coming up on tech news today is Apple stealing your email is google just not impressed by its own phones and the FCC is on the unlocked phone in case all that more coming up necklace you love from people you trust this is tweet bandwidth for tech news today is provided by cash fly at CAC h EF ly calm this is tech news today for st. David’s Day march first 2013 tech news today is brought to you by gazelle the fast and simple way to sell last year’s gadgets find out what your used ipad macbook iphone galaxy s and other smartphones are worth at gazelle com and by lantronix maker of the X print server print from your iPad iPhone or any iOS device to virtually any printer for information visit ex print server calm / twit and enter the code twit to receive free shipping on your order welcome to check these today I’m Tom Merritt I’m Sarah Lane Amaya’s actor I’m Jason L and as the show would keep you up to date on the most important stories in the tech world put him in some context for you starting with the top 10 stories of the day that’s how Microsoft felt today dramatic as Reuters reports that the European Commission plans to fine microsoft before the end of march in relation to the antitrust case regarding browser choice for windows yes the one that’s more than a decade old this would be the second time Microsoft would be found in violation and find of that 2009 settlement Microsoft’s board cut Steve Ballmer’s bonus last year as a result of the failure to provide a browser choice screen as required microsoft says that was just a technical error either way sources tell Reuters the Commission plans to find Microsoft by Easter so new pope Microsoft fine all in time for Easter just one day after Groupons very dismal fourth-quarter earnings numbers that saw negative earnings and unimpressive revenues Andrew Mason is out as CEO executives Eric Lefkofsky and Ted Leonsis will step in to cover his role on an interim basis as co-ceos o co-ceos always work out so well we’ve known some DQ for him asserts for a new CEOs underway blackberry owners get excited I love saying that there’s an update to blackberry 10 that blackberry says will improve third-party apps as well as provide better gmail calendar support the update weighs in at around 150 megabytes and will be available in the coming weeks unlocking your phone lost its legal exemption in the US at the end of January but never fear FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is here the Chairman told TechCrunch the band raises competition and innovation concerns and the FCC is gonna invest they’re going to get out there magnifying glass and decide whether the FCC quote can and should enable consumers to use unlocked phones unlocked phones can be sold in the US and many carriers allow unlocking the law is just unclear whether you have the right to unlock a phone on your own Facebook’s confirmed its buying the Atlas advertiser suite from Microsoft though rumors have suggested this is Facebook launching its own ad network the company says no no it just wants to help advertisers close the loop and understand how their investments on Facebook end up earning them money Atlas allows advertisers to plan campaigns to buy ads on sites across the web to measure their impact it can handle search rich media and in-stream video and display ads as well as offer ap is for programmatic control of big campaigns German lawmakers say Google and other news aggregators can continue to show single words or very small text excerpts on their sites without being required to pay however anything longer than that is still the exclusive property of the content owner the bill also gives publishers one year to use their journalistic content commercially I just have to make the font really small and then it’s ok CFOs say the darndest things are so cute yesterday it was time warner cable CFO saying nobody wants gigabit internet today we have Google CFO Patrick Pichette telling the Morgan Stanley technology conference that Motorola’s current roster of phones don’t Wow by Google standards the remark was likely meant to stoke anticipation for future products now that Google has owned Motorola long enough to influence the product development cycle british sky broadcasting group or BSkyB will buy telefónica’s UK fixed-line broadband and telephony business 40 200 million pounds sterling or about 303 300 million u.s. dollars the deal should close in April if it passes regulatory clearance at which point customers will be moved off the o2 and be e broadband bands and become sky customers sky would then become the uk’s second-largest IEP isp behind BTW virgin media would still be in third place electronics chain Best Buy did not receive an anticipated takeover offer from its founder Richard Schulze e by the deadline yesterday Schultz he had been attempting to back but by the company back since last August but bloomberg reports he could not line up debt and equity financing CEO Hubert Joly said the company will continue its plan to turn things around and aims to increase online sales from seven percent to eighteen percent of the US market Cody Wilson’s nonprofit organization defense distributed demonstrated a semi-automatic weapon capable of firing over 600 rounds with a 3d printed AR lower the lower contains the guns operating parts including the trigger last year defense distributed demo to lower that failed after six rounds the designs for the new lower are available for free and it covers every part you’d need this episode of tech news today brought to you by gazelle been staying at all weeks folks what are you putting it off for go dig out those old gadgets you don’t need anymore you probably got some new ones at the end of the year around the holidays or maybe you just been inspired by all these product releases in the early part of the year go take that old stuff that’s sitting in a box and turn it