This Week in Tech Episode 868 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 in tech, we have such a geeky and great panel for you. Sam will Sam. Our car guy is here. A Melano, the former sub Mariner. He now works at Intel is also an expert hacker and all the way from this weekend, enterprise tech Lou mm. Stops by lots to talk about cuz Kaspersky the first Russian come on. The no buy list. The threat of Russian cyber attacks Lou and Alan will weigh in on why Russia hasn't attacked yet. And it turns out it was a teenager in his mom's basement who hacked all those companies. It's all coming up next on

TWiT Intro (00:00:40):
Podcast. You love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:54):
This is TWiT this week at tech episode, 868 recorded Sunday, March 27th, 2022. The rods go down

Leo Laporte (00:01:06):
This week at tech is brought to you by Grammarly. Get through those emails and your work quicker by keeping it concise, confident, and effective with Grammarly. Go to grammarly.com/TWiT to sign up for a free account. And when you're ready to upgrade to Grammarly P premium, you'll get 20% off and buy streak streak makes it so easy to run your business through Gmail. And when you try it, you're gonna love it. It only takes 30 seconds to get started right now for a limited time, save 20% on the pro plan. Streak.Com/TWiT and buy noon. Unlike other programs, Noom weight uses a psychology based approach. Tell people better, understand their relationship with food and gives you the skills and knowledge you need to build long lasting positive habits. It works for me. Sign up for your trial at no.com/TWiT and by the new and recently up updated TriCaster two elite by new tech, the most complete live production system on the planet. There's a TriCaster for every production, including yours. Visit go.newtech.com/TWiT TV, where you'll find an interactive guide to help you choose which TriCaster right for you. It's time for TWiT this week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news, some fun news this week. Fortunately, we've got a great panel, Sam abuelsamid. Sam is here. He was on his way to San Diego this morning during the radio show, we got him wheel bearings.media is his podcast wheel bearings podcast. He's principle researcher at guide house insights and of course automotive technology expert. What are you doing in San Diego today?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:02:52):
I am here to drive the new Toyota BZ four X, their first purpose built electric vehicle. That's launching the spring.

Leo Laporte (00:02:59):
Boy. We talk about electric vehicles all the time now on the, the radio show. It is there just taking off. Everybody's got one more coming out all the time, time. Same thing on wheel bearings. Yeah, every week it's, you know, more, more EVs to talk about. Yeah, it's great. Also joining us, it's great to see him from this week in an enterprise tech, the host Luka. Good to see you. Lou, how many children do you have now? Every time I have to check

Allyn Malventano (00:03:28):
In still only have five children,

Leo Laporte (00:03:30):
Five, this is only five. You deserve an award. I only had two and I could barely keep up. Five is amazing. I'm very impressed. Of course is an employee of Microsoft, but his opinions are his own and he does not reflect Microsoft. And you can recuse yourself on any story that you feel is inappropriate. We always love having Lou won and boy, welcome back to our microphones. It's been a long time. You may remember Alan Malano from this weekend, computer hardware. He was a PC perspective, a storage expert. He was the, he was my source for all things SSD for so many years was still, are you still are former submarine sub Mariner from the, you were a Navy guy, right?

Allyn Malventano (00:04:14):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
And retired and retired. S N R E T. And he currently is working at Intel. You file filed Ryan shroud over there from PC perspective. He's a storage technical analyst. And just like Lou Allen's thoughts are his own. He does not speak for Intel, but I'm glad they let you be on the show. That's great.

Allyn Malventano (00:04:37):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can talk about storage stuff, just, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:04:41):
Not here to

Allyn Malventano (00:04:41):
Sell, I'm not here to sell anything.

Leo Laporte (00:04:43):
Obtain Optane, Optane. That's all I can say over. Oh,

Allyn Malventano (00:04:45):
Listen, I'm personally a sucker for some obtain. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:04:48):
A, a sucker for some over there.

Allyn Malventano (00:04:50):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:04:50):
Yeah. That's that's that's that when they announced the it's Trix, was that the original name of the three

Allyn Malventano (00:04:57):
Cross point

Leo Laporte (00:04:58):
Crosspoint? That's right. It was three 3d Ram. And I remember when they announced it, I, we thought this is gonna transform. In other words, it's, it's, it's basically an SSC that's fast enough to act as Ram or is it a Ram that's nonvolatile enough to act as an SSD? I don't know. It's one

Allyn Malventano (00:05:16):
It's it's it's in the middle between it's between NAND and Ram, right? Yeah. Performance wise. Cool. But, but yeah, it is persistent, right? So the power goes off all the stuff's still there. That's pretty cool.

Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
Very, very nice. And I see you have a bobblehead, which is a me, no, you don't. Oh, you have that too. No, that

Allyn Malventano (00:05:34):
Was Lou. I have

Leo Laporte (00:05:35):
The coaster. Lou has the bobblehead. You have the coaster. Lou has the

Allyn Malventano (00:05:38):
Bobblehead. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:41):
I'm just glad because apparently the bobbleheads have been making it to places other than I don't know, places that we would like here is an image of this is live in Palm desert photographer, thrift store junkie. Can't believe what I found in the thrift store, the Leo bobblehead, but you know, it is in pristine condition. So worth a lot of money. I made a mistake. I should have made NFTs, not bobbleheads. There was my mistake. Right. Let's start with the hacking cuz you're here. Alan. What, tell me what your hacking credentials are.

Allyn Malventano (00:06:23):
Yeah, that, so I don't know. I think it was the last, what I was on or the one before. Were

Leo Laporte (00:06:28):
You discovered that you had a deep, dark secret?

Allyn Malventano (00:06:31):
Leo discovered it might be one of the best spit takes Leo ever did on a TWiT? Cuz I caught him right when he was drinking is oh yeah. Did you know? I was in, I was in NSA there buddy. Yikes. Yeah. But I didn't do,

Leo Laporte (00:06:44):
Was that Prenay or was that part of your Naval service?

Allyn Malventano (00:06:47):
Part of,

Leo Laporte (00:06:48):
Of related. Okay. Okay.

Allyn Malventano (00:06:50):
Yeah. Yeah, because there's NSA commands that are joint service commands where you'll have all the other branches of the military they'll come in and they'll join some civilian folk that work, you know, that work alongside the civilians that work at the NSA. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:07:01):
Wow.

Allyn Malventano (00:07:02):
So my job there was, well

Leo Laporte (00:07:04):
You were an,

Allyn Malventano (00:07:05):
I did the NSA job. I was in Virginia and I was doing network defense there. Oh wow. So it wasn't that wasn't NSA, but that was still network related and like hacking related. But then yeah, the NSA side, the, they do some more offensive. I will say things of course. But when I was there I reverse engineered malware.

Leo Laporte (00:07:26):
So

Allyn Malventano (00:07:26):
We're that still kinda defense

Leo Laporte (00:07:27):
We've been talk. I mean, we, look, we talk about, you know, security all the time, not just in security now it's a common subject, but it's really become a hot topic since the Russian invasion of Ukraine because, and there's a lot of speculation about this. I think many of us thought Russia would use their cyber warfare capabilities initially against Ukraine. There were some at the beginning of the invasion, they shut some things down, which came right back online, including the financial system and some satellite reconnaissance systems. But then we've also been worried a little bit about cyber warfare attacks in retaliation for sanctions against the west, especially in the us, none of this really has panned out. What is your sense of it, Alan? Is it, is it have

Allyn Malventano (00:08:13):
I have a theory? Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (00:08:16):
So part of the job that I was doing when I was there was, or engineering malware, well, where do we get the malware? We get it when one, when country a attacks country B and then we see it and then what do we do? We pick it apart and we figure out how to defend against it. Right? How do we protect us being the United States from, you know, those other foreign countries who might happen to be fighting amongst themselves at right. But then we can learn from that and protect ourselves using that information. Right. So I have a suspicion that either Russia just didn't have, you know, they're not up to snuff on their hacking ability. Maybe it's sort of in line with their, you know, other abilities,

Leo Laporte (00:08:57):
Their military capabilities seems

Allyn Malventano (00:08:58):
Like, yeah, it seems like they haven't been panning out that well that's option a option. B is they don't wanna play their hand. Right. If they do have those exploits that they know that people can't yet defend against, why would you lay them all on the table? You know, against Ukraine when everybody else is gonna be listening, so to speak. Right? And they all have their ways of, of trying to catch that stuff coming across the wire. So that would then make, you know, subsequent attacks against anybody else. Russia wanted to go after harder, right? Because everybody, the cat out of the bag, once they try to do, once they try to use those exploits.

Leo Laporte (00:09:31):
That's why those NSO group exploits are so are millions of, of dollars because once the nation state uses it, the risk is it now the cat's out of the bag, it will be defended against. So

Allyn Malventano (00:09:42):
Don't that, that long though, they don't last that long because these types of exploits S are in and out most of the time. So I, I don't like sitting on 'em for too long is gonna be, you know, they'll end up being plugged and then they'll have to go and do a whole bunch of other work to figure out another other exploit. I think, you know, I, I kind of think that I, I feel like this, this whole thing, you know, now by, by the, by the current administration around this, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:10:04):
Biden actually gave a speech warning last week saying I've previously warned about the potential that Russia could conduct malicious cyber activity. It's part of Russia's playbook today. I'm reiterating those warnings. This was a week ago, Monday based on Avol. Now this is the important line evolving intelligence that the Russian government is exploring options for potential cyber attacks. If you go to the CSA page, big sign on the front page, this is the cyber security infrastructure security agency. It says shields up. They want everybody to protect themselves. So it's your, so Lou, what do you think, do you agree with Alan that it's the Russians are reluctant to use these cuz they don't wanna waste 'em

Allyn Malventano (00:10:43):
You know, I, I think that they're either reluctant or they're holding back, but I, I do think that, you know, obviously when there's a war going on, obviously this countries like Russia, like China will go and, and do exploits and do hacking and cyber threats around the world just to, to pull the eyes off of their war. And I feel like they're gonna start doing this no matter what ass, a

Leo Laporte (00:11:02):
Distraction

Allyn Malventano (00:11:03):
As a distraction. And I, I, I feel like organizations, if they're not aware of this, of this threat already, and haven't taken the steps, even before the president's warning, you're already asking you're already kind of in a world to hurt. So I think, you know, I think the, the it's nice that the administration puts something out there and said, Hey, Hey, there's a threat. I think it's kind of a little bit kinda like propaganda. So to speak owners almost I mean, it's, it seems a risky

Leo Laporte (00:11:25):
Thing to do, cuz it's gonna scare people. I get calls now on the radio show, what are they gonna attack?

Allyn Malventano (00:11:29):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:11:30):
Yeah. And I mean, certainly we're vulnerable. Our electric grid is very heterogeneous, which means, you know, there's no one central authority, there's no one governing it. In fact often is privately owned. We know it's porous. We've seen malware in a lot of electrical grid installations. Our financial institutions are entirely computerized, hit them. That could be devastating, forget sanctions, bring down the financial system. Our, our food network is very vulnerable. Not only electr, you know, completely electrified electronized, but there's only five days worth of food at any given time in the supply chain. That's just three.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:10):
We saw what happened. We saw what happen in it. Was it last year or 2020 when they attacked a company, a gasoline distribution, a pipeline company,

Leo Laporte (00:12:19):
Colonial pipeline.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:12:20):
Yeah. Colonial pipeline. And they didn't actually take down the pipeline system. Right. Because the billing system,

Leo Laporte (00:12:25):
Their it system. Yeah. Yeah. That was a dark side, which was in fact a Russian malware operation. In fact I know CSA estimates about 75% of all ransomware comes out of Russia, whether it's the Russian government or independent. I, my sense is, I don't know, Alan, what you think, but my sense is it's independent operators who are tolerated if not sanctioned by the Russian government because of their useful it's

Allyn Malventano (00:12:50):
Attack. It's it's as far as like a tax, it's always like the silliest thing like that, like that example that was just given about, you know, like they got into their it network and they messed up their billing. Right. It's always the, you always get into the weirdest.

Leo Laporte (00:13:03):
Oh and how did they

Allyn Malventano (00:13:04):
Get in expecting place?

Leo Laporte (00:13:05):
They got in through a what was it? It was a reused, it was a password. It was a conventional stuffing attack on a password for so many. It didn't work there anymore. Right. Who had a VPN access had used a, a reused password left. They never deactivated the account. It was just sitting there.

Allyn Malventano (00:13:24):
Right. And, and now with so many people working from home and also using VPNs for work potentially on that same system that they might be using for personal stuff when they're not on the clock and they've, you know, shut off the VPN, right. You're off the VPN. You're not under the umbrella of the corporations network and, and their firewalls and whatnot. You're under your own router. You potentially get exploited there not even be a PR prior employee, potentially a current employee, right? Like your, your personal or your work machine could potentially get hacked. You know, when you're not on the clock and then you get on the VPN. Now, if you, if your AV had not picked that up yet, now you have a vector into, you know, potentially into the work system. Right. But that applies across all sorts of industry, right. Not just not just Intel or Microsoft or any other kind of those kinds of companies, but like any, any other company where you have some remote workers, you

Leo Laporte (00:14:15):
Can employ it. The NSA

Allyn Malventano (00:14:19):
Those guys don't do like a work from home VPN.

Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
The, no, yeah. Not the, not like the NSA contractor. Do you remember this?

Sam Abuelsamid (00:14:26):
Take something home on a thumb

Leo Laporte (00:14:27):
Drive, took something home on a thumb drive. He was running at a malware Annie malware program called KasKaspersky on his system. It detected the mal, the malware, which was an NSA exploit and uploaded it to Russian servers where, from which it was apparently exfil trade, somehow we don't know how maybe the FSU and and, and released yeah, that would never, that could never happen.

Allyn Malventano (00:14:58):
I will, I will say this, like, despite the fact that KasKaspersky is of course, like Russian affiliated, like they've, they have a history of being a reasonably good reputation as far as antivirus.

Leo Laporte (00:15:09):
Not anymore. Yes of, I agree. In fact, Devor used to swear by it. He said, that's the only one I'll use, but I know knowing Devor act that that was probably because he'd had drinks with Eugene. In fact, Eugene KasKaspersky was a well liked beloved guy. He'd go to Davos, he'd go to conferences, he'd buy drinks for journalists. And I can't tell you how many times over the last five years I've asked the question, well, should we still be using Kabuki? And people say, oh, no, no, Eugene's cool. He's cool. It would never, well, maybe his his golden Nora has worn off because this week the FCC added kabuki's antivirus to its restricted list the first time anybody. But China's been put on this list, the first Russian company on the security risk list. Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15:58):
The thing, the thing is even, even if Eugene KasKaspersky is a good guy and doesn't do anything wrong, you know, he's, it's a big company. He's probably got thousands of employees.

Leo Laporte (00:16:07):
Well, and he's in Russia where there's a law that says, if the FSU wants your data, do they get it? It's kinda like China, right? KasKaspersky said they were disappointed with the FCCS action, by the way, they call themselves the world's largest privately owned security company. They have 400 million users globally, quarter of a million companies. They said they were disappointed saying it was a response to the geopolitical climate. Well, duh, rather than a comprehensive evaluation of the integrity of KasKasperskys products and services, but KasKasperskys always said that us government Bann them in 2017 after the NSA breach. And now the FCC says it would means that no federal agency can can or anybody who's using federal money can buy a copy of KasKaspersky. What, what do you think, Alan, do you have an opinion on Eugene and, and the company?

Allyn Malventano (00:17:06):
I mean, there's, there's no way to know for sure. What influence there, what level of influence there is. Right. Which is, seems to be what has led to those decisions. Yeah. So it's just, you know, but we just, we just can't condone it to this degree where we want, you know, where we're recommending our government employees to go and, and use this antivirus. Right. If you're gonna use one, just don't use that one, you know, regardless of how good it was. There are still ways, like if you wanted a, your file to be scanned by that particular tool, there's still, you know, play online where you can submit a file for analysis and it'll scan it, it'll bounce it across, you know, 20 different AVS and give you a result. Right. I think it's a virus total as one of 'em, if they're still up you know, there's ways to get them scanned, but like, you know, the, those folks are doing it in such a way that whatever does get scanned by any of those tools is a system that is not gonna then talk back to any of those companies. They sort of isolate it. Yeah. Right. So it's just, it's only, it's only in and not out sort of sort of a box. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:18:04):
And there are plenty of antivirus is so, you know, why take it to, I guess although perky is very good. I mean, it is a very good antivirus. Yeah. I D know,

Allyn Malventano (00:18:15):
It's just, it's just that, you know, it's just, are they talking, you know, to what degree are they talking back to their government? Right, right. That's that's, that's the question, mark

Leo Laporte (00:18:24):
FCC

Allyn Malventano (00:18:24):
Know that

Leo Laporte (00:18:24):
Answer. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing, they're not gonna tell you why they say this. It could just be the political climate, I guess I would hope they'd have a technical reason. They say they're relying on findings from DHS and the committee for assessment of foreign participation in the United States, telecommunications service sector, calf putts.

