WW 942: A World of Wonder - The weakness of Copilot's branding

Summary

Windows Weekly Episode 942: A World of Wonder - The Weakness of Copilot's Branding

Release Date: July 23, 2025

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell

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1. Introduction

In Episode 942 of Windows Weekly, hosts Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell delve into the latest developments surrounding Microsoft, particularly focusing on the recent challenges with Copilot's branding. The discussion also touches on new features in the Windows 11 Week D Update, security vulnerabilities, and alternative tech solutions outside the big tech sphere.

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2. Microsoft Drama of the Year: Microsoft Store Retires Movies and TV Services

Paul Thurrott kicks off the conversation by addressing Microsoft's ongoing retreat from the consumer market—a trend that began over two decades ago. The recent decision to discontinue the Movies and TV shows service within the Microsoft Store marks a significant step in this direction.

Paul Thurrott [04:07]: "Many people may not know, but the Microsoft Store used to sell music, movies, TV shows, and ebooks. Now, they're phasing out the Movies and TV service."

Richard Campbell appreciates Microsoft's move, stating it’s better to retire unsupported products than leave them hanging.

Richard Campbell [08:11]: "I appreciate that Microsoft's finally killing off products they don't care about rather than just leaving them hanging."

The hosts discuss the implications for users who have purchased content, emphasizing the importance of migrating to alternative services like Movies Anywhere to retain access to their media.

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3. Windows 11 Week D Update: AI Features and Copilot's Branding Issues

The Week D Update introduces several AI-driven features aimed at enhancing user experience. However, Paul Thurrott highlights confusion surrounding the rollout, particularly the differentiation between Copilot Plus PCs running on Snapdragon, AMD, or Intel processors.

Paul Thurrott [25:50]: "These features create a bifurcation where some users get advanced AI capabilities while others are left with limited functionalities."

Key features discussed include:

• Settings Agent: Enables natural language search within settings.

  Richard Campbell [28:30]: "Settings Agent allows you to use natural language to find and adjust settings."

• Click to Do: Enhances text actions with AI capabilities.

  Paul Thurrott [29:43]: "Click to Do is possibly the most useful AI feature in Windows, but it's going to get overloaded."

• Photos App – Photo Relight: Allows users to adjust lighting in photos with virtual light sources.

  Paul Thurrott [29:54]: "You can have up to three virtual light sources to play with post-capture."

• Paint App Enhancements: Introduction of Sticker Generator and Object Select for improved image editing.

  Paul Thurrott [32:20]: "The Object Select feature uses AI to cut out objects from images, which is quite handy."

• Snipping Tool Updates: Perfect Screenshot and Color Picker features for better screenshot management.

  Paul Thurrott [34:00]: "Perfect Screenshot automatically crops screenshots, saving time and effort."

Copilot's Branding Weakness: The inconsistency in feature availability across different processor types leads to user frustration. Paul Thurrott criticizes Microsoft's approach, resulting in a fragmented user experience.

Paul Thurrott [82:46]: "Copilot is never going to be a big deal on iPhones or Android platforms. It's just never going to compete effectively with ChatGPT."

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4. Security Concerns: SharePoint Zero-Day Exploit

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing a critical zero-day vulnerability in SharePoint, exploited by Chinese state actors. Richard Campbell explains the severity and potential impact on organizations.

Richard Campbell [116:34]: "This zero-day has been around for a long time, and it’s been used to exfiltrate valuable data from organizations."

The hosts express concern over the speed and effectiveness of Microsoft's response, highlighting the challenges in patching such exploits promptly.

Paul Thurrott [117:26]: "It's a classic case of using an exploit to run arbitrary code that closes the vulnerability. Not ideal, but somewhat effective."

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5. AI and Security: Copilot vs. ChatGPT

The discussion shifts to the broader landscape of AI, comparing Microsoft's Copilot with other AI services like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropic. Paul Thurrott is critical of Copilot's performance and integration, suggesting that Microsoft's strategy has led to a subpar AI experience for users.

Paul Thurrott [104:33]: "Microsoft is over here spinning their wheels. They're trying to implement AI everywhere, but it's not working as intended."

The hosts debate Microsoft's investment in AI infrastructure, with Paul Thurrott mentioning an anticipated $80 billion expenditure reported in upcoming earnings.

Paul Thurrott [108:34]: "Microsoft will release their next earnings statement soon, and we'll likely see revelations about their AI infrastructure investments."

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6. Alternatives to Big Tech: Embracing Little Tech Solutions

In response to frustrations with big tech, the hosts advocate for embracing alternative solutions that prioritize privacy and user control.

• DuckDuckGo's Enhancements:

  Paul Thurrott [124:21]: "DuckDuckGo allows users to customize their AI interactions and even toggle AI-generated content off entirely, offering a flexible and privacy-centric search experience."

• 1Password and Threat Locker:

  Leo Laporte highlights Threat Locker as a robust security solution that offers Zero Trust protection, praised by users like Mark Tolson of the City of Champaign.

  Leo Laporte [22:09]: "Threat Locker provides unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost-effectively."

• Synology Drive:

  Paul Thurrott shares his positive experience with Synology Drive, emphasizing its reliability as an alternative to OneDrive and Google Drive.

  Paul Thurrott [142:23]: "Synology Drive has been exceptionally reliable for my backups, outperforming services like OneDrive and Google Drive."

The conversation extends to various open-source tools and smaller tech companies that offer viable alternatives to mainstream applications, fostering a more secure and user-controlled digital environment.

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7. PC Building: Richard Campbell's New Ryzen 9 Build

Richard Campbell announces his plan to build a new PC powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 processor, replacing his decade-old Intel system. This build aims to enhance his streaming and computing capabilities.

Richard Campbell [02:07]: "We're building an AMD Ryzen 9 PC to replace my old Gen 8 Intel streaming machine."

The hosts tease an upcoming live build session scheduled for the next day, promising an engaging and informative experience for viewers interested in the technical aspects of PC assembly.

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8. Whiskey Pick of the Week: Ben Romack 10

Adding a personal touch, Paul Thurrott introduces the week's whiskey selection: Ben Romack 10. He delves into the distillery's rich history and provides tasting notes.

Paul Thurrott [141:03]: "Ben Romack 10 is an excellent intro to peated Scotch with its distinct smoky flavor balanced by a bit of spice and woodiness."

The detailed recount of Ben Romack's journey, from its founding to acquisition and rebirth, paints a vivid picture of a family-run distillery committed to quality and tradition.

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9. Concluding Remarks

The episode wraps up with plans for future content, including transitioning to Linux Weekly in the following week and celebrating milestone episodes. The hosts encourage listeners to explore alternative tech solutions and remain critical of big tech's influence on their digital lives.

Leo Laporte [168:13]: "Join us next week as Windows Weekly transforms into Linux Weekly, focusing on the growing importance of Linux in the desktop space."

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Notable Quotes

• Paul Thurrott [04:07]: "Many people may not know, but the Microsoft Store used to sell music, movies, TV shows, and ebooks. Now, they're phasing out the Movies and TV service."

• Richard Campbell [08:11]: "I appreciate that Microsoft's finally killing off products they don't care about rather than just leaving them hanging."

• Paul Thurrott [25:50]: "These features create a bifurcation where some users get advanced AI capabilities while others are left with limited functionalities."

• Paul Thurrott [82:46]: "Copilot is never going to be a big deal on iPhones or Android platforms. It's just never going to compete effectively with ChatGPT."

• Richard Campbell [28:30]: "Settings Agent allows you to use natural language to find and adjust settings."

• Paul Thurrott [104:33]: "Microsoft is over here spinning their wheels. They're trying to implement AI everywhere, but it's not working as intended."

• Paul Thurrott [124:21]: "DuckDuckGo allows users to customize their AI interactions and even toggle AI-generated content off entirely, offering a flexible and privacy-centric search experience."

• Paul Thurrott [142:23]: "Synology Drive has been exceptionally reliable for my backups, outperforming services like OneDrive and Google Drive."

• Leo Laporte [22:09]: "Threat Locker provides unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost-effectively."

• Paul Thurrott [141:03]: "Ben Romack 10 is an excellent intro to peated Scotch with its distinct smoky flavor balanced by a bit of spice and woodiness."

---

Conclusion

Episode 942 of Windows Weekly offers a comprehensive look into Microsoft's current challenges with AI integration and consumer services, emphasizing the need for alternative tech solutions that prioritize user privacy and control. The hosts provide insightful commentary, backed by personal experiences and expert opinions, making it a valuable listen for both tech enthusiasts and everyday users seeking to navigate the evolving digital landscape.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here, Richard's here. We're going to talk about the Microsoft drama of the year for this week and what you could do about it. Also, a whole bunch of new features in our week D Update to Windows 11. And why is it that all Copilot Plus PCs don't have the same features? I don't know. I don't know. Plus DuckDuckGo, a new AI from Paul's favorite service, Proton, and a Liquor pick of the week. That and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurada and Richard Campbell. Episode 942, recorded Wednesday, July 23, 2025. A World of wonder. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners. This is the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft with the two smartest Microsoft observers in the business. Mr. Paul Thurat from thurat.com coming to us live from Mexico City, California. Hello, Paul.

[Paul Thurott]

Hello, Leo. Or should I say hola, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Hola. Hola. Actually, we're in New Mexico. No, what is it? What do they call California? Did they used to call it New Mexico? Anyway, we're in. You're in old Mexico. Let's put it that way.

[Paul Thurott]

The original. The Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

Mexico.

[Paul Thurott]

El Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

Also from the Canada, Mr. Richard Campbell. Hello, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Hi.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello. We're going to be doing something with Richard tomorrow. I just want to let the world know. 1:00pm Pacific, 4:00pm Eastern, 2000 UTC. What are you. You're going to build a computer?

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

From. We got all the parts sitting behind me, actually. We're going to do. Build out an AMD with a Ryzen 9. Ooh.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know, what is this computer for?

[Richard Campbell]

This is going to replace this streaming machine, actually.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh.

[Richard Campbell]

This machine is a Gen 8 Intel and it is done.

[Leo Laporte]

Time to say goodbye.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I'm amazed it still works, honestly, half the time. But it's been well cared for and it's. The parts are used up and just get a little wonky. So.

[Paul Thurott]

Good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Go modern.

[Paul Thurott]

How. But.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's not that old, is it? Seven or eight years old?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think ten.

[Leo Laporte]

Ten. Okay.

[Paul Thurott]

That's old.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's old.

[Richard Campbell]

It was the same and it was a secondary workstation. You know, the whole time it's just got more important.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you. What do you. I mean, they say that seven dog years for every human year.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the PC equation?

[Richard Campbell]

It's minute by minute.

[Leo Laporte]

I used to say 15 years for every human year. So that would be 150 year old computer.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, it's the same number of years, but it starts when you're 60 and that person has dementia.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Anyway, watch our Windows at least a.

[Richard Campbell]

Pave or two on this since, since I built it.

[Leo Laporte]

We will start with the parts in a pile and we will end with a booting Windows 7 computer. Is that right?

[Richard Campbell]

That's right, yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

If you guys want, I could do a shorter show where I go to HP's refurbished store and buy a computer and then they ship it to my house.

[Leo Laporte]

Or we could do a longer show where you get the new ARM development kit for Windows 11. And we're still, we're still waiting.

[Richard Campbell]

I've still got mine sitting there. I'm gonna wiring it up to an AB switch, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh good. What you gotta miss, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Getting these parts is cost more than just buying a machine.

[Leo Laporte]

The Snapdragon dev kit I sent you, what'd you do with that?

[Paul Thurott]

It's. Well, there's an element of today's show that will explain that. So let's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how exciting. It's coming up.

[Paul Thurott]

A little surprise.

[Leo Laporte]

Stay tuned for the mystery segment. But we begin as often we do with the Microsoft drama of the year of the week.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, honestly, I could have picked three or four things for this, but this has happened a couple times recently where there are these kind of recurring themes. And one of the recurring themes today will be Microsoft's retreat from the consumer market, which frankly occurred about 20 years ago. But anyway, many people, or some people may not know this, but the Microsoft Store that used to be the Windows Store that's in Windows 11 used to sell music right through Groove at one point and Xbox at a different point.

[Leo Laporte]

And movies. Right. And, and tv.

[Paul Thurott]

And TV shows. Yeah, ebooks, remember?

[Leo Laporte]

I remember buying them on my Xbox. Buying movies.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that was not a good decision. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I've been wondering where they went, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Soon you're really going to be wondering where they go. We'll see what happens. But when Microsoft transitioned away from music, they offered. Well, they didn't really do much, but they said hey, maybe you should use Spotify instead, you know, or whatever. Ebooks, they didn't really have anything to say. I think three people bought an ebook from them. No big deal there. But this past week they announced or revealed in a support document, really not an announcement that they were getting rid of the movies and TV show service. I'll call it. So this is the Part of the store by which you could buy or rent movies or buy TV show episodes or series. Why anyone would do this for Microsoft, you know, now seeing how the world has gone is unclear. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so, so what I did back in the day is I moved it all the Movies Anywhere, which was used to be a Disney feature.

[Paul Thurott]

And that puts it in your other collections like Apple and think Amazon and Google, I guess as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, all of them were. Yeah, it used to be everybody. I don't know if it was limited movies or not. Let me just log in, see what.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's, it's, it should be called Not All Movies Anywhere because it's some.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a licensing thing.

[Paul Thurott]

Three of the top five studios. Yeah. So depending on which movies you purchased and it's only movies on TV shows, some subset of your content will be available elsewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

So for the time being you'll be able to access these, this content from the movies and TV app that's was built into Windows 10 and 11. It now no longer comes in Windows 11, but you can get it through the store. It is a delightfully old fashioned app. It was never really updated. I mean it's got kind of almost like a Windows 8 UI. And every time I update that part of the book, I look at this again and think to myself, it's a little suspicious that they've never updated this or updated the media player app that they have now that's more modern to support that content. But they, they haven't. And then they never had a mobile client either. Right. Which is a big part of the problem. So yeah, I guess it's not a surprise. The surprise was how it happened and when it happened because this could have happened, honestly at any time. But yes, if you did buy content from Microsoft, definitely connect it to Movies anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually, I don't know where all these. I have 166 movies in here.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. But they're probably from various services.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because I, I think I linked everything. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, you might as well. I mean sometimes not to. It was particularly important to do this for Microsoft guys because we don't have a mobile platform unless you're, you know, carrying around like a Surface tablet or something like that. We don't have a phone. So if you want to watch this content on like an iPad or a phone or whatever, you can't do it from here. So if it's in movies anywhere, you can from various clients. But yeah, the whole mobile thing and the fact that they never updated it over two generations of Windows now kind of highlights the fact that they were not really serious about this thing to begin with. So, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I appreciate that Microsoft's finally killing off products they don't care about rather than just leaving them hanging.

[Paul Thurott]

I agree.

[Richard Campbell]

One would argue they could have shut a. Shut down Skype 10 years ago, five years ago, something.

[Paul Thurott]

It's. Yeah, well, Skype at least was a decent brand. I mean, this thing was not even a brand. I mean, it used to be.

[Richard Campbell]

It's never good. It was barely supported. It should have been dead a long time ago.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's also a reminder of this whole idea that you think you own anything when it's dependent on the cloud.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. This kind of event always triggers the same two reactions. You get the guy on social media, he's like, oh, I didn't even know they had this, you know, like, yeah, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

But then you get these guys like, oh, this is a big problem. I bought like 500 movies from this thing. And it's like, what? Like, where were you when common sense was doled out? Like, what are you talking about? Like, that's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

Over in the smart home world, we're in the middle of this crisis from this Norwegian company called Future Home who went bankrupted themselves. Same guy started to back up. They pushed an update out just before the bank, the bankruptcy, to shut everybody's service off. And then you can resubscribe for $100 a year to the new service or you lose all your functionality.

[Paul Thurott]

I. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but big tech is terrible. And I know it's. It's going to be a neat concept.

[Richard Campbell]

A group of local hackers figured out how to revert to the old firmware and helped everybody get back to functionality. And now they're being sued. Oh.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh. Oh, boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Who's the bad guy again?

[Paul Thurott]

Well, the lawyers scenario, actually. Yeah. So like I said, not a surprise, but timing is just weird. I don't know. It just happened. Just came out of nowhere, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But I feel like there's a wave now of Microsoft seems to be cleaning the ship up. Like they concerned about competing for AI and they're cutting away other stuff. They're putting lots of pressure on their employees.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. When my. There are more apples coming. When Apple started making Mac OS X and then that was kind of the primary concern of that company for several years before iPhone happened or whatever. The big story there was Apple really aggressively gets rid of old features to get rid of crux and maybe too aggressively. Right. Apple or Microsoft rather was the exact opposite on that spectrum. And in recent years you can see that in things like Microsoft maintains list of deprecated and removed features in Windows. And you can see it actually does escalate over time. So last couple of years, two, maybe even three years, kind of a upward spike on that kind of thing. And yeah, this is a problem because it hurts people who bought content. They spent real money on this stuff and they might want to access it. Although, I mean, if they did, they would have noticed surely that there were not many ways to access this content. You were pretty much stuck on a PC and then you could I guess, cast it to a compatible device if you somehow have a Miracast enabled TV or something, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, odds are you aren't using it. You didn't even realize you're not.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, even the guys who are complaining I think pretty much are like, yeah, I bought all this content. I mean, I haven't looked at it ever, but you know, it's like, okay, but yeah, but yeah, all you can do for now is sign up for movies anywhere. If you haven't connect your Microsoft account to it, that will put it some of the content. Like I said, you'll have to go look at it, see how much, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, you can, I think Paramount, mgm, I don't have a deal. It says at the bottom. So some of your movies won't.

[Paul Thurott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Paul Thurott]

I haven't looked at this in a while, but for me, I was running about 2/3, so about 2/3 of my content purchase content over whatever services was in there.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't remember how this works. Is there an app that you use then?

[Paul Thurott]

No, no, there is, but you would never use that. Right? So what you, in other words, you as a consumer might use an iPad and use Apple service, right? Probably. Right. Or you're a Google.

[Leo Laporte]

So does Apple see everything in Movies everywhere, anywhere?

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, and it works in the opposite direction too. So if you are a Microsoft guy and use movies and tv, the app, you will see in there any content from other services that you bought that are compatible with movies.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually that's pretty cool. Anything I buy anywhere.

