This Week in Tech Episode 859 Transcript

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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWIT, This Week in Tech. Devindra Hardawar's here, Dwight Silverman. Microsoft's biggest acquisition ever, but will the feds allow them to buy Activision Blizzard? The IRS is gonna require FaceID. If you want to use their site, I can't wait to see how people react to that. And should you take your smartphone to the Beijing Winter Olympics? Security experts say no way. It's all coming up next on TWiT.

... (00:00:29):
Podcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:43):
This is TWIT episode 859 recorded Sunday, January 23rd, 2022. The crepe Myrtle. This episode of this week in tech is brought to you by express VPN. Stop handing over your personal data to the big tech monopoly that minds your direct to and sells your information. Protect yourself with a VPN. I trust to keep me safe online. Visit express vpn.com/twi and get an extra three months free on a one year package. And by new Relic that next 9:00 PM call is just waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does, and you can get access to the whole new Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free forever. No credit card required. Sign up at new relic.com/twit and by streak, whether you're tracking sales, fundraising, hiring or support streak is a CRM that will help you stay on top of all your processes directly inside Gmail. Get 20% off your first year of their pro plan. Their most popular option by going to streak.com/twit. And by zip recruiter, several industries are projected to grow this year. If you own a business in one of those growing industries and need the hire, go to ZipRecruiter, they've find qualified candidates for your job. Fast. Try ZipRecruiter free today at ziprecruiter.com/twit

Leo Laporte (00:02:17):
It's time for TWIT, This Week in Tech. The show we cover the tech news of the week. I don't mean to say it's tech snooze. It is the, but it might be not this week. Actually nothing is snooze over Dwight Silverman is here formerly of the Houston Chronicle now of all over the place, but you can find all his work at author, A U T H O R y.com/dsilverman. Hello, Dwight, sir. Hello. How are, are you staying very busy in retirement, so cool. Yes, well, I'm, I'm kind

Dwight Silverman (00:02:45):
Of, I'm still, my column has returned at the Chronicle weekly and so that's kind of my primary gig and occasionally I've been doing standalone stories for them and but for the most part, I'm I'm just enjoying

Leo Laporte (00:02:59):
Kicking back and and not doing all that much and contributing to us. Thank you very much. Love to have bet on also with us another regular, we love to see Devindra Hardawar senior editor, at Engadget and hosted the film cast tied Tora.

Devindra Hardawar (00:03:14):
Hello, happy to be here. What a week to be here too. I thought it was gonna be a sleepy week, but no, this

Leo Laporte (00:03:18):
Is huge. No snoozing in this tech snooze this week. And we did have, I'm sorry to say we had Brianna woo scheduled both last week and this week Brianna had nodes in her throat operated on and she still sounds really gravel. She wanted to join us. And I said, no, I want you to rest. So we'll get her back on this. Would've been a good week to have Brianna's take because the big story, of course, Microsoft making its biggest acquisition ever bigger than LinkedIn 80, 68 0.7 billion to buy act vision blizzard. And I'm sure Brianna would've had lots to say, of course, blizzard act vision has been a, you know, under the spotlight lately for the, the, the harassment and the kind of the boys club. It was interesting cuz so in a way, Microsoft is too, they've just agreed to have investigation of how they've treated harassment cases in the past, including the bill gates harassment case. So is it, is it two boys clubs joining or is it a chase into Microsoft saying we're gonna do the right thing and we're gonna clean up act division. What do you think Ofra is? First of all, is Bobby Kodak stay gonna stay or no?

Devindra Hardawar (00:04:34):
That's I think that's the big question for a lot of people, right? Like we I've spent the past year charting like all this or he is around avision and basically how Bobby Kodak fostered this company that was not a great institution when it came to women and harassment and things like that. Like it wasn't a great place for a lot of people. The story now is that at least what Microsoft is saying is that he's gonna stay on, you know, what, if this merger goes through, he's gonna stay on. But then there was a additional reporting after this was announced where people were like under the table, just telling a WSJ and others, I think like he's, he's out, he's gonna be out. But with a big, you know, multimillion hundred

Leo Laporte (00:05:13):
Million dollar parachute he's he's yeah. He's a huge, sure. He, so Kodak joined. I didn't realize this in 91. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> he's been there since 19. That's almost 40. What is it? 38, 9, 40 years. What is it Nike? My math's terrible. No, 29

Devindra Hardawar (00:05:30):
Years. I'm not 40 yet. I'm almost there.

Leo Laporte (00:05:32):
Yeah. 91 plus two, carry the four anyway, a long time, almost 30 years. A little more than 30 years. And he's actually taken an division to new Heights. He's been a he's. He really took a company that was dying, going almost bankrupt and turned it into a gaming behemoth. But at the same time, he's also a hundred I'll I'll look at this article from a few months ago on the Washington post over a hundred division blizzard employees, stage walkout, demand, CEO steps down, maybe this had something to do with the, the sale. To be honest with you, maybe Kodak said, I'm, I'm gonna cash out. And and the, the, certainly one of the reasons Microsoft was able to buy it is the stock price said tumbled over the last year because of it was, it was,

Devindra Hardawar (00:06:20):
It was a strange situation, right? Like that's the thing. As we were reporting this, the board of activism was fully on his side. They had, you know, they fully supported him because he's made them a lot of money yeah. To made act vision and shareholders, a lot of money. So nobody's gonna out there, you basically, for the past few decades, like Kodak has CR created that company, you know, and turned into BMO. This is probably the best possible solution where he gets out, the company can start fresh somewhere else. And he faces no consequences because that's the way business works in America.

Leo Laporte (00:06:54):
Yeah. <laugh>, here's another story from IGN act, vision blizzard CEO, Bobby Kodak reportedly turned up late and left early from a fireside chat meeting that was meant to reassure employees of act vision blizzard about their future. <Laugh> a fireside chat that was supposed to last half an hour, 16 minutes after Kodak himself turned up seven minutes late and finished early. I think he's on his way out. I think he's taken the big, the big payoff and Microsoft probably is solidifying its position as a gaming company. They just bought Bethesda. They have Minecraft. This is huge. Yeah, this is huge. And by the way, they don't just get, call it duty. And and more Warcraft, they get king, they get candy crush. This is a gaming behemoth. They also get mobile there's mobile call of duty. There's obviously king is mostly mobile. So this is a really good way for Microsoft to position itself in the gaming industry, shares of Sony makers of the PlayStation five humbled 20 billion when this news came out because of the fear that they Microsoft would make all of these money makers for Sony Xbox exclusives, Microsoft kind hedged its bets on that one. <Laugh> I said, yeah, no, we wouldn't. We

Devindra Hardawar (00:08:16):
Probably we'll adhere to all existing deals, you know? Well, I would existing deals.

Dwight Silverman (00:08:20):
Yeah. Well, and at the same time that this on the same day that this news broke, we also heard that the justice department is reorganizing. So it could get tougher on tech company, mergers

Leo Laporte (00:08:32):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. You gotta wonder if yeah. This has to get through regulatory scrutiny. Of course. Yes.

Dwight Silverman (00:08:37):
Yes. And, and I suspect that it's not gonna get through re the toy scrutiny until there are iron CLA agreements or at least as best as you could get 'em that Microsoft won't take all these and make them Xbox exclusives. And actually mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you know, Microsoft's current point of view seems to be the more platforms, the merrier. And 

Leo Laporte (00:09:00):
So that's, that's exactly what Satya Nadela does. It's you know, his first act as CEO was to announce Microsoft office for the iPad <laugh> he's, you know, which was, you know, very kind of sacrilegious in Microsoft at

Dwight Silverman (00:09:14):
The time. Yeah. So, and, and, and Microsoft, once, you know, as you mentioned, there's all these mobile games on here, Microsoft really doesn't have a mobile platform. Oh, this is. And so, and so this is iPad. Yeah. This gives them right. Ipad and Android to a certain extent. Yeah. And so it'll give them, you know, I, I, I don't see this stuff going under Xbox umbrella, that the only thing is of course, is that there's been this, this constant cliche of the Netflix of games that that's what everybody is, is headed to. And it could be that Microsoft just makes it easier to do these games on any Microsoft platform. That, that could be the, so

Leo Laporte (00:09:53):
Let's go, let's address this regulatory issue. Microsoft says this acquisition makes us the number three gaming company in the world. Not even number one. <Laugh> obviously that's a defensive statement, right? We're not a monopoly. We're still so small. We're, you know, we're,

Dwight Silverman (00:10:09):
We're, we're just a little weird, we're an indie studio, but

Leo Laporte (00:10:12):
You're right. This is not the climate right now. I mean, the FTC in the Jay and we'll get to this in a little bit, but they're, they're starting to say, well, what does monopoly mean in the, in the modern age? And what should we, I think there's a lot of regret about not stopping the what's app and Instagram acquisitions by Facebook. And I think that there may be that there will be additional scrutiny that you can count on that, of this. On the other hand. Yeah. Doesn't make Microsoft number one. Tenent is bigger. <Laugh>

Dwight Silverman (00:10:43):
They're Chinese tenon is number one. Yeah. 10 cents. Tenent

Leo Laporte (00:10:46):
Is the number one. Yeah. And Sony's still number two. Sony's number two. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it, I don't know, it, it really depends what the rules are these days. And, and that seems to be a shifting playground. The Bobby con himself gave an interview with games beat and they asked him, why do the deal, why is this a good time to sell? Why is it good price? I gotta go. I gotta go guys, come on to which Bobby said, what are you crazy? No, he said, yeah. You, it's interesting. He said, as you look at the increased competition between Tencent net ease, I'm not sure who that is Sony. And now you have Google and Amazon and apple and Facebook and Microsoft and Netflix, which is interesting, cuz they're getting into gaming too. We were looking at over the course of the net next couple of years, starting to realize in order to execute our future plans, we needed thousands of new people.

Leo Laporte (00:11:43):
That's interesting. We need them in disciplines like AI, machine learning, data, analytics, clouds, cyber security. There are people we don't have. And the competition for that, talent's really expensive. We've started to see that now where Apple's offering big bonuses. If you don't get a leave to get a job somewhere else engineering talent is hard to come by. Ko says that. So we're starting to think about skills we need. We don't have, there was an acknowledgement and recognition that we don't know how to get this talent then Satcha and Phil specter Spencer had a gaming at Microsoft who started having conversations with them. When Phil called it happened to be a time we were getting ready to start a long range planning process, realizing the there were gonna be challenges and issues at this. This is the kind of thing, by the way that you, you <affirmative> would say it's a, it was a strategic move. It was the move we had to make at this time in the business. Completely ignoring all the other issues. Yeah. That, that he's facing personally.

Devindra Hardawar (00:12:45):
The other that's like Facebook, rebranding to meta look over here. Yeah. Please. Don't look, don't look at all this other stuff. Yeah. We're moving on.

Leo Laporte (00:12:50):
Yeah. Plus there's stock price. Thanks to all these harassment allegations had tumbled to almost half over the last year mm-hmm <affirmative> and Microsoft was offering him 45% premium over the price, Microsoft in cash, in

Devindra Hardawar (00:13:03):
Cash, in cash. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:13:06):
Of course. You're gonna take that. <Laugh> well, why, you know, there's not even a question. He says, they asked him good, good on games. Speed. Was a sexual harassment investigation factor. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> he said it seemed to affect the stock price. Right? He said, I think what affected the stock price <laugh> was is, is pushing out Overwatch, Diablo. And then people started to see this year's call of duty. Wasn't performing well. I think the California department of fair housing and employment filing and the wall street journal article contributed, but stocks go up and down for a variety of reasons. <Laugh> and our view is $95 a share with all cash. That's a great deal for our shareholders. And it was an easy judgment. It's a

Devindra Hardawar (00:13:52):
Great deal. Sure. Shout out to Dean Takahashi. Who did that? I interviewed too. I used Dean work a great job when I was at venture beat, so yeah. Great, good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Very

Leo Laporte (00:13:59):
Good. Very good job. So CO's not gonna say, yeah, I, I, I felt the heat. I thought I'd get outta the kitchen. He's gonna get out with a lot of money. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> just proving, you know, I don't know. Has there been any reporting on who else came at act vision. If anybody else started to make a run at him?

Devindra Hardawar (00:14:20):
I haven't, I haven't seen any, but it's also like who, who can, you know, who has enough money to do this? Maybe apple, but apple historically has been really bad with games. You know, like they've had good stuff since the app store came about and apple arcade is starting and they're really good with indie Yelpers, but they don't really make their own games. You know, they, they don't really understand this market. So I maybe Google, you know, any, it would have to be a big boy to

Leo Laporte (00:14:44):
Get it. I, I think, and if Google comes to you, mm-hmm <affirmative> and your buddy for Amazon, Amazon, I would listen, Amazon, Google. I would laugh 'em out the door. I mean, look what they've done with stadia. They did in fact create their own independent game studio, which didn't even last a year. Yeah. Google.

Devindra Hardawar (00:14:58):
So did Amazon. Yeah. And they shut kind of shut some stuff down.

Leo Laporte (00:15:02):
Although new worlds I I've heard doing very well for Amazon. So it just, Microsoft makes sense across the board. They're already in gaming. Absolutely. They make a very PA a popular console, not the number one, but the number two console they have the other thing that's not to be ignored. As Kodak was saying, they have AI expertise, they have cloud expertise, they have Azure. In fact it's good for Microsoft's other businesses. The more they use Azure, the more they use gaming, especially ex ex cloud, you know, their, their cloud gaming. That's a good Testament to the strength of their network, which they can show other companies, look, you know, we're, we're, we're living on Azure. You should live on Azure. I think this all in all is makes is a great deal for Microsoft, right? It's expensive. It's also, that's the only, it's the

Devindra Hardawar (00:15:49):
Thing. It's the thing Dwight had mentioned too, like the new Netflix of gaming, that is what game passes and we haven't talked about game pass yet. But that thing, that subscription service is, is ridiculous. It's a ridiculously good deal for consumers. You pay like a monthly fee and you get access to hundreds of games. And as Microsoft buys all these studios now, even better, those games, yeah. They get wrapped into game pass. So then it's like, it's a no brainer. If you're a windows user or an Xbox user, like, why wouldn't you pay for this? And why wouldn't you pay for what was it? Game pass ultimate, which also has Xbox live. You get everything, you know, for, I'd rather pay 15 bucks a month rather than 60 bucks for a new game. But 15 bucks a month, you get those new games like the new Microsoft stuff immediately.

Devindra Hardawar (00:16:30):
So it's just such a good deal. And that, that is re that is completely changing the gaming landscape right now. So Sony is hustling to like figure out a solution because the way Sony makes games is so different than the way Xbox studios make games. Sony makes big AAA titles. Like the last of us two Microsoft has had a lot of trouble making their own games. It took halo, infinite so many years and so many delays to come out. So the value proposition of what Microsoft is building here just seems like undeniably great for consumers. But there there's a lot of worry. I'm sure Brianna would've talked about like what this means for developers. Over in gadget, Jessica conduct wrote up a great piece about like why this is not a good thing for the gaming industry, because for developers, more consolidation is not always good. You know? And a lot of people think Indy gaming is where the future, can you even

Leo Laporte (00:17:19):
An Indy

Dwight Silverman (00:17:20):
Gamer? Oh, not anymore. Can not with this, not with this. No, I don't think with this deal. No, because you got so, I mean, who knows what Tenson is doing, but you've got, you've got Sony, you know, which is a giant studio. You've got Microsoft, there's a lot of gravity. It's like black holes, you know, regarding the Netflix of games. There's, there's more than one of these operations like XPA there's Invidia has one steam and it's it's,

Devindra Hardawar (00:17:51):
It's Siemens ISN in a subscription, right? Yeah. Invis isn't, isn't the same. It's a little different. That's like just streaming. That's not like all you can eat, just gobble up all these games, you know, immediately. But it wouldn't, it wouldn't

Dwight Silverman (00:18:01):
Take that much for steam to, to start offering that. And they probably will. At

Leo Laporte (00:18:05):
Some point there is a, I there's a little bit of a cloud business esteem, but it's, it is not that big business. Mostly it's you buy games and steam, it's a library, you

Devindra Hardawar (00:18:13):
Buy games. And also like you, it's your internal cloud. So you have a steam box, you have your gaming PC and you put an app on your apple TV or something. You can play games remotely within your house. You could stream locally, but doing it remotely or from like far off distances, that's that's much harder. What in video is doing is interesting, but that is specifically against Xbox cloud gaming, which I, I feel like Microsoft is just kind of hedging their bets on right now. But the brilliant thing is that is a part of game pass as well. So game pass subscribers on their consoles. Now on PCs can just hit a button and start streaming game. Don't have to download anything. Don't have to install it. Microsoft just like really has their fingers in all the like pieces of the future of gaming. And I think that is what that's, what's worrying a lot of big companies. I'm sure Sony is freaking out right now because they, when it comes to online stuff, when it comes to like NextGen gaming ideas Sony almost always feels like they're kind of lagging behind, whereas Nintendo and Microsoft tend to be the invader. Really.

