Windows Weekly 865 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.
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Richard Campbell's here, paul Thorot's here. We've got that big Microsoft hack Seems like Microsoft might be downplaying something pretty embarrassing, frankly. New versions of Windows 11 for beta and dev channels. We'll talk about AI. Paul used co-pilot pro and not for programming but for some pretty cool images. We'll show that, plus Paul's favorite browsers and Richard's favorite Japanese whiskey. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorot and Richard Campbell, episode 865. Recorded Wednesday, january 24th 2024. You don't drink the bottle.
00:55
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02:22
Oh hello winners Hello Dozers, Hello Paul Therat, Great to see you, my friend, in the frozen tundra.
02:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am clenching my body in a vain attempt to be warm right now, literally. In fact. I'm probably going to go grab the sheet off the bed and just curl up.
02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, get a blanket. It would be cute to see you wrapped in a blanket.
02:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not, we're not far.
02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also here it's Richard Gamble, who is on the West Coast, is probably fairly balmy in Mad Park.
02:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We had a snow burst a very unusual to get snow here. It made it all the way to the coast, right to the waterline, wow, enough that we had to shovel it off and stuff. But it's all gone now. It rained, and rained, and rained and now it's just wet. I learned a lesson.
03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Last week in Providence it snowed and then it rained and then it froze, and the lesson I learned was shovel ye snow while ye may, oh yes, get it off the steps for sure, and then, mainly, get it out of the driveway, because I was driving over a hump of snow for the rest of the of not even split off the car of ice. Yeah, because it just it was like a dune. Fortunately I had a four wheel drive, so it felt like I was off-roading in my driveway, my mom's driveway.
03:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I guess it's time my car actually slipped out on the highway last Friday.
03:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, no, no, no. That's terrifying yeah.
03:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was not good. You know, I'm pretty experienced when it comes to driving in the snow and that was a little surprising. Was it ice? I guess it was. Well, it was one of the. You know, it's Pennsylvania, leo, so we don't really, yes, plow here per se until it's unnecessary. Oh, yes, so the lane, the lane, yeah, no, it really isn't. But what the lane I was in was not plowed or not hadn't been used as much, so it wasn't as bare. Yikes, that's terrifying.
04:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's not good. I remember when I was a kid, my dad driving me to school and there was a hill and he basically lost control. At the top of the hill we just kind of gently slid all the way down the hill, hoping that we wouldn't hit anything.
04:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My brother almost got decapitated by a snowplow one time for that exact reason. The snowplow went flying down the hill. Yikes, Yikes People die all the time. The entire top of the car was literally severed. Like he ducked, Yikes, Like yeah. He then had a convertible.
04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My third grade teacher, mrs Kelly, lost her husband to a snowplow accident in the sixties. Oh boy, that's so nice. And then, and I was telling my sister about it and she said I'm sure that doesn't happen anymore. And the very next, no, no, a woman died in East Providence from a snowplow. It's dangerous because partly is they're in a hurry so they're whizzing down, I can't see anything.
05:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
These blades it's the size of a house and the little thing to sit in is like it's like a little tiny thing, you know.
05:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then they put sand and salt. There's another thing I learned my car, this random car, thank God was covered with salt.
05:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, this is the experience, leo. I'm sorry, it's just always what we got. How do you?
05:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
people do it. How do we survive? I'll tell you if it's.
05:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Rhode Island we keep buying Californian car. They keep pushing the salt into the bay there, you know which is environmentally unsound.
05:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, there's a giant salt mound in between Providence and Cranston, where my mom lived. Yeah, these are all of these coasts.
05:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there's gigantic. It's like a beehive kind of thing.
05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I guess that, well, that's where they get the road salt, huh, all right, let's talk about Microsoft. This is much more interesting. Microsoft was hacked, right.
05:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, they were in the most low tech way imaginable A password spray. I love that. I love that it makes it seem like we're trying to make this sounds, you know, somehow sophisticated. Here's how you prevent that. Disallow attempts after three. Yeah, I mean like seriously, or?
06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have a good password or maybe two F A or something you know. And then they said and to dignify it they said but it was a nation state.
06:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, I mean, I appreciate that kind of disclosure, but I'm surprised by it really. Yeah, I think there's no way. This isn't embarrassing. So, microsoft, the language they used was well, this was a legacy system, you know. It was like it wasn't their fault, it was in the corner.
06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's your legacy system Collecting. We go to you it was a legacy system that had permissions, apparently, to access the email servers and read everybody's email.
06:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just not convinced that this is what happened. Right, this seems more like they were able to read emails from their corporate accounts Not that they actually, like you say, access, it's like I think I think they had access to an email account for this test account.
07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it had everybody's email. That's all the attachments to the email, right? Well, of course they would. Yeah.
07:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So here are the troubling bits of this, aside from what we've already said. Right, nation state. Okay, scary, they got through with a password spray attack, like Bob was sitting there going ABC123. Abc124. Like what is that? They also the language is always a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts.
07:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What the big ones, though. We only need two or three of them. We need the big ones right.
07:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then supposedly, this hacker group was there specifically to learn what Microsoft knew about it.
07:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they for three months, they think, and I don't know how they would know. Yeah, they were in there for three months, right, they think? I don't know how they would know that it was nobellium. I'm sorry, now they call it what? Winter blizzard or something. Winter blizzard, yeah.
08:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Midnight blizzard. Midnight blizzard. Who was looking at the next company that Microsoft acquires?
08:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
by the midnight, they were the solar winds guys right. So they think that they were looking to figure out what Microsoft at least is what Gibson said yesterday, what Microsoft knew about them. So it was like it was counterintelligence kind of a thing.
08:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, it was counter a lot of things. So Microsoft in November, in a bit of really good timing, announced their secure future initiative right, this kind of modern version of trustworthy computing where, because of AI and the sophisticated nature of cyber tax today, they really need to step up and, among other things, use AI to combat the AI being used to attack them. This had nothing to do with AI, like nothing. It was literally a brute force. Like nonsense attack that should not have succeeded against someone with a hotmail account, but it did. And now what Microsoft is saying?
08:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Once you know that test account doesn't have MFA on it. Now what you're doing is you're harnessing a bunch of zombie machines all coming from different IPs, so the three passwords thing still can work. It's just, it is killing off IPs, but it's midnight blizzard. They've got a hundred thousand of these, so they're able to test a lot fast, right, right. The real thing here is where's the machine learning model located and going? Wow, 10,000 people have tried to access this account in the past minute.
09:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That doesn't seem normal 2007 era corporate reporting tools. Here's an idea. Why don't we? If only we had software that could pull the machines in our organization and report back the level of OS version, service, pack version, whatever I mean. This problem was solved 20 years ago.
09:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know? That's what's embarrassing these rolling security improvements don't apply evenly. They found an old account against an old server that isn't in compliance and it had still had rights, which is the real issue here. It's like if you're not in compliance, why does it have any rights at all?
10:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there is something we can all learn from this, and that is to not use Microsoft software.
10:16
No, no, no, no, no. We've been talking about security here and there lately and you know I know no one listening or watching this is going to go to the extent that, say, richard did when he literally went through all of his accounts, changed the passwords, you know, closed accounts that were no longer necessary, et cetera. But really this is an example of the need to monitor this occasionally and kind of reduce your attack service, right Either by well, you can't reduce your attack service by adding to a FA, I guess, but you know, by doing what I just said, which is, you know, remove the accounts you don't need literally get rid of them and ensure up the accounts you do have. You know, and we all do this, that this is like literally 100% of us have accounts sitting out, or is it, richard, I think, have accounts sitting out there in the world that are unprotected or not protected enough, that have the same password as 17 other accounts or 100, whatever it is you know.
11:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I am at none of those left and finally no.
11:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, you are, you are literally a God among men when it comes to this.
11:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Many things right, but I would also say I do get an email from one thing or another almost every day, of somebody asking for my password. Right Like nice, oh yeah.
11:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you know, if they asked nicely, I think that's the key.
11:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, facebook routinely tells me oh, you know, we're trying to recover your password for you. If this is not, you press. You know. I literally got two of those the other day, yeah they happen all the time and it's just, and I'm kind of grateful because it's a reminder. People are trying all the time.
11:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, look, we all have our thresholds for pain and effort and time and all that kind of stuff. But the more you can go, password list the secure methods like 2FA, whatever, the better. And obviously start with the longing fruit your, you know your accounts the online accounts like Microsoft account, google account, apple account, the ones that are tied to credit cards, like Amazon and all that stuff. I mean, this is just it's grunt work and no one wants to do it. But yeah, this is why you do it.
12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But am I crazy, or am I? Feel like I'm just waiting for Paskies to have some massive vulnerability.
12:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I went through a. I thought, well, I still think Paskies are kind of the future, whatever that means, in that they will exist with other methods for you know, password list, authentication but and verification. But based on the feedback I've gotten from my own readers, I got to tell you this is maybe too complicated for people and part of the problem is that it is it's inconsistently implemented. It's consistently implemented on the same account on different devices.
12:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everything that you do that's genuinely important. That will make a difference from you. It's a password manager yeah, because it actually makes your life better, like all the past keys and things are harder to use. The fact that I don't know any of my passwords is a joy.
13:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, right, like it's genuinely a joy I feel like I'm old school, but the best thing would be a password manager and 2FA and that's damn secure, I would think.
13:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A password manager that uses 2FA, so you can.
13:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, I don't want the 2FA in the same spot, so I use this.
13:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no that I mean that you need it to get into it.
13:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I use it.
13:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the hard work is actually going through all your accounts and changing all your passwords.
13:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the part where people like put on the break. Like, I don't think so.
13:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most password managers will tell you that this is the same.
13:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've been seen in a breach.
13:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you reuse this.
13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's how you change it.
13:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm literally going to be writing about this and I kind of expected to do it by now. But last weekend one of the many things I did was to go and you know, bit warden, like all these password managers. Here are your accounts that have been compromised in some way. They've shown up wherever you know. Here are your passwords that you reuse everywhere 129 of them, you know. Whatever it's horrible and it's one of those things we all have to kind of confront. So I spent the time to go. I only had less than a dozen, and when you kind of cut out the ones that were like local 192 addresses that were just from my NAS or something, there were only a couple I really wanted to deal with, and one was like Condon Nast, which is, I guess I signed into a travel site at some point in the future, in the past rather and I actually ended up contacting that company. Were you reading Vogue, one or the other? It's probably not that one. I mean, I'm just guessing, but I haven't endless.
14:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I contacted them to them.
14:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, but I contacted them to close the. I said, look, just, I can't get in, so please close this. And they said we have no record of you ever having an account with us.
14:55
And I said that's interesting because the dark web has a record of it and you know I'd like that to be gone. The other one was Thrifty Car Rental, where I literally spent an agonizing hour trying to change my password, which is nearly impossible because their website is horrible, yeah, and I actually eventually did get it done. But those are two accounts and so when you kind of extrapolate that out to what it would take to really clean up the whole thing, we're talking about a. This is a career, and look.
15:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wanted to do this. It scratched a nice obsessive itch for me, but I was the person who opened Notepad and blocked out an hour a day and would just plow on them for a while and if I was in the group I'd keep going. But it took still took a few weeks to do the mock.
15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's for you though.
15:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But this is the central problem with anything security related A it's complex, b it's time consuming and tedious and people just give up, even the ones who are like you know, you're right, I got to do this. You start and then you're like I'm going to go watch married with children instead, and you know what you know what works on this browser Cat videos. Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's, it's, it's. There's no easy solution, that's the problem.
16:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, actually, this is in my, I'm looking at Bitward and it says 583 logins.
16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well that you, you mean that you're storing there that they are in Bitward now.
16:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Admittedly, that's a lot of like internal server stuff and so forth too, but it is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of accounts. Yeah, it's hundreds.
16:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so anyway it's it's. You're right, it's worth doing. It's something everyone should do. It's something no one is going to do, and I mean not like literally no one, but like very few one percent, you could at least do the ones that really count, like your bank accounts, right.
16:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And at least, at least, that's kind of my point and get started with all your new accounts.
16:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yes, and always use it from now on. Yeah, yeah, so you could, I mean.
16:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I suppose you could go from account to account in Bitward and or whatever tool you're using and just change the account habit, generate a, a complex password, a new password. Like you said, don't know your passwords, never, never be able to type in the password for anything.
17:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't know it. Don't know what it is. It's 25 characters long, or, if it's a really crappy site, 16 characters long. Yeah, lots of crappy sites. Do what you can do, you know. Yeah, but I you know. I enjoy being the person who always has the path, the password that's the longest, because I never, ever type it. I don't know what it is and if you know if Microsoft's listening.
17:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would just give you the same advice. I mean to a fade, when you can do it complex passwords, it's just common sense, guys.
17:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know like a but it may be, like you know, like a, c, so you know, the line they left out of here was how old that test account was, and I and I presume they left it out because it probably wasn't that old. Oh, I was okay, you know it was it was a test account from 2003. I don't feel like that.
17:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we still have a, a legacy hotmail server running for some reason, and the account name is admin.
18:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Really, don't worry, wait till you know, find out what the password is.
18:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there is no password, it's it's like running off a links router from 1989 or whatever.
18:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a. It's a big organization with a huge, long legacy of stuff and this is not. You know, this is not a thing we're ever going to show anybody. It's just internal. So I'm just doing something quick and then it sticks around for a bit too long.
18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's your guess? Is it a server? Was it a somebody's closet?
18:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh was it in such an adult's closet. Actually, that's a good question?
18:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know. No, I I think it was a test account that was supposed to be internal. Only that got exposed when in a second iteration of something.
18:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And like why can't I access the internet, click checkbox and not understanding that.
18:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Forget that. You put a trivial password on that. That's right.
18:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because you were just testing. That's right, yeah, yeah, I'm sure it was something like that, just testing. But this is where this, your size, works against you. Yep, in Microsoft's case, it's just.
18:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, this organization is impossibly vast, yeah, and uh well, I I mean that's a great thing with that Brad Smith announcement in November about the future thing. As much as they made it public, it's for them. You know they've got the problem too, and then. And then reason to make it public is A yeah, we can't take it back. And B it's also a statement we are dog-fooding our own problem. Yeah, right.
19:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, you want someone with experience, you know, and this is one way you get it get punched in the face a few times.
19:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The seam part right, the security detection mechanisms, that that whole, which is very big for us these days as administrators. Like are we? Because often after the breach becomes visible, you know when the big red screen comes up or whatever it may be. Then you go back and look through the logs. You go, oh yeah, there they were, and they were here. And they were here, like, why didn't we see this ahead of time? And it's because it's scattered in all these different places. And this is, you know, microsoft's product called Sentinel is about trying to consolidate that data in a way that gives you a better sense that something inappropriate Pull apart the disparate pieces of data and draw those connections.
20:02
Yeah, but there isn't any one thing that happened. Like you know, we, you talk about the three strikes and you're out, kind of thing, like maybe they'd actually been pulling that account for a year, right, right they only hit it every one the amount of time before they could try again.
20:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly.
20:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
To never trip over any of those lines.
20:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe someday we'll get in here. Oh look, we did.
20:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And when eventually they do? Yeah, maybe.
20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think probably though, because it's the SolarWinds group and I'm giving Microsoft credit that they actually know that. I'm not sure that they would know that, yeah, but then it would be sense, if they're trying to figure out, what do they know about SolarWinds that they've probably, they've probably, been hanging around for a while, right?
20:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, no, I mean I'm sure, but I'm also surprised that Microsoft simply named names, like I know, and called it out as a state actor.
20:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but I think that this is Russian, that kind of again. All of the language in that blog post was well kind of hand waving to say, oh no, no, this was like really terrible from that's why they succeeded, Like it's more important to show that they were powerful.
21:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were powerful.
21:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, we wasn't on fire. Well, okay, hold on a second.
21:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think they were trying to imply that Russia hacked Microsoft. I think they were trying to say that this hacker group, which is supported by the country of Russia government of Russia, was trying to find more information about what Microsoft knew about them.
21:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they said a nation state hacker. I mean I don't know.
21:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean they had a nation state and Russia Backed by a nation state. Yeah, they said all of those things so and normally they used to be coy about this Like generally, this nation state was language, for it's either Russia or China, but we're not going to say Right this time they just said, like all that was missing was the airstrike statement that followed it. By the way, we're a $3 trillion company with an annual revenue greater than the GDP of 150 nations, and here come RF 16J downs.
21:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, that's what Microsoft needs, is there?
21:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
an air force yeah. Yeah, microsoft strikes Iran will be a story in the future In the days of the East India Company, they had a naval force. You know Sure Well how many bunker busters do you think Microsoft has?
22:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and all they really, you know, all they need to do is take out one building in St Petersburg and Well, I mean, I think, yeah, I don't, I don't, we're joking, this is not the job of a corporation.
22:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, you know, I do find the language of this very interesting. They were talking, for example. They were saying you know, don't worry about. This is not caused by a vulnerability in one of our products, no, it's just caused by stupidity.
22:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, like I just but that's a good thing, because it can't be repeated. You know it's can't be repeated uniformly right.
22:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's also a good thing because it won't cascade out to Microsoft's customers.
22:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they did say we're going to be better, right? I mean they say this has triggered an examination of our processes and Well, yeah.
22:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, like I said, back in November they announced this uh what's it called Secure Future Initiative. You know the new trustworthy computing thing. What they said about that was you know, we know that when we implement this, it's going to be disruptive, and we've been purposefully kind of taking the slow boat on that, and now we're thinking actually we're going to have to be aggressive, even knowing that this will disrupt things.
23:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but that was the implication. There was disruptive for our customers here. It's disruptive to us because we like having those insecure systems lying around or we can't figure out where they are, or something. Yeah, I mean, this is an internal system, right? Or do you think this might have been a customer system? No, it was just totally.
23:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, no, no, no, it was a, it was a yeah and again. And the email explanations are so vague and the press has all made it worse. Like you got to go back and read the Microsoft ones, right? I don't think they had access to. You know they weren't impersonating any executive email or anything like that, yeah, I think your interpretation.
23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were lurking. They had an email inbox that stuff was getting forwarded to.
23:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, try to answer into yourself. You just sit back and watch.
24:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sit and read the mail. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sit back go out and watch.
24:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing is, you know, it took them months, months. Yeah, here's what's going to come out. There will be some. There's going to be. There is going to be more information, right, part of it will be actually maybe they hit more systems than we thought, or more they access more emails than we thought. You're totally right.
24:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like and did they try any laterals, like that's always questions. Yeah, when you're, did they? Did they actually have control of a machine at any point? Doesn't sound like it? It sounds like, literally, they got access to an email box and they were reading it. Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know they had a single thing beyond that. Yeah Well, we don't know. Yeah, we don't know. I mean, we don't know, we don't know, yeah, anyway, that's interesting it was.
24:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was somewhat stunning, I have to say, in this day and age, to see Microsoft succumb to something so unsophisticated.
24:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it's it's what's going to get you. I would also point out they did disclose it.
24:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, don't they have game right, are they? Are they really required to know, cause no customer facing information was real, right, right, and even then they're really telling Well, this is their policy. I mean, I would say look this is the Good on them for that, by the way, that's good.
25:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the same kind of attack that took down the Death Star and Star Wars, right, you know you don't you expect the sophisticated attacks. There's always a fence somewhere you know you don't expect the Wombat sized hole and that's not going to be a problem Wombat.
25:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There were Womprats, womprats. Wombats are much more Womprats. Sorry, a Womprat's pretty big yeah.
25:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I used to hit those back at home. Anyway, it's, yeah, it's weird, it was just, it came out of nowhere.
25:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you can read the post at the microsoftcom in their blog MSRC Microsoft Security Research, something I don't know. Microsoft.
25:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft Security Research Center, I think is oh, okay, msrc.
25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the headline even says by nation state actor midnight well, is nation state actor, not nation state right.
25:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a. It is a known actor.
25:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, russian state sponsored actor known as nabellum.
26:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but but not necessarily acting on behalf of Russia, right? That's the thing. We don't actually know that.
26:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, this and it's just sound like it was the hacking group trying to find stuff for themselves. Yeah, by all descriptions.
26:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Although we do have to read between the lines on this. I mean we just yeah, great, we have to Totally yeah.
26:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, there will be more, so I think we'll be talking about this again in a month or two, whenever they come back. Come back and, you know, provide more yeah.
26:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Be sure to see if they do they just like hey, the matter's been dealt with.
26:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Use a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold and then use. See this I don't know if this is what you think, richard. Use the accounts.
26:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think that sounds exactly like we said. I think it's a, I think it's a VM it's sitting out on. You know, it just shouldn't have been connected by direction to the internet was and.
27:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but access an email account. What does that really mean? Do you think they logged in on these two different accounts? They use more passwords. It doesn't seem likely.
27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then use the accounts permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts. Right, yeah, it's unclear, isn't it?
27:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it's yeah, it just seemed more likely just reading Would you say that the SLT at Microsoft represents a very small percentage of.
27:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft yes, it's tiny, tiny.
27:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would say it's, it's tiny, it's just literally tiny.
27:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like one tenth of one thousandth of one percent.
27:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, tiny relative to what. But it's the right percentage, though, that's the point yeah, exactly, but we have no evidence of that. Yeah, I don't even know. No, but we didn't know.
27:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's nobody know, but they did specifically say executives, right, so it's not just the place yeah.
27:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But this means if you read an email from Scott Guthrie and it had an internal only PowerPoint attachment knowledge Right, yeah, you got it Right.
27:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So I feel like they would have downplayed that further if they could have. For example, yes, there were Microsoft executive emails in there, but there were things that were sent out to large groups of employees that might have indicated to someone that the account they got into was pretty low level and didn't have access to decision-making threats.
28:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But what do you bet that this was a legacy test account. It might have been even part of attack testing or resilience testing, like that kind of thing. It was related to hacking and that's why it was on the mailing list related to hacking, hopefully what it was was a person who was now a Microsoft executive.
28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At the time was a low level employee and had no idea what they were doing, and it's Scott G or it's such a good dollar, or someone. It's like, oh look where they are. Now we have much more access that we might have otherwise.
28:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that that's great. No, no, it's Anyway.
28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I hesitate to cast stones because we all live in glass houses.
28:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, totally. It's just that we really hope that their houses got the best windows going. You would hope Because we are all betting a lot on it, yeah.
28:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Their house is the size of Mars. Yeah, what are you talking about? Fair, I, I, I. We cannot compare Microsoft's response to this to what I would do as an individual. My God, like, of course, they should be all different standards. Yeah, yeah, I, I they, I remember going.
29:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was drinking with it with a, with a system in from Microsoft, who was involved in like SharePoint migration. He was moving, moving in.
29:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Have you drank on his.
29:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, now we had to be in a show around it, but, but he's the scope of what he's talking about. Oh, I moved 35,000 SharePoint sites over six months and like what, like that's it's just. The scale of things is crazy.
29:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, to put this in perspective, I'm doing this photo project where I'm consolidating everything. I'm doing great, but part one of the reasons I'm doing great is, as you get like three months into it, you're like you know what, I'm going to stop wearing. So much about duplicates, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to. Yeah, we're going to. Just, we just going to move it along Like I just want to get this thing done, and I think that happens with anything, any big project, right, I mean. So everyone goes in with the best of intentions and we hit walls.
30:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and idealism fades with time.
30:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is exactly with, exactly exactly. I will never use a product from a company whose CEO is a jerk. Like a bad news for you, buddy. They're all jerks, that's everybody. Bad news, bad news you can't use any products. You can use our products.
30:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our CEO is not a jerk. She's quite nice, I might say.
30:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I mean in big tech.
30:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I must say I don't mean literally. I'm fondness for our CEO. Yeah, I do too.
30:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't mean it like that. No, I meant in big tech specifically.
30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I know what you're talking about, I just don't care.
30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just don't trust Microsoft, you know? Okay, well, good luck out there in the world. Facebook's great, so you'll have no problems there. Oh yeah. Have fun At Microsoft.
30:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hamburg what a sweetie, what a sweetie.
30:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Seriously, he's the best. He's never copied anyone, unlike Microsoft. So I'm saying so sweet guy, so just sweet guy. Look, it's not known for that.
30:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got more to talk about. We will in a moment, but first a word From our sponsor, if you don't mind, gentlemen. Actually this is really timely. Our sponsor for the segment of Windows Weekly is Collide K-O-L-I-D-E. You know they actually liken their service to going to the airport. You know, when you go to the airport there's two steps of authentication you prove you are who you say you are to the TSA agent and then they scan your luggage. But in most enterprises today they got the first part down, but the luggage goes right through. Your equipment goes right through.
31:30
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32:25
Collide's designed for companies that use Okta, so that's the user verification stuff. But then Collide ensures that their devices are also secure and what's cool is it's a user-first solution. It notifies the user as soon as it detects an issue on their device, teaches them how to solve. It, makes them part of your team. It gets off-loaded. They don't have to do all that work. The user feels good, I'm helping and they're learning. You know you got to turn on that firewall. You can't leave your SSH keys in the download folder, things like that. Untrusted devices are blocked from authentication, but users don't stay blocked because they fix it.
33:05
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33:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just realized I forgot to look at something. So yesterday was patch two. No, it wasn't. It was week D and Microsoft did release a preview update and I didn't even get it.
34:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, why don't you install it now while the show's going on? I will, I will. I mean, what could?
34:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
go wrong? Yeah, I think the better question is what couldn't go wrong? But anyway, it has been kind of quiet in the Windows world lately Since our last show. We've had a couple of Windows Insider builds, beta Channel, beta Channel, channeling my inner Bostonian. Get on your Beta Janitor. Yeah, it's testing USB 80 gigabyte support, which is probably going to be called USB 4 version 2, because, seriously, what's up with these brands, speaking of which?
34:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yeah, my sister told me she works at RISD, the Rowland School of Design. Yep, she said that Peter Griffin, the guy in the family guy, you know the kind of thing is actually based on the former system of the former security guy at RISD, big heavy guy.
34:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because that guy grew up in the area. My friends and I are very upset that we didn't do what he did and just make a TV show or whatever about this area because of that area. Yeah, Quahogs yeah, because that's what people are like there. They're ridiculous, but yeah.
35:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, I don't know if the guy's still there, but he was beloved, but he has always brought donuts, just like a certain family guy I'm talking here.
35:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know when did that come from? Oh, because I knew the boss of it. Oh, yeah, because why?
35:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did I throw that?
35:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God, how did we get to that?
35:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
meaningless piece of junkie.
35:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's fine, I just love following Shane, though. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, that's what we're doing. You've got to understand why I'm acting. I met some guys at a bar the other night and they were like you can't be from Boston and I said you know, one time I was talking and I could see someone look, give me the hairy eyeball and I'm like what? And he goes. You know, you could do a really good version of the ask, not what your country could do for you speech?
35:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ask not, and I decided at that time.
35:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
First of all, I said that guy did not have a Boston accent, screw you. And secondly, maybe I need to work on that and because I think it sounds dumb, frankly, I mean it's.
36:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like your accent. No, no, no, no. Yeah, I know it's a little and, like Brian Joe, both of you, it kind of would come out at me too, by the way, yes, yeah we get tired of talking too much. Yeah, I say things like orange, orange instead of orange. My wife makes fun of me. Or I say room, you're in your room, right?
36:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She says this is a real. This is not so much an accent but the way people talk there. I have this example where I went to a sandwich shop and he said we ain't got no vinegar she needs, and I'm like I can see it on the shelf. He says we ain't got no vinegar and I'm like dude. And he goes you want me to crush some vinegar chips on there for you? And I'm like you know what? No, I think I will put that on at home. Thanks, thanks a lot, man. Yep, they're brutal.
36:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That is brutal. Ain't got no vinegar. Ain't got no vinegar.
36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want me to. I like the I'm like but I'm like, oh, it's a great offer. You're selling it right here.
37:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like I would, I'll buy it and give it to you and you could put it on. No, okay, anyhow, I've been fighting, you know, stupidity with common sense my whole life and losing every time. So, whatever, anyway, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's the ADF. So, and then in the dev channel they're testing a couple of things that are kind of interesting, like commercial version of teams meeting, integration and start, and what that means is you'll open the start menu and there's a recommended section at the bottom and if it's within an hour of a meeting, it will actually pop up as an icon there and say, hey, you have a meeting in 17 minutes or whatever, which you know, I guess. If you look at the start menu, a lot is kind of interesting. But that's cool.
37:40
And then the other interesting thing is last got it August, september, I think Microsoft announced that they were testing a feature called Remote Capture which will be part of PhoneLink. Right, and the idea here is that you can I almost said idea Keep doing it. Sorry is, and I'm not that tired, but you know one of those phone, android phone, two windows, integration type things 23H2 came and went. This feature never appeared. It looked like it was supposed to be part of that. And then what we found out since then is that they've actually replaced it with something new that involves three different pieces. There's a new mobile devices interface and settings. There's a software update that comes from a store called Device Experience Host. We're starting to deliver a lot of you know system components from the store now right, just to get them out there quickly.
38:28
And then banner notifications in Windows 11 that fire whenever you take a photo or screenshot on your phone. So, in other words, you're sitting there and you're like I take a screenshot and maybe the reason you're doing that is because you want it on your Windows computer and it just pops right up and click it and get it immediately, without having to go through the rigmarole of either attaching it to the you know USB and downloading it that way, or going into phone link and trying to find this screenshot there. So, whatever, that's cool, they're just testing it. It's not, you know, it's still dev channel, still pretty far out, so it could ship in I don't know three days using a new schedule. I'm just gonna spin the wheel and see what happens. I don't know, no one can say, I don't know You've been a little sarcastic, I think.
39:05
I'll get a little beat up on the update. We'll start be here.
39:08
Yeah, yeah. And then we have. This is a couple of related items here. Zach, again over at Windows Central, says he's heard that we might have a surface event in March. This makes totally sense. It totally sense to me. We have a laptop and pro update waiting in the wings. The part of this that doesn't make sense to me is he says there might be two waves of updates for both products, where we get, you know, intel 14, chen, whatever, right away, and then in the fall they might actually rub them again for, whatever comes out, you know, post, whatever it's called. What's the next one? Arrow Lake, I think that whatever the 15th Chen will be called, okay, I mean, I guess. So I don't know, but we are overdue on these products. So, yeah, I mean, a spring event makes sense. So we'll see.
39:54
Cool, there are companies fighting this new DMA regulation in the EU, arguing that their products are not dominant enough to be held to this higher standard. Obviously, things like Windows and iOS do not necessarily fall into that category, but these companies also have products to do so. For example, microsoft, bing and Edge were provisionally on the list and they basically went out and said look, if you don't agree with this, tell us why? And Microsoft came back and said they're not dominant products, these products, nobody uses these things. So I think it was. Bloomberg wrote a report, basically that the EU was going to find it yeah, they're not dominant products, so they're not going to be subject to this regulation.
40:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, so there really is issues at a dominant company, right Like I was going to play the whole game of, I thought the browser was integral to the operating system. Didn't that what Microsoft used to say?
40:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, it is. In fact. They marketed that very heavily until they did not. It still is, by the way. I mean they're still interested.
40:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I don't mean like a deep hook.
40:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, there are, yeah, there are, there really are. I mean, if you, yeah, there are, as much as I can't stand Microsoft Edge, there are certain.
41:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, to me this still feels like they're just playing the game. They were asked for comments, so they pushed back like the clarified on.
41:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Microsoft or Apple's doing it with iMessage, for example. So iMessage is huge in the United States, right, but in Europe it's actually not that popular People use WhatsApp or whatever. So, yeah, they're pushing back there as well. So that makes sense to me. I don't have any. I don't have any issues there.
41:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, it's almost healthy interaction, right? It's non-litigious interaction about trying to manage the dominance of these products or the. You know what regulations you want to put on it. You know, all this stuff seems to be working well for the EU. You're not you're just.
41:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm hoping it will work well for all of us eventually. Yeah, I don't know. It still seemed very willing to split the two Right my future had gone accordingly, like if COVID had never happened, it's possible I would own a place in Europe somewhere now, right, and I could just take advantage of this by moving to Europe. But Europe is expensive, so I guess we got to kind of weigh the cost.
42:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sure there's a technology problem that makes it appear like you're in Europe Interesting.
42:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll look into that. What's it called? Do you have any idea? Are you just guessing?
42:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not going to name any brands here.
42:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to do everything in French from now on. There you go, wow.
42:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You do have a good run this morning with yeah, right, right.
42:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't mean a French accent. I mean, oh, I'm yeah. No, he was speaking French to me.
42:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean poorly. Which is ideal for Quebec, right?
42:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no it's also ideal for me. Like you, want to offend as many people as possible. It's not like they're sensitive about it.
42:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I've always found that I disagree, like I found, generally speaking, the French point. You make an attempt at French and then, when it's bad enough to like, please speak English. You're hurting my soul. Right Must have told you this, at least you tried.
42:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in in um, and I'm seeing I'm not going to get it right now because I know how to speak properly now. But I would say the when I'm in a car, in a like in Mexico city, and the guy will say, you know, the Uber driver will say, do you speak Spanish? And I'll say I can't say it now because I don't know the way I get it. I know what to say properly now but I used to say like not a little bit, but I would say like a short, like a short basically, and they they would laugh and that was like the way they knew I didn't speak any Spanish.
43:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, it was perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll just move right to my broken English. Instead, you've humiliated yourself and you've humiliated yourself and communicated the messages, and then I finally figured it out. I was like okay.
43:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, like I would say Un Poco, it's like that's not, that's not, that's not correct. Yeah, that's not right. That's what I was saying. Yeah, kind of a late breaking addition. Microsoft just released Microsoft mesh for Teams. This is that 3D.
43:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
In our list of bad names, like just another incredibly bad name.
43:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, because mesh for those who don't remember or know used to be something pretty special. Microsoft had a product called Live Mesh, briefly which, in the Ray Ozzy era, was a time when he would allow multiple teams to basically ship the same product and let the best one win. So we had, you know, windows. Life Sync was won, and then you know what became SkyDrive and OneDrive and Live Mesh, which was going to become a platform of its own. We weren't just going to sync documents and files, we were going to sync applications. Right, they were going to be mesh applications. It was really compelling at the time, and now it's long gone and now they're reused because this we've run out of words.
44:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's been a decade. Holy man stops this computer support in 2013. So there you go.
44:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Crazy yeah, but it was a big deal, you know briefly. So now Mesh is being reused for this. You know, virtual reality For our legless reality. Okay, great, keep your eyes up here, buddy, you don't want to see what's down there because it's nothing and it's going to freak you out, just saying.
44:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Your shirt just ends yeah, oh boy. Yeah, that's not a good, don't understand Curiously.
44:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who wants this? I don't know. And you have to pay extra for it? Yeah, it's crazy, what is?
44:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this. I don't know. I don't know that you can get them to use it. If it was free, I know, and you're going to pay extra for it, and it's again, and it's avatars, it's all iconography. So, like, who are the expressions going to be?
45:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
useful. There's something to be said for a cartoon representation of you yes, I don't mean you, I mean of one, but like I appreciate that on some level, like I don't always want to be in front of a camera, but yeah, this kind of goofy virtual world thing which you know Microsoft tried in Windows, mixed Reality and whatever.
45:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Then you've got Horizon World over on Facebook, which just certainly looks derived from.
45:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, I don't know, so we'll see. Yeah, someone asked about the Apple goggles. Right, the Vision Pro. Not that I know of, although Microsoft is allegedly supporting that product with native versions of Team Zaps, because, apparently, nobody else is, so that's great.
45:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe it will.
45:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So I bet you know, I don't see any reason why they couldn't do it. Yeah, so we'll say, maybe it'll be a WWDC announcement or something, I don't know. Yeah.
46:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like I don't understand how you launched that product finally after these months and not have a roster of apps from known brands, like where you just think they do it.
46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do understand it, because those name brands freaking hate it.
46:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well they, this is the first pushback we've seen. But listen, it's logical, right? I mean, when Apple launches like a watch or an iPad or whatever, yeah, People like yeah, of course I'm going to do this, People are going to buy this thing, but you know, 3,500 bucks kind of limited use case.
46:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point. Most they could sell half a million. They probably will. Yeah, in my first year they probably will, although there are many thousands offered on eBay, well, yeah.
46:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the problem for them is that Apple in the past would always achieve some level of success, and this one, it's like it's enough, where even their most devoted developers like I don't know, like it's. I don't think they've ever seen pushback like this in the modern era. You know, the last time someone said no to them was like Adobe with Photoshop on the original Mac OS 10.
47:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know yesterday it's been a while Jason Snell, on Mac break weekly had, I think, probably the most coherent theory about this, which is Apple knows they need something to replace the iPhone someday. I mean, they can't, you know they need the next thing? Yeah, but they can't just throw a spaghetti at the wall.
47:27
But then, well, they kind of have to because they can't. First of all, the thing that we want, which is just spectacles, right, glasses? Yeah, uh, technologies aren't there yet. I mean they don't have the battery technology. There's all sorts of things missing, but my, but Apple feels like, well, we got to get our, got to get it out there and have people use it. It's going to be a limited number of our most devoted users, but at least we can learn from this learning. Yeah, they're going to learn, no one needs it.
47:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's the problem, I agree. Flash forward a year, right? So Apple's biggest strength, if you want to put it in one word, it's like engagement, right? This is a really engaged audience. They want to spend money, they want to buy product, they want to sign up for services and I think I think I mean this is an opinion, but I mean there's a there's a good chance that this product will not receive a level of engagement that Apple's kind of used to. You know, frankly, that even those people who buy it there's going to be a huge percentage.
48:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The real question is how many buy the second one.
48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The where how committed Apple is to throwing good money after bad and well. Are they going to go 10 years with this thing waiting for it to be a hit? Have they ever?
48:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, they've never done that no no, they've.
48:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, they haven't. But this is legacy too right, so maybe, I don't know, we'll see. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens here.
48:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just I think, at that price point, tapping that most valuable piece of your market, you're going to learn from them, you're going to make a new version of it and you're going to ask for another 3,500 bucks. I know.
48:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God, they're almost going to have to have like a trade-in program or a Be better.
49:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You better. I mean I yeah, you better eat it and get them on the new year. If you're really actually going to make it better, they can afford it.
49:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you did this with Apple TV, but it was a hundred bucks. The other issue for them is they they have a slate of products now that they've been working on for a long time that have come to no fruition whatsoever, like the car and their TV product not the Apple TV as we know it today, but then actually, TV.
49:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I like, I like I Apple TV. He's a great example of the persistence of Apple, because they went three flops in a row, like they kept trying.
49:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean even though I remember this, but the the the beginnings of Apple TV was a product called front row, which was a ripoff of wait for it folks, windows media center, the software application that ran on the Mac, you know. And then they took that UI, which came from media center, think about it and put it on an actual device called an Apple TV. Now we have an Apple TV app. We've come full circle. It's hilarious.
49:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Microsoft invented it all with web TV back in the day.
50:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, microsoft bought web TV. So, yeah, that makes sense actually. So that might be, that might be true, that I want to admit that could be, that could be.
50:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I did not want, but lots of people around here, including Mike, a sergeant my parents had a web TV? No, not web TV and official, a big official.
50:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I don't I don't understand how you were able to resist this, leo I. I thought it was sold last week. You were happy to do it.
50:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You went back and find it in your mind. So I got up. It was. Fortunately I was on the East Coast, so it was eight. You know what, though I?
50:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's not the price right. It really isn't. If you thought this thing was going to be successful, you would have spent no you would have spent that money Absolutely. It's not the price. You would spend that much on a really good Macbook. I know exactly what would happen with it.
50:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I spent more than that on my M3 Macbook. You do, you do this and you'd be like, yeah, I'm done, exactly. It would sit right next to the Oculus pro Rift pro that's in my office.
50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's an expensive a wall trinket or whatever.
50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I wouldn't use it. I knew I, I know I wouldn't use it. So I.
50:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know that my hollow lens holds charge at this point.
50:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I my uh, I know where it is, but my head is heavy enough as it is, I don't need anything on it. God, it's like. It's like a boulder on a toothpick. What do we? We, you know anyway I.
51:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought that's why he has such a strong neck pull.
51:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I threw you out. It's like a baby, like supporting his head.
51:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Talking about the greatest market cap in the world. Well, second, greatest.
51:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What Apple is above three trillion now, yep, so at least what I looked today. So what I look today. So Microsoft today surpassed three trillion in market capitalization for the first time.
51:33
Second company to do so, right after Apple. Uh, microsoft was also second to two trillion after Apple a couple of years ago, but whatever, um. So obviously the next thing you look at is well, where's Apple today? Cause I know they were kind of neck and neck there for a week or two. Actually, apple, uh Microsoft's market cap what I looked at 130 or so or 1230, whatever time it was was um 3.01 trillion and apples was 3.03 trillion.
51:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, so there were crazy numbers. He's a ridiculous numbers.
52:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's right now because it goes up and down 2.99 9 trillion. Okay, so I had actually yeah For MSFT.
52:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't remember the exact timeframe for this, but between the day that Apple hit three trillion for the first time and the day that they closed a day at three trillion was something like six months. It was a long time. So it's one thing to hit it, you know cause, you know you go up and down apples at three points in my heart, right Mexico city, you never.
52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's all over the map. Um well, once you get to the altitude, high altitudes, yes.
52:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, it's the heady, uh, thin air.
52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft is up almost five bucks today. I mean, they're they're doing well. What happened? Was there news?
52:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, uh, it must be that security thing. Uh, yeah, that's it. Microsoft. A lot of confidence there.
52:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They got on top of that Actually no, I you know the Dow is going crazy because of Netflix earnings and maybe Microsoft's getting a little of that on it.
52:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The market's been going crazy for months. Actually, it's been good Um I know.
53:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know thank God for Joe Biden Anybody got for Joe Biden.
53:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, um, any who? Uh, as far as Microsoft goes, no, I mean, look, they made the big bet on cloud computing and that paid off big time and big time over a long time, right, um, and that was starting to wait I mean remember every quarter for a long time. Um, the growth rate of revenue in uh Azure, which was pegged at 70% for a couple of years, started going down 65, 60, right Got down into the 30s and actually if you look at that little chart you had up earlier, I bet that little the biggest dip there. If you can contract it a little bit, you see like more of a dip that this is one year, so let me go to three months.
53:44
Well, give you these three months, it's probably right before right here. That was probably the dip. That was like we got AI, we did it. Yeah, you know, and I, I'm, I'm, I'm not it's gone up a lot since January 5th.
53:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The month of January has been very good for Microsoft. Yes, this has been a good month. It's biggest low was back here in October and that's probably by the way semi related to this.
54:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had two pieces of physical mail today, both of which are related to Apple litigation. One was a check for the uh, the processor slowdown thing.
54:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How much are you? $92 bucks, you get a hundred dollars.
54:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow. And then the other one, which I assumed at first was just related as not it's due to family sharing, so Apple is honestly paying me better dividends in the stock market, so that's working out great, um so you were smart, you got in on that class action on the battery. Why wouldn't anyone who owns an Apple product should be getting this check.
54:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean that's.
54:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't and I wish I had yeah. Why not? It's free money. I mean, I didn't notice a thing, by the way. Good to care less, but um, of course that was a huge. It was an onerous problem. Oh my God.
54:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need Apple to pay hundreds of millions to you alone for that. Thank you, yes, I couldn't agree more yes, Um they've got a trillion, three trillion, maybe a trillion one one, you know, no, I think this.
55:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I think Microsoft's latest gain is is related to the AI stuff and, honestly, what has happened in the past couple of weeks, the thing we've just talked to beat to death. Last week, these guys talked about AI all year and then suddenly on what? The 15th or whatever we're like, yeah, here it is, it just did it all. I mean, it's it. It's rather incredible, and so I think, honestly, Microsoft could have run into some problems if they had released this on their normal schedule or God forbid, the window schedule, or it was like all over the place. But they just like yeah, here you go, Like I. This still blows me away, so that's great.
55:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's awesome. Enjoy your $92 and 17 cents.
55:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
my friend that's my wife said you're paying for dinner tonight, buddy. I said no applespan for dinner tonight. So it's on. Tim Cook. Today I'm going to take pictures of my food with an Android phone. Screw, you Just think if you.
55:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
if you'd only bought 350 more iPhones, you could have enough money for a vision pro Now this always questions how do you get it per device Cause I think Leo would have cleaned up.
56:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would have I probably cause it was a number of models. I think I owned all the models in that one.
56:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say I absolutely owned all the models. So my I probably bought my kids at least one of the models. Yeah, me too.
56:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, started with the what the?
56:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
six, I can't remember. Is that far back? Yeah, I should have gotten about 9, 9, $200 then, because I've I've owned at least almost every generation since then, but any, yes. So last when was it? Monday, tuesday, whenever it was Microsoft announced and released co-pilot pro, right, which is the Microsoft 365 co-pilot for consumers, and then they expanded the availability of the Microsoft 365 co-pilot to basically all the business customers, right? So big, big, explosive, unexpected event. I spent much of that day trying to set up for this service and I have some humorous screenshots of that failing spectacularly, and so eventually I gave up. In the next morning I woke up and I, you know, opened up my laptop and I typed in my thing and it went fine. So I went into this. I'm curious, I know, richard, you subscribed to what open AI pro or plus or whatever it's called.
57:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm the AZO PA API API for home assistant, just to give you a better voice assistant.
57:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I subscribed to GitHub co-pilot. I paid the 20 bucks a month to open AI. Yeah, I would like to okay, so I. I'm curious, I'm curious Head to head.
57:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No well, actually someday I think I do yeah.
57:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, isn't this the same? It's GPT-4, right I mean?
57:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh sorry. So here's Microsoft does have some advantages and they're not being related. So, yes, in a kind of pure I'm chatting to the bot and I want to generate text or images, right, you can use GPT-4, turbo, whatever it's called. You get priority access, you get extra boosts, which is a stupid term, for fact it's just means faster image creation if you're using that product. And of course we talked about someday soon we're going to have something called GPT Builder, which looks to me like a web app that will probably be up on co-pilotmicrosoftcom where you can build your own. You know, gpts, whatever the heck that means, but we'll get to that. But I think the big advantage that Microsoft has is that it's currently, and probably forever, dominant in the kind of office productivity space. Right, microsoft 365, slash office, and they are integrating features into those apps. Right, the core apps like Word, excel, powerpoint, onenote, outlook and it might be Mr One, but those at least.
58:40
And I had made the argument probably a week ago, but I've grown so much since then that you know, when you look, when you think about this as a consumer, you're like 20 bucks a month is really expensive compared to the eight bucks a month I would spend for Microsoft 365 as an individual, and I only use Word and Outlook, maybe, or I only use Excel or whatever it is. You kind of run down the list and you're like I have a hard time justifying this cost. But I'm like, look, I got a Microsoft guy, I got to test this right. Well, and I have to say I am I'm surprised by how good this is.
59:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good for your thumbnail images.
59:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look at this, this Halo image is incredible, so that, by the way, that image, which is spectacular, might the prompt for that did not say anything like be as provocative as possible and please offend Americans and religious people? No, it popped that out on its own. I didn't ask for that. What your prompt was an image of. Halo infinite in the painting, an oil painting, probably in the style of a Flemish master.
59:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so they made the last supper, which is the last supper.
59:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it looks like there were guys from the civil war behind them. This is crazy. There's an American-ish flag as a table linen.
59:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you're wrong. Like, leonor Da Vinci is not flammish, flammish and it's got the flag has the flur to Lee instead of stars.
01:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a weird. It's a dystopian future.
01:00:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's got the Halo things in the background, including the ships and the master chief, which is not sort of master chief, literally master chief. Yeah, which Microsoft? Owns.
01:00:20
I'm going on the well, I was going to say that's right, they're same company, so I'm hoping I'm identified there. But I thought that was. Look, I would have taken a sort of master chief. I wasn't expecting anything that provocative, but that's extraordinary, Truly yeah. So I, early on, I realized that just for generating images for the website it's. This is worth 20 bucks a month just for that.
01:00:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But no, it really is sure. Alone You're spectacular.
01:00:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But then I looked at what. I just looked at word. I've not looked at outlook or any of the other apps I will but I looked at word and you know I don't actually use word for writing anymore, but I'm very familiar with it, obviously, and again, cynically on the outside, without actually using AI for writing. You would think, look, I'm a good writer, I'm a professional writer, I don't need this. But you know what I actually? I actually think this will benefit writers of all stripes, whether you're professional or not, or a good writer, a bad writer or whatever it might be, even prolific writers like myself.
