Gadgetory

and good morning on Thursday March 9th it's time for episode 192 of the 359 podcast and today we got a packed house at Ben Fox Rubin I as akhtar and see tomorrow Blanco thank you for joining us hey to be here yeah coming in from San Francisco and today we've got a pretty full show to we're going to be talking about a new research project from IBM update on CIA vs WikiLeaks and also whatever a leafy is yeah i think we think you're trying to say Wi-Fi again we something like that a goofy and I see jeez and how it's gonna get you to buy a phone I don't know send in your questions and comments we'll get to as many as we can at the end of the show and let's let's break some hearts people the ones been good podcast the one thing been neglected to mention zo no swearing I know it's gonna be hard it was about to when you said that like literally she was about to drop a couple F times oh I can't school I'm you can but there will be problems we can make it happen of me whenever you're just whenever you're ready and yes I have accidentally curse on the show before yes several times you trying to save Xiao Mei and it kind of came out all wrong that's true yeah all right hang on everybody will be back in exactly three minutes and 59 seconds from 32 welcome to the 359 I'm Ben Fox Rubin I'm I as the wolf akhtar oh and we have a special guest today xiomara Blanco from the San Francisco office thanks for joining us what up yo so get ready to have your mind blown IBM researchers found a way to cram data into a single atom of home iam that I pronounce that right that's why folium home IAM which is apparently an element that i just found out about this could allow you to fit apple's entire music catalogue of 26 million songs onto a storage device the size of a penny I was freaking psyched I read this story i read the nature article i didn't read the nature journal article because that was a little dense but the idea that you can take a single atom and then flip its orientation to have polarity and it's stable because this was not possible before Magnus you when you keep cutting them in half what happens is their polarity becomes unstable so you're trying to write data to it it's kind of a bad idea but this is insane it's also going to be done like around under five Kelvin which is really really cold whoa yeah right psyched about this so this isn't coming anytime soon though right no the IBM researcher cousin Christopher lot sending lots he said something like it's gonna be decades before we see this in like actual products because their idea is to do the research to figure out what can be done when you miniaturize everything to a single atom that is just crazy yeah I think what would I like about this idea too is that you could potentially store your entire personal catalog which is like literally everything about your life in a SmartWatch or a ring or something like that which granted is both good and bad because it could get lost or stolen but at the same time everybody's carrying around more of their information it's the black mirror episode with the grain that's how it happened totally totally seen the black mirror episode with the grain oh no I just watched that sanjana parrilla episode again oh it's a very good one it's a very good my favorite one so next the CIA wanted to take a moment to say you're welcome America after WikiLeaks disclosed a trove of the CIA's hacking tools for phones and pcs the spy agency responded unsurprisingly by saying that it's a spy agency I love it because it's like your mom being like it's my job to embarrass you it's like what if we are it's what we're supposed to be doing it's like okay I guess I my issue with this is like how does do you think that that posture will quell public concerns like are people going to be happy with how the CIA responded to this i don't think they're trying to quell concerns yeah they're like gonna like him to your mom is the best because they're not there to make you happy they dare make sure that everything's okay not necessarily if you're happy exact with quotes air quotes if you could hear that in the audio podcast okay according to them you're gonna be your nation will be healthy and safe so the CIA also stressed that it's illegal for the agency to spy on American citizens we totally believe you that is entirely not what WikiLeaks is going to disclose in its next data dump but I don't know well we'll say last one of the themes of mwc this year was upgrading camera technology because apparently that is going to get you to buy a new phone and it's also going to help dry an Instagram and snapchat lovers this includes creating new words for group selfies like grew fee I hope I'm pronouncing that right and rally fought we fee wife wifey wifey we fee as hell Spanish people pronounced Wi-Fi when they don't know that it's pronounced Wi-Fi so LG is pushing we fee and it's huawei pushing goofy yeah right to see didn't you say that this was like I see I see is the word but you're supposed to nephi I mean I don't call it an Essie but I knew of the term I see which sounds better than grew fee but sounds like roofie it's they're very beautiful get the other for a goofy nah I don't have been that photos goofy if you want to read more about