Allyn Malventano (00:18:48):
I mean, it could legitimately just be down to potential risk and not actual risk. Like there, there might not, there might not be a shred of like direct evidence that just cus Kaspersky has done whatever. Right. Right. But the potential is there, right? There's nothing to say that tomorrow that couldn't happen and you don't want a bunch of government employees all having it on their system and then have to do that damage control and say, oh, a buddy, quick uninstall your KasKaspersky right away. Because now somebody flipped a switch and you know, is now has some attack vector via that tool. Right. Because it, because that's the, that's the worst thing for an exploit style attack. Vector is the antivirus tool itself. Right. That's the one thing you're trusting on your system. You don't want that to be the thing that's hacking you. I,

Leo Laporte (00:19:30):
I honestly, and, and we have, you know, we use an antivirus here. We use E set on our editors, computers, cuz they are compelled to use windows eight. Did we? When we rebuilt, we got new Dell workstations. Did we put windows nine on there? What nine we put on? We put 10 on. Okay, good. We're putting 10 on. But, but you know, that's very common in a business where you don't, if you've got a stable system, you don't want Willy nilly, you say, oh, you gotta upgrade. That's normal for normal users, but you don't just want say willynilly upgrade. But at the same time we run a set just to be sure. But normally I will tell normal people on the radio show don't you don't need an antivirus. S has a very good antivirus. Anything you, anything you put on your system is, has the potential for making your system more vulnerable, less reliable, slow down your CPU and all that stuff. So don't install anything unnecessary and in antivirus is, do you agree, Alan, for most people unnecessary

Allyn Malventano (00:20:30):
To install an additional antivirus ed or oh, alongside defender. Yeah. I, I personally just use defender. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:20:36):
Defender's fine. And I don't run one on a Mac. I think Apple's protections. They're not, they don't really an antivirus, but Apple's protection are sufficient. But to be honest, I don't run it on Linux either. I just don't wanna put another program on there with deep hooks into the kernel that could not be reliable.

Allyn Malventano (00:20:54):
So the, the, the key is to like having an OS running an OS, like Linux, which also applies to what's most likely on your home router as well. Right? Most of those are forms of clinics and

Leo Laporte (00:21:05):
Your phone, if you're nano user.

Allyn Malventano (00:21:06):
Yeah. I, I sort of envision like, nobody's really taken this to heart yet, but I envision this as, remember those pictures back from world war II, where everybody had to sort of chip in and like you got people make an ammo and you know, everybody's, everybody's doing their part to whatever piece of the effort that they can contribute. Right. What I think people really should be doing now, which I don't think enough people are paying into tension to is there's an awful lot of people with routers with multiple year old firmwares on them. Right? Like it's just something that nobody thinks of. If it's not something that automatically updates on its own. And there is a, basically a Linux machine sitting at the gateway to your house, right. The, the way in to your house. And there's there have been exploits over the past years and those apply to those routers as well. There's there's ways in potentially. So yeah. People like you want to chip in, on your, your war effort sort of thing update the things in your homes. And if you're a guy helping out at a small business or whatever, like make sure the routers update, that's probably the easiest thing you could do to, you know, stave off potential ways in from anybody, not just Russia, but like, you know, anybody that's

Leo Laporte (00:22:17):
What shields up is. It's not just for big business it's for all of us. I've seen this on TWiTtter too. Do you wanna do your part in the war effort patch your freaking software?

Allyn Malventano (00:22:26):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:28):
It's true. Because if you have a Steve was talking on Tuesday about micro tick routers, which have firmware updates, but people never update 'em. And so there's this vast hole that can be co-opted and used for DDoS attacks. Without your knowledge, if you apply the update, you'd vulnerably be gone, so do it. Right.

Allyn Malventano (00:22:47):
And, and that's, and that's the kind of a thing that it doesn't necessarily need to be a zero day for something that a country like Russia may have something that they that's a good,

Leo Laporte (00:22:56):
They don't mind exposing that it's a well known exploit been around for years. Well, no,

Allyn Malventano (00:23:00):
It's, it's not that it's that if they have X number of systems in the us that they own right. Effectively they're not gonna yeah. The in effect of bot net, they're not gonna flip the switch on that until it's something that's really juicy that they want to do. They're not just gonna do it. Willynilly they're not gonna send us bot net machines trying to attack Ukraine right now because the us people would figure out what those were in the meantime and have weeks, you know, to, to get those machines offline or, you know, attend would be drawn to it at that point. Right. Yeah. And people would fix it. And you wouldn't want that. Right. So that's the kind of thing you need to make sure when it's dormant and not being used yet, but potentially could be used update the dang devices and, and, you know, shut those security

Leo Laporte (00:23:44):
Holes. Last, the FBI was the strangest bulletin sent out a bulletin, say, reboot your routers to everybody. Yep. Reboot your routers, cuz these in this particular, the ma we're talking about wasn't persistent it was, it sat in memory. So if you just rebooted your router this was 2018, May, 2018 as urgent request, reboot your router to stop Russia linked malware. And it would go anyway.

Allyn Malventano (00:24:12):
Yeah. And it was probably a matter of it couldn't get back in because they had, you know yeah. Taken over whatever that DNS entry was or whatever something they had to do or that IP address. Right. Usually that's whatever that vector is, they'll figure out some other way to sort of cut it at, at the head elsewhere. Right. And yeah, just, just protection in that case could just be a matter of rebooting the router. I'm sure there was also something where you should update your firmware also,

Leo Laporte (00:24:36):
Just so you don't get reinfected.

Allyn Malventano (00:24:37):
Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:24:38):
But the, the at the time the FBI said Russia has a botnet of hundreds of thousands of us routers. And when he said, when they say Russia, they're talking about fancy bear, which is you know, a apt, a P T 20, eight's another name. They always have these strange names, which is a Russian group run by the GRU Russian military intelligence. And they said they had a global network of hundreds of thousands of routers under control. I said, please reboot. Wow. So update your router kids. That's a good thing. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:25:13):
Well question for you. I mean, you know, I, I have, I use a, a nest wifi mesh system at home, which updates itself. And I know, I think most mesh systems at Euro and so on update themselves, but do most other mainstream routers today, the ones made today, do they, are, are they now being set up to automatically update their, their firmware? Because I know in the past updating the firmware on a router was a real pain. And for, for an average person to do that, you know, I mean, they're more likely to brick it than successfully updating

Leo Laporte (00:25:46):
That's true.

Allyn Malventano (00:25:47):
Right. And many of them like I think a lot of the, a routers, they have the capability to do automatic updates, but I'm not sure that it's the default, right? So you, in there, the real problem is

Leo Laporte (00:25:57):
The cheap $54 links. This routers or micro tick routers, TP link routers where they didn't put that capability. You're right. The Euro that's, but that's an expense of router. One of the reasons I recommended is cuz it auto updates. In fact there was a flaw that was exposed. It wasn't a zero day, but was reported in the Euro router two years ago. And by the time it was reported and we were able to tell people about it, we also were able to say, I'm do don't worry because Euro has pushed out an update that everybody has Scott. Everybody has. So yeah, auto update is a, is a big deal. I feel like we should require stuff like that. I mean, if we're gonna take this security seriously, it should be kind of a requirement that all I, OT devices have auto update facilities.

Allyn Malventano (00:26:45):
There's there is a flip side to that and that is sometimes updates are known to break things, right? So there's some, you know, for the sake of, you know, I knew I was about to be on your show today. Do I want my route or auto appointing in this moment? Right? Like there's, there's some, you have to have some sort of limitations in place sometimes depending on your, your uptime requirements.

Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
Also hard to convince people if it's not gonna affect them, like they're not gonna get, they're just being used as a DDoS router. It's not gonna affect your personal security. It's harder to convince people, right? They need to, they need to fix that. I wanna take a little break when we come back, I wanna talk about lapse us. This was the, the hacking group that broke into Okta, broke into Microsoft stole source code, apparently NVIDIA Samsung the list, a long list, laps, U S dollar sign. Wonder what their, and the great story about the guy behind it. I'll give you, I'll give you a hint, not a Russian, but first a word from our sponsor. And actually I wanna give these guys a huge plug. Not only do I believe in this product and use this product, and Lisa uses this product, we talk about it all the time Grammarly, but this is one of the big Ukraine companies that is struggling during this war.

Leo Laporte (00:28:10):
They do a, I love Grammarly for many reasons. They're also written in lisp, which I really, really like really? It's a writing tool, for instance, Lisa's, spelling's great. Her grammar's pretty good, but what Grammarly does, and this is very, is as she's writing emails to employees, it'll sometimes say, you know, that's a little BR maybe, maybe you'd like to soften it a little bit. And she always laughs. She says, well, yeah, I mean, I'm just very straightforward, but she'll add a little please. And thank you. And thank you Grammarly for doing that. Grammarly has a free version and a premium version. You can even use it on the website, which is really cool. The thing I'm talking about is the tone detector. That's free. It helps you say what you mean in the appropriate tone and never never misinterpreted nowadays. As we use a lot of texts, especially email to communicate, it's very easy to miss the tone in email.

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):
So it's really important when you are writing your emails that you express it in, in a way that is not gonna raise somebody's hackles. On the other end, they have premium tone adjustments that go even further. This is what Lisa uses to help ensure you're being clear and assertive in your emails persuasive. They help you be persuasive with a confident and polished tone. They'll suggest more decisive phrases and word choices. I really love that. Grammarly also has a premium feature called full sentence rewrite. That will take a sentence. That's maybe a little run on and a little convoluted, and I'm always impressed. Come back with a sentence. If you said it this way, it'd be much clearer and it's true. Rewriting those hard to read sentences. They also have clarity suggestions in the premium version that simplify sentences and get your point across faster by cutting unnecessary words and jargon to make your sentences easy to follow.

Leo Laporte (00:30:01):
I wish everybody in business used this, the business jargon drives me nuts and you use it cuz everybody uses it. It's unconscious. It's nice though, to get a little nudge and you know what? It's not a human it's just on your computer. A little nudge saying, you know, you shouldn't really say run this up the flag pole to see who salutes. You might want to try another way of saying that and even gives you one click replacement that you can just, it saves you time. It's free to use you download it, integrate it into your daily life. It works wherever you are in Gmail, for instance, to help you work more efficiently on any of your projects. I just think it's a great solution. And I really wanna support these guys because as a Ukraine bay company, I bet you, they would love a little extra love from our audience.

Leo Laporte (00:30:46):
So go to Grammarly, G R a M M a R L Y. Grammarly.Com/TWiT. Sign up for that free account. Get through those emails and your work quicker by keeping it concise, confident, and effective with Grammarly, go to grammarly.com/TWiT to sign up for a free account. And when you're ready to upgrade to Grammarly premium, you'll get 20% off. I think Grammarly is a great choice. At least get the free version and show 'em. We care grammarly.com/TWiT. Make sure you do that though. So you can get 20% off if you decide to buy. I I'm a big fan. We use grammar Lee throughout the, I think we have accounts for everybody in the in the business because it's nobody, nobody needs to suffer from incomplete or unclear emails, grammarly.com/TWiTs. Thank you, Grammarly for your support. And we support you. We really we've been using it for years here.

Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
Isn't it great. Love it. Yeah. Love it. You know, I, you know, at first, cuz I, I, I like to think I've written a few books. I like to think I'm a good writer. Even a even I, you know, go. Yeah, you're right. Grammarly. Yeah, you're right. Okay. Okay. Lap us. We actually talked about this last week. Bloomberg had scoop that in fact lapses was not a Russian hacking group, but a 16 year old in England, multimillionaires cyber criminal in his mom's basement. He lives at home. He allegedly has a mass of $14 million fortune. Now you don't wanna piss off your fellow hackers. Apparently he's been named by rival hackers and researchers, the city of London police say they've arrested seven teenagers in relation to the lapses hacking, but they won't say if he's one of them, the boy's father told the BBC we're concerned and we're trying to keep him away from computers. You know, there's a, there's a, there's a tough conversation with your son, son. Do you have, do you have 10 million hounds in a bank account? We don't know about lapse has been really good. I mean Lou, I know, you know, they, they, they got the Microsoft's holy grail. They got the, the source code. Although this happens fairly, I don't think Microsoft really cares that much. If you get the source code, I mean, they obviously it's a trade secret and stuff, but nobody gonna rebuild windows 10 from the source code.

Allyn Malventano (00:33:22):
Yeah. I mean, you don't really, I mean, we, I honestly don't know what source code they got said something about Bing and some other things. And we don't know if they got old legacy code. That's been sitting there for a while. We don't know if they got just parts of the code. We have no idea. And I think like you said, the security is not necessarily about the source code. Go look at open source, right? There's lots of open source applications out that are, are highly secure and the source is open. Right, right.

Leo Laporte (00:33:44):
Cortana being on the other hand, windows,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:33:47):
The source code, wouldn't it be potentially possible to find some vulnerabilities that others haven't found

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
Yet? I think it's most likely who's looking at it. Right. Looking for, I look at it cuz I like to read the profanities in the comments. I hope they got the comments or you see comments sometimes when you look at source code or he is got, somebody says, I have no idea why this works, but leave it in.

Allyn Malventano (00:34:10):
We got smart a long time ago. We have, we have code scanners. Now that pull the comments out. Oh do they?

Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
Oh yeah. One of the reasons, I mean, I honestly, I think Microsoft code easily, in fact they've talked about this release source, but one of the big reasons they don't is they, some of the source code is patent encumbered, not just by Microsoft, but by third party. So you can't just, willynilly say here's the source code. You don't, you know, you don't have the right to release the source code for some of this stuff. Right? So, and, and as I said, nobody, even if you got the full thing, nobody's gonna build windows, could

Allyn Malventano (00:34:40):
You lose?

Leo Laporte (00:34:41):
If you had all the source code, could you build it?

Allyn Malventano (00:34:44):
Oh, I mean, they, they, they call that. They call that building the world. When you're at Microsoft, they say they basically call it building world. We, you have to have pretty beefy machines and it takes a really long time. And I can guarantee you probably would never get all the source code in the right spot and be able to build everything at once. Wouldn't be able to no.

Leo Laporte (00:35:00):
So I think it's more what you said. So Sam it's people want to see there, there are people like me who are just code tourists. I love looking at that stuff. In fact, one of my favorite books was the source code for the original Unix that was released early on. It's fascinating. But so there's code tourists, but mostly I think it's probably bad guys looking for holes for mistake or, or

Sam Abuelsamid (00:35:20):
Maybe he just wants to compile it to run on their raspberry pie.