01:01:20
I run into blocks. I sometimes sit back and think I can't, I can't connect this, I'm not, it's not happening, and this product is fantastic. And so this is a really good example of where I looked logically at the list and said what is this? This like four or five maybe features for word. I would only use one or two of these ever. This doesn't make any sense. And then I actually looked at what it did and I was like, actually, I completely get this, it's really, it's, it's more, it's more impressive than I would have thought.
01:01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the one chat GBT four did, which I will will, I will send to you, master chief as Colossus. And it is. You know, he's in the Middle East, clearly, oh geez Okay great.
01:02:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I have brought down the 20 commandments and these guys 10 command like stormtroopers here.
01:02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, wow, this is just a wild.
01:02:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's. It's bizarre to me that that also has curious religious connotations to it, just like the one I created.
01:02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know what happens when humans become mentally ill. They often have religious fantasies and delusions. I see the light. Maybe this is the sign that the AIS.
01:02:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's uh, yeah, it's, it's look, it's saying just in case, if there is an after life, I think I'm going to pledge allegiance here. Oh my goodness.
01:02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will. You know I'm going to you know, hedge your bets.
01:02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I might be the you said Flemish master.
01:02:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you're always going to get a religious context from a Flemish master. Yeah, what are you? Are you Well?
01:02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's what it does. His point Then he followed up with.
01:02:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He followed up with say try Picasso. And that sounds hilarious.
01:03:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can click a cubist version of that. It's just like a green blob with a yellow snow. I will do that next. That'll be my next thing and elongated naked woman that looks like a, like a, something you'd sit on in a weird movie theater. So, yes, Anyway, uh, I, I just look. I went into this as cynically as I could have. I love the guys on the horse. The crusaders on the left are amazing, I thought it was a large a light brigade for sure.
01:03:29
It's crazy, but that's I. Just, these pictures are great. This is the quality of a painting you would have seen on like a Tolkien book in the eighties you know what I mean Like a Michael Whalen painting or something like that. They're really nice and generated in a moment. Oh my God. Yes, it's astonishing. So I I came away from this really impressed and I there are people you read my site who are I'm going to call them AI deniers now, um, who just don't see it. And there's also people are very upset about this notion that anyone would allow, like a copilot or any AI to read their emails so that it could create summaries, where I'm thinking, I think, like 99% of people would like summaries and would not like to see the real thing. Could you just tell me what's going on so I don't have to read it? You know, um, I think that's a I honestly a fairly spectacular use of AI. Um, so.
01:04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So copyright is saying that I can't actually use Picasso because his images were created after 1912. So who should I say? Rembrandt, that Rembrandt's a good one. Rembrandt's good, really. Rembrandt, all right, sure, I mean, isn't he kind of a Flemish? He's a sort of a Flemish master. Yeah, dutch, but sure, yeah, yeah, all right, can we get the night watch with a master chief as the? Yes, there you go.
01:04:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Holding the lantern.
01:04:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that would be awesome. Exactly that, actually would be fantastic.
01:04:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am bringing the light of Xbox to the world. The light should be green Actually. Then it just becomes green lantern and you have a whole nother IP issue. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you yeah, there's a that looks like the cover art for Halo reach, frankly probably.
01:05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know. This is the thing and this is why it really does. It is worth 20 bucks to you, paul. For me, yeah, it really is. I, I, you know you could use again.
01:05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I expected I'd use this for one month and be like, yeah, maybe I'll come back and a few. No, it's um, this is actually pretty good, awesome, it's awesome.
01:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have the same reaction for my $20 for, uh uh, open AI.
01:05:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I really wish I still may do yeah, I still may do the GitHub thing. I, I, I don't spend enough time.
01:05:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I use almost every day copilot, yeah, and I don't, I don't, yeah, I don't do it enough.
01:05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks exactly like the Halo reach album cover. Holy cow, yeah, um, interesting, all right, we're going to put them side by side in the discord and the one that surprised me.
01:06:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's that? The home assistant thing surprised me. Is it this little bit of open source software that basically takes the description of my home assistant instance, writes it into a prompt with my request, so it's like you know, in a very non deterministic way? It's like give me the state of the house. Is this? Follow this command right and off it goes.
01:06:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you're going to run into a uh 2001 space odyssey situation where it's going to say I'm sorry, richard, I can't do that and it's like I just want you to turn on the bathroom lights. Yeah, seriously.
01:06:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just do it. You know you asked the boss about turning off the lights in the living room, cause yeah, it has it's own.
01:06:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We all have a we all have a spouse light story, I can assure you.
01:06:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you talked about this, richard? I want to hear more about this. So you tied uh chat GPT into your home automation that's right so that you could talk to it and it would do stuff.
01:06:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that it's language model was wildly better. There's always been a voice system in AHA. It's just not that good, uh, and you could also work through the Amazon and Google products if you wanted. But you know we're trying to get it on.
01:07:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You must have like a selection of like free LLMs or open source LMs you could use, but you, but use the real thing.
01:07:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know, we're flakking about a term, cause it's quick and right and cost pennies. Uh, because, real, you know, right now I'm running it on Odroid hardware, which is pretty limited. So I mean, I have a bunch of nucks floating around. If I could take the time to wipe and reconfigure one of those nucks to to run well you know traveling, so that should be fine, great, Excellent.
01:07:30
Anyway. Um, actually it's the head hardware that's the problem right now. So they, you know it's not. Once you get the command into the machine it does a pretty good job, but the wake words are problematic and that's because the cheap front end hardware is not that good. Uh, you know they, they spent money, those little Google Pox and the Amazon gear they're actually quality gear Is what do you use for that part of it, like what's the microphone?
01:07:59
It's a little ESP 32 with a tiny little mic and so forth, and it's like a $40 little gizmo. Yeah, and, and they don't they but come to appreciate that the wake word actually has to live on the device. It takes two minutes, and so you need a little more horsepower on front. So, believe it or not, this open source community being as insane as it is, there's a guy who made a replacement controller board for the little Google Puck, so you get to use the Google Puck shape.
01:08:26
You actually, you actually replace, you take the thing apart and you swap out this board and now you have total control over, but it still looks like a Google. You give Google a lobotomy and then you well, it gave those things away. I must have a dozen of them.
01:08:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, you got them with everything.
01:08:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh my.
01:08:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
God. It was like a serial promotion.
01:08:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you get it in the box, so I had to the services that do this and of course they're out of the Shenzhen. The minimum order was five and they were like $35 each. So I've ordered a pack of five and, with the electronics already on them, like they're all good to go, I love it. That's amazing.
01:09:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And why do I feel like this is really just intended for like a nanny cam, like you want to put this in your Google Puck and no one will know that you're replaced.
01:09:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, you're supposed to stick it in a, in a teddy bear or something.
01:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, or even just in the Puck, and everybody goes. Oh yes, google, it's okay. But instead it's recording every word you say or something.
01:09:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it always was. It's just it was being sent to Google versus being sent to you.
01:09:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And now it's being sent to Shenzhen and to you that's it. Now I have control over that, but I mean, I'm searching around from what this is. China is training their AI, richard, you know those little minis are amazing little devices.
01:09:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're everywhere and they're kind of junk. I mean. I have Googles largely abandoned them. Why are you?
01:09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
saving them. Is there something that you're using, like the microphone, that makes it worth it? Yes, yeah, it's a higher quality, it's the microphone, the speaker, the casement like there's.
01:09:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are fittings for that. That'll put them into a wall or ceiling.
01:09:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They come in colors that look nice in your home. They match the decor or whatever.
01:09:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you know what you know. You know. You know what doesn't last long on sitting anywhere in my house that's visible to she who must be obeyed Anything 3d printed Right. You know she's not gonna make it. It looks junky.
01:10:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I wonder, put the link in the discord, Richard, for that company so that we can put, because I know people are listening. Would want to do that and I'm wondering if I could do that, maybe to my home max, which is a nice speaker, but Google has.
01:10:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, you actually have the big one still. Yeah, it doesn't make it. That was actually a good speaker.
01:10:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a great speaker and it still works with Google. Yeah, but maybe if I put new brains in it it could be even better. Oh, I bet you could do that.
01:10:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet you could.
01:10:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a good. It's an odd thing and I haven't gotten it yet, so we'll see what happens. It's not a trivial refit to do it, but I will. I'll throw the link in it for a closing one, I bet you.
01:10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are people who want to just play with it, and of course it's just for the Google mini, it's not for anything else. Yeah, is it round? And it's, it must be round.
01:10:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it is the Google mini.
01:11:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You actually get a Google, but they're just changing the circuit board.
01:11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It must be round to fit in. Yes, you're right.
01:11:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The circuit board is round.
01:11:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How interesting. Yeah, I'm going to take a break, right, am I right? Do we have the orange break? Well, I have a couple more. I have a couple more in the AI section, oh, but you want to go right ahead?
01:11:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it needs to go through this quick. So, um bet is, this week in the UK this is the annual education show, so everybody is there talking about educational stuff. Um, the big news for Microsoft, because everyone's doing it. You know the AI stuff. Um, they have an, an, an, uh, an AI. Sorry, a learning fluency, I'm sorry. A reading you need it.
01:11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever it is. You need it, Paul. I think we have a reading coach, right?
01:11:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I don't know, Don't make me say it again. Um, it's, it's been available in the Microsoft education space for a little while, but now they are making it available for free to everybody and are adding generative AI to it so that it can do such things as invent, create stories for children so that they can learn to read using these generated stories. Now, that should throw up some red flags, right? Um, obviously there are safeguards in place to, you know, for safety, equality, age preparedness, et cetera, et cetera. But you know you can expect hilarity there. But I think the neat thing is just that they are just making it available to everybody, um, and so it's coming out late January.
01:12:22
Um, and for people in the education space are going to be further enhancements coming in the spring. And uh, google and Microsoft each are both are both are both adding an AI learning path on their respective education uh services. Right, so Microsoft for, or Microsoft education, I guess in Google education, I think of the two um, just coincidentally or not, both just added AI, uh for educator paths, the idea being, these are the people that need to know this the most, because how and where can we uh integrate AI into play, you know learning plans and so forth. Obviously it's scary and new and different, and uh well, any, any.
01:13:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're not talking about teaching people about AI, so much as using AI to teach people right.
01:13:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We think about that.
01:13:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, yes.
01:13:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, using using AI as a co-pilot, like a co-pilot for teacher, right, you get this one way to look at it.
01:13:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think there's a lot of this. Go ahead. I think you've also got this whole angle of the, the, the Western teaching system, where you put 30 kids of the same age in a classroom in front of one person you know, basically based on the British system for teaching factory workers and they write down to the alarms for changing the shift and so forth, uh, and trying to teach a single subject to the same p, all these people the same way, it's like so disconnected from reality. It's insane, yeah. And now we have software that's very capable of watching your ability to answer these questions and tune the material to that person and have a really good measure of competence at the end of it to say, okay, you understand this material now.
01:14:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My, my daughter's college roommate graduated in December and has a job teaching, right? She's the teacher now and my daughter will graduate, hopefully probably in May, right? So they're they're just shifted off a little bit, Um, and we shoot. They were up here for the weekend. Uh, Kelly, my daughter actually come up here to interview at a school, right, Cause she's going to continue in school, because uh, because I have infinite money, and that's fine.
01:14:26
So, um, anyway, it was good to see them, but it was interesting talking to her roommate because she was saying that they have these classrooms that have kind of curved half tables with screens and they this allows them to do basically what you're saying, which is you tailor the lessons and it's sort of a Google and Microsoft are both saying with education in the education market, to the individual needs of each student, which is not what was met by that, uh school system that I went to, which is exactly what you described, and I am qualified now to work in a mine or a factory, uh, and not for much else. So, yeah, I thought I, even in the short amount of time that you know, kind of the this whole revolution has been occurring and this stuff has already kind of occurring in education and she's been a lot. It's not like she works at a rich private school and this is public education too.
01:15:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, yeah, Well and the system needs to adapt because we can't pay teachers enough and we should be paying them more, which means we're going to be fewer of them. So the more and the quality goes down, the more learning right, like even a education technology has bifurcated into you, do your video training right, your plural sites and such of the world and then you maybe go to a conference for more specialty stuff, like it sort of speaks to, as we have a larger and larger repertoire of things that kids need to know to be functional humans in this complicated society. A bunch of it is rote training and the software will do a fine job of that, and some of it needs a personal interaction that has a deeper understanding of you and your capabilities when you were in school, did you ever do?
01:15:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, we called this a language lab and it was a room you went into where you'd put on a headset with a little microphone and it was all mechanical right, but it was like Raytheon corporation presents and they would do these things. But the teacher could listen in on individual students to see how they were doing and then provide feedback that way, but it was very manual and it wasn't like an AI-based feedback system could provide instantaneous feedback to people as they did things to everybody all at once.
01:16:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think that's the point. This is personal to me, not so much as I have little kids that I don't know any more than you do, but I have a few friends who, in their 50s, have chosen to marry younger women. And now have babies.
01:16:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I can't stand people my age going through what I went through 20 years ago. They're the worst.
01:16:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and they were keen to do this. Second go they have some more means. They have 20-somethings as well. It's like now that I'm doing this again.
01:16:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, now I'm talking about people who are never going to have kids. Got remarried to someone who has kids and now suddenly like, oh my God, you can't believe this. They have friends all around the neighborhood and it's like dude 15 years ago. Yeah, yeah, like to stop, like it's yeah.
01:17:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is Mary, mary the younger woman. She really wanted the second second go around second go around and so they're freaking out about the education part, like that's a long conversation we're having. Yeah, I can see that.
01:17:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And just like what's the system I want to plug into me?
01:17:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds like break the world, the robots raising our you know what, though?
01:17:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I looked cool in battle Sargalactica and I don't see any reason why you know my God, I mean you know the public systems got serious problems.
01:17:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know anyway you're right, we've got education, so let's, let's really education has so little money.
01:17:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, let's. The reality is, the most engaged parents left the system. They went to private, they went home, they did something, and so the system has only gotten worse. And they and one. In one hand you're looking at the community greater good and saying how do we make the system better, and the other hand it's like I have a window Well, 12 years for this child to get an education. I'm going to make sure they get the best education they can, you know someone will say, well, let's just pay teachers more.
01:18:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like, yeah, no, we're not going to do that. I mean, how else can we do it? Oh let's do that, let's do that, let's do that, we'll do it.
01:18:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, all right, all right.
01:18:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, all related to this as well. The last of the AI stories. Yeah, amazon has apparently been working. Well, they actually they announced this. So I I read this report, I wrote it, I kind of wrote it up and then I went back to see what Amazon actually announced. You know they do that September event. They announced this. Actually, as it turns out, they just didn't call it this. So there's the classic version of which we now have the voice assistant and there's going to be well, they're working on a paid version. We'll see when it actually comes out. That, tentatively, is called a plus. But the idea here is that it will be more intelligent, it will be more personalized, it will be quicker, more accurate. It will cost money. That's kind of the big deal and that's kind of the thing, because, you know, at Amazon it's like you know, we're kind of the Walmart of the online space. I don't know that we're going to get anyone to pay for this.
01:19:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so there's a point of the device was it was going to make sales for Amazon and it didn't? Yes, that's exactly right.
01:19:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we should talk to Charlie Kinnell about that today, but the timing was so amazing, right?
01:19:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Both Google and Amazon a couple of years ago say hey, we made these voice products for this other reason. They haven't worked out for us. We're cutting budgets in a big way, right. And then along comes chat, gpt, and it's like you know what Voice doesn't have to suck, exactly, and it's so? Yeah, but I think there's a set of owners of a set today and I'm sorry I said that word out loud, I tried to avoid saying it that would pay five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month or whatever it is because they want to get it.
01:19:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They want the product to be better. Yeah. Right? Well, we're going to find out. I guess they're. Apparently this is all internal, so we don't really know the details. It's not like they've announced the timing or anything, but supposedly there's a milestone coming up or if they don't pass it, they're not going to be able to get this thing out into the world and it's not as good as they want it to be, etc.
01:20:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it'll probably be something, but at the same, time you've got this question of how much longer, every single time you speak to that device, it costs Amazon money. Yeah, sooner or later they're going to start cutting that service back.
01:20:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know if you spend time in the home if you spend time you know talking to.