[Paul Thurott]

This kind of gets past that kind of DRM silo problem where this will come up again later in the show. But I had gone back to 2005 to look at what was pertinent at the time in the Microsoft world, as we'll discuss later. But there were all these services I had completely forgotten about that still existed then, like cinema Now. Oh, yeah, there were all these different services, so they all had different DRMs. They weren't compatible. You could buy, you know, like a movie from this one and a TV show over here, but you'd have to have the app. And it was like. It was just, you know, stupid. It was like pre.

[Leo Laporte]

Where do you get your movies from? Now, what would be the sensible way to do this?

[Paul Thurott]

I've always gotten. Because. Yeah, I rip them from a torrent.

[Leo Laporte]

I hear this website's called Pirate Bay, something like that.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, they have a surprising amount of content, and it's remarkable. It's really cheap. You can't really stream it, but it's. Yeah, no, I bought most of my content from Apple, but I did sign.

[Leo Laporte]

Up for Apple to different services and.

[Paul Thurott]

Stuff, you know, but mostly because I feel like they're in it for the long haul, you know, Like, I feel like this is part of their. Whatever. No, I know it's ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

But I did buy a DVD player and Scott Wilkinson, the home theater geek, talked me into it, so. And I just. I'm now looking at movies anywhere and realize I just rebought all the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies that I already. But I have them streaming, so now I have them on, you know, 4K UHD. I guess that's better, right?

[Paul Thurott]

That's. I mean, so you get them from Apple or wherever. They're 4k uhd.

[Leo Laporte]

No one can take them away from me.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, you get them on a DVD. It's like 720 by 480. Like, what are we talking about? Yeah, that's a thumbnail. That's the size of the icons on my desktop. I mean, that's tiny.

[Richard Campbell]

Now if you're going to do this, you got to go get a 4K player and you got to start buying the 4K media.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they look good. I mean, that's what I do for. But I don't think.

[Paul Thurott]

I think you could make the case, you know, because some content has never come forward to these newer, like, to digital.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

Maybe there's a DVD of like. There's a couple of movies actually, I do have on DVD because they're not on digital. Right. So that's one way to get those.

[Leo Laporte]

And, you know, I just got two catalogs in the mail. I'm not sure where they got my name, but they sell DVDs. Like, not even nice. Not even 4K. Some of them are just DVDs. But that's what their pitch is. You know, build Your collection. Because you can't get these on streaming.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. Yeah, look, that's. I get that. I mean, that's true of books too. You know, there are some books that are just on paper. Yeah. You know, like we're crow magnets or something. Like. So whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

If I'm going to. If I'm going down this DVD player route, I have to have more children because somebody's got to load that DVD and ain't going to be me.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, exactly. Get one of those. They have those carousel players. Remember these there for DVDs, for our CDs.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem is I don't often watch a movie again.

[Richard Campbell]

No, yeah, that's really.

[Paul Thurott]

I try to buy movies when they're super cheap on sale, like they're five bucks or less or whatever. And it's something I know I'll probably watch again. I'll do that. Yeah. I do this knowing that these might just disappear someday. Apple's financial situation is perilous right now.

[Leo Laporte]

What could happen?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Beleaguered Apple, am I right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This was it. Movies unlimited.

[Paul Thurott]

Interesting. It feels a little limited to me, but I see what you're saying.

[Leo Laporte]

I just, I don't. I don't really want to pay money for these things I already own.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. Some people like stuff, you know, they like to have physical things. They like to have a wall where they can see, just kind of show off until they.

[Richard Campbell]

Looting electrons at this point.

[Paul Thurott]

That's my thing. That's my thing. Until you move.

[Leo Laporte]

Until you move. Then it's a lot.

[Paul Thurott]

Let me tell you something. Aside from being a giant pile of kindling, the multiple bookshelves of books that I've owned over the years were also the heaviest things I've ever had to move. Ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

They're the worst. They're literally dead.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, not literally, but I love books. That's the difference. I'm not crazy about plastic discs, but I. Or even vinyl discs, but I love books.

[Paul Thurott]

But at least discs don't degrade ever. And they don't scratch. So I don't know. What's your problem?

[Leo Laporte]

They rust.

[Paul Thurott]

Nothing is perfect, I think is the lesson here. But I would take personally if I was going. If it was important to me, I would buy that thing on. I've done this like you buy it on disk and then you rip it to a digital format, store it on your NAS or whatever you have and then access it that way you want to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can then have it all 4k uhd. You can have it as good a Quality as you.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, these days. Yeah. You can upscale stuff too. That's the other thing, right? Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's what I should do because I do have, I think, 30 terabytes of storage.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, I am. I do have.

[Richard Campbell]

Considering the progression of AI at this point, you're just gonna be able to say to your tv, plus play Jaws and it'll fabricate one out of whole claw.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you want the shark to look like? Because I.

[Paul Thurott]

Exactly, yeah, play Jaws. But I want the shark to be my ex boss and I want to be the one that stabs him in the head at the end. You know, like that kind of thing. That's. That's. I feel like that could happen right now in chat. GPT it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Sometimes though, you do go to these streaming servers and you say, I would. I really want to see planes, trains and automobiles. And you can't find it. That actually happened to me some years ago. All of Steve Martin's stuff is now on streaming. But it wasn't for a while.

[Paul Thurott]

But it wasn't for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, for a long time.

[Paul Thurott]

Fundamentally, every one of us should pause for a moment and consider the fact that every single company pushing AI really hard right now cannot handle basic search queries. I just want to throw that out there. I can't tell you how good Google Photos was at finding things until they added a to I to it. And now it is like asking a child to go into a room full of stuffed animals and pull a random one out and be like, nope, that's not it. Try again. Nope, that's not it. You know, it's just. It's ridiculous. I don't know. I don't know how this has happened, but. Oh, well, at least in Microsoft lit, it never worked anyway. So for us, that's our Siri, you know, like the search that never worked, you know, but yeah, yeah. Yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

We live in a world of.

[Paul Thurott]

Of wonder.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonder.

[Paul Thurott]

I wonder why nothing works.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder. He said, paradoxically.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a world of wonder.

[Paul Thurott]

You're into heartbreak and disappointment. Personal technology is an excellent field. Highly recommend it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. What a world. Yeah, I was a little disappointed. You know, I had this AI thing that I was wearing all the time.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I know. I knew you were going to say this.

[Leo Laporte]

The B computer and they announced yesterday they just got sold to Amazon.

[Paul Thurott]

So did you stop wearing that because of Amazon or did you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, the first thing I did when I literally went to my account, deleted it.

[Paul Thurott]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

And now this is retired because I don't want Amazon. This literally recorded everything I did and said for six months.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. And you don't want Treasure trove to have access to that information.

[Leo Laporte]

Why do you think Amazon bought them?

[Paul Thurott]

It wasn't for the fun little device form factor thing.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, they thanked Panos. Panay.

[Paul Thurott]

They did.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Listen, no one knows more about successful devices.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because I. And I know, Paul, you're this way and Richard, you probably are too. We love tech. That's why we got in this business. That's why we do what we do. We love what technology can. Can do.

[Paul Thurott]

But. There's a but in a sentence.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a big but.

[Richard Campbell]

Comes the but.

[Paul Thurott]

And the but is why do we stay in this relationship? We're just. We get abused, abusive, we defend them, we tell. It's like, where did that scar come from? It wasn't AI I did that to myself. I tripped officer down the stairs and then up the stairs and then down again.

[Leo Laporte]

Big tech said they love me and we'll never. It'll never happen again.

[Richard Campbell]

It's my fault. I made him mad.

[Paul Thurott]

I fell on the knife several times and. And self inflicted.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too bad because we. We could live in a world of wonder. I wonder what happened. Yeah, I love that.

[Paul Thurott]

That's why we have Pixar movies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Everything can be fixed with a little.

[Paul Thurott]

Bit of Wall E. Well, now that you've depressed all of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. Yeah. So anybody want to buy a little AI device? I even got a nice cute little.

[Paul Thurott]

That totally is not being listened to by.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what everybody always said. Oh, Alexa listens to everything you said. It doesn't. This does. And Amazon just bought it.

[Paul Thurott]

I have in Mexico. We don't have the same restrictions on Chinese tech that you have in the United States. And I have a little Huawei router over there that's blinking as I say the word Huawei. And I'm pretty sure Nihau. Pretty sure those guys are listening.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just saying they're listening in a digital way. They're watching the traffic.

[Paul Thurott]

No, I mean listening to me talk about Huawei. I think. I'm pretty sure.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they're actually listening.

[Paul Thurott]

I think they're listening. Why is there a microphone on this thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the funny thing. You start to see TV sets with cameras and microphones. Oh, that's so you can make zoom calls. That's why.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. I mean, it could be. That could be one of the things it's for. Why? That's an option on Apple tv. You can add an external camera.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Why would you do that? What is wrong with you people? I want a dumb screen and I want to watch videos.

[Leo Laporte]

This would be an apt time to talk about Threat Locker and take a break for our sponsors.

[Paul Thurott]

It blends nicely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And then we shall return with Windows 11. It's week D time. Once again, surface news, AI, lots of good stuff. Xbox. And of course, a little whiskey at the end to reward you for your patience and tolerance. Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. Love these guys. In fact, I'm really hoping that we can go out and do a show. I think we might. I don't want to. I'm hoping we can go out to. They have. They do something called Zero Trust World in Florida every spring and I'm really hoping we can go out for Zero Trust World. Zero Trust is exciting. It's a really good way of protecting yourself, you know. Ransomware is rampant. It is harming businesses and city governments and schools and hospitals worldwide. It's getting in in a variety of ways. There's phishing, emails, infected downloads, malicious websites, RDP exploits, what they call candy drops. Where a little USB key, you find it in the parking lot. Oh, look at this. A free USB key. Don't be the next victim, no matter what the approach is by the bad guys. Threat Locker. Zero Trust platform will protect you. It does it simply, and these are the key three words with a proactive deny by default approach. Deny by default. It blocks every unauthorized action that USB key, if it's not authorized to load, it isn't going to load. That protects you from unknown threats, threats no one ever heard of before. It works with zero days. That's why big companies that need to stay high flying like JetBlue and infrastructure plays like the Port of Vancouver use Threat Locker. It shields them from zero day exploits from supply chain attacks. And this is a nice side effect. It provides a complete audit trail for compliance. It's a great compliance tool. Threat Locker's innovative ring fencing technology, that's what they call it isolates critical applications from weaponization. Deny by default. It's magical. It stops ransomware. It limits lateral movement within your network. And the nice thing about threatlocker, it works everywhere and every industry. Supports Mac environments as well as Windows, provides 24,7 US based support, enables comprehensive visibility and control, and it's very affordable. I was actually surprised how inexpensive it is to implement Threat Locker and how easy and quick. Just ask Mark Tolson. He's the IT director for the City of Champaign, Illinois. As you know, city government's really a target for ransomware. He says Threat Locker this is a direct quote. Threat Locker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do. If bad actors got in and tried to execute something, I take comfort knowing Threat Locker was will stop that. End quote. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with threat locker. Visit threatlocker.com twit to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com twit we thank him so much for their long term support for everything we do here at Twitten for Windows Weekly. They support Windows Weekly and we appreciate it. Thank you. Threatlocker.

[Richard Campbell]

Browse around.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you'll be impressed by not only what it can do, but how easy it is to implement, how affordable. All right, let's talk Windows 11.

[Paul Thurott]

So it's WeekD in Microsoft land and I had forgotten about that like I often do on that Tuesday of the month. And Microsoft put out these three back to back to back, I guess I'll call them announcements related to Windows somewhat that were all very confusing to me. We're going to highlight all of them today. The first was regards to these new AI features that were coming to Windows or in Microsoft's view, new AI features that are generally available for Windows 11. Today I was like, really? That's an odd time to release new features for Windows a random Tuesday of the month. So I looked at the list and I'm like, huh, none of these are new. I know about all these features. What is this? And then it took me a while to realize Microsoft A doesn't understand how the English language works. Microsoft doesn't know how to make an announcement. And these features are all just things that were in the Windows Insider program for the past few months. It's week D, that's what they're talking about. So there is a preview update, which is a cumulative update, a quality update, but it's optional. It's a preview update. You, you can enable a switch in Windows update to get those things if you like living on the edge a little bit. But most people are not going to get this thing. So I'm not sure generally available. I mean these features could still change. There could be bugs that will now be revealed by more people using them. And then when Patch Tuesday comes in August, right? Yep, it's July, maybe they'll be a little different. Who Knows anyway, generally available. So these are all things we've talked about. The Settings app has an agent. Oh actually let me backtrack for one second. These features can be divided into two buckets copilot plus PCs only. Actually let's, let's call it three buckets. Copilot plus PC running Snapdragon processor.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

Copilot plus PC running any processor, meaning AMD, intel or Snapdragon. And then features that are going to come to Everybody in Windows 11. Most of the features are only for Snapdragon, is that right? Or I should say. Yeah, I think most, most of them are only for Snapdragon. So if you have a Snapdragon X computer, it's about three of you, you will eventually get all of these features. If you have another type of Copilot plus PC you will eventually get all of these features a little bit longer time frame. And if you are a lowly loser on Windows 11 on a normal computer, like a jerk, you will get a couple of these features. So enjoy. The first one is Snapdragon only. Is that right? I'm having such a hard time keeping track of these things. It's so weird.

[Richard Campbell]

And setting is a difference in copilot plus PCs is disturbing.

[Paul Thurott]

It's unbelievable. Clearly there's a behind the scenes deal between Qualcomm and Microsoft that I feel like maybe should have expired by now. Yeah, yeah. So Settings Agent. All this means is you can use natural language search and settings and find settings. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurott]

It will come to AMD and Intel based Snapdragon copilot plus PCs at some point in the future. I don't think it will be that Tuesday next month, but maybe the following month, something like that. There's some. A bunch of improvements. We've talked about all these things for click to do, which I would say is the one useful, you know, maybe universally useful local AI feature that's in our Copilot plus PC. Not Windows, but Copilot plus PC today practice in Reading Coach. These are all, I should say these are all text actions. Right. So when you do the Windows key plus click and you get the purple pink AI frippery, these will be some of the new options. Read with Immersive Reader. That was the feature that debuted in Edge but now is available more broadly. If you have a Copilot plus PC draft with Copilot in Word, which is a weird one because don't you need a Microsoft 365 copilot license? I gotta look that one up.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. And yeah, so not sure why that's listed in the Windows thing, but whatever. And then two related to team send a team message and schedule a team meeting. So in other words, you've got some text, you want to use that as the basis for one of those teams actions. That's cool. Only on copilot plus PCs. A new photos app feature called Photo Relight. This one actually looks really cool actually. Sorry, Snapdragon X only AMD and Intel are coming soon. I told you it was confusing. I've not seen this one yet and I'm not going to now because I'm in Mexico and I won't see my Snapdragon X is. Yeah till I get home but a couple of weeks. But it looks really cool. So this is a. You can take an existing photo. This is like when you on your phone. Depending on the app you can adjust certain features after the fact. So for example, if you take like a portrait shot on your iPhone, if you did it with live photos, you can adjust the. The bokeh effect or whatever on the fly after the fact. Right. So this is like that. But for lighting you can have up to three virtual light sources. There are built in presets which I think most people will use, but then there's also manual control so you can really kind of play with it. Sounds great. I haven't used it, but it sounds good. If you have a Copilot plus PC. I believe this one is amd, intel and Snapdragon. Two new features in Paint. These I have used Sticker Generator. I think you can agree I would use this one on a daily basis. I love stickers and Object select which is one of those kind of Photoshop type features where in addition to supporting layers and some other kind of more professional features you can actually grab, even though it's a bitmap image, grab an object and then use AI to kind of cut it out of the frame and use it as a discrete object. That's cool. That one's good. Two new features for Snipping Tool. I believe these are Everybody meaning Windows 11. Broadly. One is called Perfect Screenshot. This is just an addition to the screenshotting tools or the snipping tools as we say in Snipping tool. So you can take a region, you can do a window, you can do the full screen. But if you do the full screen, what Perfect Screenshot allows you to do is auto crop to maybe a region or window and it will use whatever's on screen as the basis for that cropping. So it will do it for you? Yeah, it's fine. And color picker, which actually is surprisingly useful. Right. There's no end shot or video out of this one, so it's kind of an interesting place to put it. But if you do a lot of graphics work or you're working on a logo, maybe you want the exact color of something that's on screen. This will allow you to grab the color of any item on screen and then copy it to the clipboard in whatever format you prefer. So like hashtag, you know, ffff, whatever, whatever, you know, hex form, whatever you want and then apply it in whatever graphics app using and then get that exact color. So that's cool. I'm not sure why they listed this one because it's actually been broadly available for at least a month. But Edge Game Assist, this is that mini edge web browser that's in the game bar. So you're playing a game, you know, you hit the window or the Xbox button on your controller, the Xbox game bar or no, sorry, game bar they call it now comes up and that will be one of the floating windows. And if it recognizes the game, depending on the level of recognition that the support has to be built in, it will actually give you clues and tips for the part of the game you're in if you're really lucky. I've not seen that, but in my case, I'll see in Call of Duty, it recognizes that I am playing call of Duty 6 or Black Ops 6 and it will, you know, against group.

[Richard Campbell]

Of 12 year olds that are about to spank you.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah. And then look, this guy's browsing the web. Let's, let's pile it on. That's good, you know. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But it'd be cool if you were playing some role playing game and when you hit that, it popped up and gave you a let's play or a yes or you know, a, a walkthrough point and already aligned it.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I mean the end game here is that kind of gaming co pilot feature they've been talking about where it's like your little buddy and he, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, Clippy for gaming.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it looks like.

[Richard Campbell]

Looks like you're a loser. Which.

[Paul Thurott]

Getting headed. Shot at a lot there, Paul. Yeah. Maybe you should duck. I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

That's your fifth time through this. Are you ready for the help?

