Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech Great panel for you and Gadgets. Devinder Hardawar is here and Daniel Rubino from Windows Central, and we celebrate Father's Day with an actual father, father Robert Palliser, the digital Jesuit. Microsoft says what I don't recall the Stanford Internet Observatory is being shut down for, I think, shameful reasons. How Apple found a path to Apple intelligence and the passing of a true computer pioneer, but a woman many of you have never heard of. I know I hadn't. It's all coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.
00:50
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 984. Recorded Sunday, june 16th 2024. 53 clicks. It's time for TWIT this week at tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. It was a very busy week, so we've brought in the heavy hitters. Davinder hardwar is back from cupertino dressed in his. What is that?
01:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
it's the uh, the clothes of my god, kirby, nintendo's kirby. My kids got me a kirby shirt for father's day. I love it. I'm here.
01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it with it so I remember, when your first was born and you were a brand new father, how old it was five years ago. Five years, wow, davinder, of course. Senior editor of engadget. Uh, one of our favorite people, so much so he's often a fill-in when I'm out of town. Thank you for being here, devinder, we love always fun having yeah, happy to join you guys. Happy fathers. It's very nice of you to come on a father's day really is it's great. That's a sacrifice we had our celebration.
01:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The kids are sick of me now, so okay good, great, in that case.
02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Great also here, daniel Rubino, who is a dog father, father and editor-in-chief of Windows Central. Hi Daniel, hello, thanks for having me Great to see you. You've got Craig Federighi's hair. Did you borrow that for the show?
02:15 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I'm getting there. I just gave up on getting haircuts. You know what? They're too expensive.
02:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We Italians are known for our lush locks. That's all I'm saying. That's the other thing.
02:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, like I'm getting to that age, I'm like you know what? I still have it. I love it. I'm just going to grow it out. Yes, absolutely, I just enjoy it, you know.
02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually gorgeous, so keep up the good work, yeah.
02:47 - Padre (Guest)
And then there's another father on the show for day, father robert balisar, whose locks are not exactly blowing in the wind. They are not great to see you. I'm also wearing a kirby shirt.
02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is kirby in his later years. It's very dark, kirby, after he became a priest.
02:54 - Padre (Guest)
Father robert is in the vatican right now and just a few stairs, a few steps below him, jason howell, who's visiting he is visiting, although I asked him to come up, but he has an early morning appointment at the Coliseum tomorrow with his family and they just got off the plane and he's a little bit tired yeah, it's a tiny bit, it's later.
03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like 11 o'clock at night, right? Oh yeah, yeah, so it's later there. Well, that's great, though, that he could stay in the house with you and enjoy Rome. Rome is my favorite city, I adore it and I hope he has a great time there we already have an appointment tomorrow.
03:32 - Padre (Guest)
We were going to come up on the roof, uh, once the sun starts to go down, and we're going to have wine and aperitivos watching the sun go down over saint peter's, oh so jealous.
03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is awesome. Um, all right. Well, I don't know where to start. I guess the week started with apple's uh big event. Um, it's funny how here we are six days later, seven days later, and it's like what, what was that?
03:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
it kind of wears off I was there and I feel that way do you like oh wow, what happened? Yeah, I was there for three days.
04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did a two-hour keynote which we streamed live with Micah, and first hour and a half do not mention AI. But it's also really interesting because everything they're talking about seems to be or many of the things they're talking about seems to be AI-driven. They're just not saying it. And then they Sherlocked AI by saying you know what AI stands for Apple intelligence, and I thought that was brilliant. That was a very smart branding move. Did you get to play?
04:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
with anything afterwards, devendra. I mean, they showed me things hands off. I saw some demos, like I saw, you know, I think I saw the Syrian action, some of those features Like it's cool, it looks really cool and, having covered pretty much all the major like AI releases so far, I think it's the most interesting one and the one that could be the most beneficial to actual consumers. So that's fun. I will point out, though, leo, I've asked a ton of people at Apple pretty much everybody I encountered like how do you shorten Apple intelligence? And as soon as I asked that question, the programming in their brains just like shut down because they will not say AI.
05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't want to say the word they will not say artificial intelligence.
05:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So, like, the corporate command was clearly this is not AI. Don't say AI, even though those are the initials they stole basically. So I found that funny. I wrote that up in Gadget. But yeah, apple doesn't call it AI or anything shorter than Apple Intelligence.
05:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the short version.
05:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Wow, that's the short version. Somebody called it personal intelligence, which is actually longer. So good job, apple.
05:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let's add a syllable, but I have to say I thought it was very smart of them.
05:44
We talked about this last week before the event and I was saying they've got a very narrow path here. They don't want to look like they're just saying copycats me too but at the same time they don't want to look like they're laggard either, because clearly the stock market is rewarding companies that have ai anywhere near them. I mean, just look at nvidia. So they had to do something that was, I thought, challenging and maybe even not even possible, but they did it. I thought I was very impressed.
06:20
Now, none of the things they showed are going to be available, they're not available. Even when it comes out in the fall, it probably is going to be later this year or maybe even early next year. For instance, that was the latest German report.
06:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, siri, especially the Siri stuff, looks the coolest and maybe delayed a bit, but I just want to point out like this is what Apple does right, except at hyper speed. They weren't the first MP3s, they weren't the first of smartphones, and this kind of seems like that playbook, you know, in action. The last year must have been so frustrating, though, because these folks had neural engines in their processors since 2017. And now the phrase is AI PC, because they've got MPUs, but Apple's over there in the corner saying, hey, we've been doing this, we've done it, we just didn't say those same things. So they were really like victims of the AI hype cycle as well, I think over the last year.
07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those were the practical. After Tim Cook finished the ad for Apple TV shows, the completely superfluous, having nothing to do with developers ad for Apple TV shows, almost the very first words out of his mouth were we've been doing this for a long time. It's true that Apple iPhones, ever since Apple Silicon, have had neural processors. They call it machine learning, dedicated hardware for machine learning. They're very well positioned.
07:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean Qualcomm's done that too, though, right, qualcomm's been there for over a decade using the same technology, so they're all just part of that. They are trying to kind of catch up to what has now become AI PC right. This idea of like generative on a computer has become a little bit more interesting, especially for video creation, right.
07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this isn't because I thought the Snapdragon X architecture was the first to have NPUs. You're saying Qualcomm has always had NPUs, but on the phones, right yeah.
08:03 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Qualcomm has always had NPUs but on their phones, right yeah.
08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But even the Surface Pro 9 with the Snapdragon 8CX Gen 3, that has an NPU that's as powerful as Intel's current processors on the market, which is more something about Intel than it is about Qualcomm, right, yeah.
08:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That chip was also awful. I reviewed that computer and I was so pissed off that Microsoft called that machine a Surface Pro 9 5G. Sir, there is nothing pro about you. You're slow. You don't run as fast as the other Surface Pro. It was very confusing to consumers and branding and everything that was super annoying. Qualcomm has these features.
08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We held our breath when Qualcomm said wait till you see, this is faster than an M3, blah, blah blah, because they have disappointed before, but they now. June 18th is the nominal day that we're going to see these. You probably already have some data. Are you under embargo right now? You probably can't talk about it.
09:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's been a messy embargo. Let's just say that it's been a messy embargo. Let's just say that. And it has to do with CoalPilot and, specifically, recall has been screwing things up for reviewers. That said, yeah, the 18th we will have coverage of some of these devices, okay.
09:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Nothing to say, yet I will say it's just looking very positive.
09:21 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You know, like I think people are waiting to catch Qualcomm in a lie, because they have done it so many times before before.
09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all they do.
09:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, but not this time and to be fit. Yeah, well, to be fair, you know they were using arm limited. Uh, you know processor designs, right, and because arm as a, as a company who designs the chips, couldn't design something that could compete with the m series, they had no choice but to do the best they could with what they had them going and buying nuvia, ah, nuvia. Well, they bought nuvia, yeah, so now they're nuvia being. So nuvia's ex apple engineers, uh, the ones that designed the a series chips that led to the m series, and they started as a company building server chips. That was their goal they were. They started as a company building server chips. That was their goal.
10:06
They were going to build ARM-based server chips and, from what I'm hearing, this actual first design is a server-based design. And I hear Gen 2 is actually going to be the bigger one, the more interesting one, because that's actually going to be the real mobile first chip. Now they're not talking about Gen 2 at all because they want to get Gen 1 out the door. But I'm already hearing great things about Gen 2, because I'm hearing, like there's this question like is Gen 2 just going to be like a spec bump, right, or is it going to be significantly something different, and I'm hearing significantly something different. I hear it's a no jump and it's going to be a big performance increase too. So but now ARM is really upset. So all these companies have been like kind of battling with this MPU stuff for a while. It's just now we have a use for it, you know, and the usage cases for I think is growing exponentially. I think that's been.
10:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Apple's specialty here. Right Like we've talked about Qualcomm's, talked about MPUs, apple's had this stuff for a while too, but even like back in 2017, like Apple, it was applied to functional things like computer vision technology, stuff happening in your photo library, and now that's essentially where they've aligned all of the Apple intelligence tools. It's stuff you can use. It's making Siri smarter, transcribing notes and voice memos, doing like a little bit of text cleanup in your email or something Not like hey, here's a search engine that can write things for you or create images for you. That is a part of it. But Apple is very far off and they could cut that tether to open AI whenever they wanted to. So kind of a really smart implementation of AI so far.
11:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Is it much different, though, than Samsung's AI? Because on the S24 Ultra they have like I don't know six or seven areas where it integrates with, including does the notes and translation stuff. I mean it's all like.
11:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, it's like copilot, yeah, but do you think, like Apple has at least thought about it a little more? It's like thoughtfulness that we talk about. I don't want to be a fanboy here, because I cover and Apple stuff too. My main desktop is Windows and that's where I live most of my like computing life, but it is nice to see a company kind of like look at what everybody did over the last year, Like Microsoft just announced the Bing chat and went all in on Copilot and I think a lot of us were like what is happening? Why is Microsoft this company, you know, that is now invested like pretty much half into OpenAI leaning like putting all their stuff into this technology which is unproven and nobody's really asking for this? The Apple approach at least seems a little more thoughtful and slower, and maybe they'll be criticized for it. I think the stock market didn't like that, but actually like wait a minute.
12:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The stock market didn't like it.
12:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Day of yeah we're watching it because I mentioned this on.
12:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sunday I said watch how the stock market responds. Day of it was kind of up and down, but mostly down. The next day Apple had its best day in two years and soared above NVIDIA again. I mean it was a very big. I don't know what the latest is. I didn't watch the rest of the week, but it was clear that at first the market was suspicious is. I didn't watch the rest of the week, but it was clear that at first the market was suspicious. But after they thought about it for a day they very much embraced the Apple approach. Father Robert, do you have an opinion on that? That's just the market and I don't know if I believe in the wisdom of the crowd and all of that. Currently Apple's down a little bit.
13:21 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But let's look at the five days, so you can see the jump like that.
13:28 - Padre (Guest)
yeah, they're significantly up, though, yeah oh yeah they're way up, yeah, yeah when we try to explain the ai, the current ai craze, to people who are are less tech savvy over here, one of the things that we try to emphasize is all the npus from basically every manufacturer are good at one thing, which is pattern and object recognition. That's what they do. They're a very specialized processor, even more specialized than a GPU. Now, what you do with the pattern or the object that you recognized, how you transform it, how you correlate it to something else, that's the secret sauce behind every manufacturer's AI approach. But the core processing, that object recognition that has to happen at the beginning. They basically operate the same way across the industry.
14:12
Now, what Apple is doing and I think I actually kind of like their approach is, rather than trying to focus on, oh, we do AI and it can do so many different things, they're actually defining the objects that they're interested in. That's actually a novel approach right now in the ai market, which is you have a manufacturer who isn't just saying we might be able to do a bunch of really interesting things, and then you've got apple saying we want to do these six things specifically.
14:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of like that I also want to point out, because, uh, mashed potato in our club, tw Discord, is saying isn't it a bit early to declare Apple's AI a success? That's really not, at this point, what we're talking about. We're talking about marketing. Apple's marketing seems to have trumped everybody else's. Whether they produce is a whole different story. We haven't even seen these Copilot Plus PCs yet.
15:04 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We have seen copilot in action for the last year and also copilot pro and open ai's chat and yeah, a lot of like, a lot of it's cool. But it's like what am I doing with this cool ai generating? What do I do with this? How does this help my life?
15:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but that's part of, isn't that the part of the process with technology like this is the technology is invented, now what do we do with it? Is you know, we smashed the atom. Now what do we do with it? It took a few years it totally is.
15:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Except, like microsoft, within a year was like hey, this is in windows. Now, this is an office. This isn't everything. We love copilot. We love open ai. Six months ago, well, you know, before that thing was announced, nobody knew what this was it was very good for microsoft stock it was good. I have to point out that there has been.
15:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it is a uh mark on their escutcheon. In fact there's a third step in the recall debacle. First they announce recall, something that takes a snapshot of everything you do on a copilot plus pc every few seconds, saves it all for you, for ai to search later so you can say hey, what were we talking about last week? Or whatever. Security community goes ballistic. Microsoft says oh sorry, we're going to make it opt-in and we're going to add some nice. You can't access it until you verify using our Hello Security and so forth. And apparently that wasn't enough because they've now said never mind, we're not going to ship it with the Copilot Plus PCs, only for Windows insiders down the road. This is to me this is a perfect example of and we've seen it in many other cases Google showing you know the Black Pope. A lot of these companies have gotten in trouble.
16:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, all the BARD issues, like the day they announced that thing because they had to respond to Microsoft.
16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It hallucinated the day they released it. Yeah, so Apple still hasn't released anything. So there's not. You know they have, for instance, a new image, an app that's going to be on all your Apple devices that will make images. You know, we don't know. Day two it might start showing the founding fathers in a different light. You know, they may be declared woke. We don't know. So right now we're just rating the marketing.
17:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And also like what they're saying. I think there are things we're talking about like Apple saying like we have built our own, like a small model that is on your phone. Our cloud model is supposedly secure. And the way they've talked about their cloud model, it sounds better, or at least more secure than other solutions we've seen when they do work with OpenAI. Apple has said like it is anonymized to the point where it's like the most secure way of using chat GPT. I don't think that convinced Elon Musk.
17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've all seen his knee-jerk reaction was if Apple puts open AI on iPhones, then we are going to ban iPhones from all of our facilities. If you come to the front door with an iPhone, we will take it from you and put it in a Faraday cage until you leave. That might have been a little overreaction on Elon's part, Cause he's not a fan she sends.
18:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Like to be fair, like it's not like Android. It's known for the world's best security. Like I mean it already has. It has Gemini on it, it has all this stuff. So I just like I mean fair an eye on it and has all this stuff. So I just like I mean fair. You know the media jumps on this. We covered it too because it's kind of funny.
18:28 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But that dude just says stuff all the time and doesn't do it like he's not going to be an apple product he's not right sometimes and I don't know what's happening with him.
18:38 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, he's not going to be an apple product. He's not going to make his own a phone alternative either, and if he, it's guaranteed to fail. Like but we eat the stuff up. But it will be stainless steel. I mean, who doesn't want to stay in the steel? It'll probably cut you when you go to use it. Every time you use it.
18:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's great news copy, though, and I fell for it and I reported it, sorry, yeah, by the way, no, we did too. By the way, his shareholders did give him his bonus I think it ended up being $46 billion even though a judge in Delaware had said no, elon's, there's no way Elon's worth that. That was an unfair process. The board voted it to him. So he went to the shareholders and the shareholders said no, no, we love you, keep the money. So there you go. That's the entire thrust of the Elon reportage.
19:28 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Please keep tweeting, please keep saying the first thought in your mind, without any research whatsoever. We love it. There's billions, tens of billions of dollars.