01:20:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Insteon folks, right, right, like in that, I'm smart homing here. But if you committed to Insteon on light switches a couple of years ago, insteon said, sorry, we're out of money by that cloud dependency that we couldn't get our product off of. Well, it still exists and we're not running it anymore. Your switches are broken, right.
01:20:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, Google just killed what 27 assistant features.
01:20:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think something like that, exactly this. You know what You're looking at the costs and so I think Amazon's positioning here is hey, there's going to be an X amount per month, or your products about to get a whole lot more crippled.
01:20:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what I want to know, though, because obviously there has to be a value proposition here, right? So they're going to have some kind of a bullet list. These are the top five, 10, whatever benefits of this thing that you are going to pay for.
01:21:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't wait to see this list, because I'm curious with the better chat model, like the language model. I mean not that the old one wasn't good, but it could be dramatically better.
01:21:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's like the free one is like the one with the Boston accent and then the paid one. As you know, you can actually understand.
01:21:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's weird, that's a strange model, and clearly the pressure is on that team to stand on their own financial feet, that they're not being able to sell enough prime or enough anything else to justify their existence, and so the alternative is they kill the product, right? I?
01:21:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
see, I like Google. I think this is too central to their whole consumer AI kind of thing. I don't see how they could possibly do that.
01:21:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, cutting back, I mean yeah, oh yeah, I mean, they're going to sell a cripple snot out of it and Moore's Law will work in their favor. It'll cost them less and less to provide you with fewer and fewer features.
01:22:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, it's a virtuous cycle. We call that in the industry.
01:22:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be interesting. I fear it'll just be chatty, and that's really in the way that AI is chatty.
01:22:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would pay money for I do this on my smart screen. I'll say, hey, gee, I don't want to see this photo anymore. And then there's a plus and it says okay, you want us to not show you this picture anymore, is that right? Yes, okay, we will not show it. It's like would you just do it Like? Just do it Like it's it. You have an un Because you'll do it.
01:22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then ECHO will go on and on and on about all the other things oh God can do, and Lisa just swears at it. I mean it's really. Oh, it makes me insane.
01:22:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is where the insurification will really happen. Hey, now that we, you refuse to pay for this thing, so we're just going to make it say ads all the time. Yeah, yes, exactly.
01:22:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you get it? We're asleep and you can hear it from the kitchen. The cats are apparently buying something on Amazon, right?
01:23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
now they understand squawking all of a sudden.
01:23:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The cats need more food.
01:23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, that's a good model. That's where I buy all my Instagram stuff between three and four AM Exactly.
01:23:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to be a really re-eyed after I'm quite. Oh my God, I need another phone case. I don't even have this phone. That looks really good. Yeah, it's a beautiful case. I wish I had the phone. I'll buy the phone later. I'll buy the phone.
01:23:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just bought an electric screwdriver. In the middle of the night and Lisa says we already have two. I said yeah, but this one, this one's better.
01:23:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I told the story where I was looking at my phone and I went, oh, and suddenly I'm like what's wrong? I'm like they don't have the case and the color I want. She's like are you serious? And I was looking at an ad on Instagram. I thought I was going to die Last night.
01:23:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bought a meat thermometer in the middle of the night what I do, like a good meat thermometer. Yeah, it's sold under the Alien Pro brand. It's hugely expensive, it's ridiculously expensive. But Kenji Al Lopez says oh no, this is the one because and I don't know how this would work I love it, I love the meat and it tells you Sort of Normally meat thermometer. You put it in and you try to get it in the right spot, but it's only telling you the temperature there and you want to know, well, is it the same all over? What are the this meat thermometer somehow? You stick it in and it knows all of the temperatures in the whole meat.
01:24:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And so it can say it's introducing microplastics into the meat and then they're recording back before they have their half-life expires.
01:24:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what it's doing. That's crazy. But it was 2 am, or actually it's more like 3 am. We live in.
01:24:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Shangri-La and I believed it. Let's just admit it, we're living in a steel Nevitz and Neil Stephenson book and we just don't even know. Every once in a while do you ever trip and briefly see outside of the matrix and you're like wait a minute, there's a glitch. I saw it. Yeah, I feel like we're literally in a program and it was written in basic with line numbers, and it's really buggy.
01:25:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Jesus, that thermometer is 200 bucks Leo.
01:25:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly. How could you not buy a Vision Pro? What's wrong with you?
01:25:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish you'd thought you could stick that in the meat and find out how it is. I only have several other meat thermometers. Yeah, sure, who doesn't I? Have the meter, the Bluetooth meter. I have an. Insta-reed, I have one that you jam it in. But I thought, but if this really can tell me, with the dark meat and the light meter cooked that's worth 200 bucks.
01:25:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just don't believe you. You think you can get like a 3D printed thing that we pass the meat through it and it scans it like it's an X-ray or something.
01:25:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm looking forward to the report on it. I'll let you know Sure, it's great.
01:25:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, having. Is it AI powered, though? Leo, is there AI.
01:25:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure it is. How else would it know what the rest of the meat?
01:25:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is. I would point out, my meter thermometer is integrated in my home assistant, so my Google devices all say when it's time to go get the meat I love, meat, I love.
01:26:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI meat thermometer. The meter is great. It's got a knowledge of meat and temperatures. We believe that the temperature might be, you know, like no, I'll give my meter to my brother-in-law who built a barrel smoker.
01:26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know traditional, that you put wood in and everything and it has a thermometer on the outside but he doesn't know what the meat temperature is on the inside because it doesn't have any way of doing that.
01:26:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And he says, and I said, well, you, could put a thermometer in there and this thing survives 700 degrees. Is that a thing I don't know? You can't find out because it gets hot in there. That's why I was going to say what's that? Melted blood.
01:26:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you won't open it because he says if you're looking, you ain't cooking, and so he doesn't know. So he made if you're looking, you ain't cooking. Yeah, he says, I want to do it the real way. The real way is what Do you just guess?
01:26:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. No, the real. You get those gloves, you can go in there and you like to put a thermometer in it.
01:26:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Touch it, you know, without changing the temperature or something, but he did. You know it made out of a barrel, so he doesn't have a probe. So, of course, the first time he cooked a turkey and it was so bad it was like dried out, desiccated.
01:27:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's better than the reverse. He made a quick visit to the hospital and sell Manila or whatever you get.
01:27:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but we didn't have turkey for Thanksgiving. We were eating at his house and his wife said you don't experiment on Thanksgiving.
01:27:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, he didn't.
01:27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He didn't know he did a few days before. But then that was it. They weren't going to make a turkey because they didn't know how to do it.
01:27:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I said we're going to a thermometer, so I'm going to give him my meter once I get this brand new just use your oven for the day, and then we can move on, you know.
01:27:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is not when you experiment with him.
01:27:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He knows how to do try to do chicken?
01:27:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How does that?
01:27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I have chicken every Thursday, let's you know oh, all right, let me take a little break Just to remind people that this fabulous conversation you're hearing right now this doesn't pay for itself.
01:28:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Doesn't pay for itself, my friends, somebody's got to pull me up.
01:28:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What it really pays for is, of course, we have ads, and we have a few, but the ad revenue has really tumbled. I'm sure you've noticed that, richard. Everybody's noticed it across the board. It's a real problem in podcasting, thank goodness. Lisa, two years ago, said, you know, we need a club so that our audience can support us, and now I really feel like this is the way forward for us. We don't know what the new year will hold, but it doesn't look like it's going to be a good year for ad revenue. In fact, it's pretty obviously not. So it's more important than ever that you join the club. If you're hearing this, I know you're not in the club because club members don't hear it, and I'd really like to invite you to.
01:28:45
We have 750,000 unique listeners every month. Only right now, 10,630 people in the club. That's that's like one and a half percent. We would love to get to 5%. If we had 5%, we could grow, we could add shows, we could do so much more. If we had 10% of you, 10% of our audience, we wouldn't need advertisers. We'd be hugely successful. We could. We could hire people back. We could grow. The option, though, is up to you, because the opposite direction ain't good. Please, if you're not yet a member seven bucks a month.
01:29:20
You get ad free versions of all the shows. There's additional shows like Paul's Hands On Windows, which is a great show. Hands On Macintosh with Micah. You get the untitled Linux show, scott Wilkins at Home Theater, geeks iOS today All these shows that are inside the club only. Plus, you get the Tweet Plus feed, which is conversations before and after. You get to watch the stream all the time instead of just when.
01:29:40
We're recording lots of benefits, but the real benefit from my point of view and from, I hope, from yours is you're supporting something that's making a difference. You know this conversation about AI. You're not going to hear that elsewhere. You know you're going to hear mainstream media and even a lot of tech channels either singing its praises or with YouTube thumbnails. Ah, you won't believe what the AI did to me. We talk intelligently about these topics, coming from a deep knowledge base, and I think that that's valuable. If you think so too. Twittv slash club, twit, and thank you in advance. We really appreciate it. By the way, while you're at the website, do the survey too. We want to get everybody who listens to the show into the survey before it ends at the end of the month twittv slash survey 24. All right, that's the begging portion, the begging bowl portion of this show. Don't worry, your money club members, does not go to my $200 meat thermometer.
01:30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It literally goes directly into your Instagram funds. I think we should just be honest with this. All right, let's be fair.
01:30:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, I am living at this point off my retirement funds because every penny needs to go into twit, and that's fine with me. It really is what's keeping the show afloat, and so we want you to do that. All right, let's talk about browsers. You are you not going to? You're not going to because, look, I'm a Firefox guy.
01:31:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay.
01:31:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I know you're a break.
01:31:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess Firefox news All right.
01:31:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't try to woo me away.
01:31:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I'm never going to stop doing that. If you put an Instagram ad that said Leo Laporte should be using Brave.
01:31:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe I would. You might get that. I wish for that.
01:31:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So no, I it's coincidental to this and I'm going to talk about this at the back of the book. I've been testing a lot of different web browsers lately and I've been using edge again because I have to rewrite that part of the book again and it's always my special favorite time of year when I have to go back to that steaming pile. But because we're on that schedule now with Chrome and Chromium, we're starting to see some browser updates. So Chrome announced Chrome announced. Google announced Chrome 121.
01:31:52
This has three experimental AI features, one of which in particular, looks really interesting. There's a tag organizer feature. I'm fascinated. We're still struggling with tabs, but we are, and actually I'll talk about that more later. There's also a AI based Chrome customized panel. So I've used Chrome today and use their stuff. You know that you can. There's a whole little wizard thing now for making that simpler, but now they're going to add AI to that and you can have different moods and styles and whatever, and that's kind of fun. But AI themes et cetera, kind of like we see on Pixel, right, and I think maybe on Chromebook too. I think they have maybe, but at least on Pixel. But the best one, I think, is this writing Chrome like a help me write, which will provide a feature that provides writing suggestions in line anywhere that you're writing right. So it could be like you're writing a review and email, or you know filling out a form, whatever it is. This is that you know.
01:32:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Google this keeps happening right Like where it's trying to help me write.
01:32:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google has been marketing the Pixel line of phones for years as like the helpful phone, right, and they can list this laundry list of AI based features, things that will pick up a spam call and try to get the person to respond, and if they don't, they'll just market a spam and go on. And you know, this stuff is all over Pixel and this feature, to me, reminds me of that. It's like, what type of thing like that could I use in a browser? And the truth is, all of us whether you're, again, professional, right, or just normal person, whatever could use this right. This is actually very useful, so I think that's really cool. I wouldn't go, yeah, chrome on your computer, but I mean, whatever, it's a and this is something we'll probably see everywhere, right, this is the, this is the type of AI that's just going to be everywhere, yeah, so I think that's cool Bit by bit and yeah, and it seems I mean eventually it's annoying like please stop helping me go away.
01:33:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it. You know it's getting me to start question like should I keep paying for Grammarly? Is they've served me well? Yes, although I've come to appreciate Grandmother though Grandmother's gone downhill pretty hard.
01:33:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, my wife and I, you know, we're writers and we both use it and I've actually started using other tools just to kind of see I use. I actually pay for something now called language tool, which is a you know, a plugin like Grammarly. Yeah, I like to have two levels of editing, so I use something in whatever editor I'm using and then something when I publish to the web.
01:34:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I get right. When you're getting a shape to go, you have another set of eye effect or you've got a set of digital eyes on it.
01:34:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that yeah exactly, cause each catches something, the other does not. Yeah, but Grammarly is still one of them.
01:34:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, I've, it's that weekly email from Grammarly telling me how great I am.
01:34:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Well, my, so my wife pays for it. I've never paid for it. Oh yeah, I've never played about it. Um, I? What I don't like is the way they keep pushing Grammarly premium when you're trying to edit a document. It's like guys get on my way out of here.
01:34:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, you know I bought it ages ago and and uh and it's I'd serve me well, but it's definitely getting ensured a fine yep.
01:34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Feel it. Yeah. It's. It's better than the Microsoft editor which is the which is weird, because they pulled Microsoft editor out of word and it should be the best. When we talked about that, you know, a couple of months ago, when I was bitching and moaning about word, but anyway, um, yeah. So this stuff is going to be all over, uh and you were to Firefox.
01:35:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know, I know, I know I'm a version of.
01:35:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Firefox, yeah, um, across, uh, all the platforms. So, on desktop, um, for you developers in the world, um, when you, you know, when you type, you get suggestions right. So it could be suggestions for URLs, it could be a Google search uh result suggestions, et cetera. Um, they're, they're integrating with their own they, they have this kind of public open uh developer documentation, so I call it MDM web docs. Uh, that will there's integrated now into that uh address bar, which is awesome, right, um, it can also store pass keys, uh, on max, if you have uh in the iCloud key chain, which people tell me is one of the better implementations of passwords, and they've actually written a separate post about this soon. But if you're a Linux guy, I'll just point out that they now support dot deb packages across all the Debian style uh, uh, linux distributions like Debian, obviously a bit open to Linux, mint, et cetera. It's supposed to be a dramatic improvement with regards to reliability, performance, et cetera, et cetera. So, uh, go to the go look up the Firefox blog and see what they wrote about that.
01:36:11
If you're on, if you're using Linux and Firefox which a lot of Firefox, a lot of Unix users, I think, do use Firefox, yeah, um, and then the mobile versions a little less going on there, obviously, but uh, on Android you can now set Firefox as the default PDF reader. This is kind of a kill. I think this is the you know what most people would want. I use this browser. I want to use it to read PDFs as well. That's fine. And then on iPhone and iPad it supports kind of a depending on what you're doing long press for sections on their homepage if you use that, although that browser supports extensions. So maybe you should use a different homepage. I don't know, I liked actually their homepage is pretty good because they do pocket and I actually use pockets, so you can have that kind of pocket fee. It's not bad.
01:36:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't I. I usually read my pocket emails.
01:36:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel bad about Firefox because brave is so good in Firefox sticks. No, I'm just kidding.
01:37:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I see he's doing it. I am a. I'm kidding. I did that for I and now I'm like thinking I should download. Brave, I should try it out again.
01:37:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you should. It's warm and comfortable and cozy.
01:37:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is Chrome, right, so it's chromium. It's chromium, yeah, so it'll just work Secure and private by default. Minimal UI. Do you use their search engine instead? Of?
01:37:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I don't like their search engine. I use duck duck go.
01:37:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use Kagi. I pay money for my search engine and I like it.
01:37:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You are from a. You are from a different planet. I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't want to. First of all, Google search sucks.
01:37:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's admit that it's getting worse? Well, it's getting worse, it's getting worse.
01:37:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, kagi's good. It has gotten worse, although you know it's still to me. I rate things based on how many times it forces me to go to Google to get the right answer or whatever, and duck duck go has done a good job in that regard. A brave search to date is not, and that's why I don't use it. I would be happy to use more brave stuff if they, you know, if they've just worked properly again. Anyway, so there is. This is not out now, but Brave announced that they're going to simplify their kind of fingerprinting protections. They have two levels right now. So fingerprinting is this way that trackers get around anti-trackers or tracker blockers, right? They take these little bits of innocuous information and pull it together to develop a fingerprint of you and identify you uniquely without doing it directly. Right, because they're being blocked. I guess the, the, the the ironic problem is that if you go into strict mode on Drave, you stand out so much that it turns out they can track you more easily.
01:38:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You still feel like you know what? Oh, you're the one person in strict mode, Exactly.