Leo Laporte (00:35:26):
The teenager who by the way is on, they say on the spectrum, he's autistic uses the online handle white or breach base. The boy told the, the father of the boy told the BBC. I'd never heard about any of the, this until recently. He's never talked about any hacking, but he is very good on computers and spends a lot of time on the computer. I always thought he was playing games under

Allyn Malventano (00:35:51):
Understatement. Very good on computers,

Leo Laporte (00:35:54):
Seven, the city of London, police say seven P people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested. They've all been released under investigation. I mean, if he's underage, they can't, you know, they, they can't do a whole lot. In fact they can't name him. He attends a special educational school in Oxford. His dad said, we're going to try to stop him from going on computers. The BBC has also spoken to the boys mother who did not want to comment. He was docked on a hacker site after falling out with business partners. Wow. That

Allyn Malventano (00:36:24):
Is, that is impressive. Just the age range of several of them. Yeah. Because like, for some of the stuff to really wrap your head around it, it takes a few years to get, you know, just well versed enough in all of the, that aspects of just, you know, that arena, unless you're doing the script kitty style thing where you just, you know, come across some, some exploits and try to use them. Right. But, and that the learning is not very much for that, but these guys,

Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
He doesn't sound like a script at the box. Yeah. Right,

Allyn Malventano (00:36:52):
Exactly. Yeah. Like they would've had to come up with some stuff to, to, you know, be this effective. And that's, that's pretty impressive than the ages, especially

Leo Laporte (00:37:00):
The chief research officer at unit 2 21 B, which is a cybersecurity investigation company said we've had his name baker street, 2 21 B oh, I get it. It's hysterical. It's you like Holmes reference? I did. I didn't, I didn't pick up on that. They said we've had his name since the middle of last year. And we identified him before his doxing. They've been working with a security company, Palo Alto and they watched him on his exploits throughout 2021 periodically sending law enforcement a heads up about the latest crimes. I don't know why they, they didn't stop. And why would you not stop him? You want, you want roll up the whole evidence? Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (00:37:45):
And he might not have done something egregious enough to, to warrant, you know, knocking on their door or something. They haven't

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Pretty,

Sam Abuelsamid (00:37:53):
So has, has have Microsoft or in video or Intel given this kid a, a job offer yet,

Leo Laporte (00:37:58):
You know, that's nice, you know, that's next. The fact that he didn't have such good OPSEC means he was just, you know, this was as with a lot of kids who hack this was fun for him. Although he did accumulate 14 million

Sam Abuelsamid (00:38:15):
Sounds like

Allyn Malventano (00:38:15):
Fun to me, maturity. The maturity was not that high, this group. I mean, he seemed, they, they gloat a bunch. Yeah. I mean, they, they were gloating a bunch about it. They everywhere. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:38:25):
It's interesting that kids could be that sophisticated, that, that skilled, not a nation state hacker, just some kids in their basement, their mom's basement. They hacked almost, you know, everybody Samsung got hacked and video got hacked, Microsoft. The, the one that concerns people the most is Okta. Why is that an issue,

Allyn Malventano (00:38:48):
Lou? So Okta, when they're they have this thing called the w warehouse w force, sorry, workforce identity solutions layer, which is basically a bunch of organizations stored their keys to the kingdom on their network. And, and so if, if that type of data was exfiltrated, that means that all of those organizations that are open to a attack. And so I think that's why Okta is such a big deal. Cause they're an identity provider. They're, they're basically the, the first line of defense for, for most organizations. Obviously, if, if you've enable other things like MFA and other things you're in, you're in better shape, but in the same sense, these types of keys allow for like services to talk to things, right? So you can have special certificates and keys that can have services talked to you know, to your data and so on, so forth. So Okta managed all that. And so people were worried about that. It looks like they said, Hey, like this wasn't a, this wasn't this wasn't affected at all. So don't worry. But again, it could have been.

Leo Laporte (00:39:46):
Yeah. according to Hawk, as chief security, officer David Bradbury, the hackers had accessed. This is just what you were talking about, Alan, the computer of a customer or engineer working for the subprocess over a five day period, back in January the attack had been quote analogous to walking away from your computer at a coffee shop whereby a stranger has virtually in this case, sat down at your machine is using the master keyboard. It was contained quickly. It did not. The guy did not have so called godlike access. So Okta itself not breached, however, however worst case. Yeah. They said 366 clients were affected.

Allyn Malventano (00:40:31):
Yeah. I mean, think about it. It was, it could be purely coincidence that it just happened to be that person. Yeah. Right. You would hope that the people with the higher axis would have better safeguards in place, but that's, that's what I was just saying before where it's, it's always this, the silliest thing where you don't expect, you know, a particular kind of, kind of exploit. I mean, heck there was, there was a, the closest that my network here I ever came to be uncompromised was I was about to get up from my computer and my mouse moved.

Leo Laporte (00:40:58):
Yeah. Right. Not a good story.

Allyn Malventano (00:41:00):
And like that's

Leo Laporte (00:41:01):
Yeah,

Allyn Malventano (00:41:02):
Yeah. I just, I just heard a O so there was already spine tingling just for me talking about it. Right. And like, and, and I was already standing up, so I just casually walked right around to the back of my Q my computer and yanked out the network cable. I was like, okay,

Leo Laporte (00:41:15):
What's

Allyn Malventano (00:41:15):
Going on here? Wow. And that, that, or did not go back on my network until everything was completely wiped.

Leo Laporte (00:41:22):
Did you have a remote access Trojan on there? Did you find it?

Allyn Malventano (00:41:26):
Yeah. Yeah. It was a rat. I don't know how it got on there and it wasn't anywhere else on my network. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:41:31):
If you can get one just, but you know, if somebody works, Microsoft or Intel is probably a target, people are trying all the time, you know, with, oh,

Allyn Malventano (00:41:39):
This was, this was, I was like, nobody random guy at PC per you know, that wasn't this was years ago.

Leo Laporte (00:41:46):
There is bragging rights and hacking Allen's computer,

Allyn Malventano (00:41:50):
I guess. Well, they got to move my mouse for about, about six seconds. Congratulations.

Leo Laporte (00:41:55):
Okay. Little tip. If you're living in your mom's basement, do not move the mouse. Okay. That's a giveaway

Allyn Malventano (00:42:01):
Also. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:42:04):
Stay away from the mouse. That's hysterical. That's Hyster.

Allyn Malventano (00:42:08):
Most of these organizations, Leo, they, they implement, I mean, we talked about this on the show. The time is zero trust where like, even if the support person had any access to anything, the next time they access something that had, you know, specific customer data on or particular customer data on, they should have popped up another thing, Hey, make sure your identity is identified or, you know, that kind of thing. So I can't imagine Okta doesn't have these systems in place, which is why I'm pretty sure they got nothing,

Leo Laporte (00:42:35):
Right? Yeah. One hopes, you know, especially company like Okta or duo, which they're, they're there to be an added layer of security to companies that are relying on them would have themselves very good security practices. One would hope we've we've seen situations where that's not the case.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:42:58):
I, I think, you know, one, one part, one problem here though, is, you know, you've got all of these different companies that are, are being breached in different ways. And, you know, modern systems are really complex and often include components from a, a lot of different vendors. You know, you may have, you know, you can have some stuff from Okta, some stuff from Microsoft, maybe some NVIDIA stuff, somewhere in the stack. And, you know, if you start finding holes in different parts of it, you know, I think you talked earlier, you know, about kind of, you know, working, you know, finding, you know, the you know, starting off with, you know an unused VPN account, you know, and then finding your, you know, kind of just kind of worming your way through the system through all these different's

Leo Laporte (00:43:45):
That

Sam Abuelsamid (00:43:45):
Manage to, if, if you've managed to get into all these different things, you can start to make connections between them.

Leo Laporte (00:43:51):
I could totally see the pleasure and thrill of that. Right. it's like an adventure game I got in here. Let's see what else I can do. And I don't think a lot of times, especially these people, these teenagers, young, you know, younger people, they're not connecting the dots. It's just fun for them. I, you know, I, I talked to Mitnick and Adrian lamo and many others who are very skilled guys, Kevin PS, it was fun for them. Even Wosniak used to do this as a kid and it was an adventure right. Wa used to. Right. But

Sam Abuelsamid (00:44:23):
If it, you know, it might, it might be fun for these guys, but if they start releasing this code or putting it, you know, somewhere in a GitHub repository or wherever it might be, you know, somebody else who wants to do something more nefarious with it could take that and then start, you know, connecting the dots. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:44:39):
Absolutely. Pieces. That's, I'm, that's the real risk. I'm not saying it's a good thing. But on the other hand, I am saying it's probably be great to find an outlet for people like that with skills like that. That's just as fun. Because it's that's, those are good skills develop. How did you become A's how'd you become a, and that's our professional hacker a

Allyn Malventano (00:44:58):
Well, I was, I, I, I wasn't you

Leo Laporte (00:45:02):
Study at school, did you, did the Navy teach you? What, where did you learn that?

Allyn Malventano (00:45:06):
Okay. So when, so I was running reactors on subs, and then I train to over to do the network stuff that they don't necessarily teach you how to be a hacker right away. You know, you have to sort of move into the positions where you would have to do more and more of that sort of thing. Sure. And then you sort of get trained along the way, but just in order to make that first step and be in that, that rating, which is like a job description in the, the Navy to do the network jobs in general, there was a, a, a school like a, you know, couple month school with the final exam was actually here's these few sheets of paper of network traffic that you happen to have sniffed come across a network, draw out the diagram of all systems on the network.

Allyn Malventano (00:45:46):
That's right. Yeah. And so, and, and that's where you were talking about earlier where it's like there for some people, this is fun. And I, I mean that final exam, even though it was arduous and took me a few hours to do, but it was, you know, it was a pain's, but it was it's good. And interesting's yeah, yeah. It's, you know, I took, I took just this, you know, some network traffic of somebody that was like, you know, out outputting a config of a router, and I turned it into an entire network diagram, you know, just from some lines of, you know, addresses and whatnot. But that's not, you know, that's mostly for defense or just understanding networking, right. That's sort of baseline fundamentals, which you would then build. If you went and worked somewhere where they were doing more hacking style things, then you would have to go to more schools and, and build up your, your knowledge more.

Allyn Malventano (00:46:28):
Right. All the schools that I went to were more along the lines of reverse engineering and like defense, things like that. But we did have red team, like people in the building, they call 'em red teams. And that's a, that's not just in the military. I mean, there's civilian. Oh yeah. Companies that do red teaming and that's the kind of thing where those, where those kids would do great at right. Like go work there. You could potentially make a heck of a lot of money. You know, maybe not the exploit of levels of money that those kids were making sort of blackmailing people, but

Leo Laporte (00:46:59):
14 millions, a little more than any of these.

Allyn Malventano (00:47:01):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, you could certainly make an, a good, honest living. If you have a sharp skillset doing that type of that type of exploit work, and in those cases you would be doing it legally with the permission of the company who you're contracting with, you know, where they basically say, look, we want you to attack us. You know, here's the, here's the window of time where you're allowed to do it. Here's the boundaries where, you know, we don't want you to like, shut all of our servers off, please. You know, that kind of a thing.

Leo Laporte (00:47:27):
The early guys were into the system that they were looking at was the phone company, the, the, the you know, Mabel was a fascinating kind of network problem, kind like that piece of paper problem you were given where they were trying to figure out how it works. And I remember John Draper better know, was captain crunch telling me the, they used to dumpster dive behind the phone company, looking for manuals. And when they found the manuals, they would, they would pour through them. I mean, stuff that you and I would look at and go, good Lord, who cares? And they would pour through them. He's the guy who figured out that a 2,600 Hertz tone would tr would trigger the switching equipment to give you access to long distance phone calls for free. That's why he was named captain crunch. Cuz it turned out that was exactly the tone that the crunch whistle that came in a box of cereal put out. But, but they had that same kind of mindset where somehow they were fascinated by complex systems and deducing how they worked.

Allyn Malventano (00:48:30):
Right? Yeah. There's, there's some, there's a certain subset of folks that just have a really high aptitude for that sort of thing. And some people just, just kind of love it. Yeah. You know, just it's a challenge. Right. Like I had to learn an awful lot of layers of knowledge to understand all the stuff of reactor theory to run reactors on submarines. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's all sorts of, I mean, if you want you whole series yeah. They sort of touch on like all the complexities of how did this reactor meltdown and were all the things that led into it. Right. And that was, you know, that was like a half hour discussion that they did at the end of that series. And that was a super over I

Leo Laporte (00:49:02):
That, did you love that though? Wasn't that a good, oh,

Allyn Malventano (00:49:05):
It was it. Yeah. It was excellent. Yeah. It was, they, you know, those are all the exact principle. Everything was correct. Right. It's exactly how all that stuff works. Xenon is a thing that tries to shut the reactor off and all that, all those things are, you know, they, they pronounced it the way Russians pronounced it and Zenon, which threw me off. But,

Allyn Malventano (00:49:22):
But yeah, I mean all that stuff and, and there's just a certain type of, you know, people with a certain type of mentality who just really enjoy the, you know, technic, something that, you know, something that has technical manuals, right. The reactor plants on the sub had just, you know, entire cabinets, full of books, right. For you to study and learn all parts of those systems. Right. So imagine you have this black box of a system, like the mile bell thing. And you're like, well, I wanna really know how this works. Right. Again, it would be great if they worked there, there, I'm sure they would be amazing employee and probably do great things for the company. But from the outside in you just dumpster dive the manuals and try to learn how the system works and then figure out ways to, you know, do creative things with it.

Leo Laporte (00:50:00):
There was a great game I played on the Atari, I think it was called SCR. It was a classic simulator game where you had you had to SCR a reactor before it melt down. And I'm sure, I mean, it was primitive even compared to this description of how a reactor works, incher noble. I mean, I don't, I don't think we had any Zen on in there, but it was really fun to try to keep the reactor running without boiling off the liquid or it was really cool. Yeah, but I never, I don't think I had that to cuz when I first met you, Alan, you were, you were talking about, you know, the the controllers in these SSD drives and the variations. I think even I saw that even then that kind of fascination with complex systems and how they work and how they interact.

Allyn Malventano (00:50:47):
And, and that was very much the same sort of thing. Right? Yeah. Outside looking in, this is a black box it's it's misbehaving in some way. How do I find out just by poking at it with, you know, asking it to do different types of requests and then does the performance go up or down after I've done those, right. That's the same, same sort of thing. Right. You're poking at it with a stick. See what makes the thing tick. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:51:11):
You can, by the way, if you want to play SCR Chris Crawford's classic game from 1980, it's on, thank you. Brewster kale, internet archive,

Allyn Malventano (00:51:22):
You know, you know, what's, you know, what's amazing about this somehow. I have never, I did not know that this existed Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:51:27):
Oh, this is was it, I was playing on Atari 800.

Allyn Malventano (00:51:32):
I had no idea.

Leo Laporte (00:51:33):
And I didn't, you know, I thank you to the chat room for finding it for me building a nuclear power plan. And then, then you have to, you have to keep it running. Alan, it might have, might have saved you some study time

Allyn Malventano (00:51:46):
And the books, like they just built it randomly.

Leo Laporte (00:51:49):
Chris was kind of a genius game simulator waiting for NRC license. I guess you have to get your license. Oh, there we go. That's cute. There we go. That's cute. We got our license now. You've got the the pressure, the temperature, the workers. Yeah. How many megawat hours you're putting out. I'm sure it's much simplified, but still was a fun game. I,

Allyn Malventano (00:52:08):
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's definitely a reactor that he's doing some stuff,

Leo Laporte (00:52:13):
You know, I've always wanted to ask somebody who ran a nuclear reactor, how accurate this was.

Allyn Malventano (00:52:18):
I mean, it's got, it's got loops and stuff, and then there's a heat exchanger and yeah, those

Leo Laporte (00:52:22):
Here's the rods. See, there's the rods and I can rods. I can lower 'em or I can raise 'em.

Allyn Malventano (00:52:27):
Yeah. Well, I don't understand if they call it SCR. Isn't the, is it to not cause make it, so you had to scramble the right. You gotta keep it running.

Leo Laporte (00:52:35):
Is the idea. Yeah. That's I think that's what it is. I think it starts to overheat and you have to kind of manage the rods and so forth a cause

Allyn Malventano (00:52:42):
If the goal is to SCR, you would just hit SCR and then the game you're like I won

Leo Laporte (00:52:46):
SCR is what? Pulling the rods completely out so that they reaction. No, no,

Allyn Malventano (00:52:50):
No, no. In, in, in rods, go in. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:52:54):
Rods go in, but doesn't that increase the reaction?

Allyn Malventano (00:52:57):
No, the rod. Well, okay. The rods don't let this

Leo Laporte (00:53:01):
Guy run

Allyn Malventano (00:53:02):
Reactor please. But I thought I was supposed to go take him out. Okay. Okay. The control rods are not the fuel rod.

Leo Laporte (00:53:10):
The control rod, rod slow the reaction down. I

Allyn Malventano (00:53:13):
Absorb neutron. They made a half NEM. They get in the way of get chain

Leo Laporte (00:53:17):
Reaction. I remember now.

Allyn Malventano (00:53:19):
Yes, yes, yes. Remember that when you're, you know, when you happen to be touring a reactive plant and everybody dies and you have to be the guy to save the day, the rods go in,

Leo Laporte (00:53:29):
In not out the control rods. Okay. Got it. Okay. let's by the way, if Leo's running the reactor, it's time to scrap. Yes, exactly. Now we know don't get the hell out quick. I don't know if you can run far enough or fast enough. Let's take a little break. I wanna talk about the EU preliminary law, provisional law. That apple is not gonna like, not one cotton picking, but Allen Malano. Our sub Mariner is here. He is a technical analyst at Intel. And I have to apologize, you know, we used to have you on all the time. As soon as you went to Intel, I thought, well, I can't have him on anymore, but thank you for, to Intel for letting you join us and save us from nuclear meltdown. We appreciate it, hon.

