I Will Sell Him This MacBook - WAN Show March 6, 2026

What's up everyone and welcome to the WAN show. We are coming to you live from the threat locker studio here at Zero Trust World. That's right. They've taken over the WAN show, but they haven't taken over the topics. And we've got a lot of great stuff to talk to you guys about this week. Of course, the big one was Apple dropping an absolute bomb of many bombs of in kind of seriously, unironically, incredible products this week. I don't know how closely you've looked at it yet, but I'm pretty sure that by the end of this show, I can sell you a MacBook. In other news, Ratings, the I mean, what would I what would I call it? Incredibly influential and important testing site spelled RT I N GS. I know it's pronounced ratings. Don't worry about it. They have gone paywalled for some of the uh key data around TVs. Um basically kind of a lot of things. So, we'll be talking about well the bad stuff about that, but also the pressure that realistically they have got to be under in order to do this because we feel a lot of the same pressures. What else we got? Meta sends intimate videos and photos from Ray-B band AI glasses to uh to human workers apparently in Kenya for some reason. So, uh nice. They they kind of tried to pixelate some things out and it didn't work so great apparently. And also, if that worries you, along with everything else about privacy in in 2026, uh, graphine OS is coming to Motorola phones in 2027. Does that does that seem like a problem? Just like officially. I mean, that sounds cool. No, that's a that's what I'm saying. Oh, good. If you're concerned about privacy. All right, roll that intro. Yeah, let's go. Do does it work? Do we have the intro? Is it running? Oh, you're going to you're going to queue me in. The show is brought to you today by Threat Locker, who has done a full WAN takeover along with our rap partner Dbrand. Okay, I got some Dbrand that I can show off as well as our laptop partner Razer brought these with us. And our chair partner, Razer, who apparently we shipped Razer chairs all the way to Florida in order to sit on these. Is that what happened? I don't think we did. Someone did. They did. Razer did. Yeah. That's crazy. That's hilarious. Yes, they are. All right, cool. Why don't we jump right into our first topic, which is of course got to be the MacBook Neo. Okay, Apple dropped a bunch of cool stuff. Give me a second here. Okay, the iPhone 17e looks pretty compelling. It now has Mag Safe charging. Uh, that was a that was a major omission on the previous E. Um, I I honestly I think that's the that's the biggest one for me. Uh, it's got a new processor. Very cool. Trey, cool. Couple hundred dollar cheaper than a regular 17. But realistically, I think if you were going to get an iPhone, you'd probably go for a full fat iPhone anyway, which I know you've been considering. You've thought about it. He's thought about it. I I might go for the mid-tier one. Yeah, that's that's the full fat, not the Pro. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's the iPhone. But what I don't think this man has at any point in his life seriously considered is going MacBook. Literally never. They have a few new MacBooks. So they've got new Pros with new chips. They've got an M5 MacBook Air that starts with 16 gigs of unified memory, 512 gigs of storage. Honestly, the new pros and errors in the context of the current NAND and DRAM shortage are actually looking like a better value than before in spite of the fact that there have been some pricing adjustments upward for the starting at that in some cases are only upward because the starting at has more base storage now for instance. So, Apple managed to do this without making major changes to pricing. But the big one, the big one that everyone is talking about is the MacBook Neo. Now, how much do you know about it already? Practically nothing. I know it's 600 bucks. I know it's a MacBook. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, it's a mobile chip, right? It's a mobile chip. So, it uses the A18 Pro chip. So, this is not like Apple M series silicon, but realistically, it's going to perform pretty darn well. It's got two cores that are going to be able to turbo quite aggressively, and then it's got, I believe it's six total, so I think it has another another four cores total. Guys, let me know in the chat if I've got the core count wrong. The point is this thing is powerful enough that on a very re recent iPhone it was delivering pretty great experiences and everything from obviously you know doom scrolling on Tik Tok but you know all the way to doing video editing because that's what people are doing on iPhones these days. Yeah. So it's a six core CPU 5 core GPU with a 16 core neural engine. Thank you very much uh Chronified over in chat. All right. It only has 8 gigs of memory. Hold on. I need your I need your full and undivided attention because this is important. only 8 gigs of memory, nonupgradeable as well. It is not only non-user upgradeable, but it is non-upgradeable from the factory. Oh, and a big part of the reason for that is because of the way the A18 Pro is manufactured with the DRAM right on top. This package is she's packaged and they weren't going to do a new package design for this MacBook Neo. This is a firstofits-kind product. I mean, I don't When's the last time we saw a MacBook for under $1,000? Has it People who have been following Apple for longer than me might know MacBook? Back when they did plastic MacBooks. Was that a thing? I'm I'm not I'm not aware of anything. Someone says the 12-in one, I think. Okay. Okay. It only has two USBC ports and a 3 and a half millimeter jack. That's not the end of the world. Only one of them is USB 3 with display capabilities. But still not really the end of the world. A lot of people are just carrying dongles these days. I carry a dongle. The first MacBook that didn't have a type A port on it was 10 and a half years ago. Was the dongle machine was a long time ago. Long time ago. There's no backlit keyboard. And the base model current laptop doesn't have a backlit keyboard and it's way more expensive. The base model has no Touch ID. Not this one. This one does. That's a $100 upcharge for Touch ID. Okay, but hear me out. Let me make let me make my pitch. It has a 500 nit peak brightness display. It gets the same magic keyboard that as far as we can tell, as far as we can tell, it gets a magic keyboard just like Apple's other mobile Macs. It doesn't have a gigantic trackpad, but it has a very decentiz trackpad. And I mean, if you've used a Mac, have you used a Mac? Okay, so you know Apple trackpads, they're good. They're they're outstanding. It's got I'm concerned about the trackpad. 1080p webcam. Okay, so it's got like a actually freaking decent webcam and you know that the image quality is going to be good because the A18 Pro, well that's the same chip that's going to drive an iPhone camera. Man, people people keep posting like no haptic trackpad, no backlit keyboard. I'm like guys, this is a $600 laptop. I'm not expecting any of that stuff. $600 laptop, aluminum chassis. Wow. See, I assumed that it would be unapologetically plastic. Assumed it would have been plastic. The second I saw it, I was like, they've got to But that's what Apple is so good about is the surfaces that you interact with. So, you got a decent display, you've got a decent webcam, keyboard, trackpad. They still manage to have dual speakers uh with their spatial spatial audio because it's all it's all processing. Apple's a software company at the end of the day and they make some pretty incredible hardware these days, but software is where they specialize. It's where they come from. So, with all of that in mind, here's my pitch. Because I don't think you would go Mac OS. Oh, but I didn't say that I was going to sell you a MacBook Neo for you. He's realizing. Okay. No, I thought you were going in a different direction. The next time I know that you have some family members that are way overdue for a laptop. Unironically, I've been thinking about literally this laptop for that person. Yeah, I know. I know that, you know, in the future there could be, you know, family members that are younger in your family. Like you've got some you've got some I I don't know how much you talk about your family tree, but I know there are just niece, nephew. Sure. No other details. There are younger people. Y if you were looking for a machine for something for someone like that, for one of those people, it could really fit. Yeah. I think this is the one. Yep. It comes the Neo, you might say. It has some fun colors. I think the yellow is actually like pretty cool. Um, I feel the yellow might be the one to get actually. It's pretty sweet. And it's Apple, so you know that this thing is going to get software support. It's probably going to last for freaking ever for a reasonable amount of time. Battery is probably going to be quite Oh, dude. The battery is only, I think, 36 watt hours or something like that because it runs a mobile chip. Still going to last for freaking ever. It's still got really solid sort of uh longevity ratings, but because the capacity is so small, just charges like you can have just like a portable battery bank and just top it right up. You like you could operate this thing away from the wall for so flipping long. dude. I I've seen for me just the the Mac OS experience, iOS in general, all this, it just feels my brain doesn't like it. I don't have a better explanation than that. But there are other people's like my my mom, I've told this story a bunch of times. She was on an Android phone for years and struggled for years. She got an iPhone and within 24 hours like way better with the iPhone than she ever was with the Android phone and she'd never used like Apple devices before that. That wasn't like a familiarity thing. Um, so yeah, I mean it's a very