that multi-tenant Cluster aspect of Argosy was really nice the extensibility This one is key for this talk. So I will come back to that later But Argos CD allows you to be able to use different tooling You know within our city, which is nice CNCF incubating, you know, we that's something that when I was looking at doing this. I wanted to make sure as Trying to push toward that CNCF You know tooling so that was really important and also we were looking to move from something like a plain yaml to Helm to be able to template out our resources So that was also very important for us So, yeah, Jake are we gonna talk about secrets? Yeah, we're gonna talk about secrets just a little bit of background So the biggest question I always get when I talk about get ops is what do we do about secrets? That's a valid question right because we have right everything and get and I'm telling you to put everything you get but you know We've always been told not to put our secrets and get so You know, so we that's something we had to try and solve we wanted to do these resources We want to Argosy but how do we do secrets and Argosy doesn't necessarily have a native secret solution they kind of go with the mentality of You know However, you want to do it right there. There's different solutions. It's not our we're not opinionated opinionated about it So, you know, you can you can kind of do what makes sense for you So with that in mind, we had a certain set of requirements that we were going to need for this secret solution Yeah, obviously we talked about Argo, so we wanted to be able to work with Argo CD Our our secret manager solution was to use actually core vault Because that's you know what we had internally and Also, you know search products that we wanted to continue to work with that as well as IBM cloud was building a Secret manager solution based off vault. So we figured that was the way so we wanted to continue with fault We wanted to be we wanted this to be able to work with all resources So we had a couple of use cases internally that we were we were Putting things in the vault that would then be added into something like a config map or a custom resource in a lot of solutions That we were looking for looking at they were just about this secrets themselves So we just decided So we just decided let's just make it work for all resources We didn't want to have an operator to install this. We wanted to be very simple So the idea was we wanted to just have Like environment variables or a config file to be able to run this thing without having to do this big installation set of a cluster and Again, you know, we wanted to be able to use it with helm and other things So the idea was very simple we wanted to have YAML resource in a gate repository where the Value where the value would normally go we would template it out with this this kind of like placeholder syntax something that we had used on a legacy System so we wanted to continue using this because it would also allow us to use our already defined yamls We wanted then our go CD to be able to pull this do something Apply it in a cluster and then we get our value when it applies it so Very simple idea right yaml and get with a placeholder our go CD and then the cluster we get our You know secret and the way we were able to do this Talking about that our go CD extensibility was the custom tools Ability that our go CD has so our go CD right they have their native like Transformation tools like helm customized plain yamls, but they also allow you to define your own tool so This is really nice because you can basically just either you know run an it can in an it container with the our go CD repo server or You can just bake it into your repo server image And then you put it in a certain directory which our go CD will look into for these custom tools You then register it Looking the step two up in the top right or you just then you can register it with Exactly what you want this command to do So you can give it a name and you tell oh I want to run this command with these arguments and Then in the UI you'll see that you know your custom plug And then is part of the plug is dropped down because when you in the UI you'll have like the different native Options when you're creating an application, but they have a plug-in option where you can then select from your list of custom tools And so with all that being said that is You know Our requirements how we wanted it to work how we how we were able to get it work And with that we built the Argo CD vault plug-in mentioned in our intro And this is a plug-in that allows us to Take these yamls Run them through Argo CD reach out to different secret managers pull the values Replace the the placeholders and from the couple slide before and then apply them into the cluster We started off with just hashicorp vault and the IBM cloud secret manager again, which is based off the hashicorp vault Yeah, but then we realized there's much more secret managers You know that are not Hashicorp vault based so we wanted to do some of the other main ones So we then built in support for AWS secret manager and then GCP and Azure were actually added via the community Which is really nice So that's something that we didn't actually have to do so thank you community and with this with this tool some of the features is we We do versioning we have multiple different ways of defining Where you want to like where you want to tell Argo CD or I'm sorry We want to tell the plug-in to go look for the secrets So you can either add an annotation or you can build it right into the the placeholder itself We call inline path To tell you know to tell the plug-in where to go find these secrets it can be used with Helman customize and There's different authentication methods Josh Josh is going to show you I'm using the Kubernetes auth within a Hashicorp vault and how you can get that set up So just a high level to try and Kind of paint this full picture So and hopefully you can see this in the back But so in get we put our yaml with the annotation and our placeholder So the annotation is our path to vault and the placeholder is the The key right so involved you have your key value So that's the key from vault that you put in the placeholder. We have Argo CD, which is watching that repo and When it detects a new change right Argo CD does this thing it pulls it in We You specify that you want to use the Argo CD vault plug-in as the custom tool So it knows to run the binary that you've set up in your You know in the Argo CD custom tool plugins it then makes the call out to vault based on your path returns the values Does the replacement outputs yaml back to Argo CD and then Argo CD will apply it into your cluster So you know at a high level that's what that's what it does and Josh is going to show how to set that up and a couple different useful use cases that we found for our CV all plug It's logic. All right, so here we go doing the demo. Let's hope this works Okay, so Today I'm basically going to go through this and I'm going to show you how we can use the Argo CD ball plug-in I'll call I'll probably refer to it as ADP at some point shorter This repo is publicly available the link will be on the last slide. I'll show later It'll show everything here in good detail and there's read me is all over so you can follow along what we're talking about So to get started, let me zoom in here so we can see We need to get our go CD deployed with AVP installed, right? So Jake pretty much explained how that's done, but I'm going to show you in a little more detail What I'll show you is doing it with customize. I'm basically going to use a customized bundle Make a few changes that we have the repo server plug-in and then I'll have that I'll show you how you know that works out So if we go to my repo in this Argo CD overlays folder and we look at the customization yaml What you'll see is we're basically taking the upstream manifest from the Argo CD project at version 201 And we're making two important changes. We're changing the repo server deployment The repo server is where is the context in which an Argo custom plug-in runs in and then we're going to change the config map resource So the repo servers so we can actually download our plug-in and the config map is so we can register it as something Argo CD can use So to show you what that looks like if we go over here to the repo server yaml We'll see basically what we're doing as we just have this you know Empty directory Kubernetes volume that we're creating the femoral volume We have our init container in this case what we're doing is we're basically downloading the latest release of the plug-in from github releases So this version 140 here and we're basically putting it in this custom tools volume What we'll then do is we'll take our repo server container Which again is the actual thing we want to have our plug-in in and we're just going to mount it here at user Local bin, so it's available on our path and we can then reference it as an Argos CD plug-in in the config map So at this point we have a be downloaded installed It's just a matter of configuring it right and there are multiple ways to actually configure a VP to be able to communicate with your secret Manager like Jake mentioned what we're going to do today because it's keep gone is we're going to show keep your name He's off. So what that means here is basically we're going to have a vault instance Running in our keep your name is clustered here and we're going to have the two communicate to each other using keep your name He's off. So what I'm doing here is I'm basically telling a VP that we're communicating with a hash a core vault instance That's our secret manager back end. We're telling it where it's located. So it's just going to be here in our cluster I'm gonna make that we're going to use cuba nanny's off to be authenticated to it And we're going to use the Argos CD vault rule and I'm going to show you how we set up the roles in vault So that cuba nanny's off works and then finally because the repo server It doesn't usually have the service count token mounted and you need a service account token This is actually do keep renaissance. We just you know, make sure you have one mounted So all that to say you have this custom. Oh, sorry one more thing. I just showed you the repo server I didn't show you the config map. So the last thing is just actually being able to register it as an Argo plug-in What you'll see here is I have two different plugins sort of described here I'll talk about the helmet in a second or a little bit later But the simple one here is just called Argos CD vault and what you'll see is all it does is it just runs our Vault plug-in binary generate command on dot slash dot slash beating the yaml's that you have Of the Argo app that you're trying to deploy So it'll run, you know the plug-in through those yaml's replace the placeholders and send the rest to standard out so that Argo can apply them Yep, and I've got you know credentials so I can actually pull from git Cool. So now I think I've shown you everything. I think I've already gone ahead and set up port forward So I can actually show you the Argos CD UI Looks like we're good. I have this bolt instance deployed We'll talk about that in a second But just to show you that the plug-in's been installed correctly You can do what Jake was describing where this is the Argos CD app form where you can fill this out to make an Argo app And here at the bottom you can choose to do a plug-in and you'll