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WW 983: Puts the Buh in Benelux - Can Googlebooks Challenge Existing Laptops?
02:17:27
Can Googlebooks Challenge Existing Laptops?
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thuratz here, Richard Campbell. There's a Windows update that actually adds a bunch of new features. Paul will talk about that. Microsoft releases an AI security model with a great name. And we'll puzzle over Amazon's interesting numbers. There's something wrong here. Anyway, stay tuned. You'll find out about that next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you.
- [00:32]
Paul Thurrott
This is Twit.
- [00:40]
Leo Laporte
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 983, recorded Wednesday, May 13, 2026, puts the buh in Benelux. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and dozers. Time to wake up and say hello. Smell the Paulie.
- [01:02]
Paul Thurrott
No enchiladas.
- [01:05]
Leo Laporte
It smells good in Taco territory. That is Paul Thurat. Thurat.com. he is in Mexico City for the last week.
- [01:13]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, for a couple of months.
- [01:15]
Leo Laporte
And also Mr. Richard Campbell. It's always fun. Where in the world is Ricardo Campbell? He is in. Where the low cut. Antwerp. Where in Antwerp? That's. That's where all the diamonds are, right?
- [01:29]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but it used to be that way. But not so much the Diamond Mart.
- [01:32]
Leo Laporte
Not anymore. Not so much anymore.
- [01:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [01:34]
Leo Laporte
So they'd all go and get their diamonds, raw cut diamonds, and bring them back to New York City and sell them. Okay, well, enough history. Let's.
- [01:47]
Richard Campbell
Don't worry, I'm gonna do plenty.
- [01:49]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, let's not forget.
- [01:50]
Paul Thurrott
I was gonna say a lot of this is technically history.
- [01:53]
Leo Laporte
The debate rages in the twit forums at Twitter community over the Whiskey segment. Some say, just stop listening. Others say yes. But then Paul says something clever at the end and we don't want to miss that.
- [02:05]
Paul Thurrott
That one still blows me away because I feel like that's pretty rare.
- [02:08]
Leo Laporte
It never happens. Yeah, it never happens. Well, it might happen four times a year.
- [02:13]
Paul Thurrott
Clever is the wrong word. It's like bizarre segue. You know, some kind of random stick something in.
- [02:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, usually four times a year we get the last minute Microsoft earnings. Sometimes that happens, but that's only.
- [02:27]
Richard Campbell
It's problematic.
- [02:28]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, everyone's podcast player has a little fast forward thing, right? I mean, what's. You know.
- [02:32]
Leo Laporte
And we're working on chapters. I know everybody wants chapters.
- [02:36]
Paul Thurrott
You can't. Please. The problem is like imagine if we just unilaterally give it if you want. No, nobody wants to call them. No, no, no, no. That's ridiculous.
- [02:44]
Leo Laporte
I like the Whiskey segment and I don't care.
- [02:46]
Paul Thurrott
Right. The second we get rid of it, we're going to hear from the many people who are like, what the hell just happen?
- [02:51]
Leo Laporte
And the history of it is, of course, Mary Jo Folio used to do beer, right? Did she always do beer?
- [02:56]
Paul Thurrott
From, like, day one, you mean?
- [02:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I figure. I feel like she did. She's always. She was a beer drinker.
- [03:02]
Paul Thurrott
I bet she was. Always beer. I'd have to go back and look at the notes, which means I'd have to open one note, which means I'll never do it. But I feel like what you call the back of the book has been there. It feels like forever.
- [03:14]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. I think we've always had it for a long time. Yeah.
- [03:17]
Richard Campbell
So I think I told the story the other day of coming up to Penna Luna after the build event and being a good, you know, guest and bringing a couple of bottles of whiskey, and then you went and opened them on the air.
- [03:29]
Leo Laporte
That was the mistake I made.
- [03:31]
Richard Campbell
And straight to the cast. Strength. And I'm like, this is not a good idea.
- [03:37]
Paul Thurrott
Like, two golems, you know, like, with my precious. I am.
- [03:42]
Richard Campbell
I think you. I think you said something pithy like, I believe I've been shot in my tongue.
- [03:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, that's exactly what he said. What do you think? And I said, I. I think I just got shot in my tongue.
- [03:51]
Leo Laporte
That's funny. That's a good line.
- [03:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [03:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. My tongue is drunk.
- [03:59]
Paul Thurrott
We have pretty much always had apple or abunda in our house since that week. So whenever that was 15 years ago or something.
- [04:08]
Richard Campbell
It's a while ago.
- [04:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [04:09]
Paul Thurrott
Long time ago. Whatever it was. Yeah.
- [04:11]
Leo Laporte
All right. I believe this is. Am I right? Is this. It was yesterday. A patch Tuesday.
- [04:17]
Paul Thurrott
It was.
- [04:18]
Leo Laporte
It was. What does that mean to you, Paul?
- [04:21]
Paul Thurrott
What does it mean to me?
- [04:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [04:23]
Paul Thurrott
Well, it means it's another monthly reminder of how broken my brain is, because I always forget it's past Tuesday and then it happens and I'm like, God damn it. And then I have to write about it. And you think I would just. Would be the biggest day on my schedule or something, but I always forget. But I did know going into this because we've talked about it in terms of, like, the preview update from week D a couple weeks ago and 10 days ago, whatever that was, that this was going to be a big one in the sense that this is the first patch Tuesday where we've received what I would call major new features for Windows this year. This has been quiet. We've seen mostly low level fundamental things, whatever. And there's a bunch of that. But the Two big. Well, I should say too, actually. The other weirdness to this is that 24 and 25 H2 both supported, still are getting the same update, right? So it updates to a slightly different build number, but the point beyond the decimal is the same. Right? Because it's the same update, same features, same everything. That's where all these new features are. And then there's also Windows 11, 26H1, which is on the new Snapdragon X2 based laptops, which coincidentally are the only ones I'm using now as we start winding down this trip and there's not much going on there. So I had to break out like a couple of laptops that I'd packed away to be like, all right, I got to go see if I can look at any of this stuff. But if you have 25 or 24H2, you're going to get Xbox mode, which is a replacement for two things. This is the game mode replacement, which was previously or to this moment is just a toggle switch and settings that's on by default. It's nothing you can do to configure it. And then the full screen experience that debuted on those Xbox Rog, Ally gaming handhelds or handheld. Yeah, gaming handles. So this is the new version of that. It's a full screen experience like the old full screen experience. It gets rid of a lot of background processes, so it reduces resource ram usage, etc. The Xbox app essentially becomes the shell, if that makes sense. It's controller based or controller friendly certainly. And you know, the game bar is still there and all that stuff. And so if you're just going to use this computer for gaming, which you would with a handheld obviously, but maybe you would with a gaming PC too, you can just leave this on forever and you'll just have that kind of console like experience maybe is the way to put it. And I've seen that on one computer and it wasn't one of the ones I play games on, which is, you know, we're still dealing with CFRs, right, these random deployed features. So that will eventually go away, but it hasn't yet. The other major new feature is agents on the taskbar, which everyone remembers was what got Pavan Davaluri in so much trouble late last year, I believe, though it does support first and third party AI agents. I think the only way you could test it right now or use it is with the researcher agent. That's part of Microsoft 365 copilot. And this is where the agent will behave like an app. So it will put a button or an icon in the taskbar. It will pop up notifications if it needs to get to you to ask it for next steps or to clarify something, whatever it might be. Then you can also click on it. It'll pop up a little UI that will show you what it's doing, where it's at. You can get a progress report, that kind of thing. Not seeing this yet and I don't have 365 copilot, but I have to say I'm curious because this is Microsoft's attempt to make AI agents make sense within the context of how Windows works. Right. In a bit we're going to talk about how Google is doing the same thing, which is interesting, not the same ui, but their own take on this. Then there's just some other drag tray has become drop tray. I hate it. I turn it off so I don't care. Bunch of low level improvements to File Explorer which is getting performance improvements. We're seeing those across the board. We'll talk about that in a moment. This is interesting. The Windows kernel no longer trusts cross signed third party drivers by default. Instead, if a driver is in the hcl, the hardware, well the. I guess it's the hcp, the hardware compatibility program. It's not a list anymore. Right. I still think of it this like 1996, like the HCL, if it's in there that will be trusted by default. I think admins can make an allow list of trusted legacy drivers that will just be trusted by default. But this is Microsoft kind of shoring up that driver bit similar to what they did with printed drivers where they kind of just took that over and said yeah, we can't trust you guys anymore, we're just going to do this ourselves. So that's kind of interesting. If you do have 26H1 and you probably don't, but if you do, it's the stuff we saw in previous months. It's like 26H1 is the shipping or stable version of Canary. It's always like a month or two behind or more than that I guess depending on what it is. But you know, there were improvements to the narrator, the smart app control thing where you can toggle it on and off in real time. Now some pen settings improvements, the new setting about page which I feel like we've had for nine months or something. I have no idea. So these are just things like we've seen elsewhere. I don't know why these are different. I mean to me I feel like 26H1 should have the same features, or perhaps be a superset, if you will, of 25H2. But it's not. I can't explain that, but. Because why could I? I haven't had time to write this. I wondered when I saw this patch Tuesday release and then it was later confirmed. But Microsoft, not surprisingly, has developed their own in house version of Anthropic Mythos.
- [10:12]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [10:12]
Paul Thurrott
This thing that's finding all the security vulnerabilities everywhere. Their version is called M Dash, which by the way, I like the name but. And it's not, it's not really at the same level yet. I don't remember the exact number of vulnerabilities that it found this month, but it's in the double digits, like 20ish, something like that. I expect that to be, if not exponentially bigger next month and then beyond. But maybe it's going to be a lot more. I mean, as this thing ramps up, if you think about what Firefox has done with Mythos, this is going to be, you know, this is going to be big, you know, because this is going across Azure, Windows, obviously on the client Windows Server, probably the Office apps, everything. I mean, throughout Microsoft. If you think about all this, I
- [11:01]
Richard Campbell
just think we're going to get huge numbers of patches everywhere.
- [11:04]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [11:05]
Richard Campbell
And that's nothing special to Microsoft. These tools are turning up vulnerabilities like mad. And if they can turn them up themselves, the bad guys can too. Like the pressure is on.