into cash if you’re sitting there like me saying like you know and I don’t want the hassle of having to list it and talk to people and me that’s why gazelle is awesome you don’t have to do any of that stuff you just go to the website Gaz e ll ecomme you type in what you got you got an old Android phone you got an iphone ipad blackberry phone you put it in there they’ll tell you how much they can pay you for it and you lock that quote in now you don’t have don’t don’t have commitment issues don’t worry about whether you actually want to sell it or not maybe it’s your your little first phone and you might want to keep it forever lock that quote in now because it’s not going to get more valuable and you got 30 days to decide if you want to sell it when you do once they get the the device they’ll pay you fast by check or paypal it is by far the easiest way i’ve ever done to sell gadgets and turn them into cash so if you’re a procrastinator like me stop go to gazelle com right now free shipping most items even qualify for a free box fast processing and no listing hassle cellular last year’s gadgets today at gazelle com and we thank them for their support of tech news today alright Darren kitchen had a voidable issue and it couldn’t be with us today so it’s just the three of us but that’s cool it’s like you know it’s like the star team concentrated power right something like that and Jason’s here too yeah I’ll all assemble you guys into one giant Voltron of news nice I like it I like it too uh well let’s start with the FCC Chairman Julius magic on ski I was trying to remember the name of the guy in Voltron keith is the lead guy was a kief and there’s adjacent Keith oh yeah I guess so FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski as we mentioned at the dude shoes said the FCC’s gonna look into this whole dmca exemption removal for unlocking phones if you’re unclear what’s going on here cuz you’ll see some articles say unlocking a phone is illegal another articles say no no it’s not illegal at all from two thousand six until 2010 the Library of Congress which has been charged with this Duty issued an exemption to the DMCA in the case of unlocking phones now this past October when they issued their new exemptions they did not issue an exemption for unlocking phones they said that a the decision in Verner vs. autodesk by the Ninth Circuit Court of the United States which said that a EULA an end-user License Agreement can prevent you from owning software can say like you’re just licensing it you don’t own the software means that they no longer feel is comfortable issuing an exemption because you may not own the software your unlocking on the phone after that case and B there’s more unlocked phones been sold all the time and more carriers willing to unlock phones for you so they don’t feel that the exemption is necessary now what this leaves us with though is is a question of whether the FCC even needs to step in whether whether unlocking a phone is actually circumventing copy protection which is what the DMCA is about this hasn’t been tested in court so I as I know I know as a trained attorney you’ve you kind of like don’t you resist speculating on things that haven’t been tested in court but if I can pull you out of that a little bit where if you had to decide if somebody set you up as judge would you call unlocking a phone circumventing copy protection I mean arguably you could say that you don’t want somebody to copy a proprietary code that was on your phone right so I guess that would be the way to do it if you’re going to be verizon or AT&T or the wireless carriers so if that’s their argument that’s actually what they’re putting on their phones they might change the way phones are locked so that it does apply so it I don’t know how it is how the situation is right now I don’t know what arguments they would even make because at this point when it comes to locking phones it’s not really that big a deal when it comes to something that Verizon wants to support the faculty illegal theoretically I mean it’s not like they’re going after anybody there’s a reason why I has been tested in court because going after companies that are unlocking phones I let you switch carriers I mean switching carriers is very difficult in generals it’s because the hardware isn’t there so I just think this might be somewhat of a big deal over some of this technologically pretty difficult right now anyway although there was an exemption from two thousand six to twenty ten so it may be that they didn’t go after people because they are like I’ll well it’s not worth fighting when the Library of Congress has issued an exemption and maybe they would start doing it now I’m as Sarah do you do you think unlocked phone as an issue has gone away now that we have more to by wordy were you following this uh I’m using an unlocked phone uh it was really easy i called verizon i said will you unlock this and they went yeah so it no were you were you to me were you far into your contract though what’s that were you far into your contract uh no um when this happened I I had only been with verizon for a short period of time um it was the you there was there was a point where verizon said yeah we’re gonna let you unlock phone I’m phones and so I called and that was Anna that it was it was five minute phone call if that so the fact that it’s technically not supposed to be legal seems like a non-issue to me and yeah i mean if these if these sorts of situations aren’t being enforced if i’m not gonna get in trouble about all of this well i don’t know how much it really affects me an individual level but yeah we probably shouldn’t have laws in place that make something technically illegal for kind of no reason but then again you can you can do is with carrier permission right there like you were saying if if these companies are willing to make it very easy