see that we have our two plugins Here so we are good to go. I'll zoom in a little bit here. Okay So that was Argo. We have to plug in we're good now. We just need vault, right? And so this is again for the purpose of the demo. We're just going to deploy a simple vault in our cluster here This is not how you should do it in production, but just an example So I have vaults I'm using the vault helm chart to keep my life simple here And if you look at how I've deployed the vault helm chart here in the parameter section What you'll basically see is that I'm going to run the dev server which you should not do in production and I have this post art script and what this post art script is doing is It's basically waiting for vault to start up. We are creating a vault policy That allows reading secrets at the secret path We're basically so we're creating that policy in vault, right? And then we're going to enable cuban is off and we're going to tell vault where our cuban is host is so we can actually talk to the cuban is master and most importantly Maybe I have to zoom out so I can show all this. Yeah, we are creating that Argo CD role So this is the role that we can't configured AVP with earlier, right? So we could tell AVP, you know logging with vault and use this role and we're granting that role to the default service account in the default Namespace because in this case, this is where the repo server is running and most importantly We are granting that demo policy that was created up here for that service account So we have everything we need we have the repo server and we have vaults again. Don't do it like this in production This is just an example So we've got Argo. We've got vault now. We can actually start to deploy things So I'll start off with a simple example of a basic get app So just a collection manifest and get what we're going to do is we're going to deploy an engine X instance And what we're going to do with this engine X instance is we're just going to have it basically print out the value of a secret That we've deployed through AVP So I've got a bunch of the animals here first off This is config map that basically contains an engine X configuration file Don't fret if you're not familiar with engine X just know that basically what this says is we listen on 8080 and for all requests We're going to return a 200 with the value of this my secret environment variable Please report So that's that right. That's the engine X. Where's the secret come from? Well, it's going to come from this Kubernetes secret and it's Kubernetes secret is what's going to be Created through a VP and what you'll notice here is that this secret has a special annotation This is the annotation Jake was referring to earlier where we tell a VP where to look in vault for our secrets The way you read this example is there is a my engine X secret at this path secret data Because this is a vault using KV the KV V2 engine and inside of the secret There's a password key and I want to interpolate the value of that password key as part of the my next secret for this variable That's how you read the syntax here. That's what we're doing So we have our config map We have our secret and then we just need an actual engine X image so we can run this and actually you know make this work Right, so we've got a little open rusty image here using a port 8080 like we said earlier We're going to mount our secrets through environment variables in this engine X instance and we're going to mount the config file where Engine X expects it to be in this image So I put all this stuff and get already you can see them here in the apps Slash get slash engine X slash manifest folder. So these are all the files that we're going to be deploying here So I've already created them So we have the code and get great That's the first step forget ops now. We can you make our secret not in get we're going to put that in the secret manager So let's go ahead and do that So first what I'm going to do is I'm going to port forward to the vault service that I showed you I was running already So let's go ahead and do that. I'll just zoom in so you can see here. We are so we've got vault Next I'm going to basically set some vault variables so that I can talk to my vault instance You should never use the vault the root vault token should probably be disabled in any production Deployment of vault, but again, this is just a demo So, okay, we should have everything we need I'm going to create a secret called the mind gen X because that's what you know We said we're going to do in our secret YAML with this key password and a value secret password So Here it is. All right We've created a secret and I'm going to read it back just so we can all agree that yep I put secret password. Okay Now there's a way you can create Argo apps You know because Argo CD comes with the custom resource definition You can create custom or you can create apps through YAML, but I'm going to show it to you in the UI You know just to make it hit home a bit better, but you can easily do it Just YAML so here we are we're going to make an app called mind gen X how fitting. I'm just going to put it in the default project Not going to change in the sync policies here I'm going to use the one repo this very repo that I have configured here the path that contains my manifest is going to Be this this one here apps get engine X manifests apps get engine X Manifests and I'm going to deploy to my local cluster and my default namespace And the most important thing here is I got to tell Argo CD. I want to use our plug-in to deploy this So Argo CD vault, so I've got everything right here. I think so I'm going to go ahead and create this Argo app Okay, so we see is we're currently in out of sync state So basically what Argos done is is looked at the those files that were in get it looked at what's in clustering realized Hey, we have files that are not in git. We have you know resources are not in our cluster and we're out of sync So that's the yellow here, so we can easily go ahead and just synchronize these And what's it's going to do is that's actually going to run our plug-in Actually interpolate the secrets create the resulting secret in our cluster and deploy an engine X instance That's going to figure it to read from it. So why don't we make sure that we did this right? Yeah Let's actually try to talk to our engine X and see if it's returning the right values So I'm gonna port forward to this engine X instance. I have deployed And if I go over to local host 8081, which is where I'm running it Great, you see here. We've got secret password great So we've enabled show that we can deploy secrets and we can deploy apps. I use them with Argo and AVP Now we just need to actually try modifying the secret in our secret manager, right? Because you know we I can show you how to create one but a big part of secret management is rotating them, you know for reasons And it's an important use case to be able to handle So what I'm going to do is I'm going to simulate a secret rotation by just doing a volt KB put So I'm going to put a new value for the secret in this case We're just gonna put the phrase edited at the end Just read it back out for us real quick And now the question is how do we tell Argo CD that's that the secret changed and this is what a concept of a hard Refresh comes in during a hard refresh of our an Argo app Argo CD will take any custom plugins that you're using to deploy the app Do a dry run up those plugins and compare the output to what's in cluster if there's a difference Then you'll be out of sync and you have the opportunity to resync Once we do that We'll also need to restart deployments since we're using environment variables in a pod and they only get refreshed when you restart those pods So I'm gonna zoom out here real quick. I'm gonna do that hard refresh All right, our secrets out of sync because we change it in volt the plug-in ran We realize that what's in cluster does not match what we want it to be and we can easily remedy that by syncing So we've gone ahead and synchronized and we need to restart the deployment like I said And we're gonna get to have a new engine X starting up here soon And now if I just report forward back to our app We'll be able to then refresh and we see here secret password edited. So great. We did a secret rotation Thank you You can Yeah Thanks a lot. I'm glad it worked, too Cool. So that was just a simple example of you know a bundle of manifest and get But you can also use this tool with pretty much any sort of YAML JSON templating thing It's really just a matter of having the placeholders in the first sort of tool have something rendered Then it had ABP run through that. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna deploy a helm chart, right? So helm charts basically template out a bunch of YAML and we're basically going to use a helm chart with ABP to deploy You know an app with secrets. So I'm gonna do a redis instance here So first I'm going to create a redis a secret for my redis instance I'm gonna set the global password to what three H's so I'm gonna go ahead and do that here And I'll just read it back just to be sure I did that right cool So we have that and now just a matter of creating the Argo app and this is a very simple example I wouldn't recommend actually doing this for any real reason But what you'll see here is that we've created a secret in our secret manager and then we're just going to create an Argo app nothing else and What you when you look at this Argo app What you'll see is that we're basically going to point to the bit Nami redis helm chart for redis and that we're gonna use the Vault plug-in and then we're gonna set set some special Environment variables for that plug-in to explain this let me go back to the config map where I showed you where there was the second Plug-in I registered. Let me do that real quick So if I go to our duty overlays again, and I go to this dash cm All right, I talked about this one and this is what we've already seen There's also a version with how and essentially this is kind of showing the idea I said earlier right where we basically need to just render out You know our templates or our customized things or JSON or whatever and then run a VP on the result to get YAML with secrets and so what we're doing is we're basically just adding our helm repo and downloading the YAMLs that comprise the redis chart And then we're just going to run helm template filling in some stuff with Argo variables And then actually generate the manifests with a VP and you'll see this little helm arcs thing This is basically our way of passing things. We want to pass to helm the command line invocation Since you know we have to do this because it's a custom plug-in. So this is just our way being we'll pass special flags to helm and We're taking advantage of that here So that we can basically require off on our redis and use the inline path placeholder The Jake was talking about so this is the path and we're going to use the password key and that's equally created And we're going to use that to set this little redis password So real quickly here because I want to be able to answer questions. I'm going to apply this Okay, let's try that one more time. I'm going to apply this redis app okay, and If I go back and zoom out basically what we'll see here is oh, no, what is this indication required? Not sure what I did wrong here. Oh I think I I think I might know I don't have this repo configured with any credentials So, okay, so