[Paul Thurott]

I know, it's. Yeah, right. I mean it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Clipping for gaming is a good idea actually.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's definitely going. It's. It's gonna, it's. That's Coming. There's no doubt about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Copilot talked a few times about folks using the cameras to see that someone's thrashing on their app and trying to help them. Like.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's trying to do the same thing over and over again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

I will say I turn my mic off. I turn everyone's mic off in multiplayer games. But the one exception to that, which I don't do a lot anymore, is if I was playing a. Like a free for all type of a game. Leave the microphone on just so you can hear the guy that you surprise the heck out of. Be like, you know, just to hear the. The exacerbated, you know, kind of like, frustration of how did he see me? You know, that kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

But. Yeah, rigged. Yep, exactly. Nice. You know, we. In the back of the day, we'd be like, nice ping. You know, because it was never skill, you know, like, I would always beat you. Normally, I'm great. You know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That 30 millisecond difference between us is the reason you succeeded.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. I mean, sometimes it is, actually. But anyway, you know, as the victim of that, it's really. It's. It's like the volts versus amps thing. It's not really the ping. It's the frame. It's the. What do you call it? The. I guess the frame rate.

[Leo Laporte]

The latency.

[Paul Thurott]

Latency, thank you. That's the term I was looking for. It's the latency. Yep, exactly. Copilot Vision, another feature. This has been around for a little while, actually, but it's us only. It's available, the Copilot, which you know. So everyone, I guess. Lucky you. And then another one. I thought maybe I was wrong about this one because I have so many. It's hard for me to tell what's what anymore. But quick machine recovery. So this is the automatic recover option, where something goes wrong, you reboot. And maybe it wouldn't boot into Windows. Normally, you'd have to go through the recovery environment. If you could figure out how to make that work, it will do that automatically for you. But there are two fun additions to this feature that will benefit a lot of people. One is the wait time. Because what you would see, typically, is that blue screen of death. Right. So it's blue, it's got the QR code, useless information at the bottom. And it takes a while. Right. Every time I see the screen, I'm like, could I just. I get it. It didn't work. Can I keep going, please? But it would wait for, like, up to 40 seconds. You know, they've reduced that wait time up to two seconds. Cool. And they've changed the screen to black because now it's completely different, so.

[Richard Campbell]

But they don't have to change the acronym at least.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, right. Black screen of death. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's good news.

[Paul Thurott]

So there you go. Yeah. So what I just listed out was pretty much 24H2, but 23H2 will get the same features if they're not already same time frame. And there is a Windows 10 update as well, but that's pretty much bug fixes and basically just prepping this thing for those features. End of life. Yeah. Yep. And tide. Let me see if this is where we are. Yeah, no, we're in somewhere else. No, we are. We're here. This is good. So this is good. This is a good transition. So when Windows 10 goes out of support for most people in October, Microsoft will by that point have ready a PC transfer feature that will expose itself in the Windows Backup app so that you can, on either end of that transition, import or export your data to the other PC. Right. So if you've ever set up Windows 11, you surely have seen you get to a screen and it says, hey, would you like to recover from a previous backup? And that's something Windows Backup did behind your back without your acknowledgment, but whatever. And it restores some of the settings and things that you did if it will restore the store apps that you install, that kind of thing. I hate this feature. I wish I could turn it off. I always do a clean install. But whatever, it's fine. I get it. I get why people would want it. So this new.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm still burned by the previous system restore feature that never worked. So yeah, yeah, you know, it always screws things up. So I understand why your point of view, but it's better now, right?

[Paul Thurott]

I think that the feature you're referring to from a technical perspective was about a thousand times more complex than what I'm describing now. But yeah, I. This is.

[Leo Laporte]

You feel my pain, I'm sure.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah. I can't say I've never been helped by it, but I'll just remain silent on that topic.

[Leo Laporte]

So occasionally.

[Paul Thurott]

So in the future, when you run the Windows Backup app, you'll have two options. So today what you get is a list of like four types of things you could back up. You can click a backup button. That's kind of pointless. It's going to do it anyway. But now there are going to be two top level options and one of them is going to be about transferring to another PC or receiving from another PC. Right. If you've just installed Windows on a new PC. So this thing will work over WI Fi. It's like a lap link type thing. It's not complete. It's not going to do your apps, it's not going to do certain things. But it's over and above the settings based restore tool that we already have. So they've been implementing this in steps. There are bits of it in Windows 11 today probably. Well, it won't be August, but maybe September. Certainly September. I would think they'll probably complete this. So we'll have both halves and then at that point you'll be able to migrate partial migration from one PC to another PC. Either Windows 11 or 10. Right. So maybe you're upgrading from 10 to 11. Maybe in the future you're going from 11 to 11. Whatever. But okay. Also, by the way, asterisk does not work with Windows 11 R&R. I'm hilarious. Yet. I mean it will. But yeah, there you go. Microsoft's classic.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a hard computer science problem, I'm sure.

[Paul Thurott]

I feel like it isn't. I don't. I feel like that should just. I don't even understand what the problem should even matter.

[Leo Laporte]

What the processor is should not matter.

[Paul Thurott]

It couldn't agree more. Yep, stupid. We have. There hasn't been too much action on the insider front in the past week. There was a canary build. You may recall last week we were talking about a canary build with a lot of new stuff. There is one build with no new stuff, just a couple of bug fixes. And then there were big builds for dev and beta which point to probably September time frame for Windows update for patch Tuesday. So yet again, more actions for click to do in this case for images. Image descriptions. Narrator I can't. It's possible I've never experienced this in my life. Despite the fact that I've been covering Windows for 30 years. They're making an improvement to the performance logs like the. So this is something people who watch this show have dealt with this interface. Most people have not. Right. So tied somewhat to what Leo just said about the previous. What do you call it? The restore System restore feature that's still, by the way, buried in Windows. If you want to search, it's still there. Wow. Still there. Oh yeah. Yeah. You got to really look for it. But it's still there. Well, you can probably just search for it. Actually it's there if you search for. Yeah, system restore. But it's system sure. Yep. So if you want a little blast from the past, that's still there. You know, we just mentioned blue screens, right? So you would blue screen and the first thing you would do is go into the event log and try to figure out what it was. And if you're like me, you never once figured out what it was, but whatever. I mean, oftentimes the blue screens, it's a hardware thing. Maybe you just plug something in, maybe you added some hardware, you know, you find out that way, whatever. So this is similar to if you think that Windows Backup is sort of a replacement for System Restore. Sort of, I guess. And it sort of is. This is sort of a replacement for that, that process I just described. It will look at your system, it will see that things have been slowing down for some reason and it will write more information to this performance log so that you can manually today and I think automated in the future, because that's where Windows is going to figure out what is causing the problem and then you can take the steps to solve it.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe that's pretty cool.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's all, I think it's hard coded to like to say Chrome, you know, it's going to be Chrome every time. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So like if you used Edge, you wouldn't have it.

[Paul Thurott]

If number of tabs is over 5 and browser equals Chrome, it's Chrome. It's Chrome.

[Richard Campbell]

The real question is, will it ever be a Microsoft product vault ever?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I don't know. We'll see where this goes. I mean, when they introduced Windows Backup, which, you know, Windows 11, obviously, so as long ago as four years ago, I guess I was like, this could turn into something really cool. That hasn't happened yet, but it has evolved and this thing they're doing now is the biggest change. And you know, we'll see. But we'll see. I mean, I, I do like the notion that it, the system should figure out the problem and just fix it. Right? Yeah. This is its own form of orchestration. Yeah. Telling you that there's a problem is like, yeah, I know there's a problem. It took 20 seconds to display the dialog like, but, you know, telling me how to fix something is pretty good. Just fixing it automatically is very good. So maybe we'll get there, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a first step, you know.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And then just some lock screen and privacy improvements which are not all that meaningful. But on the lock screen front it was the ability to configure which widgets are there. And in which order? Right, which. Okay, fine. And I think we talked about this last week or two weeks ago, the search privacy settings were in two different locations in settings because Microsoft. And now they're in one. I guess so.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh, fancy progress. I do have a question about your article on weekd.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

What's with the life and death of King John?

[Paul Thurott]

Who?

[Leo Laporte]

I know your screenshot.

[Paul Thurott]

It's like, oh, that's from Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

That's just a. Oh, that's from Microsoft Copilot to rewrite Shakespeare. Is that what we're talking here? I don't.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So a thousand monies or copilot given enough time. No, I think what they were trying to do here was select a screen that had text and image so that. And you can see that. That. That's the blue, pink, purple thing I've been talking about. When you first do it, it's the whole screen. Well, it is sort of there too, I guess. But then it will highlight the things that can do stuff with.

[Leo Laporte]

And I see.

[Paul Thurott]

Right click and choose from the.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't do anything with that picture.

[Paul Thurott]

This is going to. This is a problem, this interface. And what I mean by that is it's a good idea in some sense. I like the idea of Interact. You know, I have a question about this thing, or I want to do something with this thing. Like, this is smart in a way. The problem is this thing is extensible. So, like right now we're just dealing. Like when this thing first came out, when they first released the first preview, probably November, whatever it was, there were two text actions and one image action. Right. And if you look at the screenshot today, this is just text. How many actions you see, there's a bunch. Eventually everything that can do anything with text is going to add something to this list and we're going to get these giant context menus that are going to scroll off the edge of the screen. Because that's how this works, right? This is the UI equivalent of like a COM component from the 1990s, having public interfaces that software code can access programmatically to access the functionality that's inside of the thing, the object or whatever. Except that now what we're talking about is an AI. Well, it's a. It's a. I guess it's an app, technically, using probably. No, definitely multiple models. It is. It's doing an almost manual form of orchestration. It's letting you pick what you want. It picks the right model on the back end for that one feature and then it does the thing. Whatever it is, but the problem is we're all going to have, you know, it's going to be a million of these things. Like if you have a copilot plus PC, you have over 40 models out of the box. You know, that's cool. It's cool. But it's like a double edged sword, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Anyway, this is to my mind the one. Well, that's not really true.

[Richard Campbell]

The models are not that important.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Click to do is possibly probably the biggest single like useful AI feature in Windows. Slash Copilot plus PC I would say. But it's going to get, you know, it's going to get overloaded. So that's kind of a, kind of a weird problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Let us pause.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And then we shall continue on. But I have a sponsor that's just dying to meet you.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

In the words of Frankenfurter, our show today brought to you by 1Password. You know that name? Of course you do. 1Password is great for individuals, but should be in business too. And I'll tell you why. Survey says over half of IT pros say that securing SaaS apps is their biggest challenge. And I think a lot of that's probably AI. Right. With the growing problems of SaaS sprawl and shadow it, it's not hard to see why they're struggling with this. Well, there is a solution, thankfully. Trelica this is from 1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps whether they're managed or not. Trelica T R E L I C a Trellica by 1Password it's actually really cool. It inventories every app in use at your company, whether it's authorized or not. Just every app in use and then pre populated app profiles and they have them for everything. Assess the SaaS risks letting you manage access, optimize, spend and enforce security best practices across every single app your employees use. It gives you a way to manage shadow it to securely onboard and offboard employees too and meet compliance goals. Trelika by1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS. Access governance is just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award winning password manager of course that's the first place, that's the first step. It's trusted by a million, more than a million users, millions of users, over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now they're doing more than just securing passwords with 1Password. Extended Access Management. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. Shadow it learn [e-mail] Windows Weekly that's 1Password.com/Windows Weekly and that's all lowercase. 1Password.com Windows Weekly thank you 1Password for supporting Windows Weekly and everything we do here at TWiT. We appreciate what you do for our listeners. This one. This next story kind of surprised me from Brave, right?

[Paul Thurott]

Well, it makes sense when you consider the point of Brave, right? So Brave, like Signal, the private messaging app that our government uses so effectively, is by definition a privacy solution. Right. Like a lot of the people who would choose Brave would do so because of the privacy and security and it's got that provides out of the box.

[Leo Laporte]

By default in most cases.

[Paul Thurott]

So with look, you could make a Venn diagram of the people who are gonna who have and or will have of Copilot plus PC, figure out Recall, decide they want to use it, and then people use Brave. And I think the gap between those two circles would be like the Grand Canyon. Like I don't think there is any overlap.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not going to run into each other.

[Paul Thurott]

No, I don't think so. But. Okay, but let's pretend otherwise. I think it's okay for an app. Well, no, it's obviously it's okay. It's okay for an app that is privacy focused to automatically elect to not support Recall. Right. To block it or hide it or hide the app from Recall. This is a feature that is built into Recall, actually. Right. So in the case of Brave, because it's a browser, Recall does not look at or record snapshot, incognito or private browser windows. So Brave identifies itself as that all the time. And it won't be included in Recall by default. You can enable it if you want to use it inside the Brave ui. I should mention this is in a coming update. So I think we're at version 1.80 and it will be in 1.81. So could happen any second now. But yeah, there's all this like of course the problem I have with this is only that it just brings up Recall again and then you get the same people. This is insane. It's the same nonsense over and over again. It's like, guys, relax, we get it. You don't have to use it. Just leave it alone. It's fine. It works fine. It's not going to hurt anybody. But yeah, I mean, the type of person who would. Brave. We use brave, advocate for brave, maybe, whatever, are the types of people who do not like Recall and would want that, even though they're never going to turn it on anyway and probably don't have a computer that could use it as it is. But that's fine. It's fine. Like, I, I think this is fine. We're fine. Everything's fine. We're all fine. Yeah, we're fine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of a statement though, about recall.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, it isn't though. That's the problem. Like, that's my problem. My problem literally is it isn't like, it's just.

[Richard Campbell]

Is the window that, is the browser going to be blacked out in Recall? Is that just how it looks or.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I would imagine so. I, I, I assume you don't see through it. Like you don't see whatever's behind it. But yeah, it's just those snapshots are just screenshots. Right? So it won't take screenshots of that window. So, yes, I would imagine it's either going to be an empty hole or blacked out. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. I don't know. You know when Signal made this similar announcement a couple weeks ago. Signal, that's what they do.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that makes sense for Signal. I, I guess, I don't, I think a br. Just a regular browser. But yeah, you're right, it's a PR.

[Richard Campbell]

Going to be the Brave browser.

[Paul Thurott]

This speaks to that audience. That's, that's all I'm saying. Like, this is, this is what those guys want to hear. You know, they're like, yeah, I told you so, Brad, you can't trust Recall. Good for them. You know, it's like, relax, there's nothing wrong with recall, but it's, this is them, you know, Like, I don't expect, you know, Opera or Chrome or something to auto, like decide for you not to be part of Recall. Right. Because you can as a user go in and say, I don't ever want this app. And if you're doing like some people would use Chrome, let's say, and do their normal browsing and it's like, whatever. But then they want to visit a porn site or use their banking site or something that they don't want other people knowing about.

[Leo Laporte]

Fire up Brave.

[Paul Thurott]

They might use Brave and that would be excluded from Recall, if that's on. But again, Venn diagram. I just want to keep bringing that one up.

[Richard Campbell]

Built in Feature and recall for like all incognito Windows or.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that's on by default.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, but interesting. Oh, well then that explains it. If they're all incognito by default.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, they're not actually all incognito. I, if I understand Brave correctly, but they will identify themselves as that to the system. So that recall is not.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how they do it. I get it.

[Paul Thurott]

That's fine. Yeah, it's fine. We're all fine. If I said we're fine, we're fine, we're fine. How are you? I don't know. I want to emphasize how fine we are, but, you know, like, this is the type of thing. Like there's all this commentary around this and it's all by people who actually do not use Brave or use Recall or ever would, but they all have strong opinions about it and it's like, guys, it's fine. Same thing with WhatsApp. WhatsApp a couple years ago announced, I'm going to call it native is kind of a strong term, but a UWP version of their app on Windows. They're getting rid of it. Yep. Okay. Oh, interesting. Then you might be. I'm curious of your opinion of this when, if or when you ever use this, they're getting rid of that and going with a pwa, which will still be in the store. It's available now in beta. I've installed it. I'm not a big WhatsApp fan, but I, I use it and it's fine. It's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

What's being able to use it for my PC, Right?

[Paul Thurott]

Like, yeah, it looks exactly the same as the other one. I sure. The, the big difference, and this is a bizarre limitation to WhatsApp that I've never understood and I hate, is it relies on you having a single instance of the app on a phone, as one would. And then you, you know, you do the QR code thing and you associate that other app with the one that's on your phone. Like, they don't let, typically don't let you log into multiple instances of their app on multiple devices. Whereas, like, for me, this is a problem because I go back and forth between the iPhone and Android and there's no way or no easy way, no way I found to automatically keep like all the chats that are on the iPhone, get them on Android, get all those and put them on, like there's no one cloud based. One list of chats. And I, I don't understand this. I don't understand why I can't go to and because they have this limitation when I pick up my Android phone but I'm using the iPhone now I can't even get into WhatsApp. I have to switch it over to that device and it's like guys like I don't understand this. So unfortunately my understanding I never. Well I probably have used it once or twice but the I believe the UWP version of the app was a standalone instance of WhatsApp. It didn't require you to have or didn't require a link between it and your phone based app or whatever the UWP version does. So whatever. I, I don't do a, I use it. I, I actually am in WhatsApp every day mostly because I'm in Mexico and they use, they use it extensively here.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's how you get your tacos from Cafe Taco Bar.

[Paul Thurott]

Let me tell you something. Not only could you do that through WhatsApp but you could then schedule a doctor's appointment and have him come back and show you the X rays from earlier and they use it.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish we had a standard like that in the US like something everybody used.

[Paul Thurott]

I also this is unrelated to anything but the other big cross platform problem I have is imessage always screws everything up no matter which direction I'm going in. And WhatsApp is. I don't like Facebook meta, whatever. But WhatsApp can now be used as a MMS SMS app on iPhone. Yeah, I don't think yet on Android or ever. I don't know. I don't think it's on Android like that. But if that app actually let me go back and forth and did have all the chats and synced everything to the cloud and everything worked, I would just use that. That would be great.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know the only reason it doesn't is because Apple won't let it.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah, no, I know it's the same problem in both cases. So I don't know, maybe regulators out there someday we'll get a, we'll get that fixed. I don't know. But today it's stinks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay, I'm jealous. You know in Japan they have what is it Line and in China they have WeChat. Here we have X.com the everything.

[Paul Thurott]

Here we have green bubbles and blue bubbles and never the twain shall meet. Never.

[Leo Laporte]

The two feel like we're a second class citizens up here. I don't know the, the Canada is there a standard I Most of the rest of the world WhatsApp is standard. But not in Canada.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, it's. It's totally regional, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

It's.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, you can't even see most of the rest of the world is WhatsApp either. Like I've gone to places where Viper was it, you know, like that's what they Amazing. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

But Brazil, WhatsApp's huge. Mexico, it's huge. I know. We used it when we were in Mexico. The hotel said WhatsApp.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Yep, yep. I just was sitting at a bar last night and some guy added me to WhatsApp. You know, like just. It's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I feel like we need a central place.