Allyn Malventano (00:54:18):
Honestly, most of it was just, I was just busy.

Leo Laporte (00:54:20):
Well, we're glad you're here with storage things. Glad you're here also with a Sam bull, Sam he's my car guy. He's every week on the tech guy, a radio show, he has his own podcast called wheel bearings wheel bearings.media. He is an expert on all things. Car, principal, researcher at guide house insight. It's great to have you Sam you're in San Diego. Yeah, actually in Encinitas right now. Oh, nice. Love that area. Yeah. Well have a good time also with us from his new home on the east coast, you relocated Lou Meeska I did. Did you take the kids with you?

Allyn Malventano (00:54:55):
I did. I did take the kids with band, unfortunately, but yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:54:58):
No, you have the sweetest boys. Are they this awful? I

Allyn Malventano (00:55:02):
Do fight boys. Yeah. I keep me real busy. Real busy.

Leo Laporte (00:55:05):
Are you gonna keep trying to have a girl? Is that what's going on?

Allyn Malventano (00:55:08):
I think we are not gonna do that. No.

Leo Laporte (00:55:13):
And, and I know you were, there were some health issues with some of them, but everybody's doing well. Everybody's healthy.

Allyn Malventano (00:55:18):
Yes, they are all on the end and we're doing well. Yeah. We're looking forward to summer. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:55:22):
I'm yeah. I bet you are. Get outside please. Dad. You did you know about winter? Are you from the east coast originally?

Allyn Malventano (00:55:30):
Oh yeah. I grew up in New York and Massachusetts. Absolutely. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:34):
Cause I always wonder why somebody would willingly move to Rhode Island. But my, I grew up there. But as soon as I found California, like why would you leave California? But my mom just literally like around the corner from you. So yeah, she does. I'll come out and visit some it's beautiful place.

Allyn Malventano (00:55:53):
Yeah. There's beaches. There's just lots of great stuff

Leo Laporte (00:55:55):
Here. I know know it's actually, I love it. And I do kind of miss that great feeling of fall. And then of course now as a great time of year, cuz you've been suffering all winter and the sun starts to shine the birds cause Robin red breast comes out and is here great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by streak, not SCR streak. Streak is actually a CRM, four Gmail, a customer relationship management tool that you need. You will love if you use Gmail in business, as we do we use Google's workspace. You know, I mean it's a great tool for business, but there are some things maybe you could have a little help with. Streak is has been awarded Google's technology partner of the year, 750,000 users, entrepreneurs, small business owners, founders love the idea that you don't have to leave Gmail to get to your customer information and email it's all in one place.

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Get started right now. It shouldn't take you to maybe less than a minute before this ad is over. In fact, if you go to streak.com/TWiT, and right now for a limited time, 20% off the pro plan, S T R E a K streak.com/TWiT 20% off the pro plan. If you're managing customers report tickets if you're doing job searches, buyers and sellers, there's nothing like it. Streak.Com/And we thank them so much for supporting our show. Not yet a law in the EU, but boy, I think apple and Google both lobbied hard against this a law that would force apple and I guess Google and anybody who has a store you have to be a company with more than 75 billion euros value, annual sales of seven and a half billion and 45 million monthly users. I think Google and apple, both qualify.

Leo Laporte (00:58:46):
Then you have to offer third party payment options in your study of your stores. This is something epic suit apple over and lost. Although that's on appeal right now saying we don't wanna pay 30% to apple. You will, you could. And I think even more important to me, I don't, I'm not, I don't care so much about that. That's something maybe developers who don't want to give apple 30% companies like Netflix and Amazon and oth and epic might not like, but I think the thing that's more important to me and actually I think would be a big improvement interoperability with Apple's messages. Apple would have to open up I'm quoting here and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. If they so request users of smaller, big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files, or make video calls across messaging apps, giving them more choice.

Leo Laporte (00:59:41):
This it, I think is really the crown jewels for apple. In fact, we saw in the epic versus apple discovery emails from apple CEO Tim cook, Scott Foral at EQ and others saying we don't make messages on Android. That's the only reason parents are buying apple phones for their kids. So they could be green bubbles. Apple would also have to allow users to uninstall safari and other stock apps. And this would be a good one too. Replace them with third party alternatives if they so wish. Although iPhones lately have allowed you to use a third party browser instead of the default safari. Well, hold on

Allyn Malventano (01:00:19):
Audio.

Leo Laporte (01:00:19):
Oh,

Allyn Malventano (01:00:20):
When you use any third party web browser on apple devices, you're you're, you may be using their sort of shell of a browser, but the actual thing doing the rendering, the accessing the webpages is still web kit.

Leo Laporte (01:00:33):
This is a perfect example of I'll I'll take this position. Why government maybe shouldn't weigh in on these technical issues. I think the EU legislators say, well, you just make them uninstall safari, make that a, an option. Don't understand. That's not a solution,

Allyn Malventano (01:00:53):
Right?

Leo Laporte (01:00:53):
You'd have to say, oh, you can use some other rendering engine pro

Allyn Malventano (01:00:58):
Or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:00:58):
Yeah, yeah.

Allyn Malventano (01:00:59):
Which, which I would, which now there may be some di downsides or maybe Apple's doing some, you know, power efficiency, toile stuff with web kit that makes a, you know, better experience on an iOS device, regardless of which browser, you know, you you're using with it. Fine. But I don't know. I really, my personal belief is that if I do, if I put Chrome on an iPhone, it should be Chrome.

Leo Laporte (01:01:21):
Right. I agree. And in case iPhone, it's not it's web kit with a Chrome Chrome. Yes. On top. Right? Right.

Leo Laporte (01:01:29):
Gatekeepers again, apple Google companies, I guess Facebook would qualify. Although Facebook, if Facebook value keeps going down pretty soon they'll be low enough. They don't have to worry about this. We'll have to make it as easy to unsubscribe from services subscribe. Yeah. for the most important software, for instance, web browsers not require the software by default upon installation of the operating system ensure interoperability of messaging services, basic functionalities. I think that would be doesn't mean that apple would have to make messages for Android. However, it just means, I don't think, I think they, this one might be no,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:07):
But if, if Google wanted to make their messaging app work with apple messages, then they would have to allow that,

Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
Oh

Allyn Malventano (01:02:16):
Yeah. Apple or, or any third or anybody could make an Android app.

Leo Laporte (01:02:21):
Oh yeah. That's interesting. Allow app develop.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:25):
It's not gonna require, it's not gonna require apple to make an Android messages app, but anybody else could do it and, and tie into it right. Tie into their platform. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:02:34):
I

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:35):
Like that provide the APIs.

Leo Laporte (01:02:36):
I like that. Right now you have to 'em through hoops to get apple messages on an Android device.

Allyn Malventano (01:02:42):
I like it right up until the point where I start getting spamed by the random person that has an app that has access to their network. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:02:49):
Good point. Yeah. And, and then, you know, I'll, I'll channel Alex Lindsay on Mac break weekly because he's dead set against any of these changes, you know? I, and I think he has a point that the way apple does it, admittedly, to Apple's benefit it's lock in it's proprietary, it's a silo, but the way they do it also makes it easier and cleaner for users. And and that's a good point is

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:17):
That's, that's a good point. You know, more secure to that. I think users should have the right to, if they want to make their life messy, they should be able to do it. You should

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Have the right to be less secure. You

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:28):
Should. Yeah. Yeah. You shouldn't be locked into a particular means of doing something. If, if you, if you want to take that risk, you should, you should be allowed to do that.

Allyn Malventano (01:03:40):
There's not, there's nothing stopping people from using things like WhatsApp and telegram though. I think, I think that's the big problem with all I have with all of this is that they're not gonna go stop these, these they're not, not gonna make them be interoperable, which means then people are just gonna move to those. I, I, I just don't understand this, this line of thinking, unfortunately, well,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:58):
The, the, the pro the, the problem with that, you know, and particularly for messaging apps, probably more so than anything else is, you know, you really are that, I mean, that is probably the one place where the network effect is the, the biggest factor. You know, you can sure you can switch from apple messages to WhatsApp or, or you know, anything or anything else, their signal or whatever you want. But if you can't get all the people you communicate with to come over as well, right. Then it's useless to you. So it's, it's, you know, you should have, you should have the ability to go from WhatsApp or signal or telegram to apple messages or to WhatsApp, or to, you know, to go back and forth between any of these from any of these, it should be a many to many relationship, not a one-to-one relationship.

Allyn Malventano (01:04:47):
Yeah. It's, it's shocking how high a percentage of folks will just use the default thing, whatever there,

Leo Laporte (01:04:52):
The tyranny of

Allyn Malventano (01:04:52):
The, what came on the phone. Yep. Yes. Yep. Right. And, and they, you know, many people in that group don't even realize that they can install extra apps and they're like, oh, I could, I could put WhatsApp on there. Oh, okay.

Allyn Malventano (01:05:03):
Yeah, that's right. They don't understand the difference between the green and the blue on iMessage. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:05:07):
They just know they don't want those bluebe in there. That's right. Yeah. And it, but you know what? It is a strong lock in. I, you know, I've mentioned this story before my son and I asked my son who was in a fraternity at CU Boulder a couple of years ago. I said how many kids have Android? How many iPhone? He says, there's only one kid with Android. And, and he's the blue bubble. He, we he's left out of all of our group conversations. There's huge pressure as a result to be an iPhone user. Apple knows that.

Allyn Malventano (01:05:34):
And also to some degree, like, I kind of want there to be more interoperability just to try to reduce, not that I want everybody to end up settling on iMessage necessarily, but I mean, remember way back in the day when you had to use like I cream trillion or not IQ trillion for IQ and like MSN and pigeon. Right. Were you had?

Leo Laporte (01:05:56):
Yep.

Allyn Malventano (01:05:57):
And I still remember my stupid, I CQ number even right now. I don't know why. Totally. It's crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:06:01):
What's your IQ number? Go ahead. Tell me

Allyn Malventano (01:06:03):
1 6, 9, 6, 6 82.

Leo Laporte (01:06:04):
You guys remember your IQ numbers?

Allyn Malventano (01:06:06):
See it, it doesn't, it doesn't matter if somebody spams me because I haven't logged into that in like 10 years.

Leo Laporte (01:06:11):
Right. You still have that account. Lou, do you remember your IQ number?

Allyn Malventano (01:06:14):
I do 1 4, 4 1 4. Oh my

Leo Laporte (01:06:15):
God. Do you?

Allyn Malventano (01:06:18):
That's a nice one.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:19):
Actually. I, I never used IQ. And I wish I could remember my copy serve

Leo Laporte (01:06:24):
Number. I know my copy serve number. I'm sure I remember. I'm sure I had an IQ number, but I don't remember. Copy serve 75, 1 0 6 com 3 1 35.

Allyn Malventano (01:06:31):
Yeah. But we, but we used to use those apps that would tie all those together because there were so many dang different one. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:06:37):
So

Allyn Malventano (01:06:37):
Annoying in the butt, right? Yep. And you know, and nowadays it's sort of the same thing. Right? I have family overseas to talk to them. Oh, I gotta use WhatsApp or I gotta use whatever. The other thing that they use over there, you have

Leo Laporte (01:06:48):
To have all the apps basically. Yeah. Because this guy uses messenger. This guy uses WhatsApp. He uses telegram. I wish I could use signal for everything. If signal isn't tied to a phone number, I would use signal for everything. And I would just say, you know, everybody has to signal me, but you can't cuz you, it has one per phone.

Allyn Malventano (01:07:07):
Yeah. There's there's and there's always gonna be somebody that's not using that. Then they use another

Sam Abuelsamid (01:07:12):
Thing. And I mean, this is, this is the beauty of email. This is why email worked so well. Cause it didn't matter what, what system, I mean, we got past MCI mail. You could use whatever mail app you wanted and it still

Leo Laporte (01:07:25):
Went through. So how come we were able to solve it with email, but we can't. We went in the exact opposite direction with messaging. What happens?

Allyn Malventano (01:07:32):
Standards. It's a protocol

Allyn Malventano (01:07:34):
S I mean, email's a protocol. I mean, it it's lack of You develop a protocol. It's more agnostic. These specific platforms that are tied down and, and, and

Leo Laporte (01:07:43):
Cause it used to be, if you had the source, you couldn't talk to people on copy serve. And if you had MCI mail or genie, they, these were all, they were not interoperable. These were like the, like it is today. They were siloed. Right? The difference was you had to have a paid account with those. So if, if I were and I had ANCI mail account, I bet I could remember my MCI mail number, but you couldn't email me from any of the other services. So if you didn't have MCI mail, you literally could not email me. That was a bad situation. An internet mail solved all that. And eventually everybody kind of conceded today. You've got companies that say, no, no, no, this is, this is my business model. I'm not gonna let iMessage interoperate with anything else or Facebook messenger. So I, I, in that respect, I think the EU is not wrong. It would be nice. I don't know if you can have a legislative solution, by the way,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:08:39):
If I think, I think the key to a legislative solution is it needs to be technology agnostic, the legisla, the regulations can't specify that you have to do it a particular way. They just have to, you have to specify what is the end result that you want. You want any message system to be able to talk to any other messaging system? That's it needs to be results oriented, not specifying a particular technology solution. And if you do that then,

Leo Laporte (01:09:06):
Well, they're not saying you have to use X MPP. They're not going that far. They're just saying you has to be interoperable.

Allyn Malventano (01:09:14):
Yeah. They're kind of targeting a, they're kind of target the big leagues, right. They're saying that you have to make certain amount before we start targeting. Right. So they're absolutely. So they're, they're kind of targeting those specific, well,

Leo Laporte (01:09:23):
It's kind of a, a form of antitrust and the EU view of antitrust is very different than our view of antitrust in the United States. But although I have to say, it's going in this direction as well in the us by the way, this is not a light. Fine. It again, this is provisional. My, I, as I remember, it's a complicated system, but every country has to ratify it before. It's the rule of that country. If the gatekeeper violates the rules laid down in the legislation, the EU says the fine can be up to 10% of its worldwide revenue. Billions, this is not that slap on the wrist. 5 million euros that the Irish state authorities charging apple every week for repeat offense up to 20% of worldwide revenue. Y so I guess the overarching question for the three of you is, is this should legislative bodies do this kind of thing or not? Is this, is, are they the right people to, to do this? Lou?

Allyn Malventano (01:10:34):
I don't think so. I know, but probably the, the odd man out, out here, I just, I just think that maybe it's the way they're going about it is just wrong for me. I think that they they're doing, they're being, they're targeting specific large companies and technology that they make in order to do this. When in fact I kind of think that's almost anti-competitive so I don't know. That's, I'm just my, my personal opinion there.

Leo Laporte (01:10:56):
What do you think, Alan? I,

Allyn Malventano (01:10:59):
I see, I see both sides of it. Like,

Leo Laporte (01:11:02):
You know, I know its hard for me to say get the other yeah,

Allyn Malventano (01:11:04):
I get where Lou coming from. But I also feel like, okay, if they don't do it, who will and how will they, right? Like it has to be somebody big enough to actually have an impact if it's ever going to happen. Not necessarily that I support how they're doing or how they're going about

Leo Laporte (01:11:17):
It. So that begs the second question, does this need to happen? Is this something we need? Or can we just go on the way it is

Allyn Malventano (01:11:25):
Again, there's two questions, right? Like, yeah. It's, there are definitely pros and cons to do it. Like

Leo Laporte (01:11:31):
The only mechanism we as a society have for this kind of thing you can't is, is government that's the whole that's in theory, maybe not in practice, but the theory is that's society's voice saying no, no companies, big tech companies. I know you're there to make a Mon make profit. That's your, that's your mantra. That's what you're doing. But we, as a society want you to do something that maybe isn't your best, best business interests, which is make your messaging programs, interoperable. And we, as a society say, if you wanna operate in our society, you need to adhere to that rule in theory, that's the way to do it. And that's the right way to do it.