19:35 - Padre (Guest)
You know, leo there actually is another angle to the AI story from Apple Intelligence and Microsoft, which is basically what Apple's trying to do with Apple Intelligence is what Apple's trying to do with Apple intelligence is what Microsoft was trying to do with recall, which is to solve a very early AI problem that we brought up on the show multiple times and that's poisoning the well, all AI is susceptible to having crap information. Well, what Microsoft was trying to do with recall was to silo information from a user so that that particular AI only learns from that user's data. Apple's trying to do the same thing with Apple intelligence. So at some point they have to explain that to people. They have to say look, the only way we can keep you from getting an AI that has gone insane or become racist is to train it only on your data. They just haven't done a really good job of explaining that yet.
20:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And that's where Microsoft screwed up here, like I tweeted out even about how Microsoft's PR reaction when I was in Taipei and I was talking to companies off the record, like they were all just throwing Microsoft on the bus on this they were just like they had a field questions from analysts and just people and it was just like I don't know how at Microsoft they just granted, they said OK, it's all processed locally, it doesn't go to the cloud Fair, and that's a huge. That's a huge thing. Right, that does make a difference. But going into the details about the rest of the security and how it worked or didn't work was one of those things. You know, two days later, a day and a half later, they had an FAQ page that kind of explained all this.
21:07
That should have been out day one. In fact, what they should have done is, before they announced this, they should have pre-briefed the media with like a whole hour deep dive into it, explain how it works, how the security works, answer any questions. So when media went to press they would have all those answers in front of them. Be like, yeah, you may be concerned about the security, but not always that localized, but it's encrypted all the time it's only decrypted when it scans your face. At least the media then would have done the heavy lifting. Now Microsoft is backtracking on this and trying to explain it and make up things. And oh, it's opt-in now and it just looks bad and I don't know how that happens. It's, it's, it's like it's.
21:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's hubris, isn't it? It's like microsoft thinking everybody loves us. Now we got copilot, we got open ai, everybody loves microsoft. Here is the thing where, if microsoft had announced this five years ago, we would have had like tanks pointed at redmond or something like what are you, what are you trying to do to our computers, microsoft? You were totally right, daniel, that they should have like pre-briefed people and also like had deeper conversations, but they should have been talking to security researchers in depth as this thing was being built, which it really sounds like again. Like that's something Apple literally said like hey, the software that they're using on the private cloud is out there for researchers to audit. We only talk to those like approved servers. So that's kind of a nice thing.
22:29
It is wild that Microsoft talked about this thing. Daniel, I'm sure you were there at their campus when the announcement was happening too. When I talked about, when I asked them questions about this, they gave me like security platitudes, like yeah, we're taking this seriously. I did ask, like, is it enabled by default? And they said yes, somebody had told me you could change that at the login process, but apparently that wasn't the case. So I think people were also confused at Microsoft. It's a whole like, it's a lot of like lack of preparation that got them into this mess. It's pure hubris to me.
22:58 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I indirectly blame Apple for this, actually, because what microsoft is trying to do is be like apple. They're trying to feel bad. They want to have these events where they announce, like jaw-dropping, new features and technologies that catch everyone by surprise, even though we had kind of talked about this I'm going to set your months ago, uh, but like you know, so they try to do that, so they that's why they kept it all a secret. They did the same thing on the surface team. They do this too, and it's just because they want to have those Apple moments. And you know, if you get it right, it works, but when you get it wrong, it's.
23:32
You know, this is a major walk back now, and Qualcomm isn't happy. This was supposed to be their honeymoon period, where they're going into this with their brand new processors, which do look very good, and it's going to be combined with these brand new features, which I think we call is actually really awesome. I'm really looking forward to it, but I get the concerns around it, and the concerns need to be addressed and people need to talk about that, but I don't know. The courses will be taught, as I tweeted on this, about how poorly Microsoft handled this whole whole thing.
24:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm astounded, like within within like minutes, by the way of Microsoft almost announcing it or that day, researchers were using the early versions of it and were like I can see this database in another account. I didn't have to authenticate to see this. I don't understand how that was even possible. Somebody like that's firing you. Send that person to the moon. Whoever allowed that to happen?
24:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some of this, honestly, is that Microsoft doesn't have the level of trust these days that Apple does. So no matter what had happened from either company, microsoft would have come under tougher scrutiny than Apple, just because people look at, look what happened to Brad Smith when he went to the Homeland Security Committee this week. Uh, I mean the not that congress is the arbiter of op sec or anything like that, but ron wyden, who's pretty smart, eric schmidt from minnesota uh, were scathing, uh, and and brad smith ultimately said, yeah, um, we could, yeah, we could have done better.
25:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
To be fair to Microsoft, I mean part of their problem is they're so massive and successful.
25:14
So, like you know, like Apple doesn't, really have this issue, like Apple does well in laptops and does in PC, but it's still around what? Between 10 and 15 percent of the market, depending on who you're looking at, whereas Microsoft is just this, they're just global, they're an enterprise, they're an education, they're in hospitals and they do with their cloud stuff. They do do business with China and it's like you can question that, as we should, but at the same time, at the end of the day, they're a capitalist company who needs to make money, and there's a lot of money to be made in China. And so it's like, you know, it was said years ago that let's do business with China. They're our best trading partners.
25:53
Now, in the last few years, things are getting like all right, we've got to look at this China thing. They're getting a little crazy over there, and so now they're kind of backtracking and backtracking. And now it's like what are you guys doing so much business with China for? And it's like, well, I mean, it's what we do, we're in business, and this is an interesting question, like do American corporations have obligations to the United States government and the citizens rate? For you know, national security stuff, like that's a weird area to get into, but it's definitely one that's worth discussing.
26:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they do have an obligation to every user, however, to make sure that security is job one, and microsoft has said that they're going to do that many times. I mean, windows xp was supposed to be the most secure version of windows they'd ever made. Uh, and even what's sad is this testimony is during the recall recall, and uh, smith actually cited microsoft's reversal on recall as an example of their revitalized efforts in security. Well, oh, so you just figured that out. Huh it, it doesn't. It doesn't look good, and and and it's why people are, I think, less trustworthy of Microsoft. I agree with your defense, daniel. I'm not saying you know, of course, but at the same time, these are real issues, these are real issues.
27:14
Because this the Microsoft Exchange issues. I mean there's just been this continuous effect. I mean there's just been this continuous effect. There's a story here I'm trying to find it about Microsoft refusing to fix the hack. This is from ProPublica in SolarWinds and now you know we'll have to vet this guy.
27:43
But Andrew Harris worked at Microsoft in 2016. He discovered a penetration that involved the company's cloud Azure and that the attackers managed to do without leaving any trace. According to ProPublica, he figured it out. He focused on a Microsoft application and ensured users had permission to log in. The product used by millions to log onto their work contained a flaw Remember this is five years ago, more than five years ago, eight years ago Contained a flaw that could allow attackers to masquerade as legitimate employees.
28:20
He had come from the Defense Department. He knew about security. He went to Microsoft and said we got a problem here, flagged the issue to his colleagues. According to ProPublica, they saw it differently. This is Harris telling ProPublica the federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing. Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging the security flaw could jeopardize the company's chances. Business acknowledging the security flaw could jeopardize the company's chances. He recalled one product later telling him multi-billion dollar deal he placed. Harris says he pleaded with again, again we this is one person's word, uh, somewhat credible, but still. He said he pleaded with the company for several weeks to address the flaw. A pro publica investigation is found, but at every turn microsoft dismissed his warning.
29:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Um, and then, of course, he left uh yeah that's, that's damning, like there's no, there's no, like sugarcoating, like how bad that seems for microsoft. It reminds me I don't know if you guys have been following the whole the british post office scandal thing, but it kind of reminds me of that story too, where this massive institution, somebody, was like hey, your stuff is messed up and it's actually making my life more difficult, and the institution just failed to listen because they were so big and it would be inconvenient to actively to actually listen to the problems and Microsoft deserves all the blame.
29:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Harris works for CrowdStrike. Now I should give. I'll give you Microsoftrosoft's response, because again, uh, this is just one guy and this is during propublica, which is fairly credible, but because it leans into what we already think about microsoft, it becomes a little more credible, right? This is, this is a perception problem. Microsoft's response to propublica quote protecting customers is always our highest priority. Our security response team takes all security issues seriously, gives every case due diligence with a thorough manual assessment, as well as cross-confirming with engineering and security partners. Our assessment of this issue received multiple reviews and was and these are weasel words if I ever heard them aligned with the industry consensus. In other words, we ignored it because everybody said, yeah, no big.
30:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Nobody cared enough. Yeah, we should have cared more.
30:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What product is this? Is this the? What is it called? Envoy? What is it? It's part of Microsoft. That's a good question, entra. Is this entra he's talking about? I wonder. They don't say in the pro publica story and I thought maybe, daniel, you might know no I suspect it's entra, because I think the solar winds thing was an entra flaw anyway. Um, I'm sure we'll hear more about this.
31:03 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, it's just Microsoft's continuing culture problems. It's a culture problem which they've improved over the years. You know they are trying, but there is still a lot of legacy people there, although surprisingly a lot have left over the recent years as well. But you know, this is a company that's just massive. You know, I kind of agree here with Zuckerberg's approach of trying to eliminate a lot of middle management. I think you know that's a really good strategy and maybe I don't know Microsoft needs to do that. But what you have are a lot of small, independent departments who all are trying to accomplish their own tasks, meet their own goals, and sometimes it doesn't align with other companies or other areas within that company. And you get that competition. And you know, I think it's just prioritization. They need to make money and inner corners get cut.
31:51
I think you know what Devin was talking about with CoPilot. You know Microsoft pivoted really fast on that. It's true. They, you know, laid off a lot of people and then they just pivoted completely towards it and they raced to get it out the door and it worked for them mostly. But security definitely probably took a backseat to this stuff, you know, and it's going to catch up with them. I think everybody who messes with AI will have a security issue. But Microsoft needs to be a little bit more careful and although you know their trust with public is not as good as Apple, that's for certain I think it's definitely better than Google. That's not saying much, no, no, but it is funny. As far as companies being dragged in front of Congress and stuff like that, microsoft has been managed to really void most of the most controversy he says yeah.
32:46
By the way, I found the name of the service hold on a second the service was active directory, federation services, adfs, and it was a saml.
32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a saml issue, um, and and that's what he pinpointed, not entra, um, it was a saml attack and and. And? Pro publica agrees basically with what you just said, daniel. It was a clash, a culture clash, a clash with the won't fix, uh, culture. Some people took it seriously, but the people who mattered did not. Um, they're trained. Here's a quote from the story by dustin childs who worked in the microsoft uh, the Microsoft RC, in the years leading up to the saga. They're trained because they're so resource constrained to think of these cases in terms of how can I get to? Won't fix? That's a culture problem, right, that's all it is. And maybe Microsoft, which has said, oh, we're going to fix this, we recognize the problem, maybe Microsoft can fix this. But you see, this is where you get lack of trust, because people read these stories and go yikes, go ahead. I'm sorry, did you want to say something, father?
33:55 - Padre (Guest)
yeah, I was just saying that, um, microsoft 100 deserves blame. Uh, and yes, it is a major culture program a, but they have had a program for 21 years now called GSP, which has allowed government agencies to actually look at their source code. That's pretty good problem of terrible security. I do kind of want to ask the question of if congress has really really really wanted to do something about microsoft security, why are they not taking advantage of the gsp program and their own experts to actually comb through the source code for the services that they use? That's nato does it, china does it, russia does it, poland does it. So why isn't there enough manpower in the united states to actually have our experts combing over the the code that?
34:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they use talk about a culture problem. That is our culture, right, we trust in. In the united states, we trust businesses more than we trust government. We, our space program is run by SpaceX and Boeing. Our internet in the Ukraine is provided by Starlink. This is a classic case of government going back to the Reagan era saying yeah, yeah, yeah, government's a bad idea, let's let private industry handle this. And obviously this is a case where both government and private industry failed. Brad Smith said Microsoft accepts responsibility for each and every one of these issues cited in the cyber safety review board's report and I I believe him when he says we want to. He's microsoft's president. He wants, we want to turn this around. But getting back to the original topic of ai, this is, this is a prop, this. This just engenders more trust issues. Yeah, do you think business, daniel? Do you think business trusts microsoft?
35:55 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, you know it's kind of like interesting at least watching you from this ai pc stuff. Um, you know I talk a lot with the companies as well as some of the ISVs. They're so going hard in on this, I think because they just see the productivity, you know, increases that it's going to be gained from this technology almost as an all cost. It's like totally fine. But they're embracing both these new ARM PCs as well as this AI stuff, really, really hardcore. I mean, I know you know, coming up in July, some OEMs are going to be doing a lot more on AI with ISBs, and Lenovo's got still big plans coming, like they really are kind of going all in this. They are going all in with Copilot.
36:43
I think they're upset with the way things have been handled so far publicly with Microsoft, but I don't think their resolve is shaken mostly because of, like your company, like Lenovo or HP, you've been dealing with Microsoft shenanigans for a very long time. You know these are the same companies that all signed on to Windows 8, released a bunch of new hardware for Windows 8, and then watch it completely get destroyed, right. So I think they're kind of, you know, used to this stuff and they see long term that what they're doing is on the right track, and it gives them an opportunity for this new technology too, because what you're going to see are a lot of these OEMs innovate around ai in their own ways to give add value to their own brands, uh, and they're going to do that through microsoft.
37:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, so the pc market? Yeah, so far didn't the pc market kind of need something like this. You think, daniel, like it's sort of like starting a college club right, like intel was like hey, ai pcs want to join the ai pc club and there's it pretty quiet. It was like a pretty not too many people kind of joining. Then Microsoft, hey guys, co-pilot plus PCs, it's better than AI PCs.
37:52 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Everyone's like oh yeah we're going to build hardware around this stuff.
37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think all of these companies have said to themselves look, consumers are very interested in AI. This could be the next big thing. It's unknown still whether it is the next big thing, but we better be there in case it is. And I think every company Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all the big tech companies are jumping on this bandwagon, and all I have to do is look at NVIDIA's stock rise and say, yeah, the market believes in it too. There's money to be made here. I will end this conversation with just a referral, a reference to Corey Doctorow's piece in his pluralistic blog. Microsoft pinky swears that this time they'll make security a priority. If you enjoy Corey's acid wit, you will very much enjoy this story. You might not if you live in Redmond, however. All right, we're going to take a little break. We have much more to talk about. Got a great panel to do it Our Father's Day panel with Father Robert Palliser, the digital Jesuit. His new app, Jesuit Pilgrimage, is at jesuitpilgrimageapp. Who's that for Dot app?
39:04 - Padre (Guest)
So if you are doing any of the Ignatian pilgrimages through Spain, france or Rome, or if you're visiting Rome and you actually just want to see some of the interesting Jesuit sites, that's basically why we created that app. It started as just something that we talked about over glasses of grappa and then, at some point, oh, that explains a lot. Code this right.
39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, a grappa and uh, then at some point oh, that explains a lot, code this right a grappa inspired journey we've been adding more and more languages.
39:32 - Padre (Guest)
I think now we have english, spanish, italian, french, vietnamese, german, polish, working on mandarin korean. Uh, our users have wanted more, so we just keep adding that's really.
39:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's very cool. Next time I'm in Rome, I will definitely pull it up JesuitPilgrimageapp Also with us. Daniel Rubino. Editor-in-chief Windows Central. It's a busy time for Windows Central. Lots to talk about, I'm sure, oh, yeah, yeah, scatting times. Lots to talk about, I'm sure. Oh, yeah, yeah, scatting times. And your reviews of some of these Copilot Plus PCs will be Tuesday. Some of them will be yes, some of them We'll be a little bit later. Tuesday's the 18th is ostensibly the day that these arrive. You know what I actually want. I want the dev kit, the Snapdragon X dev kit. I've got on the list, have you seen? You probably can't say anything, so I'm not going to ask you any more questions.
40:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I don't have one, I can say I don't have one, I really want one of those. Yeah, we'll probably get our hands on it eventually, but yeah, it's a really cool looking mini PC running there.
40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good price, new PC running their good price and hard work yeah, great way to kind of try all this stuff out Also with us. It's always wonderful to have Devinder Hardwar, who has his his feet in both camps, as it were, and and and his Kirby on his shirt and my Kirby and all my Nintendo stuff.
41:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah.
41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can I ask you a really dumb question, sure? Who's Kirby? Can I ask you a really dumb question, sure? Who's Kirby? Even I know Kirby.
41:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Leo. Leo, Leo Come on Leo Kirby's awesome.
41:15 - Padre (Guest)
Leo is the character you play in Smash Brothers if you like, being cheap. That's who Kirby is.
41:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
In Nintendo, so he was an NES character, but in nintendo lore, I think he is. He's literally a god, because he was the one who saved everybody when uh, when the great evil came in the last smash brothers.
41:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So kirby is great love so he's basically my spirit animal. He's basically a pink blob. That is in many, everything, in many, many nintendo games. Is that correct?
41:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
has his own game. Uh, he absorbs powers if he eats. If he eats something, he absorbs the power of that thing.
41:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a great character, love it. I have a daughter's obsessed with him, yeah but it's not just for kids. I mean, I think you are all adults, as far as I could tell, and you, you seem to all be in the kirby camp, so it's the only ip I like by nintendo.
42:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I do have a switch. But yeah, kirby's awesome man, like those are by Nintendo. I do have a Switch. But yeah, Kirby's awesome man, those are the most fun platforms I have. Just because I don't know. It's hilarious how he inhales people and then spits them back out.
42:14 - Padre (Guest)
It's kind of nightmare-fueled if you really think about it. But yeah, it's fun to play them. But it's cute and jank.
42:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You should play the new one on Switch. The Return to.
42:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dreamland.
42:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think it's Kingdom, oh, not Return to Dreamland Kingdom Not. Return to Dreamland, the latest one that came out on Switch the Forgotten Land.
42:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you enjoyed it. Kirby and the Forgotten Land, there you go. All right, I'm going to download it on my Switch and I will be with the Kirbys. I feel so left out. Guess I'm old, that's all there is to it. I never, you know, nintendo was after my generation. I had a sega genesis. I had, uh, atari, but I don't. Somehow I missed the nes and the mario and that old thing I think I'm just. I'm just a little too old for that. Anyway, it's good to have young people on the show to remind me of what what it's like Our show today, brought to you by Zip Recruiter.
43:05
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44:43
It was Abe Lincoln, didn't he, who said never trust anything you hear on the internet. I think he said that I may be wrong. I may be wrong, let's see. So this was interesting too, daniel. Maybe you can clarify this. I don't think it was ever formally announced, but I was always under the impression. I know that Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell were under the impression that Qualcomm had an exclusive on Windows of some kind. Right, reuters seems to have confirmed that they now have a story that says Qualcomm's exclusivity is expiring and that means a lot of other companies are going to start doing ARM personal computers for Windows. This is late next year, after Qualcomm's exclusive deal to supply chips for laptops expires. Is that accurate?
45:43 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, that's what we're hearing. That rumor has been going around for a couple of years now and it did line up with 2025. That was what we heard back then and now Reuters seems to be confirming that. It's interesting. I don't know where we go from here. To set the field, you have MediaTek and MediaTek, you know, works very closely with Arm, the company that designs the chips. Now, arm currently doesn't have any chip designs that could compete with Apple, which is why, as we discussed earlier, qualcomm bought Nuvia to get away from Arm as an alternative.
46:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And remember, apple sued those former Apple employees who went to Nuvia, I think they eventually dropped the lawsuit but they claimed they had taken Apple proprietary information with them, that their skill set, you know.
46:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
but they're poaching.
46:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, a lot of the people who went to Nuvia came from Apple. But basically it gave Qualcomm parity, or at least that's the expectation.
46:44 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
In fact I forgot the gentleman's name, but the lead designer used to work for Arm Limited too, so he has a real huge pedigree in terms of Arm. So he worked at Arm, designed those chips and he went to go work for Apple and design their chips. So he really, you know, that's why Qualcomm is doing so well.
47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gerard Williams, who Apple did sue. Eventually, last year they abandoned that lawsuit. I'm not sure why, but they had sued him for breach of contract.
47:13 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, they weren't happy about that at all, but you know. So. Mediatek is going to rely on ARM here, and I don't know. The good news is that they could come in where Qualcomm isn't right now, which is the really more low-end market for these pcs. That said, qualcomm could easily just scale down these chips right. So they're already at 10 core. There's no reason why they can't go down to an eight core chip, or even a six core, to then lower its price. But what mediatek's going to have to do? They're going to rely on arms chips, which is what qualcomm has been doing up until now. So I don't know, that doesn't seem like a real winning formula to me, because we're going to get back to. The chips are okay, but they're not amazing, right?
47:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Aren't NVIDIA and AMD also doing this?
47:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean MediaTek is not known for high-powered chips.
47:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'd be more phone chips.
48:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I imagine. Yeah, yeah, but that's what they apparently want to do. Nvidia is definitely way more interesting. They actually have a long history with ARM. They made the first Cortex processors used in Windows RT devices back in the day, and now, of course they're yeah, yeah, tegra.
48:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what? I still have a and I love it an NVIDIA Shield with. Is it the X1? And it's great, it's amazing, it's a great processor, even though it's like five years old now. It's pretty old.
48:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, but you know, NVIDIA is a very different company today, right? And so you take their GPU abilities. I think they're getting a little envious of the handheld gaming market that they don't have quite any play in that right now. Well, the Switch is powered by Tegra.
48:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
so that's something Right, right.
48:53 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, so they do have at least that. But now you know, they look at the PC stuff and they're like oh, we can play there too. So I think they're way more interesting. I think they could attack the PC market from the high end, which is something. When you talk to Qualcomm right now, they admit they're not really going after. They're saying we're sticking with thinning lights and convertibles, that kind of stuff, but they're not going after gaming PCs, 15-inch workstations, 17-inch laptops. I think they know NVIDIA is going to probably come in from that end, and I think they could be successful, because I think, as good as NVIDIA will be, they won't be as efficient as whatever Nubia and these Orion chips are going to be like. So you have that Then AMD. Yeah, amd needs to do something. I don't know what they're. They're doing well in the desktop market, they're doing well in the server market, and they have a lot of play there.
49:49
When it comes to laptops, though, I I don't know where they're going. Everybody heard the same rumor, uh, here at taipei, which was their new um, uh, their new high-end laptop chip costs more than intel's. Uh, strict point, which was weird. I don't know why we were hearing that, though, and it's a weird thing to hear an amd chip is more expensive than intel. I don't know how the pc Intel has two vendors running x86. When you have Intel, who has so much more market dominance, and they offer so much more to OEMs than AMD does, I don't see how, in the laptop market, AMD competes unless they do something dramatic and team up with AMD I'm sorry, with NVIDIA and do something with ARM, because I think Intel's new chips with Lunar Lake won't be as powerful or won't be as competitive with Qualcomm's, but it's going to narrow the gap enough that they're going to be really good chips too. So I don't know where this leaves AMD, though.
50:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I guess there's multiple levels to this conversation too, because AMD's new chips which will support Copilot Plus PCs are coming soon they're coming in July and the Lunar Lake stuff Intel's like I don't know sometime in the fall. Maybe we hope so. So Intel has been like delayed quite a bit compared to what AMD's been doing, like AMD's put MPUs and laptop chips, you know, in their systems for a while too and weren't calling out AI PCs. Also, a whole part of this is has Microsoft actually made the Windows on ARM experience any good? And when I was in Redmond, like I spent a lot of time basically just drilling Microsoft Like guys, I cannot trust you. I cannot trust that you actually made this emulator better, you know, made app compatibility better, the things that really killed the Surface Pro 9, 5g and really every ARM-based Windows PC I've ever tested. It's been a disaster. So they're kind of promising us a miracle and, especially after recall, I don't know what I can believe at this point.
51:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not alone, though. I think consumers and it's not AI, but I think they want the benefits of Apple Silicon in terms of battery life, heat fans, thin light, I think, windows on ARM, if they can get it right and can compete with Apple. I mean, that's really what they're saying is, we have MacBook Airs, but they run Windows isn't it.
52:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It took four years to get there, four years after the M1 MacBook Air. Right, right, yeah, but yeah, I believe it, just given the timeline. But man, microsoft really screwed us on like Windows, on ARM experiences, like they kept pushing it on us to the point where I was asking them I know this computer isn't as fast as the other, surface Pro 9. Oh, they were pigs. Oh, they were awful. They were just awful about it.
52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Plus, the software wasn't ready. I mean, even some of the Microsoft's built-in apps weren't native. It was a disaster Everybody says that's all changed, isn't it? Hasn't it Daniel?
52:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean when.
52:37 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I run Windows on ARM on my Mac.
52:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It runs quite nicely under Parallels.
52:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I like it.
52:43
No, it runs really well. Now. You know, part of their problem has always been the fact that they said they would support ARM, not replace with ARM. So, like Apple's, like we're replacing with ARM, we're going to get rid of all our Intel stuff, we're switching over developers. You need to all get on board because that's the next thing, right? Microsoft said no, we're going to support ARM, and so they knew it was going to be this long journey there and Qualcomm, as I mentioned earlier, was beholden to ARM, limited on their chip designs to come up with something that could compete with Apple, and so far they haven't their chip designs. To come up with something that could compete with Apple, and so far they haven't. Right.
53:17
Luckily, Qualcomm did this Nubia thing and I think that's why I will say this shift right now with ARM. I've never seen this many OEMs on board, this enthusiastic. I'm seeing enterprise mostly small business, small to medium businesses really on board with it. It really feels different. I mean, Slack just this week announced that their app is now ARM compatible. It's like you have Slack, you have Chrome. These were apps that they could have done this years ago and now they're all doing it right before the 18th, which I think is super telling. So I think it's going to be a big difference.
53:52
I think the only thing that's going to really hold back these devices and I don't think it's a real argument is gaming. You know, Qualcomm is kind of where Intel is right now with its arc GPUs, where it has a platform. It's developing it, they're releasing drivers constantly and improving things, but it's going to take them a while to get there. Qualcomm already promised that they're going to do monthly updates for the GPU and they got to constantly build it up, but it's going to take them time. So if you want to buy this to game, you know that's probably not ideal, but then again, I can say the same thing about Macs, right, so? And there are other ways around this but I think the GPU performance is going to be one of those things where it's going to take months before that gets to really where they want it.
54:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where does this leave Intel? Are they history?
54:43 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
No, I think Lunar Lake is actually looking really promising. And listen, you know Intel's been hitting their marks. They said was it five years? Four nodes. They're building fabs, like they're. You know, every year they're hitting a cadence with a new chip and they're switching architectures.
55:00
Lunar Lake is a significant shift from Meteor Lake and Meteor Lake was already a significant shift from the previous generation. Like they're doing, I've seen way more innovation from Intel than I am from AMD in this market and Lunar Lake should definitely be more efficient. Now I don't think it's going to be ARM efficient, but there was an interesting paper I retweeted. It was from an analyst talking about this discussion between x86 and ARM64. You know like the belief is ARM is inherently more efficient because it's a risk design. But there's a lot of disagreement about that saying. No, that's not actually the case. There's actually no fundamental difference between the two. It's just historically the way they've been developed has led them down kind of different paths. But Intel, I think they're doing some really good stuff. I think Lunar Lake is going to surprise people.
55:49
Devjar was making the point about the release. Yeah, so it wasn't scheduled to. It was supposed to come out in limited release by the end of the year. That was always their goal. They've been very public about that and then you're going to see mass production in 2025. That's been shifted now. Now they're trying to get some out the door by September with more production by the end of the year. That's because they're feeling the pressure from Qualcomm. There was a lot of counter-programming by Intel and Taipei at Computex to sort of be like oh, we're doing all this stuff too and our NPU is going to be as powerful, if not more powerful, than what Qualcomm has. Like I said, I don't think it's going to be the same. I think Qualcomm's going to have the edge here for efficiency, maybe even at least some performance, but Intel's chips are going to be. You know, I've always mentioned this in laptops if you, if you can get 18 hours of real world battery life and another laptop gets 16 hours of real world battery life, like is that a substantial difference anymore?
56:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just get all right now between six all day.
56:45 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's all I need yeah, if we're talking five hours and 12 hours like that, that's that makes a difference, you know. So there's point at the mission returns on this stuff and I think you're right. Right, all Microsoft needs to do at Qualcomm is get to the point of like we're as good, if not better, than Apple's M3 where it's at today, and I think for a Gen 1, that's really impressive and like good enough.
57:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's got to frost Apple just a little bit, though, that all these companies are succeeding because they're basically following in apple's footsteps. Father robert, explain to me cisc risk. Uh, efficiency cores, performance cores how has I know you? You pay attention to this. The world of processors has changed dramatically over the last few years oh, yeah, yeah, I mean.
57:34 - Padre (Guest)
The CISC versus RISC debate goes back to when I was a kid, the very early days of fighting it out in the chip market, of either you do reduced instruction sets much faster or you do complex instruction sets more slowly, but you can do more at the same time. Now, when you look at modern architecture and the panels dead on on this one, the difference between what we used to consider risk and what we used to consider CISC is almost non-existent anymore. It's completely blurred. There's no chip on the market that you can say, oh, that's definitely aC infrastructure or that's definitely a CISC infrastructure, especially when you start integrating things like NPUs and you start adding GPUs, which are very, very interesting. I want to call them RISC architecture type chips that are doing a very specific instruction set. So to try to say that it comes down to architecture, I think it's a non-starter.
58:37
What it does come down to is efficiency. How well do you move instructions into your buffer? How well do you pull them out and push them into the bus? How power efficient are you per cycle, per instruction that you process? And that's where Apple hit the sweet spot. There's a lot of people who look at Apple's architecture, their, their m1 through 3 and they say, oh they, they created something that didn't exist before. That's not the case. Remember. They took the arm architecture, they took those arm engineers and they created something. So for them to cry foul and say, no, no one else can do that that's just.
59:12 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't think that's happening. I don't think that's happening.
59:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think that's happening. No, I'm saying it. I was saying maybe in their hearts are going your guys are just copying us. But no, it's a good point. It's a good point, yeah.
59:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's a great thing. I just want to say, like we're talking about this back and forth, but because we want them to be sweating bullets, so we get the hard work.
59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want them to get better, though not by copying each other. I want them to innovate in their own way, so that we have real competition.
59:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
If everybody just says You've just opened a whole can of worms, leo, I don't know. Intel just added onboard memory to Lunar. I know Just like.
59:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Apple has done.
59:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So it's like but what is innovation? What is copying Like? Where do the lines blur? At least right now, it doesn't seem like people are directly copying, except for the whole onboard memory thing.
59:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But well, I want that competition if you find a truly better way, it would make sense that others would copy it, because that's the best way to do it. That's evolution yeah and and and so then, and then at that point you could differentiate. On top of the basic innovation, it is really interesting that you're seeing npus everywhere now, that you're seeing NPUs everywhere, now, that you're seeing performance cores and efficiency cores everywhere. Now You're seeing on-chip. Apple calls it unified memory. I don't know what Intel calls it. Is it the same thing?
01:00:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's basically on-chip.
01:00:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, on the package yeah, though I have to say, a monoculture isn't always a good thing. Intel at one point uh, I think it was, is, is the Israeli, uh Intel uh uh pirate venture discovered the speculative execution could make a huge performance improvement, but now Intel is is deeply regretting that, and everybody else did the same thing. By the way, arm also did speculative execution and, as a result, they're all being bit by these Spectre meltdown style bugs.
01:01:04 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, it happens like Meteor Lake it had a design element that made it run a little too hot, I believe, until it's like backing away from that Hyperthreading. They're not doing hyperthreading anymore. But you know, yeah, they stopped-threading, they're not doing hyper-threading anymore.
01:01:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they stopped hyper-threading. They said hyper-threading is inefficient. I don't, that was like the big thing. That was the big thing like 20 years ago. I remember when hyper-threading came out.
01:01:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I remember going to my task manager being so happy I saw more cores.
01:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whoa double the cores. So we're going to see.
01:01:36 - Padre (Guest)
There's this weird feeling I get sometimes that we're bolting on innovation to dying architecture.
01:01:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, x86, that's for sure, Drew right.
01:01:46 - Padre (Guest)
Right, right, but I mean it's sort of like okay, if we were to wipe everything out, what would we create, both hardware and software? What kind of architecture do we think would be most efficient for the type of computing that we do today? And Apple has a much cleaner start, but then they also have the ability to change everything at once.