[Paul Thurott]

The key to being a second class society, Leo, is that you think you're the greatest country on earth and you're completely oblivious to the fact that the rest of the planet has bypassed you a decade.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a different context.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay, sorry, go.

[Leo Laporte]

My point of view is we invented this stuff and it's always the case like the same with cell phones that when you were the first, you have a huge amount of legacy. So it's very difficult for you to do the thing that 10 years or 20 years later evolved to be the right thing because you've got all this legacies that would happen with cell phone, happen with messaging, happens with train gauges. I don't know what I have feel.

[Paul Thurott]

Like it happens with a lot of things. The habit slash tradition problem. Yeah. Legacy is always the same way. For so long.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

That if you actually came back and said why do we do this? No one could answer that question. Like, well, we've always done it this way. Well, actually no, we haven't. But. But why are we doing it this way?

[Leo Laporte]

How could we get like a national campaign would signal. If we all decided to use signal, would that probably be a good choice? Right. That's people want owned by Meta. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

It has the features. Does it have all the features, people? I think like telegram because it has stickers and stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. There's more restricted on the features on signal. But it's.

[Paul Thurott]

What kind of. Am I missing something? I need text and sometimes I like to send a photo.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we just send it there? You're not what we call.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't need exploding fireworks every time someone does something fun. I don't need a clown to bounce across the screen. Like just want to communicate.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe we should have something for people over 50 and under 50.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. It's going to be called AARP 72 point type. You know it's gonna yell it at you. It's like, hey, your son called back.

[Leo Laporte]

Call your mother.

[Paul Thurott]

And you gotta hear that everywhere in the restaurant because it's like happy hour and the only people in there are like 80, you know, because when Telegram.

[Leo Laporte]

First came out, I, I kind of took a sing one man campaign to get everybody to use it. Of course it failed miserably. Now that I know how bad Telegram is in, in many ways including security.

[Richard Campbell]

I wouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

But I like the.

[Paul Thurott]

My kids are, are in year five of a campaign to convince my wife to get an iPhone so she can be the right color bubble and.

[Leo Laporte]

And they've just gone after the family.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, I go back and forth, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You use both.

[Paul Thurott]

She's Samsung. She's all Samsung and could not care less. She's not passionate about Samsung. She just does not care.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, she doesn't care. That's who uses Samsung. People who don't care.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. It's like when you buy a car at Costco, it's like that's what. Why did you pick this? It was the one they had.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay. But it's a Chevy. What are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a car. You know, it's got four wheels.

[Paul Thurott]

It gets me there. I mean it's in the shop a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, Costco, I, I just bought the. I probably fell for it, but I bought for the new fold because it looks pretty beautiful.

[Paul Thurott]

Honestly. It's gorgeous. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yep. And. And I just kind of want to get a sense of, you know what. Oh, I think had the early ones but I wanted to get a sense of where they've gone with so expensive.

[Paul Thurott]

It's like so.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so you're pretty good on trade ins if you preorder.

[Paul Thurott]

Pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

But I still preorder.

[Paul Thurott]

The best phone I have is, you know, for trade is an iPhone, whatever. The newest Pro Max is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And it's still. It's still like 1500 bucks, you know, like it's not inexpensive. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

I got through Google Fi and I got it down to I think 1200. It's still expensive.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. The little one or the big one?

[Leo Laporte]

The big one.

[Paul Thurott]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

But I have a trade in. I have the most recent flip so.

[Paul Thurott]

I tried that too. The problem with FI is you can't trade in a current gen device of any kind. So my iPhone 16, whatever will not.

[Leo Laporte]

Work because they want you to replace your old phone with the FIFO. In fact, you have to use it for 120 days to get the discount. Yeah. So I will be Replacing my Google Pixel 9 with a Samsung Galaxy Fold.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay. Yeah, I looked. I can't remember, but I want to say I could have done that as well. It was like $380 maybe. Like, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's not great.

[Paul Thurott]

It's not great. You know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pricey.

[Paul Thurott]

It's expensive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I'm writing it off. It's kind of a business expense. I need.

[Paul Thurott]

No, I, I see. I hear you. I. Yeah, I'm ready, but I, I guess I'm not that ready because it was like 2000.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, get Stephanie to do it. She's Ms. Samsung.

[Paul Thurott]

Have you met my wife?

[Richard Campbell]

She is.

[Paul Thurott]

First of all, a. Get her to do it is hilarious. It's $2,000. Yeah, no, I mentioned this to her and she's. She is interested in folding funds and she was like, yeah, right. Like, she's never, she would never make that decision.

[Leo Laporte]

You know why I love my wife? It's a love hate thing. But. But because she makes me buy the newest ones.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, there you go. Okay. See?

[Leo Laporte]

She says, no. I said, I don't. I don't want to buy the new iPhone.

[Paul Thurott]

She said, yeah, flip. Like, I, I would even. I'm not stupid enough to try to bring this one up. Like, you know, like, you know, like I could make a case for it, I guess, but she'd be like, yeah, you're not doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

I actively don't want to get the new phone. I feel like, God, I can't. I just. Can I just be normal? But no, she won't let me be normal.

[Paul Thurott]

Someday we will be normal people or we'll be dead. I don't know. But, yeah, but for now, yeah, you have to kind of keep. You know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to buy the double ARP phone. It's the back of the magazine.

[Paul Thurott]

It's actually all it is is like a first. It's a first gen iPad and it has like a radio thing and it takes pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul takes pictures.

[Paul Thurott]

What do you say? Bring it down. I can't hear you. Hello? Did anyone else hear this? Yeah, we can all hear it, grandpa. You know, like we're. I'm on the cusp of.

[Leo Laporte]

So close. You're not. I am cuspier than you are.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know, man.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta tell you, I. I had a chat with a. With a mom here in Madeira park whose son has gotten rid of his iPhone for a flip phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, because the iPhone's hurting him and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the reaction to big tech. It's like the knee jerk opposite reaction to big tech.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and these kids are getting it. They just. Yeah, I know you want to be able to reach me, mom, so I need a phone, but this one.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay. Actually, you know what? I actually do respect that. I don't think that's a solution for everybody. I think there's some portion of people who actually do have the self will or whatever it is to minimize what's on their screen and turn off the notifications and they can do that. But that's like saying there are some people who can drink and maybe they over drink sometimes but they're okay. But some people, they actually just need to walk away.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like going on a diet. It's like, yeah, I could do it for a little while.

[Paul Thurott]

It depends on the person. Right. I mean some people have what self control is not fair because it makes it seem like the other person's lacking in some way. But yeah, if you have a. Whatever mental health condition and you literally can't, then yes. I mean, I would say in that case getting a flip phone, maybe it's the right choice, you know, mental health wise. Right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you could, you can get them that. They, they still text, they make phone calls.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, that's the thing. It sounds.

[Leo Laporte]

They have maps.

[Paul Thurott]

They acknowledge that human beings still need to get in touch with me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

So that's fine. They can send that K text we talked about last week. No problem. That's easy. Yep. It's not for me, but I, yeah, I get, I get it. I'm not something like I'm not going to make like this.

[Leo Laporte]

This is The Mudita Compact $439 is an E Ink phone. Comes in three colors.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Gray, black, or less gray.

[Paul Thurott]

It comes in any color you want as long as it's the one themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

And it has, you know, I don't.

[Paul Thurott]

Know about this like, because you could kind of do this to an existing phone and still get the benefit of the phone, you know, but it.

[Leo Laporte]

Nah, this is a little bit more. It has. It'll play your music. You can read, you know, you can, you can. It'll do maps.

[Paul Thurott]

Probably not going to glorious black and white, but. Because that would be terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but I'm sure because it's E ink, it's got great battery life.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep, yep, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, that's.

[Paul Thurott]

That's a bridge too far for me. I.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, I feel like I should do this just to see like be.

[Paul Thurott]

A expert guinea pig for this. Yeah, yeah. But I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't get you. I'm not.

[Paul Thurott]

Look, I. It's important. Like, I. I have a. An Apple weather widget on my iPhone. Home screen is big and it says the weather and it has nothing to do with what's going on outside. I don't even. It's just like a comedy routine. Like, I don't know what it's doing. It's like random weather or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Has weather gotten worse? I feel like the. I thought it was just petaluma. It says it's gonna be 85 degrees and it's 62. It doesn't have anything to do with reality.

[Paul Thurott]

I have a screenshot of this. So we were standing in the middle of the hardest rainfall I've ever seen. Lightning and thunder all over Mexico City. This has never happened before in history. And this thing is like partly cloudy. I'm like, yeah, close.

[Richard Campbell]

Almost.

[Paul Thurott]

Maybe you think the lightning that keeps happening is the sun, but it's. Yeah, it's not. The Apple one's terrible. I don't know why.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I've tried every weather app. I'm using something called Windy right now. Nice surfers. Like, it's the first.

[Paul Thurott]

Like when you learn a programming language. Now if you went to college and learned to program, which maybe would not be a great idea today, but building a weather app is like the second or third project. You know, it's like, it's like. What about like. So it's the back end data. I guess that's horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess that's what's wrong. Yeah. All right, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to distract. On we go with the show.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. Just one hardware related thing. This was supposed to happen a couple of months ago. And this ties into that thing you were asking about, the Snapdragon dev kit. Like, what am I doing with that? My goal for that was to use it as the podcast machine that I have at home within my home office. Yeah, I haven't done that yet because these drivers were coming and had never arrived and now they're here. So focusrite, in collaboration with Qualcomm, has released drivers for basically their entire product line. So this is like the. When I talked to Qualcomm, I don't. January doesn't sound right, but it was before Mexico. I don't remember. Maybe it was late last year. But this was the final frontier for major hardware compatibility issues. These USB audio devices, these interfaces. Right. And so their plan was early in this year to have to solve that problem. And this is the first major step, because focusrite obviously is one of the big players in this market and they're still in beta. But I was going back and forth with Qualcomm and every time I was in Mexico, they're like, all right, we're ready to release them. I'm like, I don't have that computer here. I don't have that device here, rather, okay. And then I got back home like, all right, I'm here. I got everything like, yeah, we're not ready. Sorry, it's been a. You know. And then like I go back to Mexico, like, all right, we're ready again. I'm like, all right, seriously. But when I get home, I will be. I will be using that dev device on my, in my home office and that will be the device I do this on. So I'm fingers crossed. I think it's going to be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the last hardware compatibility? I mean, is there a lot of.

[Paul Thurott]

So there might be other small ones. So I mean there might be like individual printers here and there, that kind of thing. And obviously the, the driver, not the drivers, but the utilities associated with that stuff. But as far as like a major, what do we call this? Like a hardware product category, this was the big one for 2025. They're like, we have to solve this. Like, this is. There are people who like are creators, they're on the go. They want to use their lap. They want to use a laptop that lasts forever and has good performance, but they also need this interface to do the work they do. And they can't, you know, can't do it. And now they can. So yeah, this is the, to me, this is the big one. I, you know, there were two. Well, maybe it was one. I don't. One or two software issues. I had both. We saw pretty quick. I know Google Drive was one and there was one major hardware one and it was this. And now that's. That's been solved too. So it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Fantastic.

[Paul Thurott]

Also, I'd like to announce that Windows Weekly will become Linux Weekly next week because it's time.

[Leo Laporte]

Finally.

[Paul Thurott]

It is the year of the Linux desktop, certainly the year of the Linux podcast. But I saw this headline and I had kind of set it aside and I realized after I looked at it more closely there was a big caveat, which is that Linux has it's actually usage share, but stat. Conner calls it market share, but 5% usage share in the United States worldwide. It's like 4.04 or maybe 4.0 or 8.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. It's more than the U.S. the magic.

[Richard Campbell]

Number is 10, right. Like if you get to 10, things start to change.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you include Android and Chromebook.

[Paul Thurott]

But we don't, we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

But those are both Linux.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, they're based on, that's like. I mean, yeah, they're based on Linux. But I would argue that both of those things are successful in part because they are not Linux. Right. That they, they have their own systems. Yeah. So I was instantly transported back in time to 1997 when Steve Jobs got on stage in Boston. Bill Gates, giant head came out and he said, bill, between the two of us, we have 100% of the personal computing market, which was true asterisks. Apple had 5% of the market at that time.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

So to give you. This may be the most. Well, there's two big problems for Linux. One is that if you look at Apple and what they've done since then, I would say that companies kind of go on gangbusters. Right. We can all agree, we've all seen Macs out in the world. They're on planes or schools are everywhere. That product has 9% market share today. Like they, they, they really have not exploded like 40% or something. They're not there. Linux is going to have a much harder time getting anywhere close to that. And part of the problem, that's the second problem is there's no single guiding strategy or voice or standards organization for Linux. Right. There are thousands of distributions. Even if you look at ubuntu has roughly 20% of the Linux market on desktop, 5%. So I don't know what 20% of 5% is 1% small, that would be 1%. It has 13 or 15 flavors, you know, types of, you know, the different UIs, different display technologies, all kinds of different things, different focuses, obviously, but it's a, it's bifurcated is not the right word. We need a word that's that. But like times a thousand.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like fragmented.

[Paul Thurott]

There you go. We have that word and it's a basic word, Paul. And you're a writer. Okay, so, yeah, fragmented, perfect. So I think that's the, that's kind of the headwind. Like it, it doesn't matter in Iot. It doesn't matter in the cloud, it doesn't matter in servers. Right. Like these things are doing like basically doing background processing. They're doing, I mean they're using a very small part of Linux, I would imagine. But Linux on the desktop, it's absolutely matured dramatically. There's really good distributions for sort of normal people. But no one would even know where to start when something went wrong. We can't figure out problems in Windows, you know, like how on earth, my mother, my brother, you know, normal human being, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Dude, Linux AI coming.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh yeah. Is there a single big Linux AI coming I don't know about? Like this is, you know, part of the problem, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Like the one that's going to tell you, you know, just read the manual.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Literally with a swear word in it. Yeah, exactly. And, and that community is so open and welcoming to normal people. I mean, they, they love questions, they love to help, they love, you know, people who don't understand these esoteric topics.

[Richard Campbell]

So it'll be great.

[Paul Thurott]

It's going to be. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you guys just wouldn't be so stupid.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Then we, we could talk be.

[Paul Thurott]

Fair enough. Fair enough, right? Yep. I didn't know the word fragmented, Leo. What do you expect? I, I, you know, I am maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

I am toying with a new distro that's all the rage called Cashy. O S C A C H Y.

[Paul Thurott]

O S Cachy with a C. I've.

[Leo Laporte]

Not heard of this, like. Well, it's, it's pretty new. It's based on Arch, which is nice because that's a rolling distro, so you don't ever have to upgrade the distribution you're always going to have.

[Paul Thurott]

How do you feel about immutable Linuxes? Do you like that kind of thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. Stablecoin only stored Nixos. Well, actually Nixos is functional. That's kind of.

[Paul Thurott]

See, I say words.

[Leo Laporte]

It is very fragmented because it's different strokes for different folks.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The interesting thing about CACHE is it's optimized for modern hardware and speed.

[Paul Thurott]

But I think Microsoft makes a compelling case. One product works for everyone and it works great. So what's the problem? Yeah, a good point, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft's getting pretty fragmented lately, isn't it? Yes, they are, in a way.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, we're gonna, by the way, we're gonna talk about that next, so don't worry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I mean, look, it's clearly. Linux is for enthusiasts.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Here's a little fact. No, a fact that people probably either don't know or forget or kind of just will be kind of blown away by. In general, Linux has been around for over 30 years, since 92. Yeah, that's a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Dinosaur Vogs invented Linux.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, do you have any idea how many things have come and gone since then.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

It's astonishing.

[Richard Campbell]

Babies.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. It's crazy. Well, okay. Oh, yeah. Celine Dion.

[Leo Laporte]

Tickle Me Elmo.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, the whole grunge.

[Leo Laporte]

Celine Dion is still with us. Do not.

[Paul Thurott]

Is she? Is she? I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Barney.

[Leo Laporte]

Barney. Yeah. I mean, I think Linux has staying power. You're using it all the time, every website.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, but the key to using it every time, all the time is that we don't know we are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's true.

[Paul Thurott]

It's the fluoride in the water, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

It's that thing, you know, and like fluoride. Fill in whatever you want after that.

[Richard Campbell]

Where are you going?

[Leo Laporte]

Depends. Depends how you feel about fluoride, I.

[Paul Thurott]

Guess was to have British teeth and we're going in the right direction. I don't, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

They, they say the dentists in Washington state can always tell when one of their patients is from Oregon because they didn't have fluoride.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Change teeth.

[Paul Thurott]

I, I, One thing I've witnessed with my own children and I grew up in whatever age I grew up and, and when I got filling, I. Every one of my teeth that can have fillings has fillings. Right. So in the beginning, these were like silver fillings. And then as it became an adult, at some point they were like, hey, you have to replace these over time. They fall out, whatever happens, and they replace them or they're mercury.

[Leo Laporte]

I have mercury fillings still.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that's what amalgam is. I don't think I had. Well, okay, I don't remember.

[Richard Campbell]

Literally an amalgam of silver and mercury.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a handful. I remember when I was a kid going to the dentist and he said, look at this, this is fun. And he had little balls of mercury on the tray and he was playing with it.

[Richard Campbell]

Isn't that cool?

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to put that in your teeth.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. He's in a home now and he can't think clearly.

[Leo Laporte]

They call him the mad dentist.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

But my kids, I mean, that's how it's changed.

[Paul Thurott]

My kids don't have cavities. Like, I know I have as many cavities as I have teeth. My kids have zero cavities.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And that's why, like, fluoride. Like, sorry, but you have any idea how much money that saved me? I mean, it's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a genetics equation here too, you know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but they got his genes. Don't forget Richard.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, they were screwed from the get go.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have very straight Teeth. And the kid's mom has very soft teeth and they, they got my. Both kids got her teeth.

[Paul Thurott]

Not mine.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I had, I had one where the doc, the dentist is like, ah, there's no money there. And then the other one is like, oh, gold mine.

[Paul Thurott]

My dentist I referred to lovingly as Dr. Mengele had to pull out for my team.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul is it 6.