to obtain i mean it’s pretty much a non-starter the other things i think that verizon iphone 5 is unlocked already when you buy it you can switch networks AT&T that just becomes do you want even do that so it’s i think verizon can hang his hat on the fact they have a really good network and say look if you want to switch you can go ahead as long as you bought the phone from us we’re fine the verizon iphone 5 is unlocked internationally so you can you can use another sim card when you when you go overseas but it’s not unlocked domestically because it still got a cdma radio in it so you can’t use it on the AT&T network because it just doesn’t it doesn’t have the right bands I think there’s an old story about that it was right around September so I’m i think but anyway what we’ll find out later yeah you may be right about that because it has the international banzet maybe those let you use it on AT&T but it’s got different bands in the AT&T phone anyway that’s it’s a confusing situation it’s not as clear as you know your phone is unlocked I I feel like the bigger problem here is not the FCC getting in and saying well let’s issue our own exemption let’s see if we have the authority that’s nice and all I’d rather they keep their mission focused on other things I think the problem is the DMCA we should the DMCA is broadly used for all kinds of things that it was not intended for it was intended to prevent copyright infringement and even that the way they wrote it I hate but the fact of the matter is it’s now used as a weapon to hold over people’s heads so I I think that this sort of thing if it’s got enough public support should be used as a rallying cry to say let’s reexamine what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does and say okay we’re past the millennium mark now by 13 years maybe we need a new law that is tailored specifically to what the actual harm of copyright infringement is and protects only that and doesn’t allow people to use it as a weapon meanwhile Apple is stealing my email is that what’s happening Sarah well Tom it depends on what kind of emails are sending uh Apple’s iCloud email system is filtering out certain phrases now we don’t necessarily have a list of the phrases that Apple’s filtering out but we know one of the phrases is barely legal teens now you might say barely legal teen sounds like something ah that is uh bad you know maybe people shouldn’t be sending each other those sorts of emails the issue is is that you know these aren’t necessarily spam emails that user emails that could be construed as you know inappropriate or that sort of thing but Apple isn’t sending these emails to your junk folder so that they can just sort of live there and die there it’s just not sending them at all they’re going away into the ether and macworld did some tests and found that even an email with the phrase barely legal teens that was contained in an attached PDF or even a zipped PDF we’re also going away without being sent now when you’re if I am sending these emails I mean I am allowed to send them it’s not as if you know they’re you know the send button is grayed out it’s just not going anywhere and in Macworld’s tests they found that the filtering occurs on inbound emails not outbound so you can send any email from your iCloud account it’s it’s not as if you’re not allowed to send these emails but they’re really not going anywhere macworld reached out to Apple about this because a lot of people are saying well hold on a second I mean if that’s one of the phrases that’s blocked I mean as a journalist maybe I’m I you know I’m not sending any pictures of anything that’s that that’s barely legal we’re just talking about this those emails will then be blocked well you can’t do that I mean we’re just we’re just talking about something and apples response was occasionally automated spam filters may incorrectly block legitimate email if the customer feels that a legitimate messengers blocked we encourage customers to report it to apple care my question is well how can you report anything to apple care when the email never arrived in the first place I mean I can I can say to myself well maybe there are emails the Apple is blocking that I’m never getting and aren’t going to my junk folder but if they never arrived I don’t know you know you don’t always know that someone’s about to send you an email sometimes you get emails out of the blue I as does this bother you or do you think that this is Apple just trying to keep things clean I mean I think our goalies I could see it being like a spam filter going wrong I’m technologically I could see that being the easy way out of that but I’m just like this is kind of creepy and the idea that it took mean there’s that whole Microsoft campaigns and Google’s reading your emails and if you’re using iCloud to use your emails and then you find out that certain things aren’t getting by Apple’s got a history of being a bit arbitrary when it comes to at least its app store policies I don’t want to find out that emails I was sending weren’t being sent out it just seems a little bit strange because then I then that actually would justify all those silly college get hey did you get my email like I take this is just annoying mean I don’t know why you’d use this phrase even if you’re talking about this article right so if you want to talk about this this whole idea and you write this phrase it will disappear so it’s just it’s a little bit worrisome because you just don’t know where your stuffs going yeah I mean there’s all kinds of ways that those words could be used in a very legitimate sense and you should get this email like Sarah said if you didn’t get the email how can you complain about not getting the email I guess you’d find out when somebody says hey did you get my email no I didn’t and if you’re aware of this story then you might contact apple support say