Allyn Malventano (01:12:05):
I think, I think the big issue that comes about from like, take this example right now, and there's even some other examples that the EU also has done right there. He was pretty, you know, aggressive about doing this sort of thing where they wanna step in about some particular technological thing. My sort of beef with it is the same thing that's making all of us collectively roll our eyes about the WebKit thing, for example, right? It's like, well, these guys didn't know the whole story, like technologically, right? They didn't have their, their minds fully wrapped around the issue at hand and how to address it. And all of the little caveats that the, you know, might come along with it. So of course, once they make the decision and the requirement comes down, it seems boneheaded to those who actually understand. And it's like, well, you guys didn't make a, an informed decision. Right? Like they made, there was some decision like a year ago or something with respect. I think it affected Tesla the most, but it was, it was targeted at like, if a car has like a, some autonomous site feature, then it can't like turn at this, exceeding this number of GForce. Right. That sounds like a good law. Well, no, no, but it, but it was such a low number that it was like, you basically had to make a turn like a grandma. Yeah. Right. So it was like, you couldn't even

Leo Laporte (01:13:20):
Make a grandma turn like

Allyn Malventano (01:13:21):
A normal. Right. And, and it was like, and it was to the point to the point where yeah. And it was to the point where if, if you, as a regular person tried to adhere to this restriction, just driving, normally you would have piles up behind pile ups behind you. Right. Because you're just that's to the, but that's hazardous. That's

Leo Laporte (01:13:37):
Just, they chose the wrong number.

Allyn Malventano (01:13:39):
Yes. But again, it's the whole, like you, you didn't fully think this out. Right, right. That nobody sit somebody in a car and yeah. It's like, you know, sit somebody in a car and do this much of a defense

Leo Laporte (01:13:50):
In the defense of government. That's part of the process. As you propose a law, somebody points out that's driving like a grandma, you say, oh right. What do we make it three GS, you it's, it's not a done. This is it done. And final, there's a process. And it can evolve that the constitution has many amendments I'm I don't think that that's a strike against it, that they chose a bad number.

Allyn Malventano (01:14:10):
Well, in a lot of these cases, by the time the number by the time the information gets out, like it's already sort of a done deal. And then it's, you have to have it's this insurmountable.

Leo Laporte (01:14:22):
Then the car manufacturers have to implement it. Whether or not you're gonna change it down the road.

Allyn Malventano (01:14:25):
Right. And then, and then everybody has to complain about it for weeks or months to finally meet them back in the middle. They should have met them back in the middle, before everything was set in stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:14:34):
On the other hand, I don't think Tesla should be able to roll through stuffs. Right.

Allyn Malventano (01:14:39):
Right. I agree with you. I agree with you there, you know,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:42):
To, to, to defend, you know, to defend the regulators a little bit, you know, the, the regulatory process is not something that happens quickly you know, with is both good and bad. You know, it, it's a process that often takes years. You know, and I'm not quite sure exactly which one you're referencing there, Alan. But you know, generally, you know, they'll put out and this, this not, this isn't just for, you know, for vehicles, you know, it's for everything, every regulatory process, they put out a notice proposed rule making, you know, here's what we're thinking about. You know, you got 90 days, six months to give us comments. We'll evaluate that. And even before they get to that point, they've usually done years of research and analysis before they even do that. NPRM and then, you know, then there's the, the next stage they go, they iterate through that, you know, sometimes, several times before they finally come up with a final regulation.

Allyn Malventano (01:15:38):
Yeah, of course. And in that case, in that case, the fault really lies on the other parties for not paying attention necessarily to those like the yeah. Yeah. And,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:47):
And, you know, and you know, most, certainly most big companies, you know, have people that are keeping an eye on this, you know, and they do, they do respond and comment on these notices of proposed rule making before they, before they ever get to that stage. So it's on the other,

Leo Laporte (01:16:03):
Hand's pretty rare if you're Elon, you might be tweeting that the national highway transportation safety administration are the fund police. Yeah. This is when they told Tesla, you know, that thing that makes fart sounds as you drive down the road, you gotta turn that off. That is, that is not okay. 

Sam Abuelsamid (01:16:23):
You know, they, they just don't think the CEO should be acting like 12 year olds. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:16:28):
He's had some fun with NITZY. NI's a, I don't I don't know where, where he stands these days.

Allyn Malventano (01:16:37):
I'm I'm with the,

Leo Laporte (01:16:39):
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (01:16:41):
Even, even though none of my cars have that sound maker on them cuz they're early enough to not have had it. And I, I kind of find that sound, that whole thing annoying myself, because if I'm, if I'm coming up on somebody I'll, I'll tap the horn, I'll make it obvious that I'm

Leo Laporte (01:16:55):
Well, you do need, and I don't think he's arguing against this. And then this is actually a requirement of nets a is some sort of sound so that blind pedestrians and others know that an electric vehicle, which is otherwise much less noisy than a ice vehicle is near. But,

Allyn Malventano (01:17:10):
But the key is that the sound be

Leo Laporte (01:17:11):
A standard sound. It

Allyn Malventano (01:17:12):
Has to be a standard sound. So that it's understood that that ISS quiet vehicle, not,

Leo Laporte (01:17:17):
Yes. That page just had a lot of burritos coming down the road in your direction. My Mustang Mae has a low whining sound. When I get below, I think a miles an hour. I don't have a problem with that. It also has. And there's a lot of actually Mustang owners who don't like this as a, a backup beep like a truck. Is that Sam, is that why

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:41):
That's, again, that's part of the, the same set of rules that

Leo Laporte (01:17:45):
Are all cars gonna have backup or beeps now?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:17:49):
Well for, for, not necessarily a beat for the backups, but some sort of sound when they're backing up for any, anything that's operating in electric mode below 20 miles.

Leo Laporte (01:17:58):
Oh, it's just cause it's electric. Okay. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:00):
Yeah. Well, and it applies to hybrids as well. So, you know, if you, if you're driving a hybrid and I don't, the Mustang doesn't make a beep when it's backing up, is it?

Leo Laporte (01:18:08):
Yeah. Hockey like a, like a car, like a mean a truck or a like

Allyn Malventano (01:18:12):
A truck, a

Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
Forklift must be

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:13):
Be, they must have changed that because the last time I drove it, it didn't do

Leo Laporte (01:18:16):
That. Yeah. I've, I've seen and red it, a number of owners complain. I don't mind. That's fine. I mean, I don't want to hit a kid that I think is I got a big camera. I can see what's going on, but I, I still, I don't want to hit a kid that's too small to see or whatever. So that's fine. Yeah. That's fine. I don't no.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:31):
Then, you know, that's and that that's, that's intentional, like

Leo Laporte (01:18:33):
You said, is something on my checklist for cards. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:37):
It needs, it needs to be relatively standardized, you know, so that you have, you start to build up, you know, a community understanding of, you know, what a particular sound

Leo Laporte (01:18:45):
Is means. Yes. And that beep is a well known sound. I mean, it's the same sound trucks make in others. So it is definitely, it's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:51):
Like, we know that, you know, traffic signals, you know, red lighting stop, you know, green beans go,

Leo Laporte (01:18:56):
Although dwindle idea in our chat room that they should sound like tie fighters when they go by. Isn't a bad idea.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:02):
Well, I mean, that's what formula E race cars sound like. They sound like tie fighters.

Leo Laporte (01:19:08):
The

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:08):
Ones I was actually just earlier, I was watching video, somebody posted a video, they were test driving the Porsche mission R concept, which is also an EV concept for a future race car. And it is very similar make, it sounds like a tie fighter, you know, that's funny, it's the wine of the electric motors and the gear as it drives around. Yeah. Love

Leo Laporte (01:19:31):
That

Allyn Malventano (01:19:31):
The the, the electric hill climb cars are very annoying. What, cuz that sound is like meant for you to really hear it from a long way off because they're kind of really screaming up a hill and they don't want someone to not know that they're coming. Right. So those sounds are, yeah. If you ever listen to those, they're like the they've done some Tesla hill climbs or even like the Volkswagen an EV I forget the name of that.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:54):
The IDR

Allyn Malventano (01:19:54):
Knows. Yeah. The IDR, like when that thing's doing a hill climb event, it is like the most obnoxious sounding thing where you'll watch a video and you kinda have to turn the volume down and you don't get to, you don't get to hear the cool EV sounds because you just, the sound coming out of the sound maker is so annoying on the car.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:20:10):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:20:11):
Elon, but I get it

Allyn Malventano (01:20:12):
Elon. You wanna get run over by

Sam Abuelsamid (01:20:13):
One of them? Well, you know, it's, it's, it's funny LA last week I was flying home from south by Southwest and I ran into a former colleague of mine that I used to work with about 10 years ago. And he used to be in, in PR at GM. And he now works for this company that does sound design. It's a, it's an agency and they, they work with a lot of different kinds of companies creating sounds for different things, whether it's the sound of an action you know, or you know, something that can be used in, in ads. They're working with some auto makers on sounds for EVs BMW hired Han Zimer to create the soundtrack for their EVs. And last week when I was at a, at a Volvo event, they were talking about the sounds how they do some of the sounds, you know, it used to be that when you turned on your turn signal, you know, the, the turn signal switch was tied to a mechanical relay. You know, that's what the clicking sound was of your turn signals. It was actually a relay switching back and forth all the time. And now they, they don't have those relays anymore. It's all electronic. So they had to come up with a sound for that.

Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
Still sounds like the relay though, doesn't it still

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:24):
Not in the, not in the Volvo, it's still a click, but it's different. Oh it, and you know, they, they showed us, showed us a video of some of their, their sound designers walking through a forest in Sweden, recording various sounds. And one of the sounds they happened to catch. Yes, they did was as, as he, as the guy stepped on a stick and the stick snapped and he recorded that sound and that's actually in modern.

Leo Laporte (01:21:48):
So

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:49):
Volvo that when you do the turn signal, that sound is actually the sound of a, of a TWiTg snapping

Leo Laporte (01:21:55):
That's. So Volvo, I think that probably they made that up after they did it, but here is no, they, you think they really, really did that. Yeah. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:06):
No.

Leo Laporte (01:22:06):
I feels like a

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:08):
Sound designed, rich

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
Story.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:10):
You it's basically, it's a modern sort of fully work

Leo Laporte (01:22:14):
Here is the until we get to the sound Hans SIM, let's just get to the car, making the sound ho the in the car. I think, you know, he given that he was in the bugs, it should be, you know, the fall kid, I six

Speaker 7 (01:22:30):
Electric,

Leo Laporte (01:22:31):
What? A little dark people. I want the sound. Where's the sound we are there it is. Did you hear that? It sounded like a little bit like a tie fighter going by. I like that.

Speaker 7 (01:22:40):
The BMW iconic sounds electric are about to hit the road this year.

Leo Laporte (01:22:47):
Oh, come on. I wanna hear the sound I had to sit through whole dumb video. We find all right. I think if you have a car having Han Zimer design, this sounds is not a bad choice. Elon Musk speaking, we'll do the Elon Musk segment and then we'll move on. Speaking of speaking of Elon had a poll given that TWiTtter serves as the defacto public town square failing to adhere to free speech principles, fundamentally undermines democracy. So he asks free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe TWiTtter rigorously adheres to this principle? What do you think the results would be? If you had a, like that on TWiTtter, you think they'd say, oh no, no free speech. Definitely big part of TWiTtter. No, of course not 70% said no. So then Elon being Elon, he smoked another Doby and said is a new platform needed. Is Elon Musk gonna create his own TWiTtter? By the way, after the dooby war wore out, he's tweeted, sees the memes of production. So I don't know how serious he's well,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:23:54):
He'll, he'll get, he'll get to this right after he finally launches PRODA yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
Oh, that's right. That was another thing he wanted to do.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:00):
Yeah. That was like four or five years ago.

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
Yeah. Oh, oh, he's got the of money. I mean, if, if anybody we're gonna launch the next TWiTtter, it could be Elon Musk. True. Yeah. Would anybody join it? I don't think so. Sees the memes of, well,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:17):
All his, all his fans and his bots will. Yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (01:24:19):
Right. Let's take a little break. We'll come back with more Sam bull Sam. Great to have you Alan. Malano from Intel. Not speaking for Intel, not speaking for Microsoft, but of Microsoft Lu. Meeska also hosted this weekend enterprise tech. I don't know if you've noticed, but my weight goes up and down quite a bit. I finally found a weight loss program I can live with for a long time. I am a fan of Noom. I know you've seen the ads. Lisa is also a big nom fan. I have to say I am so impressed. I started Noom a year ago. Cuz I'd seen all the ads went through the there's a question and answer process where they kind of identify your, you know, relationship to food at the beginning, went through that. Lisa was kind of interested. She said, you know what?

Leo Laporte (01:25:05):
I'm gonna support you. She never needed a lose weight. She's always been very slender. I'm gonna support you. I'm gonna do it with you. I said, thank you. That's great. We'll do it together. It's very helpful. And your spouse does it with you. She's lost like 10 pounds kept it off. She looks fantastic. Still a little yoyo, but I love Noom. Noom. Weight is all about better health through education. It's a psychology based approach that helps you change the way you think about food and health rather than demanding you change your entire lifestyle. One of the things Lisa loved and I love is there are no bad foods. You know, a lot of diets here, you can't eat that or you can't eat that. And of course my elephant mind, that's the thing I want. Can't eat cupcakes. I'm gonna eat cupcakes. And I'm a to eat them in excess Noom.

Leo Laporte (01:25:51):
Doesn't restrict what you can eat or you can't eat. It gives you the knowledge and wisdom. You need to make informed choices. You log what you eat, which by the way, just by itself is very helpful in understanding what you're doing. And then they have these lessons in which you learn about your relationship with food. For instance, I'm a fog eater. I eat unconsciously. And so they gave me a lot of tips that helped me be very conscious and mindful as I'm eating Lisa. And I will do that together. She said up, turn off the TV, let's put your fork down after your first bite paste. It it's fun. I love doing it. Noom understands building long term positive habits can be hard and it is filled with ups and downs. It's about progress, not about perfection and we everybody's journey looks different, but I have to say Noom works.

Leo Laporte (01:26:37):
I love it. I feel better. I've lost weight. My clothes fit. Lisa looks great. It really works. In fact, 75% of users finish the program. That's unheard of. And it's I think because it's based in science, it's not, it's not air fairy. It's not made up. Science is at the heart of everything they do. They've published 30 peer reviewed scientific articles that inform users and practitioners and scientists in the public about how Noom works and about how effective it is. It's proven with Noom taking care of your health is empowering instead of stress inducing. I know you've seen the new ads and you've seen the, you know, all the publicity about Noom. I just I'm here to tell you it works. It works for me. It works for Lisa. It works for so many people we know and it's, it's not punitive. You don't have to fear.

Leo Laporte (01:27:27):
You know, you get a bad day, an off day. You're not, you haven't ruined your program. Noom helps get back on track. Noom, weight fits beautifully into your life. 5, 10, 15 minutes a day. However much time you wanna spend on the app is up to you. It is not judgmental. You get a coach who works with you. You get a group which is all for a lot of people, very healthy and helpful to have other people doing in the same journey. I think they've really figured this out. I am a big fan start building better habits today. Sign up for your trial. N O O M nom.com/TWiT. And I believe in this, this is so great. Noom.Com/TWiT. Start that trial today. I think you will thank me for it. I really do. In fact, I have already talked to many people who have it's really it's very exciting.

Leo Laporte (01:28:20):
Let's see, we're gonna move on to our quick takes section. They don't have to be cool. Quick. Nothing we do here is quick. Roku has updated its OS OS 11, personalized photo screen server. Finally. I know, although I, I still think Roku probably. I know. Who do you, who do you like Alan? Who has the best software in your opinion? Was it used at finally or was it Lou? I think it was you. I said finally, oh Lou, what do you like? You have a, see, you have a family and a bunch of people watching TV. I, you have a, yeah, I

Allyn Malventano (01:28:52):
Started out, I was a court car a long time ago. I started out with Roku and I just been really, I've had all, I have all of 'em like I have the ultimate ultras, the expresses, and I just really disappointed over the years on how they've just been very static with what they've offered and the performances, you know, disabilities changed. I I've turned everything into apple TV now.

Leo Laporte (01:29:10):
It's three times more expensive.

Allyn Malventano (01:29:13):
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (01:29:13):
I like the shield TVs.

