Oh, we're live. Hurray. Now, the last couple of days, people have said that Alphacic Radio wasn't picking up. So yeah, I had issues too. I tried to get a hold of Todd, but I haven't got back to me yet. I just got to get a hold of it lately, but I did notice it wasn't, it was giving me trouble yesterday, but today was okay on TMS. So maybe you'll be all right. All right. I'm going to go ahead and try it. There we go. Samara Lynn is going to be on the show. Thank you for joining us again, Samara. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yeah. We are going to talk home networking. We're going to talk crazy optical zoom in a phone. Talk a little bit about Twitter, Snapchat. Scott, I put us alternating these top three here. Oh, okay. I can do that. Oh, yeah, I see the S and the T now. Yep. Just you just had the one there.  Is that enterprising? We haven't, but it's just something that I keep my eye on more to see if it's of interest to our audience. It's, it seems like a toe in the water sort of situation there. How so? Well, it's just like that experimenting. Yeah. Like, well, comparing it to what Amazon did, right? Where they're like, this, here's your enterprise contracts. And this is the per, per site, you know, per user license. This is like, here's hangouts, but with 30 people instead of 10, you know? What do you think? Yeah, that's, um, that's very Google-ly tendency to release things like that. Definitely. You think it's, well, sometimes I feel like it's more, they can do that. And other companies have a lot more at stake if they, if they don't have the perfect, you know, watertight launch. That's so true. Yeah. Maybe that's a nice thing for them to be able to do. And maybe it makes them, it's interesting. I always get nervous when they launch a new video conferencing app because it usually causes problems with hangouts on it. Yeah. I think, uh, I think we're okay so far. You know, it's been, what's that? Was it, did it hit those, all the app stores yesterday? I can't remember. Yeah. It just kind of showed up. They didn't, they didn't make a big deal out of it.  They're, they're not out there trumpeting it. They just sort of slipped it into the app store. Well, the reason I ask is I was having a hangout issues specifically yesterday and I thought, what is going on that? Yeah, maybe, maybe something to do with that. Snago in our chat rooms, like everything causes issues with hangouts. It's hard to tell. Just saying that was going to mess up hangouts today. I remember they had some video conferencing app two years ago that they launched some video conferencing feature and hangouts didn't work that day. And Jenny Josephson was convinced that they, that that was it. All right. Well, let's get going. You guys ready? Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by its audience. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 1st, St. David's Day 2017. I'm Tom Merritt joining me. Scott Johnson alongside for the Wednesday festivities. How have you been, Scott? I'm doing pretty good. I'm curious what St. David's famous for. Can you tell me in a nutshell, what did he do? I don't know, but I know it's the Welsh National Holiday and they used to celebrate by pinning a leak to their shirt.  It was canonized. I don't know that may be a new reason for it. Joining us today to talk a little bit later on about home networking technology, technology editor at Black Enterprise Magazine. Samara Lynn. Samara, great to have you alongside. Thanks for spending some time and sharing your expertise with us today. Oh, thank you so much. I'm so excited to join you today. I was so pleased when we got on online at first and Samara has actually watched the show before, which I don't know as soon as anyone has done. So that was that was nice to know. Well, we got some some news to get to before we get to the main discussion. For instance, Oculus lowered the price of its Rift headset Wednesday to five hundred dollars down from six hundred dollars. And then the Oculus touch motion controllers got cut in half. They're now a hundred dollars down from two hundred dollars. And if you bought either in the last 30 days, they're going to give you a fifty dollar credit in the Oculus digital store killer deal. But I'm I don't I know to two hundred dollars off is a great deal, actually. But I'm a little concerned as to why that dropped so quick. And I don't know what that says about Oculus. I guess we'll find out a little later. The first Microsoft partner for mixed reality, that would be Acer. We'll start shipping a headset to developers today with more partners to follow this month, plus Microsoft confirms the Xbox and Project Scorpio will get mixed reality experiences in 2018. Kind of a big announcement there. Yeah, it's interesting to see that that finally shipping, although still want to see what they what uses they put it to. I think that's part of the reason Microsoft is putting them out there to Google has an enterprise level video conferencing app that handles up to 30 participants and integrates with G Suite at meet.google.com and in the iOS app store kind of sneakily slipped it out there. If you want to go check that out. Now here are some more top stories. All right, Twitter, VP of Engineering Ed Ho posted about new anti harassment features Wednesday. Users can mute specific words, including usernames. So you can just say if they ever say donuts, I don't want to see it. Not that that would be harassment, but you can just mute anything from your timeline before you could mute things from notifications. Now you can do it from your timeline. Users can choose to mute accounts with the default egg avatar and unconfirmed email addresses or phone numbers. Those are often bots and spam and trolls. And so you could just say, I don't even want to see those until they've taken the time to set up their profile. Proactive measures will attempt to identify abusive accounts and take actions like limiting visibility only to your direct followers for a period of time. So if you fall afoul of the rules, you'll still be able to post. You just won't be seen in the public timeline. And Twitter will start notifying you when it takes action after you report something before it was you would report and you'd wonder if something ever happened. Now they'll take some measures to let you know what happened. Scott, these are being well received, but Twitter's got a lot of work to do to win some people's trust. It's a nice early start. I think there's plenty more to do. I also think it's a little weirdly late. All these features are coming a little bit late in the now 11 year cycle of the service. I would like to see more. However, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the you can automatically sort of mute or block essentially eggheads from talking to you, I went, oh, that's great. That actually makes a ton of sense. A lot of what I have to dig through are either fake accounts or troll accounts that were set up five minutes ago just to give me a hard time or whatever. And and I can just sort of ignore those. But then I started to think, how advanced is that checking? In other words, could I upload an exact JPEG replica of the egg avatar? And will that now see me as a new guy or or somebody who's more established on the service? Or will that still get caught as, you know, it's just an egg guy? I don't know. I feel like someone's going to gain the system is all and and oftentimes people do. So we'll see. They're small steps. They're all in the right direction. I hope it leads to more, you know, concrete features in the future is in terms of creating better security, better privacy and better control over the kind of garbage that we get on Twitter right now. Yes, Samara, what do you think about this? I know you use Twitter. I don't know how much you do a lot. Yeah. So how are these received by you? You know, I didn't if I recall, didn't Twitter roll out not too long ago, a set of sort of checks and then they had to roll them back. It just seems like Twitter never really gets it right. And I think this was after the whole Leslie Jones harassment thing, which we covered quite extensively. But, you know, I don't know. I think I think if Twitter figures out that secret sauce of how to kind of gain some control, maybe they can figure out how to finally make some money with the platform or two. Well, yeah. And how do you get people who aren't using it anymore or using it less or are afraid to post? Some people still read it, but they're like, I just don't want to talk on it and afraid, maybe even overstating it, but just tired, right? How do you get those people to come back? Yeah, maybe they maybe some really enhanced good privacy and control would entice those those users. Yeah, I know you know, people that it would help for sure. But also I just just something needs to be done. Like I'm happy just to have even if this is just really easy groundwork like this whole blocking egg avatar is I feel like they could have done that seven years ago and everybody would have been happy. So I don't know why I keep coming back to why is it taking him so long to do this stuff? But I'm trying to have the attitude of great, you're doing it now. That's good. Maybe we've just hit a critical mass to the point where this is now now is when it has to happen. Like now more than ever, we've got to plug you know, plug up that damn. And that's great. I think that that's great whenever they start doing it. But they have a lot to prove and they've had a long history of at least looking like they don't care that much about this side of things. So this is their chance. I think it's I think we should all give them a window to figure it out. And if they can, great. And if not, well, back to scrutiny heaven, I guess.  