01:38:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So few people use it. Let's say that it actually has a.
01:38:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One guy in the Boston area is using brave in strict mode. I think it might be the same guy. Yeah, so that's a problem.
01:38:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they're going to just get rid of that and Steve looked at it yesterday and concluded that this was the right thing to do and that the basic fingerprint prevention was good. Oh, that's interesting Okay.
01:39:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's good to hear. Yeah, yeah, I mean there, I don't that's not something I've ever configured, so I use whatever their basic mode is and it's you know you can drive the EFS as a Like.
01:39:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
everything's strict, broke everything.
01:39:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, that's right.
01:39:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the balance as long as you don't need to surf the web.
01:39:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this works great yeah.
01:39:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, this is the same issue with security, right, you know it's like how far do you want to go? Right, there's a. The EFS. Eff has a website called Cover your Tracks. You can just Google that, or whatever you're using, and check your browser and see how well protected you are against tracking, including fingerprinting. They also have an excellent description of what fingerprinting is on that site. So it's worth checking out. And if you are, if your browser's not doing a good job, which Chrome and Edge and whatever else isn't by default, obviously install the correct anti-trackers in extension form. That will solve the problem.
01:39:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Firefox also has anti-fingerprinting measures. Yep, yep, I like Firefox because, unlike everything else, there's no commercial commercial. And well, that's not true, is it?
01:40:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because most of the no, I was going to say they do they, they are well and they, they are selling services. You know they have a VPN and whatever. Yeah.
01:40:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's fine.
01:40:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't, I gotta stay alive.
01:40:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I want them to do that. I do not begrudge these companies that stuff. I I wouldn't. Firefox is inoffensive in that way for sure. But you know, opera Brave actually, and all these, they're all pushing something. They're trying to make money in this world.
01:40:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're trying to stay alive without selling you as the product, yeah, yeah. Which is why they're not selling you. What would stay alive is just make you the product.
01:40:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Opera, this is. This is such a hilarious story. I just think this is really funny. I don't even know if this is true. So they they're having a promotion, that's true, and whoever wins gets to go supposedly will spend a week on a desolate island off of Iceland and become their tabfulness guru, tabfulness being the inspiration for their tab islands feature. It's just a tab grouping feature, I know, but so supposedly there's a guy this is what they say this is going to be. This is just fantastic. There's no way this is true. But supposedly they have a guy who's been living on this island off of Iceland for seven years and he is the inspiration for their tab islands feature and he needs a vacation. So obviously he's going to another desolate island to get away from it all and you can go. I know this is so stupid. And you can fly out there. This is hysterical.
01:41:27
It's unbelievable. It's just promotion, right.
01:41:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, it's just. You think this is legit, Like they're really. I absolutely don't think this.
01:41:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you will. If you win you will. I do think you will get $10,000. Yeah, I have to assume this is some more of a camping experience.
01:41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you have to live there I?
01:41:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
don't know. That seems like. Yes, I mean like it's like one of those movies where you win an inheritance but you have to spend the night in the house or something.
01:41:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this is like it is internet. Obviously they have bandwidth, somehow it's so funny, it's crazy.
01:41:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love this guy. He's perfect, right? Yeah, it's kind of based on the notion of, like this kind of Nordic notion of coziness and when it's cold and yada, yada, yada, serene. You know it's funny. I just can't say funny. So that's cool.
01:42:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The island of Bjarne-ery, I know which I'm pretty sure.
01:42:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Isn't that that singer that screeches yeah, yeah. I think, that's the same person.
01:42:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'd screech if I had to live on that island for any length of time. I know. I could do that.
01:42:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just an ad. It's obviously just an ad, right, but it's cute. It's cute, it's fun. I think it's fun, hilarious. Yes, okay, okay, we have two Xbox stories and they're literal Xbox stories, I guess, not like just gaming stories.
01:42:40
Microsoft brought back its developer direct event the other day I guess it was last week and they showed off not too many, honestly several games that were coming out of the course of the year, the big one being a Indiana Jones title that everyone seems to be curiously excited about. I guess you didn't see the movie and that's cool, you know. Hellblade, new Hellblade movie games, sorry, etc. Etc. So I you know, again, we're just sitting here waiting for Activision Blizzard. I don't know why they bother doing this, but Avowed is a big RPG coming from Obsidian, but not until the fall, right, but that's, people are excited about that. I guess there's some interesting stuff here. But again, like I'm just so jaded right now, it's like I just want, I just want Activision Blizzard. Yeah, yeah, you're waiting. I started playing. I think it's Resident Evil 2. So kind of a remastered version appeared on Xbox Game Pass, etc.
01:43:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it was like week or the week before.
01:43:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I streamed it to my Google tablet over what do you call it? Xbox Cloud Gaming, and honestly, it was. I the aiming was a little off and I'm like, okay, it's a cloud game and that's why. And then I installed it locally. I actually bought up the Xbox. I played this thing on my Xbox the other day and it's exactly the same actually. So it to me what it feels like is a PC port to the console, like it's very PC, like the way the menus are and everything. It's clearly not like a console native thing, but God it's. It's a legit scary game. It's a little more puzzle solving than I would like, and I don't mean that like I can't solve puzzles, I mean I don't want to figure out the combination on a lock to get through a door. It's that type of stuff. It's just stupid. I just want to know what the story is. It's a good story from what I could tell so far.
01:44:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Show my screens. Let me shoot stuff. I'm happy.
01:44:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, it's legit scary. One thing you have to get used to in Resident Evil because, again, as an Xbox guy, it was not a big thing for me for many years is in my world, my brain if you get bit by a zombie, you're dead and then you turn into a zombie. But in the resident evil world that's not the case. You actually just get injured so you can get bitten multiple times and recover and heal yourself and do all this stuff Cause the first time I got I got bit right away and I'm like what's going on and actually that's this is a different take on zombies. I don't know I'm talking about zombies.
01:44:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's more than one kind of zombie. I mean starting with. None of them are real. Well, that's first Fair enough.
01:45:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not a thing. So last it might have been Friday night, cause it was it was. It was like two backed. It was like the Microsoft security thing and Halo were both kind of in the news like at the same time, and 343 industries, which is the studio that is responsible for Halo.
01:45:21
Now that Bungie is long gone and the makers of Halo infinite have been releasing seasons right as we do now for modern video games.
01:45:28
So seasons are kind of a combination of events that take place over some period of time and then deals what I think of as DLC, like downloadable contents. You could have new skins and weapons and maps and whatever else like depending on the game. Right, and I as well as recently as a week ago, I would have held up Halo infinite as a great example of a Microsoft studio doing something spectacular for gamers which is providing ongoing value and and kind of supporting the whole game pass ecosystem, cause you kind of subscribe to it, so you don't just get this one drop and we're done, or one drop and here's a season's pass that you pay another 60 bucks for and then a year later it's over. It's like this kind of ongoing thing. So the latest couple of Gears of War games were like this. Sea of Thieves is probably the best example kind of a B level game that you know it's doing great because they keep supporting it with new content and people love that, you know, and they're not doing that anymore.
01:46:23
So is it making the money? That's the thing I have a guess and I think and to me it's related to Activision Blizzard, right? So until Activision Blizzard comes on board, you're trying to get, provide value. You have some number of games. They have some number of updates, like flight simulators. Another great example, right, flight sim is a. It's actually a blockbuster game. It's doing great. And they have all these world updates they do where you get high level imagery from different areas of the world. Awesome, if you're into that stuff, yeah and. But but how do you handle a game that underperforms like? Halo infinite came out a year late, dropped like a dud was feature incomplete.
01:46:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've got the user.
01:46:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Several, but it just never yeah, just never picked up any amount of steam and it's a game that like they really were going for the original trilogy vibe. But if you look up like sales figures, a couple of things stand out, like one first trilogy up to the apex, halo three, which I think actually was the best game, and then it's been downhill ever since. And they don't release sales figures for this game because you know it's was released in the game pass era and it's more about usage and you know these kinds of soft numbers and so forth. So I think there are a couple of things going on here. One, I think, halo infinite has underperformed. It just doesn't make sense to throw money at this. It's just the audience just isn't there.
01:47:34
They're still going to have updates. You know smaller updates, and everyone was expecting the season six to start this month and instead they're releasing a really small update. I've forgotten the name of it already, but there are going to be three of these smaller updates over the next several months smaller events, smaller DLCs and maybe collectively. That is what they would have done for season six. Maybe, you know, maybe roughly speaking, but I bet it drops. I really I don't. I don't think we're going to be talking about Halo infinity a year for now, because we're going to be talking about the next Halo game, which they casually announced in this post or it was actually a live event but in this live thing that they did on YouTube, where they, you know, right like two seconds before the end of the lake hey, by the way, we're not doing these things. They were not doing these updates anymore. Oh, and we're hiring, everything's great, and we're working on a new Halo game and it's like our new.
01:48:25
Well, they said new content. Sorry, they didn't say no other game, but what else would they do? You know, like it's, that would be like steam not doing half way. Anyway, I'm sorry. Or, val brother, um, anyway, terrible things have happened in my life, so I'm I'm thinking Activision Blizzard comes on board, a bunch of that stuff goes to game pass. We don't have to do this stuff anymore, not for the games that aren't performing right.
01:48:50
Yeah, there's no, there's no reason people will join. There'll be so many people joining just for Activision Blizzard that I think this will be. You know, this is less of a concern, like the, the pre-activation Blizzard game pass kind of needed this, not just for top tier games. I think we still do that for top tier games, but for second tier games and now it's like you know what? We spent a lot of money on this let's uh, that's where the investment is now. It's, it's, it's going to get some value from it. That's my guess. They did not say that, obviously, why would they? But that's where I think it's going. Yeah, I think so we live in interesting times.
01:49:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, it's going to be some fun, that's for sure.
01:49:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's. Uh, we got the back of the book still to go, Don't we? Yes, Unless I unless, like Rip Van Winkle, I slept through this episode. Uh well, that would mean this would be a good time to just pause, have a drink, relax and enjoy. You're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Therrat and Richard Campbell. Paul Therrat kicks off the back of the book with our tip of the week. I say what's the tip of the week, Paulie?
01:49:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're screwed, no Um so.
01:50:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny I just downloaded and installed.
01:50:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
brave so maybe I am. Oh good, no, you're going to be fine. Um, in the wake of last week's outlook, the back will consumer reports, teamed up with uh. Who is some other company to uh examine how Facebook tracks their users and yikes, like you thought. You thought one, though, or one outlook was the problem. There were over 186,000 companies tracking Facebook users, 186,000 on average. Uh, over 7,000 per person. Like it's nuts. Like it's nuts.
01:50:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So again it's, it is crazy but then all those, you know all those lions hunting that one gazelle.
01:50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
These guys are really good at it, Unlike Microsoft, so Microsoft will get there. I don't want anyone to worry about this. It's happening. But for now, if you want to be tracked, you got to go on Facebook. Um, so this raises, or whatever. I guess Instagram would work to, I don't know, um, yeah, so the question here is you know how can and we talked about this a little bit last week, but I've been looking into this again. I've been testing, next, dns on my PC, as I'm not sure if I mentioned that. I know Richard uses a piehole, which is another too popular kind of solution for this. I obviously, if you can put this thing in one place and have it just work for all your machines, that's ideal.
01:51:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, next, dns is a piehole in the sky, essentially.
01:51:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yeah, but you can put it on a router, depending on your router, right? So you could use it as that. If you wanted to, I have it. I have it right now. I'm just installing it on individual devices, it's even more flexible than that.
01:51:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Start creating. In your next DNS profile you can create different profiles. So Francis Lisa wants to see all the ads because she sells ads. So yes though I don't have it as restrictive on the router, but then I use different. I could show you if I log into my next.
01:51:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I would like to. It's a really powerful.
01:51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love next DNS, the more I use it, though.
01:51:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really tell when it's always worked well. But but anyone who uses something like this, you'll like, I think. I use the example of the Google discovery feed. You're running to these issues where you know stuff just breaks right. I mean, that's, that's what happens, and so the trick is you have to do a little bit of management. So I have different profiles right. And so how do you do this on the device? You actually just use a code, in other words, you put it into the.
01:52:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do when you yeah, in fact I'll show you on my, on my iPhone, when I open that next DNS. You can say in the settings that you want to use profile C three, four, nine, six, four.
01:52:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then it will use the profile that just lets through my commenting system because that got blocked by next. That's right, that's the kind of thing you want, that kind of flexibility?
01:52:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Of course you could do all this with a piehole, but this it's running in the cloud. I think there's some nice features and I'll show you again. On the next DNS website you have all these tabs in your setting of things. You can turn on and off, right. This is much like you block origin, where you can choose which trackers you want to use. You can add block lists. You can say you know, I want to block all Sonos, I want to block everything that Windows is doing which be such a wonderful right, it has rental controls.
01:53:09
You could set recreation times. I feel like this, uh, and it's very inexpensive, I mean you can use it for free for 300,000 hits.
01:53:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then I was going to say I think I spend less than 60 bucks. It's tiny, it's something really small, I don't remember how much it costs.
01:53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't think it's 99 cents a month, but I don't know. I can look. Okay, yeah, it's very inexpensive, yeah, and it will also log all this, which is nice, so you can see per device, uh, what stuff is getting law blocked and what device is $2 per month.
01:53:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. Yeah, it's nothing.
01:53:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great, yeah, it's great, and I like this. They call it Gafam, google, amazon, facebook, apple and Microsoft. There it is, yes, and their dominance in the stuff you're doing, and that's four or five companies that dominate the average track. An eye opener where your traffic's going Um, and this is all because a DNS server really has so much information about everything you're doing. It's actually an eye opener, right? I think it works great, but you have to.
01:54:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess the the tips such as it is, is care and feeding.
01:54:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, look into this and and understand that you're going to do some, some maintenance. You know you just that's, but it's worth it. This isn't like the thing we were talking about, where you have to change the password on every single one of your accounts and then make this as easy as possible. This is actually it's a little bit of work, but it's. I think the Well, the defaults are good.
01:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you, you could just take it as it is. If you, if you didn't want to go through, but you'll notice.
01:54:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, I noticed, like I said, certain things you're like okay, that's not working properly.
01:54:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It breaks something Every every security always breaks something Right.
01:54:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I asked my wife about this, by the way, I think I said I was going to do this last week and I said so, you know, I don't. It's not like I monitor her phone, Like I'm like, do you turn this off, Do you still use this? And she says no, I still use it. But she says every once in a while I can tell something's not working and I just disable it and reload and then I do my thing and I put it back on. Okay, that's cool, yeah, that's fine.
01:55:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, For some reason I've been trying to unfreeze my experience account for the last two days and I don't. There's some something that experience just doesn't like, that it's on my browsers or in my DNS or something Right, it's just, it's given me a hard time.
01:55:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we're everyone here is kind of technical and you know we do all these things and then we complain. Like the people on my website are like, oh, your thing doesn't work. I'm like I think, I don't think it's me. And you can tell like, no, I haven't done anything. And then they're like oh, you're right, I installed some of the same browser extension.
01:55:31
You know like it's always, you know, we, we, we forget the stuff we've been doing that you know could screw everything up. Right, right, so right, yeah, anyway, yeah, just this is this is going to be an ongoing story. I'm talking to a security expert, actually about password stuff. On Friday there's going to be a lot more of this stuff. There's just a. We live in a horrible world and I'm I know I'm not going to solve the problem, but I'm going to try to work around it as much as I can Given this good advice is not going to hurt, Right Like well, I want to make sure it's good advice.
01:56:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's the whole thing is like you're doing the homework for us, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
01:56:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was at Jerry Pranell. I used to say you know I make these mistakes, so you don't have to. My thing is like I make these mistakes because I'm an idiot, but if you can benefit from that anyway, that's same same net effect. Right? I mean, it's fine, I get there. Speaking of browsers and then did you.
01:56:21
Yes, oh, okay, I did yes. So I have been using a lot of different browsers. They're all interesting in their own ways, good or bad, but one of the more interesting ones is something called Arc Browser, and I think this speaks to this audience. This is a complicated product and it's complicated in part because it does a lot. It's a little bit like Notion. Right, notion is the thing we use for the notes. Most people would. If you just looked at it, it's this text. You're like what's the big deal? But Notion is actually very powerful.