interesting device. And I've seen a lot of people in the comments on our Apple announcement video that were all like, "But you could get this Acer that has a dedicated GPU and it's this and it's this and it's this." And I'm like, "Bro, you don't understand. That Acer is going to have support dropped for it in in no amount of time. It's probably running hot. Windows 12 is what shaping up to be an AI first operating system. So in terms of software updates, you can make a pretty strong argument that Apple has fudged some stuff when it comes to Mac OS. But like when the bar is the bar is at the bottom of the Mariana's trench at this point. You want a potentially surprising take? Sure. I think at this point I would rather go with this laptop with the OS that it ships with than a Windows 12 laptop. And even though we haven't seen Windows 12 yet, we haven't seen anything to indicate it would be anything good. And the thing is with the same argument that I gave for like I'm going to run Arch on my laptop, I bet you I could run Mac OS just fine. It's going to live in a browser. On a laptop. Yeah. Who cares if the login to the laptop screen looks different? Like it's just going to be browsers. It's the exact same argument. So, honestly, on a laptop, it on a laptop that I'm predominantly using for work. It would probably just be fine. And there's things that Apple does really, really well. Uh, one of them is I wouldn't expect to have any stupid Wi-Fi connectivity issues on my MacBook Neo, whereas I was using until very recently, I was dailying an HP Elite Book with um I was going to say cheap laptops. That's not a cheap laptop. What's it uh what's its nuts? the stricks Halo with AMD's like topofthe- line mobile chipset. Dude, I had so many Wi-Fi issues with that thing. So, I would half the time I rebooted it, it was because it sleep bugged and would just like refuse to wake up. And the other half the time I rebooted it would be because I couldn't connect to Wi-Fi and transfer any data. It's like MediaTek chip or something. Yeah. Yeah. Because of AMD's partnership with them. Now, I I could have cracked it open. I didn't actually see if it there was a replaceable card, but at that kind of a price, it's like a $4,000 machine. I should not have to do that. No. Period. And these days, how often are they removable uh of on thin and lights? It's becoming less common, which is really frustrating. So, that's my pitch. I think in the next several years, there is a solid like 50% chance that you will buy a MacBook Neo. Yeah, honestly, probably. And and like something that I find really interesting is like I'm looking I'm on their store right now. I don't know if Dan wants to share it or not, but I'm on their store right now and I'm looking at the lineup side by side. Yeah. Of their their like previously cheap laptop, the MacBook Air. Cheap. I'm putting in quotes cuz it's Apple. Uh and their newly cheap MacBook, the the Neo. And that jump. Like Huh. And there's things about the Air that are a lot more compelling. The five chip is wicked. And you can configure the Air with way more storage, way more RAM. You get Thunderbolt. Like there's stuff there's value in the air. It's a serious deal machine at that And for a lot of people, they just really need a browser. Uh-huh. Okay. Did you you didn't watch our video, right? No. Yeah. Okay. So, one of the things that I said in the video was you can look at the MacBook Neo and you can go, well, it's manufactured e-waste. It's got 8 gigs of RAM in 2026. But hear me out. Is it not manufactured e-waste to have people who are just going to browse Facebook and write in Google Docs and have this have a machine that's loaded up with a whole bunch of RAM? Wouldn't it be better if we saved that RAM for the precious AI data centers that need it so much more than us consumers do? As a as a Mac OS S for the love of God/s whoever is actually angry about that, I don't know, dude. Do not clip that out of contrast. There's a few people nodding during that, I swear. Um, the How far does 8 gigs run you with Mac OS? A little better. A little better. They they do support some memory compression. If you are a tab monster, you're still going to run up against it. you will. You will. But to save like 600 bucks, it might be worth closing a couple. If you're mostly browsing on Facebook Marketplace or, you know, replying to emails or writing that book you've always been meaning to write, I don't think it has to be an obstacle. Um, and I don't think you need to be an obstacle for our very special guest who's going to be coming on to the show to talk about Zero Trust World. They people in the room were thinking about applauding and then they just didn't and then it got really awkward. It was slightly awkward. I'm not going to lie. Hey, welcome. Hello. Somebody just left their laptop wide open in front of me. This is Rob the uh Okay, that is a very good thing for you to notice and for us to give him a little, you know, one of these for uh Rob is the chief product officer or sorry, excuse me, chief podcast officer for Threat Locker who took over the show today and he's here to talk to us a little bit about Zero Trust World. You guys are right in the middle of it and I'm going to I swear I'm going to let you talk, but this is the co-hosting with me experience. Really? I just kind of keep going and then you you just like that you got to just jump right in. That's okay. That's okay. No, we appreciate you having us on. Uh do want to talk a little bit about what's been the huge news is your trust world this year other than you know the chief uh technical officer of uh of a large media company just leaving his laptop on the desk completely unlocked. Does it have threat? It does have threat locker on it. Touche. Okay, you're fine. You're fine. Got him. Got him. Yeah. Nice. So, what have you guys been up to? Um, a lot of shaking hands and kissing babies and some shaking babies and kissing hands. Um, just basically pounding the flesh, talking to people, meeting people, doing a bit of talking, uh, doing a bit of podcasting. Um, releasing some new products. Yeah, why don't you tell us about that? Um, new products are awesome. Um, so they fundamentally two parts to it. We've got zero trust network access and we've got zero trust cloud access. uh start with a second, I suppose. Zero cloud. Oh, I'm going to have you go back and I'm going to have you tell us about the concept of zero trust. We've actually talked about it on the W show before, but I'm sure we have some new viewers this week. Um I mean, you can sum it up really simply, which is to well, in my mind, it's to deny by default. Um you think about cyber security for the last 20 years, fundamentally it all operated in the same way, which is to allow everything except those things we know to be bad. uh the mechanism by which that was done has changed. So it started off with antivirus with definitions and you know keeping definitions up to date based on everything bad that's out there. But then we started to recognize the behavior of this software. We started to proactively getting into edor territory but I mean fundamentally they still allowed everything to happen except bad stuff right. Um the idea being you have to detect and respond. But I mean fundamentally detection assumes well it is breach because something bad has gone into the environment. Something bad is running in the environment and you're hoping that whatever tool it is you're using is going to recognize it. I.e. detect UAC will save us all. UAC will not save us all. It will not save us all. And you would be amazed. I have spoken to people who think that I've taken away admin rights for my users. we're not going to have to worry about ransomware. I'm like, you do realize that anyone can run ransomware, don't you? Oh, so yeah, it's a common misconception. UAC is not going to save us all. Okay. So now tell us about the new zero trust products. Sure. So um I will but I'll I'll sort of mention the other things. So to sort of finish the thought about zero trust, deny by default is one way of looking at it. Assume breach is another way of looking at it. Um it's effectively about controls rather than making decisions uh on what's good or bad. I mean fundamentally we don't care about what's good or bad. We're about applying controls whether those controls be allow listing. So blocking things by default from running. So can't malware can't run, ransomware can't run. But also good things other things that could be misused are going to be blocked from running. Um we extended and that's the one place where threat locker excel is we extend that concept of deny by default. So it's not just about what can run or what can't run. Although that is important because what things can do when they are running is almost equally important, right? So things like PowerShell weaponized all the time because it is so powerful. It's so powerful. It's right in the name. So it is literally right in the name. Um you don't worry about it. It's that's fine. Uh yeah, you can run remote code. You can download and execute payloads. You can excfiltrate data. You can shell the power tool. Quite literally anything pretty much. Yeah. So and it's on every Windows machine. So if you're an attacker, it makes sense to use it. But the way to stop it from being weaponized is say, well, look, it can run, but it can't access my files. It can't access the internet. So it can't run remote code. It can't exfiltrate your data. It can't download payloads. Um, and we apply the same concept to network access as well. So basically, same principle. Deny by default, permit by exception. Um, so you're allowing those things that need to connect to stuff to connect to stuff and blocking everything else. So it stops, you know, compromised VPNs or vulnerabilities and firewalls or somebody spinning up a VM on a machine and trying to attack via that, right? All those things. And