Welcome to the untold stories behind the hyperledger community, a monthly podcast in which we invite developers from across the hyperledger ecosystem to share about why they're using hyperledger projects and why they're actively involved in the community. While there are lots of venues to learn about the what of hyperledger technologies this show is focused on why individuals roll up their sleeves to help develop and deploy them. Each episode features an in depth discussion with a guest who is helping to shape the future of enterprise blockchain and their journey as a leader, developer and an open source contributor. Conversations will delve into topics such as why they get involved with hyperledger, why they're excited about the technology and how they deal with the challenges involved in contributing to a large global open source community. My name is David Boswell and I'm the senior director of community architecture at the hyperledger foundation. And I'm speaking today to Tracy Kurt, who has been involved in the hyperledger community for several years and several roles. She was a Linux foundation staff member who supported the community. She has been a developer and a project maintainer. For the last two years, she has led the technical oversight committee as the group's chair, and she is the associate director blockchain and multi party systems architecture at Accenture. Because of the depth and breadth of her experience, she is a great guest to start our series with. So thank you for joining us today, Tracy. Thanks for having me. So I've known you for about the last few years I think just over you were here at the Linux foundation when I started as an employee. And I think we pretty much interacted fairly regularly ever since then, but I really don't know much about your story before that so I thought today we could start with some questions that touch on your life before you got involved with hyperledger. So as a starting point I was curious when did you first start getting involved and interested in programming and do you remember the first open source project you ever started using. Yeah, so I got interested in programming back in junior high school. The, there was some project that they had us do or they had us research a number of different jobs for years, right that we're out there. I think we had to research three different careers and one of them that I picked was computer programming. And I'll say at the time I chose for a very poor reason, which was that the computer programmers made the most money. But that was the reason I chose it, but you know, I would say that the good thing about it is it really led to me making decisions throughout the rest of my life around what it was that I wanted to do. So for example, what it of what school I wanted to go to, and what, you know, I wanted to focus on which was computer science and engineering, you know, the first kind of job that I had and so on and so forth. So, even though I made like a decision based on some poor reasoning, I think the decision actually ended up being very beneficial. The first open source project that I used was actually Slackware Linux version one. So I was working as an intern at the time at GE aircraft engines. And my, I don't, I think my boss came to me and he's like hey there's this thing called Linux like let's go take a look at it see what it's all about. And so like 24 disk later, after installing them and getting it on right taking a look at Linux and using it so I guess it's a good thing that Linux was made my first one to be able to stay on this podcast that you know for the Linux foundation and the hyperledger foundation. That was my first experience with open source. That did work out well certainly. So was that also the first open source community you got involved with and participated in or you were just using Linux at that point. So I was just using Linux at that point on the first actual open source project that I contributed to was the GNU binary utilities. At that point I was working at microchip technologies. I was developing compilers assemblers and linkers for their 8 bit 16 bit microcontrollers. And I was working on adding some functionality to basically make the code that we were putting on the 8 bit microcontroller smaller right that was generated from our compilers. In doing that I was using the assembler and found some bugs in the code. And so I contributed those fixes back to the community. So I think it's a pretty typical sort of experience right you use open source code you find issues with it you report those issues maybe you fix those issues so that you can continue on with using that code and making progress so yeah I think that was the first real community that I would participate in. And you're right that's a classic example you're using something you needed to do something that doesn't and you can, you know, because it's open you can show up and do it so it's great. So I'm curious about the mechanics of how that community operated because I think all open source projects, you know, obviously have some similarities but differences to like, was there anything that community did around encouraging contribution or recognizing contribution or making contribution easier that you think would be a good idea for hyperledger to take a look at. I think it boils down to the sort of response that I got back from the maintainer of the assembler portion of the good and binary utilities right. It was very welcoming I felt like, you know, there were communication was very open. We communicated via mailing list to report issues and, and have conversations about what's the best way to fix this and those sorts of things and I really think that as maintainers, the best thing that we can do for people who are looking to contribute is do our best not to turn them away. Feel feel like they have a voice that they are part of a larger group and, and that the mentoring occurs I think mentoring is so important for new new joiners to a community and so that was the one thing I think I would take away from from that experience is just that I felt like there was somebody on the other end that understood my problems and was willing to have the conversations and, and help me through the process of contributions. Very similar to I think my first experience at hyperledger as well and contributing code to hyperledger. Is there was somebody here at his name was Nick Gatsky he helped me with adding some, some changes to documentation and just that experience of walking through the process with somebody right the very first time that you have to contribute it's kind of nerve wracking. Yeah, I feel like, you know, there are things that we can can do to help people as they come in and contribute to our, our projects. Yeah, I mean that's a great example and it obviously made an impact on you and it was memorable I mean you've been involved in the community for several years and you still remember the person who helped you so yeah that that was obviously a memorable and useful experience I think that's great advice you're right if you show up at a community and you don't think about the opposite nobody nobody helps or nobody responds or nobody makes you feel welcome yeah why would you stick around right. And since you mentioned mentorship, I guess I'll just do a quick plug, you know the hyperledger foundation runs an annual mentorship program. The 2023 mentorship program is getting started now. I'm not sure exactly when this will go live, but take a look on our wiki. If you're interested in being a mentor or being a mentee take a look at our mentorship program and we hope you apply. Yeah, actually kicking kicking off today. So February 1 is the start date if you have any mentorship project proposals through March 15 I think is the date that you have to submit those so looking forward to seeing what comes out this year with the mentorship. Yeah, absolutely every year there's really interesting projects so yeah I'm looking forward to this years as well. And you mentioned hyperledger some curious how did you go from being a Linux user for example to ending up in the hyperledger community was there. What was the connection how did you end up taking a look at hyperledger. Yeah, so I think it's a similar sort of experience to how I got involved with the GNU binary utility. So I was working at the time at PayPal. I was part of their strategic architecture team. My boss came to me and he's he had just been to an IBM think conference and he came back and he said hey IBM announced this thing called the IBM open blockchain platform. Could you take a look at this and see what it is and what is this blockchain thing all about and, you know, let me know. And so, yeah, I went off and I installed the the IBM OBC, I think I still have a fork of that repo. For those of you who don't know that eventually became hyperledger fabric. So that that was my real intro into into the hyperledger space and, you know, joining the chat and being part of that and that's really how I got my involvement or start to with hyperledger foundation. That's cool. And you mentioned talking about what is this blockchain thing and that led to a question I have I do want to talk more about the hyperledger community but I do think maybe people who are listening have that same question what is this blockchain thing all about. So it's curious before we talk more about hyperledger just what what how would you answer that question what is blockchain all about but because I think there are reasons that people could be really skeptical about that answer right now you know I think for example. When people hear blockchain a lot of people naturally think of cryptocurrencies and there are certainly valid reasons to, you know, have, you know, questions about that you know for example just the recent collapse of FTX, you know raises questions. And I, and I understand that blockchain and cryptocurrency are two different things but maybe not everybody you know has that understanding right now. But I think beyond that, I think there's also concerns if you do kind of understand blockchain is a separate technology you can build all sorts of things with it separate from cryptocurrencies. I think there's even concerns around that you know just to give you one example, I was recently reading an article with the title blockchain is not only crappy technology but but a bad vision for the future. The author there is saying that some people treat blockchain as a futuristic integrity wand was his expression, and he gave an example like you can set up a blockchain network to track something for example his example was about organic mangoes but he said there's nothing magic about that system somebody could still put bad data into it. So that data is not necessarily trusted at that point. So, when you talk to people about what this blockchain thing is all about like how do you address those concerns and what do you say, kind of the role in the live of, you know, why somebody would want to look at blockchain.  