Yeah, that's true. Also, my avatar currently is a drawing of a guy wearing a piece of paper with a blue egg avatar in his face. I wonder if I imagine they just look at a setting to see if it's if they've added one rather than image recognition. But that's interesting. It would be funny if I got blocked because of that. I can't believe it up to see part of me wants to see. Anyway, Facebook and new tools to help prevent suicides. This is really interesting. Oh, this is you. Sorry. Let me scoot back up. Sources tell Kate, Katie Benner of the New York Times that Snap Incorporated. This is the parent company of everyone's favorite social network, I suppose, developed a camera equipped UAV that could take overhead pictures and video and post them directly to Snapchat. It was unclear, however, if the drone will go on the market or end up in the market, but it was developed part as part of CEO Evan Spiegel's vision of Snap as a modern camera company. Also, Snap also set its IPO price at 17 bucks a share, valuing the company at $24 billion, generating $4 billion in cash. And that was all the talk on every financial site I saw today. Yeah, so a couple of things going on here. One is Snapchat didn't get all the way to the top of their range, but they got above what they wanted to have for sure. So they're making some money there. That's definitely going to happen. And the other one is not so much that they would put out a UAV or a quadcopter type product, but that they are thinking about that. I mean, it does show an answer to one of the questions of the IPO, which is how is Snapchat going to make money? Can they keep making money off advertising? And I think Evan Spiegel is indicating, well, one of the ways we want to make money is to sell products to become a photography company. So, Marty, you see yourself using Snapchat as a photography company? Well, you know, I'm a little bit probably older than their average demographic of user. But, you know, I think they had the the snap glasses. Yeah, the spectacles, right. That kind of an introduction of them trying to create some product. And I think you're right. I think they're going to have to figure out a monetization model, because, you know, even with Twitter, even advertising, that's not going so well for them. And I wonder if Snap is going to be in the same boat. Yeah, also, I would throw this out. They that is not a company I would associate with quality photography. Just straight up, right? That's not Snapchat strength. It never has been. In fact, it was always annoying to me that all other social network media apps tended to take better photos raw from the camera than you could do from within Snapchat.  So I assume that part of that is a is sort of an overhead. Nobody cares. This the people who love Snapchat like the raw nature of it. They want it just to be, you know, quick and fast and easy. And who cares if it's a little bit of a of a ruddy looking JPEG or whatever. But to call yourselves a photography company and all that that implies, probably means they need to improve that some, because I don't think they have that reputation at all at this point. So you mean putting animal ears on me in a Snapchat filter doesn't make doesn't make them a photography company. Nice look. Real nice, but yeah, like they've done so many things right. And the one thing they're hanging their hat on in terms of getting investors excited is this one thing they've kind of traditionally been terrible at. So so I don't know how that's going to go for them. Well, the best camera you have is the Snapchat you have with you. Facebook announced new tools to prevent suicide. Scott just just mentioned this a minute ago. Here's the rest of that story. If a friend reports concerns during a live video, or if Facebook's AI detects a pattern of concern, Facebook staff, special staff devoted to this will be alerted and review the report quickly and provide suicide prevention resources to the person in question if they feel like this is a legitimate report. Facebook partnered with Crisis Text Line, the National Eating Disorder Association and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to develop the program. People in crisis will be available to connect directly with mental health services through Facebook Messenger. So we often talk about combating you know, hoax news reports and and trolls and all of that. And we were just talking about that with Twitter, but this is Facebook being very proactive in a in a significant mental health area. Can I can I give it false positives if I go on there and just say things that put me in the light? Well, and that's why they have the the the staff reviewing this is to say, OK, does this look like someone who's who's actually in distress? You know, these are these are folks trained to do that. The AI is just kind of flagging it to say, hey, you might want to look at this and see if there's cause for concern. And there's a lot of talk in this article about striking the balance between violating someone's privacy and and and forcing them away and making help available to them and and sort of, you know, how do you make sure that you're not intruding but at the same, you know, and and driving someone away from help, but at the same time making sure they have a door to walk through. Yeah, I assume my sister, who's a psychologist currently in Sweden, but she does with a lot of clients who some of their some of their issues are suicide or suicidal thoughts. And she tells me that the signs are often very obscure calls for help. And let's say with young people, that includes their social networks and them making. Not passive aggressors is not the right word, but veiled sort of statements that could be interpreted as oh, this is this is the beginning of something we need to zero in on this. That's where I want. This is that's where I'm really curious about this to see if they can zero in on that stuff effectively and accurately and do some real good, because that would be that would be amazing given the reach that Facebook has. And, you know, the tendency for a lot of people before committing suicide, they tend to go to Facebook and leave letters and things. And it'd be nice if somehow we could get in between them and that and and make a difference. Yeah, I think this is Facebook taking some responsibility for the fact that they, you know, they see a lot more than anything else in existence right now that that's happening. You know, Samara, I don't see that there's much negative here, except for the privacy implications, maybe. Yeah, but I think that's kind of huge. I mean, I worked in IT health care for a lot of years before getting into journalism and, you know, with HIPAA and privacy laws. And I don't I mean, I just that that's a real slippery slope. I think I think it's great. We've it's been pretty horrifying, some of the news of some of the suicides that have occurred on Facebook Live, especially. But I definitely think there will be some privacy issues. Yeah, that is a that is a delicate balance for sure. Pretty much a guarantee. Well, the reviews for the Nintendo Switch are out in advance of its shipping on Friday. Mine should be here Friday afternoon, I hope. So far, most of the views are pretty positive and tend to credit it with being a better mobile console than it is a home console, something I think a lot of us sort of predicted a little bit. But that's all coming to light now. Anyway, but nothing that's switching between the two works well. That seems to be pretty good negative focus on the lack of launch titles and horsepower of the device itself. The review I read earlier today in ours, Technica was really glowing about the portability side of the usage of this device outside of battery life. Battery life is an issue and a problem. Also, the USBC charger that is underneath the unit, if you want to charge it and use it as a portable device is kind of just sticking awkwardly down and out. So it's hard to sort of set it somewhere that where without to sort of pinching the cord, which can lead to short some things like that. I'm really anxious to get it on Friday. I'm sure that me and multiple co-hosts of DTNs during the week are going to have lots of takes on that device. And I'm very much looking forward to reporting in with what I think. Yeah, we're actually delaying our Friday show until Saturday morning because we want to talk to Lirtad in Thailand about the differences in e-commerce there. But it also gives us a chance to spend a little more time playing around with this thing. And Patrick Beja will be on the show to give some responses to that or some reactions to that as well. Now, Samara, I know you're in the Xbox land, I've seen. Do you ever Zelda or Mario? Does this tempt you? You know, I don't. But when I was with PC Mag, I worked with Will Greenwald and Jeff Wilson and they're really the gaming analysts and they're pretty intrigued by this thing. So their intrigue is getting me intrigued. So I'm going to follow the reviews and see see how it pans out, how the overall consensus is on this thing. It looks interesting. Yeah, it is. It's very interesting. It's a handheld console. Yeah, for anyone who missed it as a yesterday, the day before. Anyway, there was a big announcement about third party indie support for this device. And they released the names of games and developers who are currently working on titles for the switch, either close to launch or thereafter. And it is an impressive list. It is almost steam like in terms of its in terms of its breadth and variety.  I think the promise of seeing a lot of stuff happen on PlayStation Vita was sort of realized and then kind of forgotten. There's a chance to do it here. And you're also talking about a Nintendo platform that has a hyper focus on quality first party titles. If they filled in the rest with third party indie titles and right now is the best time for those kinds of games, this will turn this device into something really, really special. So there's a lot that can go right. And there's a few things that can go wrong and everybody's just holding their breath and crossing their fingers and the Nintendo's got it under control. My buddies at PC Mag love it. I mean, they called it fantastic. And they're sticklers when it comes to their gaming gear. So, yeah, I remember working with Will several years back. And yeah, he he he does not give his love undeservingly. Put it that way. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds like when it's in console mode, it has it has a few quirks and a few problems. But but when it's in mobile mode, it works great. So, yeah, I mean, there's this grand goal of saying and everybody everybody making video games always had this goal. Nintendo maybe is the only one to try to try to match it or get there. But where we could have as powerful a unit in our hand as we do when we connect it to our television. And they're not quite there. It's almost there and it's impressively there, but it's not PS4 Xbox one there. And that's probably OK, because you can do a lot with stylization and the kind of graphics people expect from Nintendo consoles and hardware, I think you can get away with a lot. But scaling up from what's in your hand to what's on your TV isn't as easy as it sounds. Or as you know, it's not that quick of a transition. So I think that it's going to be fine in that way, but the real plan or the real usage for this thing is going to be on the go. And I'll bet a second generation of this thing attacks the battery power problem in a major way. They always have a second revision that's always better than their last gen of hardware. So those early adopters like me are probably chomping at the bit for what really would end up being its version of a DS Lite or its version of the 3DS XL or something where all of the things we liked about it are there, yet it's improved in some other way. That's kind of their pattern. And good luck on that probably another year before that comes out. I'm going to know that there are people in the audience right now who are like, ah, the performance on that is crap. I would never, I would never use that. And for you, my friends, we have NVIDIA launching the GeForce GTX 1080i Ti video card. The new GPU is largely based on the same GP102 chip as the Titan X with 3584 stream processors, 224 texture units. And video says the 1080 Ti edges out the Titan X on performance. And they'd have no reason to lie. They're both their own product. And they attribute that to 11 gigabytes of GDDR5X VRAM clocked at 11 gigahertz, resulting in higher memory bandwidth of 484 gigabytes per second. Preorders begin March 2nd at 11 a.m., shipping March 10th if you've got $700 to spare. And if you don't, NVIDIA announced a price cut to the GTX 1080. That's only, only $500 now. I love that they call it the old 1080. Oh, that's me calling it the old, not them, no. Yeah, that thing just came out. And this is the rate at which we get video card revisions from NVIDIA. So this puts me in a weird position. I currently have a gaming PC with last generation's fastest card, which was the 980 Ti. So the Ti level card, but in the last gen. And when the 1080 came out, I was being told by NVIDIA themselves that looking at performance stuff, we weren't talking about a huge jump from the 1080 from the 980 Ti. But this is substantial. If it's beating Titan X on speed and performance, gosh, dang it. I don't have 700 bucks laying around, but I really want one. And I suspect this is going to sell well. Samar, are you excited about a hot new contender in the video card world? It's been a while since I've had, or rigged up a gaming desktop, but I'm telling you, that is just one word for it, is sick. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. That is the appropriate description that NVIDIA should be putting in their press releases. 484 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth is, yeah. I think that qualifies probably as sick. It's incredible. It's going to be great. And I'm very much looking forward to it. Speaking of numbers that have gone higher, the Verges Vlad Sabob noticed a new 5x optical zoom and image stabilization for smartphone phones from Oppo. It's a Chinese company. This is being shown at Mobile World Congress. 5x dual camera zoom uses a prism to direct light to a second sensor that lies sideways inside the phone to let it have a longer lens. It's actually kind of ingenious if you look at it. Without really thickening the phone, think of it as like a periscope, the way you'd use in like a pirate movie or whatever. Oppo says the assembly is 5.7 millimeters thick and should be available in one of its phones by the end of the year. And Tom, you were saying before the show, they currently hold the number three spot in total. I think it's three. Yeah. They're one of the top selling smartphone makers in the world and they sell almost all their phones in China. This is an ingenious attempt. And Vlad Sabob, who I respect, says that the images look pretty good. He's got a full evaluation at the Verge, of course. I would like to see it in use myself, but optical image stabilization and optical zoom at 5X seems impossible without making the phone this thick, like a DSLR thick, right? So I love this approach and I love these kind of design quirks where you look at it and you say, gosh, why didn't I think of that? Yeah, just lay it sideways. Now before the show, Roger Chang was saying, one of the problems you'll have there is your image quality just can't be as good when you're slowing the speed of light down.  Sure, that seems like there may be some degradation. It'll be hard to measure it. But my bigger question is, is this something that Oppo could patent or sell or license to other phone manufacturers? Because that's where it seems a little bit world changing. If it does everything it's promised, you could see this and everybody from Samsung to Apple and it seems like it'd be good for Oppo to sort of own that technology. Well, Apple will come up with their own version that is tilted the other way and then Oppo will have to sue them for patent violations and that'll drag on for years, right? Apple could turn around and sue them because Apple sounds like Oppo and that you could... Yeah, yeah, there you go. That would be amazing. I'm not saying Samsung wouldn't do the same thing, but yeah, I know if this works, this could add optical zoom to lots of phones one way or another. Yeah, seems really neat. Samara, does it seem too crazy to work to you? It's just, yeah, it's kind of blowing my mind. It's just so like, yeah, how come no one did that other than this company that I've never heard of before and is a palindrome, which is extra cool. Yeah, exactly. Just extra points for that too. Yeah, I'm very curious about this, but I think it's probably... I don't like to call things under coverage because there's so many things to cover in the world of technology, but I think there might be something more to this than meets the eye. It could be totally wrong. Maybe it's just... Before you get flooded with emails that my pirate comparison is wrong, I know what a periscope is. It's like, I should have said like submarine. They look up, it goes up, it goes out. So that is obviously different than like a long telescope is what I was... Right, right. Okay, thank you. Isn't that kind of the idea where the degradation can come from? You're reflecting... Yeah, because it's taken a right turn, exactly. So again, you're talking about taste though. Like somebody who's like, I just need a camera that's good, but I want to be able to get a really good zoom.  I don't care if it's the crispest picture in the world, but make it a little better when I zoom 5x, right? That's what those could do. Yeah, they could do it, yep. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in less than 10 minutes, I've got an idea for you. Subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com, our sister's show, and that's a look at the top stories. All right, folks, lots of options out there. If you're putting together your home network or you're upgrading your home network, and one of the big trends is these mesh networking routers. Eero was one of the first to market, but there's also Luma and Netgears Orbi and the Google Wi-Fi and the list goes on. So Scott and I were talking a while back and you were saying, Scott, like I don't know if I really need this, if I want this, how it works, right? Yeah, and not only that, we at the time said, wouldn't it be cool if we get a guest in here who knew more about these things than we do. And so, Samara, we couldn't be more thrilled to have you here. And I've got a couple of questions for you. Open for a few? Absolutely. All right. First of all, explain what a mesh network is in the simplest of terms, because when you talk to somebody like me, I'm fairly tech savvy. I know what I'm doing. I build my own computers. I do this stuff here and there. But when it comes to Wi-Fi or Internet connectivity, I'm just like, give me a router. I want it to work. And I get speed for Netflix to come through the way it's supposed to. And then I kind of try to set it and forget it. But mesh networking goes a little bit further to give you maximum bandwidth, better control, better security potentially. Tell me how all that's supposed to work. So your traditional router, you set it up. It emits its bandwidth or signal throughout your house. But the problem with the way the antennas are in a lot of the traditional routers would kind of look like these flat things that with the antennas sticking out of them is that they have very limited range. So a lot of times you buy this $200, $300 router and you won't be able to get a signal upstairs in your bedroom. So along comes this idea of mesh networking and it's not really new. Mesh networking has been in businesses and enterprises for quite some time. And the concept of a mesh network is instead of one router, you kind of split up a router. You have all these little nodes and you put them all around in an area. And then these nodes, they sort of communicate with each other to make sure that there's wide area of coverage of Wi-Fi. So when I have... Sort of blankets. When you used to go and buy just a Wi-Fi extender, that's not quite the same though, is it? Not the same. It's not the same. Because an extender, it's continuing that signal, but what's happening with an extender is that it has the throughput. So you're really making a sacrifice in speed. I see. So you're basically creating your own... Kind of like your own wide area network within the space... Exactly, with Wi-Fi, exactly. What is that so expensive? And is it worth it? I mean, I know it's early days and so the way this stuff tends to go is it gets less expensive as a higher adoption. But why is it so much more expensive than it is just to get a Wi-Fi router? Well, there's more hardware. The antennas are more sophisticated. I was given a kind of sneak peek by Linksys. They have something called Develop coming out this spring and that's their mesh networking system and they've absolutely reshaged their entire router line to accommodate the new more complex antenna structure and that probably adds to the cost. But what I'm seeing with a lot of these solutions too is they're pretty sophisticated with their software. They do a lot with security. They do a lot with intruder detection. You can see who's popping onto your Wi-Fi. So I think there's some cost involved with that. I think what they're kind of hoping is that you get an arrow or you get Luma and you have it and that's pretty much going to be your solution for five or 10 years. So it's sort of an investment. Yeah, that makes sense. So let's say I'm in a studio apartment. It's just me. I got a kitchen right next to my bed for all I know. All right? That's not where I live. But if I live that way somewhere in New York, in fact, probably just a Wi-Fi router is going to be all I need. Right? Yeah, unless you sleep in a Faraday cage or some crazy new thing, you're good with just a regular. Which probably a couple of our listeners do. But yeah, probably do. And I'm glad you brought that up because my studio where I'm recording from right now is inadvertently a little bit of a Faraday cage. I have this ceiling system that we built, custom, that turns out to be really great for podcasting and lots of other reasons why it's good. But it is kind of bad on Wi-Fi signals getting out of here. So it seems like I would benefit from some sort of mesh