[Paul Thurott]

Guy was old school. He went to school probably in the 60s and stopped learning at that point. So like when he, when he took out my wisdom teeth so I could get braces, he literally had to stand with his feet on the arms of the chair I was in and with, with a, like a plier pulling with all of his body.

[Leo Laporte]

Nurse, give me some leverage. Nurse.

[Paul Thurott]

Tooth get to come out of my jaw. And I.

[Richard Campbell]

Every two. Every tooth falling apart. Except the one you wanted to get out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's awful.

[Paul Thurott]

It was unbelievable. And then I bled for almost all of a week and it got to the point where like we were gonna have to go to the hospital to figure this out. And then it finally stopped. But I, I had to stay awake that whole weekend and like it was unbelievable. I miss those days. The good old days. Anyway, that's what using AI is like.

[Leo Laporte]

Moving right along to Surface and the Copilot plus PC.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So last year Microsoft introduced this Copilot plus PC thing, which I think is at the heart of a lot of problems we're seeing in Windows today. So I mentioned the weirdness of monthly updates for Copilot plus PC only, but only for Snapdragon because they went to market with Snapdragon first and clearly there's some. Something there like a agreement of some kind. It's bizarre. I mean I love those computers but I discovered very quickly and then have verified this over time that you buy one of these things, whether it's AMD Intel, Snapdragon for the improved reliability, the better performance, the efficiency, the instant on performance. Like all that stuff, like it's. Well, especially on Snapdragon. It's much better on Snapdragon. But the AI stuff they were selling was always pretty terrible. If you flash forward, it's been over a year. I mentioned click to do kind of the marquee feature. There's a couple little individual photos like our features rather than the photos app in particular has some pretty good kind of AI features. Like the thing I mentioned today is coming soon, the relight feature. But the problem is this, this creates another kind of bifurcation if you will, where for a long time we've had different product additions or SKUs of windows and each with its own set of capabilities. We went off the rails a bit, remember Vista especially. But also seven had multiple home looks like Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, Pro. There was all these different versions and there still are, but in the consumer market it's like Home and Pro and it's like, okay, kind of an artificial delineation of features, whatever. I would say that the benefit of Pro has gotten a lot smaller than it originally was. But there are some things like BitLocker support, like the ability to create BitLocker encrypted disks and USB keys and so forth is part of Pro. That's, you know, it's good. Hyper V, et cetera, et cetera. But now, you know, Copilot plus PC creates like more of that problem. Right. And I just, we just keep saying this. Even if you get a Copilot plus PC, I mean most people are probably getting an intel or AMD chip because that's what most people buy. They're not getting the features right away. Like they'll come later. And it's this bizarre mess of like it just contributes to the problem of you never know what you're going to see on any given computer when you open the laptop later to walk up to it, whatever it is. And I here in Mexico, I have several computers at home, I have many more. But it's the same thing. I go from like this PC in front of me has the new Start menu. It's fun. Yeah, it's bizarre. Like it's bizarre.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And I, I just. You, you can if you think, if you know about the history of MPUs and how that kind of stuff happened. It came out of this notion on mobile that we needed a way to overcome the limitations of the chips and the sensor sizes and cameras and other issues so that we could do things like computational photography with this tiny lens. Have it take a beautiful, well, take a crappy photo and then turn it into a good photo using, well, what we now call AI. But Pixel did this. Google did this with Pixel. Microsoft did this on ARM based computers. Very early Windows Studio effects is this exact thing. It runs on the mpu. Apple has been talking up machine learning. Now they use AI obviously, but ever since, I don't know, 15 years. I mean, it's been a long time and then, and I think it makes sense in those cases. The problem on the PC is that most of us are connected to the Internet all the time. We can access AI. We also have computers that have GPUs that could do this and they artificially limit it to employees for some reason.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And so far anyway.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, well, we keep looking for that moment where they're going to stop doing that and the orchestration, that moment where.

[Richard Campbell]

They want more customers.

[Paul Thurott]

That's the thing. What they're doing now is contrary to, I think, the Windows team's broader aims, the broader aims of that ecosystem, the broader aims of Microsoft, which is to push AI. It should be available to all of your customers everywhere if they want it. And this just creates kind of a world of have and have nots and the people who have it. Most of that stuff is not particularly interesting. And that's the problem. We're going to get the names wrong because I always forget which is which. But in the Paint app there is an image creator that uses the cloud and if you have, you have AI credits and Microsoft account with a Copilot license of some kind, it creates images. It's as good as that thing can be. It's designer and then there's a co creator. That's a Copilot plus PC feature. I might have mixed the names up, it doesn't matter. But that works on device and that creates kindergarten drawings of nonsense. It's terrible. And that's the problem. So for these big bucket things on device, AI is not very good. It's good for like individual features, like the object selection tool in Affinity Photo. If you want to enable that, you have to download a model. It runs locally and I guess it's pretty, it's pretty good. I guess it's not. Whatever. Here's the thing. It runs on the cpu, doesn't even use it. It doesn't use a gpu if you have a gpu. It just runs on the cpu.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And there's no reason, there's no reason for this. This is so stupid. And I think we talked about this week, last week, the notion that Windows is at its heart an orchestrator and it doles out hardware resources. It also takes requests from apps or whatever, services, whatever, and throws them against the correct devices. It should do that for this.

[Richard Campbell]

It should be the perfect hub for this.

[Paul Thurott]

This is how you go to market with it. I don't understand it. Yep. Years later, it still does not do that.

[Richard Campbell]

And we said this right off the bat, when Stevie Batiche finished, we talked about this. You know, Windows should be the hub of this. It totally makes sense.

[Paul Thurott]

He literally said those people, Windows is an orchestrator. You know, he said that at the time. So this is not a challenge. But Here's a little project for anyone listening and watching if you want to do this. Stevie Batiste 2 years ago @ Build did that famous talk where he talked about the three app types or app.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, B, Side, Inside, outside.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Copilot being the side by side version. Which is exactly how you get something into the system when you have all these legacy apps because it takes a long time to redo them or add it to the app or whatever, or rewrite them, God help you. So you have Word maybe and you get this thing over on the side. That's Copilot. It's side by side. It makes sense. It's fine. One year ago he made a really compelling case for the mpu and the numbers sound super exaggerated, but the sheer amount of efficiency, like the. Even just raw kind of processing power for certain types of tasks, like these matrices of whatever that mpus are really good at, that's kind of a basis for a lot of AI stuff. Super optimized for that. Okay, great. What did you talk about this year? Can anyone tell me? I couldn't find anything. So I, I have seen references and articles to a presentation that he gave where he did talk about AI and whatever. And this is not on the Build site that I could find. So if anyone can point me to one of those things, I'd love to see it because I feel like this guy cut through the, you know, cruft a little bit and made this clear and in a way that no one else has. For me anyway. And I would love to know where we're at with this stuff because there is no excuse in Windows when, if you think about it from the perspective of the Windows team, their best customers as individuals, not businesses. But people are those who spend a lot of money on a premium PC, especially gaming PC that's going to have a dedicated graphics card that's going to cost a lot of money. They vested in. They should expect the best possible experience across the board and they're just being ignored right now. And I don't, I will never understand this.

[Richard Campbell]

This, this intel machine I just built, the 5080 is more expensive than every.

[Paul Thurott]

Other component in the machine I have at home. A. It's an hp, not that that matters, but it's a. I think it's a 35 or 32 inch all in one gorgeous. It has a first gen meteor lake core ultra processing. Doesn't meet the copilot plus PC spec but it also has dedicated graphics which are great. And so even though this is only Meteor Lake and It has a giant screen. It can play Call of Duty at like huge frame rates. Awesome quality graphics. Fantastic. Cannot use co creator and paint that stupid little hand painting thing that isn't even good enough to put on my refrigerator if it was my child. But it could. And it probably the graph. I don't know off the top of my head, but the graphics card and that thing is probably 10 times as powerful from a TOPS perspective as whatever MPU you could get today in a laptop. I don't. Doesn't make any sense.

[Leo Laporte]

We will talk about Richard's 5080 and the rest of that PC tomorrow, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern when Richard builds his PC in the club. And we'll stream that live. But that'll be a lot of fun. I'll be kibitzing in the background.

[Paul Thurott]

So when did this happen? Yeah, early in the show I mentioned on, it was Tuesday. Yesterday Microsoft had three announcements that all came out side by side by side related to Windows in some way. The first one was that thing I had to figure out. They were talking about the week D preview update. It took a while but I was like, oh, that's what they mean because Microsoft, they can't communicate. The second one is a hardware thing we're going to talk about next. The third one though, this blows my mind, was a blog post that I sort of read the beginning of and I was like, what is this? And then I just skipped until today and it was called. It is called Understanding what AI means to Consumers. So here's the thing. Microsoft has failed with consumers. Microsoft is failing in AI. So who better than Microsoft to tell us what consumers want from AI than Microsoft? Okay. So I decided today I was going to write this thing up and then I actually read it and I was like, I'm just going to have fun with this because this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. They engaged with a third party, which is called Edelman Data and Intelligence, which is a part of Edelman, which is a PR firm that Microsoft has used for approximately 20 years. I just want to say they created a study that Microsoft commissioned it. Just to be super clear about this, it's not a problem that a company commissions a study from a third party to make a point. I don't have a problem with that. I will even accept that the data is real and that there are facts in this thing. That's not my point. But the negative part of doing this is that entity Microsoft, in this case that commissioned the study can also go to them and say, not lie, not add this, but rather, I don't want that. I don't want that, and I don't want that. And they can tell them to take things out, which is what happens. I'm not saying it happened here, but I am saying most likely that a big part of this study involved the AIs that those people they surveyed were using and that that didn't look good for Microsoft and that's not there anymore. So this thing just talks about AI in general. I don't know who invented this term, but if hell exists, they will be there for the rest of eternity. They have coined the term Generation AI, which most of us would call Generation Z. I think people born between, whatever, 95 and 2012, they grew up in a world where increasingly relying on digital tools, they learn to embrace emerging technologies. I would make the argument that makes me part of Generation Video Game, but whatever. These are apparently the frailest people on earth. They are the least greatest generation. They are. They don't like negative feedback, they don't like facts, they don't like to read. They overthink things, but they also underthink things. Right? And this study is the dumbest collection of words I may have ever read in my entire life.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. There's some losers out there.

[Paul Thurott]

I know. That's why I say might. I'm not 100% sure. I tend to block things up, but I wrote what I think to be an incredibly funny article about this, but I will just like all these terms in there. It's like Generation AI has emotional delicacy. They need to be pampered in ways that their predecessors do not like. So AI is like a conversational advisor, someone who's not going to like, crap all over their stupid ideas. Those are my words. And, you know, we'll just like huddle them into like. And it's like what they like about AI is that it is no negative feedback. They're always like, yeah, you know, and buried in this report word at the end, it says only 15% of all consumers say they fully trust AI when making important decisions.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, boy. So 15% are wrong.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, if you accept the fact that Generation AI is a thing, I believe the figure for them is 65% think it's fantastic. So these are our dumbest people. They've grown up in an age of misinformation and stupidity and not reading. And they don't have time to read, Richard. They're busy. They're busy people. They've got no Jobs, but lots of side hustles and all knowledge comes in the form. Apparently YouTube is all they need. I don't have time for a YouTube short. Just tell me what it's doing. Just tell me, give me a summary. Yeah, so look, I'm sorry Microsoft, but you have lost consumers. 20 years ago. One of the things I did, I went back to 2005, so 20 years ago and I looked at the things I was writing about that year year specifically Microsoft related. And let me see if I can find this thing because this is crazy. Oh, maybe this is the wrong article, but yeah, sorry, there's a different article but it was like, it was just full of things like Windows Media Center XP 2005 RO update, Rollup 2, you know, or like Community, Microsoft Digital Image Suite, you know, all these things and it's like this stuff is all gone, you know, like nobody, nobody's using this stuff. So the fact that this generation is able to make this shift easily is great. But the fact is from a consumer perspective, obviously Microsoft has a lock for now on the business market, the web, mobile to a small degree, these Alexa type assistants and things like that. The whole world has moved on from you. And unfortunately we talked about this last week, they've done that already with AI. So yeah, if AI is the next wave, I got a bad news for you. You just missed it because ChatGPT is that Kleenex brand that everyone thinks of and it's just going gangbusters. And for Microsoft, maybe the least qualified of all companies to talk about what people are doing, what consumers are doing with AI, I can tell you what they're not doing with AI is using your stuff. And that is a problem. But that's a problem we talked about last week. Anyway, the third of the three announcements I mentioned was related to a new Surface laptop for business that has five.

[Richard Campbell]

Years, which is a new Surface.

[Paul Thurott]

So it's the same form factor as the. What are we calling this 13 inch surface laptop from a couple months ago? Yeah, that device, it was at the.

[Richard Campbell]

Four or the nine.

[Paul Thurott]

No, they don't use those. No, no. It's important every generation that they change how they name things, change the strategies. Yeah, Last year we had, well, Surface laptop, seventh generation.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

Surface Pro, I think 11th generation. Those are both Snapdragon X Elite. Well, and plus, you get there were options for plus at the time.

[Richard Campbell]

So this is basically a seven.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, so the, well the smaller versions that they released for consumers about two months ago are both Snapdragon lower end Snapdragon chips. Slightly smaller screens and form factors. Obviously other differences related to the size change. But that was the fundamental difference. This is the form factor of that smaller Surface laptop. 7. They don't call it that, but that with 5G. Cool. It's in the name for business. Also in the name. But running intel inside, so not in the name. Why? I don't know. Probably. I guess businesses might demand it or something. But you want to take this thing that gets 18 hours of battery life and turn it into a smoldering hunk of uselessness. Yeah. Put a Coulter 2 chipset in it and dear God. So to me, 5G is something you marry very naturally to an ARM device. I don't understand not doing that. So this is the second year in a row. Yep. That they've released versions of devices for business that use like the crappiest intel processor. Imagine. I don't know what's.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh God. Thank God for Microsoft because it wasn't for them. Intel might have imploded by now. Well that's not true actually. They have such long term relationships and a lot of payoffs that Lenovo, hp, Dell, all those companies.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

They're still using intel for some reason. We were talking about the Microsoft layoffs actually every episode since they happened. Intel has begun layoffs. They said this was coming, it was going to come in July. It has happened.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the new CEO doing his thing.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And you know he's to his credit, I mean he's been clear about what has to happen. They've been dropping businesses, they that aren't important to them, you know, aren't core to them. They. What are they about? Stable.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. In this case, absolutely. So the problem is that these job cuts have been much deeper than expected. And that's true of a bunch of different areas including Oregon, California in particular, but also Arizona and Texas and there are more coming. So this isn't the end of it. So not only did they come up with more than expected, but they also are going to do more.

[Richard Campbell]

Of course they were coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't Lip bhutan, the new CEO also say we're not even in the top 10 of chip companies.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So he met really depressing saying the truth.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean appreciate truth.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that really true? It's come on.

[Paul Thurott]

Well so I think the context of that. He did say that. I believe what he meant by that was from a fabrication manufacturing process perspective.

[Leo Laporte]

But they hire this guy to wind it down. They fired Gelsinger.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. So when he first took over it seemed like what they were doing was what Gelsinger was already doing. But I think what happened with Gelsinger was he was making big expensive bets, especially in the manufacturer size tens of billions of dollars every time they were doing anything out in the world with manufacturing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and they were getting billions of dollars from the federal government, the CHIPS Act, I don't know which by the.

[Paul Thurott]

Way might have been cut off since.

[Leo Laporte]

Might be gone now.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, this person and I know, look, it's fair to say the board of directors looked at this and said look, this isn't going to work or this is not working. Whatever the deal was. And the, the approach now is to make Intel a smaller, leaner company. We, you know, more agile is the, you know, the more polite way to say that. No, no, we're not losing, we're becoming more agile.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, what are they going to do though? They're not.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean I guess you could cut your legs off and lose weight that way. But like it's, it's. Yeah, so we'll see. I, I mean look so sad. Yeah. On some level I do want Lintel to succeed.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we need them to succeed. Absolutely.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

We just need to move to arm.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, it's just going to be in a different, it's going to be a different form factor. I would be very interested in buying an intel chip made, manufactured by tsmc. Like get out of your own.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, you can. There are some of those at least partially manufactured.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately Apple has pretty much sewed up most of the TSMC production.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, I mean they're building more capacity and a bunch of the U.S. i mean so yeah, they say that's what.

[Leo Laporte]

They want to make 3 nanometer and 2 nanometer chips.

[Paul Thurott]

Like we want to do manufacturing in the United States and it's like great. The only company that's taking advantage of that at scale is from Taiwan. Like what are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well it's in the US it.

[Richard Campbell]

Is in the US skill set.

[Paul Thurott]

This is the argument like Honda builds US market cars in the United States. So is it an American car is a Japanese car? You know, my father in law would be like, yeah, but all the profits are going back to Japan. You know, it's like okay, okay, okay. But it's a good car. Right? Like it's, you know, we can agree it's a good car.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but all the profits are going back to Japan.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, well in this world that's not true. Right. A lot of profits are going back to Ireland, you know, or whatever. I mean like depending on the company and the time frame.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

So anyway, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Strategy.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I'd like to, I hope, I mean, I, I don't know why I hope this, I, I, I do sort of hope that they can pull it out and be okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Because competition is good, that's why.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but it just might be. I mean, the bottom line is the existing structure isn't working.

[Paul Thurott]

Problem is ARM and Snapdragon especially. But, but, but also, AMD's been kind of kicking ass. Like, their, their stuff is awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't mind if AMD wants to take over for intel, but they're a fraction of Intel's size. They're not a big company.

[Paul Thurott]

They're still. Yeah, but you know what? That, that gap is changing or shrinking, but not because of PCs. Right. So when AMD gains ground on intel financially, it's almost exclusively because of the cloud. Right. The data centers, AI data centers, etc. But, but yeah, in the PC space, I mean, it's not, by the way, it's not like half, it's like 18 or something. It's like really teensy. Yeah, it's a big difference.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you bought a Ryzen 9, Richard.

[Paul Thurott]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

And.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, I got one of each. I got the Ultra 9 and I got the Ryzen 9.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I got, well, if I ever see it, the AI Plus, I don't know if they're ever going to ship it.

[Paul Thurott]

You're talking about that. Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

The system and the framework. Yeah, but I don't even think AMD is even shipping the chip yet, so I think way off.