these stories check us out on cnet I'm Ben Fox Rubin my as the wolf akhtar and I'm xiomara Blanco thanks for listening we have some skeptics in the chat go figure with what we can we feet with literally everything you're like it will take off at I'm skeptical of all of our fake news story now the atomic stories you say we're not going to see this for a long long long yeah what he said except for Ricky who's as androids had this since 2010 that's so yeah it's already they've done and it's readable so it was stable for several hours it was save them for several hours that's the start yeah so yeah and they even said it won't be commercialized for several decades because IBM and the other researchers behind it this is the beginning of this right and it's a huge leap forward as as mentioned in stephen shankland story a hard drive today takes about 100,000 atoms to store a single single bit of dating single single stinking bit of data which is a one or a zero this drink sit down to literally one atom which could be a massive massive leap forward in atomic storage but granted yeah it could take a while but do people even like store stuff anymore like isn't everything going to the cloud this is a fantastic question yeah so basically I'd imagine when you want the offline mode you get everything and then you ain't you can resync when you're back online assuming that there's ever an offline in the future cuz like the whole thing is like you can store apple musics entire catalog but it's like I don't even download music anymore so what's going to happen I still imagine that it would be for like imagine PlayStation 72 and your debt you downloading everything you can have like every game available and load time should be like nothing I'd imagine assuming this thing doesn't like explode on you but I think this could also have positive implications for the cloud right because all those giant cloud storage facilities that Amazon and Google and Microsoft have been building those could potentially shrink down or at least not get gigantic because there's going to be so much more storage that we're going to be creating every single day that's already been happening so the prospect of having something like this at least ensures that we're not going to like just end up being covered in a mountain of data that we're not going to be able to control or be able to even store everywhere shaking data servers I like that idea yeah or he's keeping same size and store every ever wherever or is Ricky points out in the chat porn well yeah I have and there's a lot of porn on the internet and we need to make sure that we secure it properly you gotta buy it up the atomic storage so Thank You Ricky take the arts just thinking about like Menace Arts paintings like this is pornographic and it's like when I was like now it's art yeah maybe I want to go back to this mobile world congress thing by the way do you really think that people would buy a one phone over another phone because it takes better group selfies yes no ok we have a controversy on our hands I'm letting the Samsung thing with Ellen on while ago like if you can fit all those people women like the Oscar photo it's like that's like the first time I use one of these I'm like okay that's so everyone get really close which is awkward if you want to be I exactly which we do constantly we can't taking selfies me and Ben it's just not a really good thing but guess that's a goofy excuse me it's not so easy it's a twofer to fee and there and the and the rails just why not we just went off how to tape the idea of a third party selfie like that's a photo you heard that right yes sir party self seen that many times anyway so you think people would if you think they wouldn't go for a camera I mean a camera that has a wider angle lens as a decision making I think if it's just a package with a great camera the way like the iphones just been riding the camera wave-like great phone but really great camera I think that's just how things are moving like the camera is the biggest feature yep and it's natural to improve on that with the wider angle with the better lens with all these features but for someone to like pay 500 600 dollars for a new phone because it's going to take better photos of them with their friends I just maybe I don't want to believe in that work was really one of the things when all things are equal you like of it they're all androids all Snapdragon 835 it's all got the same screen sock you're like at the end you're like okay which one do I want that could be like all right it's got a wider angle that might push somebody over the edge I think the potential of zoom is helpful that was also mention in katy Collins's story about me that yeah I think a lot of them under life digital zoom so it's not real zoom meet um but I what impressed me I'm very skeptical of the idea of that group so you have that nobody cared yeah you know Kate does something nobody cares did it happen you know and then they come out with a 17 year old phone and we're all gaga so go figure I have to quote Huber Jay Farnsworth on this I don't want to live on this planet anymore yeah cuz of the groupies yes oh I'm sorry I mean technically the show is one big groovy right now hi welcome to