what’s going on here I I do think that the reaction here is like Apple is stealing your email Apple is is is censoring you it’s not apples got a poorly implemented spam filter that shouldn’t be doing things the way it is but spam filters often make little mistakes like this doesn’t sound to me like this is really impacting people a lot because it took a lot of Investigation Tom Z and the chat room pointed out readwriteweb responded to cringe Lee’s post about this saying wait a minute just looks like a bug macworld followed up on that with the story that Sarah is talking about that took a lot of Investigation to even confirm that this was happening it can’t be impacting that many users out there still it’s bad it should be fixed that’s not the way it should work your email should go into a holding folder where you can go find it again if it got misapplied and then report and say oh this wasn’t spam it shouldn’t got God put there well exactly and if something you know a phrase like barely legal teens yeah we all roll our eyes and go yeah people call you shouldn’t be sending emails like that in general but again where’s the master list if Apple would be transparent about the sorts of phrases that it’s not going to allow saying this isn’t gonna go to your spam folder it is simply going to disappear if you send emails like this whether you agree with it or not at least you would know but we don’t know that yeah exactly i mean that that’s really the problem here is is is that you don’t you don’t have a proper fail-safe mechanism in place and and apples response is what Apple usually responds with itch is everything we do is designed to work just this way and we’re not going to admit any mistake while we quietly fix it which is probably what they’re doing oh let’s talk about those cute little CFOs and the crazy things they say what what’s the Google CFO say in this time I ask ya this google CF own senior VP Patrick Pichette instead of the products in Motorola’s pipeline quote are not really to the standards that what Google would say is Wow innovative or transformative he said the statement at Morgan Stanley technology conference he said Google inherited 18 months of pipeline and that Google has to drain that right now that’s actually his phrase drain it plays it that I was a little strange all the while the company is building its next wave so we’re going to see some Google influence soon also though interestingly Motorola is getting the help of Guy Kawasaki he’s taken a job as an advisor motorola a kawasaki was apple’s chief evangelist for four years so we’re gonna see some some new influence on motorola Sarah I’m gonna ask you this based on on Google’s recent pixel that beautiful piece of hardware what kind of wow do you expect from Motorola coming up well i mean if if google want to make products that are like the pixel chromebook that everyone almost across the board um you know based on on unlimited use says it’s a beautiful machine and maybe something that’s gonna be tough to sell because it’s also a limited machine but as far as hardware goes if google’s capable of that sort of thing i would say a lot of Wow from Motorola I mean the guy kawasaki thing is interesting because of course he’s he’s at least at one point was very intimately familiar with how Apple put together their products and and why they kind of put themselves on a pedestal hardware-wise so this sounds promising to me I mean I think I think a lot of us have been sitting around going like what are they gonna do with Motorola you know it’s like there’s this there’s this whole sort of arm of Google that they bought and then they wanted to stay away from you know or keep at arm’s length anyway so yeah I mean if Google’s saying listen motorola stuff is not does not have that wow factor well now they’re in the position to to turn up the Wow Jason you and I tested out a bunch of motorola android phones a bunch of them like so well i mean they’re not they’re not the latest generation isn’t that bad actually the M the max all these versions that they’re out there they’re but what could what could step it up what could make these phones stand out even further well I mean off the top of my head what I would like to see them do with Motorola is kind of go down what they’ve been doing just with general Nexus devices period you know peel it back from being a this is a very unique experience to Motorola and turn it into this is what Android is capable of and you know we now have the power to control the hardware and give you the experience now we’re not even working with another hardware manufacturer to help create this cope co-branded Nexus device now we have total control over this this is what we’re capable of and we’ve heard a lot of rumors about a possible X phone that has nothing to do with the Nexus program possibly but that’s coming from Motorola and probably possibly the first kind of collaborative effort with Google and Motorola creating this device um but I’m not surprised at all to know that they’re still kind of going through that old inventory and you know all that stuff I mean motorola had been working on phones for years so it’s not surprising at all that even though Google now owns Motorola they still kind of have to push out some of that product and really get to the core of what Google wants to offer here Tom do you think that Google needs to strip out all that software layer on top of Motorola phones or do they need to do something about the hardware itself who said they’re gonna strip out the software layer is that this i mean the word word all they said was the phones haven’t wowed but now that we’re in charge they’re going to i mean right what i want to know is what is it at the morgan stanley conf technology comforts that makes CFO’s say things that can easily be taken wildly out of context because it happened yesterday to to the the CFO