Leo Laporte (01:29:14):
Oh, those shields are great. You know, what's wrong with the shield? And I had both shields I had in the new shield and the old one. Not the stick. The, the big box. Yeah, yeah,

Allyn Malventano (01:29:23):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:23):
The platform they've kept it up to date. They have a te grip in there, which means it's got a lot of processing power. I've been playing the GForce game now games on it. And it's got plenty of power for that, but there's not enough, at least in my neck of the woods. Xfinity will not let me run HBO now on it Showtime and time.

Allyn Malventano (01:29:41):
Oh, the app support. Isn't

Leo Laporte (01:29:44):
Support's not there. I wish it were cuz I would absolutely. It's got the most power anyway.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:29:48):
I mean, isn't that just running Android TV. Shouldn't just get straight outta the no,

Leo Laporte (01:29:54):
But okay. And this is a really messed up situation. The cable, these channels, none of these channels wanna screw with the cable company because if without, without if HBO or ESPN or anybody weren't on a cable system, they would die on the fine. They're not, we're not yet at the point where cord cutters can support you. So for most people, people like me, I pay for a cable subscription. I'm not cord cutter. Like you Lou. I get HBO now I guess they call it free. Cuz I pay for it through my cable subscription, but that's on an apple TV. They only recently made a deal with Roku and it is not on the shield. So that, and that's only because Xfinity's my cable writer and they haven't made a deal or some, I don't know where the buck stops. It could be HBO, but I think it's pro knowing Xfinity. It's almost certainly the am. So HBO, max, that's what it is. HBO max. I can't use, I think Showtime, anytime doesn't work either. So it's a limited number of apps I can run. Not because they don't run they're available on the Android TV app, but because the stupid cable company won't let me

Sam Abuelsamid (01:30:57):
Know. You just can't log in. You can't use your cable log. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:30:59):
I could pay 20 bucks extra for

Sam Abuelsamid (01:31:01):
Or whatever. So yeah, the, you can't use the apps cause I, you know, we use those, we use Chromecast with Google TV, you know, we did Roku back in the old days and I

Leo Laporte (01:31:11):
Like that new

Sam Abuelsamid (01:31:12):
Chromecast, the old, old school Chromecast and the then and the new one. I love the interface on there. Yeah. You know the nice, it's a nice little remote. We got 'em on all our TVs and it works great. 

Leo Laporte (01:31:23):
Are you a card cutter? We

Sam Abuelsamid (01:31:24):
Haven't had cable. Yeah. We haven't had cable TV for like six years.

Leo Laporte (01:31:27):
So this is something Comcast taught on a note. This complaint does not crop up if you're not a cable customer.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:31:34):
No. So you had another reason to another ditch

Leo Laporte (01:31:38):
Cable. Yeah. I pay for YouTube TV, which really gives me everything that cable does.

Allyn Malventano (01:31:43):
Does, does that make you,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:31:44):
We try to

Allyn Malventano (01:31:45):
Make the, all of us. Yeah. Cause like if all of us have YouTube TV, does that make us all quasi cord cutters? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
Well you're dumb. We're

Allyn Malventano (01:31:52):
A monthly.

Leo Laporte (01:31:53):
Yeah. You're dumb. If you like me are still paying Comcast for cable and YouTube TV. That's really dumb.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:00):
We, we, we tried the YouTube TV trial a couple years ago and after about three days we realized, wait, we have to watch ads and we can't skip them. It's like, this was like after three years of no cable, its like you can skip them.

Leo Laporte (01:32:16):
In

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:17):
Fact. Yeah. Well just, I mean just, just the, that they're there at all. I know, you know, was a non-starter and we said, forget that.

Leo Laporte (01:32:23):
Well it's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:23):
Getting ads. It's so expensive.

Leo Laporte (01:32:25):
It's it's broadcast. You're getting the full broadcast for instance. I'm right now the Oscars are about an hour off. I'm got the red carpet and I'm not, I'm recording it on YouTube TV, not on my TV. There's another thing I spent money on. It's a lifetime lifetime subscription of TiVo in my cable. But I'm doing the YouTube TV cuz it's very easy to TV it. In fact, before I left in the morning, I said get the red carpet and get the Oscars. It's one button click. It's great. And what I'll do is cuz I'm I watch it on apple TV. You can then press the, the Siri button and say, skip ahead. And you have to know how many minutes the commercial break is and you learn skip ahead three and a half minutes and it skips straight through it and goes to the next thing. It's great. So that's the trick you have to, you have to do it on an apple TV. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I guess it would. There's

Allyn Malventano (01:33:16):
A lot of services out there like paramount applause. All of them still make you watch you for 'em and you still watch commercials and you can't skip 'em well, yeah, I don't mind.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:33:24):
Well they have different plans though, if get cheap plans with ads and

Leo Laporte (01:33:28):
Yeah. And the problem, I don't know if this has gotten better, I spend way too much money on TV obviously. So I pay for the Hulu that doesn't have the ads, but the ads were driving me crazy. Fine to see one more captain obvious Expedia ad. I was gonna shoot the TV.

Allyn Malventano (01:33:42):
That's the other thing where you'll get the ads, but they'll come in this wave where you got caught in some back corner of the algorithm where it's just like every ad you adds the same ad. This, this one ad right now for the next like day right on all your devices. That's the same ad. It's just crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:33:58):
All I've done is convince me to spend an extra five bucks a month than not have the ads we're in a bad, the other's a bad time where it's kind of a transitional period and nothing works quite

Sam Abuelsamid (01:34:09):
The, and, and the other, the other, the other key to using streaming services is to, you know, to not be shy about canceling them. If there's something you're not watching, if there's a service, you're not, you know, there's nothing on you're watching right now. Yes. Just cancel 'em and it's so easy to do now, you know, I can go in and I can cancel stars or cancel. We just canceled Hulu a couple months ago and we'll bring it, bring it back in a few months, you know, when there's stuff we wanna see again and you know, we just stuff gets on and gets turned on and off. And so, you know, the, the whole bill, the bill, the total bill stays fairly manageable.

Leo Laporte (01:34:44):
Speaking of Google TV the apple TV app on your shield or on your Google TV, no longer lets you buy or rent movies from apple TV. Okay, fine. They don't, they like others don't wanna pay Google the 30% V

Allyn Malventano (01:35:03):
Huh, huh. Funny. But even

Leo Laporte (01:35:05):
Worse, they have a button On there, which they prevent by the way on on the apple devices that has a, how to watch button that says, oh, you can't buy on this, but you can always go to the website and buy it or use it. And that's exactly against Apple's own rules. Talk about hypocrites.

Allyn Malventano (01:35:24):
Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing they don't want anybody else to do when they're doing it. Yep. Great.

Leo Laporte (01:35:29):
Anyway, I sh I shouldn't get up in arms about this. It's just, it just cracks me up. Finally the, I fix it tear down of the new max is out in the new display. Boy, these are beautifully built. I don't know. I they're not Intel boxes, Alan. Okay. But as an engineer, you've gotta, Hey,

Allyn Malventano (01:35:52):
I appreciate a well, well built piece of

Leo Laporte (01:35:55):
Heart. Beautiful. Yeah. Beautiful piece of hardware.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:35:58):
That's a big honk and chip.

Leo Laporte (01:36:00):
Oh yeah. There's the pictures of the chip are hysterical. It's I mean, it's the ultra is like as big as a, you know, matchbox or something.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:36:08):
Well, have, have we seen a picture of the chip without the, the the heat spreader on it? Heat spreader. So the actual dot yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:36:15):
Let me show

Sam Abuelsamid (01:36:15):
You how big is that actually?

Leo Laporte (01:36:17):
It's big, as I said on one show, it's as big as your middle finger, which is the message apple sending to Intel. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't say that out loud. Max tech was the first to do a tear down and let me jump ahead in his video cuz I was impressed cuz he was he gonna have to put it back again, which,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:36:41):
Cause I know the first, the first ones I saw, you know, was just the, the package, you know, with a next to a horizon, it was like three times the size of a horizon seven. Well

Leo Laporte (01:36:50):
That's as far as he, yeah, he that's as far as he's gotten, so here he is taking the heat spreader off. Here's the dye and there you see the thermal paste. He's gonna actually rub off the thermal paste a little bit here. There it is. So that where that, where that is that, that,

Allyn Malventano (01:37:08):
Oh, that same footprint

Leo Laporte (01:37:09):
Underneath that footprint that's yeah, cuz that's where the thermal paste is. The rest of this dive. The chip is filled with Ram and the you know, the pro as playback stuff and the AI stuff and all of that stuff, but he does later put a rise in next to it. Let me see if I can get to that part of the video

Allyn Malventano (01:37:27):
They run pretty cool. It's probably why they're so small. I mean the heat better are so small.

Leo Laporte (01:37:33):
Well there's one on the top and the bottom, which is kind of interesting. These, I don't think they're trying to run quite as cool because I think they really, really want to maximize the the, the output of these things. So they, the fan is always on, on this. It never, I ran a process that was very CPU intensive, pegged the CPUs all let's see, this was the max studio. There it is. That's the rise next to it. I have the ultra at home. Lisa has the ultra I pegged the CPUs for a long period of time as a photogrammetry project. Alex Lindsey gave me and it never even got appreciably warm. The air coming out. The back was no warmer and it, and the fans didn't ramp up or down. They're just on nonstop and the thermals were very good. I was like the temperatures thermals look very good.

Allyn Malventano (01:38:16):
How noticeable is the fan

Leo Laporte (01:38:17):
Blowing? They don't hear it at all. It's just, oh, but it's on the minute you turn it on. It's on. And it's a, it's those weird thrusters. And I think they're very big and they move a lot of air. So I don't think you hear 'em. Yeah,

Allyn Malventano (01:38:28):
It's a light white noise sound. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:29):
Not even that. You'd have to put your ear next to it. Right. But I have to say I compared it processor wise on this photogrammetry project to the same project running on a PC, running Linux with a radi or a NVIDIA GTX 30, 80. And it was much faster that the, the

Allyn Malventano (01:38:51):
Ultimate was it, was it acceler? Was it accelerated by, well,

Leo Laporte (01:38:54):
I think the software called meta shape which they write for windows, Mac and Linux. I was running out an Linux machine. I don't know how well tuned it is for the M one. It was M one software, but I don't know how well tuned it is for the GPUs and the M one. So these are system GPUs. They're on that chip. And I don't know, it didn't look like it was using the GP as much. On the other hand on the PC, it was the 30 80. It was really using the GPU and the GPU bound stuff was like three or four times faster. But that's important. What it means is that just going out and buying the ultra doesn't guarantee you a faster process you know, you need to have software, that's tuned for it. And in fact, apple shows the graph at 200 Watts.

Leo Laporte (01:39:40):
How, oh, we're just as good as a 30 90 at 200 Watts. What they don't mention is the 30, 90 can go to 400 Watts. And we'll in fact, outpa, the ultra, if, if heat and power are not a concern, which they're not on a desktop, then it's gonna, then you don't have the fastest chip on the block. Apple really obfuscates that. I think so I'm happy to have these, but I think you really need to know what you're, first of all, you don't need one of these, unless you're using something that's gonna use all these CPUs, which is nothing, you know, just a handful of things. And secondly, you need to use a tool that is tuned and the hardware or that is tuned for the job you're doing. And it's not obviously the apple always,

Allyn Malventano (01:40:21):
Well, I mean, that's, that's been the case for a long time though, right? Like you buy the apple, you're buying the thing as it comes, chances are, you're not really gonna upgrade it after the fact, right?

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
Those are, oh, these are not upgradeable at all. You

Allyn Malventano (01:40:31):
You're right. That that's, those are just the bounds that you sort of buy into. If you go that route, you know, if, if that's your cup of tea, then fine. But you know, if you're the flip side of that is PC enthusiast style folks who just wanna build the fire breathing rig to do, you can do it, whatever that's right, right. They wanna build, they wanna build an Uum. Right. You're never gonna do an Uum with an iMac. No. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
First of all, cause none of the games you wanna run will run on the iMac.

Allyn Malventano (01:40:56):
Well sure.

Leo Laporte (01:40:57):
But even if they did,

Allyn Malventano (01:40:59):
I have, I have, I think the Uum number, I don't know, two or three, one of the heat, one of the water blocks is on my shelf there coming

Leo Laporte (01:41:05):
Ultimate gaming machine. Oh that, oh, if Colleen gave it to you, it's the RI like the one we built, I think it's

Allyn Malventano (01:41:10):
The 2000 the water or

Leo Laporte (01:41:11):
Something.

Allyn Malventano (01:41:12):
Yeah. It was like the triple water cold. It's like, so she has one of 'em Patrick Norton has the other one and I have the third. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:41:18):
No kidding.

Allyn Malventano (01:41:19):
Yeah. We're we're we're we're we're UGA bros, I guess.

Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
Glad to know the ultimate gaming machine survived, at least in pieces, somewhere

Allyn Malventano (01:41:29):
In pieces. It's

Leo Laporte (01:41:30):
Far from ultimate these days, obviously.

Allyn Malventano (01:41:33):
Oh yeah. That was like a GTX two 80 water block or something. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
Yeah, we built those over the years. The first one we built was at tech TV. We built that one with Colleen in the mid two thousands. And then we built another one when we started the new screensavers, brought it back. It was

Allyn Malventano (01:41:53):
The we're was like, oh, and what do we use? Oh, you gotta use voice or Raptors.

Leo Laporte (01:41:56):
Oh, I

Allyn Malventano (01:41:57):
Remember remember.

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
Well, and then I think the one we built on tech TV was what was the company? And then they had the two cards and you could have a connector between the two cards and

Allyn Malventano (01:42:07):
Oh well, that was, I mean, that was you talking on the graphics cards. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:11):
What was the name? And that

Allyn Malventano (01:42:12):
Was SLI

Leo Laporte (01:42:13):
MV link. Yeah. But

Allyn Malventano (01:42:15):
SLI with the

Leo Laporte (01:42:16):
Early SLI, it was like, maybe even before, what was the name of that company that used to be

Allyn Malventano (01:42:21):
Was it was, what do you mean that was NVIDIA NVIDIA?

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
No, no, this is pre NVIDIA.

Allyn Malventano (01:42:26):
It was oh, oh, oh 3d FX, the

Leo Laporte (01:42:29):
3D FX. Thank you. And you could, and you could paralyze the cards in some weird way.

Allyn Malventano (01:42:34):
Yeah. You can have a pair of like voodoo. I don't what like two thousands at the time or something, man. That was yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:41):
Voodoo. That was it. Voodoo,

Allyn Malventano (01:42:42):
Voodoo. It was kind which, which invi, which in video later acquired. Right, right. Like that was that's

Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
Their that's how SLI came about, but it was pre SLI.

Allyn Malventano (01:42:51):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:53):
Any of you play any of the virtual things, are you a game pass? User Allen? Not a Lou. Lou, thank you.

Allyn Malventano (01:43:01):
Yes. The guy over there. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:43:05):
My brain is fried. Sorry, Lou. I know who you are. So you use the game. The, what is, is that? I do old ex old ex cloud. Now it's called game pass. Right,

Allyn Malventano (01:43:16):
Right. It's right. Correctly. Yeah. And game pass is nice by the

Leo Laporte (01:43:19):
Way, you know, it's, that's why I can't remember names cuz my brain is filled with crap like that. It used to be X cloud. No it's game pass.

Allyn Malventano (01:43:26):
Well there actually X cloud game pass and X cloud, two different things like X cloud is you can, you can remotely play from like a mobile phone on their, on their servers and, and game pass is just, they give you like, like a barrage of games that you can choose from and install for free is part of game pass.

Leo Laporte (01:43:40):
But what do they call X cloud now, then? I don't know. I think it's the game pass cloud gaming game pass cloud gaming or something. They don't call it X cloud anymore. That was a code name anyway. So is it as good? Do I need a 30 80 or I need or can I just play on Microsoft's GPUs?

Allyn Malventano (01:43:59):
Well, there's I mean it all depends. Like if you're playing, you know, first person shooter games, it's not, it's probably not gonna be super great. Cuz the latency is anytime it's gonna be a problem with that. But if you're playing like, you know, Minecraft or something like that, that's

Leo Laporte (01:44:11):
Correct from Minecraft. Yeah. Yeah. I could play Minecraft on a raspberry fly. I don't really need stadia for that. Okay. Yeah. I mean I had high hopes for all of these streaming services cuz not for gaming so much. I was really, I really thought that this was what Google, Microsoft and Vidia and others were doing to test out the ability to stream software. And ultimately it was to stream an entire computer operating system. That that was the real

Allyn Malventano (01:44:39):
That's that's that's fine. Except that that latency issue just like Lou said, right? That's that's the that's the problem is that well there's no error. Don't

Leo Laporte (01:44:47):
Care about latency on my spreadsheet.