You know, given given that blockchain basically tracks all of the transactions through the through the history and gives you that, you know, log of what's happened. I think it's, it's really interesting to think about that difference that you mentioned right that blockchain is a technology upon which we can build other things cryptocurrency being one of those. And other technologies like the decentralized identity projects that we have there are focused on potentially using blockchain or not. Right. And I do think that, you know, if I have to explain blockchain, it's about sharing data for one, but there are a lot of different ways in which we can share data today. It's about making sure that you have that that single source of truth of what that data is. And you can see kind of how that data has changed along the history of all the transactions that have occurred. But I think that the piece of blockchain ads on top of your shared data, which can be accomplished in, like I said, many different ways is that that tokenized value right being able to understand the custody of the assets that are stored on the blockchain, being able to prevent double spend of those assets, make sure that the asset exists only once and that it can't be held by more than one party I think those things are important. You know, as an architect. I think that the interesting thing that I see is that, you know, we have to use the right tools for solving our problems. And if we're using the wrong tools to solve the problem, then then we're going to end up in a situation where how did you say that. What was the title of that article. The title is blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future you're right I mean if we use the wrong tools in the wrong way maybe that does lead to a bad vision of the future right. Yeah, I think you know as an architect one of the things I say more than anything to people looking to start a blockchain project, which I put in quotes blockchain project because you know we don't talk about a SQL server project or WordPress project or whatever. You know, it's like, why are you using blockchain here. What is it that you're trying to accomplish who are the participants that are being part of this network. What are you trying to do right and, and I think that is the big question that we have to ask and have an answer before we can decide whether or not blockchain is the right, right technology to use for a project what are the requirements what are we trying to solve. And if we don't understand that then we shouldn't be using or choosing the technology. Yeah, for sure. Well thanks for going through that explanation I hope it's helpful and it gives a little bit more context for for everybody listening when we talk about what's happening here at hyperledger. So going back to some more questions about hyperledger. So how, how did you go from just taking a look at the code, looking at what's going on in the community to ending up actually working at the hyperledger community as a community architect. Yeah, so, as I mentioned right when I was taking a look at what became hyperledger fabric I joined the hyperledger chat. And was basically following along with what was happening there. We had somebody posted on the board right, we're looking for a community architect for hyperledger if you're interested to meet your resume and I was like, this sounds interesting right I think that the technology the technology is extremely interesting I think the way in which we're combining a bunch of different sorts of technologies in a different way was interesting. And I wanted to dig in more and basically say let's get in on the ground floor and and see where this leads and so I took a took the leap submitted my resume and ended up as a hyperledger community architect. And that's where we met I joined, I guess you'd been here about a year and a half or so maybe when I joined. Sounds about right.  You know, you know, I think it was really my my experience as a community architect at hyperledger was extremely interesting I got to to really travel the world. Talk about what we were doing at the hyperledger foundation and, you know, explain the different projects that were going on, I got to meet a ton of people in the community. Right from people on chat who, you know, even today I have people tell me like that was their first experience of meeting me was talking to me on chat. I didn't write like, you know, to actually meeting people in person at some of these conferences and, and, you know, I think that the network, right that the people within the community are just a really interesting set of people. And, you know, I think network is so important, right, the people that you know is is how you get to kind of the next stage in your career and, you know, and and lead you on a journey that you might not have taken otherwise. And that's really how I got exposed to the people at Accenture and how I met those folks and ended up coming over to Accenture as a as an architect. Right. And then when you went over there you still remain in the hyperledger community I mean it's one thing when you're links foundation employee you're obviously your job is to be involved in the community. And then when you left that role you still stayed in the community and I suppose you didn't have to so what you know what benefits did you see about continuing to invest your time in the hyperledger community and that new role. So, so the role that I took at Accenture, I was part of our blockchain practice, working as a technology architect, looking at a number of different blockchain platforms and distribute ledger platforms. And one of those obviously being the different hyperledger projects that exist. And so, really, for me, saying evolve with the hyperledger community is about, again, continuing to talk to people, learning what they're doing with the technology understanding the challenges that they're having where where they're going, kind of that future direction. Right. And also a hyperledger lab Stewart and so I get to see all these new things that are coming into the labs area and really understand the sorts of things where people are having problems. You know, they're trying to solve some sort of issue and, and really just having those conversations is what makes it worthwhile to continue to invest my time in the community is really continuing to want to expand myself and the knowledge that I have, but also help others, I think is another piece of this right obviously we're very collaborative community. I think it's so so very important to to work with others and understand how to work with others. Yeah, I mean I feel the same way that's why I mean I kind of accidentally stumbled into open source, you know not exactly knowing what it is but that's what got me hooked I've been involved for 20 years for the same reason you meet people who have a shared passion and that's just really exciting to you know, if you're excited about something and you know it's great to be surrounded by other people who share that interest and want to and want to work with you on whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. I feel the same way it's definitely a great interesting environment. And speaking about community members, I did, it felt appropriate if we're going to talk about why people get involved in the community. In our discussion, I felt that only appropriate to invite community members to take a part in this discussion so I did ask on the hyperliters discord server if people had questions that they wanted to ask in this discussion today and one person did submit a question so I will thank that person for their contribution and then ask that question they wanted to know about recognition so I think recognition is very important in an open source community goes back to what I think you were saying earlier about feeling welcome if you show up and do something. And nobody says thank you or nobody responds or you know nobody even acknowledges that you're not going to feel like really great you're like well did anybody really care that I did that thing so I think. When those people show up when they get involved, recognizing them in some way, you know, is critical, at least in my mind, I think that recognition can look a lot of different ways sometimes, you know, people get t shirts, if they're an active contributor sometimes they just get a thank you or a shout out in some way we sometimes write spotlight blog posts so the question this person asked when I asked her questions on discord was, do you personally have a preferred way to be recognized when you make a contribution again there's lots of different different people may feel different and might have different answers like I don't necessarily need more to t shirts at this point, but maybe you know thank you would be much more meaningful did you have a preference for recognition. Yeah, I have to say my wardrobe of hyperledger t shirts was quite large when I left the Linux Foundation. I still wear them today but you know I'm one of those people who doesn't want to be called up on the stage and sort of thing I want just somebody to say exactly what you said right thank you. Thank you for the effort. Thank you for the time thank you. And I tried to try to do that. I'm probably not as good as I should be but I do try to call out different community members. You know at the goal forum and at the member summit I tried to call out the hyperledger to see and just recognize the fact that they had put in an entire year in helping to guide the direction of the technical community and I think that's so important. Now, I will say that I'll never turned out a t shirt or sticker. I love the challenge points that you guys have created I think those are great. I have all the poker chips right for the different projects I have the challenge points right like those are little collector items just for me. As far as like, hey I was part of this community and and I can look at those and say yeah back in whatever year it was right I have a challenge point for that. Yeah, yeah I really like the coins too and for people listening. Yeah what we started doing a couple years is creating a physical hyperledger coin that had the date on it so you could point to say hey I contributed to this community this year. So we've kind of started making that a tradition. And we are, since this is the beginning of 2023 we can share that we're finally we're working into designer right now to finalize a design for a new coin for this year so if you're interested in getting a coin show up. Get involved in the community and we'll be happy to recognize you for your contribution. And I'll just have to add on top of what you said to I feel the same way I don't necessarily want a spotlight on me and don't want to be up on the stage so it's the more personal one on one connection really matters but again it's interesting people have different preferences and then you know, what's meaningful to one person isn't necessarily meaningful to another so I think it's important for us to recognize people in a variety of different ways we really can kind of do something that's meaningful to everybody. Yeah, I completely agree.  