again, you'll notice everything I've mentioned so far, none of it requires decisions on good and bad. All of it is just purely around controls. So, and there's a bunch more stuff we do with the platform as well. So, we've got network control, we've got patch management, we've got it's an entire zero trust platform. Now the new stuff, the sexy stuff, uh the stuff everybody is going to want to buy like yesterday. Um zero trust cloud access. So the idea being that MFA is good. MFA is right. People should use MFA. MFA is not a silver bullet. MFA can be bypassed. Oh, we know all about that. Yes, we we had our channel stolen by a uh like a session cookie hijack. Oh, really? Okay, that's interesting. So they didn't even need to use our MFA. Well, you need our new product in that case. Um I also am painfully aware of this because I spent many many hours at not last year's zero trust world, the one before that where we used Evil Jinx and Wi-Fi Pineapples to basically snarf credentials and cookies, right? And it showed that while MFA is great, MFA is not effective all the time and can be bypassed. So So what does this do? It basically roots all. So the likes of Office 365 for example or Google or Salesforce or any cloud service you care to mention allows you to limit access by IP address. So by default the entire internet can access an Office 365. Right now a lot of people will use conditional access but they'll do say conditional access. We're here in America. They'll say okay I'm going to lock it down to American IP addresses. That's fine but America still has a lot of IP addresses. Yeah. and you could just route through a through a data center or a random infected machine. Okay, I've just bypassed that control. Um, last year we took a stab at what we call cloud control. And cloud control basically the idea was that I'd have an app on my phone. I've got a threat locker agent running on my machine. I can gather all those IP addresses and then I can add them to a named location in Office 365, for example, and apply conditional access based on that. So, we've gone from all the IP addresses to an entire country's IP addresses to 3 or 4,000 maybe in a reasonable size organization IP addresses. Um, that was great except Microsoft because what would happen is we'd gather all the IP addresses, we'd update upload them to Microsoft and Microsoft would take their sweet ass time updating conditional access policies, right? So, that was a great idea. It was well executed I thought on our side but then when Microsoft entered the room it basically all went to Am I allow curs on this? You can say it went to pot. It went to pot. So we went back to the drawing board and said well what's the other way we can do this? How can we stop businesses from suffering business email compromise or you know people who shouldn't have access to stuff getting access to stuff cookie session cookie session hijacking etc. So basically it is a way of routting traffic through us. So instead of thousands of IP addresses or millions of IP addresses, it's one IP address. So in your Office 365, in your G Suite, in your Salesforce, basically just allow one IP address to connect to that. All others are blocked. And that way you guys have the nimleness for us to go, okay, here's our ranges. Make sure this is updated so our people can access their stuff. Everything is going through Microsoft or Google or whoever, any of the slowmoving giants, they just don't really need to update anything. They don't need to update anything. It's literally just an address is all that needs to be. Now, this might be a little uncomfortable. I know you guys sponsored the show today and everything, but I mean, I have to ask. Um, you say zero trust, but it sounds like I need to trust you. It's a tiny bit of trust. Okay. Okay. Um, no, the the phrase zero trust has been around for some time. It is somewhat of a misnomer. I mean, look, the fact of the matter is zero trust means computer turned off, locked in a vault, never connected to anything. That is fundamentally zero trust. That is not practical. Um, that is possible, but you're not get a lot of work done. You're not going to get a lot of work done and businesses are going to grow into a halt. So, that's kind of impossible. Okay. So, a little bit of trust then, tiny little bit of trust. Tiny little bit of trust. Now, my second question then is never mind the trust. Let's say I trust you, but it sounds like there's a single point of failure for access to all of my cloud services if your server goes down. So, what have you guys done to build resiliency into this redundancy? It's not one server, it's multiple servers. In fact, it's four servers basically for each organization or each company that's using it. So, there's no single point of failure. It is multiple. And that's the that's the biggest launch this year. Then it depends on how you look at it. That is the one with the potential biggest reach because that is where the biggest problem lies. More organizations and most organizations need help. They need more than just MFA. The zero trust network access comes from a unbelievably common question asked to us by customers. So we listen to customers feedback. I mean zero trust world apart from all the baby shaking and handkissing and all that stuff. Um, one of the best parts about it is we get to hear customers both good things, but probably more importantly bad things. Sure, we're running up against time a little bit. So, give me the short version of why I need this instead of Windows firewall. Because you don't want to be opening VPNs to the internet because VPNs open to the internet are bad. They're exploited. They're they're, you know, a compromised credential or a vulnerability in a firewall away from being exploited. So in the same way are we routing everything through you guys then? Effectively yeah both sides effectively. So you have a a resource in the office that you want to share with your users on the road. You basically just publish that. It's not published on the internet but basically any devices that you say should be able to connect to that will connect to each other via us. Very cool. Well hey you know what it was really nice. We forgot something. Thanks for coming out. We did. We did. There's somebody who's probably watching right now and it's gonna break his heart that I'm sitting here talking to you. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Hi, Ben. Hi, Ben. Okay, that's it. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Take care, man. Cheers. All right. That was Rob, chief product officer for Threat Locker, who sponsored the entire WAN show today. Now Luke's back. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was absolutely awesome. And let's jump right into our next topic. Mr. Luke, do you want to talk about Linux misadventures or do you want to talk about ratings going payw wall? So, so I left my laptop open and he left his badge on the desk. Um, yeah, ratings.com changes their membership program, places test behind payw wall sort of. Uh, ratings arings.com has announced substantial change to their website uh citing a loss of organic search traffic similarly to how we've been talking about the lab site. um seeing their numbers actually the chart looks very similar. The numbers are a lot higher but the chart the shape of the graph looks very similar. Yeah. Where everything was going like kind of like it was going where you're getting referrals from Google search and then all of a sudden AI summaries start scraping all of your data and just presenting it directly to the user. Clicks go up the clicks go down. Um yeah they so they uh they also highlighted how AI is scraping the website and using their results without attribution. The website hopes that the new membership will provide them with the funds to continue their testing across a growing number of categories and they are like constantly adding new things. It's awesome. um ratings. Previous premium tier called insider access limited readers to not okay the the the subscribers to insider access weren't limited the the nonsubscribers were limited to 10 individual product articles per month but allowed you to see the full test results and scores and all that kind of of those 10. Yes. The program also provided early access to product. The program itself provided early access to product reviews and allowed users to provide input into develop into developing testing categories and kind of like vote on what things you wanted them to review. It's actually very cool system. Uh the new membership, it unlocks test results and scores for paying you unlocks test. This is uh yeah because free users can no longer see individual product scores, individual test results or individual test scores. So, unless you're a paying subscriber, unless you are a paying subscriber, um, free users can still see ratings best in categories list, which as far as my understanding goes is like where a vast majority of their their traffic is. So, for a lot of people, this won't necessarily change that part of it. Uh, the overall summaries they can see as well as subcategory summaries on product pages. Um, for example, how a headphone performs for travel, office work, wired gaming, audio reproduction accuracy, stuff like that. and educational articles like their TV burn-in test, ANC explainer, and Wi-Fi 7 multi-link operation articles, which are very cool. Um, the the problem is the the the like new bit, sorry, I'm I'm not sure where this is, but I swear it was in here earlier. The the new bit, just riffing, um, is that some of the the the like graphs will be blurred out and stuff. Yeah. And and even like the numbers, like a lot is going to be blurred out. And I'm going to I'm going to get out ahead of this one here and I'm going to I'm going to throw in my my hot take. I see a lot of people really upset about this. This is this is this is the reality. This is the reality. I