Allyn Malventano (01:44:49):
Well you do. If you move the mouse and it

Leo Laporte (01:44:52):
Takes

Allyn Malventano (01:44:53):
20 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds for the mouse to move on

Leo Laporte (01:44:57):
Your screen or I'm typing and the letters show up a second later, that's no good you're right, right.

Allyn Malventano (01:45:02):
See, and that's, you know, and, and in some cases that's an awful, depending on how it's optimized, but in some cases there's an awful lot of bandwidth that you would need to go back and forth to redraw what, whatever the thing is just to, just for something we're locally on the system, it would barely use any resources at all. You're right. Yeah. So depending on what the thing is, sometimes it's actually less efficient to stream it versus just have it locally.

Leo Laporte (01:45:22):
Microsoft does have windows streaming windows solution, right?

Allyn Malventano (01:45:28):
Sorry. Windows 365

Leo Laporte (01:45:29):
And no, no, no. The, the you run their server. I can't remember what they called on the virtual

Allyn Malventano (01:45:34):
Desktop. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. BDI. Yeah. I think they, they have, they've had that for a while. And in fact, a lot of companies use this just to make things more secure. So like if you have your home machine, your remote worker, you use it as you, you kind of jump box into it. And those machines are highly patched and they're highly regulated. That's

Leo Laporte (01:45:52):
Why I thought it was take off the business would want this cause they could buy cheap hardware, run windows virtualized. They wouldn't have to worry about the it burden of keeping it up to date, keeping it, patched, all that stuff. I think I thought that would be a great solution. Azure virtual desktop. It's expensive though. More than a PC would be. I see. Think. So

Allyn Malventano (01:46:15):
It depends. It depends how many license you're buying and right. And, but you know, I

Leo Laporte (01:46:20):
Love the idea. I mean, it really solves so many security issues as, I mean, as long as you trust Microsoft, I guess, but who doesn't trust blue is

Allyn Malventano (01:46:29):
That, is that used the same sort of like trick where just the what was the, the old school version where you could just do the equivalent of like V and C locally on your network that was just remote desktop, right?

Allyn Malventano (01:46:40):
Like, yeah. You're just promoting into a machine basically. That's that's part of a virtual, you know, scale server and then they just, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (01:46:48):
What, what, what I really like about those technologies is that they are effectively like just sending the draw calls across the next yeah. It's

Leo Laporte (01:46:55):
Just vector in words, vector based. It's not, well

Allyn Malventano (01:46:57):
Just changes. It's not vector. It's literally like, you know, draw window here and do this. It's not just like changes. It's actually even deeper than that. Oh, so

Leo Laporte (01:47:06):
The local processors actually drawing, it's not a video, it's not a movie stream. It's a stream of yes.

Allyn Malventano (01:47:11):
Right, exactly. And then that respect, you know, when, when you get that, first of all, it's super efficient and you can do lots with very little bandwidth in those cases. Right. But also it's, it's, it's very effective. You don't get like you know, oh, compression artifacts or things like that on the screen. Right. Wouldn't really happen as much. Right. Because it's actually drawing, it's, it's drawing the fonts locally and it's doing things like that.

Leo Laporte (01:47:31):
It's client server computing back again. Well,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:47:34):
It's, it's, it's the way, you know, Google maps and, and services like that work as well. Yeah. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
Stream commands not,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:47:40):
Yeah. When they started off, they were sending bit maps of tiles down right now it just sends this, you know, vector commands and tells you what to draw. Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:47:47):
You know, that's interesting. Cause I remember in the old days of maps you would see tiles load. You don't see that anymore to you. You're absolutely right. What happens is it slowly builds. It adds the places of interest in the, in the streets slowly. You see it all building. I didn't realize that. So it's, it's actually gets in, in commands down, draw this here, draw that there, that kind of thing. Yep. That's interesting. Do you follow Alan? The, do you follow the NVIDIA's I know, I know you do Sam. In fact we hack stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Was it GTC? What do they call it? The G

Sam Abuelsamid (01:48:19):
GTC GTC G technology

Leo Laporte (01:48:21):
Conference. Yeah. That was this week, last year, Sam and I last year, Sam and I streamed it and I decided not to this year. Sam, did I miss anything huge?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:48:32):
Mm, not especially. I mean, there was, there were some interesting stuff that, you know, last year they Jensen first talked about the grace CPU, an arm based CPU for servers. And you know, this year they, they flushed that out and they showed what they call the grace CPU super chip, which is actually two of these combined together for 144 CPU cores. Wow. and a Tera bit per second terabyte per second of memory bandwidth. The built in memory,

Leo Laporte (01:49:02):
They also asked a new GPO architecture, they call hopper.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:06):
Right. And that goes along with the, the grace, grace. That's the,

Leo Laporte (01:49:12):
Oh, I get it.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:14):
They're designed to work together. Hoppers the GPU grace is the CPU

Allyn Malventano (01:49:19):
Will point out Naval a Naval person,

Leo Laporte (01:49:21):
A Naval command command Commodor or commander. I can't remember. Yes. Yeah. next it's gonna be Coball all over again. I'm excited.

Allyn Malventano (01:49:31):
So there was actually,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:49:32):
Except that it'll write it itself in AI.

Leo Laporte (01:49:34):
Thank God. Anything, anything is better than what we had.

Allyn Malventano (01:49:38):
There was some other stuff that PED my interest from it wasn't just in video. It was actually coming from Microsoft. So, you know, Lou doesn't have to say it. I will gladly promote it for him. And that's direct storage.

Leo Laporte (01:49:51):
Oh, huge. Originally on the Xbox, the idea of fast storage what's different about direct storage, Alan, you're a storage expert.

Allyn Malventano (01:50:01):
So to, to distill it down and again, it's not fully baked yet. For example, they don't have the graphics decompression piece in, or the, or the pass the data directly to the GPU piece in yet, but they

Leo Laporte (01:50:13):
Have an API and that's all that we need

Allyn Malventano (01:50:15):
There. There's a, well, there's an API. They don't have that other API, but there's the API to get the stuff off of the SSD quickly and to bypass some portions of the, the what's historically of very law stack of code that a request to an SD normally has to go through. So the idea is that, Hey, I'm doing these types of things. I don't need to worry about X, Y, and Z in the process, I can sort of optimize this code path so that I'm using less CPU resources just to, to request something from the SSD, just to do a request, right. And then there's some other things in there in terms of like batching. So they're trying to, and part of this is actually wouldn't be necessary if not for game developers, just generally speaking, not necessarily optimizing around SSD, just the fact that you have fast storage, right?

Allyn Malventano (01:51:05):
Many of the game that exist, the game engines that exist today, when they load things, they're doing it, you know, not optimally, you could get much better speeds out of an SSD if you requested things in a dif in a slightly different way. And so part of the direct storage is encouraging this thing called batching, which is where don't just ask for 4k 10,000 times in a, you know, four kilobytes of information over and over again, you know, you should do larger requests. You should do them in batches, right. Ask for, Hey, I need this one gigabyte of data from this file. And so the idea with direct storage is you just make that request as the game engine and then direct storage takes care of all the smaller requests, but it's able to do them in a much more up way that the SSD is gonna go closer to its full speed. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:51:53):
So they were acting as if they were spinning hard drives that you couldn't you'd have to wait. The drive came around. So you had these block sizes and you'd load it one block

Allyn Malventano (01:52:03):
Wasn't it wasn't necessarily that bad, but it was just, it was just suboptimal. Right? So it was just only, it was asking for one thing at a time

Leo Laporte (01:52:11):
It's random access can, can do a big chunk at once. Is that 

Allyn Malventano (01:52:16):
Well, some for SSDs, especially Forand right. Obtaining less, less, so has this issue, but Forand in particular, you can't really get, you know, you have a, a gen four super fancy, you know, fire breathing SSD like top of the line right now. And it's supposed to go seven gig per second. Wow. In a straight line. Wow. Sequential, sequential throughput. Right. We're about to move. We're about to move to 14 when we do gen five places when those start coming out. But because it's NN and each request has a certain turnaround time, you can't actually hit that seven gig per second. If you only ask for one little thing at a time. Right. Right. So you have

Leo Laporte (01:52:51):
To, there is that turnaround time. So

Allyn Malventano (01:52:53):
Yeah, there is a turnaround time. So if you ask the SSD, say, Hey, I need, you know, give me 128 of these 32 K kilobyte chunks at once. Right. You'll still have that turnaround time. But once the time is up, you'll start getting a fire hose of all of those requests will start coming in. Right. And overall, you'll get much closer to that seven gig per second, that you could get theoretically from that thing. Right. So this is a matter of how do you ask for the data? This

Leo Laporte (01:53:19):
Was G D as in developers conference, as opposed to G yes. T which is the NVIDIA conference. I understand the confusion.

Allyn Malventano (01:53:28):
Oh, right. But they both happened. Sorry. They

Leo Laporte (01:53:30):
Both happened. And this is actually a huge deal. Although ours, technic, Andrew Cunningham writing said that some of the improvements that you might expect were slowed down in the real world because of CPU bottlenecks.

Allyn Malventano (01:53:45):
Yes. That's the other piece of this, which is all of those requests. As they're going to the SSD, there is a slightly different code path that you can take through the operating system. Right. Cuz realize operating systems have various layers of to get to the storage. Right. For example, me doing my SSD testing, I know that I can only get so many requests per second for, from an SSD, with like one thread, just like one application thread running on a, on a CPU. Right, right. There is a top end of that. And that top end is based on the CPU pegs because it's, it's repeatedly running this code for each request that has to go through the kernel and go through all the different, the

Leo Laporte (01:54:24):
Abstraction layer and all of that. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (01:54:26):
How has to go through all those layers? Yeah. Well the, there, there is a, a more direct path that can be taken by using the direct storage API, which bypasses some of those layers. Right. Because again, the context is that you're not doing regular computer stuff. You're actually just bloating game textures and data and whatnot. You don't have to do all of the other things you would normally do for a generic, like multipurpose IO request to disk. Right. You don't need to update the last time the file has accessed. You don't need to do all these other things every time you do one of those requests.

Leo Laporte (01:54:59):
So once now, right now it's in gaming once. And particularly on the Xbox series X, but once it comes to windows, would you notice a difference improvement in performance? I mean, a lot of what we do in windows, isn't loading giant textures. It's small chunks.

Allyn Malventano (01:55:14):
Yeah. So it's, it's, it's gonna have bounds. First of all, the thing has to call the API. Right. Right. So the game developers will have to update their code, their game engines to use this. Right, right. And then once they're using it, it may not necessarily be used for every single point of the game. So like, so in other words, if you launch the game, it might launch more like a regular application with regular API calls. And then maybe it's not until you're in the game that it's actually using the direct storage stuff to just sort of transition between levels faster. That would be the gist of yeah. You know, that and, and, and the reason for making it more CPU efficient for all those requests is that that leaves more CPU, horsepower available for the game to run. Right. You're making the, the storage piece more efficient. Right. So then, so the game developers will, at least in theory, be able to move more towards you know, the same sort of thing that the Xbox is doing right. Where you have seamless transitions between what would've been a loading scene in a game. Right. Just turns into you just go right into the next thing, because it's able to all of that stuff faster and more efficiently in the background and not impact the performance of the game.

Allyn Malventano (01:56:29):
Yep. And let me add to what Alan's saying too. It actually has a cascading effect too. So think about a device, like, let's say a hollow lens that needs to be able to produce graphics quickly on if it can bypass the CPU, it actually will run at a lower amount of power usage, which means that device will be able to, you know, be able to implement these features better and be able to be bit more power efficient. So I think there's, there's a lot of advantages to doing this

Allyn Malventano (01:56:53):
Right. And, and the other, that's the other piece that's not, that's not fully baked or at least that's not in windows 11 yet. And that is right. Don't only read it from the storage faster and more efficient, but also it, the CPU doesn't need these textures just go directly to the GPU and let the GPU decompress it or do whatever it needs to do. So then potentially the, the CPU, yes, it's kind of still in the middle, but it's not really doing stuff in the middle anymore. You're literally just going right from the SSD to the, to the GPU or at least with as little CPU overhead as possible.

Leo Laporte (01:57:28):
Boy, I knew when we had Alan and Lou and Sam on it would get pretty geeky, but I had no idea.

Allyn Malventano (01:57:35):
Sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:57:36):
No, I love it. Are you kidding? Let's take a little break. I gotta, I gotta, I, I need to, I need to think I need has to digest, digest all of that. Hey, while we're doing that though. Let me talk a little bit about our newest toy here in the studio. Our TriCaster two elite from new tech. You know, that when I first started to back in 2005, I was looking for a switching solution that would let us have multiple cameras to kind of do like a TV style production. But without the big cost and we chose new tech, cuz I talked to everybody, everybody agreed. The trier was the way to go. Of course it's been 15 years, 17 actually. And the trier has gotten better and better and better. And now thank you. New tech. We've got the TriCaster two elite, the most complete production system on the planet.

Leo Laporte (01:58:28):
And I will be honest. We use a fraction of the capabilities, but sure is fun for us to play with new tech has a full line of TriCasters. You don't have to select the top of the line like we do. You there's some very affordable choices, too. Churches, colleges, broadcasters podcasters, all love new tech because it gives you solutions. You can afford that. Give you capabilities. You could only dream of the way we use it is of course is a live video production system, but new tech can do so much more. It could be an entire are digital media solution, creating content for the internet, mobile and television distribution. There really is a great time for that because of local sports local TV stations, national stations who wanna create streaming solutions late in last year, new tech unleashed, an updated version of the TriCaster two elite.

Leo Laporte (01:59:18):
This is what we're using today with so many new features, really exciting the live call connect feature supports Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and FaceTime. And that could be an input to any production, selectable, audio and video return enables TriCaster two elite operators to view an audio return like any other output, allowing greater flexibility. There's a new, have we ever used this? John, a neural voice isolation tool, which takes the audio uses AI and can cancel, reduce background noise automatically detect voices. Incredible. Especially if you're doing a show with a noisy environment, a a racetrack or a conference or a worship service, you can really clean up the audio. You get so much power and flexibility and simplicity as always with all of new Tech's products. You've got variable support in macros. We use macros a lot. John's always writing new macros for us, a dynamic and powerful tool that allows operators to nest macros now deliver complex productions more easily.

Leo Laporte (02:00:20):
And that's mostly how John uses the macro to make it easier for me in my studio. So I can press a button. It'll take care of it. That's awesome. I'm doing all my own switching when I'm in my office, but it's, you know, mostly thanks to macros from TriCaster TriCaster, two elite supports encoding of three channels and anything from HD to HD simultaneous, they brought live panel builder into the TriCaster. This was always a nice ex you know, post-production tool. Now you can create bespoke user interfaces, customize each preset within the user interface, making your distributed workflow simpler, more cohesive, never compromising on quality. I can go on and on. I have, I can Ize for hours and I'm not even the primary user. Our team loves our TriCaster. We especially love NDI. The network distributed interface. We have an NDI camera point, tilt, zoom, pan tilt, zoom camera above me.

Leo Laporte (02:01:20):
That NDI means it doesn't have to have an H GMI connector or an SDI connector. This camera is controlled by John on the control surface. And the only thing plugged into it is a network cable. Is it Poe as well? John? Yeah. Yeah. So we don't even have a power cable. The whole thing is controlled by a network cable. The video goes over the network into the trier. That's awesome. That's awesome. The NDI genlock tool, let's TriCaster two elite customers match outputs to a common sync pulse. So, you know, exact everything synced up exactly when to send a frame of video, incredible accuracy especially needed for are a remote workflow. You could send an alpha channel through one of the mixed outs you could bring postproduction closer to live. Users can use the keying on the trier to feed graphics or real time 3d creation tools.

Leo Laporte (02:02:09):
We don't use the keying, but boy, the Trier's key is get it's better. Every single time. It's mind boggling since its arrival in 2020, try Lancaster two elite has offered an incredibly powerful live production system. These very latest updates put even more power in the hands of storytellers. We only scratch the surface, take a look at the TriCaster and see what you can do with it. It's literally better than broadcast. It makes me feel like really good about choosing TriCast all those years ago. The trier one pro another great choice for producers, content, creators publishers. It's got great future ready capabilities. It's a streamlined live video production system with live call connect 4k UD switching, live streaming recording. That's really impressive. What they've done. Take a look at the Tryer family. Start by pushing that start button. Find out which strike caster is right for you at go.newtech.com/TWiT-tv.