network where I could get sort of equal bandwidth penetration throughout the house if I just went for more than just this Wi-Fi router and hope for the best upstairs. Yeah, if any situation where you've gotten like a high quality dual band Wi-Fi router, you know, like more of a top shelf, one within the last five years, let's say, and you still have dead zones, you want to look into a mesh networking solution. Definitely. So do you have, I mean, I realize that everyone's going to have a different situation. Like I mentioned, somebody in a single room flat may not have to even worry about this, but when is a two or three pack necessary? Like what do you think the threshold is? It depends on the square area. I talked with Paul Judge at CES and I had asked him that very question. I think he had told me the two pack was about up to 1,000 square feet, if I recall, and I think they sell from two to three to six packs. But they have guidelines as far as area space, the square footage as to what you should go with. You could always get two and then add on. Yeah. And I can say from my own experience with the Eero, our ONT where the fiber comes in is at one end. And so that changed how I had to arrange things. I thought I could do it one way and it's not the square footage in my case so much as the length to be able to just get it all the way over to the other end of the house. Yeah. Yeah. So in my also relatively unique case, is it going to still, I mean, is the fact that the ceilings here going to be a problem either way? Because let's say one of the nodes is in here and the other nodes upstairs someplace and a third node somewhere else at the end of the house. Any consideration for that part of this? Should you bring a professional in and say, hey, map me out, make sure this is all done the way that it absolutely should be done or can an average Joe do it as long as he's willing to buy the three-packing needs? Well, one of the great things about, and I've actually only looked at the software on Luma, so I can't speak to Eero even though I have it at my desk. I haven't opened it yet. Luma has software capability where it will advise you where to place each node. So it can actually measure the throughput and see how negotiate the range and then it'll advise you, kind of give you direction as to where to place the nodes, the extra nodes. So there is some intelligence built in the software. Yeah, Eero has a little bit of a similar system too and I used that when one node on the end just wasn't as fast as it should be. It wasn't giving me a warning, but it just wasn't as fast. I could tell when I was around that node and so I used that system and I ended up moving one of the other of the three and it solved it. It's been great ever since. Yeah, and I think kind of like when we were speaking about the Nintendo, it's still early for this consumer mesh networking and I think when we see the second generation come around it's going to get a lot better. Wow, interesting. And in terms of timeline, how long do you think we wait for the sort of 2.0 of this technology? I would say it's probably going to be on par when we first started seeing 802.11ac routers come out. At first a lot of us in the analysts, we were measuring it, we were like, we don't really see any difference and then when the second generation came out about two years later, we were like, okay, wow, yeah, we get it. So I would say within maybe another 12 to 24 months you'll start seeing the second generation. But CES 2019, I would say. All right. Well, that's probably good. Some people are sort of sitting on this and deciding what to do. So let's just briefly about security. Are we okay to depend on the router's firewall? And are there special things to do? Or again, is this software smart enough to just sort of walk us through it and not, and give us all the security we need without us having to know everything about it? Yeah, I think for the average person, the firewall should be baked in with the router and it's pretty sufficient. You know, we had that big DDoS, no, I'm sorry, that bot that took over routers, I think last summer, and was like compromising people's home networks. Well, I know I was speaking to Dr. Judge over the founder of Luma. He was saying how they really took pains to avoid that sort of compromise. And I would bet most of the other networking router vendors did the same. Yeah. We had a guy in our Slack asking us earlier today, if there's any good scanners out there for just scanning your home network. I mean, we're all used to having scanners running on individual devices, right? But I didn't know of anything in particular. I know there's an Internet of Things scanner that'll look and see if your IP address is compromised and things like that. But I don't know if you know of anything or if we just throw it out to the audience, if anybody does, of just a good way to scan your own network. That there's plenty of hacker tools for that, but something that sort of plug and play for someone that really doesn't want to get as deep into it. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's yeah, I don't know if the top of my head, but I know just really, you know, securing the endpoints, you know, before and having that firewall in the router and having that enabled, before it even gets past, you know, the perimeter into your network. On the fly, probably it's just something that's really left up to the router. I don't know of any independent scanning solutions for home user. Are there any do-it-yourself tricks that you know of or that anybody's gone through? I mean, I know with Wi-Fi, as it's continued to evolve, it used to be very popular to attach like a Pringles candy or router or whatever and really extend the range to these very sort of mad max kind of ways of doing things. Is there anything in the mesh world that is that's cropping up for people like, oh, by the way, if you connected to this pipe in your basement, you're really going to get good speed or whatever? Well, I mean, I guess the precursor to this mesh networking was someone just taking a router and then taking another router and like kind of like, you know, connecting them to extend the network, bridging them. So I mean, if you want to go that way, you can, but I don't think that's probably as polished a solution as these new mesh networking consumer kits that are coming out. So don't wrap your luma or your Eero in aluminum foil. No. Yeah, yeah, you know. Probably wouldn't want to do that. Yeah, recycle your Pringles, you know. Although that trick still might work on like a Nighthawk or something where you have to have it on one side and yeah, something like that. Yeah, there's a video on YouTube. I actually did that with a Nighthawk. I made like a aluminum parabola and I just kind of see it. It did make a little bit of a difference, but nothing like a 2016, 2017 device. So of these devices of the, of the, let's just take even the three, the four, the Orbi, the Luma, the Eero, and even Google Wi-Fi's three pack, is there a consensus as to which one's the best value right now if somebody's going to shell out the $400 or so? Well, you know, I haven't done bandwidth testing yet on them, but I'm going to tell you when I've spoken to some of the more traditional router vendors like Lynxense and Netgear, they kept making comparisons to Eero. So that leads me to think that probably Eero is leading the pack right now. And I think through the grapevine, I think that's the general consensus, even with some of the router analysts I've spoken with. Okay, we'll call it. And a lot of the new ones are capable of faster, but there's a big difference between capability and performance in the field, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. Tom, you just put a little bit. Yeah, real quickly. Steve, I in our chat room said I've used QALUS vulnerability scanners in the enterprise before, and you might be able to try their free scanner at home if you want to scan your local network. So that's- I wonder, I don't know if this is the case or not, but I always wondered if there are iOS or Android apps for phones that are on the Wi-Fi network that can do some of this. I don't know so much security scans, I know certainly you can get speed checks and that sort of thing, but it'd be really cool if there was a way to do it with your mobile device and you could also test for dead zones or weaker spots and things like that. But I say all of that knowing that you've said it a couple of times now that the software is really smart with these things. And that's the thing I'm most excited about. If there's been any kind of wrong with the home networking world in the past, it's been cryptic, crummy, firmware broken software that's just not great no matter who's doing it. And either it's made to be so simple to use that they forget all the important stuff that needs to be under the hood, or it's so overly complicated or janky that nobody ever wants to use it again. And that gives me a lot of hope in this that you're saying that that software is not just smart but intuitive and easier to use. So I can't even imagine if it's going to get better with the second gen then I say bring it on. Maybe we all need to wait 12 months. Yeah, and that's another reason why I think Eero's leading a pack. I think with not so much speeds and feeds, but everyone's telling me how easy it is to set up. Now, some of your viewers, they might want something more nuts and bolts they can get their hands on, but I think for the average home user, they want to set it up, plug it in, they want it to work. And that's what I'm hearing is so great about Eero. Yeah, I can back that up. The management software is fantastic. And even though I do like to go in and dig deep into the router, I don't like to have to if I just want something really easy. And I'm being able to run a speed test from my phone and just check, like, is there any problem on the line? Being able to send a text message to someone with a customized password that only they will use and it will time out and all of that, that's good stuff. The downside is it is cloud-based. So, you know, there is that chance that Eero's service has a problem and then you have problems managing your router because of that and you have to work around it. Yeah, absolutely. That definitely is the, you know, the problem.  Yeah, right. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them. That's how we come up with the stuff we talk about on the show. It's dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Real quickly, our pick of the day comes from Kenji Yoshino, who says, for those interested in learning more about venture capital, like from yesterday's show, Startup Security Weekly discusses different startups, funding, and strategies from an infosec security startup's point of view. You can check that out at securityweekly.com. Slash subscribe. Thanks for sending that, Kenji. Send your picks to us, folks, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com. Slash picks. How did you deal with the great internet outage yesterday, Samara?  