have I have absolutely no negative sentiment whatsoever towards ratings over this move. No. No. This is and if you have any negativity towards ratings for what they're doing right now, you've got to point it at the right place. I feel like this is what we were kind of talking about when we did that video recently on LT and we had that conversation on WAN show. Can you show my screen about be angry but be angry at the right people, you know, by all means, you know, be angry about affordability issues in tech. be angry that a site like ratings will not show you the rating of a product anymore, but don't be angry at ratings. Be angry at the AI giants. Be angry at the AI giants that are scraping, that are stealing the hard work that real actual human people with blood flowing through their veins are doing to test this stuff. Yeah. and just putting it in an AI summary and profiting off of it, benefiting from it, and not paying for it. And I know I don't have to tell you guys be mad about AI, but seriously, be mad about AI because whether it's ratings.com or whether it's housefresh, um that's that um that air purifier test site that has really struggled with a bunch of issues. We did a great video um a little while back, you guys can go check it out, talking about, you know, everything that they've gone through with respect to manufacturers trying to uh make their lives really difficult as well as AI summaries coming in and basically just nuking their source of revenue and stealing their testing. Um our discussion question is what does this mean for labs? because that was our goal was to do kind of a a ratings style thing over time. We knew it was going to take time. It's taken longer than we want, but we knew it was going to take time and have a rating style product page, but more for like IT tech, you know, GPUs, CPUs, that sort of thing. Um, every component in a computer was the original goal. What are we supposed to do? The original concern that we had was okay they're they're written articles and people are less interested in written articles now therefore traffic will not be super high when we first started the lab site. These AI scrapers to this degree didn't exist when we first started trying to do the lab site. So now it's I don't know it's a difficult pivot. I my my heart goes out to the ratings team. Hopefully this works for them. Um this the vibe I think it will work and and look what and and look if if we say yes, we think it will work and you see any value in it whatsoever, you should go subscribe and be part of that. And if we say no, we don't think it will work and you can spare a little bit of pocket change, then you should probably just go subscribe anyway. Prove us wrong, make us wrong. So whatever he says, you know, they're doing great work over there. I think they're are Canadian bros, by the way. I don't know if you guys know that. I really, really, really hope they make it. I am keeping in mind though that I'm trying to be objective as possible. I think this will work, but with a pretty big and bold asterisk on the end of it. Yeah. Of like I don't think they're I don't know. I really hope they do genuinely, but I don't feel like this is going to lead to the growth or the good sustainment that they probably need. And I think it's going to hurt for a while. Um, and I think the ratings that we see in 5 to 10 years is probably going to feel a little different than the ratings we see now. But I would so love to be wrong. That would be so awesome. Um, yeah, I don't think it's going to work, but I understand why they're doing it. And if I was in their shoes, then gosh darn it, I would try. Yeah. Oh, totally. you ought to do something because what they're doing is important. But what I worry about is that it's going to take too long for people to realize how important it is. They might have nailed their mix though. The fact that you can still get their best of pages and things will still be in the right order. You don't have the scores, but it's right order. And like I mean honestly, dude, like I'm looking at it going, this isn't going to stop AI bots from scraping them. No, they'll buy a subscription for a few bucks, scrape everything anyway. Like, I'm just I feel like quality data and quality information is just kind of doomed. It's not incentivized anymore. No one actually goes the whole way. They just search it and stop. Uh and we can complain about that all we want. It's going to keep happening. It doesn't matter. Um there's no way you're going to get the zeitgeist twisted on that. Uh one question in here. Why don't we uh use number scores for reviews? That's because I decided many, many years ago I thought it was an oversimplification and that people need to watch the whole video for the nuanced take. Was I right? Yes. Does that matter? No. Because not having numbers or editor's choice award or gold, silver, bronze award makes websites like unusable significantly harmed our ability to communicate in the way that people want to be communicated to. Yeah. And sometimes it's really hard because like how do you ultimately differentiate between these two things that are like basically equal? Um, so we we also don't have experience with it, but yeah, in a web format, everyone wants the best of list and they want to click on the one at the top. And e gadget guy says, "So every game in the world being at three out of five is wrong." SL Yeah. Like I I've always fundamentally disagreed with just summarizing something as complex, especially as a game. Oh my god, a game in just one number. It's It's ludicrous. And yet I find myself doing it sometimes. In fact, no, I think I did it today. Who was I talking to that I was like, "Okay, tell me what are how much you like it or what are the odds of you doing this out of 10?" I think I think I did that to someone today. Are they in this room? Was it you? I have no idea. Okay, I don't remember. Because because that's what we want. Sometimes we don't want a long explanation. We just want the gist of it. And some people have pointed out in the past like expecting that I or we or whoever would have some amount of animosity to ratings because they, you know, they have a website that covers keyboards. I guess that's like our main crossover, keyboards and mice. Um, in terms in terms of the website, bearing any kind of ill will or having any kind of animosity toward anyone else who's trying to test and provide valuable information to consumers is is like borderline like villain behavior quite frankly. And and like it's it it also I think people need more sources of information not less in an ever shrinking third party ones too. consolidating media landscape. This is part of the every single time we ever talk about this topic, we say, you know, check multiple reviews, check multiple perspectives. This is a valuable part of that pie. If you manage to develop like a weird hate boner over someone else trying to do product testing, then you might be the problem. Um, yeah. So, not going to name anyone. Good luck ratings. I really hope it goes really well. genuinely they they're still keeping the YouTube channel open and pumping and there's no real change there. So hopefully hopefully that goes well. I did notice that part of the announcement was a YouTube video. Um a pretty good YouTube video. So hopefully that goes well. Um all right, we don't have a ton of time today, so why don't we jump into Linux challenge updates? I shared a file with myself. Um, naturally, even though part one is not even out on YouTube yet, it is out on float plane. Talk a little bit more about that later. Uh, I did see all of your comments that I was a fool. You fool. You've chosen Papos. You fool. After everything that happened with Papos last time, um, I'm not going to be gas lit on this. What happened last time was that Pop O was like the flavor duour and I went with it because it was the flavor duour, especially if you were running a GeForce card. It was recommended a lot back then. Okay. The issue that I had with it was blamed on me super hard. And as I've talked about in the past already, there was absolutely an element of user error. Absolutely. There also was an element of an random bizarre bug crazy timing no user should have ever seen and even after that came to light so right out of the gate I was blamed hard for 100% and even after the bug came to light the presentation to me across like the entire internet was what an idiot popos is goated how could he have managed to screw this up and And then I didn't use Pop OS. So Pop OS I didn't have like a bunch of problems with Pop OS. I had one problem that was attributed to a bug. Weren't you like out of there in like an hour? Yeah. I used Mangaro. Yeah. For like the whole challenge. So So there's like there's like deep deep threads discussing how I could have possibly gone pop after last time when what actually happened last time was a I didn't go pop OS and b the one issue that I had with it was blamed 100% on me. The third part of the narrative that I'm not going to allow to happen here is that how could he possibly choose it? Nobody recommends Pop OS anymore. Uh, yes. Yes, they do. As you guys will see in the video, whether it's listicles, whether it's asking an AI, I I actually did something after last WAN show um and Lionus was there. I could probably bring it up right now, but I ask my chat jippity um like with what you know about me and remove the fact that you know which DRO I'm using right now from your memory for this from what you know about me which which DRO should I use? Um and it it gave a top three and Pop OS was in there. And and you can go Yeah, well AIS are stupid. They just like hallucinate that it's good or no. AIS are trained on the web at large. So, if you're going to have a little head cannon narrative that nobody recommends pop OS, lose it. Just lose it. Go be part of the solution. Write a really great article on