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it's Thursday April 27th and you are just in time for Episode two 18 of the 359 podcast shout out to beefy tech in the chat and in the house we got Alfred Eng and Ben Fox Ruben good morning guys it's podcast I don't know what Alfred is doing just ignore him all right we had a we had a big wheels in here Alfred got very excited yeah now your microphones not on because you were playing with the big wheels you act like a big boy you got a big boy okay all right I'll put the big wheels away what are we talking about today well we've got some big news coming from Amazon well it's a bit bit of a scoop we think that the next Amazon is going to have Amazon echo is going to have a face on it or at least a screen I mean this is coming after yesterday when they had when they were billed the Amazon look the echo look with a camera on it yes so it looks like the next one's going to have a screen on it maybe also a camera and it may be coming as soon as next month so yeah what else we got I also took the look at two cybersecurity reports that you know pretty much pointed out the same thing about ransomware and how it's basically tripled in price not to buy but on the road to you know pay off if you ever get infected and so it's basically getting much more expensive and then we're taking a look at Facebook lives a killer problem where essentially you know a lot of people are in just like two weeks people have been like murdered alive on Facebook and it's terrible news let's try to let's try to keep that one a little light but it is very important to yes guys yep either way sending your questions and comments Brian we'll get to as many of them as he can at the end of the show and let's do podcast it's podcast and then here we go in three two you welcome to the 359 I'm Alfred Inge I'm Ben Fox Ruben we've got a scoop from one of Ben's many many sources about the next Amazon echo there have been rumors for a while now that Amazon wants to release an echo with a screen that could help with you know video chats and online shopping the news comes just a day after Amazon unveiled their echo look the voices system with a camera that pretty much judges your outfit then why it was Amazon pushing all of these different variations out all of a sudden yeah we actually talked about this on the podcast yesterday that if Amazon could create an echo for literally everybody that's exactly what they're going to do so it looks like that's what what's happening on top of that it looks like they kind of feel they they're like hearing the footsteps with Google right now with the Google home that they're trying to get out these products a little bit faster in hopes of keeping ahead of the game against Google I'm starting to feel like they're April Fool's prank the Alexa for dogs and cats is like not a joke anymore oh yeah that's probably going to be coming sometime in q4 I would imagine so I'm kidding I'm kidding so why do they want an echo with a screen like what kind of benefits does that have I'm talking to a couple analysts about this they really see the potential of voice assistance not being able to do anything and everything like for instance I've tried to shop on my echo and it just takes a while like if you're waiting until you get to like the third option you're already like sick of it already so if you get a screen attached to it it you can you can query the the echo the same way that you normally would but you would get all the options all at once you probably like do a touchscreen thing and you'd be able to do much easier voice shopping you could also use it for like video chats different stuff like that well next up I took a look at two reports on cybersecurity released this week they're both pointing at a trend of an increase in ransomware in both variation and price so the average price of ransomware in 2015 was about two hundred ninety-four dollars a victim so in 2016 it jumped up to more than a thousand dollars look if you were unfortunate enough to be hit with the mere cop malware that ransomware demanded twenty eight thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars from its victim that is not cheap then jeez so what are people supposed to do like if you talk to experts as far as like are there ways to avoid ransomware like should we pay them I mean it's the same way that you avoid most malware you know don't open suspicious emails of the majority of them came through emails and what some of the malware does is that they'll like if they get an entire system like a hospital or networks they won't just infect that single computer it'll like wait until it's spread around the entire network and that's because then they can up their price even more that way good good and and the reason why they've gone up in price is so heavily is because people are more willing to pay the ransom than try to break out of it because it is so difficult to you said like before like in 2015 it was like what 200 bucks yeah like you got to do a lot of ransomware to actually be making some money if you're just gonna shake people down for 200 well the thing is is that you know people are actually start are just paying it and then if they know that they can't decrypt it easily then you know they're gonna raise the price more you know if they know the customers willing to pay I mean this semantics research found that 64% of American victims pay up instead of you know just trying to decrypt it as it becomes like increasingly difficult mmm and last we have a story on Facebook live having a problem with murderers and just the last two weeks there have been two notorious situations one in Thailand one in I believe it was Cleveland yes yeah um you know where you know these killers are going on the live streaming service for the world to see I mean clearly this is an issue for Facebook which is trying to expand its live platform but it's at the same time becoming a platform for for killers and this is like pretty grisly stuff I definitely hope Facebook does something more about this and to be fair other live streaming services from Google and Twitter you know they you know this problem too but Facebook does have the largest audience totally anyway if you like what you heard check us out on Sina com I'm Alfred Inge I'm Ben Fox Ruben and thanks for listening everybody all right let's go ahead and jump right into the chat we want to give a shout out to uh Keaton Lanka who is asking if we know when this what would they call this Amazon face so okay uh the screen and the code name is night like night with a K that is so weak it's a code name is it's not what the actual name is gonna be when it actually comes out CR I have to apologize very visceral response on my part right no it's okay this miss don't code names it's what Amazon is calling it internally and you know my source who told me about night like mention that name and the Wall Street Journal mentioned in their report back in last