Leo Laporte (00:19:11):
I wonder if I mean, game pass is clearly a winner. I'm sure the price will go up. I wonder if it'd be even more of a winner if they could have sold more Xboxs there's so mm-hmm, <affirmative> the supply is so constrained. Although, I mean the benefit of game passes you can play on you know, a double boxes. You could pay it on a, you can play, you can play

Devindra Hardawar (00:19:31):
It anywhere. They they've also talked about making dongs that you just plug into your TV and that's what you used to stream cloud games to. But

Leo Laporte (00:19:39):
Because all the work's done in the cloud, so it, it can run an ain, dumb terminal, basically where

Devindra Hardawar (00:19:43):
Microsoft's going. There are no consoles, you know, like it is the back of the future thing. There are leapfrogging to like this whole, other of what the industry is gonna be. Whereas Sony's like, please buy this box. This box is, this is all of us. You know, this is our entire people are buying this

Leo Laporte (00:19:58):
Box. Yeah. People are buy best seller. They are. It's the best seller by far, far and away. It's not it supply is not as constrained either. I don't know what Sony did differently from Microsoft, but it's a lot easier to get a PlayStation five than an X Xbox series X S you can get, but X is hard to get. I know, cause I keep trying <laugh>

Devindra Hardawar (00:20:17):
Microsoft doesn't care cuz they just want you to buy that subscription. I think you're right. Stay on it forever. I think you're

Leo Laporte (00:20:21):
Rights. In fact, the way they want you to buy an Xbox these days is with a $35 a month game pass subscription. That includes an Xbox. They're so I, I honestly am more and more impressed with Satya Ella's management. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> he's he's turned away from that windows it's windows or nothing. Right. He's turned away from that. He's really pivoted a giant company and has made it more successful. And I think this is a really good example of a strategic acquisition. That just makes sense in every way. And they've got the money it's about half of their cash cash position. It's about one month of revenue. It's I mean that's expensive. It's not cheap <affirmative>, but I think it's a good investment in their future. And, and the main thing to me is it synergizes well with their other businesses. It is a, it's a, just a natural all round. I can't see any negatives at all to it.

Devindra Hardawar (00:21:18):
Absolutely. Like it's gonna, this is gonna like, this has shifted the entire industry, but also really charts the course from Microsoft's future when it comes to mobile gaming. And I cringe when people talk about the metaverse now, but whatever that is, certainly this puts them in a place to be like a major player in whatever virtual future we're kind of moving towards. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:38):
Well, and that's the other question is I mean eSports, right? You'd like to be in that business these days, that's got a growth cl cloud gaming, but cloud everything, cloud windows, cloud office, mm-hmm <affirmative> that, that makes a lot of sense. And the other thing Microsoft is clearly wants to do. It's one of the reasons they bought LinkedIn, it's why they tried to get discord. They want to be, they want somehow to be part of communities. Peop part of how I don't know is social, I guess is a way you describe it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> they want the social graph. They want access to the social graph and that's you get with this as well. Right.

Dwight Silverman (00:22:18):
But they're not good at it. Microsoft is kind of like apple, but they're not, well, teams

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
Is not that good at it.

Dwight Silverman (00:22:24):
Yeah. You know, and I mean, I saw, I forget where all this, but I saw something written last week about LinkedIn is the most cringe social network that there is, you know, it's, it's, it's marketers and walks and business geeks and more jargon than you could shake a stick at. And it's just, you know, it's really uncomfortable. And and Microsoft has just not good at that historically they've, they've tried and they just not been able to, to make that work for them. But

Leo Laporte (00:22:56):
Phil Spencer lot will be running, will be running the gaming business is good. Right. He's a good, he's a good manager. He's not, he's not a, a, a nerdy business won <laugh>, I'm sure he talks to talk about all the Microsoft, but,

Dwight Silverman (00:23:10):
But on, you know, on, on Xbox the communities are per game and that's a different thing that like having the Xbox community, the

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
Communities are per game. Well, that's a really good point because we discovered that 10 years ago, almost exactly when we created a gaming show called game on that there is no monolith at gaming community. There is this so diverse there's console gamers who hate PC gamers, who hate <laugh>, who hate casual gamers. And, and, and if you're a call a duty player, you, you don't, you're not interested in battlefield. You're not, you know, it's, it's really interesting. There are very, they are very stratified. And so we couldn't come up with one show that would appeal to everybody. But that doesn't mean Microsoft couldn't have stratified communities in all those areas, you know,

Devindra Hardawar (00:23:56):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and the, the landscape just looks really different. Now they did 10 years ago too. Like, yes. Yeah. People tend to like their franchises, but I listened to a time in a video game podcast. Do you, is the thing I, yeah, I don't have enough time to like, stay, play all the games I wanna play or read all the reviews and stuff. So podcasts are like a nice passive way for me to keep up with what's happening. And there are a lot of, there's a lot of like great general coverage there, but I know the way people want to, to kind of consume stuff now is by watching videos, watching people play either via you live stream,

Leo Laporte (00:24:26):
Let's play that's, that's, what's really Twitch exploded. That's TWI what's really exploded. The last 10 years is let's play videos first on YouTube with Minecraft and now with Twitch and Microsoft tried to get in that business, they bought mixer remember and had to fold it. There was theres so much

Devindra Hardawar (00:24:39):
Money at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:41):
They hired, they stole away ninja and other, you know, famous gamers and just flopped miserably. So maybe, I mean, maybe, maybe they do have something to learn in this. But here's another, here's another chance here's another shot

Devindra Hardawar (00:24:56):
For them. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> certainly, certainly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:25:00):
I certainly don't blame Bobby Kodak. I hope he gets out though. I really do, and then goes to jail. That would be my, yeah. I hope he, he,

Devindra Hardawar (00:25:08):
I hope he gets to look at his hundreds of millions. Yeah. And then like through bars pieces and serious consequences. Yeah. Through bars.

Leo Laporte (00:25:14):
That'll be good. I shouldn't, he'll spend it on lawyers that's mean that's mean yeah. Well deserved, but yeah, I feel like it might be kind of, they had, I mean, we've covered these stories over years, but they had a, a bill Cosby room where they had a picture of bill Cosby and they would invite women back to the room. I mean, and co knew about all this. There's no question. He, he, he, he either turned a blind eye toward it or even encouraged it. And, and so I think he, I think the buck stops there. I really do. And boy, it is just a nasty nest of stuff. We talked about this also, and this is where Brianna would be in a, a great advantage to this show. I, I think they had the perception. There is the perception you need to create that kind of environment to get the best game developers. That's what gamers are. That's what game developers are. And I hate at notion. I think we've gotta get beyond that. That's terrible.

Devindra Hardawar (00:26:10):
It sucks. I, I think like at a certain point over the last few decades, I, this also like was the rockstar thing, you know? Yep. Grant theft, auto folks. Yep. People thought the game developers, they wanted to be rock stars, you know? So they get to be as wild and crazy as like led Zeppelin was in their heyday or something. And like, it is that mentality of like, it is basically bro culture, you programmers somehow that gets programmers. Yeah. Programmers makes genius and that makes us money. So that's what we want. And yeah, the world is certainly very different now. So if hope, I hope like he faces a record.

Leo Laporte (00:26:43):
If you go back to the earliest days of gaming, that's how act vision started Atari. Wouldn't let their programmers take credit for the games. Remember in Atari games in the early days, programmers would hide Easter eggs so that they could have their name, you know, be seen, act vision said, we'll give you credit. We'll let your name be on the game. And they were able to draw a huge talent away from Atari to act vision developed, amazing games like pitfall prince Persia. It was a really great game house. And it was because they said you can take credit. So it may be that's in the roots of act vision. And by the also you mention,

Devindra Hardawar (00:27:21):
Yeah,

Dwight Silverman (00:27:22):
Go ahead. You also have to give credit for that to ID software, which created really kind of the first group of rockstar, star

Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
Stars, programmers. Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (00:27:33):
Right, right. That, that, and, and it became like a super group. You know, I, if I had seen the original developers of doom and quake referred to as like the Beatles of, of gaming and and it was funny when they went off on their separate ways, they really couldn't kind of do what they did, you know, at ed. But what's interesting is Bethesda owns ed and IID is now under the auspices of Microsoft.

Devindra Hardawar (00:27:58):
Microsoft owns everything. Microsofts owns pitfall and you know, all, all the, all of gaming history now, basically, but it's funny, you brought up Atari Leo because there are so many stories about Nolan Bushnell and how he ran Atari and like what a sexist prick. He was basically. Oh, really? <Laugh>. And that that's the gaming that's gaming. Yeah. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:28:15):
And we, but you know what gaming needs to be accessible and open and welcoming to women because that's 50% of the market. It's not just guys playing games. It doesn't have to be like that. I think that the times have changed. I hope, I hope by the way, did you know that Bobby Kodak and Cheryl Sandberg dated for three years? Well, it's very, it's very confusing. I don't know. I mean, this is the people mag segment here. I didn't chatroom just told me a year after Cheryl's husband passed. She started dating Bobby Connick. So I don't know what that means. They broke up three years later. But okay. It

Devindra Hardawar (00:29:03):
Is funny to see page six follows something like that. That was a very

Leo Laporte (00:29:06):
Page six story. See tech is with it now. It's hip it's new it's now it's not the geeks anymore. Somebody's saying she really leaned in there. Let's take a <laugh>. I, I didn't mean that. I'm sorry. I neither here nor there very interesting. A we got it first. I gotta get regular approval. That's not a cake walk. And then, and then B, they've gotta absorb this behemoth. They did pretty well. I think with Bethesda, they certainly did ex we know they did well with Moja and Minecraft. So I think there's a good track record there. And then let's see what happens with the exclusives. I, I think Microsoft's best, best bet is just to say game pass everywhere, playing on your PlayStation. That's that's it game pass everywhere. We don't care. Bring

Dwight Silverman (00:29:51):
It to the Mac. Yeah. Bring it to the

Leo Laporte (00:29:53):
Mac. Well, it's funny because there, there is a story about Fortnite coming back to the Mac and iOS through the back door

Dwight Silverman (00:29:59):
Streaming

Leo Laporte (00:30:00):
G for within Vi's service. Yeah. So that's, that could happen. You can, right now you can play I think you can play game pass in a browser on the Mac. Can

Devindra Hardawar (00:30:11):
You, you can't play it in a browser too, but I do wonder like, looking at all this news, what is apple doing? You know, I just, I, I I've reviewed all the M one, you know, MacBook and whatnot. And every time I try to like, get games outside of apple arcade on that, it is a nightmare. And it it's ridiculous, like how badly apple has treated games as a, as like a segment. So I, I don't,

Leo Laporte (00:30:33):
It's almost, it was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that people said, oh, there's no gaming on Mac. And then apple said, yeah, you're right. <Laugh> you're right, right. Sure.

Dwight Silverman (00:30:41):
It was well, every now and then every now and then apples pops its head up and says, no, wait gaming on the Mac is great and it's coming back and they TRO out some developers and they, but they haven't done that.

Leo Laporte (00:30:52):
Remember the Pippin, they were actually building a console at one point. Yes.

Dwight Silverman (00:30:56):
So, but the thing is, is that these M one max, particularly the M one pro and the M one X are incredibly powerful. They have the same kind of a graphic subsystem that is on the iPhone and the iPad, which is great for mobile gaming. And so the, the components are there for them to do it in a, in a big way. I think somebody just needs to kind of step up and go here's it needs a killer app needs a killer game,

Leo Laporte (00:31:24):
But aren't they swimming against the tides though, because it seems, I've actually thought this when Apple's creating these better and better desktops. And there's no question, these things are superb. I I'm in love with my M one pro MacBook 14 inch MacBook. It's amazing. But isn't the trend away from powerful desktops towards cloud computing and, and, and that's where gaming's going, right? You don't need a fancy gaming rig. You don't need an M one, we'll run the, you know servers in the cloud. You just need a string to it. And so I wonder if maybe, maybe we've been saying in this for years is I, I, I don't know if the desktop computing is dead, but I do feel like the cloud is gonna at some point take over.

Dwight Silverman (00:32:10):
Okay. Well, particularly if you're on a, like, if you're on, like I'm on a M one pro MacBook 14 X MacBook pro now you're, but

Leo Laporte (00:32:20):
You don't need to be you.

Dwight Silverman (00:32:21):
I don't need to be, but, but if I would, is not connected to the internet, if I was on a plane and wanted to play a game on this, ah, you know, if you're not connected, if you're, I mean, it's a mobile device, right. If you're not connected, you want to be able to do that. And, and it has the power to do it.

Leo Laporte (00:32:39):
Well, maybe that's a, that's a 5g thing.

Devindra Hardawar (00:32:43):
I don't know if you're, if you're underground or on the subway or in the air, in the submarine.

Leo Laporte (00:32:47):
<Laugh> right

Devindra Hardawar (00:32:49):
In the subway. Like before when I moved to New York, like there was no cell phone service in subways, you know, that didn't happen until a couple weeks after, or a couple of years after. So that was like 2012 or something. So we want cloud gaming to be the kind of end all and be all. But right now people just want an easy way to like, get their little gaming fixed. So I guess apple is leaning on mobile. Right. And they're extending mobile to desktop, to everything, to even apple TV. But I just, I'm a little disappointed at like proper desktop gaming, not really what they're doing at all.

Leo Laporte (00:33:20):
Yeah. I get, I mean, so it's complicated. I mean the apple epic thing cut them off from the number one game engine mm-hmm <affirmative> they, they can't use the unreal engine cuz that's an epic thing and they don't like epic. So you gotta use unity, which is, you know, kind of as week, second unity might get better. I don't know. I feel like apple it's almost as if apple doesn't even care. I don't know. And should they care? Why should they care

Devindra Hardawar (00:33:51):
Beyond, beyond mobile games? Yeah. I don't know mobile.

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
They own, they own mobile. Really. If you think about it, they own mobile cuz they own the platform.

Dwight Silverman (00:33:57):
Oh. But it's just such a waste. I mean it is just such a waste of power, all that power do it, all that power. And, and the other thing is, is, is what you could see is you could see it coming in the back door because the I one max can run iOS titles. And if you had a developer who created a, a killer game on iOS, that when you ran it on a Mac, it ran like a game on a Mac. That would be really interesting. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (00:34:26):
I, I think some of the apple Ark titles have done that. I know fantas, which is the game from the final fancy director or creator. Right. That is a beautiful RPG and it works well a mobile, but when you bring it to like a big to a desktop, it like runs in 4k I believe, or has 4k asset. So they do scale quite a bit.

Leo Laporte (00:34:44):
Let's take a little break. Lots more to talk about when we come back to vendor Hardwar is here, he's a senior editor at, in gadget and the host of the film cast. What, what, what this is it feels like content is, is starting to ramp up. Seems to really? Yeah. We're

Devindra Hardawar (00:35:02):
Also in the middle of Sundance right now. So I, for the past, like couple days I've been watching several movies every night because I'm just like consuming as much Sundance stuff as I can. But what are you excited about? There's a couple things. There's this there's this movie I just saw called after yang by the director. Ganada who, which is fantastic. It's a, about a family that loses their helper kind of Android. And it basically dies at the beginning of the movie and the entirely I'm like,

Leo Laporte (00:35:30):
Whatever do

Devindra Hardawar (00:35:32):
It's amazing. It's amazing. Wanna

Leo Laporte (00:35:34):
See that? Do they grieve it?

Devindra Hardawar (00:35:36):
They like, it is a grieving movie about the influence. This thing has had in the family. It's stars, Colin Ferrell too. And I love like sad Brody, Colin Ferrell in like good, serious stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
So, and it's also like it's sci-fi so like there's this great like vision of the future. I wanna see of like self-driving cars with plants and bamboo. What's it called out? That's gonna be after yang after Y yang is the robot, I guess. Yeah. Oh, I really wanna see that. Did you did you see the power of the dog? Do you think that was good?

Devindra Hardawar (00:36:03):
I did. I loved it. Yeah. Ah, I love Jean Campion. She's she's weird. I like her. She's

Leo Laporte (00:36:08):
Weird. It's weird. It starts off as a Western turns out. It's not as a thriller. 

Devindra Hardawar (00:36:13):
Hey, it's a Western thriller. Sure. Western

Leo Laporte (00:36:15):
Thriller. 

Dwight Silverman (00:36:17):
It's an awkward Western. It's

Leo Laporte (00:36:18):
Awkward as hell. Yes. And I,

Dwight Silverman (00:36:21):
I'm not sure. I had a

Leo Laporte (00:36:21):
Hard time watching it. Yeah, me too. I'm not sure. Benedict Cumba really is a convincing cowboy to be honest. But I'm sure it's gonna, I'm sure it's gonna win an Oscar. I'm sure it's gonna win an Oscar. That's anyway, I told Lisa cuz we're are both looking, scratching our head saying, did we like that? I don't think we like that. Did we? Did we? I don't know. And then I said, but it will be an Oscar contender. I'm sure of it. Yes. Yes. The other one and I know you, this was your most recent episode. The apple pluses Macbeth.

Devindra Hardawar (00:36:53):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> beautiful. No. Oh my God. Beautiful. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:36:57):
Beautiful. The witches. No, the witches. No, the, the biggest problem I had with it, I love the black and white. I love how it's shot. It's gorgeous. Everything's in tight closeups. Shakespeare was not made for tight closeups. I'm sorry. It's theater. You don't, it's not, everything's tight closeups. I could, I didn't like that. And I felt like it hurt the actor's performances, frankly. It,

Dwight Silverman (00:37:23):
It, I think, I think the transition from with Denzel Washington from kind of a reasonable, but brooding contender for the throne mm-hmm <affirmative> to a mad man was like just too, like someone threw a switch too easily. It

Devindra Hardawar (00:37:42):
Happened, it moves a little too briskly. Yeah. They're

Leo Laporte (00:37:44):
Great actors. It's some of the best actors and I didn't feel like the acting was very good. So I

Dwight Silverman (00:37:49):
Don't, well, it also was, if you step back and look at it and kind of don't think Shakespeare, it really looks like a Cohen

Leo Laporte (00:37:56):
Brothers. Oh yeah. You could

Dwight Silverman (00:37:57):
Tell it's. I mean the character. Yeah. Yeah. The, the the flat cinematography,

Leo Laporte (00:38:03):
The flat flat effect. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (00:38:05):
Yes. The ultra violence at times. Yeah. See, I

Leo Laporte (00:38:07):
Like my fifth and, but I, I guess maybe that's probably the part of the problem is I have all these preconceived notions of what McBeth don't look up. Not a great movie. Fascinating cultural piece. Yeah, sure. Yep.

Devindra Hardawar (00:38:17):
Sure. Definitely. It it, my on,

Dwight Silverman (00:38:20):
Yeah. My money for the Oscars is on pig.