top Linux distros and get some good SEO and be part of the solution. Otherwise, you're not really doing anything other than just like making noise. Yeah, its recommendations were number one for me was Open Seuss Tumble Reed. Tumbleweed Fedora Workstation was number two and Arch was number three. Now it's like remember I'm gonna play games and it still did open sus number one. Still did Fedora number two and did Pop OS number three. Now let's have some fun. Let's have some fun because obviously even before seeing any feedback on my choice of Pop OS I I haven't been thrilled with Pop OS. Oh man. H sorry that's that's another part of the narrative that's just driving me crazy. How could he use that? Cosmic desktop environment is like functionally in alpha. Dude, when I go to their website and I download LTS and it doesn't mention anywhere that it's in alpha or beta. Also, it isn't. It's v1 something. Like, don't don't you don't get to say that. I don't if I download an LTS, that's that's not on me. That's on system 76 at that point. If it's not good, no. No, I'm not. I No. Uh but anyway, my experience with it hasn't been great. So before anyone even was like, why do you choose Pop OS? Of course, I was the first one asking, man, why did I choose Pop OS anymore? I seem to be just cursed with Pop OS because you got to remember for me, I I've never had any information other than my issues with Pop OS were clearly user error. So I was already exploring other dros. And guess what, Luke? It turns out the curse carries over. Do you want to see? I spent one of I spent one evening. I was probably at it for about two and a half hours in between work and going to our our badminton night and uh Dan, can you throw up uh can you throw up my system here? Uh trying to get a couple of my systems um so fascinating. Tux, I haven't spent two and a half hours fixing anything. So, I wanted to do I wanted to do my home theater system this time because um I actually like just actually come back to me for a second, Dan. I wanted to do my home theater PC because I like just had to do some tom foolery with my old Harmony remote and I like got it one button go set up again which required a combination of CC and infrared. Um just just Yeah. And I uh and so I wanted to get the the theater machine working. And I also it was a great opportunity because now that I've given up on running pop OS on everything already, I was like, "Okay, well that's a perfect place to run Basite." And Basite has an Nvidia build, so theoretically it should be fine. Also, the other machine that I wanted to do was because I was already a week into the challenge and I uh hadn't done my work laptop yet, which is kind of a hack because that's the system that I use 97% of the time. So, I was like, "Okay, I really need to get Linux on my work machine." So, I was working on both of those. All right. Um Dan, go ahead and hit me audio, don't you? Nope. Okay. So, this is me kind of wrapping up Oh, okay. Do your thing. Thank you. Go again. Well, after a couple blah blah blah. He's talking. He's doing talking things. I don't even know if this is going to be part of a video at this point. I need to go. It's bad night. Okay, that's my face. Here's my systems. That's Basite on the left and that's Kubuntu on the right. What is even happening over there? Nothing. Luke, I recorded I recorded everything I did. I recorded everything I did. I am literally quite literally, no other word for it, cursed. I It's okay. So, for a little bit of contrast for mine since the the video that released, uh, nothing has happened negative on my system literally at all. I still have I I was surprised I mentioned it in the video, but I still have the problem where when I restart my computer, I have to restart my mixer or else it won't detect anything. That might be solvable somehow. I've put zero minutes into trying to solve that. Everything else is working great. I was on my work laptop in a meeting and I had Windows on it because I had to prove to Lenovo that Windows wasn't the reason why my laptop is had constant errors ever since I got it. Um, and I did. So, I didn't need Windows on it anymore. And I was pressing the start menu and the start menu would show up, but I couldn't interact with the search in the start menu at all. It wouldn't work no matter what I did. And I crashed out in the meeting and just like live installed Mint and it has been flawless. The only thing I did, I installed Mint, switched it to Nvidia drivers, which like you click a thing in the first popup menu that comes up that's like let's get started and there's a driver manager. You click that, you click Nvidia, and it just downloads it and it's done. So like the whole like this is made for Nvidia DRO thing I think is a little oversold sometimes. Yeah, in my experience at least. And then uh on the flight over here, Slay the Spire 2 launched yesterday morning just so no like it it came out into early access yesterday morning. It has had no time for anyone to like optimize it or anything. I downloaded it, ran it, instantly worked, zero issues. I Bluetooth my headphones to the laptop in the flight. Good for you. Happy no problems. I'm so happy for you, Luke. I had just less problems with it than Windows. So, the Bazite system uh rebooting did not fix that cuz I kind of assumed that would be it. Also, it's surprisingly functional. I do in that state. Like, it'll go to sleep after a while with with it looking like that and then it'll wake from sleep and look exactly like what you saw. That's so nice. So, it's very installed. That's so crazy. And then the Kubuntu system that was on the right was like that just with the black screen with the Kubuntu logo for I think it was probably a solid 10 or 15 minutes before I had to leave and then I didn't check on it again after I got back from badminton. I came back to it in the morning and I am now Kubuntu. Oh, this is Oh, okay. However, interesting. However, I'm about to show you something fun. Uh, I'm going to go ahead and click the not start menu and I'm going to restart my system. Yes, I mean now. I have noticed it won't really prompt you. Um, but after you install, I'd maybe give it a a restart or two. Oh, I've restarted a few times. No, I'm not I'm not uh I'm more talking to them. I don't think anything I can say is going to help solve your curves. Yeah, it's it's Dude, it's wild. it's wild. I don't know. Okay, wait for it. Oh, hold on. It didn't do it. Hey, the first the first few times I've rebooted this system, it's prompted me, do you want to try a live environment or do you want to install even though and I I have this on camera, so I don't I don't need you guys to believe me. I've got proof. Even though there's no installation media installed in it, and the operating system is installed. Okay, I'm just gonna I'm gonna enter my I'm just going to enter my password. I'm going to see if it does it after that. Yep, there it is. That's funky. You don't have installation media in anymore? Weird. I've never tried Kubuntu. What? Mr. Besser, show us on this. Oh, I can show you on Yeah, sure. There you go. So every time I boot this machine, I get the try Kubuntu like like like a booting like a live boot environment or install Kubuntu and then if I click install then it just dumps me on my desktop. Yep. Nice. Like why? And people are going to ask me they're going to ask me people always ask me. They ask me all the time. What did you do? Nothing. I didn't do anything. I just I just have I thought you Yeah. Interesting. Is that Is that wild or what? Now I've got a followup. Pretty easy to pass. I've got a follow-up because I managed to break a Linux system that wasn't even mine. Oh yeah, this is funny. I got a message about this. So Dankpods was up for a visit recently and one of the things that happened was his system for whale. Well, he didn't he was ready to blame the airline or the airport. Oh, I blame his packing job, but he got it here and he shook it and it went rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle. And we were like, "Okay, that's content, baby. Let's do a video." Linus fixing DankPods's computer. So, he's a Basite guy, you know. I get the system. I find some problems with a GPU support brace that was very DIYed. Um, along with some screws that have fallen out, um, some inadequate packing foam. I rip the system apart. I throw it on a test bench. I rebend some, you know, VGA back plates and stuff like that. I give them a new cooler. I get him a second stick of RAM because he was running single channel and times are tough out there. Got to take care of your boys, right? Um, throw the system all in test bench. I go, "Okay, where's your boot drive?" And he hands it to me. He goes, "Yeah, this is running Bazite." Uh, and I go, "Okay, okay. Is that like Marmite?" And he's like, "No, no, it's a it's a Linux distro, bro." Or whatever. But but like Australian accent, you get the point. Um, and I knew what Basite was. I'm just just don't worry about it. The point is, we put it in, fails to boot immediately, and we've got it on camera. We've got the whole thing on camera in the fixing DankPods's PC video that's going to be coming soon. Fails to boot. He like does a thing to he like presses enter to continue or something like that. And then it reboots and it fails even harder. just we didn't change any the only thing we did was I added a second stick of memory and I enabled DOCP or expo like the the the faster memory profile. We then tried unenabling the faster memory profile and that didn't I didn't even take the CPU out of the socket. Okay, like this computer is the same computer he brought here that was running Basite had all of his games installed. The sheer act of me touching the drive seems to have nuked his install. I grab a Windows drive that's just lying around. Throw it in the exact same M.2 slot. Instantly boots up. Machine's totally fine. I can't explain this stuff, man. I