time warner cable neck and up granted what she said was controversial but it was definitely taken out of context in a lot of situations and I think what Patrick Pichette is saying here sounds bad in a way like we need some waffles but I think what he’s saying is you know we’re gonna step it up with Motorola it’s it’s supposed to be a positive maybe that’s why you see fon not chief marketing officer but yeah I what does Motorola need to do to get back to your original question I don’t know that it’s anything about stripping away that you know the motorola interface it’s it’s just making a better interface and and i will answer your question definitively what they have to do is in the interface it’s not in the hardware i don’t think you can differentiate on hardware with smartphones much anymore you can do a little but I just don’t know that and maybe i’m wrong but i don’t know that there’s anything left that will really wow us hardware wise and smart phones i think it has to be functionality and it has to be in her face if you really want to turn heads yeah I’m sure Tommy you’re probably right the idea is it’s a CFO and they’re like listen we got this unprofitable arm needs to make money it’s gonna make money well trust us cuz your investors want to make sure everything’s going okay all right let’s take a quick break think lantronix for their continuing support of tech news today if you have a home office maybe you’ve got a printer at home they and you’ve got an iPad or an iPhone you want to print from it but you don’t have one of those new airprint printers don’t wait don’t run out and spend a bunch of money on a new airprint enabled 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virtually unlimited iOS devices the Home Edition is only ninety nine dollars and that supports eight USB printers and to network printers or you can get an office edition for 199 dollars that one sports eight USB printers and unlimited network printers plus many network admin features like Active Directory support if you need that sort of thing so here’s where you go to X print server calm / twit for more information and to buy and we’ve got a special offer code use the code twit to receive free shipping on your order remember visit ex print server calm / twit and I check out enter the code twit and we thank lantronix for their support of tech news today well we talked about groupon’s earnings report yesterday that was quick Andrew Masons out huh Sara hey our guests uh-huh yesterday was like yeah you know Steve kossak was like I’m really interested to know what’s gonna happen with andrew mason and sure enough just mere hours after after we wrapped yesterday’s T&T andrew mason was out as CEO of groupon so this is just a day after those pretty dismal earnings that i talked about on the show yesterday he posted a somewhat colorful send off letter and set it through at the top listen this is for employees but I’m gonna post this publicly cuz I know it’s gonna leak anyway she’s probably right about you know it was he says yeah I want to spend time with my family that’s why I’m leaving the company dad just kidding I got fired you said I might be going to a fat camp because I i gained what he called the groupon 40 by working there over the last few years even made a game reference he said if Groupon was battletoads it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra tubes without dying on my first ever play through and there was a lot of talk yesterday you know some people saying yeah you know you go ang ooo that’s kind of a fun goodbye letter at least you you find the humor and all this and other people saying this is some guy making light of a bunch of people who are about to lose their jobs I mean just because he’s gone doesn’t mean that groupon doesn’t still have financial problems you know this is like you know a very cutesy way to make light of a serious situation so no matter how you feel about the way that he said goodbye to everybody there was a more formal letter to employees from Eric Lefkofsky who’s the executive chairman and co-founder and Ted Leonsis who’s the vice chairman they say they’re going to run the company as co-ceos but that they are looking for web CEO did somebody just say son I said worked great for rim oh yeah I know exactly well it’s always interesting to me when you hear stuff like this cuz it’s like how how seriously are they actually looking for another CEO sometimes they just sort of say that and then they hope that no one will remember and then they just sort of become CEOs what’s interesting is that groupon stock had had plummeted after those q4 earnings down twenty percent is now up more than about 10 now that Andrew Mason is known to be leaving so there’s a little bit I guess of you know hopeful attitudes people saying well this needed to happen there was talk of this back in December the company had said listen we’re not getting rid of Mason and the stock had taken a dip at that point as well what’s also interesting is as these co-ceos leonsis comes from AOL he started there back in nineteen ninety-three so he was quite the AOL veteran he made a lot of money when when AOL and Time Warner merged in 2001 but then he also stated al through the horrible dot-com crash of those years ended up stepping down as vice chairman in 2006 after sort of bringing AOL back from the depths of despair so he certainly has a lot of experience with the ups and downs of a big company you know groupons a pretty big company tom d does this seem like you know i think it was it was probably just you know a matter of time before before Mason got the ax do you have a lot of faith in the model now that that these two other guys are running the hell I mean we talked a lot yesterday about whether we thought coupon clipping on the internet was a good idea at all yeah I think it may be a business that’s overblown and I suppose