Leo Laporte (00:38:24):
<Laugh> I loved pig. Pig was a great movie movie movie. We talked about that last time you were on. I think I love

Dwight Silverman (00:38:30):
Pig. Oh, it was great. I, it was

Leo Laporte (00:38:32):
A great movie. Nicholas cage, as the deranged master chef who's who's left society until

Devindra Hardawar (00:38:39):
He's not deranged. He's the sames. One of all, all until they kill

Leo Laporte (00:38:43):
He, until they kill his truffle hunting pig. And he comes into town saying, I won my pig. <Laugh> they?

Devindra Hardawar (00:38:50):
They kidnap the pig. Leo, they kidnap the, they don't, they don't intend what happened. They

Leo Laporte (00:38:54):
Don't intend to

Devindra Hardawar (00:38:56):
That's a spoiler. No, I think it's in, is it a spoil? Yeah. That's the very, so Nick cage,

Dwight Silverman (00:39:02):
Nick cage will be nominated for best actor. I, I would, I really hope he would win it because I just thought that was a phenomenal performance. And so withheld, you know, Nick cage

Leo Laporte (00:39:16):
Was good in that he wasn't chewing the scenery Nick cage.

Dwight Silverman (00:39:18):
Right. He didn't do

Leo Laporte (00:39:20):
Nick cage, right? Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't chewing the scenery matrix. Resurrections loved it.

Devindra Hardawar (00:39:25):
Loved it. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:39:27):
Intro loved it.

Devindra Hardawar (00:39:28):
It was my number one movie of last year, just because of this sheer joy. It gave me I love a movie that is not made for anybody else. You know, like was very specific.

Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
It's a fan movie. Yeah. I agree. Right. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (00:39:39):
Right. Not all matrix fans, you know, there, there are degrees

Leo Laporte (00:39:41):
Of them. I loved the first matrix. Didn't like the sequels, this felt like it was another sequel. It didn't, it didn't really click for me, but I, you know, there was some good parts. It was some good stuff. Great action. Good

Devindra Hardawar (00:39:52):
Stuff. Yeah. I can't think of a movie that has reckoned with like the history of franchises and what we expect from them. It's always hard. What Hollywood expects from them. Like it is that is such a smart movie in terms of what it's doing and what it's wrestling with. And I just, I love the WWKI too. Like their sensibility their show sense eight on Netflix is, is beautiful.

Leo Laporte (00:40:12):
I really enjoyed sense eight. Is that coming back or is that over it? Didn't it finished?

Devindra Hardawar (00:40:17):
Yeah. It's pretty much done. They had like a movie kind of wrapping things up, but so many sensei people are in matrix resurrections and just thematically what that show was about it so much. It's

Leo Laporte (00:40:27):
Similar sense. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make this, the, the movie segment movies are good. I do this all, whatever defenders on. I love talking about this stuff, obviously, please. You don't mind either, so. Oh no, I love it. I'll I,

Devindra Hardawar (00:40:40):
I will throw a shout out there. The Jesse Eisenberg movie that just premiered at Sundance, when you finish saving the world is one of the most insufferable things I've ever seen. Oh, that's too bad. So I will just put a red flag against that. How about that?

Leo Laporte (00:40:51):
Not a fan actually. Mr. Eisenberg. So I don't think, I, I don't think that I'll miss that insufferable can't but that's quite a word insufferable. Yeah. Wow. All right. If you like this kind of thing, the film cast,

Devindra Hardawar (00:41:05):
The film cast and the film cast.com.

Leo Laporte (00:41:07):
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I love it to me. I could listen all day. Let's take a little break. Talk about our sponsor. We'll come back with a lot more DVE. Dwight. I'll ask you about your life too later. <Laugh> right. It's not all about Davindra. Hey, I do wanna talk about our absolute favorite VPN. I think, you know, if I say that, you're gonna say, oh yeah, Leo loves express VPN. Of course. Honestly, there are so many reasons to run a VPN, but I think the one, it used to be about security, right? And it's still about security. And then I think for some people it's about watching Netflix in Japan or England, it's still about that. All that stuff still works, but increasingly it's become a privacy issue. And I think when you're looking at what big tech is up to, and you really say, how can I keep these companies from knowing everything I'm doing?

Leo Laporte (00:42:02):
People want, there's a lot of things people want to do to protect themselves. And I think a VPN, it's not the only thing you should do, but it's one of the big things. The idea that a single company might control, 90% of the internet searches to your email, <laugh> runs your phone has a device in your house with a microphone. It's, it's pretty amazing. And in, and in at least the case of Google, they, they make money by exploiting your personal data. That they're very clear about that. That's how Google makes money selling ads based on what they know about you. Maybe you like many of our listeners wanna put a little layer of protection between your online activity and these big tech companies who do literally wanna know everything you do. That's why you might wanna check out a good VPN. You might wanna check out express VPN.

Leo Laporte (00:42:53):
Now something I've all always talked about with VPNs is you, you know, you're just passing the buck. You've gotta trust the VPN you use. It's very important. Well, I could tell you, you can trust them. Independent audits have proven it. They care so much. They've created something. They call the trusted server technology. You are running in memory in a sandboxed process that literal, they cannot write to the hard drive. And as soon as you log out, it disappears. And so does every trace of your visit. And again, that has been proven. So by independent auditors. So you can trust that, think about how much of your life you're putting on the internet. Every site you visit, every video you watch, every message you send is tracked as mind, but when you're running express VPN, your IP address is not yours. The IP address you use to emerge into the public internet is theirs.

Leo Laporte (00:43:43):
So it makes it so much harder to trace and sell to advertisers. You might use incognito and mode in your browser, but that just means <laugh> somebody on your machine. Can't see what you're up to. You better believe the browser company knows up to your carrier, knows what you're up to. Unless you use an express VPN. It also has the benefit of encrypting a hundred percent of your internet data. So you're safe from Eves strappers on the network. And the best part about express VPN is they invest. They invest in their business. You, when you get a free VPN, you've really gotta wonder, who is the product? Who are you the customer, or are they selling your information with express VPN? It's not expensive, a little less than seven bucks a month, but they in they that that's important that that transaction means you are the customer.

Leo Laporte (00:44:29):
You're not the product. And that's why they protect your privacy. That's why they make sure you've got enough speed to watch high Def video. They don't slow down your connection. It's one of the reasons it's the number one VPN service Mashable says. So tech radar says so, and it's so easy to use. You download the app, you put it on your phone, your computer, you tap a button, you protect it. You can even put it on your router, protect your whole house. And I can tell you this, no one will complain. Oh, what happened to our internet? So slow because express VPN again, invests in the network. I've turned it on on my router. And no one even knows. I took express VPN to Mexico. I was using it for security. As much as privacy. Stop handing over your personal data to the big tech monopoly that mines your activity and sells your information. Protect yourself with a VPN. I trust to keep me safe online, visit express vpn.com/twi that's E X, P R E SS, vpn.com/twi. And you can get an extra three months free, go to express vpn.com/twi. Now to learn more, thank you, express VPN for supporting this week tech. And of course thank you, TWI listeners for supporting us by using that address. So they know you saw it here. Express vpn.com/twi.

Leo Laporte (00:45:43):
Fascinating. Have you been following the F FAA FCC airline battle? That's been going on over 5g. And now this week it came to a head, of course, the Verizon and at and T who between the two of them spent billions of dollars for this frequency in an FCC auction were about to turn on those 5g towers, the, the sea band towers, <affirmative> FAA, airline manufacturers airlines, and airplane manufacturers say, wait a minute, you're gonna break our altimeters. <Laugh> wait a minute. Planes are gonna come out of the sky. They put a hold on it at and T Verizon, F F FAA said, can you put a hold on it? They said, well, we'll give you a week or two. Anyway, it's starting to roll out. Wednesday was the day. So far, no planes have fallen outta the sky, but maybe some planes aren't flying.

Leo Laporte (00:46:44):
A I'll read you it's, you know, it's very tempting to blame the manufacturers or blame the FAA or blame the FCC. I'll read you something where that shows you there's enough blame to, to, to go around on this one. This is from J U C a D R P on, on Reddit. It was one of the red best ups. And I thought it was the best thing I've read, explaining this airplanes are equipped with radar altimeters. They use radar on the frequency between forty two hundred and forty four hundred megahertz. The, these 5g towers, these CB towers are 3739 80 megahertz. There's no overlap mm-hmm <affirmative>, but, and this is the problem. There's a filter in order to protect the frequencies that the radars using. So it doesn't get interfered with, by other there's a filter, but the filter is set <laugh> because thanks to a decades old design, no one else was using this frequency to overlap with this 5g frequency doesn't need to, but it does.

Leo Laporte (00:47:51):
So 5g radio could confuse these altimeters. That could be of course, a big hazard for an airplane. So in fact, there's a hearing from 5g technology. World is an exam is a graph that shows these bands. So the altimeter, can you show on, there you go. The altimeter is this yellow thing. This is the frequency it needs. This is where the 5g band is. Unfortunately, this green line <laugh>, that's the filter. So because of this old and it's, and it is admittedly and antiquated design. And, and we should point out that these 5g towers, this spec has been is 10 years old. They knew this was coming, but they never fixed the the altimeters. Yeah, they never, they never profu. Yeah. So basically the altimeter opens a channel to listen to radar, but it ends up listening, not just to radar, but to 5g the, at, at the time they were designed, there was nothing.

Leo Laporte (00:48:52):
There, there is now. And in fact, modern filters could easily be put on these things that would eliminate this problem entirely. This guy in Reddit writes the AV in Asian industry had time to retrofit their airplanes. And now they are sorry to be blunt playing dumb. They know they can hold the nation's hostage by saying, this will disrupt flights in the middle of a pandemic. Obviously safety's paramount <laugh>, but carriers paid 81 billion for these frequencies because they were not in use. So they paid $81 billion for exclusive use of these frequencies, the aviation in his street, basically arguing. They want to take over more than they need more than they're even allocated to operate these altimeters. So but, and then to defend the aviation industry, one of the reasons air travel's so safe these days is because they are not, you know, throwing stuff in will nilly. And so you can't just go change those ALS and then, you know, you want to test it and so forth. So you can't change it overnight. They have had a little, when we had 10 years

Devindra Hardawar (00:49:58):
To test it, we had 10 years. I've been, I've been seeing 5g demo since 2020 2012. You know, so it is it's ridiculous that like this thing, like the point where these carriers are also getting to where they can actually get the fast speeds they've been promising for so long, like this is apparently a big roadblock for them. It's just kind of hilarious.

Leo Laporte (00:50:19):
This is sea band, how this is an ultra wide band. No, this is kind of the mid, this is kind of in between mid band sub

Dwight Silverman (00:50:27):
Six and millimeter wave. This was, I wrote about this in my column last week about what it was, what it meant for at and T and Verizon, which are the two that are using it, they've kind of essentially been behind T-Mobile because T-Mobile has a mid band that it got from sprint the spinner acquisition. And it's been able to offer these speeds that at and T and Verizon can't for some time.

Leo Laporte (00:50:54):
And, and T-Mobile C band does not interfere with altimeters.

Dwight Silverman (00:50:57):
No, it is a C band. It's not, it's a different frequency, right? It's it a different frequency T-Mobile has bought some C band, but they're not gonna set it up 20, 23. But it is you know, in Houston, a lot of this stuff comes here first, right? A lot of because it's so flat here, so it's a good testing ground and T-Mobile sprint had one of its first standups of its of its service. And it was remarkably fast. T-Mobile now is very fast. And when they switched it on here on Wednesday, I began hearing from readers on on Twitter and Facebook saying that they were starting to seize some speeds on their compatible at and T Verizon phones that now could kind of match in the center area. The you know, the stuff that T-Mobile is how fast,

Leo Laporte (00:51:51):
When you say fast, I mean, ultra wide band, we're talking a gigabit, but that's not, or more or more or more, but this is not that fast. How fast is this?

Dwight Silverman (00:51:59):
So I, so this they're saying for C band, it's up to about a gigabit at best when I was talking to Verizon for this store, they said that kind of, what they want to hit is about 300 megabits. That's, that's plenty. That is plenty. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And on my, on my, I, I have an iPhone 13. I doubt Promax

Leo Laporte (00:52:20):
Phone could go faster than that, to be honest. Right?

Dwight Silverman (00:52:22):
Well, on, on my iPhone 13 Promax I have T-Mobile and I have seen download speeds up to 700 mega bits on my iPhone. Oh, wow. So

Leo Laporte (00:52:33):
You can go that fast.

Dwight Silverman (00:52:34):
Yes. And, and typically, like, I, and what's really interesting on T-Mobile is that if you're down to like two bars, I still see like 250 and 300 megabits when I'm picking up one of their so what is this?

Leo Laporte (00:52:49):
What is this change? I mean, honestly, you probably don't need that kind of speed. Even at

Dwight Silverman (00:52:53):
All. It changes it, it changes it for the future. For, as we were talking about gaming, mobile gaming, if you're doing streaming gaming, it changes it in terms of,

Leo Laporte (00:53:03):
But gaming more, it's not so much speed as latency, right. Is this also

Dwight Silverman (00:53:06):
A lower latency? Well, and 5g promises, lower latency. We haven't seen a lot of that yet. Yeah, you do see it on millimeter wave. There's a millimeter, millimeter wave only

Leo Laporte (00:53:15):
Goes 80 feet

Dwight Silverman (00:53:16):
From the tower. It goes 80 feet from the tower. No one

Leo Laporte (00:53:19):
Can, maybe

Dwight Silverman (00:53:21):
It can't get through trees or rain, but, but there's a millimeter wave tower about two blocks from my house. And I walked over to it. Oh. With a with a, with a Verizon phone and stood under it and got three gigabits down.

Devindra Hardawar (00:53:38):
That's beautiful. Yeah. But that's

Dwight Silverman (00:53:40):
Beautiful, but it's beautiful right there

Leo Laporte (00:53:41):
At this point there. Yeah. But, but also at this point, <affirmative>, I mean, that's just a number we don't, I mean, yeah, it's great. But it's like saying I have a car that go 500 miles an hour. Yeah. Where

Devindra Hardawar (00:53:53):
You can ride around the block is under plant speeding limits and

Dwight Silverman (00:53:57):
It's it's, it is more, it is more bandwidth than you need. Now. It, there may be uses coming for it,

Leo Laporte (00:54:04):
Like to vehicle communications, things like that,

Dwight Silverman (00:54:06):
Stuff like that. Right. But mm-hmm <affirmative> but you know, in the beginning, when you had your first LTE phones, nobody predicted Uber and nobody predict, and nobody predicted that Netflix would go where it went. So there are things that are out there that eventually could end up you know, making use of that at the moment. No, mm-hmm

Leo Laporte (00:54:33):
<Affirmative> so, okay. I'm sure this airline thing will be worked at, at some point, probably this is mostly well

Dwight Silverman (00:54:40):
For now, for now it's working. I mean, there are no airplane. Well, they just falling

Leo Laporte (00:54:43):
Out the yeah, no, they cuz they cuz they aren't turning on towers within two miles of air of big airport, which is

Dwight Silverman (00:54:48):
Fine because you can still use regular 5g and even millimeter wave in airports. A lot of airports have millimeter wave installed

Leo Laporte (00:54:56):
It. Some for instance, I think Eddie odd, there are a couple of airlines that cannot fly their triple sevens to the us for this reason. And so there's, there, it is some impingement, a traffic, not a lot, but some, I think probably this is more like the airplane manufacturers want the phone industry to pay them to fix the altimeters. Yes. But yes. But that's a good compromise. Just don't put the towers within two miles of an airport. So we, so we're, everything's going smoothly so

Dwight Silverman (00:55:28):
Far, you know, the, the biggest complaint I've heard is for people who have at and T and Verizon phones and saying, oh, I thought it would be faster.

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
Yeah. You know, so

Devindra Hardawar (00:55:39):
It is heartbreaking like after all this buildup so much, we are kind of stuck with speeds that are only slightly faster than LTE, like most of the time. And then <affirmative> once in the blue moon, you're in an area and like, you know, mercury crosses the horizon and you get you know you get really fast millimeter wave and then that's it. You'll never see it again.

Dwight Silverman (00:55:59):
Well, C band fixes that C band fixes that for at and T and Verizon, if your T-Mobile customer in an area that they have added. And it's a, in a lot of urban areas you are seeing that already. And it's the, the only use I've seen for it is I was I was away from home and I knew I was gonna be in a place where I wasn't gonna have cellular service or good cellular service. And I was getting the five 5g U UC, which is ultra capacity that it calls for. And I, I was getting like 500 megabits down. So I quickly downloaded a couple of episodes of something on Netflix. And I got it, you know, in just a, in just about 30 seconds. And then when I got there, I had it down on my phone and that was really handy, but that's kind of like, that's, I did it.

Devindra Hardawar (00:56:53):
I mean, one thing people have been talking about is like doing your home internet could just be via a cellular eventually, you know, the way the phone service has gone well, and that could be really interesting for someplace. Is it

Leo Laporte (00:57:05):
Verizon actually rolling that out

Dwight Silverman (00:57:07):
Verizon at eight and T-Mobile both have 5g based home internet services Verizon, the first 5g Verizon home service was launched here in Houston. Again, cuz of the flat area, it was based on millimeter wave. You have to have kind of the, the router sits in your window, basically. You're

Leo Laporte (00:57:27):
Two blocks from that tower. You can't do it though, right? No

Dwight Silverman (00:57:30):
I can't you're too. I can't cause there's a, well, no, actually there's one a little closer. Okay now, but it is there's a crate Myrtle tree between me. I'm serious. There's a crate Myrtle that the,

Leo Laporte (00:57:45):
It it chop it down, chop it down. You know, like we had a, we used to have direct TV and there was a tree in the winter was fun, but there's a tree that would get very leafy right in front of the dish. So one day I climbed up and I literally carved a U in the tree, I think chopped a on the tree, just put a U where the Leafs were so that the dish could see through the tree <laugh>

Dwight Silverman (00:58:09):
Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:58:10):
Not theary ever, but it, it got the job done

Dwight Silverman (00:58:14):
And, and T-Mobile has a, a also has a 5g service. They've had some problems with the NOIA based radios that they're using for. It looks, it looks almost like a mini version of the old MacPro trash can mm-hmm <affirmative> computer and, and it, it, I had it and it had a difficult time was very stable and supposedly they are replacing those. But I was getting probably with that about 200 megabits down, you know, on my Comcast is 3.1 internet service. I've got gigabit service and the fastest I can get maybe is about 800 megabits on my phone. It's like 400, but with C band, I mean with mid band on T-Mobile when I'm out and about, I get 700 megabits down. It's faster than when I get in my living. <Affirmative>

Devindra Hardawar (00:59:06):
That's wild. That's absolutely wild. There, there are also other companies like starry internet that are doing you know, home, home based internet based on 5g. That is from the former AIO guy. If you, yes.