[Paul Thurott]

But you were looking at like next quarter anyway, right?

[Leo Laporte]

This quarter.

[Paul Thurott]

Q3.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but I don't think so.

[Paul Thurott]

Those things seem, seem like they.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I ordered an AI pin in April of 2024 and it still hasn't arrived. They say Q3, though.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, you have one that arrived and now they're owned by Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I, Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

What's your problem, man? What's your problem?

[Leo Laporte]

I got no problems because I am watching Windows Weekly and that makes me a winner in my book. We do this show every Wednesday about 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. And you can watch us do it live. If you're in the club, of course. Club, Twitter, discord, but also YouTube, twitchx.com, tick tock, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Paul's favorite streaming site, Kick. Watch it live or get it after the fact, wherever you get your podcasts. Now, as if we haven't had enough AI and security, it's time for AI and security.

[Paul Thurott]

Whether you're into comedians roasting each other's life choices or turning yesterday's bad decisions.

[Leo Laporte]

Into today's funny stories.

[Paul Thurott]

Amazon Music's got the most ad. Free top podcasts included with Prime. Download the Amazon Music app and get.

[Leo Laporte]

In on the joke.

[Paul Thurott]

Or go to Amazon.com ADfreecomedy that's Amazon.com ADfreecomediDy to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Paul, what's going on with AI and security?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, and security. Yeah. So this one's just AI, but the. I alluded to this earlier. Maybe I should have ordered these a little differently. But we keep getting these indications that Copilot is not doing great. And I feel like with Microsoft, and we've seen this before, everyone is familiar with this notion. What do you call it when you do the same thing over and over again and you expect different results? Is insanity. So what do you do when. When you do the same thing over and over again and then one time it's different and stops working? Right. Like that's what happens to Microsoft. That's what's happened to Apple. Like, that explains Apple Intelligence, right? We will do everything we can in house. We will get rid of all external partners. We will. We can't do AI, but sorry about that. You know, Microsoft was like Windows gangbusters. Great. We're going to do everything like Windows. We're going to license to third party hardware manufacturers. We're going to do this, whatever. And you know, they see certain amounts of success and then they don't, you know, it stops working. They did that with bundling, right? With Office. That still would work if it wasn't for antitrust regulation. Like they put teams into Office Smart. Well, Microsoft 365 Smart. That means you're already paying for it. Most businesses are just going to use that thing. Smart, smart, smart. Slack did not like that. And now we have some problems. So I feel like this is what's happening with Copilot, right? Like their strategy is to throw it at everything they have, put it into our most important platforms everywhere, do it so fast that we have to change it after the fact. I've complained about the simple thing of just moving an icon around in the taskbar, but the reality is like the architecture of that thing that is an app, has changed at least three times that I'm aware of. And it's because this thing is moving so fast. But what doesn't matter is that ChatGPT is everything. So Microsoft is over here spinning their wheels. They're doing everything. Every time ChatGPT or any other AI service comes out with a feature. AI podcasts, like Google did with Gemini and NotePaq LM, Microsoft's like, yep, we have that too. It's called Copilot Podcast, baby. Like, they just keep doing the same thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be working.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, Sachet told us he wasn't going to chase markets anymore.

[Paul Thurott]

He was going to leave. He's literally. And one thing Richard is intimately aware of and knowledgeable about is that in the early 2000s, Microsoft, Bill Gates came down and said, we are going to bet the company on. Net and everything's going to be net. Windows.net, windowsserver.net, office, net. Everything's net. To my memory, only one product was ever rebranded as Net, and that was Visual Studio. And I think it was only for one version, maybe two, but one, I think it was one. And you know, the other product teams were like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, we don't have any.net in this product. What do you. Like, we're not well.

[Richard Campbell]

And they tried to put. NET into Windows and it didn't go well.

[Paul Thurott]

It went so poorly that by the time Vista shipped, it was ordained by Alchen, I believe, Jim Alchin, that there will be no.net in this product. Like, we are not going to show ship.

[Richard Campbell]

You have to push it all out. Look, you can't have a non deterministic memory model in an operating system. You just can't. There are places where NET could have lived, but they were also trying to do that on the 1.0 version of. Net. Like it was.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, thank you.

[Richard Campbell]

Destined for failure.

[Paul Thurott]

That factors into what's happening now because that company, that version of Microsoft at the time at least had the maturity to come to the conclusion. Which is what you just said. Like, this can't. Like, yes, we overstepped our bounds here a little bit. Scale back. I'm sure the plan originally was going, we'll add it back over time. We'll do this thing over time. That is not what's happening today. AI is just occurring. It's just like. And if it's a mistake, too bad, we'll fix it, we'll fix it later. And it's just not working. It's just not working. I don't know how often this happens, but there's always these reports, Wall Street Journal is always publishing these things where it's like, here's a chart of what people are using when it comes to AI and it's like, oh, but you know, oh, ChatGPT is like whatever, most of it. And then it's like Gemini Anthropic perplexity. There's a sliver that's Copilot or there's nothing. There's no mention of Copilot. The latest one is Copilot should be doing better.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean Edge does well because it's default on, but does it though?

[Paul Thurott]

So what's the market share, usage share for Microsoft Edge? Right. It's probably 12, 13% somewhere in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. So people actively change the browser.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So I've said this a lot, but like the, the greatest success of Google Chrome is that they were able to overcome the power of defaults on the two major personal computing platforms at the time, Windows and Mac. Right. Even though both those companies make browsers. And by the way, 20 years later still do. Right. OpenAI ChatGPT is exactly the same thing, but with AI, it's like the brand is so good it almost doesn't matter. We've talked about this, but it almost doesn't matter what the reality is. Like if you could sit there and, and it changes every day. But measure how these things do on different features and you make a chart and it's like. And then you come to a conclusion, whatever. Maybe today Gemini is the best, maybe Copilot's the best. But ChatGPT is just running away with this. So when you can overcome that, you know, do you. Look, I don't even want to do this. I'm thinking like notepad supports markdown now I'm like, maybe I could just use that. Like just. I'll just write with that. It has spelljack and, and stuff. Like, why not? Like installing and maintaining apps is a job and most people are not interested, especially in a, like a computer. It's like I just want to get it done and get out of here. But those people are using Chat GPT. It's crazy. So they, they've got a big problem here. I don't know how you fix this. And I, I. Look, the other thing is just the amount of money. So to date, what's the date? So next week, maybe not in time for the show. I don't remember which day it is. But Microsoft will release their next earnings statement. We will find out how much they spent in that quarter on AI infrastructure CapEx and thus for their entire fiscal year it will be over $80 billion.

[Richard Campbell]

That much I can guarantee, as they promised they would.

[Paul Thurott]

We will also probably learn A little bit about what they're spending now. And what's that? That's going to look like going forward, but to date, but we'll just call it. It's been roughly 20 billion for, for a long time so far. Shareholders, board of directors, whatever, you know, they're like, okay, I mentioned that in. Not that.

[Richard Campbell]

And Satch has been hesitating on some of his statements. You know, he delayed a couple of data centers. Like he's saying we're looking for returns.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. I think if it was up to him, like I said, he, he feels like a high stakes poker player to me, I think he would still be pushing all this. But yeah, I just want to put this in perspective because when people think about the big Microsoft defeats, like the things that they did poorly and lost money on and what the two biggest ones, I think, or two of the bigger ones are Nokia. Right. $7.6 million write off. And the other one was they lost double click to Google and that became the source of all their money. And having lost that at the last second, they're like, okay, what else is there? And they're like, we'll buy this company called Aquantive. No one's ever heard of $6 billion. Write down, you could add those together. And that's not even one quarter of the past two years of capex expenditure that went into AI. It is a blip. It's what they spend.

[Richard Campbell]

Money's changed.

[Paul Thurott]

No, I hear you.

[Richard Campbell]

Billion is asset. Right. It is data centers. It actually goes back to cloud. Even if it got repurposed. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. I mean, look, I'm not, I'm not a financial person. I. No, I know that it is instantly deprecated and it becomes less valuable as we move forward in time and all this. I know, I know very little about this, but I'm, I was also very.

[Richard Campbell]

Aware that politically there was. Hey, it's being harder and harder to build data centers and AI lifts that constraint. So let's go land grab while we can.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I'm, I'm just, I'm just kind of using this from more of a rough number perspective because those things were outrageous at the time.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, outrageous, different league.

[Paul Thurott]

And Microsoft is not capable of making a product that can threaten the power of the defaults. Like Copilot is never going to be a big deal on iPhones or Android or you know, whatever platform. Like it's just never going to be. I mean, but OpenAI chat, GPT, no problem, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Except they're not the defaults either they've managed to generate a sufficient brand.

[Paul Thurott]

No, but that's what I mean. They did it like. Yeah, I, I don't think I have a link to this but a year ago they were quoted as saying, I think it was Sam Altman who said this. Our b. Our customer base, consumers, obviously smaller businesses. We have no plans to go after manage bigger businesses, enterprises etc. Now they have 3 million of those customers paying every month for chat GPT. So I don't know if they went after them or not, but they came. They came to them. Yeah, well.

[Richard Campbell]

And part of this is because their employees are using it anyway. And so you have a choice. You either restrict them from using it and give them an alternative and there's lots of frustration in that or you buy the enterprise product.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

I had a, the Amit, the, the in the systemin circle. Now the conversation is your company's using AI whether you like it or not. It's, that's what your employ. They're just cut and pasting into it.

[Paul Thurott]

What I, I want to be super clear about this. I, I don't actually have much of an opinion about the quality, if you will, of, of Copilot versus anything else. Like I, I'm not, I'm not sitting here saying it's bad. It's. My wife actually uses it. She thinks it's great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

She's a smart person, you know. But objectively I will tell you that if you're a business owner, an IT admin, a big company, I would trust Microsoft a long time before I would trust OpenAI with anything. And very specifically with. You're integrating your business data into this thing so that you can ground it in whatever you're doing. You want to make sure that whatever happens with that output, it doesn't get outside of the company through some email or whatever it is. I have a newsletter. Even if you're using OpenAI, the only company that's going to prevent that from happening is Microsoft. It is incredible that they are not gaining more traction with this stuff. Like it's, that's incredible because it's a hard lift.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, you know, these are the shows we're doing on Run Ass. I mean what does it take to get to deliver on that promise of enterprise security for this? And it's. Where is your state of purview? Yes. How's your data tagging? What's your subset? Like the responsible process takes longer.

[Paul Thurott]

You could make a really strong argument that Even if Copilot Microsoft 365 Copilot whatever is X percent less, whatever, efficient, accurate, correct, whatever you want to use than whatever people are using. That it doesn't matter because the other aspects of that platform outweigh that because they have those protections built. We have this infrastructure. We are already paying for this idiot. And what, like, what do you, what are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, and meantime, while you're trying to do the right thing as administrator, you know, all the way to the C suite, they're cut and pasting in a chat GPT.

[Paul Thurott]

Exactly. Yep. And this is the thing, I always. We've talked about this. I mean, every once in a while a technology comes along where I can just tell that it has broken through the brain blood barrier and somehow hit with consumers. Right? Like the ipod did this 100%. And I remember a friend of mine, not technical, he came to me one day, he's like, should I get an ipod? And I was like, yeah, you should get an ipod. You love listening to music in the car. You, you know, you listen in the gym with like a Walkman or something like, yeah, yeah, you should get an iPod. ChatGPT is doing this. The iPhone did this in the enterprise. The iPhone, when it came out the door, had nothing for the iPhone, the iPad.

[Richard Campbell]

A number of admins that came at me and said, the CIO just showed up with an iPad and said, you are using.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, you are doing it. Yeah, exactly. And that stuff, you know, over time, it wasn't long, you know, the iPhone a year later I think had a lot of. Whatever it was called at the time, the Exchange, what was it called? The, the connector, whatever the exchange connector was for mail, like it would, you know, it worked on iPhone. And like, okay, like we've, we've gotten that in place. And I would say obviously today like iPhone, Android, both have a lot, you know, there's all kinds of stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we ended up in third party mobile device manager management products until intune got their.

[Paul Thurott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Their acting gear. But for a number of years where you had to run. And you know who was making a good one back in the beginning? Bloody IBM.

[Paul Thurott]

Not the name I was expecting.

[Richard Campbell]

No, totally. What.

[Paul Thurott]

Interesting. So, yeah, it's like, what would be less likely than IBM, Oracle? I don't know. Word perfect.

[Richard Campbell]

Very funny.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's. But they caught up eventually and we went through a lot of convulsions on that. And this is the race that we're in right now.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

What we don't have are the stories of people cutting, pasting the chatgpt and actually Hurting the company. We all feel bad about it. The tin hoy foil half people are really upset about it.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But we still don't have, we have this story.

[Paul Thurott]

This is the human error problem. Right. So it's possible. No, no. There are many, many businesses that don't have purview and whatever email data protection stuff in place and whatever. So it doesn't matter what you're doing inside your company. If you like, keep it quiet. You know, anyone can take a picture, take a screenshot, forward an email, whatever it's going to get out there. That's just human. You know, we're always the weak link in the chain which is why AI is going to kill us when they can. But look, I think they're already there. But when it comes to this kind of thing, literally protecting it, soup to nuts across the board, infrastructure wise, I think it's Microsoft pretty much. Right. Unless you're a go. Maybe. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But given your choices. Yeah, for sure.

[Paul Thurott]

I would say so.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just not how people are thinking and this I know.

[Paul Thurott]

Which is incredible. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This latest SharePoint story does not help.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. One of you. So you probably know more, you know more about this than I do. So what. Yeah. What happened with SharePoint?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the reality is this was a zero day that's probably existed for more than a year that, that Chinese state actors have been manipulating. What happened was that it got detected. So.

[Leo Laporte]

And they got into some pretty important stuff using it.

[Richard Campbell]

Well this is the thing is arguably they have been in. They just got detected.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. They could have been in a year. A year.

[Richard Campbell]

It's an. It is a zero day that's been around for a long time. And what happened was is it on.

[Paul Thurott]

Prem only or also cloud? Do you know, I can't, I'm not sure.

[Richard Campbell]

It's on prem only.

[Paul Thurott]

It's on prem only.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Yeah. But it's. You know what it is basically the equivalent of the hafnium exploit for exchange where the on plan server can be fully remote code executed like it's a baddie.

[Leo Laporte]

So they have patched it.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. That was the whole thing was when the, when the MSRC did their announcement on the 19th, it was here's the fix. Yeah, but you only get to fix it because you've already decided it.

[Paul Thurott]

We got to find out this was like a buffer overrun problem. Sure was incredible. It's going to be how are we still dealing with this?

[Leo Laporte]

Because we're not using memory safe languages.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. And we also don't have our best and brightest working on the on prem product.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Paul Thurott]

That's true, Joe.

[Leo Laporte]

Legacy products, older products, nobody wants to work on them. They want to work on the hot.

[Richard Campbell]

You got a maintenance team on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Richard knows better than I do. But I mean shape was a particular problem because the extensibility stuff is huge. And getting that stuff on the cloud took a long time and it probably still never is the same, never will.

[Richard Campbell]

Most of it is just not secure enough and the workarounds are better. You just have to re engineer.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So what happens is these most important sharepoints with lots of customization. There's just no way.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Because they can't migrate it and they're like, all right, we're just doing this thing and yeah, I mean everyone look, businesses push back at every step on whatever. You know, email at the time, whatever. But I feel like SharePoint might be the last man standing in the on prem space in some ways they say.

[Leo Laporte]

Or Palo Alto Networks guesses that thousands of organizations easy were hacked because.

[Paul Thurott]

It.

[Richard Campbell]

Is all over again. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, I think it wasn't. It wasn't. Some of. Weren't some of them in the government?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yes. No, no. They. The big one everyone's excited about is the. The nuclear monitoring group.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, them. Oh, that's not a big deal.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's not like the Chinese government doesn't have their own nuclear weapons. They do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but are we sitting in their network?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but they clearly probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, I hope so. I hope we are.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I pray we are.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Again. And you know, we're only hearing about this now because they finally got detected and they put out a patch. Goodness. What they have not talked about, which is the concerning part for me, is how long.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well, we know it was exploited.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But for how long? Like exfiltration takes time and if you do it fast, it becomes more obvious. So the fact that we didn't detect the X fill means it's been long.

[Paul Thurott]

Like a Microsoft hack that we never got all the details on was kind of the same thing. Like this thing had been open for some indeterminate. Well, I'm sure they don't know but at the time. Indeterminate amount of time.

[Richard Campbell]

And they just for when we detected hafnium is only when the Chinese were covering their tracks by putting the exploit everywhere. So it was hard to detect where they'd actually collected every. Every email that organization had.

[Leo Laporte]

Akamai says more than 20% of observed environments are exposed to the Vulnerability. So that's how widespread spread it was.

[Richard Campbell]

This is hafnium again.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah. It's bad.

[Richard Campbell]

It is and it's. And the problem here is what we don't know yet because it hasn't had been enough time. What's it been, less than a week. What's the next step with hafnium is how many are still not patched after a month because nobody's paying attention to it. Yeah, you can make noise right now, but doesn't mean, as anybody knows, to actually patch the server or it's not our server that they don't know.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And in the end, how did a halfium actually get fixed? The FBI got permission to use the exploit to close the exploit against the customer's will or the customer's interests. Right. But they. Ultimately, that's how they close them. So I will expect. I expect in the next couple of weeks, hopefully it'll be faster. They'll push.

[Paul Thurott]

That's something similar.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the only log.

[Paul Thurott]

This is like you, the vaccine is the virus kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it. We got to use your exploit to run an arbitrary piece of code that closes the exploit. Exploit.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's really two exploits. Because first there was an authentication exploit. So they get in. And then there was a second. Yeah, remote code execution exploit. Yes.

[Paul Thurott]

Classic.

[Leo Laporte]

Classic.

[Paul Thurott]

It's a classic. I mean, not a good one, but it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yikes.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. I've been using a lot of pat phrases today, but, you know, what do you call it when you don't learn the lessons of history or what happens?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting.

[Paul Thurott]

A different Result and expecting SharePoint to work. Yeah, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody uses SharePoint though, right?

[Paul Thurott]

I was dumping on SharePoint at some conference in Harlem in the Netherlands, and the guy next to me leaned in, he goes, I think a lot of these guys are SharePoint administrators. And I was like, how many guys are SharePoint guys? There was like 90%. And I was like, it's like, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, it's not like they were. They knew also.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, Wasn't surprised, you know what you did? I was just following orders. Yeah, we've heard that one before.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that's the thing is like, SharePoint was a good career, right?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. That was job security. Yeah. Well, so.