- [11:16]
Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah. So the reason I mentioned this is only because, you know, like, for example, OpenAI last week announced their version of Mythos. Right, Whatever. I don't remember the name of that, but you know, everyone's doing it. You know, this is the thing with AI, like if you see a feature over here, just wait two seconds, you're going to get it on the AI thing over here. But this is stuff, this is not available to individuals. Right. This is something they make available to companies, governments, etc. And in Microsoft's case, they could have probably, I mean absolutely could have used Anthropic Mythos, but you know, they make AI so they want to have their own. So it's, it's not. I mentioned this only because it's not really surprising that Microsoft would make their own agentic vulnerability finder or whatever. So we'll see how this goes. I think this year is going to be very, very interesting for found security vulnerabilities, I think.
- [12:10]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I think it speaks to. I was almost making Neuromancer references like we're just not that far from having these models running inside of your network, constantly monitoring.
- [12:21]
Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, and right. If I didn't, I think yeah, well, Firefox will come up later in the show. But if I didn't say this last week, like one of the observations I kind of had about this is that at some point you find the bugs that are in an existing code base, but then you start using it more proactively because you're submitting new code into the project.
- [12:43]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And it'll be part of the CI CD pipeline, right?
- [12:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
- [12:46]
Richard Campbell
And this evaluate on the fly.
- [12:48]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So in Microsoft's case, they've been promoting this notion of secure by default for possibly 25 years or whatever it's been. This makes that more of a reality, if that makes sense. So we'll see how it goes.
- [13:03]
Richard Campbell
It also seems like Microsoft is positioning itself as self contained on the A realm. Like they obviously got into OpenAI first and so forth, but keep showing they
- [13:14]
Paul Thurrott
have their own product so they're getting
- [13:17]
Richard Campbell
ready for a go it alone day.
- [13:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I suppose there's a possibility this is in fact based on what the OpenAI thing is. And I don't know, I just haven't had a chance to look at it yet. So after the show's over I'll probably write it up and figure that out. But. But yeah, if this is in fact a homegrown model, great. I mean that's, you know, good for them.
- [13:37]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Interesting times.
- [13:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, I mean I can't get like a Android Kotlin project to even compile, let alone figure out if it's secure, you know, but, but you know, these guys, they're on their, they're on a different level. So.
- [13:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but you hit the point, which is that a lot of people have a tough time even evaluating what security means. Like what does it mean to actually have this code well, locked down.
- [14:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And I think for app developers, regardless of the platform, you know, if you're Android, iOS, web based, whatever it is, Windows, obviously there's the whole notion of like starter templates and like starter projects and you know, it's a code review thing you can do through AI, et cetera, I think that the security angle is going to be part of it from the get go like that, you
- [14:24]
Richard Campbell
know, and it makes a lot of sense to have an agent that's running and gathering the latest CVEs and evaluating the coded scene like I could. The same way we have dependabot Inside of GitHub, we could do the point with our own code bases where this agent is actually adding issues saying, this CVE likely attacks this application and it needs to be run through the evaluator.
- [14:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. In the old days we would say, oh, did it compile? Okay, ship it. Um, yeah. And now it's going to be more like, did it pass? You know, whatever the version of EM Dash is, this security profile, then you ship it. Right. So, yeah, I mean, that's. Look, I'm sorry, but that's 100% progress. Like, that's.
- [15:00]
Richard Campbell
That's good.
- [15:02]
Paul Thurrott
This is a great. This is maybe the best AI kind of thing I've seen so far. Like, it's going to benefit everyone, even the people that hate AI, because there's, you know, the stuff they use is going to be better because of it. It's nice.
- [15:12]
Richard Campbell
My. My AI hype ends. Ends with the story of Alpha Fold and giving away the 200 million protein foldings. Like, we fundamentally changed medicine with this technology. Now you're never going to take that back.
- [15:26]
Paul Thurrott
Here it is.
- [15:27]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Should we do the insiders program?
- [15:35]
Leo Laporte
Are you waiting for me? Is that.
- [15:36]
Paul Thurrott
Well, yeah. I mean, do we need to do an ad or should we.
- [15:38]
Leo Laporte
Well, you did it so fast. I can move the ad down. I like to go at least 20 minutes before.
- [15:43]
Paul Thurrott
Before I make you stop touching my notes, Leo. Okay, so. So this. This.
- [15:49]
Leo Laporte
I'm always guessing just how long it's going to take you to get to the bullet point, you know, and I'm.
- [15:54]
Paul Thurrott
I do. Well, I. I do the same thing. Just when I do the notes, I kind of think about it like, this is going to be a long show or short show, whatever, and like, I'm wrong every time. So.
- [16:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's very hard.
- [16:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [16:02]
Leo Laporte
You know, sometimes you got more to talk about with.
- [16:04]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. Sometimes you go into it thinking, all right, this is going to take some time. Got to get through this. And then it's like, bang, done, you
- [16:09]
Leo Laporte
know, I do like M Dash, by the way. That's.
- [16:11]
Paul Thurrott
That is a good name. Yeah. They should rename all their AI to that.
- [16:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they should fix all their bugs. That would be cool.
- [16:18]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [16:19]
Richard Campbell
Well, now you're just talking Tracy talk. That's not how that works at all.
- [16:26]
Paul Thurrott
All right.
- [16:27]
Leo Laporte
If it's so good, why can't it just fix all their bugs?
- [16:29]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, just fix it. Just fix it.
- [16:31]
Leo Laporte
Just fix it.
- [16:31]
Paul Thurrott
That's what I want is the just fix it button, you know, for the kernel.
- [16:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [16:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Simple. That was easy.
- [16:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So I feel like for the rest of the year or at least for the next few months we're going to be dealing with this kind of a weekly thing. And the weekly thing is going to be, well, two parts, right? There's the. Microsoft will either talk about or implement some low level changes that improve Windows to some degree as part of this pain points thing they're working on now. And then you will run into people who complain about it, which is bizarre, right, Because I think most of anybody, I mean pretty much using Windows would look at what they're doing and I can point out things they're not doing, like that's my job. But as far as like what they are doing, it's all, you know, it's, it's good and unless you're a complainer. So one of the things that Microsoft is quietly working on is something called a new low latency profile for Windows 11. And this response, this, what this does is actively engage the CPU very briefly to boost the performance of an app launching or a UI like the Start menu or widgets or whatever it is responding to that click. So in other words, the delta of time between you clicking the thing and it, you know, coming up or whatever like File Explorer, notably the app shell comes up fast. But that display of the home screen is slow and slow in this case means like one to two seconds.
- [17:54]
Richard Campbell
Did we really think it's CPU bound? I think it's usually network,
- [18:00]
Paul Thurrott
so it depends on the ui. So actually that's, we're going to get to that because that's actually part of it. But this is for specific on device, display of UI essentially whether it's an app launching or like I said, like a Start menu kind of thing. So Start menu is. I'll just get to it now, since you said it. Start menu is an example of something that is both, right. Because it is connecting to the Internet in Scott Hanselman's words, too many times to do certain things. And so people are like, oh, it's react native, it's slow and it's like, it's not that. It's like it's just doing too much and that slows it down. You know, the initial, you know, you expect to click on something and see it, you know.
- [18:39]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, and by too much you mean stuff I didn't ask for, that's another issue.
- [18:45]
Paul Thurrott
But yes, absolutely, I, it's fair to say that you can customize the Start menu to some degree if you don't like that stuff. But yeah, fair enough. So Windows Central and some other places have tested this and according to those people with this enabled, if you, you know, side by side, same machine with this low latency profile enabled or not, they're seeing like 40% faster launch times for inbox apps like Edge and outlook and 70% faster launch times for interfaces like Start and Right click context menus and so forth. So it's working, right? So, but of course, you know, like I said, people complain. So someone on, I guess Twitter, X, whatever we're calling this, he's like, so let me get this straight, it's like the slowdowns here are really coming from whatever the runtime is like React native on top of XAML or something, blah, blah, blah. And it's like so you like screwing around with the low level, how the processor works and like that's the fix. And Scott, of course, you know, being technical and having the brittleness that comes with that is like, yeah, that's not. Has nothing to do with React native. This is something that Linux and all mobile platforms do as well. And so what doesn't matter what the device is. You bring up a phone, you tap an icon, you don't wait seconds, right? It just appears. And so every interaction, whether it's touch based on a phone or in Linux now or Windows, as it's happening, it's like, like cores get woken up on a processor, clock speeds get boosted, the thing occurs and then it drops back down to idle. And this all happens in milliseconds, right? Apple does it, Android does it, and in Scott Hanselman's words, Apple does this. And you all love it. So fair enough. I'm not sure I've experienced this. I've been using like Snapdragon X2 laptops lately, so I'm already seeing an awesome performance boost. So, you know, I do, I'm sure this will help you guys. So anyway, that's good. And that's something. I don't know, I'm not even sure where this. I don't know if some of this is unstable yet or if it's just inside a program. I believe it might be inside a program. This probably would have been late last week. So Microsoft is announcing insider builds differently now. In the past, what they would do is have a blog post for each new build. So if there was a beta release, a canary release, dev channel release, whatever, there would be a separate blog post for each, even though in many cases they might have a lot of overlap for features and so forth. Now they have simplified the program by having fewer top level channels, but also made it more complex by having sub channels which is super confusing. And they're doing a single announcement for everything. So whatever day comes, Thursday, Friday, whatever this was, they're like, here are all the builds we released. There's four of them. One is in the beta channel and then three are in experimental because again, we can't have nice things. So there's experimental that used to be the dev channel. It's just experimental. There's experimental that's on 26H1, which is essentially the former Canary 28,000 series builds, I think. And then experimental future platforms, which is now what I think of as Canary. But the further out stuff that may or may not make it into the system. And when this was Canary, I was thinking that this is like 26H2 essentially, but who knows. So we got those four builds and then there were two notable changes or new features or however you want to say this, that neither one is groundbreaking exactly. But one is that they're adding additional gesture options for touchpads, like precision touchpads that have all the multi touch gestures related to scrolling and zooming and automatic scrolling, etc. I didn't see one that I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to try that. I was like, no, I don't care about these. But the other ones is nice. I mean one of the issues, and this is probably related to, you know, Chromebooks being super cheap and then MacBook Neo is now super cheap. And if you are in a smaller educational environment where you don't have IT staff especially and you don't have any budget, right. You might want to just go buy computers like either in the Channel or even at retail because they're so cheap. Like you can get these really cheap Windows laptops but when you buy them that way they come with what's Windows 11 home like the consumer version.