May so this is close to a year ago they also mentioned an echo with a screen on it called night so they've been working on this thing for quite a while and I'm quite confident that this thing definitely exists because there have been a lot of rumors about it and it looks like it may actually get introduced next month so we might be a couple weeks away from this actually getting introduced we have fantastic theory from Matthew declar in the chat who says is this a reference to Michael Knight I don't even what does that mean Knight Rider Knight Rider maybe but so it doesn't have a face serene so the other interesting thing about this is is that the echo look they basically did like a soft launch of it yesterday they didn't pre-brief anybody they just like brought it out there they were like here's the YouTube video check it out the fact is is that now that I've heard that this other echo may be coming next month that means that like it makes more sense why they would soft launch this product they just wanted to get the look out the door but then like prep for this other much bigger product next month but that's all speculative we do not completely speculative completely speculative but I guess it provides a little bit more insight as to why they would just kind of drop the luck and not do like a much bigger splash about it and Matthew dad sure also points out that oh sorry I got distracted here for a second oh sorry no beefy tech beefy tech had a comment the benefits of having a screen is the facial recognition and possibly medical support right that's it well that's if this screen has a camera on it which yeah so the assumption is is that now that the look is out the one with the screen is probably also going to have a camera on it too I mean like why now I mean if that's the case those and wouldn't it wouldn't that kind of like cut sales away from the look where it's basically if the other ones also going to have a camera like why would I spend money on this one I can just wait for the one with a screen that I can also use well the question invite-only right so this is kind of a beta test phase can't you imagine that at one point the echo is going to be all under the same hood it's going to be screen camera audible one box kind of thing they're not going to have this be a component it's not a Sega Genesis I mean I still hope they keep like the different variations of it because I am a big fan of the hockey puck oh yeah definitely well the hockey puck like the echoed died yeah 50 bucks definitely makes a lot of sense Bloomberg wrote about an echo with a screen in November so there have been a lot of reports about this thing coming it just looks like it's definitely it looks like it's coming very soon now but they were describing it as like a high-end echo so the difference between the echo look and whatever this night product is going to be would be a perhaps a substantial difference in price like maybe they would price this like the look is $200 maybe this one would be I don't know it's hard to say maybe 300 maybe more than that again that's allocation I did not hear anything about price the screen is definitely helpful but I only see it being helpful in like very specific situations where like it can't pick up like based off my voice command what I want so the other day I was trying to listen to the song music by Madonna mmm and I asked at you know echo play music by Madonna boy it was like oh playing like all of Madonna's songs instead you specify so in place so I did that and still that that's the thing it always has these errors like I was trying to listen to I've got to learn I was the other day I was trying to listen to joy badasses new album but like his name is Phelps a badass I hear what it sure the Atma in his name though the esses are spelled with like dollar signs so it's like you didn't recognize that either like that's Joey bedded olivella yes so like this green would like definitely help with that I've had that problem to listening to Bruno Mars is 24-karat man check because it's it's spelled out 24k magic and I have to say that which I sound like a limo being like Alexa play 24k magic by the way I know what the song is really uh let's talk about ransomware for a little bit uh Matthew wherever he operates and works says he's had a few clients get hit with some ransomware and that backups and shadow copies are your friends that is good advice to all yeah that's that's generally the the way to go but the attacks have gone a little bit more sophisticated where it used to be will they encrypt like specific files or specific you know folders and things like that that you can't access but now they've gone to the point where it's like they would just encrypt your entire like drive system yeah um which again like if if you have everything backed up then that's a little bit different but that's also why they're like not specifically targeting like we're just gonna get this one computer to where it's like we're gonna take over an entire network so like even though we have a backup of this you might not have a backup of you know something on another computer or anything like that and then you know they've been targeting specifically like public sector places so like hospitals a few months ago or like a few weeks ago San Francisco's like entire public transportation system got hit by it mm-hmm so and it's those things that like you can't exactly backup like you know right not only that but there's more money there too yeah that if you take over an entire like public sectors yeah or like a hospital hospital needs that stuff to work like so there's more potential for them to just pay up the money and get this over with and then I gets to a point with like security and that aspect where it's like they've targeted like police departments and then essentially if you make a backup of that like who's to ensure that that backup is safe from you know somebody like stealing it and like physically in the police station or anything like that but yeah the entire systems it's like it you can't really back up like the the like the thing that you put your money into like to get your what's the San Francisco equivalent of a metro card I don't know whatever now from San Francisco yeah I've never used a public we need to do so we need like one or two extra Internet's just lying around yeah yeah let's get on that swinging back over to smart home tech beefy tech asks do you think the new if the new Amazon echo will have more control over your personal info are we talking about like the the night product I think between the night and the look yeah it's a safe assumption that yeah I would totally agree with that comment I mean I think that once you add a camera once you add a screen in then Amazon is potentially there's much greater potential for Amazon to require a lot more data for from the customer I mean the more information that you know the more features that it has the more information people are