[Richard Campbell]

And I know plenty of great folks who just dropped off the map because they have so much money in SharePoint. It's like, I'm not doing any of this stuff. I'm just going to Go make money on sh.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, they're going to be busy for the next month or so, that's for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

If they're still involved, because a lot of them have retired out or made their money, didn't want to do the online migrations or the company didn't want to do. And, and so the bigger thing here is why are a whole bunch of these going to go unpatched? The same reason the exchange service going unpatched. There's nobody to patch it.

[Paul Thurott]

There's like no oversight at all, man.

[Richard Campbell]

There's nobody. They're not even looking. You know how you know you don't have the exploit? You never looked at the logs.

[Paul Thurott]

Right? You'll never. I didn't have cancer. I never went to the doctor.

[Richard Campbell]

That's exactly it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, boy. That's not good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, and it's the, the thing that stuns me is you knew you just closed one like this a year and a half ago.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that should have been a security.

[Richard Campbell]

Are you not on everything after this? Like, you know, but I presume they are. You know, I just did an interview with a red teamer. You know, that's their job.

[Paul Thurott]

And so it's like red teamer at Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

At Microsoft.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

These are hard to find, I'm sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's the thing is they're given missions like that. It's like, go steal data from SharePoint. That's what a red team mission looks like.

[Paul Thurott]

This stuff is always. It's like the TSA model. Something horrible has happened. Let's just focus on that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And if Microsoft follows the pattern of the past couple years, there'll be a SharePoint Resiliency Initiative and, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they have the future secure initiative. Right. Like it's been going on and this is ultimately part of it. Although primarily FSI is focused on misconfiguration and bad credential usage, not actual exploits. And that's again, this is two totally independent exploits.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They're also both old exploits. So they have been sitting in the zero day weapon hopper at certain groups for some time.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. I think. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's talk about something happy.

[Paul Thurott]

Let's talk about ducks. Ducks.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody likes ducks.

[Paul Thurott]

So DuckDuckGo this week made two separate announcements on different days on the opposite ends of the AI spectrum. The first one is that. I know, it's crazy. We're going to serve both masters here. So DuckDuckGo makes a search service. They also make something called Duck AI, which is, you know, the One of those kind of anonymous chat bot things that interacts with other models in the background, et cetera, et cetera. It's accessible from DuckDuckGo search or you can just go to Duck AI on the web, etc. Okay, so they added. I actually have to say this is pretty cool. So because I've noticed this thing, I've talked about this with like my smart screen at home, which is not AI, but same problem where you know, hey G, I don't want to see this photo anymore on this photo slideshow. Okay? So you want me to remove the photo and it's like, would you just. So what they're allowing this is. This is apparently not unique to me. A lot of people hate that kind of thing. So they've just added a bunch of customization to this thing, which I have to say, I want to see this everywhere. So it's like tone of response, which could be like casual, professional friendly, etc. Length of response, right. Let it be very reboot, verbose or don't what the AI's role is in your life, like brainstorm partner, career coach, chef, coding coach, whatever. You know, you can explain to them what your role is. Like. I am a programmer. I am using you for programming. Let's only, let's don't tell me about the weather. Don't, you know, talk about whatever else, whether you can have clarifying questions. You can name, you can tell it your name, you can give it a name, right? It doesn't have to be called whatever the name decay, whatever. And then you can also fill out a form where you can provide it with additional information that you always instructions. I should say that you want this thing to follow. Nice, right? No one uses the service, but that's a good idea. Smart. On the other end of the spectrum, they are now allowing you to basically completely turn off AI as much as is possible in DuckDuckGo, the search engine, right? And so the latest feature is there's a toggle you can turn off AI generated images from search results, right? So if you're searching for an image, you can say, I never want to see that. But actually that's just the latest feature like this, there's a URL you can go to to get called. It's Noai DuckDuckGo.com right? And it does that image filter thing. It turns off AI Assist assistant summaries. It gets rid of any mention of duck AI. You couldn't even go click to find it.

[Richard Campbell]

So, you know, there no AI in my search Results thing. That's a good idea.

[Paul Thurott]

Right? That's what I want in Google, folks.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what a lot of people want.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I think like, okay, let's go. And that's smart.

[Richard Campbell]

So to play both sides. You want the AI, I got you all. Yeah, you want no AI, I got no AI Right over.

[Paul Thurott]

I love you too, man. You know. Yeah, it's pretty funny. Yeah. Good for them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

I'm going to look at this. I'm going to be talking about DuckDuckGo and Little Tech, such as it is later in the back of the book. But this kind of factored into this because I've been meaning to sort of formally kind of write this out a little bit. And it was after I saw this, I was like, okay, I think I need to kind of document this. But good for them. So that's good. Now if they would just put extensions into their browser, maybe I would consider using it. But we'll see. But I like the company and they're in Pennsylvania, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they don't do extensions in the. Duck. Duck.

[Paul Thurott]

No. Oh, yeah, there's a bunch of. Well, yeah, I know it's. Well, yeah, it does. I mean, the most important extensions are the privacy ones. Those are. That's built in. Like, they actually do a pretty good job with that. But you know, things like. I'm trying to think what. What else?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I have a lot like a translation.

[Paul Thurott]

AI. Grammar checking. Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to have.

[Paul Thurott]

Exactly. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Search. Well, I guess I'd use. I have to use.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't, I don't look, I think for them as a. It's a company. Right. So search engine. Now, AI, that is probably much more of a focus from an engineering perspective for them, but man, I wish they would just dot the eyes on the browser because it's real close. Like, I actually really like the browser, but it's not there.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to talk about an option in a little bit, but first, let's get all excited for the Xbox.

[Paul Thurott]

There's only a couple of things this week, but these are both good news, I guess. No, not. I guess they are both good news. So Microsoft in the Xbox Insider program is now testing a feature which is related to Crossplay and to Xbox Play anywhere. Where if you're on the Xbox today and you look at your library or you look at what's available for you to play or stream, like download and play or stream, if you have that subscription, you're going to see Xbox games. If you are in The PC and you do the same thing. You're going to see PC games but now they're going to mix and match them. So I think for now it makes most sense only for like play anywhere games because obviously like you bought Call of Duty, whatever. Well, maybe that's not a good example. But on Xbox and if you. This is not really true actually, but let's say it is, it's a play anywhere title so we would let you play it on PC. You don't have to buy it again, like it would appear there and that would, you know, show you what was available. It's smart. But I think this is actually pointing to a couple of different things. One is the integration of other stores where you're going to see games from, you know, Steam and Epic and etc. But also this coming platform unification that we keep talking about, that as the Xbox becomes a PC, essentially from an architectural perspective, that list of games is going to grow pretty dramatically. So we have ways to sort of play games like Xbox console games on PCs through streaming. You know, it's like, okay, we don't have a way, I don't believe. Yeah. To do the opposite. But I think we're, we're going to get there like it's going to become all one thing. So you'll have a cloud playable library that will cross those two platforms essentially over time. So yeah, we'll see how that evolves. Microsoft announced some months ago that a game that was coming out later this year called the Outer Worlds was going to be its first title to cost $79.99. Everyone's super excited about that. So much so that they decided to lower the price to $69.99 because now.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems be to cheap. It's only 70 bucks.

[Paul Thurott]

That's. It's funny how that works, right? Because for several years, many years, 59.99 was the price for new AAA type games and it kind of quickly escalated like 69, 78 and I think they got a lot of bad feedback from that.

[Leo Laporte]

This game kind of looks interesting. A little bit Bioshock and a little bit no Man's sky and a little bit. I don't know. It looks cool.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Now there is a more expensive addition which I don't think has been addressed.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, I'm sure there's, there's always 129.99.

[Paul Thurott]

So I don't know if that's gone down by 10 bucks or not.

[Richard Campbell]

Deluxe T shirt.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

If you're already buying the Hundred plus dollar. You know, and the extra ten bucks is not gonna make any difference for you, right? Keep the, keep the money and throw in an extra skin. You know that.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, right, exactly. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I, you know, I really loved BioShock. I would like to see more like that.

[Richard Campbell]

That was one of the last games that really scared me too. Like it couldn't be that one at night with the headphones on.

[Leo Laporte]

Like that's really great.

[Paul Thurott]

That game is very much like Assassin's Creed to me, where it started out so good. And I, I think I did the first, I replayed the first one, you know, and then over time it, they kind of, you know, they weren't as replayable or as interesting or it was kind of more of the same or whatever. And I know they changed the, the location and all that, but like I far cry was like this too. Like they kind of lost me over time. But I agree, like you go back and look at the original BioShock, especially that opening sequence, it's like, oh my God, how is this not a movie or. Yeah, a long form TV series on HBO or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Like it's, I enjoy it. I thought it peaked at Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, that's pretty late in the game. Okay. So I would have, I was going.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe Greek World was astonishing. And like at one point I just stopped playing the game. I started following yeah. Around like.

[Paul Thurott]

So, yeah, I would say, you know, the one that was in Egypt had kind of a compelling location as well.

[Leo Laporte]

The one that you could walk around and learn things. Like you could say, tell me about that. Tell me. It was really kind of, it was.

[Paul Thurott]

Like jumping around Paris in the, I think in the 1800s, like when Notre Dame was still being built or whatever. And like that was kind of cool. Like there's these little things, you know. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're right, the storyline gets real ham fisted after a while.

[Paul Thurott]

Like, I mean it's the nature you have. What are you gonna do? Like you have something worked, you know, like, we'll do more of it. We'll try to change a little bit. You change it too much, people don't like it, you know. Change it too little, people get bored, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This immersion into an ancient time in history was pretty cool. Neat ideas.

[Paul Thurott]

It's all I ever wanted was like one suit. You have one superpower. You know, it's like I want to time travel. I just, I don't have to be there physically. I don't have to interact with, just.

[Leo Laporte]

To walk around and love to be Able to do that.

[Richard Campbell]

I, I followed this old lady NPC character. Didn't even have any dialogue. But she got up, she went to the market, she's bought flour, she went home. Wow.

[Paul Thurott]

Bread that really. I just want to be super clear about this. If you did that in real life, you'd be in jail.

[Leo Laporte]

Or you'd get some really good bread or.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And now he's a serial killer. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're going to take a little break. Back of the book is just around the corner. What do you do if you hate me? Big tech Paul Thurat's got the answer. Next. Meanwhile, how's that for a tease?

[Paul Thurott]

That's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Coming up next. Meanwhile, if you're not a member of Club Twit, I'd love to invite you to join. Actually, if you were a member of Club Twit, you wouldn't be seeing this or any of the other ads. That's one of the first benefits ad, free versions of everything we do. Because I'm not a big believer in, you know, you give me money and I still show you ads. No, no. For 10 bucks a month, no more ads. You get access to a wonderful Hang in the Club Twit Discord. Lots of fun talking to people watching the shows. But you could talk round the clock because there's all sorts of different topics going on and it's all the stuff, you know, we geeks love to talk about. The Discord also features a lot of special events. In fact, tomorrow I mentioned before the live PC build with Richard Campbell. We stream those live, but after the fact, you can only get them in the Twit plus feed available just to club members, at least for the first month. Usually in 30 days we make that available. Same with Paul's hands on Windows Show. You can hear the audio, everybody gets to hear the audio. But if you want the video, and it really is a lot better with the video, you gotta be in the club. So the main reason I would say to join the club is it supports what we're doing here. The club now does covers about 25% of our operating costs. That's a big chunk. If it weren't for the club, we would have to lay 25% of our staff off or cancel 25% of our shows or both. I don't want to do that. I'd like to continue to expand, continue to do specials. We're going to be covering the Google made by event August 20th. We stream those in the club only Chris Marquardt's phototime, Stacy's Book Club, Micah's Crafting Corner, Hands on Windows of Paul Thurat, hands on Apple with Micah, all of that in the club. So please, we'd like to have you in the club. Twit, TV Club, Twit. If you're not a member, join us, will you? Now let's go to the back of the book and Paul Thurat's tip of the week.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I feel like I've been kind of building toward this because I've made changes in the kind of software services, whatever that I use over the years, like anyone does, I guess. But. But it is interesting that I kind of came of age career wise in the sense just as Microsoft was rising to dominance. And when it comes to personal computing in the late 90s, it was Microsoft, it was Microsoft and this little sliver of whatever else. And obviously today the world's quite a bit different. I mentioned earlier I went and looked at the apps I was using and writing about in 2005, so 20 years ago, and there's some good ones in there. It's like MSN Music, Microsoft Anti Spyware Spot Watches, long run, still a thing. MSN search for a 64 bit version of Windows XP, Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006, Windows 1, Care Live. They've revealed the name of Windows Vista. That year Windows Media.

[Leo Laporte]

We were doing this, started doing the show.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Palm was circling the drain and so they partnered with Microsoft and made a version of their Treo Phone Trio Pro. I think it was Trio Whatever. Running Windows Mobile. Right. Which was a piece of garbage was MTV Urge, which nobody remembers, but MTV Urge was one of the third party music services that plugged into Windows Media Player or whatever version we were on at the time eight or something and was sort of the predecessor to what became Zune and you know, later, whatever, Groove, Xbox, Music, whatever, you know, the Xbox 360 came out that year, first Office 12 previews, et cetera. My favorite, though I think I might have said this earlier was the Windows Media Center 2005 update roll up 2. Man, they could really name the best name a lot of products, you know, the very best.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an omnibus name.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. But now, you know, we have all this certification occurring in our world. The problems with OneDrive and folder backup being turned on against my will pushed me to Google Drive and then eventually to Synology Drive. Similar related ads in Word drove me to finally just adopt Mark down across the board. So I use Typora now. I do use Microsoft stuff, you Know where it makes sense. I mean I use Clip Champ for video editing. It's still a surprisingly. It's just an amazing. I got to do an another episode about that actually. It's just an awesome app. Xbox, obviously, Visual Studio, software development, et cetera. But I use a lot more of these things. So from time to time I've sort of talked about like I'm not like the Unabomber, I don't live in a cabin. You got to do the right thing for you. And I don't have like a plan to just eliminate big tech or anything like that. But we are suddenly in this world where there is a lot of what I'll call little tech solutions that are really good. And this is a better time than ever, I would say, to think about at least these things. I finally just laid out what are the companies that I actually really trust in this space and those companies are Notion, Proton, duckduckgo. We mentioned earlier Affinity, right? Which makes these graphics tools like Affinity photo, which I use every day, which is a pay once alternative to Photoshop, right, Which you normally have to pay for over time or if you buy the Elements version year to year, whatever it is. I wish they made a video editor, but okay, you know companies that make browsers like Mozilla, although they're falling off a cliff, but Brave Opera, Vivaldi obviously the browser company. Very interesting. Automatic, which owns Beeper, right. Doing the cross platform messaging thing. Pocket Cast which I use for podcasts. Tumblr which I don't use, but blogging et cetera. Well, the big ones are WordPress and what's that thing called WooCommerce which I use for. Actually I use both those on my site. Right, but then you get into the kind of open source question, right? Because a lot of the best solutions in this space are actually open source, right? Linux probably a step too far for mainstream people. We'll talk when they get to 10%. But there are good kind of user friendly Linux distributions. But if you're not willing to go that far, which most people probably aren't, you know, open source office suites like LibreOffice or Only Office, et cetera, video editors like One Shot Cap Cut, which that one I'm not 100% sure is open source.

[Leo Laporte]

But DaVinci there is an open source alternative, I think.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, any Type and Joplin are both notion equivalents that are open source. And Obsidian, which is not open source.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's kind of open standard because it's.

[Paul Thurott]

I think of it as like open adjacent, you Know, it's like, yeah, but at least you can use data out of it. Like you can always get your data out of it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's local data. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Gimp, which I don't use and won't. But it is free and open source. There's something called paint.net, a lot of Microsoft Blender, remember? Yep. VLC media player, you know, kind of goes on.

[Leo Laporte]

So many good open source tools.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. There's a lot of stuff. So I mean I'm. This isn't really about big tech versus little tech per se. Except that it kind of is. Because what you see in big tech is that certification, I think, where they take their own strategies, their own aims are more important than their customers and that these things should be healthy relationships where you're both getting something out of it. Like if I pay Microsoft for something, you shouldn't harass me for, for enabling backup and then putting it on after I said no, you know, like that's a bad relationship. Like, and so your metaphor that it's abusive.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an abusive relationship.

[Paul Thurott]

It is abusive. I mean, like, what do you, you know. Yeah. Why do you wouldn't put up.

[Leo Laporte]

They're exploiting us.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

So like I said, I, I, through whatever combination of factors, I, I, we are kind of in this golden era of, of viable alternatives across the board. I didn't. Less Slack, for example. Slack is owned by Salesforce, which I hate, but I also hate Slack. But if you're outside of the Microsoft space, you don't want to be any part of that. You don't want teams, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's degrees. I think that's the point. You can go from big to medium to little tech to open source.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Use it where it makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

One of the most amazing things that's happened to me this year is I've been meaning to replace the old NAS that I had for a long time. And I was like, okay, I'm doing it this year. And when we were in Mexico on the previous trip, I was researching this and I, and you know, so I, I start to learn. Like Synology Drive works like OneDrive and Google Drive. It does, you know, files on demand.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been using that ever since you recommended it. And I love it.

[Paul Thurott]

In the back. I was afraid to even say it out loud. I was like, I'm going to look at this. I hope it works. I don't, I don't expect it to, but if it's, maybe it's just a backup. I don't know, whatever. And then I actually started using it, and it was so much better than I thought. And it opens up this whole new world of like, oh, my God, like, I'm using it right now. So one day, probably on the next trip here, I'll have a NAS here, and those two things will talk to each other. Right. But for now, I have one nas and it is in Pennsylvania. And I use it every day. I use it on this laptop, every laptop. I use it instead of OneDrive and Google Drive. And it has never not worked. Right. Like, it's great. And I keep waiting for that moment because I know it's going to stab me in the back eventually. But. But so far it's been great. And I'm not saying everyone dropped.

[Richard Campbell]

You're talking about the caveats here, which is what you need to do is plan your exit strategy too.