- [23:19]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [23:20]
Paul Thurrott
So what they're allowing now is for you to buy a Windows 11 home based PC and then upgrade it to what's called Windows 11 Pro Education for K through 12 and for free. So it's not what do you need
- [23:35]
Richard Campbell
to be able to do that upgrade? Like you have to be a teacher of some kind.
- [23:40]
Paul Thurrott
I didn't even look into that. So I would imagine. Yeah, I don't know. So probably right. And the idea here is that like pro, but also, you know, Pro Education is. Can be centrally managed to some degree or not to some.
- [23:53]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [23:54]
Paul Thurrott
Can't. Can in fact be central managed. Right. So it might be an MDM type solution. It's unlike. It's not going to be active directory
- [24:00]
Richard Campbell
probably in A it'll be intune. Yeah, they're not doing anything new with AD It'll be into.
- [24:05]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, yep.
- [24:06]
Richard Campbell
So the per seat charge.
- [24:08]
Paul Thurrott
So yeah, that's nice. I mean to me that's just nice. So
- [24:14]
Leo Laporte
on them, that's just nice.
- [24:16]
Paul Thurrott
It's nice.
- [24:16]
Leo Laporte
It's a nice.
- [24:17]
Richard Campbell
It's nice.
- [24:18]
Leo Laporte
Anybody say the word Canary? Oh, this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by the thanks to Canary. This thing, look at this. This looks like a what an external, you know, USB drive. Just kind of plain black case. You could put this in your network, nobody think twice about it. Except it's not. This is a honey pot. And man, this is the, the kind of honey pot you want. First of all, totally secure. I know when you say, well plug a device in your network, you go, okay, but really. But this is designed. These guys at the thinkst Canary folk are super good. They have been in this business for decades teaching governments and industry how to break into their own systems. They've always been white hat, but they do a lot of pen testing, that kind of thing. So they know what hackers are looking for. They understand that. They know how to design a super secure box that looks like something super valuable. That's the key to a honeypot. In this case, mine is a. I've mentioned this before, Synology, nas, but it's so easy to change it. It could be a Windows server, it could be a Windows XP server if you want. It could be SharePoint Server. You know, bad guys are looking for that. It could be a SCADA device. I mean, yes, it could be almost anything. And when I say it impersonates those devices, it does it perfectly. It does it down to the Mac address, down to the exact login screen. Everything looks real. The hacker, even if the hacker suspicious, the hacker cannot resist because inside there is potentially gold. This is what they're looking for for. So these are tools that everyone needs, every business needs anyway to know, let you know if there's somebody inside your network prowling around. We all have, I'm sure, perimeter defenses that are very, very good. But are they perfect? You know, just ask, well, who's the breach of the day today? Just ask anybody. The breaches are happening 50, 60 a day now, right? That we know about. That's because perimeter defenses are not perfect. But the problem is when somebody gets into your network, they're. They're stinky, they're clever. These hackers are wily and they don't, you know, telegraph that they're in there until they've done everything they want to do. Exfiltrated all the information so they can blackmail you, put little time bombs in there so they can ransomware you. They do that, then they send you a little note. On average, this is the wild stat. On average, companies don't know they have been breached for 91 days. That's way too long. What you want to know is right away. So you need these. You need these, at least on every segment of your network. This is the things to Canary. They also make, by the way, each canary can make many infinite number of tokens. Canary tokens, they call them. They're files. So where they look like files of any kind, anything from a PDF to a Word document to a wireguard configuration, I mean, there's hundreds of different document formats and they looked like the real thing. But the minute the intruder opens it, and they can't resist, like I have on my Google Drive, it looks like a Google sheet that says payroll info. Now what hacker could avoid that? You can't. You look at that, you go, I gotta open it. The minute they do, you get an alert. The minute they try to hack your SCADA device or your Windows XP server, you get an alert. And only the alerts that matter. No false positives. You get it any way you want. Email, text, of course, they support syslog, they support web hooks, there's an API, I mean, any way you want. But when you get that alert, you know that someone is in your system. You get the alerts that matter. So choose a profile for your thinkscanary. It's really easy. You could change them daily. You can Change them every 10 minutes if you want. It takes no time. Register it with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications and then you can just sit back. Okay, I'm gonna relax. Attackers have breached your network. Malicious insiders, other adversaries cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your thinks Canary. How many do you need? Well, it depends on, you know, how big your network is. Some banks have hundreds. Casino back end operation probably has one everywhere. On every segment for sure. On every slot machine. For a small business like ours, five is plenty. For let's give you a sample. Numbers visit. Canary Tools slash Twit. That's important. That's the address. Canary dot tools/twit. 7,500 bucks a year gets you five things. Canaries, your own hosted console, your upgrades, your support, your maintenance, all that's in there. Oh, and if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us Box you're going to get 10% off the price for life. Now, if there is any in your mind, any doubt, any doubt at all, be reassured you can always return your things to Canary. They have a very generous two months money back guarantee for a full refund. Should mention they've been advertising with us for 10 years now. And in all that time we've partnered with Things Canary, their refund guarantee has never been claimed, not once. Visit Canary Tools Twit. Enter the code twit and how'd you hear about us? Box Every network deserves a thanks to Canary. Canary Tools. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly and for keeping our family safe. Now let's go back to Paul, where the word is a new threat has emerged.
- [29:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean, Google's been kind of previewing this for a year, but they finally announced, well, what the device there we'll call Google Book, which is a new kind of Chromebook, right, Based on this aluminum OS thing, which is not going to be the first final name
- [29:58]
Leo Laporte
of the os, but Android Aluminium, by the way.
- [30:02]
Paul Thurrott
I'm not doing that.
- [30:04]
Leo Laporte
No, no, I'm not. That's what they say. But anyway, that's how they spell it. But they say, don't worry, it's a code name.
- [30:10]
Paul Thurrott
It's a code name. Yeah, yeah. Still a lot of questions here, but, and I've written a lot about this. I'm fascinated by this notion of like scaling up a mobile platform to make it compete with the desktop platform and how that might or might not work. So a couple of things I will say, because this is pertinent to our space. You know, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, once described Copilot as potentially becoming the new Start menu. And we all kind of chuckled and laughed and everything. But when you think about it, this thing you go to to get work, that way you start, you start, you know, you launch, literally start. I keep saying start, but you start your day, so to speak. It makes some sense. But you know, Google, unlike Microsoft, has had a lot of success with its AI. And they're putting Gemini in their case across their entire stack. They have incredible reach with consumers and businesses. And this thing, you know, I don't like some of the marketing here. It's like it's not an operating system, it's an intelligence system. And you're like, okay, guys, whatever. But you know, Android based makes sense because that's the popularity and the, and the scope that you need. All the developers there, the drivers go there first, et cetera, et Cetera. So this, you know, they're doing what they did with Chromebook. I, you know, it's sort of rethinking the laptop.
- [31:24]
Leo Laporte
You know, there's a. I really like. And I had, I got it from my daughter. The Lenovo chromebook with a MediaTek companion.
- [31:34]
Paul Thurrott
No, those are great.
- [31:36]
Leo Laporte
That's the funny thing. Terrible name. Great processor.
- [31:39]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So it's a. This, that's a like a Copilot plus PC class Chromebook. Right. As far as the hardware goes with
- [31:44]
Leo Laporte
the benchmarks make it kind of equivalent of Apple's M2.
- [31:48]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So the Google Books, we don't know a lot about the hardware, but I
- [31:53]
Leo Laporte
hope they use this mediatech for us.
- [31:55]
Paul Thurrott
So they're going to use Snapdragon, they're going to use the MediaTek whatever, what do you call it?
- [31:59]
Leo Laporte
And the Lenovo has a LED screen.
- [32:01]
Paul Thurrott
They'll use it as well. Yeah. So we know that all the top 5pc makers are on board, which, you know, they are for Chromebooks as well. I didn't realize this at the time, which kind of shows you where my head's at. But one notable exception to that list of OEMs is Samsung, which is Google's biggest partner in this space.
- [32:20]
Leo Laporte
They make great products.
- [32:21]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, they do. And there was a rumored Samsung Galaxy Book running this OS out doing benchmarks or something in the world. So like that will happen. It's more likely that this was not a snub and that because these guys are such close partners that they'll have a special thing with just the two of them, you know, at some point. Right.
- [32:42]
Leo Laporte
I, you know, so that's interesting that Chromebooks are still a thing because I feel like schools have kind of soured a little bit on that.
- [32:48]
Paul Thurrott
I don't, I mean, I don't know about. I don't know. I mean I will say having recently reevaluated a Chromebook using like a really cheap one too. It was like under 200 bucks.
- [32:58]
Leo Laporte
It's actually, it's fine.
- [33:00]
Paul Thurrott
It's pretty good. Like it's.
- [33:01]
Richard Campbell
As long as you don't need to install any software on it. Right, right.
- [33:05]
Leo Laporte
Nowadays everything's web based.
- [33:06]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean like a real Chromebook you could install. Install Linux environment and run Linux apps. I mean that's, you know, for developers.
- [33:12]
Richard Campbell
That was just a bit common.
- [33:13]
Leo Laporte
Android people. Yeah.
- [33:15]
Paul Thurrott
Oh no, I understand. And then.
- [33:16]
Leo Laporte
But almost everything's web based now. Everybody had. Even QuickBooks has a web interface. I mean.
- [33:21]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [33:21]
Leo Laporte
Can't you run on in a browser nowadays?
- [33:24]
Paul Thurrott
Well, a game Locally.
- [33:25]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that.
- [33:26]
Paul Thurrott
And then yeah, like, like top.
- [33:28]
Leo Laporte
That's why schools like it, frankly.
- [33:30]
Paul Thurrott
No, Right. No, there's good reasons for it. I mean, you could see where a business might like it too. But yeah. Anyway, this is, you know, this is interesting. Like I.
- [33:37]
Richard Campbell
So the question is, is it more Android compatible than Chromebooks?
- [33:42]
Leo Laporte
I think this will be, I think that's the whole.