willing to give to it you know we're like oh it knows all the music I listen to but at the same time that's because I allow it to you know have access to my Spotify account so and aside from privacy issues to the possibility of having at least a screen could maybe make Alexa a little bit smarter too right because it would be able to like if it didn't fully understand what you said maybe it would provide you with like three different examples and be like what did you mean by that and that would at least train the system a little bit better to understand something if it's garbled text or what have you so there is a consumer benefit to doing this beyond just Amazon getting more information from you branching off of that Joey comments the Amazon or Google just need to build an entire home how long do we think how far away from that are we like like a prebuilt home they just like drop somewhere a just a grill house they 3d print it on the spot and I mean we is it self together and the whole thing just knows you I actually love that idea we had terrifying but we have something like that on our Instagram it wasn't from Amazon or Google but it was like some engineer that like 3d printed an entire home it was like the thing that printer was like in the middle and it had like it would like go around and it were just like 3d print based off of that I can all you have to do is make it smart yeah um can't imagine how sturdy it would be like a 3d printed home but it would be really funny if it was like your new house brought to you by Google and then inexplicably Google or one of those other tech companies goes bankrupt and you're like how stops working you have to move we mean to stop at working that doesn't work yeah like like No I'm sorry all the services are done more likely gets bought out by something you hate and then you get like you get read Yahoo home right you rise warp time warner home evil Corp took over my house you know and like now the sink like spills out blood this is horrible and the Wi-Fi constantly fails a Michael Brown our old buddy Michael Brown on the subject of home assistance do you think we'll ever see a Samsung big speed home assistant well they're aiming at that yeah they talked about it going in there washing machine that's like one of the first like non Galaxy s8 that they're aiming it for and then the TV which like is like pretty standard as far as you know like yeah TV washing machine refrigerator yeah Samsung makes a ton of products and the the potential and the assumption that they're gonna add the Bigsby and to a lot more studies definitely did there however Bigsby is still a very early product they purposely made Bigsby to be able to you know be on pretty much every device not just their phone mmm it's like imagine if you know like if we were like Apple TV I was able to be controlled by cereal or like seriously specifically to be Apple TV can be controlled by Siri yes that but imagine it too oh yeah yeah just like so sorry I misunderstood you um swinging back around beefy tech is asking how do we feel about Amazon echo and their shopping trends is that bad news for other rivals of Amazon like eBay it's terrible news for them I would imagine I mean like I just saw a statistic today that Amazon in the u.s. accounts for 40% of online commerce like EECOM how so I mean like in Walmart and eBay are the two closest competitors and they're not even close so what does this mean is that we're all shopping if you're an online shopper you're extremely likely to be shopping on Amazon and you're probably a Prime customer so you're shopping on Amazon a lot what does that mean for competitors and other sellers I don't think it really like seems very good like Amazon is extremely dominant right now and it would be useful for the market if other competitors came in and balance a bit the edge of this these voice assistance though is that it's helping them like collect a lot more data like customers and then they can like tailor their ads a lot more effectively that way right right giving Amazon the opportunity to really continue to pull ahead yeah so is Walmart going to do a better job in the future they've definitely been stepping up their game as far as e-commerce is concerned I would probably expect at least from the tech situation and the device situation to have Google but generally come in at least like with the home and with a lot of their services to at least counterbalance but this perspective isn't on you know we want to sell things it's more like we want the information to you know for like ad revenue purposes yeah they make most of their money I make like 90 plus percent of their money off of ad sales but you can buy stuff through your Google home and they definitely see Amazon as becoming more of a direct competitor every single day so yeah it's it's we'll see what happens with that we've seen Amazon do nothing over the last decade but climb slowly but surely and then sometimes quickly and surely I even if these new endeavors we're the ultimate horizon like this is our new tentpole is this the smart home integration where everybody nobody ever has to step outside ever again smart tend to shop yeah smart tent even if these the the look and the night look are relative failures that's I don't think that's going to slow Amazon's roll at all yeah and they're they're still ahead right now and yeah the potential of the Amazon lifepod Allah the matrix is just around the corner I think they're actually going to come out with that product in 2020 where you just you go into the life pod and you just live there forever and they'll send you stuff from Prime hopefully on the night with a screen it'll make it easier to actually make phone calls on the echo because that's still like my number one like yeah request its its connect as the internet its voice commanded like just let me make phone calls on it it's there I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they're probably not making the deals that they need to with the telecom providers and they also need to like do a better job of connecting to like Android and iOS and like those two guys like Apple and Google don't I mean I'm saying more so like like I mean with Google home they have the potential to do like Google voiceover on that mmm so not Google voiceover sorry but like void yeah way voice voice voice alright yeah yeah okay they said void void that's their new product what would that be what would Google void be I don't know a black hole being on there yeah being on the fifteenth page of search like trying to find that one song that is yeah the greys anyway is that an urban dictionary we should put it there I like that idea a lot all right that's a perfect place to end for the week thanks everybody let's uh let's wrap it alright if you liked what you heard the 359 podcast is available on iTunes TuneIn stitcher SoundCloud feedburner Google Play Music and of course Cena comm have a great weekend everybody thanks everybody