Dwight Silverman (00:59:18):
AIO I loved Dario. They were

Leo Laporte (00:59:20):
Great. Oh,

Devindra Hardawar (00:59:21):
The story like has, has been trying, they are in a couple cities right now. A lot of people are experimenting with this. I'm really wondering like the AR glasses, we're all hoping to see in five years they would, those

Leo Laporte (00:59:32):
Need to be, yeah, they need to be connected.

Devindra Hardawar (00:59:34):
They can't just rely on their phones. They like have to be smart on their own. So I feel like that is the future. We're kind of like laying out there

Leo Laporte (00:59:44):
What a world do we live in it's it's happened so FA by the way, I should point out these five GC band rollouts have happened in 40 countries so far in Japan. They're, they've rolled out this according to ours Technica and in fact, they're deployed at 4,100 megahertz. So there's just a hundred megahertz guard band between 5g operations and there's OS and there have been no claims of interference. So Hey, I call, I call foul on all of this. 

Dwight Silverman (01:00:17):
Well, it's kind it's, it's kind of, it reminds me a little bit of the you know, turn off your devices before landing thing. Yeah. You know, remember, remember Nick Milton, who was kind of on a tear and campaign

Leo Laporte (01:00:32):
On this. I remember he won, he got it changed. Right,

Dwight Silverman (01:00:35):
Right, right, right. And so you can you leave your wifi on, they still want you to turn off your, your cellular modems on your phones. But I think a lot of people don't my guess is actually planes. Aren't

Leo Laporte (01:00:47):
Falling outta the sky. The cellulars on your phone should be turned off only because you're your flying 600 miles an hour. And the hand you're losing all your battery line. The hand drops right. As you fly across the country are not good for anybody. So it should

Devindra Hardawar (01:01:01):
Be tell people it's a good for you. Save your battery life. Don't like, it's not really about the plane safety.

Leo Laporte (01:01:07):
Yeah. It's not plane 70. And it's probably, probably has something to do with cell carriers who don't wanna have all these handoffs as people fly over.

Dwight Silverman (01:01:15):
If, if you're flying that far over, can you get even get the absolutely a

Leo Laporte (01:01:19):
Single, sure. Totally. You're not. You're only a few miles high, eight miles high <laugh> you probably can't get ultra wide band. However, I don't think you can get that up there. Actually. This is now I'm starting to get the calls. I had a guy call me today, said I just got a phone in the mail because from 18 and T, because they say, my phone's not gonna work in a month. At and T is on oh, 2, 2, 2, 2 0 2, 2, February 22nd of this year turning off the three G towers. He has a Galaxys seven. I said, well, wait, that uses LTE. But turns out at and T is using the 3g for call signaling to make the connection. So your voice on that phone, on that phone, on that phone Uhhuh, so it'll stop working. So they sent him like a $20 crap phone. <Laugh> unsolicited. I said, you, you, you should probably just get a newer but this is gonna be, get ready. This is a month from now. A lot of people with older, not even that an S seven, isn't that old.

Dwight Silverman (01:02:30):
Well, and one of the big things that doesn't get talked about a lot is a lot of home security systems use a cellular modem. <Affirmative> that talks on 3g because a lot of them were set up like that. And there's not a lot of 4g ones out there and they're gonna have to upgrade their

Leo Laporte (01:02:48):
Security system. Yeah. Lot of cars have 3g mode on on star, on star, out of the own on

Dwight Silverman (01:02:55):
Star use

Leo Laporte (01:02:56):
3G. So that's the next moment of outrage. I just kinda thought I'd give you a warning. 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 0 2, 2 every decade. We'll just have a wave of, of devices that kind of die basically. Well, that's right. That's the future. Isn't it from now on? Yeah, that's the way it's gonna be from now on. We lost all the blackberries. They're they're they're all gone happened last couple weeks ago. Yeah. <Affirmative> it's okay. That's okay. Let's see what else Intel is gonna build new president new factory. Intel's gonna build a massive, the largest chip factory ever in Ohio. They say they will build two new semiconductor fab on a thousand acre site where Intel research development manufacturer its latest gyps. And this is really part of the Intel transition mm-hmm <affirmative> from being an IDF in an integrated design Foundry, where they design and make their own chips to becoming kind of almost two companies, a design company like Invidia or arm or a apple for that matter.

Leo Laporte (01:04:02):
And then a fabricator, a chip builder like TSMC. They wanna do both. And so these new plants, I think, are part of their pat Gelsinger mission to start selling their chip manufacturing capacity to other mm-hmm <affirmative> companies, including they say aspirationally, apple very aspirationally construction begins this year. The plant should be operational by 2025. So this is it's really gonna be interesting to watch, you know, traditionally companies making this kind of pivot fail. It's a hard thing to do. And the one GA you know, prime example is Microsoft, which has really made an amazing pivot and is actually a stronger, better company because they move from being the windows office company to being the cloud company be, it'll be very interesting to see if Intel can make this transition. Ben Thompson wrote about it in his tra techie column.

Leo Laporte (01:04:57):
In fact, that's where I get most of my understanding what the hell's going on in Intel, cuz it's very, very confusing, but he actually years ago said Intel should split into two companies. This integrated solution is not gonna, is not gonna be a good solution. And it turns out he was right it's it was one of the reasons Intel struggled with new technologies. They got osified fossilized stuck. And because TSMC didn't have to worry about you know, being an integrated company, they were able to leapfrog them. But now Gelsinger has at least decided he's gonna try to change Intel's tune. You think they'll succeed to Andrew,

Devindra Hardawar (01:05:37):
You know, I've, I've been covering Intel for a, for a while and AMD and all the big chip chip companies. It does seem like they've been affected by the innovators dilemma, you know, for a while I think at least within the last decade and now we're seeing AMD come up with like much, much better mobile chips and desktop chips, like the competitions heating up and also with what apples do. I, I think Intel has a chance of doing something really interesting here. It's a big bet and this is kind of the thing Intel his need to make. We just recently saw their 12th gen chips, which have this new like hybrid design, which I think is a really interesting idea. And that is something like we saw on is this, that big,

Leo Laporte (01:06:15):
Big, big thing where you have efficiency course and performance course, and this is basically, yeah, this is what apple has done so well with. Yeah. 

Devindra Hardawar (01:06:22):
And yeah, yeah. And snap dragon chips as well. Mobile chips have been doing that. Yeah. it is interesting to see that come to laptops, you know, and desktops and Intel's leaning in on that. AMD still has the the, the lead on like manufacturing making them in smaller sizes. So Intel's just kind of racing to catch up at that level. They kind of have to do something like this, you know, it's a big bet and this company just can't keep doing what it's doing right now when apple can just build mobile chips that blow pretty much all their desktop hardware outta the water. Yeah. So yeah, I, I can't of tell if it'll work, but we need capacity. I think the big problem right now that we're facing with the whole global chip interest industries that we've relied so much on a couple companies that make all the chips. And if something happens in that pipeline, like we're all kind of, so many industries just kind of like start to fall apart. So I, I think it's smart for Intel. Clearly there's a demand for this stuff. And I think we're like, we're gonna have more and more of a demand for anything that requires chips right now. So yeah, it should pay off even if it's not Intel zone chips being

Leo Laporte (01:07:29):
Built there. One of the things that Thompson's points out in his article on Strat tech is that Intel actually ended up going to TSMC saying, can you make our chips? Yep. Which was kind of crazy, cuz here you are, this is your biggest competitor. And you're actually giving them capital to continue to whoop your <laugh>. But it, it actually was maybe part of this transition to, you know, kind of two different businesses, the design business and the fab business and the design business needs to get a its designs made somewhere and it doesn't have to always be an Intel company. It's very, it'll be very interesting. I think are they building in Texas too? I think they are 

Devindra Hardawar (01:08:10):
They're building in Arizona as well. Arizona also

Leo Laporte (01:08:12):
Arizona 20 billion.

Devindra Hardawar (01:08:14):
They're that is really interesting. I'm really interested to see what happens down here in the south too, like American manufacturing is something that we've kind of just ignored for so long. And now that you know, we're thinking hard about like where stuff is being built and what we can invest in here now too. Right? Like they're still trying to pass the chips built, which hasn't what hasn't gone through the house yet, I believe. So like there, there's still things we could be doing certainly down here in the south after Rivian announced that they're gonna be building stuff here in Georgia, it's gonna be really exciting to see like where manufacturing moves around in the us.

Dwight Silverman (01:08:52):
Yeah. In Texas it's AMD mm-hmm <affirmative> in Austin and Samsung also is gonna do chips in in Austin. And one of the things that, you know, that I think is really interesting and I'm curious about how this will work out is if freeing up Intel from having married manufacturing with design, if it will ex accelerate the innovation in their design you know, Intel's to theory, right? Yes. Right, right. But how, how, how would that work? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> what would, what, what exactly is the mechanism there that would cause that to happen?

Leo Laporte (01:09:28):
Well, I think the, the premise, at least Ben's premise is they were being held back because their fab capabilities were not developing at the same speed as their design capabilities. So they couldn't design future chips. That's why they ended up getting fab at TSMC. And remember Intel couldn't get below 10 nanometers. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I, I think they still are struggling to get below 10 to gears.

Devindra Hardawar (01:09:48):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:49):
So, so in a way they, whatever their design teams wanted to do, they were very much limited with what their, their fabs could make. So this is probably smart to decouple. The two now let's see what they've got. Good designers, Gelsinger designed the 4 86. Let's not forget he's a designer by trade. He understands this my first CPU.

Devindra Hardawar (01:10:08):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I will.

Leo Laporte (01:10:10):
<Laugh>

Dwight Silverman (01:10:11):
Well it's the one thing about this is though is that, is that if their limitation was the fabs and their capabilities impacting their design, where, where will Intel the design company go? Aren't they more TSMC, but, but PSM C is won't have the capacity. They may not.

Leo Laporte (01:10:32):
And everything else buys up all their capacity. Yeah. TC. So

Devindra Hardawar (01:10:34):
What happens building more too? They're

Leo Laporte (01:10:36):
Building a lot more. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. But,

Dwight Silverman (01:10:38):
So, so, so, but what is to keep Intel from just keep going back to Intel now as an independent company and still having that limitation.

Leo Laporte (01:10:47):
Well, that's, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, that's gonna be one of the potential pitfalls. And as I said, these pivots, traditionally don't go so well. <Laugh> right. There's a long history failed pivots like this, but splits,

Dwight Silverman (01:11:00):
You know, split one of the most interesting splits right now, I think is H HP and HPE that's gone. Great. Hasn't it? That has gone great. HPE or H HP. Yeah. It, it has,

Leo Laporte (01:11:13):
I mean, look at the HP's making its the HP divisions making its best PCs ever. I can't, I don't know how well HPE is doing the enterprise division, but I, my sense is it's not doing badly. Why did you laugh? Is it bad?

Devindra Hardawar (01:11:25):
I'm thinking, I'm thinking maybe I'm thinking back to like HPE from several years ago. I don't know. No, they've

Dwight Silverman (01:11:31):
They've they've made a good recovery, have gotten, they've gotten pretty good. With selling cloud computing servers, they're they sell, they sell a variety of services. They have moved here to Houston. The, the company is now based in Houston and and what's interesting is a lot of the, a lot of the people, the older executives are from the old compact days when they were built servers here. So it's kind of been in fact, Antonio ne who is the CEO worked here and was part of the compact server group and HP when HP had it. And so it's kind of a homecoming for them. They're they're doing pretty well from what I could tell.

Devindra Hardawar (01:12:10):
They're good. I'm remembering that that awful deal they made remember with autonomy. Yes. So it's like that that's the last major headline in my head, but yeah, yeah,

Dwight Silverman (01:12:20):
That was

Leo Laporte (01:12:21):
That's Leo Apotheker and that was why HP and HP split really BLI. Right. That was, that was the, the straw that broke the camels spec. I'm looking at HP's stock over its over the last five years. And it's pretty, it's not, it's not going through the roof. It looks a lot like Microsoft did before it's pivot. But I do have to say at least from the consumer side HP's making the best computers they've made in years. Really much nicer, much more interesting design.

Devindra Hardawar (01:12:47):
Really good. Better than like what Lenovo and some other yes. Yeah. Lenovo has gone real downhill.

Leo Laporte (01:12:53):
Yeah. So maybe the story really is that they got rid of that lead balloon called HPE and they could finally do their, they got rid of the enterprises. I feel

Devindra Hardawar (01:13:01):
Like that's kind of it at least that's the way I've been

Leo Laporte (01:13:03):
Seeing it. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's really the, the story. Let's take a little break. We'll have more dive Hardwar and gadget. Wonderful to have you how's the baby.

Devindra Hardawar (01:13:13):
She's good. She's she's three. She turned three in October. We tried to do

Leo Laporte (01:13:17):
This show during nap time during,

Devindra Hardawar (01:13:19):
I mean, no it's dinner time now. So my wife has to do dinner and baby put down. So I'm sorry. It's always rough. But my wife also likes your work Leo. So, you know, she knows the whole

Leo Laporte (01:13:30):
That's nice of her. It helps put the baby to sleep anything for Leo

Devindra Hardawar (01:13:34):
That's that's the

Leo Laporte (01:13:36):
Motto. It puts the baby to sleep. We know the real reason. Dwight Silverman also here. You're the, the you're are you back at the Chronicle? I see your by line at the Chronicle again. What's going on Dwight?

Dwight Silverman (01:13:46):
Well, I'm doing I am freelancing my column, so it's still there once a week and it's essentially what it was before I, I retired. And then of Forbes for seven months, your

Leo Laporte (01:13:57):
Retirement is <laugh> I think I know is gonna it's like Frank Sinatra. I think it's <laugh>

Dwight Silverman (01:14:03):
I, I have on most of my social media bios, not good at retirement <laugh> and and that's true. I don't good for you. That's true. Well, and but, but the other, the other fun thing is, is that you know, I have found that I am incredibly busy with my free time. It's not like I'm like sitting around, you know, binging Netflix, although when we're done, I gotta go finish watching Ozark, but oh

Leo Laporte (01:14:29):
Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (01:14:30):
But, but it's, it's like, it's, I'm incredibly busy with life and so it's it's, it's pretty wonderful.

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
You know, it's funny cuz I, I talk a lot about retiring and you know, I'm 65 it's when you would normally take the gold watch. We're the same age. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Get the little banquet. They'd say you were great last 40 years. Goodbye. and now and then, so I'm kind of looking at this idea and now I'm thinking I don't, I don't, what would I do? <Laugh> that'd be boring. What would do it do? I

Dwight Silverman (01:14:59):
Would just, if you're still having fun, you know, and you still, this is easy.

Leo Laporte (01:15:03):
This isn't exactly work. I mean, it's not like I'm digging ditches or you know, laying railroad tracks. I'm just sitting here in a chair assing. So <laugh>,

Dwight Silverman (01:15:15):
It's not even that what this is, that's what this

Leo Laporte (01:15:17):
Is. It's not even as hard as writing. It's like just <laugh> so I'm figuring, you know, okay. As long as people will have me, I'll probably end up doing this for a long time. I'm sorry, John. John wants to retire, but I we stick around for a little bit anyway, if you wanna see all of Dwight's writing, he's got it all under one roof now, which is kind of cool. This is a three, a U T H O R y.com/d Silverman. And so you are keeping busy. There's quite a few articles here. So you,

Dwight Silverman (01:15:48):
Yeah, this is a, this is, this is a subscription service 

Leo Laporte (01:15:52):
Subscription for you. Not for the reason for

Dwight Silverman (01:15:54):
Me. Right, right. But it's, there's no ads on it. You can go in there. You can, it actually will set up as like an email. Oh, that's nice alert when I have a new story. It is it aggregates from all of my past work and anything I do now it's it is if you're a freelancer who writes at a lot of different places, it is a great way to have everything all in one place. I'm not getting any money for saying that. It's just as it's kind of a no you're giving them a problem. Yeah. Yes, yes. It was. It was a problem I had and they solved it for me. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:16:28):
Well, I'm really glad it actually is a great solution. If Devor had done that, they'd be paid after page after page. <Laugh> all right. Thank you. It's good to have Dwight and D vendor here. Our show today always pleased to welcome new Relic to our show. As our sponsor, I am, I've known about new Relic since back in the day, when they were a Ruby on rails solution. These days, new Relic is just a must have, have for anybody. Who's gotta keep a stack running. You know how that feels that nine o'clock call or maybe 3:00 AM call where you're, you know, you're kind of winding down, maybe watching a little Ozark and the phone rings and something's down, something's broken and you're going, what is it? What could it be? Is it, is it that fix? I just pushed is the back end. Is the front end?