- [33:44]
Paul Thurrott
I think it's literally just going to be Android. I think it's Android. Yeah, well, it's Fuchsia and that's fine. And it will run, it will run the full desktop Chrome web browser with the extensions and all that. So that's important. So in that sense it will be like a Chromebook is today. There's no plan to replace Chromebook immediately, but that's obviously going to happen. These are going to be premium kind of Chromebook plus or Copilot Plus PC type devices. They did. There were a bunch of announcements around this, but one that is pertinent to us is that I mentioned this agent on the taskbar thing that Microsoft has in Windows and for this system Google is rethinking like the mouse cursor, right. And so if you're familiar with Windows, you have to enable this feature. But there's a. It's called Shake. I forget what it's called, I think it's just called Shake. But you shake your mouse cursor and all the Windows minimize. And so what Google is doing is you shake the mouse cursor and then it turns into what they're calling. I think it's a smart pointer or magic pointer and it becomes this Gemini kind of front end. So it does that vision stuff where whatever's under the mouse cursor, you can learn more about that. You can select items and point, put them into kind of a little, it's like a pop up bubble bucket and then write a prompt right there next to the cursor on screen anywhere and okay, I mean I've not used it. It looks interesting and it is a way to bring kind of new AI capabilities into what is essentially like what I'd call a legacy, you know, desktop type platform. I know it's not a legacy, but as far as you know, there's a, basically a taskbar star button, you know, it's, it's like thing everyone knows and knows how to use and you know, they're kind of rethinking it which, you know, Google has a pretty good history of doing this kind of thing. It's kind of interesting and we'll see There's a lot of questions. A lot of questions. So many questions.
- [35:45]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [35:46]
Paul Thurrott
Devices by the end of the year. One of the inevitable conversations you get into with this kind of thing, and I say that because I often trigger it myself, which is you can take something big like Windows that's been around for decades and you can kind of strip off, strip off, strip off and try to arrive at this more mobile like, or literally mobile platform that's simpler, you know, does that make any sense? And Microsoft's tried this with Windows CE and all the stuff that became, you know, Windows Mobile over the years. They tried it with Windows RT and the Windows 8 time frame. And then what we have today is Windows 11 on ARM, which is just Windows 11. Right. I mean, there is some culling of legacy code in there, which is great, but they haven't really changed the. You know, it's the familiar Windows interface. Apple did the same thing, right, with Mac OS X when they made the iPhone. And then they've since used that smaller code base which they added things like multi touch and whatever to and created all their other platforms like iPad, you know, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, etc. Google's done the same thing. Like they have Android XR, they have Google TV, Android Auto Wear OS. I'm forgetting some. It doesn't matter. So it's interesting. But, you know, the question of whether a mobile platform can replace a desktop platform is a obviously dependent on who you are and the things you need to do. But I kind of like the idea of scaling something small up in a way like you're starting from maybe a simpler code base, hopefully. And we'll see, we'll see where that goes. But they position this, this was their wording that this thing is modern. Right. In other words, they're not really saying mobile. They don't really describe it as a mobile platform. It's a modern platform. Right. And you can make the argument that desktop systems like Mac and Windows are legacy platforms. Right. I mean, they've been around for a long time. There's a lot of cruft and with great power.
- [37:38]
Richard Campbell
I mean, I'd definitely like to see one of these as a tablet.
- [37:43]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, right. I mean, so the answer there would be. Well, we have that, right? We have Android tablets. Like, this is very specifically a laptop.
- [37:51]
Richard Campbell
Good.
- [37:52]
Paul Thurrott
Well, we'll see. I mean, you know, like the iPad can be good at like, like a laptop in the sense that you have a magic keyboard.
- [37:59]
Richard Campbell
Definitely that. And that was my point. It's like, are you really going to make the iPad Pro competitor that can snap into the keyboard and be very laptop.
- [38:06]
Paul Thurrott
Right. So we may see that they, they're not talking form. I mean, in the past they were talking Android laptop, but they, you know, we'll see. I mean, it's possible. OEMs, Google itself, whatever, we don't know. But I will say, you know, with the iPad, there's still some little rough areas where it's touch first, you know, it's, it's awesome as a tablet, of course, but there are interfaces, you know, depending on the app and whatever it is where you're trying to right click and it doesn't right click, but if you click and hold it then gets the menu, which is how it would work with touch, not how it should work with a mouse. And you know, if Google can kind of get by that and make this a little more seamless, you know, maybe they're on the subject. So.
- [38:47]
Richard Campbell
Awesome.
- [38:48]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we'll see. Okay. We'll see. Okay. So that's kind of fun. Always like to see that out of the middle of nowhere. I guess that's not the right way to say that. Microsoft announced a major update to Edge across both desktop and mobile today. Wasn't expecting that. Oops, I just closed the tab. So this is going to be another one of those, you know, you'll cheer, then you'll boo moments where it's like, I'm happy to announce that they've gotten rid of co pilot mode. Yay. No, because it's all copilot mode now. You knew that was coming, right? Come on.
- [39:29]
Richard Campbell
Like, yeah, we don't need an icon when you can never get away from it.
- [39:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's just, there's no mode. It's just going to be all this AI crap. So there's a lot of new capabilities that are occurring across both desktop and mobile. There are some things that had been on desktop before that are now coming to mobile. For example, Copilot Vision and Voice are now available on mobile for the first time. That's cool if you want that, I guess. I don't know. But the things that will be across both is Copilot has first of all, long term memory, which I think is important to all these things, meaning you can ask it about things and it will have the context of all the stuff you've given. It promotes permission to see which can now include not just multiple tabs, but reasoning across multiple tabs so you can compare information, get summaries, see what matters the most, blah, blah, blah, whatever. The new tab page has been redesigned. This is the thing. This looks like the Copilot mode new tab page to me, but that's fine. Copilot has these two features that were experimental. Actually, one of them still is, but there's a feature called Journeys, which is now broadly available across desktop and for the first time, mobile. I don't think it was even tested on mobile before, at least publicly. I could be wrong about that. I don't think so. There's a study and learn mode with guided study sessions. There's a writing assistant, which is obviously AI based for drafting new things or just rewriting or for tone clarity, whatever. There are Copilot quizzes, so you can generate quizzes, flashcards, guided sessions, etc. Based on information you might be looking at in a tab. You can turn any tab into an audio podcast. Right. So if you think about what's it called, the immersive view or whatever, the reading view in Edge today, you know, that's a way to read the actual article, but without the distractions of the webpage with, you know, whatever ads and nonsense right there.
- [41:24]
Richard Campbell
All the blinky and jumpy stuff.
- [41:25]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. But you can also click a little play button and it will read it to you, which is nice. But the podcast feature is not a literal reading of the article. It uses AI to kind of summarize it, and then it presents it as if it were a podcast. So you might be on your phone, maybe you see some interesting article, you're like, I got to get on the subway of the bus or whatever. I can't walk around and read this. But you can listen to a podcast version of it, which for some reason is super common with AI making a podcast out of things. It's almost like they're training all their models and all the podcasts, but I'm sure they didn't do that. And I think that's probably most of it. So these features are all rolling out across Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, and iPad.
- [42:07]
Richard Campbell
So cool.
- [42:09]
Paul Thurrott
There you go. This one kind of hit me personally, because I love Markdown. I write Markdown. I almost think in Markdown at this
- [42:18]
Leo Laporte
point, you're writing a book about Markdown.
- [42:20]
Paul Thurrott
I might be writing a book about Markdown.
- [42:22]
Leo Laporte
John Cooper is expecting you to write a book.
- [42:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, yep, yep. Now there's some pressure, right? Yeah, there's pressure. But the thing is, Markdown is. Has become even more prominent lately because it's the language of AI and especially AI agents. And I guess I never really thought about this too much, but it's one thing for it to be able to easily process Markdown because Markdown is just plain text with a couple of formatting tags essentially, but it also outputs a markdown. And there's an engineer from Anthropic and I think Anthropic as an organization is making the argument that this is not the right approach, that the output should be HTML because this is richer possibilities there, including programmatic interactions and through JavaScript, et cetera. You know, you can link to images in Markdown just like you can in HTML. So there's some, there is some visual kind of things that you can do there. But the thing is, you know, this isn't the part of the book or part of that book I'm working on. I wrote this, but I haven't shared it publicly yet because that chapter is not done. But when Jon Gruber created this and
- [43:36]
Leo Laporte
Aaron Schwartz, I really want to make sure Aaron gets credit.
- [43:38]
Paul Thurrott
Okay. I'm just based on me reading his blog, right? He, he described Markdown as two different things. There was the syntax that gets added to plain text, which is both human and machine readable, obviously. Then in his case, I think it was a Perl script, but it was a way to transform that Markdown plain text into HTML because that's what gets published on the web. Having AI do that, having an AI agent do that, actually to me does make sense because the surface that you're looking at in cloud or whatever AI you're using, if you're on the web, whatever it is going to be HTML, right? Like it might as well use the thing the whole world already uses. And it has richer display capabilities as it is, and must maybe better understood as well. So even though you can do some, you can do some, some kind of cool, depending on the Markdown editor that you use, a lot of them have a side by side view or a view where you can bring up the. It's called a preview usually, which is the HTML view, right. So you're writing in code essentially. Well, you're writing plain text, but it has little hashtags and whatnot. And you can read it, it's readable. It's not particularly pretty, but if you want to see what it's going to look like on the output end, that's. That is HTML. It was always going to be HTML like. So I think this, it's an interesting point. Like I, I don't know why AI agents spit out Markdown other than the. I don't want to. Let me think about.
- [45:13]
Richard Campbell
They like text, right? They're just, they Love text.
- [45:15]
Paul Thurrott
And it's.
- [45:16]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, could have been HTML, but.
- [45:18]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And he's. And they're saying they do both equally.
- [45:21]
Leo Laporte
Well, honestly, it's just whatever. If you told your agent, use HTML from now on instead of Markdown, it would.
- [45:28]
Paul Thurrott
It will just do it. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, I think what they're saying is.
- [45:31]
Richard Campbell
And by HTML you mean marquee with flaming text.
- [45:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean blinking text.
- [45:37]
Richard Campbell
So after.
- [45:38]
Leo Laporte
After that article came out from Tariq, I. But I don't. I. So. And some have said. Daniel Meisler, who I think is really smart, has said, stick with Markdown and do HTML when you want something that is easy to. That's prettier or easy to read. So I still stick with Markdown and you need to for things like Claude MD or Agents md.
- [46:00]
Paul Thurrott
Right. I think the reason it is Markdown on output is because it is on input 2 and these things all interact and so it's just easier. This is the workflow.
- [46:10]
Leo Laporte
I'll show you what I've done. So what I do when I want something that I can visualize better, I'll say make the markdown and put it in my Obsidian. Because Obsidian reads Markdown well. But also make a page. This is on Cloudflare, so I just have a Cloudflare page. So we're working on a workflow and it just did this page now, it also did it in Markdown, but you could see instead of using Mermaid to make diagrams and stuff, it does it HTML and it's nice and it makes it easy to read and it's stuff like that. The other thing I had to do, which I guess I can share this with you, we're planning a vacation in the fall and I didn't know what to do where we're going, so I had the AI act like a travel agent and recommend stuff. And I said, make that an HTML page and put it up on the Cloudflare. Cloudflare is free for pages and it's easier to read. That's all. That's the beauty of it.