So, I think we have a little bit more time left so I am interested to hear more about what you're doing currently in Accenture and again with the focus of this discussion being on the why of things. I am really curious to hear how discussions kind of internally at Accenture have gone about talking about, you know, again why get involved, you know why do things in an open way. Because it's, again, I have I've been involved in open source for you know around 20 years at this point and I think the reasons why not to get involved are often, you know, over, you know, often kind of really compelling for some people you know I think, especially if you have short what I've noticed if you have short term deadlines if you had a company that's using an open source piece of code and you have short term deadlines sometimes that kind of time pressure makes the why of getting involved not make sense right because it's often quicker to not contribute right. You can take code modified internally and you're off and running right, but to try to get that code that you might have modified back right into the community requires extra steps right and if you just don't have that time maybe you don't do those extra steps right you have to talk to containers go to calls submit, you know, your issue, you know there's a bunch of different steps right. So, I have noticed that kind of the why not to is often really compelling so I'm curious. How do you address those concerns and say no it is really important to take those extra steps here is why it's important why we really should not just take the code and use it but take the code and contribute back. You know, do you get pushed back around that internally at your role or is everybody on the same page or how do you kind of address those concerns if they do come up. Yeah, I think it's, I think there's a couple things that we can talk about here I think sponsorship is extremely, extremely important. Having a sponsor in your organization I think set open source is important is is so key to making sure that you can contribute to that there's no roadblocks that are put in place I think education of different people and what it means to do open source. You know, I've, I've had conversations around different sorts of licensing terms and what that means for for us, right. I think those things are important to just to bring up and, you know, I'm sure there's repositories of knowledge out there, because people have been doing this, you know, for many, many years. And, you know, but getting that knowledge to the right people, the people who need to understand that there are benefits to contributing is so important. I think, you know, if you look at the example that you gave right I take the code or modify it I don't contribute that back. What happens when you need to upgrade to the latest version. Sure, sure. That is time consuming.  And I think it's really, really important for us to think about the, the unintended consequences of our choices and kind of what what we're doing when we decide whether or not to contribute something or not contribute something.  If you're using that project, then maybe you should contribute to what's going on there and be more involved in that community. I think it's so important that people recognize that, you know, people are investing their time and when they don't have the time to invest. It's very possible that a project that you're very dependent on goes away. I mean, you mentioned Hyperledric Composer earlier. It's so interesting that we continue to see people who are like, Hey, I found this link about Hyperledric Composer and I want to use it and it's like, well, that's been end of life for a while now years. Exactly. And so, you know, I think it's just, you know, a bit of knowledge transfer that needs to happen to make people understand what could possibly go wrong in the future. Well, you've said a couple of things there I'll respond to and you're right. I mean, I think the Composer example is a great one. You could say the same thing about Hyperledric Explorer that was also end of life recently. Both of those didn't go end of life because they had no users. I mean, people were absolutely using them. They just didn't have maintainers, right? And you're right. We did the same experience that you talked about with Composer. We had with Explorer too. There was a lot of people who showed up and said, Hey, I was using that. But nobody was left to maintain it, right? And so, you know, it's this catch 22. So yeah, I think that's definitely a compelling reason for why to get involved. If you rely on something, right? You want to make sure it grows and evolves and meet your needs, right? And the only way to make sure it's growing and evolving to meet your needs is to get involved, right? Right. And to, you know, even, you know, make sure that if there's any security issues or anything like that, they get addressed, right? You know, they get addressed. You address any bug fixes that you have, right? Those bug fixes that come in from the community, so important, so important. Yeah. Agreed, agreed. And you also were talking about that kind of the short term speed kind of angle, but then you pointed out that maybe you do go more quickly. Not contributing in the short term, but you're right. It's, I think it's absolutely right to focus on what happens in the long term. Maybe you're heading for a much bigger slowdown later, right? When you're kind of internal development is kind of completely out of sync with where the open source development has gone, right? Maybe you saved a little bit of time up front, but you're going to have to deal with that, you know, time at some point in the future. So I've kind of used the phrase in the past and I don't know how effective it's been, but I've talked to people about go slow now to go quickly later, right? I mean, if you do take that time up front to contribute back, you will go more quickly later, right? Because you will be doing your work with a much larger team, right? If you integrate with that open source community, it's not just you and your internal team anymore, right? It's everybody else in the community who cares about that same project, too, but you don't really get that benefit unless you do that short term slowdown to really integrate in there, right? That's correct. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I do want to point out that beyond just contributing to open source code, Accenture has done more than that in the hyperledger community. You're not just contributing to a given project, you've also started projects as well. So is that a different calculus? Like, how do you say, it's one thing to say, hey, we're using this open source code, we rely on it, so let's get involved. I think it's another thing to say, hey, we're doing this thing internally. Do we open source it? Or, hey, we need to start something. There's a, there's kind of a gap here. We need to start something. Do we start it as open source code? Is that a different discussion internally or how, I'm curious, what did, how did the discussions internally go about the two hyperledger projects you have started? Yeah, so I think with both hyperledger bevel and hyperledger, again, the sponsorship is so key, right? We do have a sponsor with an Accenture who believes that we should pretty much open source everything that we possibly can, right? I think with bevel, there was a recognition that, you know, when we did proof of concepts and pilots with blockchain, we got to a point where, you know, oh, let's change this from a proof of concept to something that we're going to put in production. So how did, how did, how do we make a deployment tool that allows for us to deploy blockchain networks that would be production ready at the gate and allow for those proof of concepts to more easily move from a proof of concept to something that goes to production? I think that was a key kind of missing area that existed out there in the space and so hyperledger bevel was created specifically for that to fill a gap, right? With hyperledger cat die, the focus was on interoperability and for some of you may know Accenture has a couple of different patents on the interoperability between different blockchain networks and the way in which that might be done. But really wanted to get the community involved in, you know, developing something larger and something that would meet more use cases and basically have the benefit of all of those different voices coming in and saying this is what we think interoperability should look like. And so cat day has become that, right? We've taken it from hyperledger cactus to bringing in weaver to making it cat die, right? And really, there is a big focus on talking to the community and bringing interoperability as a whole into and under the hyperledger cat die project. And I think there's been some some benefits, right? Just as you would expect, right? When more people come in with their ideas, you end up with something better. I think collaboration as we talked about, right? So important for us to understand how to do that, how to collaborate with others and work with others. And, you know, I think it's a skill, a skill that people can can get and gain and I think that's another kind of reason why people should contribute to open source is because it helps them kind of work with others and it's like a skill that is really hard to learn until you do it, right? The more you do it, the better you get at it and so on and so forth. So yeah, hopefully that helps kind of understand the the why of both of those projects and kind of why I think, again, open source is so important. Yeah. And I agree with what you say about the skill and I'll just give a shout out to the maintainers of the bevel and cacti projects that you're talking about. I mean, I see them doing exactly what you were talking about earlier about, you know, how do you bring people into the community? Peter, for example, you know, on cacti, you know, is out there and very welcoming and but that takes his time, right? I mean, I guess, again, you could make the argument Peter could say, well, I'm just going to be heads down and do coding, right? Versus running, he runs regular peer programming calls. He's on Discord. He's in the community answering questions. I mean, that that's time that he's taking to do that. But I guess he must get, you know, a return on that benefit from that, right? And I think one of that, you know, benefit is cacti is a very active community project, right? That's correct. Yeah. And, you know, shout out to Peter, shout out to all the maintainers for all the different projects. I think it's just so important to have that welcoming spirit. Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. Bringing bringing people together. It's so so important. Yeah. I would say if you're looking at, you know, these two projects, you know, check out the community. If you're seeing like, what does it mean to go back to what you said earlier, Tracy about community building as a skill. If you're kind of wanting to see a good model of that, I think both bevel and cacti are great models.  And so, you know, if your intention is on the hyperledger wiki, you can just show up, right? You can just show up anywhere, right? No invitation needed on discord or the mailing list or really anything. So if you want to see what these projects are doing and how it works and the kind of the whole mechanics of, you know, community development, you know, show up and take a look, you know, everything, everything at hyperledger is open. And I think these, these are two good projects to, you know, check out to see how it all works in practice. Yeah, if you do need an invitation. David just gave you one.  Yes, they don't need an invitation, but if you need one, you just got one. So please show up. Yeah, even though no invitation is necessary, I think it's still helpful to, you know, still, still offer one because it's weird. I mean, I still remember getting involved. You're like, and it goes back to what you said, do people really care what I have to say or what I have to contribute, right? And until you have that positive affirmation coming back at you, I think you still have that question mark. And I think it's really telling that, again, you remember that person who gave you that, you know, entry point into the hyperledger community, even though this was like, what, seven or eight years back, right? Yeah. It's memorable and helpful. So we may be about out of time, but I'm curious, is there anything else you want to share with the people who are listening about why, excuse me, why you're getting involved in the community or any other points that you want people to take away from this conversation? I mean, maybe just to summarize why some of the topics that we've covered, right? Collaboration, so important when you use a project, contributing back to that project in some way, shape, or form, be it a bug fix, an issue, or report to, you know, any sort of documentation or education or blogging or anything that you could possibly do to help people understand answering questions and chat, right? These are things that help other people get involved and feel like the project is moving forward, right? I think that's so important. I think, you know, having sponsors in your organizations, understanding what the benefit is to really contributing and, you know, educating people on what open source is and what the impact of being part of these organizations are, the networking that's involved, right? As we go back to some of the really early questions that we had, all of these things are reasons why you should get involved. And so hopefully, yeah, I've imparted a bit of knowledge here and happy to talk to anybody in the community if they would like to follow up at any point. I think that's a great way to end it, yeah. I mean, if people do have additional questions, you're in the community, they're going to ask, yeah, hop on our Discord server, for example. I think that's maybe kind of a best way to get in touch, although there's other options. You know, again, we run community calls, there's mailing lists. But if you're curious to get on Discord and talk directly to Tracy or to me or anybody else in the community, just go to chat.hyperlegio.org. The information is there about how to join the Discord server. We've got a bunch of different channels based on projects or special interest groups or what have you. And we hope to see you then. So maybe that's a good place to stop it and we'll hopefully talk to people more soon. Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me, David.


of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Seeking our lady's intercession, let us pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Good morning brothers and sisters. In continuing and coming very shortly to the conclusion of the seven last words of Jesus Christ, the Sunday, the fifth Sunday of Lent, we speak about the sixth, the second to last statement that Jesus made from the cross. Now before I tell you which one that was, there is some disagreement among biblical scholars and theologians about which is the sixth and which is the seventh. There are reasonable arguments for having one in either place. And I have my reasons why I am certain that this is the sixth one. And I will not explain them today. That will be for later homily. But just trust me on this one. You'll see later on. But the sixth and penultimate statement of Jesus on the cross is also from the Gospel of John and it follows directly the sermon I gave last week on Jesus' statement by thirst. And I want to read to you again reviewing what we read last week from the Gospel of John and then finishing off with this sixth statement of our Lord. After this, aware that everything was now finished, in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said, I thirst. There was a vessel filled with common wine. So they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop and put it up to his mouth. When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, it is finished. It is finished. You know, we can look at these words in a very simple and practical way and say, Jesus is just referring to the fact that he's about to die. My life is over. My life is finished. And sure, technically, that's on some level what he meant. But we know that Jesus doesn't waste words. And if he's going to speak in this profound moment in his life, there's going to be a deeper meaning. It's very important that we seek to study the Scriptures in order to understand the deepest meaning of what our Lord is trying to teach us. So what is finished? If it's not just his life, what is finished? To know that, we have to actually return to the beginning of the Gospel of John. In chapter four, Jesus, in speaking with his apostles, says this, my food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work. To finish his work. Jesus is telling us that at this moment on the cross, right before his death, he has now accomplished the work of his father. The reason why he was sent into the world. And we all know what that is. It's to save us from our sins. It's the work of salvation. So here is Jesus proclaiming that after he has taken the wine that was soaked on the sponge, he tells everyone around it is finished. It's complete. I have done the work of my father. Salvation is accomplished. Obviously that alone is profound that at this moment we recognize from the words of the Savior, the completion of the act of redemption. But if you just look at the words in their English translation, you're also going to miss something even more profound about this statement. We necessarily have to go back to an older translation. I think it's easiest to use the Latin. Because in Latin, Jesus actually said on the cross. Consumatum est. Simple translation. It is consumated. You know anything about that word? You know the mystical language that Jesus is employing. He's not saying I've just kind of completed the task like a job that God has set out for me. He's telling us exactly what kind of task job it is. And we use this word consumate in reference to the love between a husband and a wife. It's nuptial language. When a husband and wife come here before the Lord, well, when a couple comes here before the Lord and exchanges their marital vows, that's when they enter into the sacrament of matrimony. However, until that matrimonial commitment is consumated, the marriage is actually not valid. This is church law until the law that they expressed in words is then completed in action. It's not valid. And it can be dissolved. Here is Jesus who's lived his life, especially in his public's ministry the last years, preaching his words of love and truth. In a sense expressing his vows to his bride, the church. He's saying, this is how I love you. But he also tells his bride how she's supposed to love him too. You know, he speaks her vows too. And so there's this exchange of vows, but the marriage is not consumated yet. Not until the cross. And here is Jesus finally giving himself body, blood, soul, and divinity to his bride. He has held nothing back from her. He has given everything. And once everything has been offered, then he cries out consumatum est. It is consumated. This is beautiful language. And we see it played out every time that we come to celebrate holy mass. Here is Jesus consumating his love to his church by once again offering his body and blood. And we become one flesh with him in the holy Eucharist. The great mystery of our faith. It's a mystery of nuptial love between God and his holy people. It's a challenge for us to see God's love for us in a nuptial way because when we think of our own marriages, they're never this perfect. Right? We may have intended those vows when we first expressed them here in the church of our Lord. But how often do we throughout our marital life take back that love or withhold the full gift of self? In essence, contracept our love for our spouse. We do this all the time. It can be in any way. I'm just too tired to listen to you now. It's a lack of gift holding back. It just takes too much to be patient with you right now. Again, a lack of love. We struggle so much with understanding God's nuptial love for us because on our own, we could never have that love for our spouse. So we doubt that he has that kind of love for us. And that's the mistake. We know by faith the extent of his love that he has and never will withhold any degree of love from us. He has given us everything. And that's the model for our love, right? For all of our loves, it should be as complete a gift and offering. And so on this day in which we recall these most holy words of our Lord, we remember what they mean, Jesus expressing how much he loves us, how far he has gone to redeem us and draw us to himself, how he has consummated his love for us in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.