Leo Laporte (01:17:19):
Is it global? Is it the server? Is it the network? Is it the cloud provider? Do we have slow running queries? And now suddenly you've got a team scrambling. They're going from tool to tool. They're slacking you they're they're, they're calling you. They're buzzing your beeper, trying to figure out what's going on. It's just like an anthill that somebody just kicked. If only you had a system for figuring out what's going wrong, weirdly enough, such a thing exists, they call it observability. New Relic just did a report. Only half of all organizations are implementing observability for their networking systems. And, and it's a huge issue that you can solve with new Relic. New Relic is a umbrella for 16 different monitoring products. You'd buy 'em separately. Maybe you'd try to make 'em work together, but you don't have to. With new Relic, you'll get a application monitoring APM.

Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
So you can build new Relic into your tooling on across the board apps. Microservices. In fact, it's so good that if you have an error in your code, it can tell you the line number can tell you, you know, what, what your Stack's doing. You can get a, an instant feedback, which makes it much easier to fix what's wrong. You get, if you use Kubernetes, you'll love pixie for observability distributed tracing. You see, you can see all your traces without management, headaches, fine and fixed issues. Fast network performance monitoring, stop guessing where performance issues start ditch data silos for a system-wide correlated view so much more the 16 tools. That's just four of them. And I love it that you can note instantly. Exactly. Look at the companies that use new Relic, 14,000 companies, DoorDash, GitHub, CloudFlare Atlasian epic games. Everybody loves new Relic because it solves that problem.

Leo Laporte (01:19:10):
With 9:00 PM phone own call, you push a button, see what's wrong and fix it and go back to Ozark or whatever you're doing. You could be kniting. I don't care whether you run a Cloudnative startup or a fortune 500 company, it takes five minutes to start new Relic up, get it going in your environment and get ready for this no credit card required. You get a hundred gig, a data free forever. And for many people that's plenty. If you need more, you can get more, but you really want to get new Relic. You before that 9:00 PM call it's just, it's just out there waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does sign up at new relic.com/twi, N E w R E L i.com/twi. And if you're boss, you want, wanna see some smiles? Ask your team. Hey guys, do we need new Relic? Oh boy, they'll go. Yes. We thought you'd never ask or more likely they'll say yeah, we've been using it. You wanna get, you wanna get more new relic.com/twi, N E w R E L I C. New relic.com/t w I T. I love this company. I love these guys and they do such a good job and you definitely need it. New Relic.

Leo Laporte (01:20:22):
Okay. Oh, I wanted to ask you, I'm asking everybody. This is pixel week. We got the January update. I know DRA you've you you've covered it. I see Dwight. You've covered it. Has it fixed your, I personally, I love the pixel six. I've not had any problems. Fingerprint reader works great. Never stops, never crashes. I just love it, but everybody I know hates it. How's your pixel six. These,

Devindra Hardawar (01:20:48):
I don't actually don't have one. I think I wrote up piece of that news, but yeah, I, I, I want to play with it because it looks like the most interesting phone. Google has made such

Leo Laporte (01:20:56):
A camera. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly think there's hardware issues or a QC issue because I, I don't have the problems. A lot of people report very Joe Foley says the fingerprint reader doesn't work for her. Somebody call today on the radio show said, yeah, it doesn't even ask for a fingerprint. It just, it just

Dwight Silverman (01:21:12):
Sits there. <Laugh> yeah. I, I had a review unit and I did not have any of the problems with the review unit that that other folks had. I did not get it from Google and I got it from from a carrier, but very, you know, I did not have any problems with it. All. I liked the phone. I had to send it back, so I don't get a chance to see what the updates are like. And by the way, if you hear any crinkling or other sounds, my cat got into the room and he's in that's.

Devindra Hardawar (01:21:41):
Okay. I heard some yelling. Yeah, yes,

Dwight Silverman (01:21:44):
Yes. He's in the room and he'll maybe he'll be quiet, but he's in this that's okay.

Leo Laporte (01:21:47):
We love it's of

Dwight Silverman (01:21:48):
Tube and and he, so there's a little crank on, oh, I hear. And he may, he may jump on me. He likes to get like right here.

Leo Laporte (01:21:56):
Are you actually the, I think you're in the cat's room.

Dwight Silverman (01:21:59):
I am in the cat's room and that's why they're mad. That's why they were trying to get this room. This is my wife's office. <Laugh> and and when she is in here that like, they, they sit on her lap or, and she's a psychotherapist and does zoom sessions. And so her clients are used to her, but you know, so you may see, you may see Milo on my chest.

Leo Laporte (01:22:22):
<Laugh> okay. Well, right. So I guess nothing to say. I mean, the, the January update is out is rolled out. We'll talk more about it. I'm sure. On twig, I'm curious. Cause aunt Pruitts had a lot of problems. I'm curious if it fixed any of his problems, this was the update that was supposed to come out last month.

Devindra Hardawar (01:22:37):
It's such a shame, cuz this was supposed to be the iPhone killer for them. Right? Like it so much seemed good. I was like, as an iOS user, I was like really jealous of some of the things I was seeing on that phone and then this is happening and it just kind of reminds that Google's so bad at consumer products sometimes like so many things are so bad. I have nest thermostat that is always losing its internet connection. I don't know why. So yeah. It's so

Dwight Silverman (01:23:01):
Frustrating. It's it's not an iPhone killer. It's a good phone. It is probably the best the best phone that Google has done, but it is not an iPhone killer. Mainly because while Google has created you know, a really decent piece of hardware and Android 12 is interesting. Android 12 is just not as easy to use as iOS still mm-hmm <affirmative> and and so, you know, to be able to pick it up and kind of do the things that Google talents isn't necessarily always the simplest thing to do. I

Leo Laporte (01:23:35):
Honestly think that that's the selling point <laugh> believe it or not. The iPhone is just what the iPhone is. The iPhone is what it is. Don't mess with it cuz that's you can't <laugh> yeah. Although that's not the case now

Devindra Hardawar (01:23:48):
Marriage, go

Dwight Silverman (01:23:48):
Ahead. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that's not the case now. I mean, I think you could really customize an iPhone now. Yeah. I mean

Leo Laporte (01:23:54):
Right now, but not degree that you can't no,

Dwight Silverman (01:23:57):
Not to the degree, but it's, it's it, you know, beginning with kind of this stuff with shortcuts and the ability to change, even, even the look of the phone's. So it looks completely different. Shortcut

Leo Laporte (01:24:09):
Made the iPhone a lot harder to use. Right. You know, what else made the, I felt harder to use is this new focus feature. I felt terrible the other night. Lisa's desperately trying to figure out how to only allow text messages from her son he's he's Michael's down the hall from us BS COVID and who sealed his door? <Laugh> with caulking. So we wanna be, if he needs something, we wanna know how to, you know, slide something under the door or whatever. And and it's like, you know, we're at bedtime. I'm I'm going to sleep. She says, I can't figure out this focus thing. Could you help me? And I'm saying the tech guy doesn't take calls after 9:00 PM, go away. Helpline is closed. Helpline is closed. I don't wanna help you, but it's not because I don't wanna help her. It's because it is hard to figure out I can't figure it out for the life. The focus mode

Devindra Hardawar (01:24:59):
Stuff is super unintuitive. And what I'm saying is more like the iPhone is a perfect expression of apples, hardware, and software. I kind of felt like the pixel six was going to be that even if it's

Dwight Silverman (01:25:10):
Didn't get, it's not, it's not still

Leo Laporte (01:25:11):
Even that. I mean, but that's why I like Android, cuz it is very kind of infinitely customizable. And that's one of the features of Android. 12 is, you know, your wallpaper changes the colors on your phone and things like that. It's yeah. Nothing apple would ever do.

Dwight Silverman (01:25:27):
And I'm not sure I want it to do

Leo Laporte (01:25:28):
That. Yeah, no, exactly. You know, I'm not sure I that's

Dwight Silverman (01:25:31):
Right. Yeah. Leave my phone alone. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:25:35):
All right. Moving, moving on. I get off my phone, get off my phone. I don't want get outta there.

Leo Laporte (01:25:44):
You know, it's it's really, I want to use the pixel sit. I have a, a Samsung smart watch. I use Linux. I wanna be in an, but the problem is the apple ecosystem is so integrated. You can't productive. You can't use an apple watch with it and I wanna use, so it ends up just sucking you into this all apple ecosystem, which I'm not happy. I don't think that's the right thing, but

Devindra Hardawar (01:26:10):
I mean, isn't that what we want. We want easy to use, easy to use hardware and gadgets and software and everything integrated. And you give up a little freedom for that. But I sure love the ability to just like, you know, pop up with my laptop. That's a airplane, my TV slippery slope.

Leo Laporte (01:26:26):
He is willing to give up a little freedom for ease of use <laugh> I think Ben Franklin said this didn't he that's

Dwight Silverman (01:26:33):
Right. Something

Leo Laporte (01:26:35):
Nice.

Dwight Silverman (01:26:35):
Smartphone

Leo Laporte (01:26:36):
Could keep it tyranny. Yeah. IRS, this is gonna be really interesting to see people react to this is going to start requiring face recognition scans to access your taxes online. That's gonna happen this year. They're using a service, a company called id.me starting in summer 2022. You will. And this is, you know, it's all about secure, right? But this is going beyond two factor mm-hmm <affirmative> you'll have to create an account with id.me. And you will have to send them a scan of your driver's license or a government issued ID, or you'll have to prove you, or you copies of utility or insurance bills. Maybe they'll ask you questions about your mobile phone service, but you're go, it's going a lot farther to, to say you are you. And I guess this is all because there, I guess the IRS is experiencing a lot of fraud. I don't know. It says 27 states are using id.me. This is from Krebs on security 27 states use id.me cause of identity theft with benefits is becoming such a problem. But I think people are gonna go, well, you want me what? And you ha sometimes you have to do a video of yourself, a selfie video of yourself, a live video chat. What do you think is I, on the one hand, this is smart for security, but boy ID me is gonna have all of our information.

Dwight Silverman (01:28:14):
It's also complicated. And for people who don't, who, who aren't, you know, there are people who are not necessarily you know, tech savvy that use on online filing for their taxes and online access for their taxes. That may be the most advanced thing they do. Yeah. And for them, this is just gonna, I have a, I have a feeling this will not stand. This will not be immediately required. I think it'll be optional and maybe you'll work into it over time, but it's not it, yeah, this, this will stand.

Devindra Hardawar (01:28:47):
This seems like it's an ongoing story because actually last fall they announced that there would, there would be some sort of like stronger biometric authentication. But I was looking at, you know, some of the reporting from this past week and even the IRS is saying like, it's not true. Like you, you don't have to submit you know, facial, facial authentication. That sounds more,

Dwight Silverman (01:29:07):
That's more reasonable.

Devindra Hardawar (01:29:08):
So it's like, yeah. So it's like makes more reasonable. Yeah. Maybe they're in the process of like setting this up and there's certainly issues with relying on a single company to do this. But yeah. I,

Leo Laporte (01:29:17):
Especially a private company. Yeah. <Affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So maybe it isn't gonna happen this summer. Although if you go to the sign-in page, it says it is <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> so I don't,

Devindra Hardawar (01:29:32):
You know, this is there, there's a comment from the IRS and the Gizmoto thing. Okay. That you guys have linked to. So there's way at the bottom and then seems like the SA the spokesperson misspoke at the beginning. No, no,

Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
But no, this is an IRS page. We are bringing you an improved sign experience. You won't be able to log in with your existing IRS username and passwords starting in summer 2022. If you're a new user, please create an account with id.me. This is not a spokesperson. This is their site. I'm very confused. Can

Devindra Hardawar (01:30:02):
E-File you can e-file without uploading a selfie or any of that. So some things

Leo Laporte (01:30:06):
You'll think more if you wanna hang out, some things you'll have to do. And that, I mean, that makes sense because not everybody has a smartphone or a laptop with a camera mm-hmm <affirmative>. I mean, now, you know, if you're just a normal person <laugh> what are you gonna, you have to go down to a drug store or something and get a borrow some's smartphone. It doesn't

Devindra Hardawar (01:30:24):
I please notarize my IRS authentication. Yeah. That's what

Leo Laporte (01:30:28):
IRS told Gizmoto that users can still receive basic information from the website with, without logging in, but added, they will need to sign in through id.me to make and view payments, access tax records, viewer create payment plans, manage communications preference, or view tax professional authorizations. Then the IRS spokeperson later said the information he provided was not accurate <laugh>

Devindra Hardawar (01:30:54):
So, so this sounds like a government around like, you know, situation.

Dwight Silverman (01:31:01):
So I wonder if there's, if is any way that they could, if there's any way that, that the IRS could leverage the biometrics built into things like windows hello, or yeah. The iPhone. Yeah. Well, so that you don't have to use something like IDB, but that's true. Yeah. Where, where you essentially create a hash with face ID and that is used to log in. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (01:31:26):
That would require government that can actually build those things. And yes. And we're having communicating,

Leo Laporte (01:31:33):
I am gonna give credit also because we've had so many terrible government websites going back to the ACA and everything. But have, did you get your COVID tests today? Yeah. Did you, how fast that site is? How well it worked. Yes. And

Dwight Silverman (01:31:48):
They, yes. And, and they came, I got my yesterday

Leo Laporte (01:31:53):
I don't know who, who set this up, but it's a snappy site. It's easy to order and you gotta figure there's a lot of people using it. Actually the us government actually has and I can't remember what the address was, but has a analytics site that that's open to all. Let me see if it's analytics. Oh, that's right. The data.gov USA do gov. Yeah. You could see this. So this is if you, you can narrow it down to just the postal service, which is, I guess what's running this. Yes. it, it was more than a quarter of a million. When I went there on Wednesday. There are 1.2, 9 billion visits to the postal service over the last 90 days. This is actually really a great of information here. Right now there are quarter of a million people on government websites right now, number one, us up us PS, then COVID home tests, then us PS, then COVID tests and then login.gov. So there, you know, the vast bulk of it is people getting COVID tests right now.

Devindra Hardawar (01:32:57):
It's surprisingly good. I wish it had come year when we did tests. Absolutely. Right before the leaves. Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:33:04):
Okay. It's better than not better than ever. Somebody, some, I don't know if it's us digital services. I I've gotta find out who designed that cuz that site is fast it's reliable. And even at the peak right after it was just announced it didn't crash. It didn't crash.

Devindra Hardawar (01:33:20):
I'm sure there was a lot of pressure to make sure that site worked because it's like, we can't, we can't ensure election laws, but we can make sure people get their COVID tests. Okay, good.

Leo Laporte (01:33:31):
Okay. Let's do something right. Do something. Right. So I just want to say credit work credits due cuz you're right. Not a great history of government <laugh> websites and tech. This one worked pretty well. And by the way, they're using log four J to keep track of all the logins. So you can be sure <laugh> no, I dunno. I hope not. Let's let's cross your fingers. Speaking of government, Senate committee has voted to advance the Amy Klobuchar Marsha Blackburn antitrust bill. It was in the judiciary committee passed Thursday 16 to six. This is the American innovation and choice online act that requires companies like Amazon, Google, apple do not favor their own products in their search results, surprising that they could get a bipartisan agreement on anything.

Devindra Hardawar (01:34:33):
I think it's the one thing Democrats and Republicans can

Leo Laporte (01:34:35):
Agree on that agree on big tech is the a hundred amendments were offered at the start of market. The Mark's only three hours was only a were debated. They were able to move it through pretty quickly. Now I'm not sure, you know, I mean that's another step. You know, I'm not sure what the next steps are because I did not watch schoolhouse rock. So I do not know how a bill becomes law, but <laugh> even, even CNBC says the Bill's path to approval by the full full Senate is still murky <laugh>

Devindra Hardawar (01:35:09):
And I mean, there's, there's something happening on the house side too of

Leo Laporte (01:35:13):
This. Yes. They're doing the same thing on that side. And then they do a reconciliation basically bill Mitch McConnell and has to say, okay, <laugh> we'll, we'll let you vote on that. So there, you know, there's, it's not just Mitch it's whoever's who I don't even know who's in charge anymore. Is it Chuck Schumer, Schumer, Chuck Scher Schumer. And, but he's, he's in charge. It's kind of a joint sharing things. So yeah, so they have to bring it up for a vote. But meanwhile boy, our apple, Google, Microsoft lobbying like crazy Ted Cruz, this must have been a hell of a phone call, had a 40, he said this, the market had a 40 minute phone call with Tim cook to discuss it.

Devindra Hardawar (01:35:57):
Just Tim cook, like saying the same thing over and over again. You know, Ted? No, no, Ted can't pass this.

Leo Laporte (01:36:03):
Yeah, but Ted <laugh> of course, how do you fill apple again? Yeah. Apple's point of view is if, if you pass this, then we will, we, our app store will, the security will be harmed. It'll make harder. It'll make it harder for apple to let consumers out of monitoring from apps. You know, that check that IDFA box crew said, I don't, I don't think that's the case. You know, big lobbying against this, which probably means it's the right thing to do. I would guess. I don't know. I don't know. But the, it, it passed with a very big majority mm-hmm so we

Devindra Hardawar (01:36:42):
Shall see, it'd be interesting if they actually start, if this all, all goes through and become law and we're actually looking at what these companies are doing more crucially too, right? Like I think it's targeting companies with a ton of users, right? Like a large amount of people who have big, big, big tech that has market its way and then can help to avoid things like the way Google can prioritize their own links or Amazon can prioritize their own products within their search. Cuz it's something I look at, I see it happening in front of me. And then I see Amazon starting to make products that I know we're being sold by other companies, you know, and that they under Amazon basics and it's like, all this stuff is happening and we are kind of just powerless to stop these giant companies from absorbing everything and making everything their own. We need to do more so hope this leads to something much

Leo Laporte (01:37:28):
Mixed feelings about this. I don't know what the right thing to do is I agree. I mean I would like too much power. We all would like better control of our data <affirmative> but I also don't fully trust Congress's motivations here. Some of it seems to be more like we wanna knock down section two 30 and we don't want to be censored on Twitter or, oh, they're always

Dwight Silverman (01:37:55):
Try to stick that in. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (01:37:57):
I just, I, I have very mixed feelings, but there's also,

Dwight Silverman (01:38:00):
There's also benefits to this. You know, for example, my daughter is furnishing a town home. She needed a new a new garbage can. She bought one, saw it. I said, oh, that's a simple human can, you know, it's very slick for styles and you know what, it's Amazon basics. Oh, she paid about a half of it and it looks very much like simple human and it's, it's be of quality and it's less expensive, but for her, there's a benefit to that. But,

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
But grocery stores have been doing for years.