- [47:01]
Paul Thurrott
Right, Right.
- [47:02]
Leo Laporte
That's all it is. And then I have an index on it. So this is just like a quickbookshelf. They're disposable. And I think that I still use Markdown because I still put it in Obsidian.
- [47:15]
Paul Thurrott
Like I said, I almost think in Markdown. So to me, that's just normal but easy.
- [47:18]
Leo Laporte
It's how you type. But nowadays when the AI is typing, it doesn't matter. Python go. Markdown. HTML. Yeah, it's spitting out thousand Lines a second.
- [47:29]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, I obviously can read HTML. It's the earliest role of AI was a web scraper.
- [47:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, right, right.
- [47:38]
Paul Thurrott
Translator, obviously can handle it. Anyway, interesting conversation. Yeah, it's interesting.
- [47:44]
Leo Laporte
Um, I do both, is what I say.
- [47:47]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
- [47:49]
Leo Laporte
Depending on how I, you know, what I. How I don't want to.
- [47:52]
Paul Thurrott
I don't think about it because I'm not producing anything that I want anyone to see. Like, I'm just. You know what I mean? Like, I don't really.
- [47:57]
Leo Laporte
I'm not producing well for things like those, the diagrams and stuff, it's a little easier to individualize. But anyway, it's just as fluent in both languages. So I just say, hey, give me an HTML list and put it up on Cloudflare. And it does it.
- [48:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, okay.
- [48:11]
Leo Laporte
It's easy.
- [48:11]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [48:12]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's great.
- [48:13]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. So I think we referenced this last week. I hadn't. I still to this moment have not written about this, but Google Chrome was found to be downloading this 4 gigabyte local AI model, which I said at the time has to be Gemini Nano. And it is. I also had this vague idea, like they said a couple of years ago they were going to do this, and they did. Actually, this is not a secret thing they're doing. And I made the point, I think, last week, that Firefox does this with the language translation stuff. Every time you select a language in there and say, I want to be able to translate between this and whatever other languages I've downloaded, it downloads local AI models for that. That's what it does. Now, they're probably not 4 gigabytes of space or whatever, but all these people are writing tips like, here's how you can free up 4 gigabytes of space on your computer. And it's like, okay, but I mean, if you're actually using this stuff and you want this thing to work offline, for example, or whatever it might be, and you have the space, I guess you might want this. But it was sort of presented as this nefarious plan or something like, we're going to sneak Gemini.
- [49:22]
Leo Laporte
The only thing nefarious about it is that it's changing web standards unilaterally without the help of the W3C.
- [49:30]
Paul Thurrott
So you use the word only, and that's actually serious.
- [49:35]
Richard Campbell
But it's not. I mean, is it actually trying to change the RFCs? I mean, no, but it's doing what it wants.
- [49:40]
Leo Laporte
But it's de facto, right? So if a developer says, well, I have an API, which it is, by the Way there's an API. If I have an API to a local AI, I'm going to use it. But the problem is it only works with Chrome. So there goes Firefox, there goes Vivaldi, there goes.
- [49:54]
Paul Thurrott
This was the Internet Explorer strategy back in the day. You know, make stuff that only works in ie. And this is not what we want. We don't want a button that says this page works best in whatever the browser is. Right.
- [50:05]
Leo Laporte
So I don't think it's a bad thing at all.
- [50:07]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean when. Well, the first outrage about this wasn't that.
- [50:10]
Leo Laporte
Although that it was the four gigabytes,
- [50:11]
Paul Thurrott
it's just the four gigabyte thing. And it's like, okay, but you know, whatever. I. If you have a copilot plus PC, you might have 40 gigabytes models. I'm not joking.
- [50:20]
Leo Laporte
Like, and there's a lot to be said for a local only model, right?
- [50:23]
Richard Campbell
Yep, yep.
- [50:23]
Leo Laporte
Especially Gemini, which is very, very good.
- [50:26]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly.
- [50:27]
Leo Laporte
There's a lot to. There's a lot of.
- [50:29]
Paul Thurrott
This is the same model that Google puts on their Pixel phones, for example, right?
- [50:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Right. It's on every phone. Every phone is a local model. So. Yeah, but I, I do think it's. It's unfortunate because it means Firefox is. There should be a W3C should set a standard for local models in the local API.
- [50:46]
Paul Thurrott
I agree, I do, but I agree Google has a rich doing this kind of thing. So they were going to do that. What was that sandbox thing they were going to do?
- [50:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they Big foot everything they eventually
- [50:59]
Paul Thurrott
gave up on but they were just basically pushing by whatever the standards are and, and doing their own thing and, and my God, where there was there complaining. So the good, the good news is that complaining leads to antitrust investigations which leads to them completely reversing course. So maybe they'll do that here. I don't.
- [51:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they gave up on the. Whatever that.
- [51:19]
Paul Thurrott
This is a privacy sandbox.
- [51:21]
Leo Laporte
Privacy sandbox. They gave up on that, didn't they?
- [51:23]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they did.
- [51:23]
Leo Laporte
In fact they had several different proposals.
- [51:25]
Paul Thurrott
Five years, maybe longer. It was, you know, they were going to be doing that for a long time until they were not.
- [51:31]
Leo Laporte
The difference was it was the advertising community that didn't like that this would be end users that don't like it. I don't know how much cloud we have.
- [51:37]
Paul Thurrott
It blows my mind that it's like we want to find something that's going to be really good for advertisers and doesn't violate your privacy so much. And it's like there's no such thing as that. You're going to do one or the other.
- [51:50]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, just pressed the wrong button. I'm trying to get my watch to shut up. Instead it made more noise. Sorry.
- [51:58]
Paul Thurrott
No, it's okay. OpenAI has a coding agent called Codex. Like anthropic cloud code, it has expanded to include productivity functionality.
- [52:11]
Richard Campbell
So they're going out to co work?
- [52:13]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Yes, they are. They released a Codex app on the Mac and then on Windows and this is over the past, you know, X number of months, I don't remember. And what they found was, and it's always fascinating to me, like you think you release software and it's intentional, but then you users actually use it and you find out, oh, they're doing different stuff with it than we thought. The most common workflows that customers were using happened in their web browser, whatever it was. Now they have a version of Codex that's for Chrome, meaning it will work in. I haven't tried this, but it should work in any chromium browser like Edge, Brave, whatever. The idea here is that if you're doing across multiple browser tabs, workflows like inspecting log, this is their words, inspecting logs, testing web apps, reviewing dashboards, moving through internal tools, CRMs, dashboards, docs, yada yada yada. So okay, okay, whatever. You're cute. So that's happening.
- [53:21]
Leo Laporte
That's all I got.
- [53:21]
Richard Campbell
Suddenly open AI is chasing, which is
- [53:23]
Leo Laporte
weird, you know, isn't that strange?
- [53:25]
Richard Campbell
Just like that, they couldn't quite get
- [53:27]
Leo Laporte
to a billion users. They wanted to, they thought they would and they.
- [53:30]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but they're all consumer side, they're
- [53:33]
Paul Thurrott
chasing that valuation thing, which is very similar to what OpenAI is doing. And I don't know the organization, but there's some, you know, in the same way that we have like analyst bodies that tell us, you know, what they believe market share Is for like OS's and browsers and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Apparently anthropic adoption with businesses just surpassed OpenAI's.
- [53:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the enterprise that's the, that's where the money is. Those are the people who are going to pay the money.
- [53:59]
Paul Thurrott
But, and I'm doing this off the top time ahead, so forgive me, I think this is correct. But they're doing the run rate thing, right? So they, you know, they have whatever revenues they had in some great quarter and their annual run rate is, was either the 30 or 50 billion, I can't remember, but their annual run Rate the year before or maybe their actual revenues I guess were 9 billion. So like that's great growth. That's awesome. It is awesome. The thing is they're on the hook for like four to six hundred billion dollars in costs.
- [54:26]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [54:26]
Paul Thurrott
And that run rate is not going to pay for that. You know, there's no such thing as a 30 year mortgage for this stuff that makes any sense. Like so these, it's not anthropic. This is not unique to them and I'm not dumping on them. But the financial story and it's always presented as this giant positive is very close to what you see with OpenAI. And meaning big numbers for like growth. Yes. But not enough to cover their costs.
- [54:55]
Richard Campbell
No. Well, and also so much of the cost stuff is speculative based on further growth. Like these are hard numbers to work out.
- [55:03]
Paul Thurrott
I know, I know. I keep waiting for this whole thing to come crashing down to earth, but
- [55:09]
Richard Campbell
it seems to be getting closer.
- [55:11]
Leo Laporte
I don't know, I'm not convinced. I mean, it's bubbly.
- [55:14]
Paul Thurrott
It is bubbly. But is it a bubble? Bubble.
- [55:16]
Leo Laporte
But is it? You know, I'm not.
- [55:18]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [55:18]
Richard Campbell
Well, the question to me the moment the momentum shifted is when the memory companies refused to double production and all those projections for all those servers were impossible.
- [55:33]
Paul Thurrott
It's like we're going to, we're going to stop selling this to individuals, but we're not actually going to increase capacity.
- [55:40]
Richard Campbell
No. And I think they're looking at this as a bubble and thinking, I don't want to be in the situation of a global crossing or a KPN at the end of the dot com boom where I laid all this undersea cable and everybody went broke.
- [55:51]
Paul Thurrott
The market is flush with RAM that nobody wanted and now it's selling at exactly it.
- [55:57]
Richard Campbell
And they're like, it takes us three years to build a fab. You guys aren't going to be wanting these things in three years. We're going to stick to the production we can do.
- [56:04]
Paul Thurrott
This is smart for AI companies because it puts all the risk on the microns or whatever these companies are that make RAM and other components and they're all like, no, we're not doing that. Like, sorry, we're not. We're not.
- [56:19]
Richard Campbell
You also see where they micron saying we're taking deposits. If you want more ram, no more speculative ordering because they're just not going to be caught holding the bag.
- [56:28]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [56:28]
Richard Campbell
But at that moment that, you know, slope graph going up and to the right is impossible. You can't keep scaling. We don't have enough equipment. You have to get more efficient.