01:56:51
There's a lot of hidden features, there's a lot of icons and if you and it works differently than like Microsoft apps, so if you want to change something, you have to click the little dots and you know, turn into and you know it's a whole different world. There's a syntax for writing with slashes that does style and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So I would say that Arc is to browsers what Notion is to like. One note you know it's the same thing a web browser in this case but it's very different. There's a sidebar on all the time. The tabs are always vertical. They have these notions of folders and spaces and it's favorites as well that are not the favorites.
01:57:30
You think there are little UI bits that don't do anything when you most over them, so you can't tell what they do, so you have to click and it destroys something and you know it's it's. It is a little complex. However, I think for power users and people who are kind of technical and like to be organized and like to do things in a different way, you'll you'll stumble a lot because it is. It is confusing, but it is it's very interesting and for people who live in a browser, I mean, this might already be, if not might evolve into that kind of Uber product, because it's. It's kind of like a one stop dashboard for everything you do on the web. I don't know how else to what else to call it. It's crazy. Who's got?
01:58:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the wait list for this.
01:58:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this is the problem. So they launched on Mac I don't know a year and a half ago. They promised that by the or whatever that was last year, maybe they promised that by the winter of 2024, they'd have a version for Windows. I signed up for the wait list at the time. I got in in December and you just have to wait, basically for now.
01:58:35
They do have an announcement coming, I think on the 30th of 31st, that may be related to this. It may be related to AI features that are coming to the browser. It may be related to a teams version, not teams the product for Microsoft, but like a team based version of Rock Browser, because they do have aspirations to be like a slack or notion, in the sense that they see this as a platform that could be extensible and that businesses might pay for, and it's. There's a lot of research to do here. You should look up this company, which is called the browser company, you know, watch some of their videos, read their documentation. But look at this product I. It's not something I could ever, you know, recommend to my brother or my wife or not for some people, friends.
01:59:20
But this is, it's fascinating. Here's one for you. If you use terminal in Windows or Visual Studio Code, you may know that there's something called the command palette, which is like control shift P and it brings up this kind of Apple search looking box in the middle of the product. You start typing and then it auto fills and you get commands. It does that. So control T in this browser has nothing to do with well, it has something to do with tabs. I'm sorry, but it's all. It's kind of this one's.
01:59:46
It's like a, it's like a command box basically. So you can use it to do like autocomplete for web searches. Like you went into a dress bar which it doesn't really have, you could use it to find tabs that are open now or were open in the you know the past. If you have favorites or folders or whatever other things you might have, you could use it to find that stuff. So they, unless you pin things, it actually auto closes tabs, like up to 24 hours by default. Wow, it's inscrutable in some ways. There is in fact a settings interface, but there is no UI to find it. It's, it's, it's. You know, it's still in beta, right, it's not there yet, but it is it's fascinating, and it's it's. It's not, like I said, for people who watch this show.
02:00:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think, if you can, when you can, and if they could poach the power user, they've got something.
02:00:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Two things, just to kind of conclude this. It's it's chromium based right, which I know some people grow on. Whatever, To me that's an advantage, but the disadvantage to me is that it's not secure and private by default. So you're going to want to install an anti tracker, like you block origin or privacy badger and probably an ad blocker, frankly and then throw it against that EFF site. I was talking about the cover, your tracks. Just make sure you covered there.
02:01:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But does it use the Chrome browser extension? So any chromium and Chrome browser extension would work. Yes, like you block, or that's right, or bit warden or that kind of thing, yeah. That's right Yep. Well, yeah, everything, I just stopped my brave download and I've just installed arcs I wish you'd make it.
02:01:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm glad I got you in the hook for like 13 seconds.
02:01:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, you know you win some. You listen, that's okay. And then, just speaking of Notion, real quick, I think I think it was the day we did Windows Weekly. I didn't look at it until later, but Notion released their calendar, which is based on that chronic acquisition they did. Right now it only integrates with Google Calendar. I believe you could use it as a standalone calendar as well. I wish it was integrated into Notion in the app. It's a standalone app and so it's like sure, sure, looks like Trello, Only man yeah.
02:01:51
If you are a heavy Notion user and you use it collaboratively with other people regularly. Richard and I do the notes together but we're not interacting all week long, you know, discussing topics and things like. But for people in actual businesses, you know I, honestly, this looks really compelling so it's good to know about. And, honestly, if you use Notion, you've heard about it because, my god, do they promote it incessantly now, but it looks solid, I mean it's. You know I, given the outlook news from last week, I wish they would make a Notion email client. That would be something I would use, or be more likely to use, in calendar. But they are, they seem to be heading into that Slack, slash, google workspace, you know kind of territory. But maybe we're going to see a Notion suite someday in the future.
02:02:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's such a weird pivot, I know.
02:02:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they should just come over to the music service. That would have been more sense. You listen to music when you work, right, I mean that makes sense While you're making notes.
02:02:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let me play you a song.
02:02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it only works with Google Calendar right, which is kind of a not right now.
02:02:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but it's going to work with everything. This is just the first release. Is Google Calendar?
02:02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just don't see why people don't work with CalDAV, and then it would work with everything. Instead of saying, oh, you got to be, yeah, I think it's just because you can't make money on.
02:03:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
CalDAV. Yeah right, I remember when, CalDAV, when Apple started doing an iCal a million years ago and you could get like the Red Sox schedule in your calendar, and I was like this is the most. This is like an RS well, literally an RSS feed from my calendar. I love this Like I thought that was the greatest thing in the world, Right, and I think that was the last time I used it. It's been a while. Well, you know the calendar app and Vista, that was exactly the same. I probably used it there for 10 seconds too. But yeah, CalDAV, you don't really hear about that too much anymore.
02:03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, except that it's a standard yeah it's a standard?
02:03:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it is Absolutely. Yeah, it should be everywhere.
02:03:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should be like many standard, like web dev too, it's like standard.
02:03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's card dev CalDAV.
02:03:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think Google, I know Google support the Apple support. It's interpreted differently. Well, yeah, maybe that's any time you have an experience trying to relay information between a Google mail account and an Outlook email account, you get and it's literally a count by account, like Carl's, purely Gmail, and there's one account where I can't send him an invite, it just won't arrive. But it's other account, no problem at all, and it's literally just the email address. That's the difference. That's crazy.
02:04:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we'll tell him to make an alias. Well, we solved the problem.
02:04:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we just found an account where it worked fine on and that's the account I put it into. Okay, there you go, solved.
02:04:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, richard, I have given you what I believe is at least 40 minutes to get through this thing. So, as my apology for last week, are you.
02:04:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can use that a really great whiskey store, although it was an awesome by the way, this is another great choice Whiskey wise.
02:04:38
But look at this was this particular run as a recorded back at Ignite so months ago and I've been holding on to it to publish it now. Gail Peckerman is the CEO of a company called Atara out of Israel and they had for many years been building really sophisticated product for a deep analysis of the state of workstations and servers inside of networks, and then a few last year got heavily involved with LLMs to add this sort of void, this communication interface over top of understanding the machine, and what it turned into was an extraordinary tech support product so that when a user and study organization needs to submit a ticket, like to have a problem, want to change your password, whatever that may be, you now have this much better parser of that information upfront and then you can build playbooks for one of the most likely scenarios, so many of the you really go from sort of co pilot to an autopilot mindset where it's like, oh, the the tool knows how to solve this and it'll walk the user through it with a voice interaction throughout the whole thing and that's awesome. But when it can't solve it, it will then also collect analytics related to it. So because it understands the request by the user, it knows what analytics to pull from what devices and sort of puts together a package for your tier two support for your. Now your person needs to get involved and so they're not starting from scratch. They don't have to check with the heavy, turn it off and turn it back on again.
02:06:07
It's like, okay, we've already done these things, I try it, that the software helped them with this, and now here's the data set go and so a much better use of your tech support people to keep people operational and a very and to give a sense of responsiveness that traditional support has a tough time doing. That. You know, a person frustrated at the moment writing that nasty gram email for how do I make this work, gets an immediate response from a piece of software that just is not emotionally affected by them at all and then goes on from there to to actually solve and get as many of the simple problems solved and as much data as possible so that the when the person needs to get involved, it's efficient.
02:06:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, autopilot as the next step from car pilot Awesome, yeah, good line.
02:06:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Huh, yeah, I know it's. I did not think of that, that was Gil, so. But yeah, we had a great conversation. And look, tech support folks have been outgunned for a long, long time and running the same script every day is a path to insanity when you just so tired of telling them once again how to change the password, right. So the fact that you can get more of that solved with automation and not annoy them that much, it's compelling. I'm very excited to look at the product and to to experience its ability to to help folks through an awful lot of tasks and you can build your own. So you know, as a tech support person is you're seeing what's my most common ticket that we're still handling by people to be able to then improve the automation to the point where now that ticket is fully automatically served so that you're only dealing with exception cases, which makes for happier tech support people too. Like you're only working on cool problems, then, not the same thing every day, very nice, I like it.
02:07:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we got to go to bear country, no wait a minute.
02:08:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was last time. That was a few weeks ago.
02:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wouldn't mind going back, though if you want to go other business in Japan.
02:08:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We look, we, we, they know anymore. I know We've, we're doing country tour, right, like we, we. I did a bunch of of Scottish towards the end of the year last year when I got stuck in in in Balveny and in Glenfiddic and then I thought, oh, we got to get the Americans break. So wait, well, I got to bottle Elijah Craig over Christmas, which is gone now and the bear face is still upstairs, but it's been doing well in cocktails, right here's. I didn't buy for that particular case, but I felt like, oh, we've, we've done English, we've done the Scottish and the American and the Irish, so we should do Irish as well in the Canadian. So it's time for Japan, and I realized I've only ever been to Japan one other time. It was was episode eight 26, when I did sort of the overall discussion of what makes Japanese whiskey distinct and, of course, and then we landed on this really unusual whiskey, the, the Ohashi, the whiskey sherry cask which is made with rice.
02:09:07
They use the shouju process to make whiskey. Because Japan now has a standardization for whiskey that's taken years it really only fully came into effect in 2021, where their whiskey needs to be a spirit that's fermented, distilled and aged in Japan. It must use grain, but it can be any kind of grain, all including rice, and we use Japanese water, which is an interesting specification Like what's the alternative? But okay, and at least three years in casks. They also limited the size to to 700 liters, which is not pretty big barrel, but not the biggest. You know that certain classes of large barrel, like certain port barrels and so forth, they get really huge they couldn't be using, can't over distilled, can't go to above 95% cat, which is still high, can't go below 40%. Needs to be bought in Japan and those rules mean it's Japanese whiskey but the name immediately created category called world whiskey, which allows you to work around that problem and many of the major distilleries make a world whiskey on top of making Japanese whiskey.
02:10:09
I was going to talk about Suntory, which is literally named for its founder, which is Tori Shinjiro, as in, so that Tori with two eyes. They turned it to Suntory who is the originator for Yamazaki, arguably the first whiskey in Japan, and there's always people talk about that and we talked about this in 826 back, that older show where Takasiro Masataka, who had done his training in Scotland, joined with Tori to make the Yamazaki distillery and after a certain amount I think it was 10 years he's like okay, that's not for me, I'm going to do my own. I disagree with you about your stuff. And that became Nikke, another major Japanese distillery, and right away there are many more now. This was in the 30s and through World War II and into the harder times of whiskey, but today, when whiskey is so hip, this by the way is fully described in your episode of the whiskey creation process Jatsumise Whiskey Creation.
02:11:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And this is probably the most familiar, popular Japanese whiskey. I feel like this is the one.
02:11:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see the most Suntory is Yamazaki right.
02:11:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, especially.
02:11:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Habiki is made by Suntory as well, but I mean, when you talk Suntory, we know, because of lost in translation, right 2003. That's right and that all of that. It's Suntory time, which, by the way, in the story, what Bob is promoting is Habiki 17.
02:11:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, which is okay.
02:11:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, that makes sense, I've been yeah, I've been meaning to rewatch that movie ever since you mentioned it before, actually, yeah, it's been a great movie in a very young Scarlett Johansson and in her underwear for some reason, which I thought serves no purpose, like necessary Worst things in this world. Interesting that that movie came out in 2003, which was the same year that Yamazaki 12 won the gold medal at the International Spirits Challenge, which was the first time a Japanese whiskey had ever won an international challenge the Bill Murray effect, something like that Except it literally was the same year. What I find interesting when you really study that particular whiskey was you know they laid that up in 1991, like literally in the middle of the Japanese financial crisis was when that stuff was going into barrels. That winning whiskey and it may.
02:12:39
You know it's easy to hate on a company like Suntory. They're now called Beams Suntory because they bought Jim Beam as well as a own, ben Nevis, and, like you know, it's a massive multinational conglomerate with that parent holding company on Osaka. But through those difficult times, like when whiskey didn't sell well in the 80s, they never stopped making single malts. They just didn't make very much of it. So they and they were funding it on the back of Suntory whiskey. Like them, when you talk about what is Suntory regime like back in the 30s they weren't making single malts. That wasn't even a thing, right? We don't get the term single malt as a product. Until the 1960s they were making whiskey Suntory whiskey, right, and whiskey that we generally know of, as I wrote the name down here and it got away from me. But they don't even sell it outside of Asia or Japan, and they do distinguish the difference between Asia and Japan because that's sort of the way they work.
02:13:39
But and, by the way, if you want to try and find that hippie key 17, but the Yamazaki 12 that won the award in 2003, you can still get a Yamazaki 12. I was originally talking to. I was going to say this is the whiskey to talk about today, but it's bloody hard to get and it's 200 bucks and it's a $40 whiskey. To be clear, it is a $40. It was $40 before it won the award. It should still be $40, but it's $200. And that had the key 17, which they stopped making in 2018. I was searching the rare whiskey sites to try and see if I could actually get a bottle of it $700 plus dollars for a blended whiskey, like okay.
02:14:20
And then and the Yamazaki 12 is very much a classic Scottish style whiskey made in Japan. It is purely malted barley, twice distilled, right, that's super conventional. They age in in expirbine casks, sherry cask and minunara oak casks. Now we talked about that on the Japanese show as well. There is an oak from Japan. It's not good at making barrels so it's expensive because it doesn't grow really long and straight like French oak does. But it does have its own unique flavor, a flavor we literally is often coined as Japanese. So while 2003 was the first time that Suntorye run these awards for Yamazaki, there are others distilleries like Hibiki and and Hakushu have won many awards, since they are now just a major player in the world. They've won Distiller of the Year a few times, like it's a big deal. And Hibiki is also a very old whiskey In some ways it would be, it's older than a lot of the Yamazaki institution because it is a blended whiskey and blended whiskies are simply easier to make.
02:15:23
You could take, you take all of your specialty whiskies and you combine that maybe don't sell out. Well, you combine them together. There's something that tastes good and you sell it and it costs less to do that right. And one of the examples that you look over in Scotland is the Glen Turret, a distiller you've never heard of, and they're single malts, not impressive, but it's the same company that makes famous grouse right, which is a grain whiskey that has Highland Park and the McAllen is. That's how they do their thing, right, and so the fact that they've kept all these different styles under one house is one of the things that makes Centauri so resilient and you, you know, again easy to hate on this company, but you remember that cool Makers Mark small batch we had. That's because of Centauri right. Centauri bought Makers Mark and said, hey, you're not doing where, you're not doing any rare, weird versions of your whiskey and they make a lot of money. Go to it and it was great, it was expensive, you've given me a story that I've told several times now.
02:16:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is my probably my most retold Richard story of finding that special edition. Makers mark. I love it. I just love it Cause they're like no, that's me, like I just love they came in, like no, you're doing this thing, and now it's the biggest thing in the world, you know yeah.
02:16:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and that's. You know the way it goes. So Habiki is been made since the 80s. Especially original edition was from 1989, which was to commemorate Santori's 90th anniversary, you know, going back to the 1890s. Today you can get a hundredth anniversary edition of a blend whiskey for more than a hundred dollars, if that inclines you. I think. The blossom edition is almost $200.
02:17:07
And they use a lot of different whiskeys because they make so many. They're all Santori whiskies. So the major distilleries Yamazaki, hakushu, chita, those are all involved. They have different barrelings. One of the barrelings that they use and I've seen the special edition of this in the Hakushu distillery they actually sell this as a separate single malt is aged in Umushu cask and Umushu is a Japanese plum liqueur.