Dwight Silverman (01:38:36):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:38:37):
Why is it somehow different if, if Amazon does it, mm-hmm <affirmative>

Devindra Hardawar (01:38:41):
Amazon. I mean, Amazon sees the data too of what's happening. And they also, I I think like they have more, but so do the grocery stores,

Leo Laporte (01:38:48):
Grocery store every day, they know yeah. How much olive oil they sell. And they could have a house brand, olive oil. They, they, they sell access to the end caps. That's actually grocery stores make most of their money, not by selling you groceries, but by positioning right. Product placement

Devindra Hardawar (01:39:05):
And Costco and others, like put their names on things that are actually manufactured at they brand places to you. Like, you know? Yeah. It's something that

Leo Laporte (01:39:12):
Happens out for doing something that everybody else has done. Just

Devindra Hardawar (01:39:16):
Think it's the scale. It is. It's the scale. And we've talked about this before, too, like nobody elected mark Zuckerberg to be you know, leader of the world internet, but that's essentially what he has become. Right. And we are powerless. We are powerless against what Facebook is doing. And other countries like these things have blown up so much that I think at the very least government kind of wants some controls or some ability to push back. And we can't, we've seen what happens when industry especially in America is fully untapped, you know, and like has full control over everything. So there needs to be a conversation. I I'm not

Leo Laporte (01:39:50):
Any government, I'm not, I'm not a knee jerk antigovernment guy. And I don't, I don't go along with the people say, well, the government can't possib, figure out how to regulate this because they're so old fashioned, no, this is have, will the people.

Devindra Hardawar (01:40:04):
Yeah. Yeah. We have traffic signals. We have S you can figure this out out. It's like this is tech and government working together to save lives and, you know, make things better for consumers. I always work.

Leo Laporte (01:40:13):
I want it to make that's exactly it. I want it to make it better for consumers, not worse and apple Apple's contention. And of course is in their self-interest is, well, this is just gonna make things worse. You don't understand the unintended consequences. It's just gonna make things worse.

Devindra Hardawar (01:40:27):
We need to highlight our own apps before other apps. It's important. <Laugh>, it's so important.

Dwight Silverman (01:40:32):
So I would say the vendor, I would take exception to the notion that mark Zuckerberg is the defacto king of the internet. And there's nothing we could do about it. You don't have to use Facebook.

Devindra Hardawar (01:40:45):
But you, you are using Facebook, right? Like here, this is the thing we know if if you delete your account, you know, and other people still have you tag, like

Dwight Silverman (01:40:55):
You that's Facebook easy you. Yeah. And that, so, but you don't have to use Facebook to access news stories, to communicate with your friends, to you know, to get the news of the day. It depends on where you are, turn it off.

Devindra Hardawar (01:41:10):
If you're in a lot of international countries, WhatsApp is the defacto way you talk with each other. And Facebook has done a lot of work to make sure, Hey, we are the prior, like, we're the way companies we're the way people communicate, right? We, we have subsidized internet in other countries and things like that. There are a lot of ways. Facebook is basically underlying communication throughout the world. And it's not as simple as just saying stop using WhatsApp if you're or families in Asia or something, because you kinda have to

Leo Laporte (01:41:35):
The justice department, we talked about this on I think it was on twig on Wednesday and the FTC are asking a request for comment about how they should treat mergers.

Dwight Silverman (01:41:50):
Right. This, this also came up when we were talking about division

Leo Laporte (01:41:54):
Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. So part of this is that the antitrust laws, you know, the Sherman antitrust act and what's the other one's name? I can't remember are a little antiquated. And so their question is, how does this change, you know, how does the modern world change what we should what we should how we should treat this. In other words, traditionally we've considered consumer harm, but are there harms that perhaps are more subtle that we don't pay attention to things like reducing innovation, which, you know, that's a serious concern. And also the, this issue of, and this is a complicated one, Monomy power. If so, monopoly, I monopoly is one seller to many consumers. Monopsony is the opposite. There's only one buyer, and this is a particular issue in the labor market. If there's one big company is the only company hiring engineers. They have huge power over that market. And so they're trying to understand that a little bit better. That's a big Monomy I believe was Alina Conn issue when she was a professor mm-hmm <affirmative> she's of course, the new chairman of the FTC and has written, wrote papers as an academic complaining about the power of Facebook.

Devindra Hardawar (01:43:18):
She she's the one who's basically like yeah, deconstructed the way Amazon works and says why it's anti-consumer even though the, the regular argument is like, yeah, sure. Prices are cheaper, so it's better. Right, right, right. But I think it is more complicated than that and yeah, I, I hope she ends up doing great work at the FTC. But Leo, I mean, you, you probably remember like how hard the government was against mergers, like back in the, what sixties and seventies too. Right. Like I remember, like, I've read stories about like grocery stores in California. Yeah. And how, how much the government was like these two tiny little chains can't come together because it would be a percentage too much, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:43:57):
I think it all changed under, in, in the Reagan era. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> in the in late eighties and early nineties under Bush as well, and even Clinton where they just did not as aggressively pursue a litigation against mergers. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (01:44:12):
Greed is good. It's the

Leo Laporte (01:44:13):
GRE is GRE is the greed is good. That's right. Right.

Dwight Silverman (01:44:16):
But then the, but preceding that preceding, that was the at and T breakup, which was kind of, you know, the, the undoing of that, which to, you know, interestingly at and T is kind of reconstituted, but it's not the power that it, that it once was. But, but that was kind of the pinnacle of that era of trespasing

Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
Threats to potential competition. That's of course the accusation of against Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp is to prevent Instagram was tiny when they bought it. Why would the FTC have of that merger? Well, because it was taking a nascent competitor out of the market. And so they want to consider that as well. It's

Devindra Hardawar (01:44:58):
A, and, and that one is kind of tough too, cuz I was, I was reporting on startups, you know, when that deal happened. So between in the span of a couple weeks, Instagram went from being a company where I could like email the CEOs, you know, to say, Hey, how how's your user growth going? And to being a billion dollar company, you know? And I don't think anybody was prepared for the whiplash of that. And that is basically because Facebook had the power to be like, here's a billion dollars, you know, we see your future threat and nobody will ever give you this money. So why don't you take this acquisition? It was so big. The government had no way to really respond. And I think now after WhatsApp, after everything is really after this Microsoft division deal too, I do feel like there is more, the government is kinda seeing what's happening in the long term effects of some of these things you need coming together. Maybe there's gonna be smarter ways to push back against the stuff. I

Dwight Silverman (01:45:47):
Really don't. Yeah. In fact, looking back on what happened with Instagram and Facebook may have a big impact on whether activism and Microsoft come together because you know, it's essentially, it's, it's a, it's a huge acquisition for Microsoft and it potentially changes Microsoft and changes the entire landscape. Even though there are plenty of other game companies out there,

Leo Laporte (01:46:12):
We should point out this is, is just a request for comment, a request for information the FTC and the D this is the joint press release from the FTC and the department of justice say the comment period is open for 60 days. You have till March 21st, 2022. And, but then it isn't even after that, it's not really up to them. Congress ultimately tells, I think tells the FTC and the DOJ and, and the courts, frankly, you can bring a case, but but you know, the courts are gonna look at case law and they're gonna look at the laws themselves. So it isn't really ultimately up to FTC and DOJ, they can decide to prosecute, but it may go nowhere. So it's interesting. I think these are reasonable things to think about. I absolutely do. I would hope really the place that, that they should be thinking about is in Congress. Do we need an update to our antitrust laws now in the EU? The European parliament is absolutely moving with a laity. The members of the European parliament today or Thursday voted in favor of the digital services act.

Leo Laporte (01:47:23):
This is a big bill that covers the digital market has a lot of amendments, but it's among other things the most let's see the, they passed amendments, extending the limitation to sensitive personal data so that a company or a site can't collect political and religious beliefs, sexual orientation moral over, they decided online platform should not make denying consent for processing personal data, more complex than giving it. It shouldn't be harder to say no than it is to say, yes, mm-hmm <affirmative>. And this is a big one refusing consent to collect personal data should not be penalized by disabling functions.

Leo Laporte (01:48:11):
So this, I mean, I'm gonna, I haven't read this whole bill, it's a big one and there's a lot to it. And this has been much debated. They got a, a vote on measures against dark patterns. Article 13, a dark patterns are techniques designed to distort or impair recipients of services. Ability is to make free autonomous and informed decisions or choice. In other words, to trick you mm-hmm, <affirmative> it forbids the use of specific techniques to extort consent on personal data, for instance, via repeatedly showing popups <laugh> you sure. You sure really come on. You know it also prevents platforms from request such consent if users already chose via automated means. In other words, finally, that setting in your Firefox that says, do not track ask companies not to track. Maybe they'd have to listen to you, which they don't right now.

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
There's a lot more anonymity online all sorts of regulations now. I, I think, and I, this the way the EU works is a little confusing to me, but I think this is just advisory. I think that each member nation has to decide what to do about it. That's my sense of it, but the good. And you might say, well, what do we care if we're not in the EU? Of course, many of our listeners are so you would care, but even in the us, we should care because companies often are influenced by this. GDPR has absolutely changed how companies collect data. This is kind of the next step to GDPR, the digital services act. So it has been adopted. Now I think that the other shoe will be to wait and see what the countries do with that. That's my sense.

Devindra Hardawar (01:49:55):
Absolutely. And GDPR wasn't perfect, but it certainly like set the stage for companies to start thinking about the stuff more seriously. Yeah. And it

Leo Laporte (01:50:02):
Be get the California privacy act the CCP. Right. Right. And you

Dwight Silverman (01:50:06):
Know, and it has given us many more check boxes to control our cookies, cookies, more check boxes than we go to. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:50:13):
I literally now have an extension. <Laugh>

Dwight Silverman (01:50:15):
Oh, there's an extension for maybe

Leo Laporte (01:50:17):
It, I haven't seen it. I haven't seen a cookie consent form in a long time. Oh,

Dwight Silverman (01:50:22):
I need that. That'ss the,

Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
What's the, if you, do you use U block origin? <Affirmative> no, there's an ad blocker called U block origin. That has a check that has a feature you could say, no, I don't wanna see those anymore. And I <laugh>, and I almost don't even want to admit this, but I also have a Firefox extension that will bypass paywalls pirate

Devindra Hardawar (01:50:43):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:50:45):
Cause I'm, you know, well, no, the real reason is I pay for a lot of stuff. Yeah. and, but I, I, I don't, I want to, when I'm showing articles here and stuff, sometimes I just wanna show the article instead of having a bunch of logins and stuff. So this bypass is a huge number of paint walls. I shouldn't tell people about this, you know, about it. Don't I've heard things.

Devindra Hardawar (01:51:08):
I also know that the pockets and Insta paper are also really good if you, if you hit one of those, but I,

Leo Laporte (01:51:13):
When you're like article to be really clear, I pay for more than a dozen. I pay for Bloomberg. I pay for wired. I pay. But, but unfortunately, paywalls are so sucky. For instance, I pay for wired, good luck getting to a wired article. I log ins like it's ridiculous. Right. Right.

Devindra Hardawar (01:51:30):
So they, that happens so often, like, I, I pay you, let me log in easily, or remember me yes. In a, in a smart way. And they can't do that.

Leo Laporte (01:51:38):
So I just put this thing on and, you know, cuz, and by the way, for both, for wired and Bloomberg, even though I've paid for them, I can't still get around these things. And I just want to show you, show you the are well, one

Dwight Silverman (01:51:49):
Of, one of the best ways to get around them in a lot of cases is just to hit the reader mode on your browser. Right. That often will get you past it.

Leo Laporte (01:51:58):
Good tips. We're giving out good tips here, ladies and gentlemen. And here's another tip. If you buy an NFT on Twitter, you can have a hexagonal profile picture. Sure. Oh no. I'm unclear on this. Do, if you have Twitter blue,

Devindra Hardawar (01:52:19):
You have to link your NFT like yeah. Wallet with the, you

Leo Laporte (01:52:23):
Link your, your wallet and then, and then, but somebody point out this is a great way to, to just block bro. Cuz every time you see it. Absolutely. Exactly. And all that's right. Absolutely.

Devindra Hardawar (01:52:34):
You just, I would love to block everybody with.et at the end of their yeah.

Dwight Silverman (01:52:39):
Explain Twitter. We want an edit button. We don't want NFTs for our avatars

Devindra Hardawar (01:52:44):
<Laugh> and there, there is edit button. I think it implemented in the best way. Twitter could've right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:52:50):
The edit button delays you're sending that's all that's the only way could do it's a chance. Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (01:52:55):
But it gives you a chance to look at it. Make sure you made it has saved my button.

Leo Laporte (01:52:58):
It's the regrets. It's absolutely thes. It's the,

Devindra Hardawar (01:53:01):
It's the Gmail unsend button basically. And you don't want people posting things, having them be displayed and then taking stuff back. That would be a nightmare on an already nightmare service. Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (01:53:11):
I use, I use tweet bot for my both on the Mac and for my phone and it just added a feature that actually has been in, in Twitter. Terrific. For a while, where you, when you go to delete a, a tweet that you've done, one of your options is edit and delete and it takes the text and puts it in a new composition window and then deletes the old one. And then you can correct it. So it's for correcting. That's just cheating. It is cheating, but I will all your RT. I will definitely cheat.

Leo Laporte (01:53:44):
I am gonna confess that because I was so, you know, perturbed by this, I found a site that actually will make a hexagonal Twitter profile picture just for you. You can

Devindra Hardawar (01:53:57):
Use it instead. I'm not gonna do that as a silent protest.

Leo Laporte (01:53:59):
This is a silent. That's good. So what I did was that's good. I made it. I made it six-sided as, or see 1, 2, 3, 4. Is that a hexagon? Yeah. I guess that's a Hexa he is hex is five, five. No, that's a Pentagon. Yeah. And then there's an hexagon. A six. So you can make a stars. You can make it any, anything you want and then people will think you're a Bitcoin bro. So maybe you shouldn't <laugh>

Dwight Silverman (01:54:21):
Leo dot, et H yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:54:23):
I made my, I made mine a little, little. That's a excited one. Yeah. So I can't remember the cider. I would tell you I'll have it for you by by the, by twig. What should Spotify do about Joe Rogan? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that's think about that. We'll talk. When we come back, I wanna take a break. We we're running a little long in the tooth here and I want to tell you about our sponsor streak as a startup founder, as an entrepreneur, you know what it's like running your business from your inbox. You use Gmail, you need streak. Whether you're tracking sales, fundraising, hiring support streak is a CRM that is in Gmail. It lives in your inbox. Use streaks for email tools to check if their email, if your emails have been opened, send bulk emails with automated follow up emails to improve your response rates.

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Devindra Hardawar (01:57:05):
Somebody please stop Joe Rogan, stop him.

Leo Laporte (01:57:07):
Stop him. Rogan says I'm just a comedian. Of course that's what Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson also say on new year's Eve the program featured Robert Malone, a doctor who calls himself the inventor of RNA vaccines. He was banned from Twitter. You would think the inventor of the RNA vaccine would not circulate anti-vaccine misinformation. Youtube deleted recording of the podcast shortly after it was uploaded to the website by a third party, the letter says quote, by allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotifys, enabling its hosted media to damage public trust and scientific research. And so doubt in the credibility of data driven guidance offered by medical professionals. The signers asked Spotify to immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform. But is, is Spotify responsible for what Joe Rogan is?

Devindra Hardawar (01:58:06):
They're paying him for it. So, you know, I, I think in a, if he was on TV right. Or traditional network certainly. Yeah. And we see Fox doing this all the time, but there's certainly like limitations and things you can expect a network to do. Somebody is just outright lying, but again, Fox proves the point. Otherwise I guess what about

Leo Laporte (01:58:26):
The first amendment? I mean Rogan's first amendment says, says that the government can't tell you what to do. Oh no, I know Spotify has the right to do it. Right. But I mean, I think there would be reasonable for them to say, well, he has the right to say whatever he wants.

Dwight Silverman (01:58:41):
I think, I think that if you, that probably if he were to lose listeners viewers,

Leo Laporte (01:58:50):
Oh, then they do something. Yes. But I guarantee you, this is not losing listeners. This is gaining them.

Devindra Hardawar (01:58:57):
Yes, yes. The position won't won't do anything, but yeah, financial hit will certainly make Spotify rethink what's happening and that that's, it that's all these companies will listen to. So I would love for them to like take a moral stand at some point. But at the end of the day they have shareholders and they have shareholders. Right. And in people they need to like people who want them to make money. And it's really hard to take moral stances against that. 

Leo Laporte (01:59:19):
Brogan's podcast, number one on Spotify globally. And in the us last year I'm reading Bloomberg. They say 11 million people listen to the Joe Rogan experience. But I think that number comes from Joe Rogan. So <laugh> <laugh> Spotify does not say he Spotify paid him and again, no one knows it's estimated around a hundred million dollars to be exclusive on their platform. They have to be fair, deleted more than 40 episodes of a show to date. They've removed 20 Spotify hat, not

Dwight Silverman (01:59:53):
Spotify, not YouTube.

Leo Laporte (01:59:54):
Spotify Spotify's removed 20,000. Well, the first thing they do, it took all of the stuff down from YouTube cuz they own it now. So that different thing Spotify's removed 20,000 podcasts episodes for COVID misinformation. They do, you know, prohibit infringing in illegal content and hate speech. But they don't, I guess misinformation is the problem. Partly that's hard because it's hard to identify what's factual and what's not <affirmative>

Devindra Hardawar (02:00:23):
Except when he's out there denying like medical science. Yeah. You know? Well, and also there there's a clip going around of him. Like somebody presenting, you know, kind of facts about what's happening. And he rejects it. He screams at him.