01:02:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's Apple right. They're willing to cut off legacy and that's what Microsoft has never been willing to do and they couldn't do it.
01:02:10 - Padre (Guest)
I mean, if they tried to do that they'd be crucified Right and rightfully so.
01:02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's their businesses, absolutely in their business. They're right to say you know, if there's, if there's a guy selling uh chipotis in new delhi that's running an x86 pc on windows 7, we're gonna make damn sure that his machine continues to work.
01:02:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think that's their superpower.
01:02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah that's their superpower. It's also their achilles heel, um, and apple, because they're a tiny fraction of the market, is willing to just, every few years, just say yeah, sorry guys, your machine's no longer gonna run. Um, it's a fascinating world we live in. So june 18th supposedly you, you went to computex, daniel, yeah so you saw all those new pcs june 18th samsung, acer, asus, lenovo, hp all are going to ship dell these new uh co-pilot plus pcs this week.
01:03:11 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yes, give or take. I think some of the dells might be a couple days behind, but yeah, I mean that's the goal.
01:03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everything should be coming out and look what they're saying 18 hours, 26 hours, 22 hours battery life. I mean, uh, amazing, uh, battery life 27 hours.
01:03:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Um, we don't know the numbers I seen, yeah, the numbers I saw from one oem and I don't have reason to doubt them.
01:03:36
Right, of course we got to test it and back up, but like they were very explicit in their testing how they did it, because they want us to repeat it. That's the reason why they're doing that. Right, they showed, compared to apple's m3 and the macbook pro 14 inch, and there was no doubt going by their numbers the efficiency gains that Qualcomm has over Apple. It is, in other words, a much more efficient chip, because this laptop definitely got more battery life than ours, even though its battery was significantly smaller than what you find in the MacBook. So I think it's going to be really good. I think there's a little bit of confusion that will happen and I'll predict this right now, which is you're going to see benchmarks a little bit all over the place, because technically, there are four chips there's the X Elite and everybody knows the X Plus, but within the X Elite, there's actually three SKUs and the X Plus is just one. By here there's at least another one coming.
01:04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are they all just binned versions of the same chip?
01:04:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
probably yeah, so it's the x. Elites are going to be 12 core, but they can vary. The lowest skew of it doesn't have turbo and it doesn't peak as high in terms of speed. Uh, also, its gpu is less powerful. So it's 12-core 3.4 gigahertz, no dual-core boost and a 3.8 teleflops for the GPU. But the highest goes to 3.8 gigahertz with a boost to 4.2 gigahertz. It has a 4.6 teraflop GPU.
01:05:09
So you're going to see, and then OEMs within that chip can then choose different tdp levels for the power drop. I've seen some as low as 18 watts on what I would consider most mainstream laptops you'll see will be around the 18 to 20 watt range, but some can go as high as 45 watts. So they use this vivid book vivid book it's supposed to be 45 watts even though they're using a lower tier chip. So you're going to see benchmarks a little bit all over the place and it's important to interpret that because it's going to be, but I think they'll all be as fast as the macbook air m3, you know at least that speed, which, which is an older system, now based on an older chip too.
01:05:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So it's like yes, if you're releasing something soon, qualcomm, it better be faster than when Apple showed off.
01:05:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a four nanometer process. They're made by yes, we think they're made by Samsung, we don't know who. Probably, probably.
01:06:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Well, they've actually actually Cristano said that they're one of the few very openly about that they dual source their chips from TSMC and Samsung.
01:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there's not a lot of capacity from TSMC because Apple buys all the TSMC chips. Those are the three nanometer node. Apple, I think, looking in the rearview mirror, is saying oh crap, and has jumped to M4, a new three nanometer node that is better, apparently. A new 3 nanometer node that is better, apparently. So a lot of this is, yeah, basically measuring yourself against Apple's previous generation or soon to be previous generation. The only M4 right now is an iPad, so it's not comparable, but it's, I would say. Apple knows kind of.
01:06:48 - Padre (Guest)
If they can match the M3, that's still. That's fine. I'll still take that.
01:06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I spent a lot of money on m3 max laptop, which I'm feeling like maybe I shouldn't have done that. I thought that was going to be ones are totally fine with m1.
01:07:01 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, I think the problem with apple and I say the problem with apple it's not really a problem, but like I think people were expecting each generation of the m series to be a substantial jump in performance and it's not even the no jump between the M two and the M three only resulted around. I think it was a 10 to 15% performance gain in CPU power, which is fine.
01:07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's like Intel stuff, right, that's like it's not doubling or tripling which they had done when they went from Intel to Apple Silicon.
01:07:31 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And the chips are. So they can either clock the chips higher again, like what Intel does, and then you're going to reduce, you know, get more heat, and then you're going to reduce battery life, or you got to shrink the node again, but then the node you know that's not easy and you're dependent upon TSMC to be able to manufacture that. I will say, what Apple's been doing really well in is the fact that they've been focusing on their GPU and making their GPU much more powerful, and so that's the route that they're going down now. I think actually Qualcomm is going to follow the same pattern. Actually I think we'll see a significant jump with Gen 2 for the Snapdragon X Elite, but then I think you're going to really start to see them focus on their GPU performance and try to get that, because right now they even admit their GPU it's there. They and try to get that Because right now they even admit their GPU it's there. They're happy to do things with it, but their real focus was efficiency and performance and trying to match what's out there.
01:08:23
But I don't think we're going to see the M4. I know people are like, oh great, qualcomm's out, but now the M4 is coming out, but I don't think the M4 is going to be this game-changing performance jump. I think, if anything, their gpu might be better and that'll be the interesting story and their npu is finally going to get up to what 38 tops I believe is the rumor, uh, which still behind qualcomm, but it's a big jump from where, I believe I think, they're at 18 tops right now. So, uh, they'll have a lot more power there. But that gets back into the apple intelligence and what devices it can run on. Right, because now you're getting to that issue where, oh, turns out a lot of the older hardware can't run this stuff.
01:08:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they're requiring the new iPhone, the iPhone 15 or later, although I did see Pro too. I think Pro that's right. I did see the difference between pro and non-pro is RAM, and I did see people say that's the 16 gigs RAM versus 8 gigs RAM. You need a lot more RAM as well.
01:09:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Also, the plain iPhone 15 runs the older chip, not the new one. So that's the whole thing, yeah.
01:09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we pay attention to all these details. We're geeks, I don't think real people. What are they looking for? I don't. What are they? Do they even care what tops device does, or any of that?
01:09:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's why Apple was smart. It's features like things that your computer yeah, apple was smart to focus on functions as opposed to any of the rest of it.
01:09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Precisely, and they blew me, I have to say. They blew me away and I cannot wait to get my hands on the new calculator.
01:09:53 - Padre (Guest)
I was wondering when someone was going to bring that up.
01:09:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They were very one note, done that forever. Uh, doing that for years not that, not that what? The ability just to write out equation to convert them they.
01:10:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's like a spreadsheet. You write on an equation, it produces the answer in your handwriting and if you change a number in the equation, it updates the result like a spreadsheet.
01:10:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's pretty impressive I don't know about the updating part. I don't think one note does that. They have handwriting but well okay, but it solves problems. It solves problems for you, right? Yeah, and again, it'll even explain the steps.
01:10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll even explain the steps of how it got there this is all marketing until we actually get our hands on the thing. But uh, I like the co-creator stuff that's.
01:10:37 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I know I think apple's doing this too, but microsoft has it where you can, um, draw something and then tell the ai what you want it to be yeah, yeah, and then the ai will draw it for you and you can control. Like, I think that I think it's gonna be a little rough out the gate, but, you know, for people who can't draw it but want to create images for either presentations or their own artwork, I think that's super cool actually.
01:11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and even take it to the next step, because you can draw it. You can draw a web page and not only will it create the image, it'll create the functionality and make it real. That's an open AI feature. That's pretty darn impressive, I have to say.
01:11:15 - Padre (Guest)
We've been using that a lot over here for icons like religious icons, to make copyright-free versions of religious icons when we can sketch out what we think it should look like, and then we'll ask Copilot to give us 10 different versions of this place.
01:11:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what's nice is? When the Muslims take over? They could just erase the faces in software. It'll be so much easier. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm joking.
01:11:41 - Padre (Guest)
Please don't start a holy war on them.
01:11:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
What are you doing in?
01:11:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this episode. I remember going to the Hagia Sophia and it's gone through several. It's a mosque now, but it was a cathedral for a while.
01:11:56
And because they're not allowed in the mosque to have faces human faces they took the icons and they scratched the it's different kind of icon, though. Scratch the faces out so that we're faceless. I mean, this is history. It's just fascinating to me. But anyway, let's take a break. We're going to come back and talk about more while the religious war rages around our heads.
01:12:13
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01:14:58
And we thank them so much for their longtime support of everything we do here at this Week in Tech. Great panel here Devinder Hardawar from Engadget. Senior Editor Kirby Phan. Now I know what that is Great to have you also on Father's Day. Happy Father's Day, daniel Rubino, the dog father, editor-in-chief of Windows Central and the actual father, padre SJ. Father Robert Balassaire. The digital Jesuit Jesuitpilgrimageapp is his latest thing.
01:15:34
All right, so we've talked about Microsoft, we talked about Apple. Oh, there is some bad news for Apple, by the way, just came out in the financial times yesterday. Apparently, according to three people in the know, brussels is about to call Apple to the mat. Apple, you may remember, under the digital marketing act. Call Apple to the mat. Apple, you may remember, under the Digital Marketing Act, changed the way its app store worked. According to the Financial Times, the EU has determined Apple is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to steer users to offers outside its app store without imposing fees upon them. This will be the first charges brought against the tech company under the dma.
01:16:18
Meta, apparently, is next apple, uh, meta, and then maybe alphabet. They're still under investigation. You may remember that apple's solution okay, you can have your own app store, we're still going to charge you 27%. And they really it was. They were malicious, compliancing it, dragging their heels. Regulators, though, have only made preliminary findings. Apple still has a chance to correct its practices, but we kind of saw this coming, didn't we? Apple was doing the minimum to see what they could get away with. Any thoughts?
01:16:57 - Padre (Guest)
I mean, we saw this back back back during Epic games, the Epic games saga with Apple.
01:17:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they did the least they could do. We knew.
01:17:04 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, exactly.
01:17:06
And we all looked at that and we realized, yeah, you're right, you are a gatekeeper and as a gatekeeper, you have an obligation to make sure that all of your publishers aren't penalized for publishing on your platform. And that's essentially what the DMA is trying to do is trying to say look, we will grant you a functional monopoly. However, you can't use the power of that functional monopoly to further expand the monopoly Over here. The precedent is getting on this side of the pond is yeah, this is, this is a government that is rightfully taking a big tech.
01:17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go get them to go get that for acting in bad faith apple introduced this core technology fee, which is 50 cents per uh user, on developers with apps that have more than a million users, for every first installment by a user. Apple also charged an additional 3% fee to app developers that use its payment processors. They did cut the fee from 30% to 17% for digital goods and services paid, but the EU has apparently the commission has apparently decided that's that's insufficient.
01:18:14 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean certainly seeing how Apple has responded to, like it seemed like every week they were kind of changing the rules for for developers in terms of what was allowed outside the app store. The whole thing about them finally like being like okay, uh, emulators, emulators can be on our app because they were threatened by stuff outside the app store. Um, all that. It's just like dragging apple to some sort of like compromise. It makes sense. It makes sense that the eu is not happy about this.
01:18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, meta, of course, is in trouble. Uh, because of its so-called pay or consent model, where users pay a subscription fee for an ad, free facebook and instagram. Otherwise. Otherwise, meta continues to collect every bit of information it can. Apparently, the EU is not real happy about that either. Also, the EU is expected to add a second investigation focusing on the Safari choice screen. Remember the Windows ballot, the browser ballot? Apple's doing that with Safari. The EU is less than pleased.
01:19:19 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So Microsoft is still doing that too.
01:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They still do the browser ballot Really, oh wow.
01:19:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, if you not the ballot, but if you go to like, hey, I'm searching for Google Chrome, you will get pop-ups in Edge saying, hey, you still, you got a great browser right here. Why do you?
01:19:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
need to go to Chrome.
01:19:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So they're all doing it.
01:19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they do that in the US. Good luck trying to download a Chrome. You've got to go through a barrage of Edge ads. Another problem this isn't Microsoft's problem but it kind of related to it VS Code, which is Microsoft's free code editor that so many people use. It's also open source. You can use it as visual codium. But vs code is of you know, comes from microsoft and there is microsoft runs an extensions market for it, called the visual studio code marketplace, and apparently researchers showed how easy it is to put malicious software on that marketplace.
01:20:18
One of the very popular dark themes is called Dracula. You would think people would stay away from that, but no, they love it. So three researchers created an extension to typosquat the Dracula official theme. The fake extension was called Darkula, which I think is actually a good name. They registered a matching domain at darkulathemecom. They became a verified publisher.
01:20:46
There it is on the VS Code marketplace. It actually incorporates code from the legit Dracula theme, but also includes a script that collects system information host name, number of installed extensions, devices, domain name and the operating system platform and then sends it to a remote server via an HTTPS post request. None of this is malicious. It's just to demonstrate that malicious code can be run. The malicious code was not flagged by the endpoint detection and response tools. Vs Code is treated with leniency due to its nature as a development and testing system. The Darkula became very popular. It was mistakenly installed by multiple high value targets, including a publicly listed company with a 483 billion dollar market cap, major security companies and a national justice court network oh, what is the it within these organizations?
01:21:47 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
what are they doing? There's, there's a very easy joke here. Uh, of course, of course, this is happening. Microsoft doesn't know what it's like to run a successful app store. Like the security's not there, they don't know what to do, uh wow.
01:22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So fortunately it was just researchers, but they showed how easy this was and how many people downloaded it, because it's darkula who wouldn't want. Darkula wouldn't want it who wouldn't? So I you know microsoft has yet to respond. Bleeping computer. I got this article from lawrence abrams. Great website has contacted microsoft to ask if they plan to revisit the studio marketplace's security and introduce additional measures, but has not received a response by publication time the security is like one guy in a closet.
01:22:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
What uh like letting all of them?
01:22:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm working on SolarWinds. I cannot be bothered. This was back in June 9th. I don't know if they responded since then. Okay, amazing, just you know what? This is not just a problem with Visual Studio Code. Pypy, which is the library of useful libraries for Python, has thousands of malicious projects there. I mean, it's just, it's a mess. These supply chain attacks are very difficult to thwart, apparently.
01:23:05 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But you'd think Microsoft would be a little better than like open source projects. You know, like would take a little more care.
01:23:11 - Padre (Guest)
I don't know. I mean, would they be? I mean, the whole idea of having a marketplace is so that you could develop applications at record time by using snippets that other people have created. Well, I mean, there's no way to make that safe.
01:23:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Surely, but surely somebody, just anybody, using the service would be like hey, that looks weird and report this Like it should. That should happen, yeah Right.
01:23:43 - Padre (Guest)
So where does that go?
01:23:45 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But I mean, that means that you're going to be investing in people who are actually going to be reviewing these code snippets and looking for weird send-offs and weird post requests. That's not Microsoft's business and they wouldn't be good at it either. The solution here is going to be AI. I'm really looking forward to the idea of AI using it to sniff out. It's just sophisticated machine learning to go through people's code and look for things. At the very least, it could just flag things so a human then could go through it and verify. I think this area of security is going to be massive.
01:24:09
I've already talked about, you know, with email and phishing attacks, no-transcript you just got to click a link to and enter in your information and you just gave it all to the hacker, Right? I think you know, using AI. I already know companies are working on that and they're going to leverage these new NPUs to be able to do that. So I think that area of AI is going to be super interesting as capacity rolls out to be able to improve this kind of stuff. Because, to be fair, humans not only cost a lot of money to employ. They're fallible, right? If you're just hired and you're reviewing code like, it's pretty easy to overlook something. So I think this stuff will help out a lot.