I probably won't be able to fix this in time But just know that basically if I had done this, you know, we'd have what you have seen is a set of Manifests just like we did here But you know for all the animals that comprise a helm chart and then if we had just synchronized them You know the plug in would have ran replace the placeholders and we would have had a redis instance deployed with our secret set to sh So sorry, I can't show you that I must have messed with this the night before so I'm gonna stop here so that we can take questions So thanks for your time. Thank you Oh One more thing this is the slide with the links so you've got the repo link there We've got documentation, you know as part of our repo our github pages and there's a demo repository Where if you don't take my work for you can be sure the redis example works So and some blogs that have been written on this so thanks So something we have about two minutes for questions If you have any questions, please raise your hand and I'll run over with the microphone and When you have a state out of sync like when you detect it is there a way to actually check what the discrepancy is Good question. So because it was a secret that changed the Argo UI will always redact the values of secrets You won't actually be able to see oh the secret was previously secret password and now it's secret password edited I get I don't know what the difference is you won't be able to do that Really, I guess in that case what I'd recommend is just going into the secret manager and taking a look Yeah Hello How can we limit what secret path can Argo application can use? Well, let's say I want up to be able to read this namespace involved for secrets But not the other namespace from the other application A good question so When you're setting up Cuberin Okay, when you're setting up Cuberin is off I believe there are ways you can actually configure that especially you can basically set like which service accounts can you know talk to vote? Yeah, so Yeah, so what you can do is because it's based off environment variables Jesus, sorry you can go into the When you're setting them up you can set the specific environment variables for each You know Deployment and so you can like you can have certain applications use certain environment variables that point to the different Service accounts that you set up and that way you don't have like one set of credentials You can have these multiple set of credentials pass throughout environment variables for each Same each different application that you deploy That makes sense Is is there a way to automate the part after you cycle the secrets?  That's a good question So, you know, Argos he does have a rest API So if you do have a way of like I know you change a secret and then you have that call some sort of web hook Right, you can tell Argos to be hey do a hard refresh for this app and that if you have automated sync Then you could have an automatic complete rotation That's a good question Think we're time for one last one first-hand up all So Is that a way not to put the bash scripts and stuff inside the YAML because I mean we moved to YAML definitions not to tell, you know, we just want to have the state right not tell it how to do things You know what I mean sort of We're just defining the data inside a YAML, but now we're back telling them Oh, this is how you fetch a secret. This is how you render it. So I think to me I mean, this is a great presentation, but it's kind of messy when I looked at the YAML file So that's a fair So if I understand correctly you are talking about the when we register the config when you actually register the plug-in in the Argos City config map and how we have to have that bash stuff to be able to tell it how it works So that is fair. I will say that is a one-time thing, right? Because once you have once you have this set I mean you have it forever You don't you know once you have an Argos CD that is using this config map It's it's good to go you can deploy helm charts all you want and you just have to say use this plug That's really it like the complexity is yeah at the end of the day You just have to I mean you just have to be able to tell Argos CD what to run in this in this case It's just you have to tell it that it's wants to run this command So there's really no way around that unless Argos CD adopts a different way So that's just the only method we have to register the plug-in to Argos CD, right Cool, I think that concludes the Q&A. So if you have any more questions Please meet up with the presenters outside in the hall and don't forget to rate the session. Thanks everyone. Thank you


only delay is the imposed delay of however long it becomes after a few tries. So actually, all right, here's another idea. Why not make a million virtual clones and try different codes on each of them? Right, you could do it in order. You could do it in parallel. Yeah, that could possibly work. I don't know if it's possible, but if you have the ability to copy, to do a bit for bit copy, in theory, I'm sure someone, I mean, that someone should be able to figure out, I'm guessing, if the bit for bit copy is possible. Yeah, that's a good question. Interesting. Do you want to mention it on the show? Yeah, sure. All right, we sort of have, but we should mention it on the show proper. New version of Audio Hijack is ready to install. You can do that later. All right, good timing. Here we go. My fellow citizens of the internet, there is nothing to fear but fear itself. So go show fear, you mean business. Go to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support and show them you're not interested in fear. You're interested in the future. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 1, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt, joining me today. Patrick Beja, Frenchspin.com. How are you, Miss Yola? Yeah, I am excellent. I'm in the Finnish countryside, you might remember. Oh, I should have used a Finnish word then, instead of. How would you say, Mr. in Finnish? Mr. Well, in Finnish, I don't know. I speak Swedish, sir. So you don't speak Finnish to any Finns. You're just like Swedish or English or French. Yeah, I say thank you. And even Swedish, it's not, I'm not quite there yet. But yeah, I'm a proud defendant of the Swedish language in Finland to the pride of my wife. Excellent. Who is a Swedish Finn, correct? Is that right? The right way to say it? Yeah. Awesome. Well, we got a lot to talk about today. Microsoft has a plan. And Patrick and I are gonna try to figure out what it is for allowing you to play games on Windows 10 and the Xbox. I mean, the goal of the plan is pretty easy to figure out how they're getting there is what we're trying to tease out. Also right now, as we record, there is testimony going on with the U.S. House Judiciary Committee over encryption. So we're gonna keep our tabs on that as well. Let's start off with the headlines. FBI Director James Comey testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Tuesday morning. Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell is also testifying as his New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance, he of the 174 iPhones fame, as well as encryption specialist Susan Landau. Now, she's formerly a privacy analyst at Google, now a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. During his testimony, Comey said, you're saying we either have privacy or security. I don't accept that premise. He thinks there's a way to make a compromise. He also said that if the FBI gets the authority to compel Apple, it would likely use it in other cases. He's indicated the opposite in the past. Landau explained that when requests like this become routine, leaks become more likely. She had a good explanation of how that might happen. She also called for investment in law enforcement's own technical capabilities as an alternative to compelling Apple to assist in cases like this. We were discussing this a little bit before the show started. And I think we came across a few interesting ideas as alternatives to compelling Apple to rate their own encryption. Do you wanna get into those just very quickly? Yeah, real quickly. I don't wanna spend too much time on it, but my own representative, Karen Bass, who I respect, but I have not personally voted for, asked a fantastic question. She may have won my vote with this by asking Director Comey, is it possible to clone the drive on the iPhone in question and then go after the passcode in a way that even if it destroys the data or destroys the password, it doesn't hurt the phone. Now, this would not be possible if the secure enclave was in there, but the iPhone 5C doesn't have the secure enclave. I think there may be other problems to it, not the least of which would be, it's the slow nature of having to clone the image. But if the only problem is, if you could clone that drive and the only problem is the speed, Patrick Roger and I before the show were kind of brainstorming ways around that. And the thing is, let's imagine it is possible to clone it and then to have an image of that drive, then you could in a virtualized space have that process of trying out different codes for the drive to unlock it, run in virtualization, and then if that is possible, then there's no reason you couldn't have a million of them running in parallel in order to try and crack it pretty quickly. So it all rests on the possibility of cloning it, but if it is possible, maybe that would be a way to get into the phone without having to break the encryption in the sense that the FBI is asking for it. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely slower than what the FBI is asking for. And maybe that multiple of speed ends up being not practical. But what a great question. I was so proud of my own representative there. No, but you know, if it is possible to run as many instances as you want of that phone, I don't know that it is slower. If you can run as many- It's gotta be. Like in other words, all I have to do is have a program that's putting in passcodes one after the other that is going to be faster than any other system that requires parallel operation and image-making and stuff like that. How much slower would be the question? Yeah, yeah. In a somewhat related case, but not really, but a little bit, the magistrate judge Orenstein of the U.S. Court of the Eastern District of New York ruled Monday afternoon that the O-Ritz Act could not be used to justify government requests to compel Apple to assist accessing data on an iPhone running iOS 7. It is important to note that this is not the high-profile San Bernardino case, but a drug case where the defendant has already settled but is awaiting sentencing. Yeah, so there's a different principle which politically makes it different. You're talking about a settled drug case. The only reason the FBI is still pursuing evidence is it might affect sentencing, but it is the same principle which is we believe the O-Ritz Act gives us the ability to make this request and the judge in this case, now the judges in California don't have to agree with this, this is not a precedent-setting case, but the judge in this case said, there is no prescription that Congress has said we want you to be able to access these things. In fact, Congress has had the opportunity to pass legislation that would allow you to circumvent these kinds of things and in fact, hasn't decided not to pass it. So it would be a ridiculous reading of the rules to say, well, if Congress