Leo Laporte (02:00:37):
Yeah. Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (02:00:38):
Even though they are facts and it's pretty much in, in that segment that it's pretty much proven

Leo Laporte (02:00:44):
And he just, you know, yeah. He and the part of the problem according to scientists is he's, he's primarily listened to by young men <laugh> who are very influenced by him. I know my son was a big fan.

Devindra Hardawar (02:00:58):
He's poisoning like an entire generation. Yeah. Of guys right now. And I've I talked to people who really are into him after a certain point. Like it's like they live on another planet because of what Joe Rogan told them, you know? So there, there is harm there. I don't know. It would be nice if Spotify kind of stepped up and did something about it, but he's making them a ton of money. So of course they won't,

Leo Laporte (02:01:20):
It's the number one podcast, which I could say that <laugh> it's

Devindra Hardawar (02:01:27):
Okay. We'll have you replace your broken.

Leo Laporte (02:01:30):
Oh, there you go. Right. Go. There you go. There you go. But I that's the thing, I'm not gonna get 11 million listeners a month. That's crazy. I mean that's, I, I, you know, I wish I could you gotta be more provocative. Yeah. I gotta be that's. I mean, honestly, that's the key. Yeah. That's the key, right? That's how you generate listeners, you know, be, be, be controversial, be provocative. The fed has released a long away what the hell going on with COVID with COVID with Bitcoin, I confused the two, sorry, what's going on. <Laugh> the other thing. The other virus affecting the world, look at the price. That's today $429 down today, $5,819 down this week for $14,999 down this month. What if you, you know, if I feel sorry for El Salvador, that's their national currency. That's right. That's right. Talk about inflation.

Dwight Silverman (02:02:32):
<Laugh> in, in 2017 when the, when Bitcoin was like at its peak and I did this store, I think I've talked about at this before I did a story on Ethereum minors, buying up graphics cards. Tand I went into this woman's house in north Houston and she had turned her living room into a room full of, bit of Ethereum mining cages. Oh my God. And she had to, she had to beef up her air conditioning system in her house to do this well that's

Leo Laporte (02:03:00):
Thing. It's be great at that point, but cost you more as time goes by right to mine. Right.

Dwight Silverman (02:03:06):
And she, and, and, and I, so I thought, well, I'm gonna try, I, I need to learn about this. So I spent $20 on Bitcoin in back then and it peaked at one point at $122. My, and I thought, oh, I should cash out, but no, I'm gonna hold <laugh>. And

Leo Laporte (02:03:25):
You are my friend, a diamond hands. You are on a rocket

Dwight Silverman (02:03:30):
<Laugh> laser eyes, laser eyes. But, but it's now down to, like, when I last looked, it was down to like 70 bucks, my $20. So it's, it's, you know, what, what is

Leo Laporte (02:03:45):
My, I'm a skeptic? My I've lost half the value of my wa unlockable wallet. <Laugh> doesn't matter. The fed, the reason I bring this up, the fed has released a long wayed study on the digital dollar but refuses to take a, so thanks for nothing. The central bank's 40 page doctorate document explores, according to the CNBC plethora. Boy, I haven't seen that word in a while of issues and notes that the public comment the public comment will be solicited currency. I mean, we're almost digital as, as it is these days. Right.

Dwight Silverman (02:04:26):
But the dollar is digital for the most part. No, mm-hmm <affirmative>, I mean, I can't remember the last time I used cash for anything.

Leo Laporte (02:04:32):
Yeah. One primary difference between the feds dollar and other digital transactions. Current digital money is a liability of the bank. You know, your credit card a a digital dollar from the fed would be a fed liability among other things. That means the fed wouldn't pay interest on money stored with it. It is riskless. So you get, you gets to choose. I don't know. I, I don't, I don't know if this, how this relates to stable coin, which is another kind of currency ki you know, kind of a cryptocurrency that a lot of national banks are looking at. I'm not sure how this relates advocates of the digital dollar wor worry that the feds delay in implementing central bank currency will put it behind China, which is already doing a digital currency. There have been suggestions, suggestions have been made that China's lead in the space, ultimately could threaten us dollars hegemony as the world's reserve currency fed says, eh, we're not that worried about that.

Leo Laporte (02:05:37):
Gotta get this right. And at the very bottom of the piece, it says, and we can't do anything unless Congress allows it anyway. So <laugh> right, right, right. Forget about it. Certainly will pay, pay off for us to just take our time. Right. We don't wanna be a point where somebody's like, I lost the password for the federal reserve line. Oh my, what do we do now? I do. I got millions in there. Trillions, trillions. Yeah. Faster cable, internet speeds are coming, says, Dwight, even though you don't really need 'em, what do you mean? What do you mean?

Dwight Silverman (02:06:17):
So this is a story worry. I did. LA, if you remember last week, I mentioned that my co what the hell

Leo Laporte (02:06:23):
Is that? <Laugh> are you wearing a cat hat?

Dwight Silverman (02:06:27):
Right? My, my, my cat has arrived.

Leo Laporte (02:06:30):
He's he's an orange, an orange tab. He is

Dwight Silverman (02:06:32):
This, this is Mylo.

Leo Laporte (02:06:34):
Oh, hi my, yes.

Dwight Silverman (02:06:35):
Oh, so anyway. Wow. He, there he goes. What a leap. So, anyway I did a last week. I wrote about 5g and I thought I'd write about home broadband this week. And you know, Comcast had said it had completed this test of the next generation of cable modem, which is known as Dous four or to the marketing guys at cable it's called 10 G. And and it it's, it's called 10 G because they think it can get up to 10 gigabits. Yeah. Eventually. And so 5g. Yeah. Yes. Double 5g. It has 5g is fifth generation. This is 10 gigabits. So anyway, so, so this is coming at the end of this year and early next and Comcast and you know, Warner and all of the other cable companies are going to be moving to this and it will take your speeds up to if, you know, you're willing to pay for it, 10 gigabits.

Dwight Silverman (02:07:36):
And I talked to an analyst and about this. And what's interesting is that right now you know, you barely need, you know, gigabit speed or, you know, what, what a lot of people have with Comcast. This would take it even beyond the at, but as we were talking, you know, about activism and Microsoft, and what's coming in the future, gaming in the metaverse streaming games. At some point, if you have multiple people doing this in your house you may actually start to need more than a gigabit. And so it's kind of a, it's kind of and a, you know, the, the cable companies attempt to kind of get ahead of fiber providers, like at and T and and it's coming faster than you think and interesting and likely next year.

Leo Laporte (02:08:26):
So this is kinda like that 5g conversation we, we had earlier.

Dwight Silverman (02:08:30):
Yes. Yes. But it's, it's wired.

Leo Laporte (02:08:32):
Yeah. I have gigabit right now through my cable company. It's not

Dwight Silverman (02:08:37):
Cemented. And how much do you actually get

Leo Laporte (02:08:39):
Close to a gigabit? Very close, like 900 something. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> why is that? Not

Dwight Silverman (02:08:46):
A lot of people. Don't like, I have Comcast gigabit and because of I have a gigabit router, what I thought was a gigabit router, and it really can max out on need about 800. Oh, okay. And, and then, and then my phone can only can get out of that gets about 500 or 600. Right. And so, but I don't, you know, I'd be, I could probably get by with what I do with 300 megabits. Well, that's,

Leo Laporte (02:09:12):
It's really more how many people are using it at the same time. That kind.

Dwight Silverman (02:09:17):
Right. Right. If you have a household with multiple kids, they're all streaming games, or they're watching 4k video at the same time. Yeah. You probably would need it. And of course, you'll also need a Comcast raise its bandwidth cap.

Leo Laporte (02:09:35):
Ah, I pay thats that's the no bandwidth camp. That's the big, and by the way, that is not cheap.

Devindra Hardawar (02:09:41):
That should be outlawed, like talk about regulations. Like, yeah. My parents also had to move over to business account because of that ridiculous thing. And what's the point of making speeds faster if you're campus wasn't, wasn't there

Dwight Silverman (02:09:51):
Some discussion in the pre-Trump FCC about, about data caps, wasn't there some discussion about discussion about banning them?

Leo Laporte (02:10:04):
Well, it'd be nice. There was a lot of court action about UN unlimited bandwidth. Yes. Right. <Laugh> but not being unlimited obviously. Right. Yeah. Right.

Devindra Hardawar (02:10:15):
But this specific technology sounds good because I do remember being in New York and relying on cable. And like, you could tell what everybody was online at home at part time. Right. And then your neighborhood speeds start chugging. So having better speeds overall, like, you know, expanding that pipe a little, I think is a good thing overall. But I'm sure people are not getting the speeds are actually paying for, like, I get, I'm subscribed to at T gigabit down here near Atlanta. And I only really get gigabit if I'm wired directly into the router or like standing right near the router. And then I just started testing their new wifi six gateway, and that made a lot better, but they're also doing things like I have a and a, what do you call it? An extender down here and a mesh extender and now at, and T is gonna force people to pay $8 a month forever for these things. Whereas last gen before I used to be able to just buy one for like 50 bucks and you own it, but now it's like forever add on yeah. The,

Dwight Silverman (02:11:13):
The good news with, at least with Comcast. When I, I was talking to their senior vice president of network operations, he said to me directly, when I asked that they will continue to allow you to have your own modem and your own router when they go to docs fors. Good. So you'll be able to buy a third party. Yes. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so that's,

Devindra Hardawar (02:11:33):
I was because you can't really do that fiber fiber that's the, you gotta use whatever the company gives you basically. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:11:40):
So fiber's pretty much stopped, right? Nobody's nobody's rolling out new fiber or

Devindra Hardawar (02:11:45):
Are they, I see new fiber from down here from, at and T, but I don't know if it's like part of an existing schedule or plan or Google stopped.

Leo Laporte (02:11:52):
Verizon stopped, I guess. There, I mean, we have a local provider around here called Sonic, which we actually use that we love and they have slowly been rolling that they actually have to dig trenches and stuff. Right. I, I feel like though, that nobody's really investing in infrastructure at this point.

Devindra Hardawar (02:12:10):
I know I,

Dwight Silverman (02:12:11):
The one, the one thing about docs four is that it does, you use the existing cable infrastructure. So right. The coax,

Leo Laporte (02:12:19):
This is a different protocol with the same hard right.

Dwight Silverman (02:12:22):
And, and that's, and the other thing is, is that cable companies have been, they, they use fiber up to nodes in your neighborhood, and they've been pulling that fiber closer and closer. And that's one of the reasons why they're able to do it, but they don't have to trench.

Leo Laporte (02:12:35):
You don't have to do fiber to the curb, but you would like to get, yeah. Okay.

Dwight Silverman (02:12:39):
You get as close as you can. Do

Leo Laporte (02:12:41):
You think any, I mean, do you think we'll actually get 10 gigabits ever? I mean,

Dwight Silverman (02:12:47):
I think if you're willing to pay for it, you might get it <laugh> but you know, I'll take, I'll take the four that Comcast tested the other day. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:54):
We have five, 10 symmetric here from, is that from Sonic? That is from Sonic. Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (02:13:00):
Is it, is it 10 gigabit? Fiber?

Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Yeah. Symmetric.

Devindra Hardawar (02:13:03):
Nice. Very nice. It's

Leo Laporte (02:13:05):
One of the reasons we moved here <laugh> oh man, I'll be honest with you.

Devindra Hardawar (02:13:09):
<Laugh> I do wanna throw a PSA out there for at and T gigabit user is apparently this new gateway has fiber. We right. To the gateway, which is kind of nice, oh, interest. So interest there's like a little box, like when comes to your house. Right. And that normally connects to fiber that goes ethernet to the old gateway. Now it's like fiber right. To the box. So I think that, so if they speed upgrades to,

Dwight Silverman (02:13:29):
So if you're a customer of, at and T and, and you get that, that new modem, they have to make a change in your house. Right. They have to come in and bring that fiber in. I think

Devindra Hardawar (02:13:40):
They, so there's a box, like at some point, you know? Yeah. There was a whole drill through the side of your house, right. To pull that fiber in. But the box that like sits by an outlet in your house it's they just have to swap that out and then they can pull another fiber line, right. To the, to the gateway.

Leo Laporte (02:13:56):
Of course, if you're on wifi, nobody's getting speeds anywhere near that.

Devindra Hardawar (02:14:02):
My wifi is faster. That, that is the weird world we're living in right now. Like right now I'm in an office in my basement and I use I don't have full ethernet pull down here. So I've been using power line ethernet to get like really nice stable. Yeah. That's a good idea

Leo Laporte (02:14:16):
For podcast and that's

Devindra Hardawar (02:14:17):
Working well, but that, yeah, it should be gigabit, but the only speeds I'm ever seeing are like 200 to 300. Yeah. Like at most. So not really that much, but I have a wifi extender down here and this sucker is getting me like 700 to 800, like regular. That's

Leo Laporte (02:14:32):
More common on, I better on being on wifi power line networking than it is on the mm-hmm <affirmative> on wifi. There is, here comes wifi seven.

Devindra Hardawar (02:14:42):
Oh boy.

Leo Laporte (02:14:43):
Lovely.

Dwight Silverman (02:14:44):
What you need with your

Leo Laporte (02:14:45):
10 G. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying. If you're gonna have that fast bandwidth, you better get better. Wifi, wifi seven should become available according to a report from digital trends next year in anticipation of the launch of wifi seven around 2024. So you could buy the hardware, but you won't be able to do it, anything with it till 2024 Taiwan based semiconductor firm, media tech conducted the first ever tests showing super fast speeds and low latency transmission of its wifi, seven biologic technology to key customers and industry collaborators, 2.4 times more speed than wifi six. Even with the same number of antennas, <laugh> 30 gigabits. What going all the way up to 40 gigabits?

Devindra Hardawar (02:15:36):
I mean, there's also wifi C that is kind of rolling out now, too. So it, yes. That's been never ending

Leo Laporte (02:15:41):
Green light. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's been green light. Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (02:15:44):
That's that's on the six megahertz, six gigahertz spectrum and they're really expensive. Yeah. Mm-hmm

Leo Laporte (02:15:50):
<Affirmative> and, and many of your devices don't support it yet. Anyway, so, all right. Let's take a little break last break. And then we will wrap things up with our fabulous panel, Dwight Silverman. I don't know how to say of what of I've of Dwight Silverman <laugh> of Dwight Silverman, Dwight Silverman. I also have

Dwight Silverman (02:16:09):
His, I also have Dwight silverman.com so you can,

Leo Laporte (02:16:12):
Okay. There you go. Throw down into white silverman.com at Silverman on the Twitter.

Dwight Silverman (02:16:17):
I'm I'm like Trent cram, the independent,

Devindra Hardawar (02:16:21):
Independent

Dwight Silverman (02:16:22):
And independent. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:16:23):
Nice. Also with this diver Hardwar of en gadget fame, our show today brought to hello. Hello, brought to you by zip recruiter, our sponsor. This is it's actually you know, I, I'm just, I feel like we're on the cusp of a big year. And of course there are industries now in 2022 that are already hiring to ramp up, cuz I, I just, I have to think the end is not. And I mean that in a good way, <laugh> sustainability businesses, eco-friendly products and services, big pet services, all those pets that we got during COVID have to be walked, fed and trained fitness services, not just regular fitness, like gyms, but non-traditional workout studios, kickboxing wellness apps. It's gonna be a big year. And if you're hiring for your big business, I want you to talk to zip recruiter. It's what we use for hiring.

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And it is awesome. Digital events and conf yeah. Home improvement. A lot of people are renovating redecorating. If you're gonna be at home more might as well, fix it up. If you work for or own a business in a growing industry and you're hiring, you gotta go to ZipRecruiter ZipRecruiter. You could try it for free right now at ziprecruiter.com/twi. What does ZipRecruiter do? That makes is so special. Well, first of all, one posting on ZipRecruiter goes to more than a hundred other job boards. So you're casting the widest net social media too. The more people are gonna see you are posting. And that's good because the more people see it, the more likely the right person will see it and apply for that job. But here's another secret, super secret sauce that ZipRecruiter has. They'll actually look at your job posting, analyze their resumes and find people who are right for your job and then send you their names so you can invite them to apply.

Leo Laporte (02:18:20):
And I have to tell you, when you invite somebody to apply, they show up, they show up for the interview. They're ready. They wanna work for you because they're they're, they're flattered. Frankly. You said, Hey, you look good. Would you like to apply for this job? No wonder ZipRecruiter. The number one rated hiring site, according to G2 ratings, number one in the us. Now you can try ZipRecruiter for free ziprecruiter.com/twi T w I T. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twi. If you're hiring, God bless you. And if you need people right now, there is no better way to do it. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twi drive free. I know you're gonna love it. We had a fun week this week on the shows, in fact, such a good time that we've made this mini movie for you to enjoy watch you, you NACO. And Jamer B always got some great stories. Oh man. You know it's age. I think as you get older, it turns out you did have some things to tell. Do you have a, do you have a memoir in you? If I didn't hate writing so much, this is my second book. <Laugh>

Speaker 5 (02:19:31):
Oh yeah. Wow. Previously on Twitter tech news weekly

Speaker 6 (02:19:37):
Act vision blizzard was acquired by Microsoft. This news kind of came through and suddenly everybody was just, ah, you know, lots and lots to

Speaker 7 (02:19:47):
Talk about. It's pretty accurate. <Laugh> so when the news broke that Microsoft was going to acquire this company, it immediately raises all of these enormous questions about what happens to a company in turmoil that has cultural issues that might be fixable and might not be honestly,

Speaker 5 (02:20:02):
Windows weekly. There will be regulatory. Well, that's

Leo Laporte (02:20:05):
The next question? Can this go?