01:25:00 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This reminds me of something you actually brought up earlier in the episode Padre, that certain projects Microsoft was doing are transparent and open for governments to look at. That is often a thing that is critiqued, you know, like when a company says, oh yeah, you go take a look at our code, it's all totally safe. It is almost like a false security move because few people actually have the resources to do that or the time. So yeah, you'd expect maybe the American government can go in and go look into this stuff. But it's kind of like one of those things that Microsoft can say, hey, we're being good, but also the actual, also the actual motivation to take them up on that offer isn't always real.
01:25:41 - Padre (Guest)
So that's a whole other. It's all kind of related and, daniel's right, ai could finally provide them with the resources to go through that, to actually take them up on the offer of running the source code and saying, okay, well, where are the problems going to end up? I actually love that idea. I've already worked with a company that has created AI honeypots for trying to stop call scammers and it works exceptionally well. I was not able to tell that I was in a virtual environment that did not actually exist. I thought that I was penetrating a network and I was seeing all the things I should see if you're penetrating a network, and it turned out that it was entirely a network and I was seeing all the things I should see if you're penetrating a network, and it turned out that it was entirely a fantasy. I mean, that's actually a very cool application.
01:26:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, a boy can dream, can't he? I like this story. I don't like it, but I like it. Phishing attack hits LA County Public Health Agency, jeopardizing 200,000 plus residents. Residents personal info. You put this in here, father robert. How did they, uh, how did they do this?
01:26:41 - Padre (Guest)
okay, so the first thing you have to realize is this actually happened back in february, oh, and they did not say when it stopped. Oh, so this was, this was probably a very long-running exfiltration.
01:26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did they just discover it?
01:26:58 - Padre (Guest)
They just announced it but they didn't say when they discovered it, slash, stopped it and with that breach that's over 200,000 people's records of personal identifying information and that personal identifying information includes things like social security and name, financial information, health history, prescription history it's bad and any financial information that may have been tied to that person through the Department of Health. So that's one of the worst breaches I've seen in a while, not in terms of numbers, but in terms of the type of information that was exfiltrated.
01:27:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As you say, it happened back in February. Employees received a phishing email. They clicked on a link in the body of the email, thinking they were accessing a legitimate message, and then that's that. It's not clear. According to Yahoo News, when officials became aware of the incursion, this department spokesman did not immediately provide answers to questions. This is actually from the la times. Uh, so yeah, but you know I it's so funny, I'm so inured to these. I don't, I see them every day and I don't report on them.
01:28:10 - Padre (Guest)
Uh, because it's happening all the time now and it wasn't just one employee, it was 53 different employees clicked. Oh oh, they all clicked on the thing.
01:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, maybe everyone clicked on the link. Now, that's really the failing of the la county health department, because you're supposed to do? We do training with your employees so that they're aware not to click links in email 53, did it, oh God?
01:28:37 - Padre (Guest)
But like Devendra said, I mean human. Someone in the organization is going to make that mistake, Wow.
01:28:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But 53 must have been well-crafted. That was a well-crafted phishing attack.
01:28:51 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
My company sends out phishing attempts and I fell for one the other day, did you?
01:28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so that's it, yeah, and I'm pretty good at this stuff, that's a walk of shame, yeah yeah, they used to do.
01:29:03 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It wasn't even yeah, it was like. It was just. Uh, it was saying someone's trying to access my accounts and if I didn't just click this link to report it, so, it wasn't like to me. That seemed like legit Click and they're like gotcha and I'm like you guys suck.
01:29:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it goes to show you. It's so embarrassing yeah.
01:29:25 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We're so vulnerable to this. But you guys were talking about how AI could potentially help prevent security issues, but I'm more worried about what the AI tools will do when, when they're actually, yeah, yeah, being used to attack us too, so like it's gonna go, yeah, back and forth.
01:29:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It'll be a back and forth between the two.
01:29:40 - Padre (Guest)
So the ai will click every single link.
01:29:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what it's so you also had this story, robert, that you put in here from the register that it turns out Russia was pairing two pro-Russian residents of Ukraine to operate a SIM farm, attacking Ukrainian phones. What is a SIM farm?
01:30:03 - Padre (Guest)
So SIM farm is just you've set something up so that you can have multiple actual SIMs either eSIMs or actual SIMs and send out a mass of messages or a mass of whatever it is that you're trying to payload to a bunch of different numbers, hoping that one or two will click on them. And this sim farm was actually targeting Ukrainian soldiers. Now, if they click the link which was sent via SMS, the sim farm would get root access to the phone, and that means anything on the phone they would have access to. That farm would get root access to the phone and that means anything that on the phone they would have access to. That's the microphone, that's the camera, that's the GPS system.
01:30:42
So imagine you're trying to do a secure operation in the field and some hacker has just managed to land themselves on 15 different phones in your platoon because someone clicked the link that said uh, here's a dating service or here's oh, look at this video. Uh, and it. It worked, it worked. And this was a small one, by the way. They they found another one that was running what? 15 000? This? This one was only running 600.
01:31:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a modern warfare, isn't it? I mean, if you're uh in a war and you can convince uh the enemy soldiers to click on a link on their phone, I mean there's nothing, no rule. It's not. There's no geneva convention preventing that kind of cyber attack. Maybe there ought to be, but there isn't right, I mean you.
01:31:33 - Padre (Guest)
You should be telling your soldiers not to have phones. Well, that's what's interesting about.
01:31:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ukraine. In fact, we've had people on the show several times who said that's really what's scary about this Ukraine-Russia war is that it's a testing, a proving ground for modern cyber warfare technologies, including drones, and that this, these technologies are going to seep into warfare everywhere soon well, yeah, because they're so cheap and they're, they're asymmetrical I can send a ten thousand dollar drone and destroy a 14 million dollar tank, right, I mean, who's not going to do that?
01:32:14
if you're, if that's your business all right, let's take a little break. I want to tell you about a business that, uh, is very cool. I talked to them the other day in touch cx. Now I'm an idiot. I said what's the cx stand for? They said leo, customer experience. I said, oh, I'm not really up on this enterprise stuff, but I do know that companies, small and large companies like ours the relationship to your customers is everything right.
01:32:43
Intouch CX knows a major goal of your company is to give your customers an excellent customer experience. But how do you do that? Well, there are some really interesting techniques and in and and the most modern are used by in touch cx. I can't, there's so many I can't I get you just have to go to the website and look at them. They work with brands around the world. They use ai, they use smart automation to automate the customer experience, not to automate away customer touch points, but to make them better, to make them more efficient, to do triage for every touch point across the entire customer journey. It's really an interesting technique. They train your customers, make it better for customer service reps, make it better for customers, make it better for your company To provide a great customer experience.
01:33:35
You've got to depend on a combination of talented people, efficient processes and innovative technology. That technology supports these people in doing their job, but it only works when you've got the right mix of these things working together, and most companies I'm sorry to say you probably one of them are dealing with outdated, complex systems because times have changed. That makes it hard to meet your customers' needs, hard to retain your customer service agents because they're frustrated. They want to support your customers. Customer interactions have got to feel smooth for both sides for your customers and your agents and that's why InTouch CX improves the experience for both the agent and your customers at every point of the journey. They do this through innovative AI and automation. Intouch CX is an advisor you can rely on and trust.
01:34:21
If you're ready to update your customer experience, to improve your relationship with your customers, to make your agents more effective and happier, to elevate your customer and agent experience and to add AI and automation to every touchpoint, you need to talk to the people in TouchCX. Whatever your company size, regardless of where your company is on its CX journey, intouchcx can help you go the extra mile. Go to InTouchCXcom, slash twit. Sign up for a free, no-obligation consultation. They'll create a tailored customer support strategy that includes this AI and smart automation, customized specifically for your business. That's intouchcxcom Intouchcxcom. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Maybe you can explain this to me, devendra, because I didn't get this at all. This is from Reuters. Nokia CEO makes world's first immersive phone call. Do you have any idea what they're talking about here?
01:35:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We have not reported any. I was surprised by this link, leo, because yeah, we have not reported on this as being like a major thing happening, but I think it's more like whoever the nokia ceo now just like wants, uh, wants headlines you think it's just a press release that got somehow got turned into a reuters dispatch?
01:35:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we have demonstrated the future of voice calls, says pekka lundmark, ceo of nok, which, by the way, as far as I know, no longer makes phones. Hmd makes Nokia branded phones, but Nokia doesn't. They make tires.
01:36:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Nokia is just a brand. I think this was maybe a press release. I don't know the full story here, but the technology does sound cool. If it is a thing, it's supposedly. Yeah, they're calling it immersive audio and video, so like the sort of like thing you get from dolby atmos surround sound phone calls.
01:36:19
Ladies and gentlemen, well, more like specifically like directional, you know, like if, uh, I think like maybe if, like two people were sitting in front of you, uh, on a voice call or something like, maybe you would get like the actual spatial awareness of where they were. It sounds cool, but I but I'm not going to be super excited about this at all. And also, it's not voice calls that we want. These days Nobody wants to do voice calls. That's what I was trying to say.
01:36:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Who makes voice calls?
01:36:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point. You're innovating in last century technology.
01:36:47 - Padre (Guest)
Well, it sounds like Nokia Also don't most phones try to cancel out any other noise other than the person who's speaking? Do I really want a three-dimensional positioning of the car driving behind the person, the people at the next table at the Starbucks? I'm not sure if that's something I need.
01:37:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Maybe it's positioning, like the person or something, or if, like, you had your phone up and maybe the direction of the audio would like follow your phone or something. Um, this just reminds me of, like, my first ces, and I was like maybe 2010, I think, where I had steak with the folks at nokia and how blissfully unaware they were about the throw of the iphone or android or anything they're like. No, no, no we.
01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a flip phone, everybody wants flip phone.
01:37:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's a great, everybody wants nokias. And uh, a couple years later they're gone, they're gone. They're gone.
01:37:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The technology is part of the upcoming 5G advanced standard, so it is in the standard. Nokia aims to get licensing opportunities, which would likely take a few years to be available, widely so forget I even mentioned it.
01:37:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'll let you know when they get here. The technology we need is for when folks of a certain age are taking their speakerphone calls in public.
01:38:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We need that active canceling information. It's all over the place Audio for external noise canceling. I'm walking behind.
01:38:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, look, I'm 67, but I can call her a little old lady. She's probably younger than me Talking like this. She's probably younger than me Talking like this. I blame Kim, I blame the Kardashians, because on reality TV you use the speakerphone like that so that the camera can pick it up, but for some reason it's gotten into the culture. People are talking on the phone like this and you hear the call.
01:38:25 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I need localized audio, yeah.
01:38:29 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
What the hell? I'm seeing it all over the place too.
01:38:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you?
01:38:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah.
01:38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, it's terrible. I blame my generation, we boomers.
01:38:42 - Padre (Guest)
The last time I visited my parents in Las Vegas, my mother was doing that, so she had the phone on the table at a. Starbucks with the speakerphone on having a conversation and the people at the next table. They were doing it too, and then the people on the other lines of the two speakerphones. Actually, started talking to each other. Who's that? Who's that?
01:39:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh my God, this is what AirPods were invented for. What the heck? The other thing I'm seeing a lot more of these days is people who just play TikTok videos or YouTube videos on their phone.
01:39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, at last. At the airport and just watch it.
01:39:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah.
01:39:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Stop it, we need like vocalized audio. Yeah, I will say like the usability reason for it makes sense, like if you just have to hold up my phone, not to my ear, because nobody holds up phones to their ears anymore, but just like talk to the person quick, quick conversation.
01:39:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think that makes sense, but we have not solved for the externalities of people using their devices like that and it sucks. I think part of the mistake putting it to my ear you do, because it tells people leave me alone.
01:39:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're like, yeah, you just walk to the airport like this, you don't actually talk to anybody, like a normal human being.
01:39:50 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I'm on a phone call right also I don't know what the other person's going to say, like why don't they say something really salty, like?
01:39:58 - Padre (Guest)
that's true, sorry, everyone, you know. Look, if I get a phone call, I'm assuming it's because someone's on fire or has been in an accident.
01:40:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
If it's not that text me. Yeah, yeah, there is that my my two-year-old is now doing like pretend phone calls. I'm like where did you? Nobody's picking up phones and holding them to their ears anymore. Where did you learn that? And it turns out my wife is. She's a bit of an oldie when it comes to tech, so she still does that and she doesn't use her AirPods for phone calls. So that's where he's picking it up from.
01:40:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But nobody else. Nobody else I see is do phone calls anymore. I mean, is that going to?
01:40:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
be in a few years. People, this won't be called a smartphone, it'll be called something else.
01:40:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your your data device or your handy smartphone, but yeah, and you'll still and you'll still say I'm going to dial a call, even though, yeah, there's been no dials 50 years to be like.
01:40:51 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Why do they call them smartphones anyway? Well, back back in the day, it's like how we explain words now. Yeah, it's like we explain the origin of the words by doing that right. Well back in the day, the original usage of it was and I go oh, I had no idea.
01:41:02 - Padre (Guest)
Oh, that was funny. Yeah, they won't change. Before telepathy Leo, we still use a floppy disk icon for the save button, for save Right.
01:41:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it'll be around for a while is uh, is it still a handset? Yeah, it's still a handset on the iphone. Nobody's had one of these handsets. What's that? Why does it look like that, daddy? Well, that's a kidney. That's how much I had to pay for this. What is that? You know, I don't. You don't see phones like that anymore.
01:41:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Maybe you do it in the office eventually it'll just all be facetime, either facetime audio or facetime video, you know.
01:41:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then the facetime audio calls will be rarer what a world, what a world, what a world we live in. Uh, so elon musk, who is really salty over open ai, going all profit and all that and said you should let me run it. To which open ai said but uh, apparently he sued them earlier this year. He's now withdrawn his lawsuit after he, the day before a hearing was scheduled in san francisco. I think he did not want to face the judge with this what is blatantly nonsensical lawsuit, since there was there was no contract, no formal written agreement, so it's all like well your honor, he said he was going he's turning into Donald Trump of tech.
01:42:24
Like every time he yeah something happened.
01:42:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Every time something happens, he's like I want to sue them, and it's just like all right, then it's like the lawsuit gets dropped. He and it's just like all right, then it's like the lawsuit gets dropped. He loses it Like he's barely. He doesn't win a lot. The open AI thing is hilarious. Who remembers when he called for a moratorium on AI and so we can get the?
01:42:44 - Padre (Guest)
safety and then immediately immediately bought a lot of hardware Immediately.
01:42:49 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, and behind the scenes, he's trying to build up his own company and it's just going full steam ahead building AI. Like what happened to the dangers? Oh, we're different, you know. It's like, are you, you know? And him calling out safety and security for money. And you know, with Tesla it's just like and I have a Model 3. Like, I like Tesla, right, but my car literally has a camera on the inside looking at me. That has no function. It was supposed to be for the robo taxi that was going to come at any moment, but, like I just take it for granted that Tesla is not recording me. And then people are like, well, in my car it works, like you could do it through the app. And I'm like, yeah, that's great. It doesn't in mine, though. So, like, what am I supposed to do?
01:43:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would you want a camera recording you?
01:43:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
because the only thing that that could be used for is an insurance company saying see your honor, he wasn't looking at the road. It was supposed to be for robo taxi, so that when people damaged the inside of your car, you had it recorded. That was the original intent. They then converted it so that if you're doing, um, uh, full self-driving, you know which.
01:43:52 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Obviously is just around the corner paying attention.
01:43:55 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You're dozing off, you're falling asleep, which is a cool thing. Mine doesn't do any of that, probably because it doesn't have their actual hardware. I don't know. I'm taking their word for whatever reason, but I don't know, it's just weird.
01:44:06 - Padre (Guest)
I like you. I will forgive elon for all of that as long as he holds up to his word to fight uh zuckerberg in a cage match whatever happened to that? Right whatever.
01:44:15 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, well, remember he had to have shoulder surgery oh yeah, that was right oh yeah, what happened there, you know. Again it just I might have to have shoulder shoulder surgery. So we're going to call it off for now and then, like, did you ever have the surgery?