- [56:40]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [56:41]
Richard Campbell
You know, you have to change the trend. And so it's like that's how you deflate a bubble. And hopefully in a graceful way.
- [56:47]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. Not the balloon going around the room, but rather a. Yeah, a graceful Big
- [56:52]
Richard Campbell
Ten came off, what, 2 trillion in the first quarter. And they've had a bounce back for the past few weeks, which is the pattern that happened in the dot com boom, too. At some point, the investors go.
- [57:04]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [57:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I mean, it comes down to how much the investors will put up with.
- [57:11]
Paul Thurrott
Right? Yeah, they're putting up with a lot. And. And, you know, in the same way that, you know, if you watch sporting events on TV now, you'll see all the ads are for, like, basically gambling apps or services, whatever.
- [57:21]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [57:22]
Paul Thurrott
Wall street has always been speculative, obviously, but, like, it has become more and more like gambling than I think ever before in history. I've never. I. I don't know what's going on here.
- [57:33]
Richard Campbell
Well, they moved from crypto.
- [57:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, fair enough. Sorry. They're collecting junk. I'll be right back.
- [57:40]
Leo Laporte
I know the junk girl is here. You said it was like a child.
- [57:44]
Paul Thurrott
I can hear that. Yeah, it's a. A girl. She's a woman now, but she. It's a child's voice.
- [57:48]
Leo Laporte
They recorded.
- [57:49]
Richard Campbell
Recorded it.
- [57:49]
Paul Thurrott
She's famous in Mexico and so funny. I tell you who doesn't like her, though, is the dogs. They're like. All the dogs out there are going,
- [58:00]
Leo Laporte
All right.
- [58:01]
Paul Thurrott
I can hear like five dogs. It's so funny.
- [58:03]
Leo Laporte
Can you really barking?
- [58:04]
Paul Thurrott
They're freaking. They're not barking. They're whining like they hate it. It's like they're.
- [58:07]
Richard Campbell
Thank you.
- [58:08]
Paul Thurrott
The sound of this is punishing.
- [58:10]
Leo Laporte
Throwing out all the good stuff.
- [58:12]
Paul Thurrott
I don't think that's it.
- [58:13]
Leo Laporte
I want that bone.
- [58:16]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [58:16]
Leo Laporte
All right, we'll take a little break. Dogs howl. The. The adult woman cries as a baby.
- [58:24]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [58:24]
Leo Laporte
Mexico is alive.
- [58:26]
Paul Thurrott
Labradoras, etc.
- [58:30]
Leo Laporte
Our show today, brought to you by Trusted Tech. If you are managing Microsoft 365 for your company, you're responsible for, well, both the cost and whether it's set up correctly. Now, let's talk about cost first. And on July 1st, I think everybody knows this. I hope I'm not telling you something you don't already know. Microsoft is raising prices that we're now less than two months away. So any mistakes in your licensing are about to get more expensive. Most companies using Microsoft 365 are either over licensed, meaning paying for unused seats and features or under licensed, creating compliance and security risks. And believe it or not, it can be both. The result either way is wasting thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a year on on tools your team doesn't use. Or worse, missing critical security features you thought you had but you didn't license. It is. I understand it's complicated. There's no shade. I'm not throwing shade on you. That's why you need Trusted Tech. Trusted Tech helps businesses understand what they have, what they actually need, and how to lock in the right setup now before costs go up. Yeah, I know. You could feed it to an AI, don't. You don't want hallucinations on this. You want the facts. That's Trusted Tech. Their team ensures your Microsoft 365 environment is well supported and aligned with how your business actually operates. Think of it as a tune up. You need this. You should probably do this all the time. Oh, and by the way, they're also there if you need ongoing help because they offer reactive support for your Microsoft environment through their certified support services. So they do both. Microsoft licensing is a moving target. It is changing all the time. E3 versus E5 versus premium, business premium and then the add ons. But There's a new E7. It's confusing. It's easy to misconfigure, it's easy to overpay or underpay. Yes, that can happen. Licensing mistakes don't just cost money. They can create compliance exposure that will also get more expensive after July 1st. Even if you think your license is dialed in, it's worth a second look. You know who really loves Trusted Tech? Kevin Turner. You know his name? Former Microsoft coo. He said this. This is a direct quote about Trusted Tech. He was talking to them. He said you have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. If Kevin Turner says that, you can believe it. Now, after July 1, the clock is ticking. You are stuck paying more. This is the last chance to fix your licensing before the costs go up. Trusted Tech is offering a free, free Microsoft365 licensing consultation right now. Visit TrustedTech Team WindowsWeekly365 TrustedTech Team Windows Weekly365 and get a clear, data backed view of your current licenses, what you're wasting and how to lock in savings before the price increase. Let me give you that address again. TrustedTech Team Windows Weekly 365 There's a form right there. You submit that form, get in contact with trusted techs, super smart Microsoft licensing engineers. They can cut through all of this, tell you exactly what you have, what you need, and do it now. July 1st is coming faster than you might think. TrustedTech Team WindowsWeekly3 65 we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. All right, my friends, onward.
- [62:23]
Paul Thurrott
So I'm not a security expert, but
- [62:26]
Leo Laporte
I play one on tv.
- [62:28]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I pretend to be one sometimes.
- [62:30]
Richard Campbell
I do have common the Holiday Inn Express last night.
- [62:35]
Leo Laporte
Did you really?
- [62:35]
Paul Thurrott
I'm so sorry.
- [62:36]
Leo Laporte
No, yeah, I was going to say
- [62:39]
Paul Thurrott
I broke the waffle machine.
- [62:40]
Leo Laporte
Sorry.
- [62:42]
Paul Thurrott
So. But I do have a sort of pet peeve about security vulnerabilities which I should put air quotes around, like, where the first step in the way that you duplicate that you make this happen is first of all, sign into your computer. Like, okay, but like, but now you're signed in. I mean, when you're signed in, you have access to your web browser, which has all your information on. I mean, you're, you're signed in. You know, so there were a couple of these this past week. You know, the recall. The more the recent recall episode is one of them. So this first one, I've, I've not written about it, just. I just was alerted to it today. So I gotta. I'm gonna look at this in more detail, but the person who found this vulnerability calls it yellow key. He describes it as one of the most insane discoveries he's ever had. Feels like a backdoor. So it says how to reproduce step one, Copy the whatever folder to some other location. Well, actually, that's not step one, is it? Step one is sign into your computer. You can't just copy that folder. So to me, that's like the rest of what you're describing. It's like I've kind of stopped listening. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you know, when my. The recall one was a little bit like this, it's like, okay, sign into your computer. And it's like, well, you know, and then sign into recall, which requires the Windows hello ESS nonsense. And it's terrible and slow. It's like, I, I'm sorry, but that's, that's the security. What are you talking about? Like, so I don't know what to say about this one. I got to look into this a little bit more. We'll see. But. And in the same vein, there was a report this past week, Microsoft Edge loads all your saved passwords into memory in clear text. When you first run the browser. Microsoft has responded this one similarly to what they did with Recall. And basically the short version is. Yeah, that's how it works. It's supposed to work that way. You're signed into a computer like securely, like this is what the security protecting the browser, which is the operating system, which is Windows hello, is what secures this.
- [64:55]
Richard Campbell
And yeah, but at the same time, it's like, then you click on a phishing email that drops a payload on your machine.
- [65:02]
Paul Thurrott
100%. Yeah. So today they're saying this is by design. I agree. I, I feel like, look, they've already done the thing where they want to make it more secure so it becomes less convenient. Right. That one of the reasons, maybe the reason you would do this in plain text is fast, right. If this is encrypted and you have to decrypt it every single time you access any password, that could take a long time. That would slow down the performance, etc. People would complain about that. And yeah, there's got to be a better way. I mean, you know, the, the new Windows hello experience is very, is slow. I hate it. When you're in Windows, signing in is the same. That's always worked great. But the, you know, do we want more of this? I don't know. You know, here's the way you can secure Microsoft Edge. Don't use it and you know, just use like an actually secure browser. So I don't know. I don't know what to say to this one.
- [66:00]
Leo Laporte
It's an interesting story. The same, by the way, Chrome used to do the same thing, keep the passwords in the clearance. And Google's explanation of this was, well, if, like you said, if somebody has access to your computer, I mean, you have problems.
- [66:12]
Paul Thurrott
You know, it's not just this, you know, it's like.
- [66:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, so. So, I mean, I think it is kind of a tempest in a teapot. I don't, but I don't know about this. You should be using a password manager anyway.
- [66:24]
Paul Thurrott
This is right.
- [66:26]
Leo Laporte
And that's the real answer.
- [66:27]
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
- [66:28]
Leo Laporte
But Google for a long time kept passwords in the clear in Chrome. I'm sure that's why Edge still does.
- [66:32]
Richard Campbell
It's just.
- [66:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I feel like, you know, they have this Secure Future initiative, they have the Windows resiliency initiative, it's, etc. Etc. Etc. This is going to get caught up in that. I, I can't.
- [66:47]
Leo Laporte
Google does encrypt them now, which is why.
- [66:49]
Paul Thurrott
And no one is complaining, right? So no one's complaining that Google is Slow when it comes to accessing a password. Then again, if you're using a Google Password Manager in a Chrome browser, you have mental problems and you need, well, assistance.
- [67:01]
Leo Laporte
I hate to say it, but that's how most people.
- [67:03]
Paul Thurrott
I know. I know, of course, but most people don't know any better.
- [67:07]
Leo Laporte
You know, they shouldn't.
- [67:08]
Paul Thurrott
And this is why you use a third party password.
- [67:11]
Leo Laporte
You would also think that if. That people would start to say, well, wait a minute, but I also need those passwords in other places on their.
- [67:19]
Paul Thurrott
How do I. Yeah, with the third party password manager.
- [67:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [67:22]
Richard Campbell
That's how they keep them encrypted all the time.
- [67:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. They're there. Everywhere. They're everywhere.
- [67:27]
Richard Campbell
I'm just saying they're free.
- [67:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Bit Warden is free for interpersonal.
- [67:33]
Paul Thurrott
Proton is for, you know.
- [67:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [67:35]
Paul Thurrott
As well. What's the other big one? Password I think you have to pay for.
- [67:38]
Leo Laporte
But yeah, most of them.
- [67:40]
Paul Thurrott
But they're good.
- [67:40]
Leo Laporte
Free.
- [67:41]
Paul Thurrott
Bitwarden is, you know, for this audience. I mean, Bitwarden.