Yeah, I was trying to, yeah, a couple of sites. There are a couple of, actually a couple of startups are trying to send me links to their site. We write about quite a few startups here at Black Enterprise. And I could tell the ones that were on AWS. I'm like, oh, you're on AWS. I can't get to your site. So put me a little bit behind my work, but that's about it. It was a bummer. Yesterday was a real bummer across the board. I mean, for me, I couldn't post shows. I couldn't stream to Twitch for a while because all of Twitch is based on Amazon stuff. And there were all kinds of server issues and routing issues. And man, when an S3 server goes down, you realize as much as we talk about being in Facebook's walled garden or Google's walled garden or whoever's walled garden on the internet, we're all in Amazon S3's walled garden. It seems like, right? Yeah. I haven't talked to anybody who went untouched entirely. You know, at least something wasn't working. Brian, aka Electronic Eagle wrote in and he says, look, you could probably do a whole episode just listing the services affected by the outage. What my small DevOps team saw yesterday was four of the five websites we maintain hosted in three different AWS regions failed simultaneously within a pingdom per minute scan. And the only site that didn't go down was hosted on AWS GovCloud in the US. The failure case is pretty easy to miss. The default North American API endpoint for the Amazon S3 storage service, s3.amazonaws.com, stopped working. Until recently, S3 didn't expose the same region structure as most of the other AWS services. So even if you ran across multiple availability zones or even multiple regions, there's a good chance your web servers were talking to the default S3 endpoint to handle image and document serving. There are region local S3 endpoints, but I don't know if they were working during the outage. We fixed our sites by flipping the switch to file serve images and static files directly from web servers. It was an Apollo 13 moment for our team minus the cigarettes. They're trying to switch everything over to new servers mid-flight. There are a lot of folks out there saying that the 11 nines of reliability on AWS S3 is out the door, but read the fine print folks. That is durability, the 11 nines. There are only three nines of availability on S3. And if you don't know what that means, it's 99.9% is three nines. It's really up to those of us developing cloud-native systems to understand their limits. This is still better uptime than most enterprise environments achieve. You know who you are, writes. Designed for 11 nines durability and three nines availability of objects over a given year. He sites from Amazon. So interesting insight there about that endpoint. Because I was wondering about that too, where I'm like, okay, but if you're stored not in the Virginia S3 region, why would you be affected? And this could explain that.  And it feels like that was yesterday, but so much uptime for the most part. And we just forget that, right? So I was trying really hard yesterday not to get too bummed about it. It's just that when it's in the moment and nothing can be accessed for that moment, it does feel like it's the worst thing ever and why are we relying on Amazon?  But really, it's like once every, I think we can live with it once every five, six, seven years. Or we can all move to Estonia because T2 T2 in the chat room says he slept through it. It's lucky for him. Thank you, Scott Johnson, as always. What's going on real quick in your world? A whole bunch of stuff. Boy, best thing to do right now. We redesigned the Frogpants site. So it's a little easier to navigate, find the projects you want to find, the podcast, the art, the whatever. There's more being added, more being worked on there. But for the most part, it's done. Go to frogpants.com and check it out. There's live links to our Twitch page and ways to donate and help and support all the podcasts out of their own page. So go check it out. That's frogpants.com. And for all else, follow me on Twitter, as always, at Scott Johnson. Samara Lin, I cannot tell you how much fun it was to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. It was great. Thank you. I'm glad you thought so. Let folks know where they can find more of what you're doing online. You can read my articles at blackenterprise.com and also on Twitter, at Samara Lin. I'm always talking something techie. Go check it out, Samara Lin. That's two Ns, S-A-M-A-R-A-L-Y-N-N. Follow on Twitter and blackenterprise.com. It's also patron day, the first day of the month when we receive the generous support from folks who back us at patreon.com. Slash D-T-N-S. Thank you to every single person who supports us, whether it's on Patreon or PayPal or some other way, we couldn't do it without you.  Quick programming note, Friday, we're going to have a Daily Tech headlines in your feed, so don't freak out. You didn't miss the show. Patrick Beja and I are going to record our fifth show of the week on Saturday morning with Lertad from Thailand to talk about how people shop online differently there. They don't use carts. They don't use shopping carts. They don't have that metaphor. They don't trust that. It's interesting to hear a different way and of course we'll give our impressions on the Nintendo Switch. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. That was great. Thank you again, Samara. Oh, thank you so much, guys. It was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. We appreciate it too. I know you've got to run. We're all busy, but please come back. Thank you. But take care. All right, cheers. St. David's Day and Patron's Day. Maybe he could be... St. David was a patron. Patron's Saint. Patron's podcasting? I don't know. He's Patron's Saint of Wales, actually. Not the animal, but the country. All right. Turkey? Millions. Turkey. I wonder if they have... When Twitter's down. There you go. Wonder if they have a City of Stuffing. All right. City of Stuffing. A new angle on optical zoom. Meshing around. I like that one. Mishing around. Meshing around is funny. You can mute a tweeting egg. Oh, a new angle on optical zoom. I just got that one. That's what you do. Oh, that's pretty good.  Scott wants a Ronco router. And it works. Only $19.99. The best camera you have is a Snapchat you have with you. This network is a mesh. No, it's no routing. The mesh-y side of networking. I really like this network as a mesh. This network is a mesh. That's really good. Because it works two ways. It could either be a MENCH or a M. This network is a mesh. This network is a MENCH. I got to tell you who Eileen had breakfast with yesterday.  It was. Jackie. Let's get the title. Let's get the title. This network is a mesh. I mean, I've kind of done. Is there anything else in there, Roger, that caught your eye? The Titans have fallen in price. Except the Titans didn't fall in price. It was all the 1080s that fell in price. Daily tech in meshment show. I like the top. This network as a mesh is the one that works. Yeah. I think we got to go with that one. Yeah, that's a winner. City of stars. Jackie. A guy that played trusty the clown's dad on The Simpsons. No, Larry King. Oh, all right. You're talking actually. You married a girl from BYU. Oh, is that right? Burt is a good grandma. That's not to say good for him. And he's half his age. And I've made me say I'm creepy. Something good for him. Well done. I meant good for him. Marrying a Utah per age did not enter into it. That's fine. How old is this? No, just I don't know. 83. She is. Wait, don't. Don King is her name. They married in 97. Don King is her name. D.A.W. And I'm guessing. I'm just she must have a pretty tall hair. Yeah. Oh, she must get real tired of that. Yeah. I think she's 57 now. But also, I didn't realize there was currently a giant controversy about perhaps an affair. So. Oh, dear. They're on. But it's always the way with. Virtuality. Celebrity poop. Hey, this network is a mesh. Yep. Cemented. And then our wives were constantly pinging each other during the show, Roger. Yes. The food. Food. About food. City stars. Get some motor oil. Motor oil. Motor oil.  Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken. We already have two fried chicken places. We have Dine-In. You have Gus's World Famous. You know, anything that puts world in front of famous, usually it's just famous locally if maybe you get extended out regionally are World Famous Fries. Like, no, it's not World Famous. Unless maybe it was on the travel channel when they do their top 10. I do love it. I do love fried chicken though. It is one of my favorites. You know, I like well done fried chicken. The thing is it really has to be the right batter. Yeah, I agree with you there. And I go and it comes in waves. I'm in a wave right now where I keep having a taste for it. But yeah, not every restaurant is going to make it to my satisfaction. I remember having a fried chicken at a place where they still fried them in a large cast iron skillet. And so it wasn't like drenched in oil when you got it, which I really found odd because like, this is not fried chicken the way I am. How is this possibly fried chicken? How is this good for me? Larry King's been married eight times. Good for you. I'm surprised. You know, like if we've moved on to fried chicken at this point, I'm sorry, I got distracted. I've moved on to, I've been at eight different chicken places in my life. There, Mr. King, I'm on you. I've eaten more than eight chicken places, I'm pretty sure. Oh, no, more. Yeah. Well, not what I said. What's your favorite fried chicken, Scott? My favorite fried chicken is probably, ooh, like restaurant style, obviously, is what you mean. Well, yeah, what I mean, I've had really good chicken that people have made that. Yeah, like homemade. That's true. I was thinking restaurants. But if I'm if I'm going to sit down some place, probably, I really like El Pollo Loco here.  