01:44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, do you think do you think like the only reason that we know this is because of twitter and stuff like alexander graham bell and thomas edison? We're gonna have a cage match too, but nobody knew because there was no twitter at the time and that the only real difference? The billionaires have always been nuts, but we just now know it is that?
01:44:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think like there was a lot written about the crazy things, edison, yeah, exactly did you know, it was just was just the medium at the time.
01:44:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was it Edison who killed the elephant? I can't remember who killed the elephant.
01:44:59 - Padre (Guest)
I forgot which one, but yeah.
01:45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was Edison.
01:45:01 - Padre (Guest)
Howard Hughes went out of his mind. I mean, come on.
01:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At the end he was wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet to keep the germs away.
01:45:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Maybe billionaires shouldn't exist because it just melts your brain. Or maybe Musk was always like that.
01:45:13 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
engineers shouldn't exist because it just melts your brain. Or maybe musk was always like that, who knows, we don't, we may never know. He made zuckerberg look normal, I mean that's like he made zuckerberg like we're all human. Yeah, we're all like you know. Zucks ain't so bad anymore. We're just like a hell of a position to be in in 2024 uh tech crunch did have an article last month on mark zuckerberg's makeover.
01:45:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand? I guess um both world's best therapists.
01:45:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think that's what it is. It's like he had somebody who could really help him talk out his life's problems, while also like compartmentalizing all the problems his companies have produced apparently Apparently, his wife, for his 40th birthday, convinced him to do a series of photos.
01:46:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is his childhood bedroom, where he learned to code, and he's wearing a T-shirt that says and I only know this because I had a good classical education Cartago de Lenda Est, which is the at the end of every was it whose speech? Was it Cicero, at the end of every speech, would say Carthage must be destroyed. Now why Mark Zuckerberg is wearing a t-shirt and, by the way, a very fetching gold chain that says Carthage must be destroyed. Well, that's just an exercise we'll leave for the reader. Here he is in the same t-shirt in a very small room is this Bill Gates in basketball with an elderly gentleman?
01:46:44
this is his dorm room. It's like when they were in college they were three feet tall. I don't understand what he's a hobbit.
01:46:52 - Padre (Guest)
What's going?
01:46:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on and there's a lava lamp which is an on.
01:46:57 - Benito (Ad)
Uh, for some reason, this is benito that looks like an ai picture you think that's fake it really does, but it really does it does look like one.
01:47:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's like very being john malkovich like oh, you're in a small room all of a sudden. What is this little teeny?
01:47:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
weeny sofa that bill gates is sitting on in basketball shorts. Give the man pants. Yeah well, they both went to harvard, remember?
01:47:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
neither graduated but and zuckerberg really looked up to bill gates like bill gates was a big role in this case, he's looking down at bill gates because yeah, that's true, tiny sofa uh, this is his first Microsoft's is Carthage, you know what they?
01:47:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, now I get it. These aren't real. They built little sets. They built little sets. They built little sets for this photo shoot.
01:47:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The bedroom, one looks real, it could be real.
01:47:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First apartment with just a mattress. No, but it's little. Look at the size of the chair yeah.
01:47:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
No his the childhood bedroom one oh, that looks real.
01:47:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because he's a child, so he's full size. There's something going on, creepy as hell. Yeah, here it is office lockdown, where we worked all day and night to fight off competitors again, it's a diorama.
01:48:12
You can go there, and it's all the same t-shirt too. Here's pinocchio's pizzeria, where I basically lived in college. Now this is his wife and his kids. There's priscilla chan and his two children. Happy father's day mark. By the way, this is the like. What lucky kids, my girls. This he's showing his kids the room where he grew up, with tiny furniture. I don't, I don't. Is did he wear.
01:48:37 - Padre (Guest)
Hey, we're talking about it, so yeah yeah yeah oh my god, he looks happier he looks happier now, so is he happier now, is he?
01:48:48 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I don't know. I mean I don't know.
01:48:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It seems like a guy that's finding control centered in a way, but I do think it's like it's either a combination of therapy or something, but it's like he has totally like cut off all the harms and all the things people were like blaming him for or what facebook did, and it's just like focusing on life in a weird way and I find that honestly, I find it a little disturbing, as much as like we're talking about it being a glow up. It is.
01:49:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's weird he's not like actively like dealing with the and then he was at a wedding in india recently, where he wore an alexander mcqueen suit and followed up the following day with the luxurious organza shirt from rahul mishra. Um, here he is, uh, in in this, in this suit, do you he's? He still looks like a robot, by the way Smiling.
01:49:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He's smiling. That's never going to go away. Yeah, he's tanned and smiling. What?
01:49:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the hell he's got dragonfly suit, dragonflies.
01:49:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We need the Twitter suit guy to deconstruct all of this.
01:49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the Alexander McQueen suit. Oh, there he is. This is him, derek Guy to deconstruct all of this.
01:49:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This is the Alexander McQueen suit.
01:49:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, there he is. This is him. It's Mark Zuckerberg. Derek Guy, if you like the shearling he's wearing, you can check out the Shot B3, acne and valstar. This is the whole thing. It's a well-cut suit. Well-cut suit from Derek Guy. Yeah, oh, look at that shearling coat Straight out of Succession. Wow, eating a bagel or burger or something at mcdonald's burger. Oh yeah, it's mcdonald's mickey, d's okay, he's a girl. Yeah, still looks like a weird nerd we.
01:50:26 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The real news is the stuff happening to the stanford internet observatory, by the way, which is, uh, freaking heartbreaking.
01:50:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let's talk let's talk about that, but first a word from our sponsor and then we'll talk about it. I agree, it's very sad. Thank you for getting us back on track. The Vendor Harder War. We appreciate it. That's why he's the big guy at Engadget senior editor over there. Just the guy, just the guy, just the guy. The big guy is Daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief EIC at Windows Central, and, of course, father Robert Balliser, who talks to the Big Guy daily, the digital Jesuit Our show today, brought to you by Panoptica.
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Panoptica provides several key benefits for businesses at any stage of cloud maturity, including advanced CNAP, multi-cloud compliance, end-to-end visualization and the ability to prioritize with precision and context. It provides dynamic remediation and increased efficiency with reduced overheads. Visit panopticaapp to learn more P-A-N-O-P-T-I-C-A panopticaapp. P-t-i-c-a panopticaapp. And we thank Panoptica so much for their support of this week in tech. Was it the Panopticon? Was it Jeremy Bentham's plan for a prison where prisoners would be observed but they didn't know when? So they could be being observed at any time and they'd have no idea? We all live in that.
01:53:16 - Padre (Guest)
Well, Panopticon is just an architectural design in which the control of the, whatever it is, the facility is part of the architecture. So if you build something that's designed to observe the rest of the building, that's a panopticon.
01:53:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here is Bentham's original. Oh no, this is Willie Reveley's drawing of Jerry Bentham's original design. You can see, the prisoners had no idea if they were being observed at any time, but they could be, which the idea was. Well, that encourages good behavior, which is why there's a camera on every corner of every street in America. All right, now let's talk about the Stanford Internet Observatory which, sad to say, is no more. Its former director, alex Stamos, was a regular on our shows. Very smart guy. I guess the writing was on the wall when Stamos left a few months ago. But the interesting story is why Stanford is closing its Internet Observatory. It was designed to watch for misinformation, in particular for attempts to affect elections from outside nations. I think it provided very important information for the last two elections, but just in time for the 2024 election it is being dismantled. Why is this such a big story, davindra?
01:54:46 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
first of all, this is gonna be great folks. This election year is going to be terrible no, no misinformation there.
01:54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one will attempt to affect this election. It's going to be fine.
01:54:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's I mean. So, first of all, stanford says that the work of the SIO is going to continue in other forms is what they're saying. But I just remember seeing all the, basically all the conservative pushback against this, this organization, all the conservative pushback against this, uh, this organization.
01:55:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I believe they were sued three times and, and worse, in the lawsuits, the names of students as well as staff were revealed, were doxed. Uh, and that's a big deal. Um, uh. These conservative groups alleged that the sio's researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, when in fact, what they did is provided the government and platforms with information about misinformation, disinformation campaigns from other nations, particularly Russia. Stanford was forced to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff, according to Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer in the Platformer News newsletter.
01:55:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I feel like that's the reason is that it was probably too successful at what it was trying to do and the pushback, especially big money conservative pushback, was probably too much for Stanford to deal with. It's a shame, because I thought this was such a necessary thing, you know, coming basically after the 2016 elections and we have not even fully reckoned with how misinformation and disinformation shaped that whole, that whole period. Um, we're still living with kind of the outcomes of that today. I'm just, yeah, a little terrified of what we're walking into with this election I I don't.
01:56:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know I am always trying not to be political, not succeeding very well, because I mean paying attention. If you pay attention, life is, but life is politics. Right, pay attention, you might be a little political, but let me read this paragraph from platformer in parallel to these lawsuits by the conservative groups, republican house judiciary chairman jim jordan and his orwellian subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government have subpoenaed documents at Stanford and other universities, selectively leaked fragments of them to friendly conservative outfits and misrepresented their contents in public statements and in an actual weaponization of government. Jordan's committee has included students, both undergraduates and graduates, in its subpoena requests, publishing their names and putting them at risk of threats or worse. So thank you, jim Jordan and the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government. I think in years to come this will be viewed very much like Senator McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee was viewed, and it's it's quite shameful.
01:57:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But the support for it now is also far greater than I think that was at the time.
01:57:43 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, maybe you're right, but if an institution like Stanford, with deep pockets and with a good reason to keep doing this, finally pulled out and said it's too much, no more. I mean, what smaller group would be able to pick up the mantle from the SIO and continue this work? There's nothing out there.
01:58:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you remember, harvard had a similar disinformation group at the Berkman Center, which they've basically shut down. There is pressure across the board on institutions not to investigate disinformation, not to investigate collusion and foreign government interference in our elections. I wonder why and I wonder who that's coming from.
01:58:25 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
No reason, no reason, no reason. It's just a chance yeah.
01:58:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just a coincidence.
01:58:30 - Padre (Guest)
It's a wild Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here, Just move on, it's a wild.
01:58:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here, just move on, continuing to point out perfidy in all its guises. T-mobile, you may remember, offered a lifetime price lock back in 2017.
01:58:46
They- literally said T-Mobile will never change the price you pay. John Brodkin, writing in Ars Technica, says guess what happened next? By the way, every time the federal government steps in to prevent a merger as they did with t-mobile and sprint for the longest time, uh, as, as comcast universal, I mean. I can go on and on and on in every respect, these companies, and every time, say oh no, no, no, this is not going to, we're not going to what. We wouldn't increase prices, we wouldn't fire people, we wouldn't. Oh no, no, this merger is has nothing to do with that.
01:59:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And every single time, every single time, it does um, and there's no penalties, and there's no penalty, they get away with it, of course not.
01:59:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, t-mobile, uh. Now says uh, well, it's. First of all, there were some weasel words cause in the FAQ that they published in January 2017, when they promised not to raise rates ever again. What happens? Here's the question what happens if you do raise the price of my T-Mobile One service? T-mobile said well, really, the only guarantee is we'll pay your final month's bill if the price goes up and you decide to cancel. That's it. The Uncatch Act is our commitment that only you can change what you pay, and we mean it. To show just how serious we are, we've committed to pay your final month's recurring service charges if we were to raise prices and you choose to leave. Just let us know in writing within 60 days.
02:00:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Talk about like great marketing campaigns. By the way, like the whole un-carrier thing, I was covering mobile and T-Mobile. Quite a bit like when that started. That was like 2013. But it was all stuff that sounded great in headlines, right, and I don't know how much of it has actually survived.
02:00:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is the problem, the media doesn't? They only cover the headline. And then, after three years later, when it all falls apart, they don't say anything.
02:00:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, no, I mean, come on, the media like this is media. You're reading Ars Technica covering this. Okay, you're right.
02:01:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean mainstream media, I mean Mainstream. For sure You're right. I mean you guys are. I mean, look, the tech industry is actually getting pretty good about calling these guys on their bluff.
02:01:13 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean tech criticism is much stronger now than it was a decade ago too, so. I feel like, yeah, people are, people are like actively looking for it now than it was a decade ago too. So I feel like, yeah, people are, people are like actively looking for it. It's just funny. Like searching for this, I see a story from 2017 and gadget talking about t-mobile retiring their free data for life ipad, remember that yeah started in 2012, I believe for 2013.
02:01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, nothing is for life from a from a tech company no, and be suspicious when they make offers like that and, yeah, when the CEO looks too young for his age be suspicious.
02:01:45 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think this is why, though, people are increasingly wanting more government intervention Ironically, even though people don't trust government with this stuff. But it's just because there's like, ok, they'll get some bad press from this. Some people may switch or drop them, but probably not. But, like you said, there's no repercussions for doing it. You can just kind of go out there, say these things, and they'll just take the hits, but they'll just continue going on. So it's like you know, the telecom stuff is ridiculous, and especially how all the mergers have happened and you have three choices now, and even Mint Mobile got swallowed by yeah, they got purchased.
02:02:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our sponsor, mint mobile, got purchased by t-mobile although, thank goodness, they're still offering the deals. I really what? How does that work with an mvno? How come an mvno, a mobile virtual network operator like t-mobile, whether a company owned or not, can sell the same service for less? I don't priority.
02:02:40 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Ah, it's because they don't get priority on the network, but I have never noticed a slowdown on mint mobile.
02:02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's not right, it's more a theoretical.
02:02:49 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But then there's also right yeah, there's also like silly stuff, like when I fly delta, you get free wi-fi for t-mobile. But I'm on mobile but t-mobile owns mint mobile. I don't get it. Yeah, you don't get it, you know. So it's just like you know, that's a good point.
02:03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's all those like sub deals I don't get the free Disney Plus subscription bundle. I don't get the yeah.
02:03:10 - Padre (Guest)
So quick life hack for anyone who's flying Delta.
02:03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't need to know someone who uses t-mobile oh and then what you just put in their phone number oh and that's it. I do notice it's interesting on uh was it on jet blue? You could still send text messages, even if you don't sign up for the free stuff. Right, they get yeah like you have some connectivity, which is weird. They're doing that more and more yeah, yeah.
02:03:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean I was just on a couple delta flights and it was just like, hey, t-mobile is giving everybody free internet and there was no, like it was an ad with your t-mobile, it was just well so it was an ad and everybody got internet. It wasn't bad. So yeah, yeah this is.
02:03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it feels like, um, we were talking earlier, this is a continuation, the same thing, where the billionaires can say bs and just walk away from it, and the companies apparently can do the same thing. It's just the same. It's two sides of the same coin.
02:04:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm happy to see the FTC taking a stronger hand in some things now, like people are complaining that maybe they're going a little too far, but I don't know. I think all these companies, we should be looking extra close at them.
02:04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got in a big fight with Paul Theriot because he was mad at the FTC for slowing down the Activision Blizzard acquisition by Microsoft.
02:04:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And that really helped all those workers at Activision Blizzard who immediately got fired.
02:04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, but I, you know, I said don't knock the FTC, don't knock Lena Kahn, because that's the, because that's the last stand against these people. No one else is stopping them. Yep, now maybe Activision Blizzard. I mean, in the long run, the acquisition went through. Were you in favor of that, daniel? Did you care about that?
02:04:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I was in favor of it.
02:04:58
But I thought her arguments like I'm all for her looking at tech and closer eye, and I was okay with them looking at the case but I thought their argumentation against the acquisition was ridiculous because microsoft is, although xbox is there, they're, they're in a distant third right, uh, behind nintendo and sony, and sony is still doing very, very well, uh, and sony does a lot of stuff, like getting exclusives, like sony drives the whole exclusive console advantage thing.
02:05:30
And you know this wasn't going to give microsoft an unfair advantage, especially since microsoft was going out of its way to make deals and say we'll give you call of duty for 10 years that you know we're not going to take it off your platform. Like they were making these public promises and signing contracts. I thought it was a little like I. I just thought it was one of those they thought would be an easy win publicly, uh, but and they were, and they were isolated, all, all the rest of the regulatory agencies around the world signed off on it, right, no, it's fine, it was the UK. Uk had some issues. They wanted to offload some of the cloud stuff.
02:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was confusing because there isn't even a business in cloud gaming. So to protect the non-existent business of cloud gaming.
02:06:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think they just wanted to pick something. They just wanted to pick something, but.
02:06:19 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Microsoft was like fine, we'll do that too, you know, like. So I just thought it was a weird thing. I'm happy with them, and not because I think you know it's like, but google, apple, looking at their market practices, I think is good too. And it's not because, oh, it's not microsoft, but, uh, you know, apple has come into a very dominant position. Uh, I don't necessarily even blame Apple for doing what they're doing, because, especially with the App Store stuff, I understand it, because iPhone sales are kind of flattening out. We all have iPhones. If anything, their market share has grown, especially in the United States, but the only consistent source of revenue for them is going to be from the store, and so they don't want to reduce stats because it hurts their stock. So I totally understand why, but is it good for the market?
02:07:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is the, and maybe you guys can help me because this is the conundrum I deal with. On the one hand, I don't think it's good for companies to become that big. I think that a free market only works if there's free competition, that everybody's striving to produce the best product to succeed in the marketplace. That's when a free market works. And once a company becomes as big as almost all of our tech companies are, they that that kind of breaks the whole model? I don't like.
02:07:31
I don't think there's any legal grounds for saying microsoft shouldn't be able to buy activision blizzard that was a really big deal but that's a consolidation in a way that I think doesn't probably help the game community or the game industry but I don't think that they couldn't have argued that like that's the unfortunate thing.
02:07:49
Yeah, go ahead yeah, because it's not against the law to. I mean, to be big is not against the law. So but? But on the other hand, the other side of me says but unless you're of a certain size, nowadays it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to do a AAA game title. Right, you can't. There's nobody in his garage going to make a AAA game title. Only an Apple could create a Vision Pro spending tens of billions of dollars over a decade to make a product nobody wants. Only a big company could do that. Um so so, uh, innovation. In some ways, innovation does require that size, that scale. So that's why I'm conflicted.
02:08:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't know, it's uh, I mean that's. I feel like it's multiple arguments here. But specifically when it comes to the gaming industry, there's a ton of consolidation, like at engadget. We have been tracking like how much how layoffs have been just like going throughout the entire you know industry. I believe in this year we've already surpassed the amount of layoffs that happened throughout all of 2023 and the consequence of that is that you don't see innovation in games.
02:08:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you you see sequels, you see more of the same first-person shooters. You don't see innovative interest in games, so much because these big companies can't afford it.
02:09:07 - Benito (Ad)
No, no, no, I think you're wrong about that, leo, so I've covered games for Benito.
02:09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gonzalez, our technical producer. I've got to introduce him so everybody knows who that voice from nowhere is. And Benito used to cover gaming, right yeah.
02:09:19 - Benito (Ad)
I used to work for GameSpot as an editor. Anyway, what you're saying is exactly right and wrong at the same time.
02:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my problem.
02:09:29 - Benito (Ad)
Because you're saying that only these giant corporations can make AAA games, and that's just not true. And also it doesn't mean that AAA games are any better than all the other games. Aaa games right now are actually quite terrible.
02:09:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree, but that's because of consolidation?
02:09:43 - Benito (Ad)
No, that's not because of consolidation. That's because the giant companies can't take risks anymore, because they're giant companies.
02:09:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because they're giant companies, right. It's the same thing in the movie industry right. You still have small arthouse movies, but they're not many, and you have an awful lot of DC and Marvel comic books.
02:09:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's a very crowded market space. Yeah, I mean, I personally I do Steam, I have Game Pass Steam's incredible yeah. Game Pass is great, and I do it because there's a lot of indie games and I hear this Kirby game is amazing. Yeah, which I would play if it was on Steam, because Nintendo, nintendo is all about its own platforms.
02:10:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But, I mean to the core argument here, though, like I personally was like really ambivalent about this deal and kind of didn't want it to go through for Microsoft and Activision because there is already too much consolidation in this industry.
02:10:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was my position, yeah.
02:10:34 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, the acquisition also means a lot of people are going to lose their jobs, basically because of redundancies within a single organization. What Microsoft has shown is also they're releasing these games and immediately killing the studios producing these games too. Award-winning, big-selling games yeah.
02:10:52
Award-winning big-selling games. Hi-fi Rush was like one. That was a small game that did really well. That studio was killed, even though it was super successful, and Microsoft executives went on and said we need to make more, you know smaller games that are cheaper to buy and easier to make and they went ahead and killed that studio that made that same type of game.
02:11:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So to be fair, because I did, I love that game. That studio was amazing. From what I understand, it wasn't so much about the studio per se, it was their location. Yeah, so this has to do with when you consolidate. I think everybody forgets to.
02:11:28
When you buy companies, Sometimes everybody thinks the company you're buying is a plus across the board, Most efficient, everything. But sometimes you buy a company and then you open their books and you go through things and you're like, oh OK, we got some issues here. Just like if someone bought Microsoft, I'm sure it would be like Microsoft we have some issues and and so where that studio was in terms of location and timing made it really difficult for them to organize uh, games and schedules and testing with Microsoft back at Redmond. So it was sort of the same issue with Nokia, I hate to say it, you know, based in Finland. They bought them and they're like alright, guys, you can come to Seattle, Because it just wasn't going to work with them all being in Finland, different hours and stuff. So sometimes it's just a strategic decision. It wasn't like a personal thing. I know that's a crappy answer if you're like one a developer that worked there, or two. You really love the game but unfortunately these are the realities of like wanting businesses.
02:12:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's ultimately like you are an inconvenient part of this organization. Now bye-bye, and I think that's. I just think that's deeply unfair and it stinks, it just like stinks and that's. I don't think the gaming industry or gamers or anybody really benefited from Microsoft buying this company. Game Pass is going to benefit. You know Call of Duty is going to be on Game Pass.
02:12:42 - Benito (Ad)
And Microsoft didn't think about that before they bought the company. Like they knew where they were located, right, Did they not know where?
02:12:47 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
they were located?
02:12:48 - Benito (Ad)
They probably didn't know, that's one small studio, you know it was a very small part of it.
02:12:53 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, I'm sure they saw some stuff and had some ideas, but once it was acquired, then they had to make some decisions and you know it's tough running a business. You know, like I, I know a lot of our own writers are very much against all these layoffs and no one likes to see it. But you know, this is the system that people subscribe to, right, and it's just like. This is what happens when you have massive corporations. Whether we should is a separate issue. Maybe they're too big.
02:13:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that that's kind of the fundamental question, because, on the one hand, obviously, giant corporations are less responsive to their customers, less creative, less innovative, more protective, less likely to take chances. On the other hand, it takes a lot of money, a lot of capital to make things happen, especially nowadays. You know, look at creating an LLM as a non-trivial process requiring huge amounts of compute. You're not going to do that in your garage, I mean some would argue maybe we shouldn't be creating some of these.
02:13:49 - Padre (Guest)
LLMs. I agree. I agree with the points being made by the panel, but can I play devil's advocate? If not you, who?
02:13:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
How does that work?
02:13:58 - Padre (Guest)
So, all right, I understand I don't want people to lose their jobs, especially at indie studios that are creating some incredible content. I want them to be able to innovate, and what they have that larger studios and larger platforms don't have is they have less inertia. The larger you are, the more that you can spend on development, but it also means you move slowly. Indie studios are small and they can move quickly. They can fail quickly and then move on. But to say that nothing is gained by Microsoft gobbling up a smaller studio, I think reduces it too much, because there is something there and that is the ecosystem of indie studios. Not every indie studio was going to become a Microsoft. Not every indie studio was going to become a Microsoft. Not every indie studio was going to become a huge studio. But what it can contribute by selling itself is value for the initial investors in that studio, probably value for some of the I'm not talking about in these slash investors?
02:14:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
No, we're talking about Activision.
02:14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're talking about Activision, the reason that Bobby Connick sold Activision is because he didn't. It was not going to be pretty, oh no.
02:15:03 - Padre (Guest)
I understand that, but I mean we also folded in this idea that, well, microsoft buys small studios as well and there's nothing to be gained by letting it swallow up smaller studios.
02:15:14 - Benito (Ad)
You can make a stronger argument that they shouldn't be allowed to do that. That's a case-by-case basis. They shouldn't be swallowing up all of them.
02:15:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's where the incentive is. Don't you draw that line, that's.
02:15:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And while we're.
02:15:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
02:15:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
While we're doing Devil's Advocate.
02:15:29
I mean, the reason why Microsoft wanted to buy Activision is because they don't have enough strong IP that they can exclusively release on Xbox to compete with sony.
02:15:41
Like sony makes a lot of these in-house games, they uh, or they sign exclusive deals and they're really good at it. Now, if sony didn't do that, because even like nadella has come out and said, like we don't like doing exclusives for our platform, we wish that didn't exist. So if there was this like blanket rule that you can't have exclusives to platforms, which would be pretty hard to enforce and make happen, but uh, you know, you wouldn't see, you wouldn't see this happening with companies buying studios, because that's what they're doing. They're trying to buy these studios so like they don't make stuff exclusive to their platform as a game, like call of duty, but they do make it exclusive for Game Pass, which is part of their next selling point for users. And so you know, if we could get away from this exclusive stuff and this battle, then you wouldn't see this problem with companies, because ideally these Sony and Xbox should just be making the hardware, they shouldn't be publishers at all. Right, but this gets into that bigger discussion of who controls what.
02:16:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's not forget, they also got and I think they needed this too mobile gaming. They didn't really have a good play in mobile gaming and they got King Right.
02:16:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And that was a more like viable, like yes, we are a big business, we don't have this component in our business. Let's get this. But Microsoft certainly had a lot of like big budget studios, like they've had big IP. It's just they keep failing, especially with this generation of consoles, like Halo Infinite was delayed for far too long, like a lot of the things that they built up. You know, starfield was another thing that they've been hyping up for a while, kind of came and went and died, so it's just also like a series of failures. I was so excited about starfield.
02:17:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was so disappointing it was kind of us.
02:17:26
Yeah, it's too bad hey, let's take a break, and I want to. I do want to ask you what games you guys are playing, and we have some final thoughts in just a little bit. You're watching this week in tech with a great panel, father robert balisar, who it's getting late in a beautiful Rome. The sun has gone down, the bells are ringing, the pigeons have left St Mark's square oh no, that's Venice, nevermind. Anyway, it's great to have you. Thank you for being here, I appreciate it. And also with us from a window central. He's the editor in chief, daniel Rubino. Lovely to have you. When did you get back from Computex? I hope you're over your jet lag.
02:18:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yes, I'm just kidding, but yeah, I got back Wednesday. I got out of there as soon as I could, but I love Taipei. It is an amazing city. I've always wanted to go and it's just great. You'd love it, leo. It's beautiful. I hate getting there, though.
02:18:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a long flight long flight.
02:18:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It takes me it's about 25 hours of actual travel time for me to get there. Yeah, it's just, that's awful, it's brutal it's brutal and davinder hardewar.
02:18:26 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Just back from the brutal trip to cupertino, california I mean it was a brutal flight back, because coming back from the west coast to the east coast is a pain but I miss computex, that's a great, I miss the. I even miss the like plane trip because it was like a whole day of just like to yourself.
02:18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I always get an invitation to go as a junket by various groups and I feel, journalistically, I just can't accept it. But maybe I'm after I'm out of all this, I can do it because I really want to go. It looks like it's so much fun. Maybe next year, Maybe Our show today, brought to you by Bitwarden Love these guys.
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02:22:07
I just read somebody was breached because the developer put an API key on a Git commit. I'm trying to remember who that was. It happens a lot, right, it's easy to do by accident. It just I almost did that once so I can't laugh too much right, yeah, but it's very there.
02:22:28
There are very simple ways to encrypt them before you do that. It's just a that bit warden supports the secrets like that. Um, all right, what game are you playing, father robert ballas? Are you still doing the factorio? Uh?
02:22:41 - Padre (Guest)
a little bit, but uh, so I I've gotten back into the rust. Uh, survival you were a big rust guide yeah, I was big for a while and they've done a lot of updates so I'm sort of just poking around, but what I'm spending most of my gaming time is on a another playthrough of the entire bioshock collection. I know it's all of that, no kind of love that story.
02:23:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've done it twice, I know exactly what you mean. It is such an innovative there's an example of it was a trilogy and such an innovative, different feeling and look and I just loved those games. They were fun to play, that's fun.
02:23:17 - Padre (Guest)
That was the first game I ever played where they included that sort of emotional moral choice as part of the game mechanic and I actually I could not choose the kill the sisters choice. Oh wow, Even when I wanted to, I couldn't do.
02:23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It Did you throw the baseball at the guy.
02:23:37 - Padre (Guest)
That is the most useless weapon. That does not work at all. That is terrible. The weapon that does not work at all, that is terrible. The little bee thing, yeah, oh, the mind control ball, the mind control ball.
02:23:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go, it's on Steam.
02:23:51 - Benito (Ad)
I got a question real quick Did you shoot the civilians and no Russian.
02:23:57 - Padre (Guest)
No, and you don't have to. You can just sit there and walk until the uh, the you get to the end of it. That's what I did. What game is that call of?
02:24:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
duty call of duty.
02:24:08 - Benito (Ad)
You know, there's a, there's one seat, like the big controversial scene where you you play a russian terrorist and you're supposed to gun down a whole airport.
02:24:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time I play I play call of duty. It it's so hairy the minute you enter that it's like ah.
02:24:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's just multiplayer. Yeah, I suppose if I were playing a campaign it would be different, the same thing with Fortnite.
02:24:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The only good thing about Fortnite is I would die immediately, but at least I could watch the game continue. I'm not good at it Actually, Leo. Can I ask you a question? Yes, you, I'm not good at it. Actually, Leo can.
02:24:39 - Padre (Guest)
I ask you a question, yes, thinking of your Steam account, your Steam library. How many games are in your Steam library that you've never played? A lot.
02:24:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because every time you recommend a game.
02:24:51 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh no. I too have a massive Steam library. Yeah.
02:24:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I buy stuff on sale.
02:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, they go on sale, Forget about it I figure, someday I buy stuff on sale oh yeah, they go on sale. I figure someday I'll play, I can log in. It's a big process to log in. Let me see if I can do the QR code recognition because I'll show you how many games I have. There was one really for me big announcement so there were three announcements at the Apple event that I thought were undercovered really for me big announcement there were. So there were three announcements at the apple event that I thought were undercovered. One was that they're going to rcs in the fall, which means that, finally, apple messages users will have uh encrypted conversations with android users. They can have group conversations and they can send full quality video and audio. That's huge.
02:25:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So that was one apple. Apple itself barely mentioned that, by the way, it was the recap for ios 18. They're like oh, by the way, there's rcs, it was in the bento box and they mentioned it it was in the end.
02:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What they really didn't mention and I thought this was even bigger was you're going to be able, in ios 18, to rename siri. You can call her anything you want, that's huge.
02:26:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's going to be problematic. That's going to be an issue Seriously.
02:26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what? This was a feature of the Moto X 10 years ago.
02:26:12 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I love the.
02:26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Moto X. Yeah, my trigger on the Moto X said, hey, goog, help me, obi-wan Kenobi, and I thought that was really useful.
02:26:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Especially in public.
02:26:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, unless you're at a Star Wars convention, then it maybe wouldn't be so good. Siri gets triggered all the time easily. And then the third announcement which only I noticed was that Valheim, which is my game, is coming to Mac OS Game. Yeah, valheim is my game is coming to mac os game. Yeah, valheim. So what's interesting about apple silicon is because essentially, the iphone, the ipad and the mac all run the same processors and it's very similar operating systems. Games will run on all three platforms.
02:26:54
So they run pretty well, yeah, because of that gpu. So assassin's creed is going to be available day and date on all three, as well as Windows, which is, I thought, very interesting. But Valheim is my personal favorite. That's the one where it's like Minecraft for Vikings. You're a Viking.
02:27:10 - Padre (Guest)
You know, Leo, I have Valheim. We could do some co-op.
02:27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I wouldn't mind, I'd like to do that with you. Yeah, we could build a little hut together, you and me. Let's start your Twitch channel.