- [67:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Bitwarden's open source, so it's free. Free forever.
- [67:46]
Richard Campbell
Your primary consumer breach is a phishing attack, and that's the moment where whatever you had loaded in memory under your context is now vulnerable.
- [67:54]
Paul Thurrott
That's true. Like that you're. You are the weakest link, in other words.
- [67:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And you're going to make mistakes. The whole trick here is how badly punished are you going to be for that mistake? If those things are encrypted and residently decrypted when you use them, you know, like Bit Warden does, then you're not going to have all your passwords immediately hijacked.
- [68:12]
Leo Laporte
And we should mention Bitwarden is of course, a sponsor of the podcast.
- [68:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [68:17]
Leo Laporte
The other thing, though, I hesitate to say this, most individuals are not going to be attacked. Right. Or not. Is that not true?
- [68:27]
Richard Campbell
Well, most phishing attacks are cheap.
- [68:30]
Leo Laporte
That's true.
- [68:30]
Paul Thurrott
Social engineering attacks of all kinds are.
- [68:33]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [68:33]
Leo Laporte
I mean, by the way, valuable target is, of course, an enterprise, not an individual. Sure. But.
- [68:39]
Paul Thurrott
Well, you can still.
- [68:40]
Richard Campbell
48 hours I've been under steady attack. Like I'm getting dedicated.
- [68:44]
Paul Thurrott
I had a phishing thing this morning. I mean. Yeah. So, yeah, I. Look, you can get distracted, you're out in the world, you're on the phone, maybe you don't see it. So good. You didn't think to look at the email address? No.
- [68:54]
Leo Laporte
I mean, that happens.
- [68:54]
Richard Campbell
There's.
- [68:55]
Paul Thurrott
It's very real.
- [68:55]
Leo Laporte
So I had my. Hadn't had my coffee yet.
- [68:58]
Richard Campbell
First stage breach is always a possibility. Everything is about what happens next.
- [69:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [69:04]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [69:04]
Leo Laporte
And in that case, the password manager didn't help me because I was. I was going along. I was helping the bad guy. Oh, yeah, I got all the. I got all those credit card numbers. What do you need? No problem.
- [69:17]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [69:17]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. They're encrypted, but I know how to decrypt them.
- [69:21]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Could you do that now, please? Oh, yeah, of course. I'm signed in.
- [69:24]
Leo Laporte
That's the first time I'm sending you the code. Oh, yeah, I got the code. Thank you.
- [69:27]
Paul Thurrott
Do you need remote access to my computer? I'm going to be out for a few hours.
- [69:32]
Leo Laporte
That's what we do with open clot.
- [69:34]
Paul Thurrott
I know. That's what. I was just joking about that with Stefan, my wife. Today, I'm just going to open up my life to AI and just let it run amok, because what could go wrong? What could go wrong?
- [69:45]
Leo Laporte
I counted them. 19 different cron jobs running on my framework all the time, doing all sorts of stuff. I mean, it's code, so it's not. I mean, they know what they're doing. But, You know, you can get a stripe account for your AI now, which is great.
- [70:09]
Paul Thurrott
It's gonna buy a bunch of those little terminals so it can start running
- [70:12]
Leo Laporte
people's credit cards and post it on X. Something like. Okay, now that I can have a stripe account, I said to my agent, buy yourself a gift. What would you like bought? Like an $8 ebook?
- [70:26]
Paul Thurrott
Who owns Stripe Is Stripe? Is that Block? Is that the same company?
- [70:30]
Leo Laporte
No, no, it's the Collisons. Stripe is Stripe, right?
- [70:35]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know. I'm trying.
- [70:37]
Leo Laporte
They have a larger name. Okay. I can't.
- [70:40]
Richard Campbell
Stripe is Jack Dorsey.
- [70:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it is. Oh, so it is Block, then It is Black. Right.
- [70:45]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [70:46]
Paul Thurrott
He's trustworthy. I. I wouldn't.
- [70:49]
Leo Laporte
He likes his AI.
- [70:52]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. I think he likes his Nazis, too. Anyway.
- [70:55]
Leo Laporte
No Jack Dorsey. Oh, no. I'm sorry.
- [70:57]
Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. Right?
- [70:58]
Leo Laporte
He's the hippie.
- [70:59]
Paul Thurrott
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. He's not Peter Thiel. These people. There's too many of these people. I can't. I. I apologize.
- [71:07]
Leo Laporte
No, Stripe is not.
- [71:09]
Richard Campbell
No, it's. It's Colson.
- [71:11]
Leo Laporte
It's the Collisons. Yeah, it's. It's privately owned.
- [71:14]
Paul Thurrott
I feel like the only person.
- [71:15]
Leo Laporte
It's not Org.
- [71:17]
Paul Thurrott
It's like Automatic, the company that makes WordPress.
- [71:20]
Richard Campbell
Block is Dorsey.
- [71:22]
Paul Thurrott
Is that Dorsey, too?
- [71:23]
Leo Laporte
No, no, Stripe is not Dorsey. Let's get this clear. It's the Collison. Lock is Dorsey.
- [71:30]
Paul Thurrott
We should probably just automatic.
- [71:31]
Leo Laporte
Is Matt Mullenweg right? Look, it is really hard to keep track of this.
- [71:37]
Paul Thurrott
I screw this, especially because this is on the periphery for me. This is not my focus at all. Like, I. I would know this if I was cared about this stuff.
- [71:44]
Leo Laporte
I guess I don't care about it. And I have to know. I'm so.
- [71:47]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know why. This is what I. This is how my brain works. I'm so stupid. All right. We have talked a couple of times about Mozilla and Firefox and using anthropic, mythos, etc. There were, when they released, I think it was Firefox 150, 270 fixes they had made in that release alone. By the end of April, they had fixed 423 security vulnerabilities just in that month. A year ago in April, they pitched fixed or patched 31 vulnerabilities. To give you an idea of the scope of how this has changed.
- [72:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [72:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. So that's great. And not all of those are actually from Mythos. They still do all the traditional stuff. People still submit bugs and they still find things, and that still happens, you know.
- [72:35]
Richard Campbell
But I think they're also starting to use the new AI development style too. So they are moving faster as well as using these tools for detection.
- [72:42]
Paul Thurrott
And that's one of the things, I guess Mythos is very good at, is not just saying, hey, here's a vulnerability, but, hey, here's how you can duplicate it yourself and here's how you can fix it. And for an organization like Mozilla, but whatever company, they can take that information and prove it to themselves, prove that the fix works and make that fix. And not a lot in the way of false positives, although I think, I guess it must be the Microsoft one. I think they were talking about false positives there.
- [73:08]
Richard Campbell
But, you know, well, and often problematic fixes too. Like there's ways to fix things that are creating other issues. I'm hearing over and over again from different teams that they're using tools like this and they're just finding incredible reams of vulnerabilities and as it was described to me, keys to the castle kind of vulnerabilities. Like. Yeah, no, no, but that's not a. That's not just a buffer overflow they might exploit someday. That's.
- [73:32]
Leo Laporte
I have.
- [73:33]
Richard Campbell
I have admin access to every buffer overflow.
- [73:36]
Paul Thurrott
The good old days.
- [73:37]
Richard Campbell
I was so looking forward to that.
- [73:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's incredible.
- [73:42]
Paul Thurrott
But these guys are Doing that thing I said, which is they're going to shift into a place where now they're going to be proactive using AI so they'll find problems in code bases as they're submitted and before they ship to the public.
- [73:55]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [73:55]
Paul Thurrott
And it doesn't mean it will be perfect. You know, software's never perfect perfect. But I think this is going to lead to a new level of. And level of the problem.
- [74:03]
Richard Campbell
And the problem is because it needs to. Right. Because that same set of tools are being used by the black hats to find and take advantage of vulnerabilities in zero day at high speed.
- [74:12]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [74:12]
Richard Campbell
And there is a panic going on. It's a, it's an underlier.
- [74:16]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [74:17]
Richard Campbell
Since the fall last year of all of these major companies going, we have to get this stuff patched as quickly as possible before they, the attacks really come in full bore.
- [74:27]
Paul Thurrott
And then China was like, hey, can we have access to Mythos too? And Anthropic said, no, no, you cannot. Interesting. In other good news, I guess this is not AI related, but rather security related. I think Monday or the other day, whatever day was passkey day, which used to be password day. And Amazon used that to announce that they now have over 465 million customers who have enrolled in pass keys. So that's how they sign into their Amazon accounts now. That's a 75% gain year over year. That's awesome.
- [75:05]
Richard Campbell
It's not going to continue. Obviously that's now most of their customers. So they won't do that.
- [75:08]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't know what that. Yeah, exactly. But, but that's great.
- [75:11]
Richard Campbell
You hammer away at sign upski. Sign up. Yes. So it's like I can make this go away.
- [75:18]
Paul Thurrott
I think you guys are the same. But I use passwords wherever I can use passwords. And I got to say the best passkey implementation to this day is GitHub. GitHub's implemented really nice. Signing into GitHub is the best. I love it.
- [75:33]
Leo Laporte
You know what's great is that many, many AI tools and I think other geek tools use GitHub as their single sign on.
- [75:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So there you go. It's great.
- [75:43]
Leo Laporte
So now passkeys everywhere because they really.
- [75:47]
Paul Thurrott
Now the caveat to this is it's possible Amazon's is just as good. But every time I sign with a passkey, I still get a code on my phone.
- [75:53]
Leo Laporte
No. And I think, yes, it's not just as good.
- [75:56]
Paul Thurrott
Okay. I would say I wasn't sure if that was like something I did.
- [75:58]
Leo Laporte
It's not just you, it's me, too. I hate it.
- [76:00]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't like that. I feel like the pass key should be it.
- [76:04]
Leo Laporte
Yes. It's fully secure. You do not need a second third factor.
- [76:09]
Paul Thurrott
If you sign into Google a lot, which I also do, your experience will either be the best experience imaginable or. Are you serious? Like, because they literally do it randomly when you sign in. So one time it will say, oh, do you want to use passkey? You're like, yep. And a little, you know, my password manager will come up and boop, done. Other times it will be like, oh, you'll get an alert on your phone. You're like, oh, come on, man. Like, just do this.
- [76:35]
Leo Laporte
I haven't had that experience.
- [76:36]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, I have this every day.
- [76:38]
Leo Laporte
And I had to have Russell, our administrator, turn on passkeys for workspaces because they're not on by default.