technology hey back in the chat they want to go back into the storage stuff Diaz asking how much will it hold in the range of terabytes at gigabytes or as premium gamer points out yocto bytes 10 to the 31st power figure 4 megabytes per song and do that x 26 million i have to do the math but you you got a calculator there let's know that computer thing the computing part oh my gosh that let's find out that's my ring on the desk sorry we're not mathematicians so buddy asleep or megabytes x 26 million so that's 104 so what is that under 4 million bytes on 104 million megabytes which is I don't know many many petabytes or many many yeah maybe hello hello we're making up the new Hellebuyck there it's a lot it's a lot and you'd be able to store it in a very like such an incredibly small size that you're talking about the size of a penny the potential of just like squeezing together like a stack of pennies to create the amount of data storage that you would probably never really need but at the same time that's big enough for your phone I mean yeah you could potentially do a lot with that but I do think it's interesting what you mentioned as far as like everything's cloud storage these days and more things are becoming cloud storage so what exactly is this gonna but it do for us it evokes images of that original IBM computer that was the size of a truck totally and that was like what right 16 megabytes or something like that yeah yeah anyway to eat you know pieces of paper with you know punch cards in it so hundred come a long way so be 104 terabytes on a penny thank you so if you had like imagine like two or three of them in a phone you wouldn't have a lot of those these chips so you have like 300 terabytes at your phone you'd have more room for your stupid goofy can arguably you basically have what I think this is like a conspiracy it's like the Goofy's and all the storage like it is and this any way they want to take photos of ourselves so they they can steal them and be like an what it's our job it's our job it's our nigga describe annoy sure Raja Raja has got an interesting theory says that the current highest capacity SSD sits at 60 terabytes with atomic storage we could have maybe 60 petabytes I think that's entirely obtainable theoretically throughout this conversation 30-year in about 30 years of righties right but the idea to and it's worth mentioning in the story that they started with one atom to specifically say like hey this is possible we did this and it was actually functional for a couple of hours but then you move up from there to something that could actually be more commercial so yeah it's probably not going to be a single atom but it's still significant improvement like any huge shift from potentially flash storage to you know go to Tom here's a here's a concept I don't think we have an immediate answer to but it's definitely a good point of thought from yothu and our friend Chris does it require cryogenic cooling or anything Chris thinks it would probably yes a pretty intense cooling system to keep maintain this based on what we saw there it was about minus 286 Celsius 0 minus 5 Calvin so if you do the math it's pretty crazy I don't know if cryogenic is necessary but it's gotta be really freedom like six hundred fans ought to do the trick yeah pretty close to atomic 0 this is this is also an issue with quantum computing where they also have to have it really really low temperatures what's interesting is like are they going to find certain types of atoms in the future that don't need to be that low temperature so that you could actually like walk around with this in your phone and and I think that's also what's going to take a really long time to figure out is what sort of like molecules they can use at room temperature they can still do this kind of thing and coming full circle alex says with this type of storage people could get off the cloud and get some privacy back from the government right cos it doesn't really matter yeah so they get her phone nothing sacred you're basically screwed regardless and the CIA is watching the ship that would have been a great title for basically screwed regardless no and the CIA is watching the show not because they're spying on us because they fence they love this show I've heard directly from they left you a note it was in you walk oh yes you warned you not to do that it's okay it's all good seahurst time is your first time we're not on CBS yet so yeah in trouble yet that's right sorry bunny this will this will eventually just be the replacement for CBS News though so so obviously we have that kind of tech all right that's probably a good place to end it for the day as a fun conversation theoretical atomic storage absolutely I guess it's really not theoretical anymore it was practical and way way way way way way down the road so yeah always fun talking about that stuff cool it's called uh sees you guys I'm not calling with that yet all right i am gonna exit the show at some point okay the 359 podcast is available on itunes melon cares anymore soundcloud feedburner google play music and of course on cnet com thanks everybody for watching and we'll see you again on monday alright have a good weekend everybody thanks for joining us this week