02:17:35
So they make granite alcohol and then they soak these green underripe plums with sugar in them and make a kind of liqueur and they age them in wood and they now have been putting whiskey into those barrels for a certain amount of time and then it imparts its own flavor and the sort of traditional Habiki harmony which was the replacement for their age, appellated versions like Habiki 17 blended, and then it was a 21 as well, all of which are now off the market. The harmony just means they don't put an age on it. For a reason there's some five and six-year-old in there guaranteed and nobody wants to buy that. So it's harmony. The harmony is it costs us less to make this good tasting.
02:18:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not the harmony between the ages of the ingredients.
02:18:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And, that being said, habiki harmony is disturbingly difficult to find. It is easier to find than most. You'll have to go into your liquor store. It is not always stocked and it is selling for $100, which is a lot for a blended whiskey. It's good, is it $100? Good, that's tough. 40, this is a grabber. Like you should have this on your shelf all the time, but at 100, it's a lot for a blended whiskey. 43% Again, it's a blend, so it's got its own niceties to it. Like for me, my go-to blend. There's a couple of go-to blends I keep on the shelf all the time the Dewar's 12. I will always drink a Shivas's around, especially their 12 famous crafts. Right, those are my usual go-to blends, and Habiki harmony used to be just not at $100. But there are inexpensive Japanese whiskies. They're just not from any distiller you've ever heard of. Like all of the known brands now have upscaled to the point where it's $100 plus bottles of whiskey.
02:19:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is this accessible in the US, like the Habiki harmony? No, no, the other Japanese yes, they're starting to show up more and more.
02:19:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
In fact, and I think, like you go to a Total Wine or a Bevmo or any of those kinds of sites and you search for Habiki, they're going to throw a whole bunch of other whiskies that they have at you for $40 or $50. Because I know you look at them.
02:19:48
Because you're looking for Japanese, so like oh, you like that because you heard that name. Let me show you something that we actually have, because they often don't have this one, but you will find it. This one I still find around. This one is often on the bar. If you've got a nice whiskey collection, you'll have harmony. Before you have any Abizakis of any kind, I have what I call a temporary whiskey collection.
02:20:13
All whiskies temporary. So I've got. You know I, with this new office, I've got the decanter out. There's Shibus Regal in it at the moment. That's a good one.
02:20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That way you don't have to advertise it. If someone wants a glass, you pour it. They're happy. Yeah, exactly.
02:20:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the use of a decanter is something you should possibly talk about at some point.
02:20:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean I got a nice decanter and glass set for Christmas a few years ago. It's Bohemian and so it's a shame not to use it.
02:20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have an empty Louis XIII you know, remi Marten brandy bottle. That would make a nice decanter for something.
02:20:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It would make a decanter. It's beautiful right.
02:20:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But at least I, just at least as a fan of really old Madeira's. She just got a few bottles on like 1968 Madeira and I said we'll put it in a decanter, we'll have the little glasses and the tray. She says no. She says no, I'm gonna. She uses a Coravan and she says, I said, but it's already fortified, you don't have to worry about it. She says no. So but I like the decanter.
02:21:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's very, it's husband-friendly. Yeah, it's attractive Like it's pretty you bring it out.
02:21:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
people come and you pour it. They don't see the label, they don't. It's not about the label, it's about having a fine.
02:21:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and once upon a well. Obviously the canters exist, because once upon a time you had to get your whiskey for barrels, and so you know you, you know that's my lot running jokes.
02:21:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you're serving down to fill it. Yes, you're filtering out the wood chips.
02:21:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Bottles used to be very plain, because bottles were expensive, so putting it into a canter was nice. But today, like, I'm still in awe of that bare face bottle with the slashes in it.
02:21:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love that Through the label. Yeah, so that was really like this. Habiki harmony. That's an attractive bottle.
02:21:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks like a hand. It really is. It's got a glass stopper.
02:22:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very nice yeah.
02:22:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, it's an attractive bottle and for $1,500.
02:22:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice or $45.
02:22:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nice Well you know when they start making bottles this nice, you got to know they're charging too much for it.
02:22:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's like the Louis XIII, it's like a Lele crystal bottle.
02:22:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sure, that's what got me with it, with that bare face. That's a $40 bottle of Canadian whiskey and it's got a gorgeous bottle. Or the Pendleton Rye that Pendleton Rye bottle.
02:22:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm still trying to find that, by the way.
02:22:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just remember you don't drink the bottle.
02:22:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, but you do admire it.
02:22:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going out tomorrow up to the, as we call it, the big liquor store, and Pendleton is on my list. That's one of the things I'm going to try to find.
02:22:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I definitely living up on the coast now. There's lots of places where I can get a Johnny Walker and there's only one bigger liquor store down in quote, the city in Seashel, which is a town of 10,000 people.
02:23:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It helps to know that inexpensive whiskey can be good and that you could walk into a place and you order like I'll order a Manhattan. They're like is makers market. I'm like yep, it's fine, that's absolutely fine. Mark is great. Yep, it's great.
02:23:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But everyone has it. Is it that really, though, richard? You just don't like the Japanese style that much. That's why you're downgrading, no.
02:23:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I do find Japanese clinical in general, but I often like that too. My problem is, the brands that have worked hard to be great have now gotten rid of all their reasonably priced products.
02:23:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're talking about not to generalize the entire island or whatever, but they've studied whiskey and they're like we're going to do this, exactly right, and in that sense they're not really innovating per se, they're just trying to come in at some period in place, I mean.
02:23:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would argue that Santoris passed that now, with them blending across like bringing Ben Nevis into some of their versions of the Amazaki. They are doing remarkable things and that's one of the themes I wanted out of. This particular story was as much as I'm, I haven't got a lot of great to say about Diagio either, or Perno or any of these large booze companies that in a lot of ways, are ripping the soul out of it, like we always love the few standalone distilleries that are left that are still running their own show the Balvinis of the world Right at the same time. I think Santoris made Mark better.
02:24:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Full stop. Yeah right, that's the and that's the story to me. Yeah Right, this is a rare example of some giant conglomerate coming in, turning around a mom and pop store and doing something special.
02:24:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So like you don't really see that a lot, well, and giving them the budget to set up the space for a short run. Right to that, a certain market's going to appeal, but it's going to raise the product overall for doing that and that's, I think, a very interesting aspect of alcohol. Look, it does not cost $100 to make this blended whiskey. I bet it doesn't barely cost $10.
02:25:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It doesn't cost $10 to make an iPhone either, but you know that's the.
02:25:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wonder if the bottle doesn't cost more than the booze in it. But it's a nice bottle.
02:25:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that would be a nice bottle that would be good for olive oil and be good for balsamic vinegar.
02:25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you buy the bottle and you fill it with some other cheap stuff.
02:25:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's right, yeah, exactly, that's a divorce.
02:25:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Divorak told me to leave it out for Louis XIII. He said just fill it with.
02:25:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, go down and he actually, I literally, he had a brandy. I have a friend I hide whiskey from. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Yep, yeah. Literally I put whiskey away because I know he's just going to suck it down. You know, Unthinkingly.
02:25:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I think you should. I showed you this, Paul. It's like I have three tiers of whiskey in the cabinet, yeah, and there's stuff for people that's just drinking stuff. There's stuff. Oh, you like whiskey? Let me show you something interesting and they use this to oh, you're very interested in whiskey yeah, let's have a and I actually like you. Okay, well, there's a whole other rock Nice.
02:25:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice. Yep, I feel like I should like whiskey, but then I also think I don't really want to get that habit.
02:26:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God yeah, well, you know, start with peanut butter. They're way worse at this. Yeah, that's just, you know, moving from screwball, it's kind of a latterable move from there to.
02:26:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not trying. You got those problems with Instagram late night Instagram. I'm not trying to hit them dude, anything extra?
02:26:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What decanter is best for screwball? It looks like a Mr Peanut. You know it's perfect.
02:26:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would be fun to have a shelf of commemorative whiskey, or just like a peanut butter cup, you know, in crystal, A crystal peanut butter cup.
02:26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is this $5,500 charge? Leo, it's a crystal peanut butter cup.
02:26:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A crystal peanut butter cup. What is Is what it is. Would you like to come with? Peanut butter cups.
02:26:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it was empty. You put whiskey in it. Sure Yep.
02:26:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I just want to point out, Paul, that I did install ARK and that window is an. Ark window floating on my Mac desktop. It's got no. No, look at that.
02:26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's got. No, yeah, no adornment whatsoever, yeah.
02:26:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Which I kind of like.
02:26:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's kind of beautiful. Yeah, it must be much further along in the Mac it's been out. Oh yeah, yeah, they developed it for. By the way, here's a fun little fact for you Apple folks out there Even the Windows version is written in Swift. Oh, interesting.
02:27:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Interesting. Yeah, I love that yeah.
02:27:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, that's. I don't know of any other. I'll tell you.
02:27:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Looking at. I was not concerned about running this until Leo pulled it up.
02:27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look how pretty. That is right that is beautiful, that is simply beautiful.
02:27:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it's On the Mac, I suspect it's much more mature, like there's more. I think there's probably more features, you know, etc, etc. But still, it's kind of an incredible thing. That's really great.
02:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, except that I have no idea what to do now, because I don't have any, no one does.
02:27:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the problem. Yeah, and you can click on stuff, maybe delete something. I remember there's the sidebar.
02:27:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. I have to do something.
02:27:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can pen it if you want to keep it there.
02:27:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I turn it off, because what I really do want, in fact, if I make this whole. Is the minimalist. This is great for the show. If I make it fullscreen, there's no extra.
02:27:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nothing.
02:27:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's perfect for the show. So that's why I actually made this the default on this machine.
02:28:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's interesting. Yeah, because you can't even so. Did you use this before? Are you familiar with this product?
02:28:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh yeah, I got on the list when it first came out and Okay.
02:28:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what do you think of this?
02:28:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I try it again and again and I'm trying to think of what the use case is for it. And so now that you've seen this. I want to try it more devotedly, you know.
02:28:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what I should have said earlier. I'm sorry. The problem with this product is we've been using WebRomance for 20-something years. We have all these, we know how things work and this thing breaks like 50% of it. If you can get over that hump and it's hard, I suspect- again people listening to this show. I think technical people will love this.
02:28:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, like I'm looking where's my Bitwarden, I know I installed it.
02:28:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know, oh, that's the worst part is extensions. There's no. The easiest Well, the easiest you can get them through the menu. There's an extension and then a submenu, but it's a little ponderous, you know. They're trying to keep it minimalist.
02:28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It should be an easier way, don't you?
02:29:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
think Maybe there is. I couldn't find it.
02:29:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, maybe there is, by the way maybe you could figure Bitwarden to autofill and you wouldn't need to touch it.
02:29:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't believe you can pin something where you can actually see the icon all the time, Like I don't believe that's possible.
02:29:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could be wrong. That's their point is you don't want to right Right?
02:29:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I do want to right In this case. I mean, the truth is I do.
02:29:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like you, I'm very much used to it. This is just a window on the internet window on the web.
02:29:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I kind of love that I think it really appeals to me.
02:29:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of interesting and it is very interesting. Less Chrome, Like I don't even know how to get back to the page I was on.
02:29:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Less Chrome literally. Yeah, Beautiful, but difficult to use. Yeah, exactly.
02:29:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It reminds me of like a supermodel difficult but beautiful.
02:29:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know what's interesting is, you know when it's also a throwback because it's keystroke driven right.
02:29:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a very simple plain page.
02:29:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's right, and that's what I'm used to. Right, if you used to terminal, or? Well, listen, we're all doing text now with chat, gpt and everything. So this is it's coming back.
02:30:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Baby, you got to get that bit warden shortcut key nailed down. You might be okay, yep.
02:30:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think that much, you just need the mouse to select the window, then you're done.
02:30:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and then you live in the keys. Look, every menu command has a keystroke. So, that's good, except for the extensions, but maybe you could add a keystroke.
02:30:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know the extension one. That's the one I can't figure out. It's a bit.
02:30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's yep, all right. Well, all I know is it's Centauri time.
02:30:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's always Centauri time.
02:30:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell, runasradiocom. That's where Runas Radio lives. It's also where NET Rocks lives, and we do have an entire YouTube playlist of Richard's whiskey talk, which I don't promote enough. I really should mention that more often.
02:30:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I every so often I said it's like you know, I took me two and a half hours to explain Scottish whiskey.
02:30:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yeah, and so it's dividing into nice little chunks, which is good. You don't have to, you know, listen all at once. I think he's done a great job of it, and so, thank you, thank you, yeah, I did too. Yeah, I don't even know where it lives. To be honest, I don't.
02:31:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it? It's a club twit thing, right? Or is it just?
02:31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, it's on Twitter, it's on YouTube. Let me look. Here's the YouTube page.
02:31:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's probably just a playlist off of the normal Twitch channel.
02:31:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I guess I'm trying to see where the? Yeah, it's the Twitter podcast network, so if you go to youtubecomtwit there, it is Okay, yeah.
02:31:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
YouTubecomtwit.
02:31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You will then see windows whiskey, which is a playlist.
02:31:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Windows whiskey.
02:31:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kevin King did this Right, really nice.
02:31:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, kevin did all the work on this.
02:31:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it took all of the little bits from all of the shows, 23 of them. I like it.
02:31:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Starting and I've had people. I've had a few now People. Somebody asked me about Pocchino the other day and I just was able to point them to that clip.
02:31:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a really. Yeah, there's Pocchino. Thank you for doing this, kevin. This is really nice. Yeah, ton of work. Yeah, so it starts with barley and it ends with a spinach. Yeah, the original eight.
02:32:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the original eight, whereas the bot was the making of the whiskey and then we went in Just like whiskey when the Japanese is in there.
02:32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, there's a whole Japanese thing. You got barley malting, milling, mashing, fermentation, distillation, barreling, bottling bourbon. That's the first nine. Number 10 is Japanese, then Irish, then Canadian. This is great. And then you go to individual pics Really really nice. Thank you, kevin, for doing that. And of course, while you're at youtubecom, You'll also see that we have a live stream of the shows as we're like now recording them. So people want to watch live, club member or not, you can do it. Of course club members get to watch before and after the shows. They get a lot of other benefits as well. So thank you to our club members because they really support this.
02:32:49
Paul Therade is at Theradecom, t-h-u-r-r-o. Double goodcom and that's become a premium member because that's really there's some great stuff behind the premium paywall. Of course most of the stuff's in public. And his book two books actually field guide to Windows 11, including Windows 10. And the brand new one, windows Everywhere, which is kind of the history of Windows through its programming languages, is. Those are both available at leanpubcom. You're going to Mexico soon, paul, pretty soon.
02:33:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a week from Saturday or Friday, okay.
02:33:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So one more show. Therade Macungy yeah, that'll be a win and the weather will turn. And, richard, you're headed out. Where are you going?
02:33:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll be in London next week. So they've got, I've got my usual little recording room in the Queen Elizabeth Convention Center, so I will have a nice view of Westminster Abbey and a good spot to record. I'll bring that little swing camera so I can show you the view. But we'll get it, we'll shoot it from there. It'll be, of course, evening in London, jolly out. Like I said, I'm pretty sure I'm going to go make a trip to a world of whiskey and grab myself a flora and fauna bottle, like it's something weird. Good, you know, a Dallioan or a Blair Aptol. It was on my radar. It's like ah, I got an excuse and that's also a whiskey I can finish in three days.
02:34:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, is there a whiskey you can't finish in three days? I was curious.
02:34:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, yeah, try drink a whole bottle of Frey. That's just a lot of, that's a lot of ashtray man, that's tough, no way.
02:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What else? Oh, we do this show on Wednesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern time, 1900 UTC. That's when you can watch the YouTube live stream. After the fact, though, and that's probably a lot easier for your life, busy lifestyle go to twittv, slash ww for current and past episodes, or the YouTube channel there's one dedicated to Windows Weekly or, you know, subscribe really, that's the best thing to do on your favorite podcast client and get it automatically. Soon, as we're done. Putting it together on a Wednesday, then, say, tuesday, it's Wednesday, 11am Pacific, I don't know who can tell anymore?
02:35:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who knows anymore? I've had a little bit of that.
02:35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hibiki, I don't care, I'm going to go over to another thermometer. Thank you, paul, thank you Richard, thanks to all of our Windows winners and dozers. I'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.