that Andrew Mason being sort of the visionary founder type was the wrong guy to lead a business that has smaller margins than maybe he expected and maybe these guys are the right choice whenever I hear co-ceo though it never ever ends up well now rim worked very well as co-ceos we joked about that earlier but for many years it worked just fine so maybe they’re the exception that proves the rule for most of their run but it usually seems like a compromised situation and that’s not going to last and maybe it’s just meant to figure out who’s better at running the company and then the other one will step aside but no none of this gives me any confidence that groupon has has cracked the code and figured out how to do online coupons I think online coupons are here to stay i don’t think they’re going away but i think the initial euphoria over groupon has proven to be overblown and this doesn’t change that my definitely seems like that with co-ceos it could be troublesome but the thing is it depends on what they actually execute because if they just stick to what they’re doing which is just these deals that’s not going to be enough they looks like they’re going to need a lot of strategic partnerships with major companies but the fact is all these major companies already have their own competitors so don’t really know I’m not really sure how they could work with that I think I was reading some article I crazier ideas why don’t they just go by four square or do something like that where they can just integrate something with the that has a similar user base but they can actually take advantage of groupon better maybe something wild like that is way to go but we’re gonna have to see what happens with this because it’s just a really crowded field that’s actually a really interesting idea I as the whole group are the whole Foursquare thing um you know cuz when we mentioned some of their really bad earnings reports groupon still has quite a bit of cash on hand I mean they have the kind of money too I don’t know if it’s it’s Foursquare or someone else but yeah if you can if you can figure out how to make the coupon business somehow richer with another business thats related and that can incorporate your core business into something that’s already working for them that would be interesting but yeah they’ve they’ve got to change things up I I can imagine there are a lot of people working at Groupon right now that are just absolutely freaked all right let’s talk about I fix it adding a lot of details about the repair ability of the surface pro I always love it when i fix it gets around to finally pouring out the results of the tear downs now they’ve actually put a list together this one the first lists normally I fix it will explain how difficult it is to just disassemble one or two tablets in this particular case they made a list and they rated tablets repairability on a scale of one to ten with one being the least repairable points were awarded for upgradability use of non proprietary tools for servicing and component modularity the number one best most repairable tablet is the dell XPS 10 scored nine points for being easy to open having color-coded screws and labeled cables inside notable ones like the fire HD and nexus 7 both scored seven points the ipad 2 3 4 and many all score 22 being very difficult to open and the least repairable tablet was the surface pro with a score of 1 I believe want some of the complaints that was using a lot of adhesive Tom you know I like to tinker with with with gadgets a lot should tablets be more repairable by normal people or is this just something just an appliance there’s no need for this sure I’d love them you know I I would absolutely love that I love being able with eat way I remember when I first discovered that laptops you could open up and put new ram in that was the revelation cuz I I laptops were really expensive in the early days and they just weren’t something I considered to be within my reach but when they finally did become I was like oh but they’re all locked up but they weren’t right you could replace the hard drive you could replace the optical drive you can put other things in the optical drive there isn’t really anything like that with tablets you just sort of assume oh this thing is glued locked up there’s nothing I can do with it I would personally love to be able to tinker and upgrade with my tablet but I’m not sure how important that is to the masses of humanity so a lot of phones are all sealed up but a lot of phones aren’t they have the removable back you can swap out the batteries why should tablets be any different why can’t you just swap out of battery on your iPad about obviously I was Apple’s a very bad example for that but why not have an open a bull machine no good reason really I mean they’re they’re very thin there I mean there’s not you know it’s not like they’re like little screws on the back where you go hey this should be a lot easier I mean the whole thing is is kind of designed to be sealed up really nicely um I also I understand it you want to be able to customize you know the hardware that that you bought and they own but i also don’t find i mean i’ve got like four ipads well you know over the years i’ve collected them for you know research purposes for my shows but i don’t need to change what’s inside them and I think I’m probably speaking for the vast majority of people who have tablets it’s just it’s not something I look at and go gosh if I could only open this I’d be so much happier you know as long as my battery life holds I’m pretty good and the battery life least for iOS stuff is generally great these sealed items I think kind of Earth me sometimes I mean when there’s no expandability Apple looking at you here I mean that’s where the issues come in but there aren’t a lot of components that you could mix and match with with these devices