don't know. I don't know. I can't explain it. I don't know. I also can't explain why this stuff just seems to mostly work for me. We were talking at Whaleand, right? Like sometimes that's actually more terrifying. Yeah, I don't know. It just works fine. I will say so far the experience of having Mint on my laptop again has been like really positive and some of the little added bits of like okay I can totally do this thing but I have to jump through like four hoops on Cashios when it's one hoop on Mint is like I'm starting to think flavor of the week is just not a thing. I'm also starting to think that longterm long-term distros like Kubuntu are not a thing either for me, but your mileage may vary. Anything might not be a thing. I I think the uh yeah, I think the flavor of the month thing is like if you're into hyper optimization like that can be fun. Like there's some performance stuff with Cashy. Like I was dialing in Ballers'sgate and was able to get some like real smoke. like it felt great, but I I did some like custom things to get it there. If you want to do that, I think it makes a lot of sense. Um, but yeah, like when I when I when I booted up Mint on my laptop, it was just nice. Like I think I showed you the store. I showed somebody on the plane the store and I was like, "Yeah, it's just easy." Yep. I I I think there's just a god of irony somewhere that when I was being born was all like, "Wouldn't it be funny if there was like this tech media guy and he literally just couldn't use the operating system that that was like almost his name?" Now is the time for us to talk about or you're just going to end up getting really good at it. No, I don't I don't have time to get really good at stuff that is actively fighting me this way. Like I I I can't I can't. Uh do you want to bring up the story? Sure. I I always want to tell him to go try Mint and then I I end up stopping myself because I'm like I don't Do you really want me to break it? Exactly. I'd kind of I'd almost rather he didn't. I'm on it. I'm on it. All right. You guys asked for zip off pants. We got you zip off pants. Dan Luke screen if you don't mind. If some of you remember about a year ago, Tatiana from the fashion team roasted the Zip Off pants in a video about reviewing their boss's setup. The comment section was flooded with replies that you love Zipoff pants and that you would get them if we sold them. Well, guess what? Here they are. The Zip Off cargo pants are built with the same fabric and same construction as our regular caros, feature a total of nine pockets, and now zip off when you want to switch them to shorts. For those who commented, you can get yours now at lmg.gg/zip. GG/zipoff pants. Speaking of cargo pants, if you're not a fan of the zip-off feature, guess what? We just launched two new colorways of our regular caros. They are now available in olive night and naval academy. They feature 21 pockets total, including four zippered pockets and two magnetic cargo pockets, plus two hammer loops and, as one reviewer put it, an incomprehensible amount of pockets. You can get yours at lmg.gg/carggo pants. But wait, there's more. This week is all about utility, and the next item we launched is the lightweight packable jacket. Okay, this is super cool. And somehow the coolest thing about it did not end up in the dock. Maybe it's on the page. Does it say where the design was inspired by? Are you you've got to be kidding me. You've got to be kidding me. We don't talk about it. Ah, okay. Well, let's start with we made the lightweight packable jacket because if you live somewhere like Vancouver, you know the weather can turn on you pretty fast. The whole jacket packs into its own little pocket with a loop and a carabiner so you can clip it onto your backpack or your carry-on. We also added a small embroidered screwdriver on the pouch just for fun. It It doesn't screw anything. It's just a little embroidery thing. It's decently windresistant and it is treated with a PAS-free DWR or durable water repellent. So, it handles drizzles and light rain. And it's perfect for hiking, running, traveling, or just when you're on the go. I am going to call M Bridget um to get an answer to this, but you can shop the packable jacket at lmg.gg/packable jacket. Fashion team has been absolutely killing it. Let's see if she picks up. She might be busy. She's a busy lady. The design though, the design is inspired by something really cool. I just forget exactly what it is. It's like a microscopic or like electron microscope view of something. All right. Darn it. Well, I'll have to find that out for you guys next week. It's It's super cool. Uh, what else we got this week? Oh, more topics, I guess. Luke, do you want to pick one? Yeah, sure. Hold on. I'm about to do a thing. Go for it. Oh, wait. No. I was supposed to talk about merch. Uh, stop it. Stop. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Check out messages, comms. If you guys are into interacting with, you know, uh, live streams or whatever, you're probably familiar with the concept of throwing money at your screen and then maybe they acknowledge you or maybe they just, I don't know, don't or, you know, whatever. We're not into that. That's why we created checkout messages. If you guys want to send a message into the show, either to uh, producer Dan who can reply to them or forward them to someone who can help you out. Do we not have a Dan cam? I'm over here. Oh no, we have no Dan cam. Okay, Dan, you'll have to come on over here and wave. What is happening? Why did you do that? No, we can't. But now you can't We can't see you, Dan. Okay, so it'll either go to producer Dan. Hey, there it is. Nice. Solid. Run. Who will reply? Reply, you fools. Or he will curate it and Luke and I will respond to it. So Dan, do you have a couple curated checkout messages for us this week? I do. There's All you got to Oh, right. All you got to do to send one is go to ltstore.com. Add something to your cart. You'll see the interface for our checkout messages. Bippity bopity. There it is. Go ahead and place your order and it will go to Dan. There. That was not the most organized we've ever been, but very cool. Wow. Super professional. You're great at this. Thank you. I'm I've been doing it for a very long time. Unironically though. Wow. Hi LLD. My mobile died. I have a no 11400K. Should I pay $100 to $200 replacement or wait for the new Intel and get a micro sensor bundle which was uh the original plan? I'm currently on a good enough laptop. Ooh, Dan, do you want to come back to us? Uh, sorry. Normally, our producer doesn't have to actually handle producer things like camera switching. So, understandably, he's a little behind. I have a few things to worry about right now. Oh, man. 1100 11400 K is still a very decent gaming chip. You've left out some information that I could really use like what games you play and what GPU you have. Pretty important. I think the bigger question though is should I be spending $100 to $200 on such a dated platform at this point. 11400 K is um what is it? LGA uh 12 uh LGA 1200 if I recall correctly. So, if we go on eBay, I wouldn't buy a brand new board for it, that's for sure. Uh, LGA1200 motherboard. Like, can I get something for less than $100, $200? Yes, I can. So, that would be my answer to you is finding something between now and when Intel's new stuff comes out won't drop in value by that much. So, you should only be out shipping and then seller fees when you get that new board and then resell it probably alongside your 11400 K because that is still new enough that it is going to be very usable for someone who just wants to play, you know, not necessarily the very latest most AAA games with their RTX 6090 or whatever it is that we're looking at by that point. Um, playing the the secondhand hardware game can be an a phenomenal way to get the best value out of your system as you're as you're upgrading. Oh boy. Are we dead? Are we local recording? If so, we should just keep going. We're not. You want to tether your phone? What are you? We're back. We're so back. All right, why don't we jump right into our next topic? Luke, you want to pick one? Yeah. Meta sends intimate Ray-B band AI glasses footage to human workers in Kenya. There was a joint investigation by Swedish newspapers SVD and Gutborg's Poston. I butchered the heck out of that found that Meta sends user footage from its Rayband AI glasses to data annotators at Sama, a subcontractor in Nairobi, Kenya. Over 30 workers were interviewed. workers said they regularly see footage of users on the toilet undressing uh having very fun alone with one other person time uh and exposing bank card details. One said, "We see everything from living rooms to naked bodies. They risk losing their jobs if they refuse to label said content. So, they just got to dive on in." What? Um, there's a there is a third person in the room with you and your um really good roommate. Uh, Meta says that faces are automatically blurred before reaching workers, but employees but are going to blur my strawberries just just faces, but employees said the blurring frequently fails. Uh, former Meta staff in the US confirmed that algorithms sometimes miss. Uh, Meta's AI terms of service state the company can review user interactions and that review can be automated or manual. The only solution offered is telling users not to share info they don't want retained. The teams don't say how long data is stored or who sees it. The reporters found Meta's wearable privacy policy buried behind multiple links. Swedish retailers gave contradictory answers about data handling. Uh, yep. uh with several incorrectly claiming data stays local. Yeah, right. On anything meta, data staying local, please. Yeah, big time. Testing showed that AI requires server side processing and cannot work offline. Well, yeah. The UK's ICO called the findings concerning. Uh yeah, I'd hope so. Uh and is