So I remember 24 hours ago I asked you when are you going to get your first medal and now already 6 medals down. Congratulations. How do you feel? Fantastic as we should. We expected more a couple but we go home with 6. I'm proud of this young guy over here. Him and his team and our Bombay team as well. Feeling great. Are you expecting any more wins in the last day? No, we're done. We're done with our entry so this is it. I'm going home tomorrow. It's a great can festival for you this year right? This is the first time you got shortlisted and this is the first time you're taking home so many medals. Yeah, it's pretty great. Like he said, we did not expect far from what we expected. But I think what makes us super happy is also that these were really effective campaigns. Everything that's won, really effective campaigns that also happen to win a lot of critical acclaims creatively. So that's great. It's great knowing that the really really effective product has also been awarded and makes us feel really good. And yeah, we'll do more on that front. Congratulations to you and your team and may there be many more. Thank you guys.


Man mocks woman on plane, doesn't realize who's behind him. She was trying to fight back the tears, but she just couldn't take it anymore. She couldn't handle it anymore. She looked away and out of the nearby window, and tried to calm herself down. But then she heard someone, she turned back to look and saw him standing there, taking her abuser down a notch. What she hadn't realized, is that this man was itching to make a move. Savannah Phillips felt that she was a passionate woman. She worked hard both in her job and as a mother. Even with all the effort she put into her life she always felt something in the back of her mind that always said she wasn't good enough. Whenever she could, Savannah would book a plane seat that had no flyers next to her. Unfortunately for her, today the plane was filled to capacity. She began to feel nervousness overcome her. She tried to breathe, but she never knew what would happen on the plane. Savannah had been battling with her weight for most of her life. Because of her weight she had heard it all, a lot of people were heartless, and some were just ignorant. Whether intentional or not it definitely affected her self-esteem. America's population is no stranger to being overweight, it has been a problem for a while now. But a recent development is body shaming. This doesn't help the problem or motivate someone to lose weight. Savannah knew this and had always been sensitive about it even though she tried to have thicker skin. Savannah didn't fly out of pleasure, she flew out of necessity. She went on many business trips and had to get on them to travel. Even though she hated the cramped cabins she just had to endure it. She had found a solution to her flying problem, she would book the seats around her so there wouldn't be anyone around her and she'd be more comfortable and less claustrophobic. Savannah had already booked her ticket and they had said it was full but she couldn't help but try again. She got to the gate and asked the check-in assistant if there hadn't been any cancellations. She simply shook her head, Savannah would have to board the packed plane without a spare seat. Savannah's experience with packed planes was never a good one. She looked at the check-in assistant and tried reasoning with them. But she looked at her and said it was just impossible with the number of passengers on the plane. As Savannah made her way to the plane she could see all of the passengers on either side of her, she already felt like there were eyes on her. She didn't appreciate it and could feel her anxiety slowly rising. She just looked down at her feet and kept repeating it'll all be over soon. But she couldn't shake the horrible feeling in her gut. Her instincts told her something would happen. Savannah was now boarding the plane, seeing the jam-packed cabin. She tried breathing and as calmly as she could, make her way to her seat. She got to where her seat was but it was a window seat and there was a man sitting in the aisle seat of the row. When he saw her waiting he rolled his eyes and stood up to let her pass. When she shuffled past he let out a loud sigh which made all of the calming exercises that she tried redundant. The man sitting next to Savannah was an elderly man wearing bright sunglasses. To say he didn't like overweight people was putting it lightly and he wanted her to know exactly how he felt about her. He started typing something on his phone. After he had typed out his message, he said his screen's brightness to full and said his text size to the biggest it could be, he wanted this message to be clear. After it was finished he moved the screen towards Savannah so she could see it. But what he didn't account for was that the man sitting directly behind him could see everything. Savannah was always a helpful person, when she saw the man moving his phone towards her she asked what he was doing. He said that it was so he could see his screen better. But he was lying and kept putting the finishing touches on his message. But when Savannah saw what he had typed out on his phone it took her by surprise, you don't expect such a horrible thing to be typed and shown to you. She averted her eyes and quickly looked towards the window. She didn't want to cry, little did she know that the man behind them witnessed the whole thing. It was now clear why the man had played with the settings on his phone until she could see it clearly. The message he had typed out was obvious and he didn't even try to hide it from her. He wanted his opinions to be clear. She felt like she was back in high school being teased all over again. The message that the man had typed was, sitting next to a smelly fatty. Savannah couldn't take it, but she was unaware that her protector was so close. The old man received a sudden, vigorous tap on his shoulder. As he turned around he heard I need to speak to you. Now. Startled, he rose and followed the young gentleman down the aisle. Angry, chase or when spoke firmly, were switching seats now he ordered. Savannah back by his confrontation, the old man cowardly agreed. Sitting back down, chase addressed the tearful Savannah. Then he really became a hero to many. On the plane ride, Savannah and chase began to talk. Savannah couldn't contain her gratitude. But all she learned of chase was his name, profession, and that he was a parent too. When they landed, Savannah felt compelled to share their story. But she couldn't find chase on social media. So, she wrote a powerful Facebook post and urged people to share the post until chase was found. But she didn't expect the response she received. Facebook post. Savannah's post began, I am only sharing this story of what happened to me today in hopes that the person who stuck up for me will somehow be recognized. We sat on the runway waiting for the OK to take off for about 10 minutes. I sat there unable to stop silently crying. I was scrunching myself up against the wall as far as I could, she continued. The guy next to me takes out his headphones. Someone behind us says, we are switching seats. Now, the guy next to me said, OK, why? And I hear someone say, removing curse words, you are texting about her, and I'm not putting up with that. Savannah was taken aback by how many likes, shares, and comments her post received. Many users wrote encouraging comments, stating that Savannah was beautiful just the way she was and not to let the rude man's personal opinion affect her. Many users also praised Chase for his actions and said that his good deed needed to be acknowledged. And they were determined to find him. It wasn't long before Facebook sleuths identified Chase Irwin by looking for the page of the restaurant he managed, Dirk's Bentley's Whiskey Roe Bar and restaurant in Nashville. Soon, people who had read Savannah's heartbreaking story began to flood the restaurant's page with well wishes and praise for the hero Chase. And it wasn't long before the media caught wind of the story. Chase said in an interview with News Channel 5 that he had not approached the stranger and intervened for the publicity. When he saw the texts that Savannah's rude seatmate was writing, something inside of him snapped. I was going to wait until the end of the flight to say something, but I could not have this guy sit next to her this whole flight, and her thinking he's making fun of her, Chase said. It really gets to me deep down when I see someone crying, and when I saw her crying it really hit me hard and I actually got sick to my stomach. Chase had been paying attention to the situation from the very start. He sensed that a situation would unfold as the elderly man was excessively rude to her. As soon as he had seen the text, Chase knew he couldn't let this old man get away with hurting another person so badly. But he had no idea how much of a difference his act of kindness would make.  She's overflowing over my armrest. I think I'm going to be sick. Chase couldn't believe what he was seeing. I began noticing her wiping tears and my heart sank, Chase confessed in an interview with Inside Edition. He knew he had to do something. He took a short video of the man on Snapchat and wrote.  I watched her read his text and is now looking sad. Deliberating over whether he should confront the man right there and then, he added, should I just say something when landing? Then, he decided that he wasn't going to tolerate it. In an interview with Local News, Chase mentioned how much he hated discrimination. When he had seen what the elderly man was writing, he had to act on it. But instead of waiting to have a word with him when the plane landed, he called a flight attendant over to let her know what he was about to do. Then, he confronted him. According to Chase, he approached the fat shamer and ordered him to swap seats with him now. At first, the man was confused. Assuming that Chase was offering him a better seat, he thanked him and asked why. But Chase was about to set him straight.  I read your text, and the girl next to you crying also read your text. And you should really take into consideration other people's feelings. That certainly kept the old guy quiet. Then, before the rude man could say anything else, he sat down next to Savannah. He encouraged me not to let that guy get to me, and that everything was going to be fine, Savannah recalled. He said he just happened to see that guy's text messages, and he started shaking, he was so mad, and he knew he had to do something. He stopped the flight attendant and told her what he was about to do. Savannah's Facebook post garnered over 7,000 comments and 1,300 shares. And when Chase was located by his Facebook fans, he was inundated with messages, thanking him. Posting a story about the incident to Facebook, Dirk's whiskey rose said it was so proud to share the story about Chase. Thank you to everyone who has messaged us regarding this story, the company said. It has warmed the heart of our entire team. But how does Savannah feel now? I would like to add that I do forgive him, Savannah said in an interview. I have said lots of things in my life that I shouldn't have, just like everyone else. If I hated him, I would not be any different, and it is vital to respond with love. Only love brings change in the world. Savannah said that neither she nor Chase have spoken with the man again, she doesn't even know who he is. And I really don't want to know. I don't want this story to be about him. My goal was for it to be about Chase, and how we should all be brave like he was and stand up for others. Thanks to Chase's kindness and Savannah's post, they helped raise awareness for the victims of body shaming and issue which has now been brought to the forefront of people's consciousness. Body shaming is an abhorrent practice that should be stopped. Chase will always remain a true hero in Savannah's eyes, as well as many others were sure.