because they’ve soldered everything to that one board I’m just I mean I don’t foresee a chance where we’ll have you can actually like upgrade the RAM or upgrade your storage other than using microSD cards it’s just it just it’s just this weird almost making these things appliances I don’t like this idea of its almost thing that happen two cars you can’t really go in there because it’s designed by designers are not engineers from you’re trying to get into their you just can’t work I’m I think they should be more repairable because I mean if you try to take one of these apart like you need like a like a hot glue gun or what are you trying to repair well I want to get inside of this thing it’s a toy I want to play with my toys well okay but that’s not repairing anything that’s what you want a little bit you know singapore it i haven’t broken anything yet and that don’t knock on wood but money 2004 says it’s emasculating absolutely emasculating that i can’t rip open my tablets i I think we’ll leave that right there Thank You sergey brin and money two thousand four real quickly new browser stats out from net applications in statcounter they both say different things because they measured things in different ways net applications measures unique users and of their measurements Internet Explorer second month in a row above fifty five percent up to 50 5.82 percent ie6 fell to six point three three percent if you’re in the IE six death watch it still got a ways to go firefox number two 20.1 two percent it nudged up a little bit as well chrome was the only one to decline in the list at one point to one percent down to 16 point two seven percent then Safari and opera round out the top-5 now stat counter measures page views and the reason i bring both of these up is when you measure page views you’re measuring a different thing you’re saying how active are the users of these browsers no matter how many of them there are chrome tops the list thirty-seven point oh nine percent of page views in February IE second 29.8 two percent then firefox 21.3 four percent and a drop off to Safari and opera after that my question is first of all I think these are all great stats because it shows there’s more diversity in the browser market place than we’ve ever had since the launch of internet explorer and the the death of Netscape but I I think it’s really interesting that chrome is on the decline in number of people showing up to use it but it’s still top of the heap as far as power users must be using it all the time I mean obviously I’ve got like 20 tabs open right now myself some countin for a lot of page views in chrome I mean you guys both use chrome right yep I use cream and Jason when you’re not sitting there at the at the counter we kind of have to use a certain browser what do you use on your own um I prefer Chrome but I use a mixture of chrome and firefox no real like specific application for either it’s just because I like having different browsers to have different accounts logged into and that’s fair i actually have opera as my default browser on windows chrome on OS but i like chrome because of the sinking yeah me too do you think that that’s why we’re seeing this disparity is that chrome actually isn’t top of mind for the general populace Firefox has kind of creeped into the the general awareness and that’s why it’s rising in unique users but the power users all use chrome cuz cuz of the features that allows you to use when the number seems to shake out that way right so the general public uses IE is that’s the default it’s what’s available and then people who are like wait I’m getting kind of tired this but I want to do a lot of crazy things you’re gonna use firefox so you can extend that like what’s all the extensions but then there’s also a chrome with that sink ability that’s built in because you have that Google account so I mean it seems like this looks about representative I don’t know if it’s going to I mean this idea that chrome is going to become the biggest browser Firefox maybe it’s just because the way they work just works for this right proportion of people and and people are pointing at you can sync with firefox but it’s harder to use firefox across platforms now that chrome has an iOS version that works very well that’s one of the reasons that I’ve stayed in that universe but opera and Safari also have their own sinking Sara why do you use Chrome um that’s a really good question uh it’s funny every so often doesn’t happen very often at all something will be really wonky in chrome and so i’ll open up safari and and you know just try to figure out like this is the chrome issue or is this an issue you know with the originating site and firefox for whatever reason you know a long time ago years ago i remember it was like a huge resource hog and a lot of people were you know had the same complaint and so I khurana was just like well screw this i’m not using firefox anymore and I’ve really never gone back for the most part though I find that chrome is the cleanest browser I like the way that it works I actually like it better than safari for that reason um so it’s I kind of am a browser loyalist you know when I get something that you know I get my my stupid flash crashes on Chrome every once in a while um but besides that I just I’d like it and I’m definitely a chrome power user I’ve got like four gmail accounts i’m logged into right now the endless number of tabs and and it just kind of works for me I do find chrome to be a resource hog sometimes but it’s been better in the past I don’t know six to eight months in fact I was having a little bit of the old problems today and all I did was restart chrome and it was fine so I don’t know what was going under if chrome on mobile is gonna have a halo effect cuz I know chrome is only supported an Android 4.1 higher but is it is it even the default yet on on jelly bean