has failed to pass a law saying we get to do something or we can't do something, then we should get to do it. The judge said that is an overly broad reading of the O-Ritz Act. The O-Ritz Act is meant to say, if there's not a specific leaning one way or another, but it's obvious that it should happen, the court gets to make it happen. That's obviously not the way the California court saw it because the California court went ahead and issued it. So I don't think this is really going to affect the San Bernardino case, but it is interesting to see one judge who might be having the same reasoning as a judge on appeal, saying it's just too broad of a reading of the O-Ritz Act. It's very interesting. I mean, the judgment when you read it, reads like it's almost about what's happening in the California case. I mean, I'm sure the judge knows about that. Obviously everyone knows about it. In fact, that's why Apple had to submit how many phones they were being asked to break in other cases that became part of this court record because they brought up the fact that they're being asked in other cases. Yeah, and the way the judge describes his reasoning for not granting the request is basically saying, again, I understand this is not the same case, but it's basically making a lot of the same arguments that Apple is making in the California case. So it's a very interesting thing. And if we want to take a step, just a little bit of a step back in this question that we're being asked, I think it's a little bit of a controversial way of seeing it, but I do think it's kind of asking us as a society, as a culture, what we are willing to sacrifice is a strong word, but to trade off in order to combat terrorism, since terrorism is the issue we're discussing in the case of Senator Bernardino. And I think it would be useful to sort of really take that step back and really wonder how far are we willing to go? Is it one phone, old phone, security, other things? And as a society, ask ourselves about this. And that is what is going on with the House Judiciary Committee here. Exactly, yeah. Because what they decide in the House Judiciary Committee has no effect on the court case, but it is saying, hey, this is bringing up this broader social question that Patrick's putting forth here. DJI introduced its latest drone, the Phantom 4, that can see and avoid obstacles. It has four cameras, two ultrasonic sensors, plus some flight software that allows it to avoid running into stuff. Also includes a 4K main camera. So if you want to take some 4K video, you can, it has a new lens. There's something called Active Track that automatically tracks camera subjects while it's in flight. So you can make sure that camera stays on the person. Sport mode boosts the drone speed from 35 to 65 miles per hour, and there's a larger battery in the 4, 5,350 milliamp hour battery. They say that should give you about 28 minutes of power on a single charge. Phantom is available today at dji.com and apple.com for $1,399 should come to DJI's store in Shenzhen and an Apple store around the world on March 15th. Cool stuff. I know that the drone fans, like our dear friend, Daryn Kitchen, and I don't know if Darren's excited, but I've seen other drone fans out there saying, this is a pretty nice spec bump. This is a cool looking drone, or quadcopter, I should say. Please do be precise. Sony announced the next PlayStation update, version 3.5 will include remote play for Windows PCs and Mac. The remote play was already available on PlayStation Vita and some other devices. The Vita of 3.5 comes out tomorrow, but will not have remote play active yet. Other features that will be in 3.5 include notifications when friends log on, the ability to appear offline, a much requested feature in many different gaming networks, daily motion streaming, play together, and user scheduled event. No words on when 3.5 comes to the general public though.  You still have to have bought them and installed them on your PlayStation 4, but right along the same time that Microsoft makes public its announcements on cross-platform capability, Sony goes to more than one platform in a different way, obviously. Yeah, in a different way, and they have recently started retiring the PlayStation Vita TV in Japan at least, and there's no doubt it's gonna be retired in other areas as well. So this is kind of following Microsoft in saying you can stream your game console to a lot of different devices. And it wouldn't be surprising if that kind of thing also came to other devices like TVs, for example. And at some point down the line, we know that they've been doing this for their PlayStation Now streaming service, which doesn't even require a console. So there's a lot of streaming happening, I guess. Yeah, both stories, we'll talk about the Microsoft story in a bit, are centered around the idea of separating your game from the device you play it on. So that you can just play it on whatever device you have, defending on what the definition of the company has about what device you have. Soundhound has developed a voice powered digital assistant called Hound that is available now for iOS and Android. In other words, it's like Cortana or Siri or Google Now, but it is separate, so you have to launch the app before you can use it. The app has partnerships with Yelp and Uber, so you can just say things like, hey, I need an Uber to take me to Fifth and Venice, and it will say, oh, do you want me to call it? And you can say, how much is it? It's got real good natural language processing. Virgins' Nick Statt, in fact, called it the smartest and fastest assistant he's seen yet. It can understand questions within questions, is good at understanding context, so you can do follow up questions, and it supposedly skips translating speech to text, but interprets speech directly, making it that much faster. They wouldn't go into their proprietary system for doing this, but I tried it out. It is not perfect. There are definitely things you can do that will stump it and it'll throw to search, just like all the others, but it did understand things a lot faster and a lot better than Siri, or even Amazon Echo, or Google, or Cortana. I think you sort of buried the lead a little bit here. It's called Hound, so I think it would be pretty good if it answered in Woofs. I would do that. Should we ask it something? I can try and see if it'll, where'd it go? I can't find it on my phone, there it is. All right, what should we ask it, Patrick? What kind of hound are you? What kind of hound are you? Showing search results for, what kind of hound are you? Yeah, okay, let's do this. What's the average bandwidth in Finland? Showing search results for, what kind of hound are you? How much would an Uber be from here to downtown LA? This can take you from here to downtown for about 16 US dollars to 22 US dollars, Uber Espanol, Uber Assist, Uber XL, Uber Wav, Uber select, Uber SUD.  Hound, sit, rest. Good boy. Anyway, perfect demonstration because it showed the limits but also it was kind of cool that it could just give me that dollar figure without me saying the addresses on either end, right? That was smart. Yeah, that was pretty good. I wonder if it's specifically integrated into Uber or if it understood everything in the context. If it knows the Uber commands or if, you know, but. It's, yeah, they've integrated with Yelp and Uber so they got a little bit of a leg up. Yeah, that's why. Brazil's federal police arrested Facebook's vice president for Latin America, Diego Zodun. I hope I'm pronouncing this right, while he was on his way to work in Sao Paulo. Facebook is accused of disobeying a court order to assist investigators in a drug case involving a WhatsApp user. WhatsApp says it has cooperated, quote, to the full extent of our ability, end quote, and can't give law enforcement information it does not have. The arrest came at the request of the state of Sergei Pei or Sergei Pei, Sergei Pei, that state. Essentially what's happening is WhatsApp's saying, we have ended encryption. So you're asking us to give you something we don't have and the state is saying, we don't believe you, you're under arrest and we're gonna arrest a Facebook VP because WhatsApp's owned by Facebook even though this VP doesn't actually oversee WhatsApp. It's a good way of making a point. I don't know if you're aware, there was a politician in France that has proposed a million dollar fine per device that Apple and other big companies do not comply to unlocking. So that's also, you know, a million dollar is also something that can make a pretty strong straight statement. That's probably not gonna go through, but I think it's getting tense in a few countries around the world. Daniel Issa, by the way, is talking about mirroring an iPhone's memory and using the images with the encrypted chip to brute force the passcode. Do you think he was listening? I think he might, let's say he was. I think we will gladly, you know, give our collective ideas to the betterment of law enforcement in general. The Verge passes along some clarifying details from road to VR that IBM is unfortunately not helping to make an MMO out of Sword Art Online. It was all a misunderstanding. An IBM spokesperson told the Verge, IBM is helping to make a standalone experience involved in an event that goes on from March 18th to the 20th in Tokyo where a select group of participants will get to experience a VR game of Sword Art Online using IBM's software cloud service. And I guess Watson might be involved, but it's not going to be something we can all subscribe to and play. Okay, so our bewilderment at Watson's involvement might have been justified. Yeah, well, I don't, yeah. In other words, it ain't what we thought it was. And sometimes that disappointment is real. Adweek reports McDonald's in Sweden are selling 3,500 happy goggles at 14 restaurants from March 5th to March 12th during the Sport Love holiday. Happy Goggles is a happy meal with a box that can be folded into VR goggles. It works with a ski game for your phone called Se Upp Ibacken, though, sorry, the switch in language there sort of confused me, though McDonald's did not say what platform the game is available on. And the Sport Love is Sport Holiday, which is a week holiday in Sweden where everyone is encouraged to do sports and usually people go skiing. And my wife informed me of when I asked about Sport Love's translation. Yeah, this is really cool. And I am curious what phones it will really work with. It also really has a, basically the box comes with a folded up insert that has the lenses in it, which almost could be used on its own. You don't really need to fold the happy meal box around it. But I love the idea of VR as a happy meal toy. I wonder how good the app will be and what platforms it'll be on. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm sure, you know, usually those happy meal toys, I don't think are built to last, so it's not like this is gonna, but it's a cool, fun way. I think there's someone, again, maybe someone listening to this show, well, maybe not. It's VR is everywhere, but someone at McDonald's, Sweden, who was like, yeah, that would be awesome. And it kind of is. So, well done. Microsoft announced a new enterprise level anti-malware service only for Windows 10. Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, or WDATP, neither one of which, rule trippingly off the tongue, is designed to stop malware that uses social engineering and unpatched zero-day flaws to infect systems by leveraging cloud-based machine learning. Essentially, WDATP keeps an eye out for unusual behavior, maybe ports that shouldn't be scanned, servers that are not usually accessed by that person, uses machine learning to alert system administrators, something weird's going on over here. WDATP is currently in private beta with a half million systems and open to public preview later this year. This is really very cool. I mean, if it works, and I'm guessing there's no reason it wouldn't, especially with machine learning, it could potentially help fight, I was gonna say user behavior, but enhance user behavior into deflecting some of those pesky social engineering threats, which are, obviously, as we know, basically impossible to fight without, with standard software needs, so. By the way, just checking in on the testimony that's going on, Ms. Landau is actually giving the best testimony, in my opinion, because she is an expert on this, and she's answering questions from Representative Zoe Lofgren right now, saying it's just as Sewell said, once they've built the software, it can be used for other phones with the serial numbers, which is where the security risk comes in, especially if it's a routine process. So it's not like Apple would have to rebuild new stuff or hand over new things if anyone gets a copy of what Apple makes for the FBI, they can unlock other phones. I think this is one of the most misunderstood issue in this case, and I've seen this repeated everywhere, including in audiences of shows just like this one, where it has been made, I would have thought, abundantly clear that this will not be limited to one phone. Usually the argument goes, well, if Apple can do it, they're just asking for this one key to this one phone. It doesn't concern other ones, and it's kind of this heartening a little bit that people are not, I don't know if they're not understanding or trusting the people talking about this, this is not just about this one phone, but it's good that we're getting some clarification there, hopefully in front of the committee. And I think it's an important point that people just don't understand, which is, well, the FBI's asking for something very reasonable, make a tool one time for this one phone to help us get in. And if that were possible, and there was no risk to it, I'd be 100% on that side too, like, yeah, get into the phone, come on, help them out. There's still a question legally whether you can compel Apple to do something, make something new like that if they don't want to, but I would be on the side of saying maybe you should, whereas this is something that could be used for nefarious purposes, and you can't unmake it once you make it, and that's what they're covering right now in the testimony. And this is a little bit the most disheartening thing, which is I think everyone, most people would have a similar reaction to the whole story if everyone understood the whole story in the same way. So maybe we should be focusing instead of arguing pointlessly back and forth all the time, maybe making sure that everyone understands exactly the facts on the ground. Yeah, I would be in favor of that myself. AT&T announced it will launch Direct TV on the internet later this year. Hooray, customers will only need the internet and an internet-connected device, and there will be no contracts. Direct TV now will include much of what is available on Direct TV's satellite service today, and Direct TV Mobile will be cheaper, but limited to phones, and finally Direct TV Preview will be free with limited content. Pricing availability and content offerings are not announced yet. So that Direct TV Preview will be interesting, that's ad supported, and it sounds like it's mostly made up of Direct TV's own audience channel, which is an interesting channel, has some cool concerts on there sometimes. Direct TV now and Direct TV Mobile are probably, if I had to guess, and they haven't made this clear, probably just the internet version of Direct TV service that you get as a subscriber. I was a subscriber to Direct TV up until this previous autumn, and you got a pretty good lineup of live channels and on-demand programming that you could use on your tablet or watch on the web, and it wasn't everything. So I'm guessing this is not going to be everything either, but everybody that they got to agree to let them do that streaming service, they're basically just saying, we'll shoot, we'll sell you Direct TV service, but without having to send somebody out to put a dish on top of your house. International researchers revealed that some misconfigured TLS implementations on web servers allow end user computers to request use of the obsolete SSL V2 that was retired 20 years ago. For some reason, it's still on there, and even though it is not opened, attackers could use this vulnerability to decrypt secured connections in a matter of hours. Scans show that 11 million websites and email services are vulnerable in an attack that has been dubbed drown. Servers should be updated, and CIS admins could use a firewall to filter SSL V2 traffic in the meantime while they wait to update. You know, I really wonder if WDATP could squirt that attack. No, I just wanted to say WDATP again. Yeah, probably not. But it was a good attempt. Hey, thanks to everybody who submits articles to us at our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We had some great stuff today from you guys. We really appreciate it. So get in there and submit and vote at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. That's a look at the headlines. All right, let's talk about Microsoft. They had a preview like a week ago that they put everybody under NDA until today when everybody could talk about it, which I found odd, but I think the idea was they gave them a bunch of games to play and they wanted to give them a week before they talked about it so they could experience the games and form their opinions by then. Games made by Microsoft or their close partners are intended to run on Xbox or Windows as part of the universal Windows platform. That's the platform that says you write it here. It can run on any Windows device, including an Xbox, including a Windows phone as long as the device has the proper specs. And there's a little issue about that. They wanna put the gamer in the center of every decision they make. That's what Phil Spencer said. He said, we're decoupling our software platform from the hardware platform. He said optional hardware upgrades could be coming. He told Engadget he's inspired by the smartphone's two-year upgrade cycle where you could still play the games on the older hardware, but you would have the option to get something new every couple of years. The key to being able to do all of this, forward compatibility, backward compatibility, all of that is universal Windows apps. He said, you'll actually see us come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible because we have that universal Windows application. We want to make sure game developers have tools at the right time so we can support SLI, Crossfire, all other technologies in the PC space, DirectX 12.2. But in order for this to work, universal Windows app, UWA has to be seen as a fundamentally better way to build games or we'll fail. You know, this is a really disconcerting announcement. I'm really not sure what to think of it yet. It's, they're kind of breaking what makes a traditional console and I'm not sure whether they're making their consoles more into PC-like devices or if they're making their PCs basically more able to run what the consoles can and how this impacts either platform in a positive or negative way. All of those things could be true and sometimes at the same time it's very strange. So does that mean if you look at the concrete side of things, does that mean that the Xbox One is going to have a regular upgrade cycle and that your three year old Xbox One or four year old Xbox One is at some point not going to be able to run the newest games because it's too old like an iPhone 4 or a Galaxy S3? Yeah, are you going to have the Xbox One 2017 and then the Xbox One 2019 and then the Xbox One Special Edition and I see the hesitation there. That doesn't bother me overly if my current Xbox One still plays all the games, right? Because right now there's a new PC for Windows out every day practically and I don't worry too much that I have to replace my Windows PC because my Windows PC still runs all my software and eventually it'll get too old and eventually my Xbox One will get too old and that's the same upgrade cycle. It's a change of thinking about it though for sure. I think what's confusing most to me is they're saying we want a universal Windows platform here but they're saying we got to convince the developers which means they haven't convinced the developers yet and they're saying things like we're going to give you a Forza Motorsport 6 Apex for Windows free to play in 4K but it's only on Windows. We haven't actually ported that over to Xbox. Quantum Break coming April 5th to Windows and Xbox but you have to buy the Xbox One pre-order and then it comes with the Windows version. It's not one app. Like there's some seamlessness that I'm not seeing here which is I should be able to just buy a Forza Motorsport game from Microsoft's Windows Store and then if I'm sitting in my Xbox One or I'm sitting in my Windows machine I get the option to play it. I think that's ultimately what is going to happen at least hopefully that's their goal. But it does raise the question of why would people buy an Xbox One? Basically, if you can do everything, well, most of the things you would like to do the exclusives are a big deal in the console world and there was quite a bit of hubbub about Quantum Break which was branded as an Xbox One exclusive coming to Windows 10. So if the games that are exclusive to Xbox One can be played on a PC anyway, why would anyone buy an Xbox One? And the answer to this, even though I also bought an Xbox One and I felt a little bit miffed that Tomb Raider which was a big exclusive came to the Xbox One very quickly after, I'm sorry, came to Windows after the Xbox One. And now Quantum Break and there are rumors that many other titles are gonna be following the same path, it seems to be confirmed with this event, but if we take a step back again it's always good to take a step back and stop looking at it as the hardcore geek gamers that some of me and my friends are who own a gaming PC and an Xbox, the reality is the two are really very different things and have a very different target audience. The Xbox One is currently 350 bucks I guess, I'm sure by this holiday season it's gonna be 250 or 300. It's a very cheap device for gaming. If you want to have an equivalent or if you want to have a gaming PC that can run those kinds of games as well or better, you're gonna pay around eight, 900, maybe a thousand bucks and you're gonna be constrained to your desk and you're not gonna have the layback experience so this is in a way very similar to what Satya Nadella has been doing with Microsoft in general which is we don't care where you use our product, we're everywhere, just use our stuff and I think in reality the two, the gaming PC and the Xbox One are differentiated enough that they're not going to compete with each other for most people and people who are wanting to buy an Xbox One are not all of a sudden gonna think oh I can play it on my gaming PC then I don't care about the Xbox One anymore because most of those people don't really have