This 10th year of daily tech news shows made possible by you right there I'm in your ears. Maybe you're Dustin Campbell or Tim deputy or Brandon Brooks or our new patrons Tracy and Drew Welcome on this episode of DTNS Microsoft accidentally uploaded its plans for the next generation of Xbox to a court website Oops, plus soon You'll be able to just walk out of Amazon clothing stores wearing the clothes you want to buy and Charlotte Henry's here to explain the brave new world of free streaming TV This is the daily tech news for Tuesday September 19th 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio garage. Hey, I'm Sarah Lane And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang as I mentioned Charlotte Henry from the addition newsletter is here.  I love our little monthly check-ins. I'm very pleased to be here And it was nice of the UK to give us news like right before you joined the show. Yeah, I organized I had a word with a good. We've got a couple of UK based things to sort Yeah, go on on the show. So let's drop some guys. Come on guys. That's a that's a stable and functioning society right there Well folks X chairman Elon Musk says a lot of things and the latest thing he said was he's thinking of Moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system, which sounds great. Here's what else is in the quick hits Google's Bard that is the company's conversational AI chat service can now connect to your Google apps and services The company announced what it calls Bard extensions in English at least to start which can pull relevant information from Gmail Google Docs Google Drive Google Maps YouTube and even Google flights and hotels information The company says if you do choose to use the extensions your content from Gmail and Docs and Drive Isn't seen by human reviewers. It's not used by Bard to show you ads or used to train the Bard model overall Intel announced it will launch its next generation of chips code name Meteor Lake on December 14th Just in time for holiday shopping Me metro Metro Lake Meteor Lake Meteor Lake will be the first chip from Intel on its Intel for Process which isn't four nanometers, but it's supposed to be equivalent It will also be Intel's first CPU with different chiplets for each component and a dedicated AI Co-processor Intel also says it should be the most power efficient client processor It's made yet and it will support Intel's intelligence graphics upscaler its version of NVIDIA DLSS Which it calls ZXS ex ESS Intel says it will have battery and performance numbers closer to launch We mentioned on Monday show that TSMC still has to send ships it that it manufactures in the US back to Taiwan for packaging before selling them After a meeting with TSMC executives the governor of the US state of Arizona and where TSMC is building plants So they discussed bringing advanced packaging to Arizona as well TSMC's Arizona fabrication plants are expected to begin work in 2025 Yeah, I get those plants online first bring in the advanced packaging but Researchers at trend micro discovered that attackers took a six-year-old windows backdoor known as either Trocolus or you may have seen it referred to as net scout and Combined it with new socks and implementation to create a Linux backdoor that they're calling Sprisocks it can collect system information control a compromised system transfer data Usual backdoor malware stuff the malware is spread with social engineering So if you need to get to a watering holes be careful what you click on out there appears to be operated by a group targeting governments in Asia Trend micro has the IP addresses file hashes and other information if you want to determine if you've been compromised At it's made by Google event happening on October 4th Google is set to announce the pixel watch too. In fact the company has Given us videos of it. They're announcing it 9 to 5 Google sources say though that the watch will include the FitBit FitBit sense to use a electrodermal activity or EDA sensor Which lets the watch track and manage stress levels a temperature monitoring sensor apparently also will check skin temperature on demand Which would even though other watches do something similar Make pixel watch to the first to actually do this on device Google also reportedly will Redesign FitBits app workout UA on the pixel watch to to integrate more closely with Google Fitzware OS app Add new personal safety features and offer real-time translation with Google assistance interpreter All right details about Microsoft's internal conversations have been slowly being reported all over the internet lately Because of public court documents now you may have seen this and thought well, that's odd Why why is Microsoft's filings becoming public when the FTC withdrew its lawsuit on July 20th? Well, they shouldn't have more than a hundred documents were uploaded Friday to a website run by the US district court for the Northern District of California and the United States Federal Trade Commission told NBC News. We didn't do it That's not an exact quote, but they said Microsoft uploaded those documents in error They weren't supposed to be uploaded wasn't the FTC that did it Microsoft has not commented on this Whatever the case the revelations do keep on coming. Do they not Sarah? Yeah, so for example Phil Spencer Send emails back in August of 2020 saying Getting Nintendo would be a career moment, and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. Well, yeah, I mean Microsoft buy Nintendo would be a good get Something to say about it, but sure. Yeah, right Yeah, other emails indicated some other stuff I Quite a data dump here. Microsoft was interested in acquiring Almost any game studio you can think of for example Warner Brothers Interactive Bungie Sega Square Enix among others There were also three-year-old emails showing unannounced games in development including the oblivion Remaster Doom year zero the Fallout 3 remaster a sequel to Ghost Wright Tokyo and Dishonored 3 but the set of documents getting the most attention Were around plans for some next-gen Xbox. Yeah, and these are slides So they certainly are legitimate plans. It doesn't mean that the plans haven't changed since these were made But here's they say one is codename Brooklyn spelled with an I instead of a Y Which would be a series X console with two terabytes of storage So twice what the series X has now Wi-Fi 6e a cylinder design instead of the boxy look no disc that's why you need the extra terabyte and Listed at the same price as the current series X $499 on the slide they say they indicated would come in June 2024 so June next year there was also a slide for an updated controller codename Sebyl se bile sebel sebel With precision haptic feedback modular thumbsticks some kind of direct cloud feature That one was listed as coming May 2024 and there were a few details about the next generation of Xbox in 2028 That's the most intriguing one. It would support cloud hybrid games So Microsoft Flight Simulator is an example of this now it's running locally, but it pulls a lot of its weather data and things from the cloud and the idea seems to be that Hardware would handle displaying main characters It would run direct X to do ray tracing and stuff like that But the cloud would deliver background elements other kinds of data There's an indication that they might consume multiple console models with varying degrees of reliance on cloud including a thin OS client which would be almost entirely in the cloud and Could be a hand-held handheld game that they would sell for 99 bucks All of this information is a year or more old at this point But Sarah given all of these things we talked about how did this get uploaded by mistake teeth? That was my first question like okay, just Assuming that everyone at Microsoft knows what they're doing. This was just one of those errors that Nobody could predict would happen, but why? Apparently, this is a PDF thing You know, there's a lot of talk out there of like why would Microsoft do this? Do they just not know what they're doing? Did they assign an intern to all of this? No, okay So assuming that that's not the case apparently One of the scenarios that I read online was Sometimes if you attach a PDF to an email for example and that email ends up being something that is needed to be, you know Uploaded to some FTC server, right? And there are multiple extensions and you say well pick this one, but not the other ones Sometimes when it's a PDF, they all get compounded together And you end up with a big data dump that you might not have originally wanted recipient to get Because we're trying to upload one thing and then accidentally everything else got included. Is that yeah? The person who has explained this said this has happened to me with acrobat reader before So that is something to keep in consideration I think we're gonna probably hear more about this as other people come forward and say this also happened to me But but yeah, I think I think there is no way that Microsoft was like ha ha. Let's just leak this Not do this on purpose. This was a big mistake and it was it wasn't in competency there It was it's something like what you're talking about that makes sense to me I just spend the whole time when we've been talking about this story and like reading about this story Feeling so terrible for the person who was responsible for uploading or sharing these Like we've all done that thing where you send an email about a person to the person You're writing about or share something that was meant to be private with your colleagues to public whatever We've all made those