or you stuffed install that they you still have to install it because a lot of the device manufacturers still load their own browser in there well not necessarily come previous nine X’s seven came with chrome default so right it’s a bit it all depends exactly the Nexus devices it is pre-installed we’re sure interesting ah right and yes Firefox exists on lots of platforms I meant mostly iOS that you can’t get it on yet you can get that you can get that version of it though so it’s just it’s just not as convenient yet but it’s almost there you can’t get chrome on windows phone there just aren’t as many people using Windows Phone lots of little niggly bits around that are uh send us an email TNT a twit TV let’s move on to the random big dog is that big scary dog that can walk like a dog but it’s a robot it can now throw things at you it can actually pick them up and throw things at you this is Boston Dynamics robot and it’s a it’s been replaced by the ls3 version of big dog if you saw the old one and wow that’s the zoo don’t do it the demo is throwing like a tennis ball it’s picking up a cinder block yeah and chucking it like six or seven feet what’s going that’s not terrifying at all huh no not at all building from that cinder block thank you now we need big dogs that can catch them I think I think you’re onto something I think this is the new mode of transportation of cinder blocks everywhere dis fight with you I mean like this idea that we always have her fear of robots trying to kill us the fact that one can pick up a cinder block well I’ll draw without you what throw it at you so instead of just like running you over cuz it probably don’t know how accurate it is though right but you look at the bright side I really like that yeah that’s done alright Sarah do the calendar before I as those a cinder block at you hey the freedom to connect conference is happening in Silver Springs Maryland it starts on Monday the fourth goes through Tuesday also starting monday is the launch festival that’s happening in San Francisco runs March 4th through 6th and now incoming incoming message we got an email from Todd he says AT&T crew a couple comments of the conversation in Episode seven hundred about users not wanting gigabit internet first from a consumer point of view why would i pay for that when i would never actually get to use it the best speed I’ve available at my house is through comcast at a maximum of a hundred and five megabits per second at two hundred dollars a month first the word maximum they don’t actually guarantee I will get that speed and odds are i will not especially at peak use times second how fast would i go over the data cap streaming HD video and such over a connection like that i would be throttled halfway through each month now from the point of view as a person who works for a telecom i actually asked our executives if they considered offering something like residential with a guaranteed minimum symmetrical connections no caps etc i was told that marketing determined that the plans offered based on what they felt they could get what they could get people to pay so as you all postulated until it makes money now they aren’t doing it all on my company’s putting a lot of money into infrastructure to cell towers no great yeah well cell towers are necessary but but not from my wired internet provider yeah we have a lot of people wrote in about this Vijay one of the boys Boston wrote in kind of the same thing that Todd’s saying it’s it’s the sticker shock that makes you not want to upgrade in speed and also the fact that you don’t get the speed that’s advertised I am I’m always a little shaky on the don’t get speed as advertised is because cable modem cable internet in particular shares the node and it all depends on how many other people are using it at the same time I mean they cannot guarantee you an exact speed the way dsl can say yeah we’re pretty sure you’re going to get this amount if you’re this far from the Colo or not Colo but now I’m by the click but anyway I’m probably got that wrong too they can they have more accurate ways of measuring it then cable internet does but it all comes down to the fact that what Todd said about marketing and setting the price wouldn’t be as much of a problem if they had competition a marketing knows you can’t really go much where else to get 50 megabits per second so here we go we have price at whatever we want it’s this old prices that seem crazy because I’m a google is offering gigabit for what seventy dollars a month I mean that’s the thing it’s it’s it’s not necessarily about if you if your price it in your you’re anchoring to these old prices of course it’s gonna look like two or three hundred dollars a thousand dollars but it’s these things should just evolve faster like okay the technology is there let’s get faster internet please well we missed Darren kitchen today we’re sorry he couldn’t make it will try to get him back next Friday he always does his best but he’s in Amsterdam and those darn European clocks they’re they’re hard on it on a hacker out there uh but let’s thank each other for being with each other today thank thank you all thank you say Tom being with me Jason’s not an audience oh and thank you yes he’s that’s it protect this today don’t forget about our subreddit tech news today at reddit.com place to let us know what stories you’d like us to cover on the show also don’t forget about our best of submissions form at any point during the week any week on any show on Twitter really if you see a something you’re like that’s hilarious that has to go into the best of show at the end of the year go to twin TV / best of and let us know that’s it for us you can find us on the web twit.tv / TNT you can email us T&T a twit TV or give us a call leave us a voicemail our phone number is 260 TNT show lens ulanov choices on Monday we’ll see you then you