writing to Meta. EU lawyers flagged potential GDPR violations. Yeah, I think so. since there is no adequacy decision recognizing Kenya's data protection. Um, yo, had to look up what adequacy meant. So, I'm dropping that here in case it's useful. It's a legal term indicating that the European Commission can officially declare that a country outside the EU has data protection standards equivalent to EU standards. Yeah. I wouldn't think that Kenya would fall under that. Totally. If a if a country has that, um, EU companies can freely transfer personal data there. Kenya doesn't have one yet. Apparently, they're trying to get one, uh, which means sending EU user data to SAMA in Kenya may lack the required legal basis under GDPR, at least as of right now. Uh, Meta is rolling out name tag, a facial recognition feature. Um, they should have dong tag, a facial recognition recognition feature for the glasses. An internal memo obtained by New York Times said Meta uh intentionally planned to launch the feature now during what they called a dynamic political environment when civil society groups would be distracted by other concerns. Ah, so between the data collection and facial recognition, this feels not great. The funniest part of this to me, there's lots of funny parts of this to me, not least of which would be dong tag, but the funniest part of this to me is every time we've talked about what the killer app would be. Yes. For us to go smart glasses, it was the like creepy dystopian facial recognition and like, oh yeah, this is this guy. You had a meeting with him six months ago and he has a dog named this. I would love for it to only be local, but it will never be from Meta. And it would it for for for me to be comfortable with that thing that would be very useful to me existing, it would have to be optin. It would have to all be voluntary. It would have to be con consensual with the people that you're, you know, identifying. But I could see it being great for things like trade shows. It'd be cool if it was like you have a name tag request and you be like, "Yep." And then it like shares your in a similar thing to like the iPhone touch. Yeah. Like social media. Social media but like IRL and like before it went crap. Like if it was actual social network. That would be actually really cool. That'd be very cool. Unfortunately, Meta going to work that way. Meta moved past being a social network and became an advertising monstrosity. Antisocial demon many years ago. Many many years ago. Our discussion question is, is privacy dead? The answer is yes, for sure. But there are things that you can do. There are things that you can do like not wearing meta glasses. Yeah. And avoiding I've even I've even wanted to try them cuz like I think I've talked to you about this like I've felt kind of out of touch. Yeah. Because you know the the new gadget hotness. I'm just I'm just not using it. Like I'm completely I'm not completely ignorant. Like I I used them a little bit on my trip to Cabo for Christmas. I uh David and I used them when we shot the Costco PC. So, we just had one pair of glasses, totally inconspicuous, right? Because we were just stealth filming. So, we had one pair of glasses and we would like switch depending on who was on camera to share them. That's pretty funny. Yeah. So, I like I've used them a little and like honestly I got to say they do some pretty cool stuff. But this is horrible. Yeah. But I mean there there is still stuff you can do like like we were talking about earlier. You have Linux on one of your laptops that can help a lot of people even outside of the either uh you know pirate hatw wearers tricorns or uh people that are like oh my god I'm I don't want the the the the government seeing all my secret informations. Um, even people outside of those spheres are just getting a little tired of like videos of them going to the toilet being sent to Kenya and they're like maybe maybe I just want my data to be my freaking own and they're just self-hosting. Hear me out. We all start wearing hijabs. I'm I'm good. You can't steal my face. You can't steal my face if I don't show my face in public. I think you can have it at that point. Do you think so? It It is what it is. Ma Magical 8321 says, "I'm in." Oh man. Uh oh, apparently we're supposed to do sponsors. I thought the sponsor was just Threat Locker. They already had a whole segment on the show. Dan, how much did they pay for this? Said float plane announcement first. Okay, float plane announcement. Go ahead. Or should you want me to do it? Okay. The first part of the Linux challenge video is out early on flowplane. The video fully goes over everyone's reasoning. So, it's me, Elijah, and Luke, our installations, and we go through Pop OS continuing to be Lionus's downfall. Sammy writes, "Personally, I can't wait for people to clip Linus using chat GPT out of context and say, why is the biggest tech YouTuber using AI summaries to find the best Linux? you deserve the dumbfall is the best for my hen anime. That's a direct quote from Sammy. I do not take responsibility for that. Um, also, if you guys enjoyed the reboot video, we've got extras. It is 27 minutes of raw hardcore hardware uh fixing the uh the D1 deck with Mark. Oh, no. It's cool. I watched the whole thing. You Oh, you watched the behind the scenes? Yeah, that one I watched for sure, dude. It's like Oh, the behind the scenes I haven't seen yet. I watched the whole main video. There's 27 minutes of us just like working on the D1 deck. Mark is so knowledgeable and he's so well spoken. Uh he just he did such a great job. He's got a great voice. Not just of doing the work to make Reboot Rewind um happen, but of explaining it. Because a lot of the time you get people who are just like, let's say super focused, let's use that word, and they're really great at doing incredible stuff, but people don't properly appreciate it because they don't know how to present what they've done and and communicate it in a way that relates with people. Mark, he's got the whole package, man. And so as he's walking me through everything we're doing on this old like like third of a million dollar tape deck, it was just it was so much fun. There's so much to learn and he just he just did such a great job. It's totally worth watching. You can go check it out at lmg.gg/fpwan. Uh the show is brought to you today by Threat Locker. Every day, hacks and data breaches are happening at companies all around the world, and it would be nice to think that multiffactor authentication would be enough, but fishing websites have gotten pretty good at mimicking MFA sites. But our sponsor, Threat Locker, uses zero trust enforcement, so it makes sure your device is validated through a secure broker before connecting to different services. Even if you get fished, then there isn't anything attackers can do without using an actual trusted device. With secure network and secure cloud access added to threat locker zerorust platform, organizations can implement zero trust controls across applications, endpoints, networks, storage, and software as a service within a fully integrated and easy to deploy solution. So don't wait. Proactively keep your business safe today by checking threatlocker.com/ltt. Go back to the two. Hey, there we go. And you can see we're actually here in their in their studio today. We were just at zero trust world on stage. I thought we did okay. Adam Savage was talking and I have once again managed to not meet him. I don't know how I've traveled in the circles that I've traveled in while he's been traveling in the circles he's traveled in and I have somehow never managed to cross his path. He's a pretty cool guy. I'm looking forward to it though. Yeah. Like he's met him. He likes the screwdriver. Really? He also really liked the really big screwdriver. I mean he also really liked the really big screwdriver. He might I know. you know, I mean, he's a man who knows tools. He actually he turned me on to um he turned you on to a particular tool. I'll accept tool file, but I don't know if I'm a savage file. Um but he turned me on to what what are they called? Basically, they're like a they're like a special plier. It has like a grippy locky thing here and then you put like uh I think it's called aircraft cable. Just like that that wire that's great for like making hooks and hangers and stuff. And then you just like pull a thing. You pull like a plunger and it twists it and makes it into like a twisted thing. Someone, anyone? No, not foreps for crying out loud, you guys. Um, safety wire pliers. Safety wire pliers. Is that it? No idea. I think that's what they're called. He He made a video about them and uh it like seriously Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These are the ones. And that seriously helped me with my motorcycle painting project. Are you gonna show the screen, Dan? He's not gonna show the screen. He doesn't want you to see it. No, Dan doesn't want you to see it. So, I'm going like this. There. Forget it. Forget it. We're over it. Uh, but those are super cool. He's so petulant. Petulent man. You know what else is super cool? Lego's smart brick is here and it's got some actually kind of neat tech. I had really wanted this for tonight's show. I thought I thought this would have gone pretty hard. Done pretty well. LEGO has released their new smart play sets starting with eight Star Wars builds like Luke's Red 5X-Wing and Darth Vader's Tie Fighter. Weird. It's like they know the popular stuff. I don't know. Each powered by a new electronic smart brick that adds lights, sound effects, and interactive reactions. Inside the smart brick is essentially a tiny computer built around a custom ASIC chip smaller than a standard Lego stud. The brick also includes motion sensors, a speaker, and LEDs so it can react when the model moves, fires, or interacts with characters. The system also uses smart tags and smart minifigures