kind of mistakes and you know that feeling of your stomach just dropping out Can you imagine what this poor person went through there is no control Z for some parts of life There are certain scenarios where it's like, okay, this person was You know going through their email too fast, you know, it was user error You know, we've all been there. This sounds a little different almost to the point where people are like, hey heads up everybody PDFs can can't do some weird stuff and that's where the FTC is like Thank you for this embarrassment of riches, but we didn't do this I don't even think it helps the FTC because they already withdrew the case. So that Not because of this this was all stuff that was in the court cases anyway, yeah, you know what I mean So this was all part of discovery. It was just public outrage or you know, you could even call it that way, I guess I guess it's still over. Hmm. Yeah Well, what's not over the development of just walkout Technology Amazon uses that in its convenience stores and grocery stores with ceiling mounted cameras and sensors That track items as you walk around the store So it knows what you take with you when you leave so it can charge you properly This doesn't work for everything for example in the whole foods that I have gone through that uses this The bananas have to all be packaged together and they all have to be I think it's six bananas Because otherwise it's too hard to track individual bananas It also doesn't work for clothing because clothing is floppy and it's hard to tell what shape it is not to mention You really don't want to have a system of cameras and sensors in a business that requires people to go into fitting rooms and Change their clothes So you're not gonna get clothing stores to put a series of cameras up on the ceiling However, Amazon thinks it has a solution, right? Yeah So it's introduced a new version of just walkout for clothing stores that uses RFID chips So stores already use little RFID chips to manage inventory This is pretty common practice, especially if you're you know a larger store that that Moves a bunch of merch instead of tracking items throughout the store in this case Amazon customers would walk through a gate that can read the RFID chips on their way out Even if the customers like wearing a new outfit They would all be scanned because you have to go out a certain way Amazon tried the system for clothing sold at a few Seattle Kraken hockey games earlier this year and is now launched for Seattle Seahawks NFL games This I got the Iq with this story even when you explain that actually there's not gonna be the system of cameras It's obviously it's a new system. There's something about this that I look I think that just walkout technology is amazing It really is for things like food and those kind of things. It's been it is amazing. Although it's noticeable It's not a huge amount. Maybe this is a London and England thing I'm not noticing a huge number of Amazon stores popping up. But anyway, no, that's true here, too Yeah, they're they're not widespread and what I have noticed and this bears on this story Is Amazon pulling its four-star stores its bookstores But it did open a clothe a few clothing stores factors one in Glendale that I that I've been to So it does feel like Amazon's maybe shifting its focus to clothing and retail The announcement was not like hey the whole ceiling camera thing didn't work for us This is here's how we're going to be able to handle the apparel part of you know Including third-party retail stores. Yeah, they don't have to be Amazon branded. I You know my first reaction to this is endless and I am not a crook, but You know, how how would this be circumvented because if you don't go through that RFID scanner at the end Then you technically didn't steal all that stuff that you stole But I mean, you know, that's I mean theft is always a problem in retail stores So this perhaps is a better way to handle it. I think Especially at like, you know hockey and football games Great example of how this works. It sounds like they've had pretty good success Yeah, I can't report and and you know certain event venues where people are kind of in there for a certain purpose They want to get in and out quick Every concert I've been to that has one of these convenience stores with the just walkout technology has been broken Like it it's never it's never working. They always have a person at the end like yeah, sorry No, we have to ring you up. So I'm not sure what's going on there. It's probably it's probably just my personal experience, but Forgive me.  So if you're getting a piece of clothing you buy a piece of clothing and You obviously have to clip out the tag at some point or that has to go offline at some point the tag Because otherwise, you know, none of us would want something in our claim that we bought from Amazon that's You've got RFID chips in your clothes right now almost to it. Yeah, so so that's that's not new The the I don't know though if the chips are in the tags or if they're in the clothes themselves That was one of my questions too. I've never really I understand RFID. I've never really thought about How my clothes might be I Don't know if you're really gonna be a conspiracy theorist potentially tracks.  I mean, that's not a huge concern of mine, but it is a concern if it's possible This is one of those stories though where it's all things the theft the tracking It's all things that exist right now. It's just the fact that we put Amazon's name on the story That makes everybody think about it and go, well, wait a minute. I don't know if I want that Oh, if people gonna try to rip it off I feel like it's it's actually gonna reduce theft Because right now with a retail clothing store, you can just walk out without paying You just need to figure out how to keep the security tag from going off All this is doing is saying hey, that's security system. That's keeping you from walking out and the alarm going off We'll now just charge you. Well, it'll just automatically charge you So it almost is like well, you can't walk out without paying because we're gonna scan the clothes and charge you Yeah, I'm picturing do you remember those old Big gray tags that used to have sometimes in shops that someone on the desk would have to like punch out of the Oh, yeah, they'll still exist. Yeah, exactly. So the day This is obviously a bit neater and smarter and cleverer than that. Yeah, but You know still seeing issues of like what happens if the tag well, maybe you get luck in the tag Doesn't look and you get your clothes for free because obviously with the old school system The problem would be you'd get to the desk thing you paid and some shop assistant left the tag in your clothes. Yeah Well folks, we know a lot of you are Android users If you haven't already subscribed you got to check out Android faithful with Android aficionados Ron Richards went to a Dow and all the latest Android news and information catch it Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m Pacific live or get it at your leisure on your schedule at Android faithful The UK's public sector broadcasters like the BBC itv Channel 4 and Channel 5 are launching a new digital service called Freely to deliver live TV over broadband freely is being developed by Everyone TV. That's the name of the organization that provides TV without cost in the UK and is jointly owned by the aforementioned broadcasters Everyone TV has a three-year funding deal from those partners which is meant to cover the launch cost of the service Marketing push so people understand how everything works and the service freely will be built into next-gen smart TVs Starting next year if you've got an old TV and you have other options, but listen if you live in the UK You probably have a pretty decent understanding of how public broadcasting like the BBC for example works But for the rest of us Charlotte the UK does work independently in this way So how does this change the way that people consume free content? Yeah, so obviously the context of public service broadcasting in the UK to basically watch live tip for intense purposes to watch TV in the UK You need to pay the license fee. It's a hundred fifty nine pound a year. I always say it's the best service subscription I ever pay streaming subscription I ever pay because it covers so so much But anyway, that's a different conversation What's going on here is as you explained Sarah is that these public service broadcasters? So BBC's the BBC which is one two that's got three and four as well ITV Which is for old school is channel three and then channels four and five are combining for this service And I when I was reading about it I really like this idea because basically as you said it's going to be built in to you know updated smart TVs Which is great, but it's going to provide things like a Scrolling service, you know to proper TV guide the ability to jump between channels of things like that Because obviously now if you just want to get your TV provided by the internet say you want to use I don't know You've got the apps for all those public service broadcasters, but you're not watching on TV You kind of have to jump between the apps, you know, you don't have that scrolling Jumping from one channel to the other. Oh, I quite like that. That's on yeah It sounds almost like what Pluto TV has been doing Making a you know giving you a Channel guide that you know, otherwise you had to kind of hunt for before a proper channel guide You're staying in one place, which I think is really nice All those kind of things and obviously between these