02:27:21 - Padre (Guest)
Leo, I get killed by everything, though I streamed no.
02:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll protect you. I streamed Valheim for a little while on Twitch, yeah, and it was fun. I mean, you know I got five followers. It's not a. What are?
02:27:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
you playing these days, daniel, so I do stick to mostly indies, and so I'm playing a game called Anomaly Agent, which is available on Steam. Yeah, it's a well, it's a description. It's a cyberpunk action adventure featuring fluid combat, time bending story, quirky characters and a catchy synth wave soundtrack. Oh, it's a really funny game. It's a platformer. Oh interesting.
02:28:05
Yeah, it's a platformer. It's got a real sense of humor to it, it's got some weirdness to it. Uh, it's just different. I'm just such a fan of like growing up in the eighties. I love the whole cyberpunk synth wave.
02:28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, cyberpunk synth wave. Uh, well, we're kind of going through again. And, by the way, 8-bit platformers are very, very popular roguelike games and so forth which is good, because that's the kind of thing indie studios can do. You don't need a giant team to make this, you just need some good gaming ideas, some puzzle ideas, things like that cool. Yeah, it's a fun game it's.
02:28:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's casual, you can just pick it up and play. Um, it's just, I don't know, it's one of those games that'll make you smile and it's got a cool soundtrack, uh. So yeah, I just give them a plug good, good.
02:28:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we keep mentioning pentiment, which seems to me like something father robert should actually be playing, because you're a medieval monk wandering around.
02:29:02 - Padre (Guest)
Oh, that's my day job. I don't want to be gaming with it.
02:29:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it doesn't have a synth soundtrack. It has more like a Gregorian chant soundtrack.
02:29:15 - Padre (Guest)
So it's the Halo soundtrack, basically.
02:29:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I've been waiting to buy Pentagon on sale or something like that.
02:29:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I was gonna say my game pass the big game yeah, oh, yeah so it's on sale right now for 12 40 off. There's no excuse. Oh big father's day sale, I gotta get it.
02:29:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
There we go the big game I'm waiting for, it I'm super excited about, is the new doom dark ages.
02:29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, that looks really really good. Yeah, they showed that last week at the Xbox event.
02:29:45 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, that looks really cool. The new Doom games have just been so extraordinarily good and it's been a while since you know Doom 2, the last one came out. But I've been this announcement and the where they're taking it. I think it's just awesome, like it's just such a creative direction for the character.
02:30:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's also the Middle Ages, right, you're also in medieval times. Yeah, doom in the medieval times. How great is that? Yeah.
02:30:13 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's just insanity when you watch the trailer, Like he has a gun that he wears on his wrist where it crushes demon skulls and then shoots the bones out.
02:30:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
man bring that to the catacombs that sounds all right, let's do that let's rock.
02:30:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, did I ask you, devendra? What are you playing these days?
02:30:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
not yet, but I I do have to say, father, forgive me, I'm playing a lot of hades too, so hades is hot.
02:30:37
We talked about this last week yeah, it's fantastic, I've been playing it with my daughter we basically do a little bit of game time as like story time, and she's getting really into Greek mythology because of it too, and she enjoys watching me play it. It's a fantastic little game. How old is your daughter? She's 5 years old she's playing Hades she wants me to explain what's up with these gods. Why do they all hate each other?
02:31:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
that's pretty cool.
02:31:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I've always been interested and there are actually a lot of great kids' books that simplify the stories, take a lot of the worst parts out or the most adult aspects out, and we're reading those and she just digs it.
02:31:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a lot of fun. Is it fair to call Supergiant an indie?
02:31:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They're absolutely an indie. Yeah, that is true indie, but uh, and I've loved every single game that they've made too, so they're fantastic. And another indie thing that has gotten really popular is animal. Well, which is a cool.
02:31:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I've been dying to play this. You playing, it's cool it's great oh, I really want to play this one.
02:31:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I just love the format of 2d sidescrollers like that's what I grew up on, and I love that indie studios are just kind of all. It's a really easy, you know format to make. Um, I love metroidvania type games too, so hades and you know this sort of thing. Hades is like an evolution of that with, like you know, different directions and whatnot, but I I love 2d. That is where my heart will always be. Again, this is an individual developer.
02:32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a very yeah, one guy did everything One guy, yep.
02:32:05 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The engine, the music, everything, I believe.
02:32:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What it shows really is, despite the attention paid to engines and graphics and all of this, that the gameplay is what really makes a game. This is what I was saying about AAA games. Yeah, they may look gorgeous, but if there's no gameplay, who cares? But then there's Baldur's Gate 3, right, benito.
02:32:25 - Benito (Ad)
Well, there you go. I wasn't even that into that game.
02:32:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He likes Dwarf Fortress. Talk about indie games, bellatro.
02:32:31 - Padre (Guest)
Actually, do you remember Cuphead?
02:32:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
02:32:33 - Padre (Guest)
Cuphead looked. It was visually stunning, but I stopped playing it. Game ever.
02:32:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It was too hard. It was too hard, it was hard to tell what was happening because of the animation. So fast.
02:32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our 21-year-old has beaten it three times Wow. Wow, that guy's cuphead isn't that hard really.
02:32:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Cuphead is. Compare that to Super. Mario 1, even Super Mario 1 was harder than Cuphead.
02:32:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Benito, benito, benito. Your IGN is showing benito. Yeah, before we go, uh, I like to. I don't like to, but I often want to end shows by marking the passing of pioneers in the industry. And a little sung but very important pioneer passed away Pat this past week Lynn Conway. She wrote the book on very large-scale integration VLSI, taught VLSI courses in 1978. But, very sadly, she invented the superscalar architecture at IBM, was fired in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition. Ibm said what no? And now, 52 years later, ibm formally apologized to her in 2020. She, despite being fired from IBM, continued her research in VLSI. She got the 2009 IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award. She was truly a pioneer, not just in technology, but also as a trans engineer who paved the way for many others. So RIP Lynn Conway, age of 86.
02:34:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Amazing story rip lynn conway, age of 86.
02:34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um amazing story I love hearing, um, I mean, these reminiscences of very influential people that we don't, we don't, we don't really talk about, we don't know about even I mean, I think people know vlsi and they know how important that is still is important, uh, even you know in bitcoin, things like that, um, but probably don't know the woman who created it, who did the research, who shaped the way chips are designed for 50, 60 years and a tragic story that ended up happening. She left IBM, went to Xerox PARC and then on to DARPA. She taught electrical engineering and computer science until her retirement in 1998. So I think it's worth mentioning.
02:35:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Glad to hear that IBM apologized also, by the way, for the way they've treated her. But did IBM ever apologize for the whole Nazi thing? Oh, the Nazi. Thing. No, the Nazi thing. You know, we're just going to let that go. Yeah, it cracks me up business.
02:35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that was just business, although if you go to the computer history museum, they have a whole section devoted to what ibm did for the for nazis in the beginning of the of the nazi era. They pulled out, I think when we went to war with Germany, but before.
02:35:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's interesting I think the most interesting recollection I've ever seen of like Nazi not quite memorabilia, but of the influence it had. In Berlin I believe there is a it's a, it's a museum about the history of movie making. I forget what it's actually called, but they have a whole separate section where it's all just Nazi propaganda film and it's all like locked away in a way so you can watch it, but also it is very much like presented in a way like this is a dark memory that we live through as a country and as a city. So yeah, ibm, I don't know. I would love to see something eventually, because every time I'm reminded of that it is disappointing.
02:36:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there's another one Volkswagen celebrating its 75th anniversary.
02:36:25 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
There's always Volkswagen.
02:36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When in fact they're a little older than 75 years. But they'd probably not want to remember those first 10. Yeah, yeah, we're celebrating our 75th anniversary. That's the anniversary of Volkswagen in America. They have a history that predates that a little bit.
02:36:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's all they're going to talk about.
02:36:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all they're going to talk about you know what? I don't really blame them. That was a different time and different people.
02:36:50 - Benito (Ad)
Yeah, I mean, america didn't even join that war until winter. That's a good point. I mean, come on.
02:36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a great picture of her later in life Professor Emerita of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This is the obituary from the University of Michigan Engineering Department where she taught for many years. That is it for this show. We got games in. We got movies in. Did we get any movies in? What are you doing on Slash Film lately? I saw, you know I was watching. Uh, you still do slash film, right, davindra I still do.
02:37:25 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I was not slash.
02:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the film cast, podcast film cast, not a part of slash film, not yeah, no longer part of slash film, because it was funny, because I was watching. You know, sometimes they have those movie yep ads, the blurbs, the blurbs, and I saw, you know, something like your most best to see movie of the year and it was slash film, and I thought, oh, you couldn't get the new york times in there, okay, fine I mean listen.
02:37:47 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Whenever I see those I just see friends of mine from the the film podcast or film journalism world. So I always love pointing and saying we will never be there because I never feature podcasts in those blurbs. But you know what? Uh, go check out furiosa. It's in theaters and I cannot believe Garfield of all things killed that thing at the box office oh no. Furiosa is incredible.
02:38:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've seen it twice in theaters.
02:38:07 - Padre (Guest)
I hope to go back again really.
02:38:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I haven't seen it.
02:38:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh, you gotta go, leo, just go yeah, yeah support real artistry yeah yeah, I saw Fury Road three times in the cinema. I did like 12 times on video yeah, so like.
02:38:20
So like I'm a big Fury Road fan. If Furiosa is in some ways a better movie simply because it has like a real story to flesh out with characters in it and it's just, but it still has all the insane imagination of Miller that like, yeah, I watch with my best friend. We just kept looking at each other Like, wow, this is incredible of Miller that like, yeah, I watched her with my best friend and we just kept looking at each other Like, wow, fury road is amazing, just some.
02:38:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'll never forget the guy with the flaming guitar and the truck, and you know there's so many moments in that movie that you just never forget. All right, I will. He has a lot of great moments too, I will. I will go see a Furiosa episode seven, curiosa episode 776 of the film cast. Don't listen to it until after you see the movie, is that right, devendra?
02:39:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, we do a spoiler section so you can listen to half the review and we tell you when to stop. But yeah, everything else we reviewed since then Hitman is on Netflix. It's incredible. It's the Richard Linklater film. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really sexy. That was fun. We don't really see movies like that very often and I really like the newest Bad Boys. I cannot believe that they're making Bad Boys movies and they're still good and fun and silly in the way like the original.
02:39:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The first two were Is Will Smith in it?
02:39:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, will Smith is in it, and he gets slapped, of course.
02:39:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He gets slapped.
02:39:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Okay, I'm in. They know what they're doing.
02:39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, that might redeem it. Okay, that might redeem it. Thank you, devendra. Devendra Hardwar, when he's not on the Filmcast podcast, is editor at Engadget and it's always a pleasure having you on. Good luck with the Kirby. Happy Father's Day, dad. Thank you.
02:39:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I remember when you became a dad. I mean, I remember seeing stories about your kids on tech TV when they were little. I had them on when they were little.
02:40:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're 32 and 29. Now Amazing Henry's book is coming out. It's already a bestseller. It's just amazing. It really is amazing. Yeah, they were this big. It happens fast. Somebody said the days are long but the years are short. Remember that, because it's over before you know it. Enjoy every freaking moment of it. I'm sure you do. You seem like you really are. That's great. Thank you, Devendra. Thank you to Dog Dad and good friend. It's always great to have Daniel Rubino on editor-in-chief of Windows Central. Thank you for being here, Daniel. Anything you would like to plug? How about the Windows Central podcast?
02:40:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, we do that on occasion. It's not as regular, but we're still doing it. Yeah, other than that, pay attention to the site in terms of reviews coming, it's going to be a very busy summer, yeah.
02:40:55
So we're very excited to see do these PCs live up to the hype and which one is the best one? I think they're all going to be kind of cool, but Surface Pro 11, I'm really intrigued by because of all the smaller changes they did. And will it actually last a day? That's going to be, I think, the most important thing. Yeah. And as far as movies, you have Furiosa, I'll also say I'm watching Dark Matter on Apple. Oh, that's pretty. I watched the first one.
02:41:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting, yeah, interesting yeah.
02:41:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
If you like. You know deep sci-fi kind of stuff. Although that is the worst title, I don't know why they call it Dark Matter, it's a bad title.
02:41:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It has nothing to do with Dark Matter. That was the book title. Yeah.
02:41:33 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh was it.
02:41:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But like they could just yeah, but um, joel egerton is just, he's really good, I like him as an actor. Yeah, jennifer connelly, elise braga yeah great.
02:41:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, it's a great cast, yeah, and it's just um cool stories and it's uh really kind of keeps you guys. I'm actually like they make it hard for themselves with the plot twists.
02:41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like, wow, okay, I didn't see that coming, but it's good, it's good and our jesuit pilgrim himself, father robert balisere, who stayed up late just to be with us. I really I'm grateful to you. Jesuit pilgrimageapp is his new app at home on a journey, available on android and ios. What else you want to plug, father robert?
02:42:20 - Padre (Guest)
uh, not much. It's been relatively quiet over here, just a lot of the background work for getting out content for uh, the my, for my big boss. Uh, I will be doing a couple of projects. I've got like three or four different irons in the in the fire right now but they're not anywhere near releasable. I'm starting to discover all the things I miss about having the Twit production team behind me, because now I have to do everything by myself.
02:42:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I know we're trying to keep the production team together. That's why we have Club Twit. It is kind of a tough situation right now for all media I guess All media. I just saw iHeartheart media facing severe bankruptcy. You know they managed out, to get out of chapter 11 a couple of years ago and now it's looking like chapter 22 is around the corner. Why? I mean, this is the biggest radio group in the country. Why advertising is off. It's down for everybody podcasts, podcasts especially. In fact, for most advertisers, the first campaign they cancel if times are tight is the podcast budget. So we're unfortunately on the receiving end of that, which is why, thank goodness, we started the club a couple of years ago.
02:43:34
Club Twit is $7 a month. It's not much, and for that I think you get a lot. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get video from the shows that we only put out in audio, including hands on windows, hands on macintosh, ios today, the untitled linux show, home theater geeks, a lot of twit, plus bonus content, events. We got the book club coming up. We did that was fun. We did an escape box. That was really fun. And, of course, you get access to the discord where club twit members hang, not just during shows but all the time uh, talking about things geeks are interested in. There's a lot going on in the club twit discord. Get ready, here come the animated gifts. Every time I show the discord they go wild.
02:44:17
So, but the real reason it's not all of those benefits. We like to give you something for your money, but, but, but. But the real reason is because that seven dollars makes the difference, uh, in keeping the shows going, keeping our staff employed, keeping the lights on. We are probably, uh, because of a shortfall in q3, going to close the studio in a month and send everybody to work from home. We hope to keep people employed, but the studio is a big expense, so we're probably shutting that down. I don't want to go backwards, so if you can help us out, I'd appreciate it. Twittv slash, club twit, and for those of you who are members, my deepest thanks. It makes a huge difference in our future. So we thank you. Thanks, father Robert, thanks Daniel, thanks Devendra. Great to have all three of you on. Thanks to all of you who watched the show today.
02:45:13
We do it every Sunday, 2 to 5 pm Pacific, that's 2100 UTC, 5 to 8 pm Eastern Time. You can watch us. We stream everything we do While we're doing it. You can watch on YouTube at youtubecom slash twit, slash live. After the fact, you can go to twittv, our website, to download shows, audio or video. There's also a dedicated channel for most shows on YouTube so you can watch the video there.
02:45:39
Great way to share clips from a show. If you want to tell somebody about why Bitwarden is so great or what show they should be watching tonight, you can just clip that out on YouTube and share it with them. Of course, the best thing to do is subscribe, because that way you get every podcast the minute it's available in its audio or video form. Just go to your favorite podcast player and subscribe. 20 years we've been doing this. I want to do it for another 20 more and with your help we can. But as we say at the end of every show and I have been since 2005, another twit is in the can. Thanks everybody, bye-bye. Oh, there's the can. It's cream of mushroom. Tonight. Father Robert's pulling an Andy Warhol. Thank you, robert, I appreciate it. Thank you.