Leo Laporte (02:03:16):
Did you get that? Go.Newtech.Com ne WT K go. New tech.com/TWiT-tv. You'll find an easy to use interactive guy. That'll give you that advice when you hit that start button on which Trier's right for you, but you know what? Just go, cuz it's fun to browse and dream and think about all the things you can do with TriCaster. Every time I look at what we can do, I'm thinking, you know, why aren't I in Mount Rushmore right now with the read? I mean, there's so many things we could do. We could do with that. It's just so cool. And I know John is always excited. We got a new control surface to go with it, right? And we got, we just it was a big upgrade for us co.new tech.com/TWiT-tv. Please go to that address. So they know you saw it here. We want them to know how much we appreciate everything they do for us at new tech, the TriCaster one pro and the new TriCaster, two elite. Very good stuff.

Allyn Malventano (02:04:09):
I have a, I have a request on behalf of the listeners.

Leo Laporte (02:04:11):
Yes.

Allyn Malventano (02:04:12):
Don't enable the noise cancellation on your mic because then we can't hear John laughing in the background.

Leo Laporte (02:04:19):
The AI would strip John out. You probably, you probably can hear right now, John going with all the things he could do with it. I'll tell you what. I'll give you one more button to press John. We had a fun week this week on TWiT. We made a little promo watch. I use Instagram less and less. In fact, I just saw a story that they wanna become a shopping mall.

Speaker 8 (02:04:38):
People buy a lot of that crap. Oh geez.

Leo Laporte (02:04:41):
What's the, why do you think I'm sitting on a

Speaker 8 (02:04:42):
Stick?

Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
You think I would've bought this in a store?

Speaker 9 (02:04:47):
Oh, that's perfect. I need a chair with a little tiny seat.

Speaker 8 (02:04:52):
He's been squirming all day. When did you get this middle of the

Leo Laporte (02:04:55):
Night

Speaker 10 (02:04:57):
On tweet

Speaker 8 (02:04:59):
All about Android. Guess what? Google I is gonna be around for 20, 22. And guess what's gonna be at shoreline amphitheater. How get he go to shore and party? I can't no, no one just shoreline party because it is a virtual event.

Speaker 10 (02:05:13):
The tech guy, they make the world smallest view you master. Oh, they make the world's smallest light bright. And now they are making the world's smallest Atari when he, oh,

Speaker 8 (02:05:27):
That's so cute.

Speaker 10 (02:05:29):
Wait a minute. Working Mac break

Leo Laporte (02:05:32):
Weekly. Apple is fine for the ninth time. There's only one more week. Then this will all be over apple by the Dutch regulators. It's 5 million euros every week. But I think

Speaker 11 (02:05:43):
That apple just saw it. Well that'll cost 50, 50 million. And then they went back to what they were doing. They

Speaker 8 (02:05:46):
Were like, yeah, like Tim cook has a stack of singles and he's just counting off singles every week.

Leo Laporte (02:05:51):
Make it, make it rain, Tim make it rain

Speaker 10 (02:05:53):
Twit. Take it to the bank.

Leo Laporte (02:05:56):
Oh, don't mind me. I'm just my in centipede on my little tiny.

Speaker 10 (02:06:03):
This

Leo Laporte (02:06:03):
Thing is

Speaker 8 (02:06:04):
So I need one of those. It's so

Leo Laporte (02:06:05):
Cute. Look, it's a little 2,600 and then you get a little joystick. It's totally playable though. And you can, there's the reset button. It even makes the sound look. Where do you get those target Walmart, Walmart, you know, it's Micah and I were, did this yesterday with Dick and oh, look at this. This is the first game. First video game I ever played. P I remember getting a stack of quarters and a white Russian, and sitting down to play this game in a bar. I didn't come out five white Russians and eight hours later. Cuz I was so entrenched by the idea that you could play a thing, a video game on a computer. Now, now I have it on something. The size of, I don't know The size of a something, a cube. It's so cute. Look, the TV comes out, it's got little legs. This thing hysterical. It kilts 20 bucks

Speaker 8 (02:07:01):
Miracle.

Leo Laporte (02:07:02):
It's a miracle. It's already 2020 bucks. You

Speaker 10 (02:07:05):
Gotta get one of those.

Leo Laporte (02:07:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:07:06):
And that was, that was the first. That was the first console

Leo Laporte (02:07:09):
I owned me too. Me too. I've told this story many times. I apologize if you've heard it before, but I spent so much money and time at Chucky cheese pizza, time theater, playing asteroids and battles zone and all that. I finally said, you know what? I should really get the 2,600 and I did. And that's actually how I got into computers, cuz then I said, well, what I really need is Z Atari 400. And then I said, what I really need is Atari 800 and well, you know how it goes, but now I have a 2,600 look. It's so cute. It's okay. It said I, they must have licensed it. Right. It's exactly like it.

Allyn Malventano (02:07:42):
I'm just surprised they got pong.

Leo Laporte (02:07:44):
Oh I know. That's not. That was that an to game. I don't think so. Originally it was Namco or somebody. They have PAC mans on there. That's

Allyn Malventano (02:07:51):
That's the, they are the pong arcade game is the one that like they're, that's the only one that gives like the main project, like a really hard time.

Leo Laporte (02:07:58):
Oh really? They Soo

Allyn Malventano (02:07:59):
Them about like, well they just like don't they just don't want that out there. I guess. I mean, people don't get it. Of course they

Leo Laporte (02:08:05):
Figure it out. You could write it in, in Python an hour.

Allyn Malventano (02:08:09):
I mean it's

Leo Laporte (02:08:10):
The simplest game ever.

Allyn Malventano (02:08:12):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:13):
It's funny. I didn't who on pong to chat room? Do you know Owens pong? I wonder why they're they're so tough on it. It is historic. I mean, in that respect, it,

Allyn Malventano (02:08:21):
It is. I think that's what it is. They're going for the historic value of, Hey, this is the first game.

Leo Laporte (02:08:26):
Well, as I mentioned,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:08:27):
If you're not getting any revenue from it, why do you care? Right,

Allyn Malventano (02:08:30):
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:31):
As I mentioned earlier, just go in an archive. You could play all these games. You could play the rods go in and the reactor slows down. Is that right? Yes.

Allyn Malventano (02:08:41):
Okay. Yes. Good to know for when you play that later,

Leo Laporte (02:08:44):
Just in case Chris Crawford was an amazing guy, he was like the king of simulations on the old Atari. Let's see, YouTube's buying more TV shows four free episodes of TV. Amazon's buying the old MGM catalog with a bunch of crappy TV shows, obviously catalog, is it? I think streaming is, we were just talking about this. This is where the big battle weal is about to begin with these big companies trying very hard to get your dollar. Yeah. Unimpressed.

Allyn Malventano (02:09:18):
Obviously I I'd say that cuz I, I all, I watch Disney just pull and suck everything back into their service and distract

Leo Laporte (02:09:24):
Me to. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:09:26):
I I'm very selective about who gets my dollars from that stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:09:30):
Yeah. I don't blame you.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:09:31):
You said I, you know, I, I regularly shut off services, you know, cancel 'em and then bring back when there's something on there that I actually wanna watch.

Leo Laporte (02:09:39):
Yeah. Yeah. It's a good idea. Honda is retiring ASMO oh, the first robot 20 years. I didn't realize robot had been around that long. The first humanoid robot debuted in 2000. It could walk, it could dance. They haven't upgraded it in 11 years. But that's it for asthma. If you have one, if you bought one. I don't know.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:10:07):
I don't think they ever sold them. Oh, okay. I, I actually did. I did meet ASMO really in Japan. Yeah. Back in 2009, I was there on a with Honda, brought some media over for the Tokyo motor show and we went to Honda headquarters and we got to meet AMO and, and get a demo you know, see a demo and shake hands with 'em and everything or it,

Leo Laporte (02:10:32):
Well, I hope you memorized that because it's they're gonna, they're gonna I've I've got a photo of it somewhere. Retire in Omo. Yeah. He was still performing in a science museum, the national museum of emerging science and innovation in Tokyo, as well as the Honda ASMO showroom. But last performance of is coming up. It's been a good 20 years. Hamo the inventor of the Jiff. And I'm gonna say Jiff from now on has passed Steve Wil height. He invented the Giff in on CompuServe. We were just talking about that in the 1980s and spent the rest of his life, trying to convince people that it's J not Giff.

Leo Laporte (02:11:20):
In fact he, when he won the WEBY award about 10 years ago, he very famously his acceptance speech. You know, you only get five letters here. I'll play it for you was it's pronounced J and the crowd goes wild. Not G not GIF. I can never remember. Hey, you invent it. You get to name it. You get, is that true though? Really? I mean works for me. Should I guess yeah. I, I never really wanted to call it Giff cuz that made me think of peanut butter. In fact, remember when Jiff peanut butter sent out a peanut or jar, we probably still have it somewhere with a label that said it's pronounced GIF, weird Giff so there's a little, little, you know, tension between them. Also passed away speaking of vintage computers, the former CEO of Tandy corporation who pushed out the original TRS 80 a lot of people got their first taste of a personal computer in the $600, TRS 80 and 1978.

Leo Laporte (02:12:36):
I think it came out 77. And it was John Roach who was the CEO at the time. They shipped he says the apple one had been introduced the year before Commodor and other companies were marketing their own home computers. But the TRS 80 became for a time, the most popular computer on Mr. Roach said that Charles Tandy blew a little smoke and said build a thousand. And if we can't sell them, we'll, we'll use 'em in the store for something, the battery club or something. We were finally able to ship some machines in September shipped 5,000 that year. That was all we could make competitors ship none $600, which, you know, in 1978 was a lot more, you know, dollar was worth something, but it was still a lot cheaper than anything else out there. So John Roach passed away at the age of 83, Steven Wil height at the age of 84, a couple of the pioneers of the computer industry, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages.

Leo Laporte (02:13:41):
This has been a lot of fun. We had some geeky times. Thank you so much for being here. I want to remind you that Lou is a regular, he's the host of this week on enterprise tech every Friday round noon, you can watch it live noon, Pacific 3:00 PM Eastern time. I know what it's it's I can't do the math 22,000 UTC. I believe no seven it's 1900. I think something like that on by watch it live or subscribe it to TV slash TWiT. Thank you, Lou. Thank you, Lou. Everything going well. Yeah. Good. Having

Allyn Malventano (02:14:19):
A blast, having a good time. We're doing we're doing remote work and enjoying it. We,

Leo Laporte (02:14:23):
Oh, you working remotely at bank Microsoft. That that's right. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano (02:14:26):
My whole, my whole org is, is over in in Redmond. So,

Leo Laporte (02:14:30):
So when, so I know Microsoft's bringing people back into the office. You can stay remote though.

Allyn Malventano (02:14:35):
I am 100% remote.

Leo Laporte (02:14:37):
Nice. Well, we love you and we really love the work you do. And so thank you for being here for us. Thank you. I enjoy, I enjoy doing it. I don't like to make you work on a Sunday, but every once in a while, just to, just to reconnect, it's great to

Allyn Malventano (02:14:49):
No, I'm had, I have a blast. Thank you for having me

Leo Laporte (02:14:51):
So glad to reconnect with a Melano longtime friend host of this weekend computer hardware for many years until he went off and joined the enemy at Intel storage, technical analyst enemy. No, no, they're the, they're the good guys. How is it at Intel these days? Is there invigorated?

Allyn Malventano (02:15:10):
Yeah. You know, there's, there's plenty of storage stuff for me to try to get people to fix and make better.

Leo Laporte (02:15:16):
Mr. Optain also I think Gelsinger, pat Gelsinger has been a really exciting CEO and his vision for Intel is both a design company and a Foundry is really interesting. I, I, I know it's a gutsy move, but we wish him absolutely wish you guys absolutely the best. We need Intel. Intel's very important. And

Allyn Malventano (02:15:36):
Yeah, the level of enthusiasm is kind like just collectively higher oil.

Leo Laporte (02:15:40):
Yeah. I think Pat's a great, great guy. I mean, here's a chip designer, right? He should be who's running Intel, I think. Yeah. Great to have you on Alan. Are you any podcasts? You do anything you wanna plug?

Allyn Malventano (02:15:52):
No, I don't. I don't really do much of anything lucky to get you of well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, I mean, heck I can go over to Lou or Sam to talk to storage for cars,

Leo Laporte (02:16:02):
Get geeky, man. Oh yeah. You're a big car guy too. We didn't even get to some of the car stories. There's a lot of car news as well.

Allyn Malventano (02:16:09):
Yeah. I, I may have been, I, I may or may not have rude access to my Tesla. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:16:15):
Oh. How interesting.

Allyn Malventano (02:16:17):
You know, come on,

Leo Laporte (02:16:19):
SSH in, into your, your, yeah. Mercedes. I love it.

Allyn Malventano (02:16:25):
Mercedes

Leo Laporte (02:16:25):
What'd I say, I mean Tesla. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you, can you can you side load programs into it? I saw somebody put like a

Allyn Malventano (02:16:35):
It's basically, it's basically a Buntu.

Leo Laporte (02:16:37):
It's a Buntu. Once

Allyn Malventano (02:16:38):
You're in there, you can do whatever you

Leo Laporte (02:16:39):
Wow. So you can pseudo app update, huh?

Allyn Malventano (02:16:43):
Well, you

Leo Laporte (02:16:44):
Have to be thank you for being here. A Samal Sam of course, a regular on the tech guy show his wheel. Bearings is a fantastic podcast to do with Nicole and Robby. Two of my two other favorites. It's a great show. If you're into cars wheel bearings.media, principal researcher at guide house insights. Anything else you wanna plug?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:17:06):
Let's see. There's also the other podcast that I'm doing with my colleagues on the transportation team at guide house called guide house transportation insights. Nice. you can find out on all the, all the usual places, just search for that. What else? Oh speaking of of software defined vehicles we're gonna be doing a webinar on April 12th with we're gonna have an executive from Aurora labs, which is a company doing some really interesting stuff with vehicle software tools Scott Miller, who is the VP of software at general motors. And trying to remember somebody, a VP from NVIDIA who I I'm sorry, but I cannot remember his name am right now. But so we'll have GM NVIDIA and Aurora labs talking for an hour about software defined vehicles on April 12th. And if you look, just look for GHouse insights webinars you can find the registration page for that.

Leo Laporte (02:18:05):
Nice. Very cool. Thank you gentlemen. A great show. Well done Bravo and I bet you are all glad you were here to watch or listen to it. We can, we do it live so you can watch and listen live@livedotTWiT.tv. It's every Sunday around two 30 Pacific five 30 Eastern 2130 UTC, if you wanna watch live just you know, head over to that website, you can choose from a live audio or video stream. Now, if you're watching live, you should probably chat live with us. It's always fun in the IRC irc.Twit.tv. And of course the club members, they get to chat in the fabulous discord, which is kind of rapidly becoming my favorite online community, not just chat rooms for every show that we do, but for every subject, a geek could be interested in including automotive tech, beer, wine cocktails, crypto gaming hacking, and a whole lot more.

Leo Laporte (02:19:00):
That's just one of the benefits of club TWiT $7 a month gets you access to the discord. You get a ad free versions of all the shows we do with your own special feed and a TWiT plus where stuff that doesn't make it into the podcast appears including our untitled Lennox show, the GIZ Stacy's book club, which is I think coming up on the 20, oh, we was, it was last week. It's over, but you know, what is coming up is Paul Theros after hours conversation, thanks to aunt Pruitt. That's coming up March 31st, about four days again, $7 a month. I think there's a lot of benefit and it sure helps us keep the lights on, go to TWiT.tv/club TWiT to find out more. There's a corporate membership as well. Thank you very much for your support. After the fact, all the shows we do are available at the website, TWiT.tv also on YouTube. Every show has its dedicated channel as does TWiT. And it can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player. That's probably the easiest way to do it. So you get it automatically ready for your Monday morning commute. And if your podcast player has reviewed, please do us a solid and leave a five star review so that everybody knows about this. Probably the longest running tech show in the world. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another TWiT

Credits (02:20:21):
Its amazing byebye. I'm running on the, on the, doing the.