broadcasts. They have a hell of a lot of content I believe there's an on-demand element as well, but it's not going to replace things like the BBC iPlayer Which obviously is a very very popular service. I personally is one of the best Streaming apps out there works really really well. I think it's quite underappreciated But so this is putting all of that in one place what it is Replacing or is an update on is free view which you used to like when I was a student eight million years ago To get free view TV I had to buy a box and plug it into the little TV in my student dorm room, you know And that gave you a whole host of channels instead of just the one two and three That was actually going to be my question because I I know that The the partners who are part of the you know, everyone TV initiative say well, okay If you you know starting in smart TVs in 2024, this will be built in it'll be great if you don't happen to have one of those TVs you could still get some sort of a External box I would think to be able to enjoy the rest of this I mean so many so many people myself included already do that and you know, yeah, that's the deal Yeah, I don't know what the hardware side will be but obviously they'll still be things like as I said the BBC iPlayer They'll still be itv's equivalent of that which is called itv x there will still be the channel for player There's still gonna be the channel five, you know those still stand-alone apps as I understand it having dug into this a little bit Will still exist But this is trying to make it easier for when you By plugging your TV and this should all be that I think is the basic vibe The important thing to note is this is being delivered over the internet for board-bank connected homes So that's because there's a bit of I haven't had a chance to dig too much into this but there's looking to be some changes to the old free view system and potentially shutting down or selling off some of the frequency so That I think the idea is basically to try and move people to internet Connected services as opposed to old-school terrestrial services, you know over-the-air services For me, I kind of think this all makes sense actually. I really like the idea That it's a service bringing everything together, but you're not jumping between apps You know, you might not be using a traditional TV system, but you're not jumping through apps Which you know what it's like sometimes you think oh, I'll just start on this and I'm in Netflix and then I'm in Netflix, but sometimes like you want to jump between channels and this will be a place to do it Yeah, also, you know think of things like Samsung TV plus which I have on my TVs at home It's a pretty like there's some good stuff on there I watched CNN through that for example, but it's also a pretty clunky experience It's mostly filled with stuff that streamers and broadcasters just want to find a way to get anyone to pay anything for Like it's not great content. This is going to be substantive content It seems like a good way to just To ease people into a world where internet is like electricity It's just something you pay for you you have to have electricity to watch TV too, right? But nobody gets mad like oh, you're making pensioners pay for electricity to watch their television Internet's becoming like that in a world where the internet is just normal for every household This is a great way to ease that transition. I like yeah I'm glad you mentioned the pensioner thing because I think there is a bit of a campaign and a backlash Where there are concerns about what older people who are used to a today terrestrial TV setup will do And whenever we made these transitions, I guess you always have to bear that in mind But there's no doubt of the direction of travel for all the, you know TV services that we use and it seems to me freely is moving in that direction I would suggest it's the right direction. I would suggest it's moving freely in that direction. Oh, Tom Get it, but maybe I shouldn't instead. Let's check out the mail bag We got some good responses to Setting apps to use your own voice This is iOS 17 related from our discussion with Justin Marbury young and Chris Mancini yesterday Specifically the carrot weather app letting you use your own voice or maybe a celebrity's voice to tell you the weather Mark wrote in and said I get that all of this on device is to improve security But what happens when you move or upgrade to a new device these companies ever talk about that?  Maybe it's a parent-grandparent significant other whatever. This is some someone that is no longer with us What if I want to get my device trained by a loved one who's not nearby or easily accessible? Is there the ability for somebody to send the 15-minute training as recording to me asks mark What about if I decide to get an iPad after training my phone? Can I share the training with my iPad mark says Apple Google and Microsoft? Never tend to talk about this when they rave about how secure on-device features are to protect your privacy There's just no winning is there everybody complains that it's in the cloud And they're gonna spy and then they put it on the device and then you complain and then they say you can't transfer The the good news for mark though is that you the reason they don't talk about it a lot is it's just part of the migration So if you move from device to device it can move good question about whether it's easily movable to an iPad If you wanted to do that that that's that's a great question. I imagine it could and should be without having to be in the cloud The idea of having someone who's not nearby send training Yes, that is not something easily as easily done But it wouldn't be as easily done even with the cloud because you'd have to have them log into your account and do do stuff like that So I feel like the better Solution there is to just have them record something and send you the recording and then you play the recording we we got a We got a recording that Allison Sheridan did of her training and I have to say it doesn't really sound like her Do you want to hear a little bit of it? Yeah Do it Okay, here you go. I Think it's gonna be playing any moment now We're not maybe it won't That's why it doesn't sound like her. Yeah, it just sounds like silence. Yeah, it's like, you know Allison just is Sounds smarter than silence. This is such an interesting issue though, isn't it? This is Allison's personal voice created using iOS 17 the training to create this voice required reading 150 short phrases with a pause in between each so it took quite a bit of time the phrases were out in that they were about just a few things The included political institutions with sentences like he was in the US Senate for 12 years There were a lot of years called out like this happened in the 1970s and finally the creed it kind of goes in that way for a while It's just I'm gonna say, you know having spent enough time with Allison This does sound like Allison you can tell that it's yeah, it's machine-generated, but to to your point mark I You know, I think your mileage may vary when it comes to wanting, you know People who are inaccessible to you because they're you know, they don't they're not living anymore Or they're just like super far away, you know, it could be something that brings you, you know happiness or Or something else, but this is not bad Yeah, and Mark's not alone. There were a lot of more than a few people who wrote in saying I don't want to hear myself read the weather, but I would like to hear grandma grandpa mom dad Etc. A lot of people talking about you know, yeah, thanks everybody who wrote in about that No, I could do Thing really interesting particularly in the context where I'm thinking of AI and The fears or otherwise Around how our voices could or may well be Distorted or used in different ways and how you know there can be We know that it's gonna be possible It kind of is already possible isn't it to have voice recordings that prepare for port to be you but are not used It's gonna be the same is the same with video I can understand that even with the Inconveniences it may cause why the tech companies are really really approaching this cautiously I can I'm seeing it more in that context of As opposed to like wouldn't it be nice to have X or Y family member read the weather to me? Well, Charlotte Henry, you know whether or otherwise we are always Happy No, it's listen sometimes weather is good sometimes weather is bad The addition newsletter is always good And we're so happy that you're doing it and so happy that you're on the show more regularly But let folks know where they can keep up with your work Yeah, I mean if you head over to the addition net There's regular blog posts there and as you can see on that image There's a box where you can sign up to the newsletter part pop your email address in there And I'd love to have you along I'd really really love it if you became a paid subscriber as well because that's really I really appreciate that And if you just want to go straight to the newsletter, it's newsletter dot the addition net Patrons stick around for the extended show There's more Charlotte Henry to come the UK just passed the online safety bill and while it does not look like it Means end-to-end encrypted apps are going to leave the UK which some like signal had threatened to do so There are still a lot of questions and we are gonna ask them Yeah, just a reminder though. You can catch our show DTS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com Slash live we're back tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants calm