I haven't had that in a while. We have so many of them around us here. Yeah. The ones down here are kind of, are not that great. We've got the last one I ate, that was over on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was fine. It was all right. Two here and they're great. But it's, I realized that that may be an anomaly because there are things that we have here. Like, I'll talk to friends who think Applebee's is the worst. We actually have a really good Applebee's near us, but I've been to an Applebee's in Colorado that was one of the worst places I've ever eaten in my life. What was the fried chicken I had? The best one I've had in a restaurant is, here, I'll share this yelp because I actually like this place enough. Now, we're not talking about like one place like in, because I've been to places that were unbelievable. I don't remember. So wait, are you talking chains? Because this is not a chain. This is just a restaurant. Yeah, if you're talking non-chain, then my answer is definitely not, they'll play. Oh yeah, what's your non-chain answer then? That's a good question because I don't remember any names of it.  It's way too expensive, but the fried chicken there is incredible. So I'm going to say Carvers. It's a steakhouse, but they have really good fried chicken. If you're ever in San Francisco, Have I been to Carvers? I feel like I've been there. Made? Did I go there when they were in Tacular? Oh, 2011. Yeah, you and Veronica were there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had steak, so I missed out on the fried chicken. Yeah, it's really good. Go to Auntie April's Chicken and Waffles if you're ever in San Francisco. It's really good. You know, we got fried chicken, and I can't find the name of the place, but they did, remember Long John Silver's Fish and Chips batter? They did that kind of batter on chicken. It was good. What's like Japanese? Panko. No, not Panko. Oh, TVZgon mentions Lolo's Chicken and Waffles in Phoenix, which reminds me of Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles here. I have yet to try that place. And then TVZgon, because he also is a MASH fan, yells, the chicken was a baby. And a TMS fan. We bring that up too much. Yeah, I know. I'll tell you what. Like, what's the place in Vegas that does... It's like breakfast food. Oh, shoot. They were featured on one of those diners, dives, and dashes things, and it's really good and won a bunch of awards. Anyway, that was good fried chicken, and it's like Chicken and Waffles kind of as well. I can't remember the name of that place. It's over in Culver City. That's the only thing I remember. Chicken Vegas. The place I'm thinking of is called... Oh, Lolo's Chicken and Waffles is in Vegas too. Oh, maybe that might be it. Maybe where I went. I can't remember. You know, Vegas, I have... Oh, I'm sorry. Good. No, go ahead. Oh, no, I'm just always surprised at the number of really good restaurants you just stumble over in Vegas. They're just like... Just so many people go through. There's so many people with money. Oh, there it is. Winnings. The one I'm thinking of is Hash House of Go-Go, and they had the best... Okay, that's my answer. Hash House of Go-Go fried chicken. Hash House of Go-Go. See, that's one of Eileen's favorite breakfast foods is the hash. Yeah. The corned beef hash. Twisted farm food, this one? Which one? The one on the screen I'm sharing. Oh, yeah, Hash House. That's it. Yeah, twisted. That's it. They do bread. Ooh, Indiana hand. What does that even mean? Hand hammered pork. Did they beat the animal to death to claim its flesh? No, it's afterwards. They tenderize. Hand hammered pork. That's a weird phrase. It's a pig. That's exactly right. Hand hammered for your enjoyment. Dude, I got so hand hammered the other night. Oh, what's... You ever been to Vegas? There's an Italian restaurant. It's totally not chicken related, but there's an Italian restaurant called Capos, like a Capone or like a mob boss. And it's weird because you go into it through this very innocuous door. And when you go in, there's no obvious way to enter. And so you knock and then a speakeasy door on the side magically appears. And it's like, who sent you here? Like they try to do the whole... Oh, so it's a stick. Yeah, it's a stick. But it's really good food. I was surprised. Probably sticky places tend to skimp on the food. Well, so there's that place bourbon and branch in San Francisco that does the same thing. You make a reservation and they give you a password. And then you show up and you have to... It says temperance society on the sign. And then you have to buzz them and then they ask you for the password. The thing is, I found out the first time I went there that if you didn't have the password, they'd let you in anyway to check your reservation. And it's the same password for everybody. Oh. I'm like, oh, I thought like my password was really going to be like my ticket in. And it's like we gave the password and then we went in and they're like, so what's your name? I'm like, I'll just give you the password while you need our name. No names. No names. So this is... Now I remember, this is the... Oh, here, I'll put the Facebook page of it. Hopefully there's nothing rude on it. But this... This is rude. I like that. No, not now. That movie's rude. If not now, when? When who? No, it's this place in... I'm not sure if it's still... It was good a while ago when I went there in like 05, 06. But it's called Cock of the Walk and it's in Maumel, Arkansas, right outside of Little Rock. And they had the best fried chicken they've ever had. I believe that. Unfortunately, they also used the same... Unfortunately or unfortunately, they used the same batter for the fried catfish. So it tastes sort of the same when you first bite into it. But they also did these little cast-iron skillet cornbread with jalapeños and hot peppers in it. That sounds really good. The Verge put Pilot X on their list of sci-fi to read in March. It's awesome. That was very nice of them. I thanked Andrew Liptec on Twitter for including it. I'm so good about that. Also, I have to write a guest post about it for John Scalzi's blog, whatever duck... Or whatever. It's not whatever.com, I don't think. And I'm really nervous about it because I don't want it to be bad. It's whatever.scalzi.com. Well, he's a pal, right? He'll be okay. He'll be fine. He's a really nice guy, yeah. I like him. And it's one of those things where I'm such a big fan of his work. I don't want to send him something. Not that he's going to... Yeah, nothing's going to be mean, but I want him to have to send it back and be like, yeah, this isn't going to work. My favorite quote about your book is from Publishers Weekly where they say, a retro space opera for readers who enjoy seasoning their planetary romps with a dash of cynicism. I can almost hear like Lilith Crane say that on an old episode. That's what the place in Culver City did with the chicken. They seasoned it with a dash of cynicism. That's why I liked it so much. Oh, it's amazing. I like, what was the other thing that they said? Appropriately convoluted. Veronica's quote is great. Full of tiny, whiny goodness. Yeah, that's great. Are there any puns in it? Yes. Guaranteed, right? There's in fact a whole planet of puns, actually. I think that's awesome. Planet of the puns. That's not called Planet of the Puns. It's not that bad. But the whole pineapple planet. See, I want that to catch on. And now with pineapple pen, which I heard two teenagers talking about pineapple pen yesterday at the grocery store. I'm like, it's still hot. Super hot. Or they're like way out of it. I can't say pineapple or pen to anybody without them saying, oh, it's like that meme. It's impossible. I think I put the pineapple planet chapter up on ink shares as one of the samples. Chapters. It's one of my favorite little apple planet. The pineapple planet. There are no pineapples there. Is the phrase that it's one of those phrases that people say in this world. And then there's a chapter that explains the whole thing about why it got called that. 314 release date. Well, let's let's just read it to you now. All right. SoundCloud's finally, finally uploading. They were laggy. Yesterday, I think it was the S3 stuff. It was S3. I couldn't upload it all yesterday. It was awful. I avoided it for daily tech headlines, but I got caught by it with DTNS. Yeah. I had a bunch of people saying they could get like every other show downloaded from the end, the point of the end user. And I thought, what is that about? So I think there was a lot of caching and servers were up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was weird. But I couldn't upload for a while. I used archive. I just put it on archive.org until SoundCloud came back. Swap the links. Hold another cloud.  Yeah. It'll be good. But we finally got some date work out. That show is really fun. I'm going to be newbie as hell because I don't remember much, but between now and then I'm going to try to remind myself of it. Yeah. Just watch that one episode. It'll bring everything back, I think. Yeah. And we've had all ranges of people, like people who had not rewatched it in years. And this most recent episode we recorded is a guy who wrote the online recaps and has watched it a million times and knows every little thing. So there's all ranges of people. Nice. All ranges of people. This network is a mesh. It's such a mesh. Yeah, I ended up doing kind of just basically have the router in my father-in-law's room and then I just run a really long flat cable. I need to run it under the house, but I'll do it during the summer. That's what I do here because I want this streaming box to be wired. I don't trust Wi-Fi that much yet. My trust issues with Wi-Fi are going away to some extent, but not quite yet. But for upstairs, I do Wi-Fi for everything, even like Netflix, and it works fine. But I had the router that's over in the garage by the fiber optic. That's the first one of the heroes. Then I had it going upstairs into the office because the office used to have problems getting connection. And then I went from the office over to the other side of the house, and that was too far. So the one on the other side of the house kept losing connection and was kind of unreliable. So I moved it. I actually did the little tutorial thing and it said, we'll move it over here. I'm like, oh, well, I can move it into the kitchen. It didn't seem like that would make that much of a difference, but it totally did. Oh, cool. I just turned my other router into an access point. I'm going to go mesh for sure. I don't know how, but I'm going to. Then you should make your SSID 4077. Incoming loaned. Incoming packets. Incoming broken packets, all hands. All surgeons are forced to the router. We've got incoming. All right, folks. We will be back tomorrow with Justin and Robert Young. Don't forget, no show. Well, not no show Friday. The Friday show is on Saturday. Late. It's not the Friday show. Saturday morning. Yeah, Saturday morning, which I guess there won't be anybody that's still, would it still be Friday for someone at that point? Like in the islands before the dateline? Maybe, I don't know. Hawaii? Yeah, we'll see you tomorrow. Yeah.