[Paul Thurott]

Right, Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And get acquired or they scale up or they have.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's exactly like this B, little B thing, which was as small tech as you can get and is now Amazon.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Richard was there when the unexpected happened to me. We were together in Puerto Vallarta and we were going to have breakfast, and I. My phone. What's going on? And Google.

[Richard Campbell]

Are you not having breakfast?

[Leo Laporte]

That was the worst.

[Paul Thurott]

YouTube just cut me out, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Was that your beginning of the end? Was that your.

[Paul Thurott]

It was at one of the straw. No, I know. The big. Honestly, one of the big ones.

[Richard Campbell]

Milestone.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Yeah, it was a big one. And there's a whole thing for me this year where I'm doing more along. One of the things I'm a little nervous to raise yet, but I did want to talk to you guys about it somewhat, and I will write about it, is this notion of. It's like a succession plan. Right. I walk outside of the house, I get hit by a bus, and I'm dead. And my kids and my wife have to get into all my accounts. How do I. You need to do work to make sure they can do that and get in everything. And you got to figure that out. And I. I don't have the answer to how you do that. I don't think there's any one answer, really, but it's tied into identity management and password management through something I use. Proton Pass, Whatever you guys use. Whatever. But this is like, as all of our lives are occurring, as all of our important data is digital, you have to figure this stuff out. It's not as simple as someone walking into your house and doling out your remaining items to whomever Selling the house and you move on with life. They have to be able to access our bank accounts and our. There's a whole thing in there. But yes, to me, the biggest one at first maybe was the combination of OneDrive and word badgering and hectoring me and forcing me down some path. That YouTube thing was a huge one. Like it was really big. And then the Synology thing was just like almost a happenstance. Like I was going to do this, this Anyway, I think the YouTube thing put me over the top because I need storage for the. I have to back up those videos. Right. If they ever cut me out again. But then I saw how good Synology Drive was and I was like, oh, wow, that's. That was like eye opening.

[Richard Campbell]

What if I didn't send them to in the first place? Yeah, I mean, I'm running my Synology as a backup to my one drives on the risk of being cut out.

[Paul Thurott]

But. And right. So I thought, step. I thought that's what I was going to do. But now I realize I can do it in reverse. I can use OneDrive and Google Drive and whatever else as a backup to what's on Synology. Like Synology becomes my one primary place of truth or whatever you want to call it. Yeah. So there's a whole thing here. But anyway, my point is only this. Look, Windows is a platform. It's great. I still prefer it to the Mac or Linux or whatever. It's what I use. It's not just because it's my job. Like I really do prefer it. I do use a bunch of stuff that comes with Windows. I do use some Microsoft stuff too. But I, you know, I'm not a big fan of some of the stuff that I see out there. It's not just Microsoft, but I obviously firmly immersed in that. But I just wanted to. I feel like I've kind of dipped into this from time to time and I put this up because I wanted other people to kind of come back and say, okay, here's another one, here's another company you can trust or here's another thing in this category that's good, like an app or solution, whatever, and that this becomes kind of a baseline, you know, and it will change, you know, moving forward. But just to kind of, you know, just formally be like, look, this exists. Like you don't have to stick with the thing just because it's there. Like you can do, you know, AI is a tough one. AI is something I did not address in this article and I was fascinated the next day. Today to see an, an announcement on my inbox from Proton, which was one of the companies I trust. And you got to look up this company and how they're structured and what they did to ensure they will always be the way they are, that it can't be bought and no one's ever going to take them away or whatever. They announced like everyone else is announcing these days, their own AI chatbot, right? Theirs is called Lumo. They haven't been super clear on what models they're using in the background, et cetera. But this is one of those privacy first, everything's included, encrypted, you own your data, et cetera type companies. This like the duck, duck go. The duck AI thing I was mentioning earlier, where they let you configure everything to a degree which I think is appropriate, is very interesting to me because I think for this, some class or some, some kinds of people who like, don't trust this stuff for good reason in many cases, right? Where I think like this, this kind of thing can help address that. Now, open source AI is not as good as the big tech AI stuff. I mean, I think it's fair to say that. I mean, I'm sure Apple, which is big tech, but I'm sure Apple would like to do their own AI, but they have to pass it off to ChatGPT and eventually to Gemini and whatever else. But you can try this thing for free. If you have a Proton account, you can use it a little bit more. I'm not sure what the exact details are, and they do have a subscription. I do pay for a Proton subscription of some kind that spans their services. I'm not sure yet if I'm part of this or whatever they give me. I don't actually know, but this is something to look at in this scheme of what I just talked about a little tech company that I explicitly trust entering a part of the market that is really not trustworthy. Right? And I'm not telling you it's great. I'm not telling you, but I am telling you maybe you should look at it. And I'm going to be looking at it and we'll see, we'll see how it is, we'll see if it performs better over time, et cetera. But you know, they mentioned things like, look, you're, you're integrating, you're talking to them about these things with your health, your finances, like, what are you doing? Like, you can't trust these companies and they even kind of, they crap on Apple in kind of an interesting way where it's like, unlike Apple Intelligence and others, Lumo is not a partnership with OpenAI or other American or Chinese AI companies. Love being lumped into that little box. And your queries are never sent to any third parties. And so they said going forward, our research and development will remain focused on open models, which we will continuously improve and augment. So, yeah, I mean, it's probably not there today, right? It's probably terrible, I would guess, but this is a space to watch. It's worth looking at. That makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Bravo. All right, subscribe to the premium version of Thorat.com if you want to read the whole piece. It's a good piece.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I've been on kind of a tear past several days with this stuff for some reason, but that's what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome to the Dark side, Paul.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, thank you. I. I do feel the power of the Dark side. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. What do you want to do next? Is it your turn, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's Run As Time, Run As Radio. Yeah. This week's show, before I get into it, it's episode 994. So episode 1000 is six, six weeks away and I finally have a plan. And that plan is to do a Q and A show with my friend Paul Thurat.

[Paul Thurott]

Wait, what's up?

[Leo Laporte]

Hello.

[Paul Thurott]

Hello. I'm sorry, Testing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this thing on?

[Richard Campbell]

So at the, at the. The lead in bumper for the the this show this week, I actually talk about it and say, hey, if you want a question answered, you can email [e-mail] or better still, send me an audio clip asking your question so I can include it in the show.

[Leo Laporte]

It's about time. We hear so little of Paul these days.

[Richard Campbell]

He's. He's a shy kind of guy. And I've also made up a 1000th episode version of the Run Ass mug. So anybody who gets a mention on the 1000th episode will get this very rare Run mug.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, so there'll be a thousand.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a Run as mug. How rare is this mug?

[Richard Campbell]

There's a few hundred of Those, including many VPs at Microsoft and they, they are popular in that respect. But I decided to make a special edition for this, the thousands episode version.

[Leo Laporte]

So I was using it to hold paperclips, but now I'm going to put coffee in it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's a good coffee mug. But then I have to replace it occasionally. They do eventually wear out. I break them every so often.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it.

[Richard Campbell]

But meantime, after you get past that 30 second bumper I chatted with April Dunham about co Pilot Studio so very again talking to sysadmins who don't want to do a lot of programming but are interested in the AI agent angle. And so Copilot Studio is that low code, no code solution to bringing agents into the equation. And April, who's been in this space for forever, certainly in the how do you do stuff with power apps and SharePoint and things like that? We talked through how this integrates into your organization and you can take advantage of the new tooling that's been going on here. Microsoft's been doing lots of changes in this space, but they're sort of settling on a pattern now to be able to set up some good template solutions for this so that you can empower your users as an administrator to build agents specific to their PowerApps and to that low code space. So she's got a great video called your first Copilot Studio agent in minutes on YouTube and included a link to that in the show notes. But certainly something you can work with. And they understand mcps, so there's including a bunch of the Microsoft mcps. So nice get into that without having to be a programmer, just an administrator or just technical enough. You can make it happen there. And April got us started.

[Leo Laporte]

I hear good things about Playwright. Actually, I didn't realize it was a Microsoft tool. That's cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft's been backing it for a while and they created this MCP for it, which now makes. We did a whole Net rocks on this as well. Because one of the problems you have with test tools in general is that you make a new version of the website. You often break a lot of your tests. But what if your tests were driven by a set of prompts fed through Playwright? So simply regenerating your test gets a lot more efficient.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

That was a great conversation we have with Debbie o' Brien over on Net Rocks for those who are interested.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Runasradio.com show994 April Dunham,000 is upon us.

[Richard Campbell]

A thousand is. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I think we should celebrate with some brown stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I finally ran through all of the gifts and things and actually had to go shopping. And I was in the local liquor store where there still is no American bourbon, but there is Scottish Ben Roma, which I had not had before, and which is funny because it's been around a long time. It's nominally a Speyside. I mean, it's in the county of Moray, which includes the Speyside. This is the larger area of which they once know, known as Elgin Shire, because the biggest town is Elgin, which is about 25, 000 people that got renamed as the Moray Shire in 1919. The second largest town is Forest, which is about 10, 000 people, which is where Ben Romack is. Of course, we've mentioned this before. The northern part of Scotland here has had humans on it going back to Neolithic times. Although the area was this specific area, this particular inlet where Taurus is, or for us is, was mentioned by Ptolemy in 100 AD so it's also got a very famous carved rock by the Picts called the Sueno Stone, which was a commemoration of a successful battle of the Picts against the Norse, likely around 900 AD, plus or minus 50 years. It's also the location in Shakespeare's Macbeth of Duncan's Castle. In fact, when the three witches are meeting on the moorlands, those are real moorlands outside of forest. So you can go, you know, stand where Macbeth, where Shakespeare was describing these locations, their real locations. So, 1898, the original distillery is built by Duncan MacCallum and F.W. brickman. They run for a whole two years, make their first products in 1900, and then shut down. They run out of money. McCallum gets some additional money and reopens it as the Forest Distillery. Instead of calling it Ben Romack, just in time for World War I, where they shut down again. They try and start up after run for a few years, shut down through Prohibition and then World War II, by 1953, to sold the Distillers Company DCL, which, you know, is the path to Diageo eventually, who ran it for 30 years from 53 to 83. And then it got mothballed, shut down for about a decade, where it was acquired by the Urquhart family now. And when mothballed, meaning stripped for parts, there was nothing left. Now, who are the Urquharts? Well, the Urquharts own Gordon and McPhail. And Gordon McPhail is another very old organization inside of Scotland. They were founded in 1895. And these were grocery and wine merchants, James Jordan and John Alexander McPhail. But one of their early employees was a fellow by the name of John Urquhart, who began there as an apprentice, and he specifically focused on the whiskey side of the business. So they're grocery and wine merchants, but they were bringing in barrels of whiskey and eventually got into, you know, you got to pick your casks, and then they started doing blends. And a lot of this was Urquhart's work. He was also instrumental in the idea of doing long aged whiskey, where he started buying casks that they weren't going to touch for a decade or two decades or in one case six decades. And he was finally became a senior partner when the founders passed, he took over the business entirely and it's been in the Urquhart family ever since, four generations now. So after John, his son George ran it and then his sons Ian and David and Michael. And right now the fourth generation operates Gordon McPhail, so that Neil is the non exec chairman, Stephen Rankin runs the Prestige Group, Stewart is the operations director and Richard is head of sales for the Americas. That's a lot of Urquharts. So they acquired. They'd always wanted to have their own distillery and they bought Better Romac as this very small distillery in 1993, refitted it over five years and in 1998 Bonnie Prince Charles, now King Charles, opened the distillery for them. And coincidentally, part of this story has to do with a fellow by the name of Keith Kirk Shank who happened he was in the distilling business already in Scotland, but he got hired on at that restart in 1998 to be the manager of the company within a couple of years and has been through the run of Ben Dromak, only left this year to join another small distillery in Speyside called Colburn. This is a small place, they don't make a ton of whiskey, but while they are in the spay region, it's much more of a Highland setting style. And it's peated, which is weird. Now it's at 12 ppm, which is a very low. They call it just a whisper of peat smoke. Although I have tasted this and that's a pretty loud whisper. You could see, you could hear it coming. I would consider it a peded whiskey at 12 ppm. And generally they say peded is like 10 to 15 ppm as opposed to lagavulin at 40, which would be significantly peded. And then there are of course the crazy ones like the high peats in the 60 to 100, the octamore at 300. I don't know why you would do that to yourself. And we remind ourselves why we put peat into whiskey in the first place. It's because it was the cheapest way to dry the malt. So, you know, before the Industrial Revolution, if you go out to the early 1800s where whiskey is still, everything's peated, you know, spade was no different. They made it then. Now there was different kinds of peat, of course. Right. The Islay whiskeys are, are what? The seaweed peat versus the heather peats in the north. But which begs the question, why, how does peat get made into from seaweed in the first place? And the answer of course is that the land of those islands is still rising from the Ice age. And so, you know, it takes several hundred years to make peat. So the 10,000 year old peat, the seaweed that was on this now, well, on dry land and has become Pete is why we get that sort of iodine type Pete that the islands are well known from. Then this is very much heather Pete. So it's not that style. Why did they go away from Pete? Because peat got expensive and cheaper drying materials were available and that cheaper drying material was coal. So as the coal revolution takes a hold of in the, in Scotland and then railways, the cheapest way to dry your malt becomes coal driven. And nobody likes to flavor coal, so they just use it for heat, they don't use it for taste. And it was the ardmore Distillery in 1898, around the time that Ben Romack was being formed, that was the first to switch the coal for their heat. And that's why Islay still peated, because when you're on an island and it's kind of tricky to make a railway, so all of the mainlanders switched over to the lower cost things and the Islas were stuck sticking with their Pete. And so Speysides, as soon as the train line started coming through, they switched across the coal as quickly as possible. And by the end of World War II, there's literally no Pete left in the northern parts of Scotland. They just stopped doing it. It's too expensive. And this is a much more efficient way to go about it. Now, as whiskey gets more popular in the 50s and the 60s, some start adding in peak because it's got some character to it. But then when you get into a downturn in the 80s, the peak goes away again. So the fact that Ben Romack calls himself Spaceide, which with traditional peating is interesting, you know, there are very few, I mean even Balvini once in a while does a peat week where they do use a bit of malted peat barley to do the flavors there. This is a small operation. They. So they don't obviously grow their own barley. Most don't they actually use. They purchase the barrier for the, for the big malt houses already peated to specification. They turn it into wort using a combination of both breweries, yeast and distiller's. Yeast typically three to five day fermentation. Three would be normal, five would be long. But it's all hand operations here. They have no automation whatsoever. So they literally ferment until they're happy with the ABV and sort of the texture of that early ward. They use large wooden washbacks, only 11,000 liters, tiny washbacks. There's four of them. And then they only have one pair of stills. And they're some of the smallest stills in the business. The wash still is 7500 liters and the spirit still is 5000 liters. Now this has a consequence in that there's only so much room for reflux. So it tends towards a spicier whiskey to use these small stills. Near as I can tell with everything I've read, there's only two people who actually involved in the distilling process inside of Ben Romac et al. So it's very, very personal. And they run, they. They run a small operation, 5,000 of 500,000 liters a year. And their banish warehouses only hold about 8,000 casks. But they're big believers of using sherry in their aging. Very spaceide thing to do. And so they use both sherry casks and white are now being talked about as sherry seasoned casks. This is the modern way because there's simply not enough sherry produced for the amount that the whiskey industry needs. You can now buy barrels to specification from sherry producers. You can even choose whether you use European or American oak. And they will put sherry in it for three years for the purpose of treating that barrel so that you can use it for sherry aging. This is different from traditional sherry casts in the fact that traditional sherry casts are almost entirely European oak, no other kinds. They tend to be very large and heavy barrels, 500 liters being normal. And they are used repeatedly for sherry. And so they build up a character that when you finally get them for use in whiskey has a lot of depth of flavor. And typically sherry finishes are short, a few months at most. The sherry seasoned casks don't have that same impact. And so you need to age for longer in those in those barrels. But there's been some special editions, sherry casking and American oak that are very popular and kind of special. This is not one of these. It uses very traditional approaches. The Ben Romack 10 was not necessarily destined to be a 10. They had come up with a new recipe. And this is from Cruikshank's interview on the topic. And they were thinking probably a 12 or a 15, but somewhere around nine years. The flavor was coming up so nicely that they decided it was really great at 10 and so they made it a 10. And that gives it a distinct advantage for a Scottish single malt. It's $50. It's just not that expensive. And so barreled it bottled at 43% and you can't smell the peat coming in. It's in fact, it's not even boozy. He's mostly smelling a bit of wood and a bit of the barley. Flavors are still in there. But boy, when you drink it, it's like, wait a second, that's smoky. Now. It's not hugely smoky, but it's definitely the dominant flavor. But there's also a lot of that spicy kind of. I know it comes from the barley that they've got a lot more of the character, that sort of sharpness that they haven't pulled the sulfur quite as heavily. So it's got a little bitter, a little bite. It's got some clout to it. It's not real mouth filling and creamy, but it drinks nice and yeah, very warming. Like you definitely had a good sip of whiskey there. This is a funny Speyside because it's peated. It's not a special edition. Every Ben Romac 10 is like this. I consider it an excellent intro. Whiskey to. To Pete. If you've never gone into Pete before, I would go here. It's a great place to start.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good. Richard Campbell, thank you for the whiskey pick of the week. Thank you, Paul Thurat, for being such a grump. And I must say, this is the first Windows Weekly with not one, but two references to Shakespeare in it, which is pretty amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

That's odd.

[Leo Laporte]

Almost unlikely. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. Watch it live or download it from our website, Twit TV WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to it. But the best thing to do, subscribe and your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it as soon as we're done. Well, as soon as Kevin King is done fixing it up. And you'll get it each week. Do leave us a good review. Tell the world how great Windows Weekly is. We'd really appreciate it. Thanks to our club members for making this possible. You'll find richardunasradio.com that's where dotnetrocks also is. You'll find Paul atherot.com, become a premium member. Find out why big tech sucks and what you could do about it. He also writes about Big tech. His books, Windows Everywhere, a history of Windows through its programming frameworks, and the Field guide to Windows 11 are available at leanpub.com where you set your own price. But don't be a cheapskate, okay? Okay, Paul, Richard, we'll see you again next week. Thank you, all you winners and dozers. We'll see you next week right here on Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

Bye. Bye.

[Paul Thurott]

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of.

[Richard Campbell]

Unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back.

[Paul Thurott]

So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a [e-mail] Save upfront payment of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile. Com.