which contain unique identifiers that the brick can detect using nearfield sensing through internal copper coils. That makes sense. Now, when a tagged figure or piece is placed nearby, the brick will trigger the appropriate sound or lighting effects. How cool is this? Multiple smart bricks can also connect together wirelessly using a Bluetooth-based system called BrickNet, allowing different sets to synchronize effects and interact with each other. Okay. Now, our discussion question here, though, is one for the ages. Does adding electronics and wireless connectivity make Lego not anymore? Does it take the imagination when you're not doing mouth sound effects for the X-wing? Have we lost something or have we gained something? Come on, guys. Hit us up in the chat. I want to know what you guys think about this. I have kind of a two-prong answer. I think for kids, you lost something. I think for adults, you might have gained something. I think the ability to have fun with the I'm going to do the Vader voice and do all that kind of stuff kind of fades a little bit, but I think it would actually be worse and less mentally stimulating and stuff for kids who would naturally engage with those things making the noise effects themselves. All right, I got some bad news for you. Here we go. Is it specifically targeted to kids? They seem to be for the most part. I mean, it's old Star Wars references, so it might not be. That's true. That's true. Okay, let's have a let's have a look here. Okay, Daniel, you got my screen? Yeah, here we go. Oh my god. Okay, so there's the smart brick. Okay. Blah blah blah. Smart play system. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Okay, show me show me some smart sets. They're pretty small. Pretty small. So, there's kind of I can see what you mean, Luke. There's kind of conflicting Uh there's some conflicting um uh information factors cuz like a lot of adults that I know that are into Lego build them very much as like showpieces. Yeah. This would not be a good show. They buy a kit, they build it exactly as it's supposed to be done and then they leave it exactly as it is. And a lot of kids like when I was growing, I didn't care about the kit at all. I wanted the pieces and then I just build random extremely different. Smart sounds good. This is looking pretty rough, dude. Not going to lie. $90 for this. Three stars. Three stars, boys. That smart break is expensive. Uh, okay. Where are the low reviews? Good idea. Poor execution. The X-wing looks like a 4 plus set. They mean age. And the integration of the smart brick compromises the look of the fighter too much. The back of the R2 looks terrible to accommodate the smart tag. Yeah. And the and that price. Oh. Oh. Okay. Okay. Ah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yikes. Well, that's unfortunate. You know what else is unfortunate? An Amazon change means that wish lists might expose your address. Amazon is changing how they work starting March 25th, and the company is removing the option that allowed users to restrict purchases to only items sold by Amazon. meaning that items on your list can now be fulfilled by third-party sellers, even if you previously blocked them. This change means that those sellers will receive your shipping address in order to fulfill your order. And because these independent merchants handle their own shipping and tracking, your full address could appear in delivery updates or tracking information that buyers see. Uh, Amazon says the goal is to give buyers access to a wider selection of items, but it is warning users to switch their wish list delivery address to a PO box or non-residential address if they share lists with the public. So, by buyers, they mean the buyers who are like for your gift registry. I understand, but my my brain immediately went to gift registry and I was thinking most of those wouldn't care too much unless you're a Twitch streamer. expect it's Twitch streaming or something and and a lot of the or something. I think it's mostly the or something. I shouldn't need a PO box. No, I It's not a bad idea to have one, but I just, you know, wish I didn't need one. You don't? I just mean in general. Yeah. You still don't though. What would you do? Your office is I would just ship it to the office. Oh, but okay. I know. I just I was talking from like a like a more a more general sort of standpoint. I never had a wish list. I think most of the wish lists are the or something category, which I'm for sure not in. And then in that case, I mean, I would just flip the thing, right? Can you clarify what you mean by or something? Cuz I'm I I think I'm losing like only FANS AND STUFF. OH, YEAH. YEAH. YEAH. OH, LORDY. I think most of the usage out of this outside of registries is going to be that. Is it Is there Is there something else? Is that a thing? This is genuine safety hazard for women. I don't think like I I don't know. It's not for us. A thousand% only fans. Yes, it's a thing. Yes, it's a thing. Buying gifts. But like money is so easy to send. I've Isn't that more convenient? I have no idea, dude. Well, no. They're telling they're saying it's a but you're saying like I don't know what the like I don't know the reason like I just I don't really Most models have a public Amazon wish list. Why? I have not a clue. Are people more likely to like stretch and spend a little bit more if they if they buy you a gift versus if it's money? It's been a thing for Twitch streamers for years and years. Yes, it absolutely is. Exposing the person's address is especially dangerous to the women on Twitch. Okay. Totally. Yeah, for sure. Feels more personal. Remember, these are people looking for a connection for professional work. You can probably get a PO box, right? But a PO box is inconvenient because you have to go to it and like, you know, going all the way somewhere for the things that people bought you. You might be able to get a courier service. No, you totally could. You totally could. You could get the Uber package thing to go to your PO box and bring it to your house. You could totally do that. You could definitely do that. I think the big problem is it Well, it's saying like uh that it could be from third party people now uh and you'd have to update your stuff, but I don't think this is going to screw over anyone that's currently on there because they would only have things that are fulfilled by Amazon. Is that right? So, it would just be as you're updating your list, don't add things. Not fulfilled by Amazon. It could be fulfilled by anyone. That's the problem. No, I know. That's the change. Got it. So, what what I'm saying is if you already had a list, I don't think it's going to suddenly compromise you because I think you would have only been able to add things that were fulfilled by Amazon. Yeah. But you can't control where things are fulfilled by. Sometimes it changes. Okay. So, you don't add a specific listing because the specific listings are fulfilled. It's fixed fulfillment, right? I don't think so. I don't I think Yeah. No, I think a listing can be fulfilled by multiple places. Do the the Amazon um Graphin OS is coming to Motorola phones in 2027. Motorola made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress earlier this week. For those unfamiliar, Graphin OS is a security and privacy focused fork that features significantly improved sandboxing, exploit mitigation, and permission models. The deal depends on Lenovo owned Motorola producing hardware that satisfies the unique demands of graphine OS, which is a standard that most current Android hardware doesn't meet. Currently, graphine OS is supported on Google Pixel 6 through Pixel 10 devices. According to a post on Graphin OS's uh Twitter account, support for Motorola devices is expected to start with 2027 flagship devices and may expand to a broader range over time. Our discussion question is Linus tries graphine OS episode 2 win. I would actually I think this is genuinely compelling. I would love to give it another shot. genuinely this is really cool actually. Um I probably won't yet. There were a lot of things that I ran into with Graphine OS that just were not really compatible with all the services and all of the applications that I use. at least with the amount of work that I wanted to put into getting it all set up and and working correctly. But I think they can get there. Do you think that's uh a normal amount of resistance to and your answer is very likely just going to be like yes to be clear. But do you think that's a normal amount of resistance to work for an average user or is that a resistance to work because you switch phones every freaking month and so it's you think it's more that? Oh yeah. So, you'd be more willing to if you were not switching phones? If I was not switching phones all the time as a as a hardware tech hardware person and if my job wasn't so dependent on my phone. If I just used my phone as a phone, for a lot of people is fairly true. Totally fine. Then I would I would be strongly considering graphine OS at this Uh Seagate is shipping 44 terabyte drives to the data center. 10 platters. That's all. That's all I really wanted to say. They use hammer, so it'll it'll heat a tiny section of the disc to over 400° C in nanconds, which temporarily reduces the magnetic coercivity to allow data writing. Um, Hammer allows for higher capacities and more stable storage than conventional magnetic recording or shingled magnetic recording. Freaking hard drives are still they're still doing stuff. Hammer drives are so sick. They're so It's actually so cool. It took forever. They were so far behind road map, but now that they're here, well, sort of here. I mean, you can't buy a hard drive to save your life. Plof is working on a like an I built an ass video and um it's funny. He actually had a line in the script that I I I like I turned to him and I…

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