a gaming PC and if they did they wouldn't wanna play on their couch anymore. Well asking, well if you could play all the Xbox games on Windows why would I buy an Xbox? Ends up becoming well if I can play all the Windows games on an Alienware PC why would I buy a Dell gaming PC? It's like well because you like the specs better because that's the one that fits the price and the features that you want. I mean the Xbox One if this plan works out is just another gaming PC. It's a gaming PC that's designed to lay flat and sit under your television and give you a lean back experience and if that's not what you want from a gaming PC or you find another one that does it better Microsoft doesn't care because as long as you're doing Windows gaming they're making money off you. Yeah and I think the comparison an even more apt comparison would be if I can do all the things I want on the phone why would I buy a tablet? Yeah, right. Tablets famously are slowing down and not everyone is renewing their tablets as much as they would in the first few years but the tablet market is still very large and it's still a real market. The form factor, the way you use it the places you use it does change the device you know the willingness to buy the device and that is exactly the same case I think. Yeah, anything else on this? We got a quick update on what's happening with again Ms. Landau seems to be answering the bulk of the questions here before I update you on that and get to our pick of the day anything else to mention here? Just to say that I think this is the way we're understanding the message that Microsoft is putting forth but their message and the way they're distributing it is very confusing and that does concern me a little bit because we had to wait through a bunch of articles trying to understand exactly what they meant with journalists that themselves weren't sure what exactly Phil Spencer and Microsoft were saying at that event and it leaked of unskilled communication I would say and that is not great especially for a move that is enormous it is momentous it is a radical shift in the way they approach their gaming strategy could be awesome could be dangerous maybe both but I would have loved to have a much clearer message from Microsoft. I think the problem is that Phil Spencer wants to tell you his goal but doesn't want to be seen as over promising because Gears of War Ultimate Edition launched for Windows 10 today but it's still not a universal app Minecraft is a launch title for the Oculus Rift but that's also not a universal app so his message wants to be games for Windows play everywhere and he can't actually say that yet and so he's hedging his bets and trying to give that feeling. This seems like a step in a much longer game plan. First steps into a wider world would you say? I'm maybe. Or first steps into a Windows world. Okay so real quickly representative Hank Johnson asking Susan Landau, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute should the government force Apple to assist in this method? Landau said it would be a security mistake it would be a target for organized crime and nation states any phone could be targeted if there is code that could get into the phone and get the data it will be a target and don't forget if someone were to be able to get a copy of the software that the FBI wants to use and maybe they wouldn't but if they were able to get it they wouldn't have to have physical access to push that software update. You get firmware updates over the internet all the time. Representative Johnson said therefore Apple should not be required to comply with the court order and Landau said I'm answering the technological question not the legal question. Technologically it would be a mistake. So it's an interesting back and forth. James Comey I'll be honest sounded very reasonable in person he has a very reasonable tone much more reasonable sometimes than many of you may think when you read his terms and he was very much of the opinion that he wants people to talk he wants to have an open conversation I think that was heartening to say he's willing to listen to the other side and come up with a reasonable expectation. The sticking point is there's no compromise on math. Encryption works and you can actually use it without permission all over the world and without even Apple's cooperation. And they've covered some of that in this testimony as well. Our pick of the day comes from you Patrick Beja you've been using a router you really love. Yeah you know when I arrived in Finland I was surprised to learn that the phone company doesn't rent you a router apparently it's a common practice here and maybe in other places in France we all have those triple play TV boxes that are basically set up boxes that can do everything. That's the way it is usually here too yeah. Yeah so I had to go to the store and get a router and of course initially I was like I'm just gonna get the 50 bucks cheapest thing I can find who needs a fancy router and then I looked at the specs and looked at everything and then ended up selling out 300 bucks in a router. I didn't even believe there would be such a thing it was a discovery to me and I got the ASUS AC3200 router and I have to say I thought I was just buying a thing that was the fastest one I could get just for getting a fast one but I really like that router. It's very well built it looks like a Boston robotics robot it's very strange it has lights everywhere which I don't see because I'm not that kind of a geek I don't want my electronics to have LEDs that I can program to glow in the dark or stuff like that but in general having a high-end router is actually very cool. You can obviously configure it in much more ways than you can your regular ISPs router and I won't go into too much detail but the thing is ASUS has it was the brand that was recommended to me the most for routers and I'm very happy with mine so if you're shopping for a router maybe check out their offerings. There have been some reports back in January of some vulnerabilities with ASUS routers and if you heard about those and you're like wait Patrick why are you buying a vulnerable router? It is very rare for any device not to have vulnerabilities at some point and they have patched to them so make sure you update your firmware is all I would say to that but I'm kind of loving my ERO router which was my pick last week as well so I'm glad we're feeling some router love here on the show. You were saying yesterday that you had a few issues with it though. Yeah I've noticed some connectivity issues and I'm kind of holding out judgment on that as I figure out the proper placement because I used to have two different SSIDs two different routers one on each end of the house and now that I have three routers I've got kind of a different situation going on they need to be close enough to each other that they have good throughput to be able to create the mesh network and so I'm experimenting with that I'll let you know it hasn't been perfect but when it is running it runs super fast, way faster than my other routers. And it's also it just came out so I'm sure you know those firmware upgrades you were talking about I'm sure they're gonna polish all of that too. Send your picks to us folks we wanna hear what you like feedback at dailytechnewshow.com doesn't have to be routers you can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks couple of messages before we get out of here regarding autonomous cars and ethical decision making Arne in Wintry and surprisingly sunny Germany so this should be the threshold to surpass even better I don't think it even has to why not let the owner or driver of the car make the decision about who what the car should do in a situation we were talking about the trolley example yesterday where it's like well if I do one thing one person dies if a new another thing three people die why not let the owner or driver of the car make the decision before we can drive the car just fill out a legally binding questionnaire that sets the baseline for any critical decisions the car takes then the driver would be liable or I guess the passenger or the attendant would be reliable for the result just as he or she would be now well yeah I'm not sure first of all you make the same decision where you're in the middle of that you know life threatening situation in the middle of that well that's Arne's point right you make a more rational decision if you decided ahead of time than if you're panicking in the moment so would anyone decide yes I want to sacrifice myself in order to save someone else yeah and then they're desperately trying to change that choice as they see how do I change the firmware I need to change my options that's funny and dark but it's an interesting idea to say like yeah put the liability on the operator slash owner I don't know what you do for shared cars though and a lot of self-driving cars are probably going to be used in self-driving taxi situations or zip car type situations so that presents a little wrinkle there but yeah I think there are a lot of situations where the car is going to have to make a decision that you wouldn't have to make anyway that this is a very specific example sacrifice the driver or sacrifice you know the oncoming people in the traffic but this is just one example I'm sure there are going to be tons and tons of other instances where the AI let's call it like that is going to have to have to make those decisions that are not equally difficult on the cost you know life cost way but equally difficult for a computer to make a decision so I think this is just going to be have to be worked out on the software level anyway but well but to program the software properly you have to figure out the ethical decision like to be able to tell the car like okay when you hit the trolley question here's what you do you have to know what the answer to that so I think my point is that this should be a again a societal level decision where all cars should behave sort of make the same kinds of decisions and not ask each driver to take that responsibility and I think each driver should be responsible for his own okay no problem yeah I actually do kind of hate the idea of society deciding for me how my self-driving car is going to happen I agree but if you know let's say we see a trend of every driver deciding they should be the most safeguarded person even if it costs the life of 20 kids in a school bus is that really should that be allowed no right exactly yeah but although it's happening now I guess now you can decide to do that if you're in control but then it's very clear who's liable in those situations whereas like oh we program to do it it to do that ahead of time is a different is that's why this is a different question yeah but if Arnie has it his way then it would be you would be made liable because you signed the thing before so anyway I guess that solves it though is like you can't program your car to do something that would be illegal for you to do three laws of robotics let's just abide by that and we'll be fine those those laws suck they're not very good they're just a fictional device Preston wrote in he works for CompTIA which is a non-profit trade organization and they just put out a report this morning about the tech industry's jobs they say nearly 200,000 new jobs added last year employing over 6.7 million people in the United States an important fact is the average tech worker makes more than double at $105,400 a year than the average