Speaker 5 (02:20:07):
I don't think it's gonna be stopped. You don't. I don't think it's gonna be stopped either. There's a single sentence in the Microsoft announcement that I think tells the tale. When this acquisition goes through, we will be the third largest gaming company by revenue. They're not creating the biggest, they're not leapfrogging everybody all about Android, even

Speaker 8 (02:20:24):
More excited to welcome our guests this week, my friend, your friend, none other than Mr. Patrick Norton, Patrick has earned the right of, for our video Watchers of a lower third that says the Patrick Norton because there is one the won, the only the Patrick Norton.

Speaker 5 (02:20:39):
I just thought Burke was mocking me. We go back Burke and I <laugh> twi.tv. Tell your friends,

Leo Laporte (02:20:46):
What are you gonna tell him? That's the question. <Laugh> thanks to, to our club TWI members, we had a great number of great club, TWI events, Stacy's book club. They asked me anything with Andy Anaco. We've got some great events coming up, including an event with Mike and Amira. ELGAN talking about gastro nomad. Well, who else? Georgia. Georgia do that's right? Is that this week? That's exciting Friday. It was Friday. Are we missed it? Oh man. Well, anyway, that's okay. If you're a member of club TWI, we put it up on the plus feed. You can hear it after the fact, there are thanks to aunt Pru, our our community manager. That was a lot of stuff happening in the club. Here's the benefit, $7 a month. Add free versions of all of our shows, access to the fabulous club, TWI discord, which is full of good cheer and lots of conversations, not just behind the scenes, at the shows, but on all sorts of topics, books and coding and, and all sorts of stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:21:44):
And you get the club TWI plus feed, which is a unique feed filled with things that don't make it to the shows, including stuff before and after shows. He untitled Lennox show Stacy's book club, the GIZ fizz seven bucks a month seems we should charge more, but we're not gonna. All you have to go do is go to twi.tv/club TWI and join the club. And we thank you. All you club, TWI members for supporting everything we do here at this week in tech, couple of short stories to wrap it up. We made a big deal when Twitter hired mud to run its security team. Peter Zako, he's gone now. He's only, I don't think he was there more than two years. Zako was famous. He'd worked in government, but he also was one of the founders of the the cult of the dead cow hacking group. Twitter recruited him after teenagers compromised the company systems in July of 2020. Any, I, I don't know. Somebody help us with these teens help us with these teens much. I don't know. I don't know what happened. Mu is gone. That's it? It's a, it's a much nudge. It's a nudge nudge. He was nudged out after the new CEO came in. Also rinky Setti, the chief information security officer. I think security's been good at Twitter. I, I don't know what's going on. Yeah. I don't know what's going on.

Dwight Silverman (02:23:07):
It's personalities. It's it is relationships.

Leo Laporte (02:23:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Probably U CEO like lining up his people too. Has people he wants. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Tos marketing, chief Ted, after going rogue with bizarre, loves

Dwight Silverman (02:23:22):
Love story. This is a great story and wins. You know, one of the things he was gonna do was he was gonna have this restaurant based on recipes from TikTok. Yeah. And when I saw that story, when it first broke, I was like, what? Because like the recipes on TikTok looked just, God awful.

Leo Laporte (02:23:41):
Hey, wait a minute. You haven't seen my son's account. Hold on, hold on my oh great. My son is one of the, no, no. It's okay. I don't care. My son is one of the one of the people Nick tra who is the former marketing guy was talking about. There's a lot of cooking stuff on tick. I think you would enjoy my son's cooking videos. However, I think they're they're, they're quite good. Go watch the, and 

Dwight Silverman (02:24:08):
That's not what I would call clean

Leo Laporte (02:24:10):
Food. Oh, it's not healthy. Did I say it would be healthy? No, it's not healthy. He's got 1.8 million followers though. Let's see. What's a, yeah. Here's one with 7 million views. The pesto chicken sandwich, always a, mm it's sloppy. It's wet. It's messy. And he made that knife stick right in the cutting board. You got, you gotta stick the knife. Okay. If you're a to, I always, I see stuff like that. I go, how many takes did that take? I'll have to ask him. <Laugh> I'll have to ask him anyway. He's he cooked a whole chicken for just one chicken sandwich. How about that? Right. That's what I call commitment. Anyway, Nick train. And back to the, I thank you for the chance to plug that. I'm really stop this. Yeah. Tiktok kitchen was gonna FA feature your foods made popular in TikTok, including by the way, the number one TikTok food, which is some sort of weird pasta with feta cheese that you stir up, it looks, oh my God gross. <Laugh>

Dwight Silverman (02:25:06):
Right, right. I hear it was good

Leo Laporte (02:25:08):
People. I'm sure it was delicious. Actual two people say it's good. Yeah. But it didn't look delicious. Other half baked, get it product ideas. Creator led NFT collection featuring celebrities like Lil NAX and Bella porch. The problem is he didn't, he forgot to ask management. <Laugh>

Devindra Hardawar (02:25:28):
He's, he's just too much of an innovator. You know, it's too much of an innovator

Leo Laporte (02:25:31):
Best. Right. But we covered all of these things. Tiktok resumes. Yep. You would post your resume on TikTok and help people get in. It helped people get entry level jobs that target should Olay a TikTok senior executive called these campaigns out of line with the company's goals. <Laugh> too many side shows. They said he was getting, remember, TikTok is owned by what was, it is probably a fairly conservative Chinese right company. And, you know, he was too, he'll find a job.

Devindra Hardawar (02:26:03):
It is weird how TikTok, you know, owned by bite dance is a company that is basically like took what vine was doing. Kind of let, let people run with it and do a lot of different stuff with it. So that, that sense of freedom versus traditional Chinese company does it is a little weird sometimes, you know what TikTok is turning into culturally. Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:26:22):
Yeah. By the way, salt, hank.com. Get that collab, pesto, flaky, sea salt while it's still in stock. <Laugh> I'm shameless. I know <laugh> wow. If you're going to Beijing,

Devindra Hardawar (02:26:35):
We need to regulate all this too much in too much in marketing.

Leo Laporte (02:26:39):
That's right. That's right. Hashtag sponsor, hashtag ad. If you're going into the Olympics starting a couple weeks, February 13th the athletes are being told, don't bring your phone, bring a burner because you have to, first of all, you have to have to install an app. Yeah. A B Olympics app, which, which apparently kind of tracks everything you're up to. So you're not gonna wanna bring that home. Bring, bring your own phone, I guess is the the bottom line China has an app that is required to even get around the Olympic village. But there's some question about exactly how

Devindra Hardawar (02:27:19):
Much it'll do. I'm sure it's mostly for like COVID prevention stuff too. Yeah. Is what I'm wondering, like yeah. They they're trying to be zero COVID and I'm sure it's like, China wants to be really careful with all these new people coming in, but yeah, a little scary.

Leo Laporte (02:27:33):
I'm gonna ask Mr. Mr. Film cast, Netflix. Yep. Kind of in trouble the stock market anyway, didn't like it, when they re reported a net game of this sounds good, right? 8.28 million subscribers in Q4 driven by markets outside north America, 221 million total subscribers, but it was below estimates. Shares felt more than 20%. Wall street analysts had projecting a gain of seven and a quarter million S res for the first quarter of 2022, the company forecast a third of that. Also investors likely spooked by the fact that Netflix admitted in its quarterly newsletter to shareholders that stepped up competition in the streaming wars may be affecting our marginal growth sum. That's the quote, may Uhhuh maybe affect being our marginal growth, maybe sum a little bit, just a little bit, a little bit a they spend a lot of money on content. And of course it works for 'em or has worked in the past, but you know, if you, if it doesn't then you've, then you've spent a lot of money

Devindra Hardawar (02:28:50):
For sure. They make so much stuff. And now they're not the only game in town. Right, right. It used to be competition pretty much just Netflix, maybe Hulu, like Hulu was in there. And Amazon was the throwing a lot of money, like prestige movies and shows. And now with HBO, max and Disney and paramount plus in everything, all this stuff happening all at once. I'm sure. Like, I, I, I have to pick and choose what I'm subscribing to sometimes, you know, I'm subscribing to Showtime for a couple weeks to watch yellow jackets, you know? And then I hear that's quite description. Yeah. It's really good. It's a lot of fun.

Leo Laporte (02:29:24):
Okay. I have to watch that. It's about a bunch of what cheerleaders who it's kind of

Devindra Hardawar (02:29:27):
A, no, it's a soccer team. Soccer team. It's very much alive. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:29:31):
Lord of the flies meets soccer team meets Flos Ted lasso meets Flo

Devindra Hardawar (02:29:36):
Flo. Not so much Ted lasso. Yeah. With the girls high school soccer team. And you see them in high school time in the nineties. So you get like lots of great nineties soundtrack that's stuff's that's and then modern day today with great actors like Christina Richie. Okay. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:29:51):
Love. Well, that's right. I'm gonna, I'm gonna watch that. Yeah. But there's

Devindra Hardawar (02:29:53):
Too much to watch. There is too much to watch.

Leo Laporte (02:29:55):
Billions is back. Yeah. I have finally catching up on the Witcher that's hot stuff.

Dwight Silverman (02:30:03):
That's right. And don't forget Ozark.

Leo Laporte (02:30:04):
Don't forget. And Ozark is back

Dwight Silverman (02:30:06):
Ozark. I, you know, Netflix is kind of like the baseline for me. I would not mm-hmm <affirmative> to be I'm on the, I was on the 1799 now, 1999 plan for 4k. And and it's like, I would not drop Netflix. I love it's so much there. Love it. And you know, you can't find, you know, yeah. You've got Disney and, and HBO, max and so forth, but where else you gotta find something like midnight diner. Yeah. For God's sake, there's obscure midnight

Leo Laporte (02:30:34):
Diner just wonder you search around. That's the real problem is discoverability. But thank God. We've got to Vera on the show cuz he he's

Dwight Silverman (02:30:40):
The guy I'm gonna listen to his podcast. I'm gonna subscribe to that. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (02:30:44):
Yeah. Have you guys seen midnight mass? Because that is like the white Netflix thing. That's everything Mike Lanigan does just worth a watch. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (02:30:51):
What's what's I don't think I've seen that, which what's

Devindra Hardawar (02:30:53):
That about? That is the recent horror show. It's very like Stephen King style about a small like island town off the coast of new England. So you you'd actually appreciate the accents and stuff there. Leo, what? It is very much like it's

Leo Laporte (02:31:04):
Goodwill hunting meets the house of haunted hill. So it weird kind

Dwight Silverman (02:31:11):
It's happening on the island. Don't wanna, you don't, you don't, you don't wanna give 'em too many spoilers, but, but it is, it's also a slow burn and it's really

Leo Laporte (02:31:19):
Good. Oh, I wanna watch this. It's really good.

Devindra Hardawar (02:31:23):
It'll creep the hell out. Yeah. It's it's really good. Everything. My plan again does, and he's done several shows on Netflix at this point. So yeah. Haunting hill house inly manner. But yeah, they're, there's only, they could only grow like rocket ship for so long. Right. And even now they're still grow. Just not as much as wall street wanted. It's

Leo Laporte (02:31:40):
So typical of wall street expecting that kind of, you know, a hundred percent growth quarter over

Devindra Hardawar (02:31:45):
Quarter. Why do, what do you mean? You can't keep doubling, but you just can't do that growing so

Leo Laporte (02:31:49):
Much. You just can't do it. Mm-Hmm yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (02:31:51):
So there may be a plateau coming who knows? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:31:54):
Felony charges. The first a fatal crash involving Tesla's auto pilot. The driver apparently didn't know that the autopilot does not stop at stoplights. Red lights was right through the red light and caused a fatality crash. The driver pled not guilty. He's free on bail while the case is pending, but he killed two people in 2019 a yeah. Or did autopilot do it?

Devindra Hardawar (02:32:24):
I don't know. I, the feature is called autopilot. Yeah. You know? Yep. What, what does that mean? There, there is. I respect a lot of what El Elon Musk has done, you know, with Tesla, with SpaceX and then some things are just like, you are don't pushing

Leo Laporte (02:32:38):
Things. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (02:32:39):
Yeah. Don't call it autopilot. Don't don't set these expectations because you're responsible for what's happening because of that. And that's what consumers see, they read autopilot. They expect autopilot. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:32:49):
Exactly, exactly. To VIN. It's always a pleasure film cast. The film cast, the film cast, the film cast.com and of course, senior editor at Enue. What are you working on over there right now? Any big stories? Oh,

Devindra Hardawar (02:33:03):
We're in the middle Sundance right now. So I am, I'm just like watching a ton of movies. I just reviewed this documentary called we met in virtual reality. Ooh. Which is a it's a documentary set entirely in VR chat, which is this really cool, like social community that existed in virtual reality. And it's been around since 2014. People have been really Lee on it during the pandemic. So it's about people who have found friendship and relationships in VR chat. It's a really well done documentary too. Like they also, the director, Joe hunting shot it like a real documentary. So the camera, it is a virtual camera, but it has depth of field is weird.

Leo Laporte (02:33:38):
Wow. This is really weird looking. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (02:33:42):
And I really like the movie, so I don't know if tickets are available for Sundance, but hopefully it'll be you know, streaming somewhere eventually. And it's it's lovely. It, it shows that people are getting a lot out of being in VR and finding relationships in VR and we make fun of the metaverse but maybe some element of that will be really useful to people down the line. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:34:00):
So this, it looks a lot like second life. This is people, demographics, demographics.

Devindra Hardawar (02:34:07):
I mean, full you're watching here full finger tracking people are investing in like full, so there's real people.

Leo Laporte (02:34:11):
There's a real person in this. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar (02:34:13):
It's real person. People are doing belly dancing and dance courses and lap dances and stuff in it. Like it, it, it covers everything that's happening right now

Leo Laporte (02:34:21):
In VR chat. Very interesting. Are they signing? Are they doing sign language? That's interesting.

Devindra Hardawar (02:34:26):
Twitter look like, yeah. Somebody, somebody does a virtual sign signing class and they do it regularly.

Leo Laporte (02:34:32):
That's and the thing is I could look just like that if I want to <laugh>

Devindra Hardawar (02:34:36):
You could look like the, the man with the tail and the great pecks. Yeah. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:34:42):
Okay. And so, and this is a documentary, how interesting. Diver's got a, it's really review in in gadget. We met in virtual reality. Love in the metaverse great to have you on. Thank you, diver. Thank you. It's always fun. Thanks. Also to my old friend, Dwight Silverman <affirmative> and all three.com/dils where you can find his latest work. What are you working on today?

Dwight Silverman (02:35:04):
I mostly, I'm just doing my column. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do something I think on air tags and stalking next. That's an interesting story. That is a really interest, you

Leo Laporte (02:35:12):
Know, I don't blame apple. It just works really well. Right.

Dwight Silverman (02:35:15):
And, and, and what's interesting is you, I think you're hearing all these stories about people finding air tags on them because the product is doing what it's supposed to. It's alerting people to it. Yeah. The, the Android hole is a big problem right now because apple has this app that that will let you find it, but you have to turn it on. Yeah. And you have to manually like look for it. But but it's it's, it's a really interesting conundrum. I, I used it to find my keys the other day cuz my cats had knocked it off a stool and it fell behind the stool and I couldn't find my keys and it's the first time I used air tag to really find something and it worked great. Yeah. It's so good for kidding. Yeah. It's yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:35:59):
I think apple kind of got a lot of heat for that, for the own reasons you can buy they're cheap GPS devices. You'll have no idea that it's trusting you and it's much more accurate. It's true.

Devindra Hardawar (02:36:10):
It's the ease of use here. I'm looking forward to reading your thing Dwight, because like the ease of use of it, the, yeah, there's a lot of just weird. It's

Leo Laporte (02:36:16):
Interesting. Yeah.

Dwight Silverman (02:36:17):
My, my sister who is an Android user was in town and had to use my car and she's not familiar with Houston. I put an air tag in my car. Yep. And I could see where she was because she wasn't on fine. My, but it kept chirping at her because it was right. You know, it could sense a phone there, but it wasn't an iPhone. And so it would chirp at her and it drove her nuts

Leo Laporte (02:36:39):
Next time. Do what I do. Just put in the trunk. She'll never know. <Laugh> she'll never know. I'm joking. Thank you, Dwight. Thank you Tondra. And thank you. You I feel terrible, but we, we just her voice was yeah. So bad. We had to, I will, I,

Devindra Hardawar (02:36:59):
I would love I'll bring Brian on the GA podcast. At some point would left to chat with

Leo Laporte (02:37:02):
Her good makeup for it, make for my, our loss. But, and we'll also have Brianna we on at a later date, but I didn't want her to hurt her throat. She really was sound it's kinda rough. It was painful.

Devindra Hardawar (02:37:14):
I, I, my throat always hurts after

Leo Laporte (02:37:15):
The show cuz we we're going. There's a lot of, talking's a lot of talking. How do you think I feel <laugh> we do every Sunday afternoon, 2:00 PM. Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern. it's actually more like 2 35 30 Eastern 2230 UTC. If you wanna watch us through it, live tuning at two. So you can see the setup and all that live.twi.tv, there's audio and video streams. There. You can chat live@ircdottwi.tv. Of course, if you're in a member of club TWI, you could chat at discord in our discord server as well after the fact on demand versions of the shows are on the website, twi.tv. There's also YouTube channel. You could subscribe in your favorite podcast player that know get it. I mean it's available of a Sunday evening. If you listen asynchronously, if you listen as a podcast, there's still a very active community at our TWI forums. That's www.twi.community. Our discourse forums. They're really fun. I go in there all the time. Twi.Social is our Mastodon instance. Kinda like Twitter only nice and no hexagonal avatars <laugh> actually I might make my hexagonal avatar there too. That'd be kind of fun to throw them off. That's twi.social. You're they're both free. You're more than welcome. We'd love to have you. Thanks for joining us, everybody. We will see you next time. Another TWI. This

Speaker 9 (02:38:35):
Is okay. Doing the, doing the right, doing the, maybe doing the right, doing the.