Welcome to Shrink Rap Hawaii. My name is Stephen Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in Hawaii. And I'm like really excited because I have a very special guest. I am really honored today. And to introduce her, let me give you a little bit of background. As part of the Women's Caucus, Women's Legislative Caucus, my guest, Senator Laura Thielen, has been working on a special project regarding domestic violence in the state of Hawaii. On average, over the last six years in our state, more than 10 arrests have been made every day resulting from domestic violence. Domestic violence is the leading cause of homicide against women in Hawaii. In the United States, three to four women are killed every day from domestic violence. Senator Thielen is here today to talk about what we're doing to try to fix this problem. Welcome, Senator Thielen. Thank you very much for having me here today. So where do we begin to even talk about it? I mean, it seems to be such an endemic problem around the country, if not around the world. Where do you start? That's a really good question. I think a lot of people are a little bit overwhelmed by the problem. Some people feel like it's not maybe their problem. It's somebody else's problem. So I think part of what we need to do is get people to look at domestic violence a little bit differently to understand it better and how it affects their lives, even if it's not going on within their own household. And then I think another part of the problem is we've been pushing these cases into the criminal justice system, which simply is not an effective way to handle the volume of cases. So in a lot of cases or the vast majority of cases, nothing happens as a result. And so the perpetrator may then go back out and repeat this pattern of violence either against the original victim or against subsequent intimate partners that become victims. So you're saying nothing happens simply because there's so many people on the court docket they don't get to them in time? Well, as you were mentioning, the number of cases is huge. So we're looking at some statewide statistics and I don't have statistics statewide, but just for Honolulu alone, over the last six years on average there's been about 6,000 calls to patrol officers every year asking for help in incidents of domestic violence. We have about 1,000 cases a year that happen in Honolulu where they're seriously violent. Attempted murder, strangulation, aggravated assault. 1,000 just in Honolulu? Yes, just in Honolulu. And then the number of cases that's filed in each year in Honolulu is about 3,000. Criminal charges filed each year. And this is just for the abuse of family and household members. So if it's something like an aggravated assault or attempted murder that's on top of that, that might be something more seriously, a more serious charge. So the volume is huge. And so figuring out how to manage the cases where you have a pattern and practice of conduct and how to change that and what kinds of services are effective. I think we need to be a lot more smart and targeted in our, how we handle the cases, the prosecution and the services and how we protect and keep people who are victims of domestic violence safe while this process is going on. So right now what we're doing is not working because it's not getting any better. Well, the women's legislative caucus has been focused on domestic violence. We have, I think the oldest state women's legislative caucus in the nation. And that was thanks to people like Patsy Mink and others who were real trailblazers. And what they did is it was every woman in the legislature, both parties, house and Senate were members and they decided to come together around issues that were of particular interest to women. So a lot of health, family health, children's health, violence against women, gender equity and things like that, education. And we've passed some great legislation. So it's not necessarily the statutes. It's just how does that, how does that work when you're out in real life with the volume of cases that are being handled, not just in domestic violence but other cases as well by police, prosecutors, public defender and judicial system. So right now there's a lot of people that either they don't get charged because the, or they get charged but they don't go to trial because the trial doesn't come up in a speedy enough way so they get dismissed. Most cases, civil and criminal, never go to trial. Because of that. But just in general, in most cases in general either they settle or they get dismissed or something like that, they're charged with a lesser offense and there's an agreement to that. Most cases don't get to trial. The disturbing thing about the domestic violence cases though is a lot of these cases are being pled down to lesser offenses where the services that are normally provided in a domestic violence charge would be say domestic violence intervention to teach people how perpetrator, how to control themselves, how not to be abusive and what are some alternative behaviors. Those types of services are not provided when somebody pleads down to a lesser offense in most of those cases. So then I would guess most of the time it's gonna happen again. Yes. Because there's no change. Again, it's a pattern and practice. And then in cases where charges are filed in domestic violence, if they can't get to a jury trial within a certain amount of time, the court will dismiss them. So in Honolulu, for example, with the volume of cases we have, the city did an audit recently. I think there are four prosecutors tasked with handling all of the misdemeanor domestic violence criminal charges. They just can't do it. And the number of judges and the amount of time a jury trial takes, they just, they can't do it. So you've been holding meetings with all the different stakeholders in this? Yeah, the Women's Caucus, we've tried to address the issue during session, but session happens January to May and you're just dealing with so much and it gets complicated and people on Oahu want one thing and people on neighbor islands say we're different from Oahu. Our population is smaller, we handle the cases differently. So we haven't been able to come up with a resolution. So we decided this year to do something different and the caucus is going out to each of the four counties because police and prosecutor are county level. Judiciary and probation are state level. So we got the attorney general and the chief justice of the Hawaii courts to co-sponsor these meetings with us and we're going to each of the four counties to meet with all the parties. So it's not like anyone can say it's their fault. And so we'll have the police, the prosecutor, the public defender, judiciary, including probation. And we've begun by having a session where we bring in advocates and survivors to talk about their experience with the system and it's our turn to listen because they're really the people that are going through the system day in and day out. So what's their perspective of the problem? And then we take a break and the advocates and survivors leave and then we start to have a conversation around the table between all the people involved in the system about okay, what do we need to do to do things differently so that there can be something that happens that could change behaviors. So that's the ultimate goal. We want less violence within households and families. Right, so I wonder about, I mean, you didn't mention the perpetrators, right? And I can understand the problem of getting the perpetrators to come to the meetings but it seems important that they be part of the solution because they're maybe the biggest part of the problem, right? A husband and wife have a fight and typically the guy hurts the woman and then what? And very often the aftermath of that is a lot of I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll never do that again until it happens again. And part of my job as a marriage therapist is working with couples that are dealing with that stuff and trying to affect a change and in order to affect a lasting change I find that you really have to go way back. I mean, the problem started before they met each other. It probably started in childhood because that's what was modeled for them at least on one side of the couple. You know why the woman chose a guy who's like her father and I'm being stereo, I'm stereotyping now but it's not unusual. And the guy swore he would never be like his father, the guy swore he would never hurt his kids and now he's done that and there's a lot to go through. I guess what I'd say is first of all domestic violence is a little bit different. I mean, every couple will have arguments. Every marriage or relationship is gonna have stresses and strains and arguments. Domestic violence is really a different from an argument. It is a means of one person controlling or having power over another. And using violence, either physical violence or psychological violence are both as a pattern and a practice in that relationship to have control over the person. In some cases it gets so bad that the victim ends up being killed. In some cases the person ends up surviving and exiting the relationship but the perpetrator goes to the next relationship and creates a problem. So we saw something a while back where there was a young man who had domestic violence within his girlfriend's relationship. She ended up getting a restraining order. She got out of the situation. This perpetrator did have some subsequent violence outside the relationship. Also had some restraining orders against him. Had another relationship where they attempted to get a restraining order. He was out on probation and ended up throwing lighter fluid all over the young woman and lighting her on fire. I mean, this is the kind of thing where it's not, it's not like, you know, my husband and I are disagreeing whether we should support our daughter's effort to go do something or rather. You know, this is control, manipulation, abuse, and in many cases if the abuser does not behave this way with people outside of the relationship. So it's not a matter of, oh, this guy is a hothead and I'm saying guy because- It's usually a guy. The statistics are it's usually men and certainly in the cases of the fatality or near fatality, it's almost, you know, it's well over 90% women who are being the battered person in the relationship. So when you talk about having the abusers there on our meetings, I think it's important that as a society we look at, okay, in many cases these abusers, they're part of our community and we need to find things that work to get them to change their behavior. Right. And that's where I think we need to start taking a harder look at, does the domestic violence intervention services work? What's their success rate? What's their recidivism? You know, how do we get better at that? But to bring them into the room with the people who are the survivors now who are sharing their stories is not, it's not appropriate to bring them together and in some cases it would be downright dangerous. Maybe not together. But I mean, I would really want to try to understand, I mean, to me what you described sounds like a kind of mental illness.  What do you do for him besides lock him away for the rest of his life? Is there something to be done? I think there needs to be something to be done but my first priority is protecting the victims. I want to protect the people who have the restraining orders, who are recognized that this person is really violent and so that when there is a violation something happens and when the probation is violated that they're taken in. This young man was on the Project Hope Probation which is supposed to be better than typical probation. But we have to find a way of doing better lethality assessments to say, okay, there's certain people where let's just stop them from hurting people in society. Then maybe you have your one time, first time offenders that you can deal with another way and then you can deal with the middle. But we don't do that right now. We're just kind of funneling this mass through the system like it's relatively the same. We'll be right back with the rest of our show with Senator Lathielen. Don't touch your mouse. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening guys? They told me they were making music. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science. You care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational. So I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science. Welcome back to Shrink Rap, Hawaii. I'm Steve Katz, I'm with Senator Thielen. So the question most people have a hard time wrapping their head around, why don't the victims, the people who are getting beat up, just leave the relationship? Yeah, I think that's one of the hardest things in getting society to relook at domestic violence. Again, there's different kinds of relationships where domestic violence takes place. So let's say you have somebody who's in one of those really violent relationships. The most dangerous time for a woman is when she tries to leave the relationship. So nearly one third of women in Hawaii and in the United States who are murdered because they're in a relationship with domestic violence and that person knows best what they need to do in order to keep themselves safe. So sometimes the timing is not right for that person to leave a relationship because the perpetrator's gonna go after her and kill her. There are other situations that say maybe it's, I don't wanna classify it as minor because sometimes domestic violence can be minor, minor, and then major as far as the injury that occurs. I've been in a minor for 20 years. But yeah, but let's say it's kind of a lower grade offense. You're married, you have kids together. How do you move to a separate house in Hawaii given the cost of housing?  