U.S. private sector worker thought it would share this information bought school data in the full report if you're interested at cyberstates.org and finally Scott in London said you guys are wondering why the Raspberry Pi Foundation didn't wait until Pi Day that's Veronica and I were wondering that yesterday to release the Raspberry Pi 3 says Scott it's probably because 14-3 is little more than the day before the Ides of March on this side of the Atlantic where the Raspberry Pi comes from at least Leap Day is Leap Day wherever the Gregorian calendar is used no matter how you write the date well played were you thinking the same thing Patrick not really no you guys don't get to have Pi Day though well yeah that's that's the thing we don't we say 3 slash 14 so it doesn't there's not 14 months yeah there's wait what 314 314 it would work what am I saying I don't know we just don't value the way you do it it's 14-3 so you never get to do 314 right that is what you confused me with your notes where you wrote it down the way we do what's happening there that's how Scott wrote it he wrote it the way you do oh because he's from London but no they have the imperialist do they I'm confused now who's writing what I don't think we need a standard we need to get get nixed on this well thank you Patrick Beja for joining us Frenchspin.com of course to find all Patrick's fine English works Frenchspin.fr if you're interested in the French works what you got going on we recorded a really good if I may say so myself a really good episode of the Phyllis Club this Saturday we had Turkey from Saudi Arabia he was in London we had Eric who is in Vietnam we had Annie who is in France and I'm in Finland it was a really great show we talked about a bunch of stuff happening in those different countries and discussed how we were considering them from our own perspective honestly I would really love it if you dear listener went to Frenchspin.com and listened to the Phyllis Club I guarantee you're at least going to be entertained and if you're not come yell at me on Twitter at NotPatrick what the what my man I had to reinstall stuff and Phyllis Club didn't go into my running playlist it's like how come I didn't listen to that this week I'm gonna fix that as soon as this show is over so go check it out folks Frenchspin.com thank you to our patrons dailytechnewshow.com slash support is where you can make the show happen what we ask is if you get some value out of the show give a little value back and if that value can't take monetary form it could be doing a review in your favorite podcast app it doesn't matter what podcast app it is iTunes or anything else if you review us doesn't really matter what you say it helps other people discover us so there's all kinds of ways to support this show you can find them all at dailytechnewshow.com slash support March meetups are happening I'm gonna be in Austin, Texas for the Diamond Club Party on Saturday March 12th from 2 to 5 p.m. with Justin Robert Young and Brian Brushwood and more I'm also doing an LA meetup Saturday March 19th at 3 p.m. at the Farmer's Market by the Grove so mark your calendars our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com you can give us a call 51259 daily catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern at alphagetegradio.com and dimonclub.tv and visit our website at dailytechnewshow.com Scott Johnson's with us tomorrow we'll talk to you then this show is part of the Frog Pants Network get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program is the ISO standard 2016 314 I have no idea Big Jim suggests the next backer level be $31.41 a month for 3.14 that was a good show man chock full yeah it was fun I like you know I actually really like the small interruptions for the hearing that was kind of fun it was really fun and dynamic and you managed to follow all of this pretty masterfully I was impressed oh I tried I was trying not to not pay attention to you and be able to like carry on a conversation but also keep an eye on that and I noticed that what there was some split attention going on but it was only because I was looking at you I'm pretty sure the listeners are not gonna know they will never know they'll never know well now they know damn it well yeah you know the other thing that Landau brought up that I didn't have a chance to mention which I think is really interesting is she points out that two-factor authentication relies heavily on your phone and so this isn't just about like oh I'm keeping my documents here like this is securing your identity well yeah and well because a lot of the rhetoric from some of the representatives has been like hey you know yeah you want to be secure in your papers but if we have a warrant we get to come look at your papers why is this anything different yeah I think a lot of people are not realizing how I had people on my Slack say oh but you know anyway that the important things are our papers at home this is just the phone exactly what you're saying basically right people don't realize when when Cook was saying this is about public safety in the interview the ABC interview for however much marketing there is around this issue I honestly agree that this is much bigger than just you know it is about public safety and he was saying you know oh you have the location of your kids in your phone and that's you know as soon as you bring up it's two things either you bring up the safety of your kids or you bring up terrorism then you have to think wait a second what are you really talking about but I agree it is about to an extent public safety there's so many things in your phone people don't it's about public safety on both ends of the request it's just in different ways yeah I think yeah the the the point about philosophically what are we willing to to give up to fight terrorism I think is a really important discussion to have and I'm not sure it's being framed in in quite that way and I in the way if I was very cynical I would frame it in cost of lives and I would like to remind people something that would be I think is difficult to to accept but terrorism is actually not an enormous cost of life on for us at least in our western societies and I I understand it's cold and terrible to to say it like this but it isn't a statistics that that is well I wouldn't phrase it as it's not a terrible it is a terrible cost of lives what you're saying is it's not a large number right it's not a large number when you you realize how many people die and when you you you look at any other issue we're having in the world really I really think literally almost any literally almost any other issue the cost of life is probably higher and and you know we often talk about the the car accidents and we're not ready to sacrifice a lot to we're not getting rid of cars we're not only allowing you know certain people to drive of course you have to have a permit but I think someone said there are more Americans struck by lightning on average than people who die in terrorist attacks that's kind of the and that is not to say that we shouldn't defend ourselves against terrorist attacks but it does set something to evaluate how far should we give up certain rights and comforts in order to combat it exactly I would argue comparisons like that are kind of glib because terrorist attacks typically involve a great number of people in a short amount of time I have a lightning strike that suddenly hits a hundred people at the same time and sure the impact is greater and when you I think I think it's somewhat disingenuous to break it out into pure numbers because you don't you lack the context in which that which that event takes place not to say that of course you know the discussion shouldn't occur I would add to your bit about your router hat that if DDWRT ever gets firmware image for that router you use that if you want like security that gives you more options too I think you can I think it is available for the ASIS I think but uh not sure and a DDWRT totally saved my my neck here it was just gone super flaky and I put that on it's been rock solid like 24-7 for the past what 10 months I'll remember that I'm going to call this a hack of the clones oh that's cool so thank you to Biocow yes you were saying Patrick no I was going to make a really controversial comparison to gun laws and the fact that we're not willing to we I mean the American people is apparently not necessarily willing to curb gun laws even though they are very costly in terms of life and you know terrorism what are we willing to give up and all of that but you're also talking to people with similar values to yourself right if you culturally some people say you know what life are our particular view of life means that that's an acceptable you know byproduct of our behavior and so for them that's legitimate I mean it's I mean it's not of course I mean if it was easy obviously the it wouldn't be a difficult debate I'm just saying that I guess what I'm trying to get at is what I was saying in the beginning I suppose how much are we willing to sacrifice I think when you say terrorism people are sort of immediately thinking that we should sacrifice it's so terrible that we should be sacrificing almost anything in order to fight it and what I'm trying to say is is it really so terrible that we should sacrifice anything I think I think what I think Roger and Patrick you both are saying things that are not incompatible which is Patrick is saying the the danger and impact of terrorism is often overestimated and what Roger is saying is yes but you shouldn't it is actually has impact beyond the numbers of people that it kills and affects and you have to we have to take both of those things into account when you say okay so what should we do in response to it yeah I think yeah no I agree that that is I guess I'm trying to say that we're not having that balance right at the moment I think it's too weighted towards the psychological and as as a resident of a country that has that has had two of the most terrible terrorist attacks in the last year in the previous year in the western world believe me I'm very aware of the emotional impact of terrorist attacks but I think that's the issue terrorist attacks are exactly that they are engineered to have psychological impact and if you let them have that psychological impact which is their only true weapon you let the terrorists win is what is happening which essentially it's kind of true terrorism is about instilling instilling fear and if you let fear rule your judgment of how you're going to fight that terrorism instead of rational thinking then they're kind of achieving their goals I guess is my point and and but to bring this all back that is not what is being litigated in the Apple San Bernardino case it doesn't have anything to do with what should our reaction to terrorism be what it has to do with is should the FBI be able to compel Apple with the searcher like this isn't a question of should we get in the court has said yes you should you have the right FBI in this case to get into that phone and look for evidence the question is should Apple be compelled to assist them in this it's not about Apple has something that they should turn over it's it's it's not about user data it's about should Apple be compelled to create something new under the All Ritz Act does the All Ritz Act give the court the authority to do that yeah that is what is being debated in the House Judiciary Committee is a little broader and includes the things that