You want the person maybe to be the way they were at the beginning of the relationship before the abuse started with you. Maybe the family and friends that you're going to for help. Oh no, no, no, no, this isn't a problem. Very good friend of mine, her family, her husband's family, no, you're making it up. Cause they didn't want to address the fact that it was going on. And given the cost of living here, it's really hard for people to leave. Yeah. Part of what domestic bonds advocates are looking at nationally is not just how do we keep people safe, but how do you get people where they can economically, safely move to another place. So they can survive afterwards. They can make a fresh start.  So there has to be an alternative. Yeah. And sometimes, I mean, I've dealt with a lot of families where a lot of the violence is directed against the children. And there's denial on the part of the other parent, because I'll say she, because typically it's she doesn't know what else to do. You know, it's, yeah, this is happening, but I can't say this is happening. Because if I said this is happening, it would mean I have to leave and I won't know how to support the family. Yeah. And it's, you know, for, there's a lot of children that are growing up in households where there is domestic violence and they may not themselves be hit or use matter psychologically, but they see it.  But now studies are showing it has an overwhelming prediction for things like homelessness, for mental illness, for other crimes, which is why, you know, some of the prosecutors that we've worked with have said if we could reduce domestic violence, you will see a reduction in crime. You will see a reduction in drug abuse. You will see a reduction in alcoholism. Because a lot of this is because of people being raised in households where this violence is taking place. So we could have a huge societal payoff if we can figure out better ways. You know, people change behaviors on drinking and driving. People change behaviors on smoking. You know, people change behaviors on seatbelts and cars. I don't think it's too much to say, can we change society's attitude towards domestic violence to be willing to recognize it? To be willing to say it's not okay? And to be willing to say that the people who are the victims or survivors of these acts of aggression need help because it's not something that they can exit on their own. It's not like a stranger has come and hit me on the street and I can go and testify against that person. You know, there's a lot of deep ties there. And what you were just saying kind of answers my next question, which was, if it's not going on in my house, why should I care to do anything about it? But you're saying that people that grow up with this domestic violence are more likely to become, excuse me. Excuse me. Are more likely to have all kinds of problems that affect us all, like addiction and felonies of all kinds. I pulled up the statistics from the Uniform Crime Reports and it's interesting, because Hawaii has very low violent crime, which means when you're talking about issues of domestic violence, it is a large proportion of the total violent crime we have. But we have huge rates of property crime. If a child growing up in a household with domestic violence is more likely to end up using drugs, a lot of our property crime in Hawaii is due to drug addictions to fuel the addiction. If the child is more likely to end up being homeless, we're dealing with the highest per capita homeless population in the nation right now. And is that something that we can reduce by reducing the crime that's going on within households? So I think people, even if there's nobody in your family that you're aware of, that is going through issues of domestic violence would benefit if we can reduce it. But I also think that caveat about if you're aware of it, because a lot of people where domestic violence is going on in their households, they will not talk about it. Because of the perceived shame. I was wondering, a lot of what I do in my practice is I look at instances where things are going well. So cross-culturally, in other countries, are there places that are doing a lot better that have a lot less domestic violence? And what, if so, why? What are they doing that we're not doing? You know, internationally, the statistics about violence against women are really horrifying. And there's not really any country from the statistics I've seen that I would hold up as an example of where it's not a problem. And I think that that's, you know, I got asked at one of the meetings, well, there's a women's legislative caucus, is there a men's legislative caucus? And one of the other legislators said, yeah, it's called the legislature. I was just dancing, asked that before the show, I said the same thing. But the reality is the violence against women is a global problem. It's not just the United States. It would be nice if we became a leader in the reduction. And I think we've taken steps towards that with the Violence Against Women's Act and having some funding. But that's where I think, thanks to databases and everything now, we can be a lot more analytical about is what we're doing working. And if it's not, then for heaven's sakes, let's just change it and start to try something else to see if that works. Because what we're doing right now isn't working. And so that's what the women's legislative caucus is doing with our meetings, is we're not trying to say that we have the answer. And we know Neighbor Island and Honolulu, it's very different volumes. But, you know, even the public defender told me, he's got daughters, you know, that people want to change. So fine, the ones that work in the system that's come to the table and take a hard look at the data we have and say, if this isn't working, then what do we do differently? Yeah, I'm also, we live in Hawaii and it wasn't, you know, in the annals of history, it wasn't that long ago, it was just Hawaiians here. I wonder, did they have this issue? Maybe we need to look at that. I have no data. Right, there was no written record. Yeah, yeah. Right, there's no data. No, that's an interesting, yeah, I don't know. But I guess when you look at other cultures around the world, are there any cultures that don't have it? And I'm not aware of any, yeah, I'm just, because I remember reading recently about a culture in some ethnic group in China, I think, that tends to be led by women. So maybe- Yeah, I was wondering, that's what I was wondering. Would it be a less violent culture if women were in charge? But you may need to look at the flip, you know? Because, again, we've been saying he and she, that men can be victims and are victims of domestic violence, it's just, in our society, the vast majority of perpetrators are the men, and certainly the vast majority of the statistics for the deaths are- Well, because like he was saying before, it's about power, power and control, right? I've had instances where it was flipped, where the woman was a perpetrator. And he wouldn't leave. And because, yeah, it's about somebody needing somebody else to do what they say. And the way that they control them, you know, you can't go out, you can't talk to friends, it's a whole universe of control. And it's scary. But this is the kind of thing where, you know, I have more of a background in land use and environmental, but I've been involved in issues of domestic violence for about 25 years. And this is one of the things where, as a senator, you know, we may or may not end up with a lot of legislation that comes out of these meetings, we may be fine-tuning it, but there's an opportunity as a senator to just, in the Women's Legislative Caucus, to convene people around the table to look at an issue. And to say, you know, as leaders in the community, we need to recognize when we're not doing as good a job or as effective a job, even though everybody's working very hard and everyone's well-intentioned, the results aren't what we want. So it's time to re-look at it. And that's been very, you know, I'm grateful for the ability through the Women's Legislative Caucus for all of us to bring people to the table. I'm grateful for the help from the Chief Justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court and the Attorney General in cosponsoring these meetings, because everyone was willing to recognize we need to do something differently. Are you hopeful that it'll change? That makes me hopeful. I don't know that we're gonna arrive at the solution or that there is the solution, but a recognition that we have to try something and be smarter when we do try it, to monitor it, to see the results, to follow the cases and see what's happening, and to not be so wedded like, oh, this was my idea, so we can't change it. You know, if it's not working in the future, let's change it in the future. You know, we just have to, in government, we gotta figure out when things are not effective. How do we make them more effective? Well, thank you so much for doing this, and thank you for coming on the show today. I really appreciate you asking. Oh, I appreciate you coming. Thank you. And tune in next time for Shrink Rap Hawaii Aloha.


We're talking with Kenny about this, but Ray Wohl just said out there, you guys are underdogs in every game. You guys talk about that in here? Not really. We always talk about a mindset, a dominant mindset. I understand we can compete with anybody. We already know everybody's going to count the Titans out. That's this season, the next season, wherever season is going to be. Nobody counts on the Titans, but this season for us to prove them wrong. You like that? Oh yeah, always. Definitely. Obviously you don't want to give Lamar Jackson space. How do you cut down on his space? Biggest thing is closing the gaps on him. Don't stash your feet when that guy got the ball in his hand. Take your shots. Biggest thing is get a hit on him as much as we can. Get him running sideline and sideline. Don't let him get downfield. You ever think you'd see an NFL offense average 200 yards a game? I don't think I have actually. Definitely going to be excited to go in against a powerhouse offense like that. See what our defense is really about. It's been a long grind for you here, but now on to round two for the second time in three years. You know, it's not where you want it to end, but it's got to be rewarding. Oh, definitely. At the end of the day, any time you get into the playoffs to get a chance to go play for the big dancers, you got to take advantage of it, and this is definitely going to be one of the weeks. We ain't going to let it come up short this week.  That increased the pressure on you guys to keep this one. Oh, definitely. It's a defensive game. Everybody knows as the playoffs go, defense wins championships, so we've got to make sure we prove that this week. They offense is top-notch. We've got to make sure their defense is going to come out. Number one defense in the lead this year, we've got to make sure we match their tempo. Definitely.  Dean's got a couple things up his sleeve, but at the end of the day, we're going to run our defense. It's been working for us all year long. I don't think we need to change so much of it. You've got to make sure we execute.  You guys maybe gotten back to what you were doing early the last few weeks? I wouldn't say we got back into it. We just kept on moving forward. Keep trying to be consistent. We let everybody else feel if we're the same or not. Anybody drill you're facing your friend that reminds you of Lamar that... No, not one guy. He's definitely a different beast, man. Not one guy in the lead now or in the past that can match up and compare to what that guy can do. And in real, what you see and what's the challenge? The biggest thing is going to make sure we make this guy run sideline and sideline. Don't let him get downfield. When he going downfield, he's picking up yardage. And when I say picking up yardage, he's picking up 25, 30 yards a carry. So keep him sideline and sideline, get him to shatter his feet back and forth. Don't know where he can go with a lane. Keep guys, you know, assignment football. Get in gaps, get in lanes where you can't cut downfield. How quickly did the move change? Coming off an emotional win, big win. But now the challenge is even bigger. We enjoyed it. We enjoyed it for the moment while we were in the locker room. Enjoying it for the celebration when we fly home. But as soon as we got back and landed, it was time to snap in gear. And I think everybody transferred their mindset over to the Ravens. And that's where we are now.


What's most important, I believe, is that you genuinely be your authentic self. And more importantly, you are intentional. That means asking those deeper questions early on to see if you're on the same page because when you're on the same page with someone, you're vibrating together. When you're not on the same page and there's uncertainty, you're in a state of confusion and your actions might demonstrate a sense of confusion and that creates mistrust. And what's most important for a relation is reaching that level of trust. That reaching that level of trust isn't just about fidelity. Trust is does this person genuinely have my best interest at heart? Why don't you really sit with that for a moment?