you and Roger are talking about yeah and that's that the whole the whole issue the legal case I think is a lot easier to debate if you don't add the general moral implications of that legal case and well I think what one of the things the FBI is doing and whether it's by design or just opportunistically is saying look this case gives us a chance to have this discussion because we want there to be an exception created by Congress we know the courts aren't really going to give us a backdoor but we think we could get one if we started a conversation Apple's also saying the same thing they're saying you know what we should have a conversation because Congress should declare very clearly that you're not allowed to make a backdoor so they both think they can get Congress to do what they want which is why we're having these talks which is sort of contradicting what you were saying just before you know it's not just about that legal case it's about having the wider legal case is just about that the Judiciary Committee is about this wider issue because they said ah well now that we've got the public's attention let's see if we can change it to be talking about this other thing which is backdoors yeah but the two are very much linked the legal case is bringing forth the wider conversation yeah but that's but my point was not that it isn't bringing forth the conversation my point is the case itself is not about backdoors it's not about whether you privacy and security should be balanced it's it's very narrowly about should Apple be compelled to assist well yeah I would the case the lower the court case your opinion about the court case totally different if you view it super narrowly that's what it is about well that's what the judge has to decide of course but the the the next you know sentence over is about opens you know that that box enormous box of discussions but that's where that's where the Congress comes in that's why I'm dividing that line is the court shouldn't be deciding well the FBI has has a really good reason so we'll let them do it this time that is not the way it should work and that's not the way it is work yeah yeah no I agree I agree um I'm wondering if that that uh hearing would be happening if that case hadn't been publicized so no I and I think that is a fair point to say like because this case happened and again whether the FBI pushed this case on purpose or not I don't know maybe Apple did I don't know but the fact is that case has got the public's attention and so Apple and the FBI have taken the opportunity to pursue a separate issue which is should we be should we be forced to break our encryption Apple's saying what we're being asked to do here is a pathway to essentially having broken our encryption the FBI is saying you know what we really should have a standard for how we're allowed to get into these things because we don't want to go dark quote unquote yeah it's it's I think it's really past time that we had this discussion seriously and I really hope that it's going to be had seriously with hearing all of the experts that it seems Lando is the ideal person to be having those discussions and questions Lando system Lando's not a system she's an encryption expert you will uh smoothie around the case but yeah yeah yeah you're right I I was very impressed with with her testimony whether it does any good or not who knows well I hope once again you Americans have a discussion that is going to be echoed around the world so you know I really hope that discussion is is had rationally rationally what is rational encryption works every time some days I think we should go back to the stone age and just throw big sticks and rocks at each other to settle scores some days you know what I'm I'm I'm fine with my Xbox and my big screen TV you you go do that I'll stay here I'll go back to my paleo lifestyle as I did my own code I'm I've given up gluten that's the the amount of paleo lifestyle I'm willing to to go to uh-oh what no no oh what's happening uh I I don't think it's desperate I think I just put the wrong in bed in the uh show in the post the podcast will get it correct but anybody going to the post right now and trying to play the embed would get yesterday's episode by a mistake so don't go there yet audience wait but near minutes yeah yeah I just kind of I was paying too much attention to our excellent conversation and forgot to upload thank you for supporting your creators says patreon oh yeah today's payday for the patrons for the patreoners for the for the patre for the patriots is patriots for the oh you mean the the creators yeah the creators because in uh in on the French show we call the contributors the patriots patriots you should call it pack tricots not really no no we should definitely not do that who is the uh is the book out the uh so yeah I think the life engineer is out today uh by J. F. Dubot it's the first in the sword and laser collection for I ink shares and it's about universe where the robots took over long ago and everything's great and there's no crime or is there what happens after robots take over the universe yeah J. F. basically was like what if the robots took over and everything was great then and then tell that story something happened well yeah obviously and I have you got to have something happen or it's not a very good story and this is a very good story no the robots took over everything's great the end it's like two pages long yeah so he decided well maybe I'll have something happen and then he did and it's a great story so go check it out amazon just look up the life engineer I just tweeted it so awesome thank you all of you tweet it tweet like the wind by the way we saw an eagle today oh really it was actually yeah there's an eagle that was that came back to live here in the area wow and we saw it a bald eagle I don't think so I don't know what kind of eagle it was flying too high was it a a a two-page eagle is it kind of a dark brown yeah probably a golden eagle oh yeah what just happened sounds like robertron oh it's gone on it was just what what's happening what's happening oh it's fine now I don't know what happened one one you just went hmm and then it sounded like robertron for a second and then it went away oh maybe it was I was actually being robertron maybe you were actually that's the only conclusion I can reach now from the future from everything is wonderful I am a k-peck all right ladies and gents we are out of here thank you for watching we'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson goodbye


So one of the most explicit ways in which this idea of the tyranny of need comes up is, are you familiar with this intersectionality in this cultural thing where you get a score based on how needy you are, supposedly, and, you know, you have a hierarchy of need where, you know, you get added scores, but it seems like the left is obsessed with this idea of need. And, and, and, and it's so much of both in a cultural and an economic, cultural and economic agendas driven by this idea of who is the neediest. Yes, and need, let's be clear on what need means, according to altruism. When altruism says you have more money than your neighbor, you have to help him out. Well, what about your needs? Why, why are your neighbor's needs take precedence over yours? There's no way to measure the extent of the need because what there's only one definition that altruism has of need, and that is need is something that requires someone else's sacrifice to fulfill.   That's not a need that that that altruism cares about. Altruism cares about a need that you can't fulfill for yourself the need that you've abdicated self responsibility. And you say, I don't have money for x, somebody else has to provide it for me, then you have a need suddenly, then altruism comes in and the welfare state comes in and says, we will provide for you. So and need the more the need is, which means the more sacrifice required to fulfill it, the more urgent it becomes, and the more the state acts in order to fulfill it. The according to altruism, remember, it's not just love thy neighbor, it's love thy enemy, love people who hate you, love people who want to harm you. The greater the sacrifice on your part, the greater is the demand that altruism makes on you, the greater altruism says you must do it because it means so much suffering for you. And if you talk about things like this intersectionality, you talk about the the one of the things that really strikes me as so terribly unjust is what's happening now in athletics, where you have transgender athletes competing in sports, where you have a transgender woman used to be a male became a woman competing in let's in women's sports and women's swimming women's gymnastics women's fencing. And they obviously have a clear physical advantage. It's the whole purpose behind creating separate athletic forums for men and women in the first place. Yet that is ignored. What what about the needs of all the athletes who spent years and years perfecting their skills, trying to become champions, becoming, you know, a tenth of a second better. What about their needs, which are being crushed by somebody who has clear physical advantages that they're not entitled to in that competition, but because they're transgender, they're allowed to compete. And it's their needs that that are paramount. Why are the needs of this transgender athlete more important than the needs of all those other athletes who've worked all their lives to achieve what is now being taken away from them. And it's because it's it's it requires a greater sacrifice on their part to give up the goal that they deserve in favor of giving it to someone who does not deserve it. That's what altruism says, give up sacrifice, the earned for the unearned sacrifice, the rational to the irrational, that is the essence of altruism. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me, you get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to Iran book show dot com slash support, go to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube, so that you get announcement when we go live. And for those of you who already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.


Hi and welcome to the session, let's work out the following question.  So let us see the solution to this question. First of all we see that X squared plus X minus 2 is equal to X plus 2 into X minus 1. Now let the polynomial PX be X minus 1 into 2X squared plus AX plus 2 since X plus 2 is a factor of PX therefore P at minus 2 should be equal to 0 by the factor theorem. This implies minus 2 minus 1 into 2 into minus 1 the whole square minus 2A plus 2 sorry this will be 2 into minus 2 the whole square plus A into minus 2 plus 2 should be equal to 0. This implies minus 3 into 8 minus 2A plus 2 should be equal to 0 or we can say minus 3 into 10 minus 2A should be equal to 0. This implies minus 30 plus 6A is equal to 0 this implies 6A is equal to 30 this implies that A is equal to 5. Now let the polynomial QX be equal to X plus 2 into 3X squared plus BX plus 1 since X minus 1 is a factor of QX. This implies Q at 1 should be equal to 0 again by the factor theorem. This implies 1 plus 2 into 3 plus B plus 1 is equal to 0 this implies 3 into 4 plus B should be equal to 0. This implies 12 plus 3 B should be equal to 0 this implies B should be equal to minus 4. So our answer to this question is that A is equal to 5 B is equal to minus 4. So I hope that you understood the solution and enjoyed the session have a good day.