- [76:43]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So I have one in workspace and one for consumer account. And that might. Maybe that's part of it. I don't know, because I go back and forth between the two, but I
- [76:52]
Leo Laporte
have always been able to.
- [76:53]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, see, that's a good.
- [76:55]
Leo Laporte
And I say yes.
- [76:56]
Paul Thurrott
And so that. That's a good experience. Like, to me, that's. Yeah, that's good.
- [77:00]
Leo Laporte
Huge. I still have to enter my email address. I really don't even want to do that, honestly.
- [77:05]
Paul Thurrott
I know.
- [77:06]
Leo Laporte
A site should say you have a pass key.
- [77:08]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. And give you the choices. If there are choices, or just the one. And you click. Yep. And then you do a Windows hello or whatever you're using for authentication. And. Yep.
- [77:16]
Leo Laporte
I don't want to have to enter anything.
- [77:17]
Paul Thurrott
I just want to click 100%.
- [77:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [77:22]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. If you're feeling suicidal, I mean, remove the password from your Microsoft account. Have fun with that.
- [77:29]
Leo Laporte
I regret that so much. I did it.
- [77:31]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I did it with a secondary account. And I will. No, I can't say never. I mean, so I will not do it to my. The one I use all the time. Because it's just like, are you serious? Like, what is this?
- [77:40]
Leo Laporte
Like, it's screwed up.
- [77:41]
Richard Campbell
If you're going to keep a password, make it as long. Make it a 32.
- [77:45]
Paul Thurrott
You know, mine's three digits, but yeah, I mean, it's. But that's another inconsistent experience. They have all the right stuff. Like, they. They have all the secondary forms of authentication, and the problem is you have to use them every single time. It's like a. You know. All right, now we're going to send you an email to a secondary address. Type out the full address, and then you go to that address, you get the code. You go, okay, now do it over.
- [78:10]
Richard Campbell
And like, seriously, is this just because you're in Mexico? Is that what it is?
- [78:13]
Leo Laporte
No, it's happening to me. And it happens on Xbox. And Xbox won't give you enough time to type in the code. Every single time it says you didn't do it fast enough. And it's like 10 seconds. I don't know how fast it's supposed to be.
- [78:25]
Paul Thurrott
This is the problem with the, like, a two FA code thing is you can see, like, on the countdown, it's like, I get 12 seconds. I got this. And then I'm like, you know, and then, like, you. You finally get it in and it's like, nope, it's wrong because they moved on to the next code.
- [78:36]
Leo Laporte
Yes, Right.
- [78:37]
Paul Thurrott
Like, I. Oh, well, someday. Oh, well, someday, I.
- [78:44]
Leo Laporte
That's an amazing number. 465 million.
- [78:47]
Paul Thurrott
I know.
- [78:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I don't even believe that.
- [78:50]
Paul Thurrott
Okay. I don't.
- [78:51]
Leo Laporte
I don't think that's true.
- [78:53]
Paul Thurrott
Interesting.
- [78:54]
Leo Laporte
All right, wait a minute. Well, how many people are in the US including in three something.
- [78:59]
Paul Thurrott
Amazon is humongous in other parts of the world too.
- [79:01]
Leo Laporte
Right. And how. What is passkey adoption generally? The percentage, it's not more than 20 or 30%.
- [79:07]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [79:08]
Leo Laporte
This is everybody in the world who. Who.
- [79:11]
Paul Thurrott
So I don't understand it. I. Look, the first day they offered this, I did it. Right? So I can't tell you what the experience is like if you're not using it.
- [79:19]
Leo Laporte
I don't believe. Believe it.
- [79:20]
Paul Thurrott
I suspect they're pushing it pretty heavily.
- [79:22]
Leo Laporte
I don't think they have any reason to lie. I mean, it must be true.
- [79:25]
Paul Thurrott
But it just seems you want that thing to be. You want that to be secure, right? I mean, it's money.
- [79:31]
Leo Laporte
How many customers does Amazon have?
- [79:34]
Paul Thurrott
That's a good. Let's find out.
- [79:35]
Leo Laporte
Must be several billion in order for them to have 465 million pass keys, remember?
- [79:42]
Paul Thurrott
So when companies start doing E commerce in the early days, they'll always say something like, they might just be counting. We have X number of credit cards in our system or whatever. Right. So there are 260 million prime members worldwide. There are.
- [79:56]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so this is more than twice as many. Almost twice as many prime as prime members.
- [80:01]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [80:01]
Richard Campbell
So maybe counting the number of pass keys, not counting.
- [80:04]
Leo Laporte
There's something wrong with this number. I don't buy.
- [80:07]
Paul Thurrott
If it's. If it is the number of pass keys, I must have 10 of them, because in different looks well, let me see. Let's look at the. Where's the wording?
- [80:17]
Leo Laporte
This is on LinkedIn. He posted this.
- [80:19]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, because that's where all the good stuff is posted, man.
- [80:23]
Leo Laporte
I actually have a LinkedIn account.
- [80:24]
Paul Thurrott
Just because it literally says 465 million of our customers.
- [80:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, So I don't know. Agree. Doesn't mean they use them.
- [80:34]
Paul Thurrott
No, no, they agree. No, they actually do say 465 million customers enrolled in passkeys.
- [80:43]
Leo Laporte
Not in this post.
- [80:45]
Paul Thurrott
Let me look it up. I got an email in this post.
- [80:47]
Leo Laporte
Passkeys are one of the most useful changes in user auth security. Guess what? 465 million of our customers agree.
- [80:54]
Paul Thurrott
All right. This is the email I got.
- [80:56]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you got an email. I'm just looking at the link.
- [80:58]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, well, it should be in there, too. So where is this?
- [81:01]
Leo Laporte
I don't know what agree means. Yeah, you're right. Oh, no, you're right. In the first quarter of 2026, more than 465 million customers have enrolled pass keys in their Amazon accounts. That's amazing. I just. It doesn't seem like it passes the sanity test.
- [81:16]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, that's. It's almost like it's every. Everybody, you know, basically. I mean, how many?
- [81:21]
Richard Campbell
Well.
- [81:22]
Leo Laporte
Well, they must have billions, because I guarantee. I mean, Lisa's not using pass keys on Amazon.
- [81:28]
Paul Thurrott
Most people should be.
- [81:29]
Leo Laporte
I know. We agree. Everybody should be.
- [81:32]
Paul Thurrott
Put her on the phone.
- [81:35]
Leo Laporte
So we were talking about this this morning.
- [81:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [81:37]
Leo Laporte
And she said, you know, I really should be using passkeys everywhere. And I said, yeah. She said, but I don't want to take the time to go through all my accounts.
- [81:43]
Paul Thurrott
Right. We don't have to do that.
- [81:44]
Leo Laporte
Just do it.
- [81:45]
Paul Thurrott
A good password manager would tell you which ones support it that you're not using. Right. That's true, too. This is a good feature, but I
- [81:51]
Leo Laporte
don't think you have to go through everything. Just as you use accounts, whenever you log in.
- [81:55]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [81:56]
Leo Laporte
And you go, oh, another password. See if they have passkeys. If they do that, she's trying to
- [82:00]
Richard Campbell
bulk it up, which is, you know, reasonable.
- [82:03]
Paul Thurrott
I do have two Amazon accounts. I mean, I suppose.
- [82:07]
Leo Laporte
Let me. I gotta ask Perplexity. How many. How many? How many people have Amazon?
- [82:12]
Paul Thurrott
I love that you turned immediately to Perplexity.
- [82:15]
Leo Laporte
Well, I paid for it. I might as well use it. Amazon accounts, like, globally.
- [82:22]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [82:24]
Leo Laporte
Because if they only. Oh, wait a minute. I'm not logged in. Restore. Can I restore it? Something went wrong. Okay, bye. Perplexity. Sorry, I paid for.
- [82:35]
Paul Thurrott
You don't make me regret this.
- [82:38]
Leo Laporte
No, make me. I got a. Okay. What would be the next. God, everything's malware blocked. What is going on on my machine?
- [82:48]
Richard Campbell
You're rocking it. This is what happens. This is what happens when you travel.
- [82:53]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly.
- [82:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. No, that's exactly probably what it is. Yeah.
- [82:56]
Paul Thurrott
When I go home, Netflix is gonna be like, where do you live again? What the hell is happening?
- [83:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you must go through that, right? It's a huge problem because suddenly. And. And how do you watch tv?
- [83:07]
Paul Thurrott
Do you.
- [83:07]
Leo Laporte
Don't. Don't. Does.
- [83:08]
Paul Thurrott
So we don't watch much live tv, but when we do, that's out in the world somewhere, like a sports or whatever. So we just. We have Apple tv.
- [83:15]
Leo Laporte
Okay. And the app. We do plane.
- [83:18]
Paul Thurrott
We do. We do watch Netflix here, though. It works. I mean, it's fine. I have a. I mean, I also, on this trip, have used Proton VPN on the Apple TV the whole time for the first time.
- [83:29]
Leo Laporte
Like, it's interesting.
- [83:30]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [83:30]
Leo Laporte
I didn't know you could do that. That's great. So it thinks you're in Pennsylvania.
- [83:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. And I am, Leo. Wink, wink.
- [83:40]
Leo Laporte
I sure am.
- [83:41]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know why I just said that out loud. It's fine.
- [83:44]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so this is wrong. I mean, this is Chat GPT working really hard, by the way. I mean, it has been looking aws
- [83:56]
Paul Thurrott
to kick the hell out of us.
- [83:57]
Leo Laporte
Looking everywhere says I'll go with about 300 million Amazon accounts. Amazon does not disclose this, so that's not that number.
- [84:07]
Paul Thurrott
That seems small though, right? You know, given how much money this company makes, most of which is on literally things being shipped around the world. I don't know. I don't know. That's an interesting question. I don't know. I don't know.
- [84:21]
Leo Laporte
Hello, Marcelo in Argentina. Listening. Today, I think Marcelo and I had a lovely meal in Buenos Aires, I think, many years ago, I believe.
- [84:30]
Paul Thurrott
A Google AI overview tells me that over 635 million users across Amazon through its mobile app.
- [84:39]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. All right.
- [84:41]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, I.
- [84:42]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, ChatGPT has apparently given up. It's checked everything from Axios to Substack, trying to find a number for Amazon accounts.
- [84:52]
Paul Thurrott
Right, we're going to get. Let's look at AWS's internal service. Hold on for one second.
- [84:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, really? Come on, you're chatgpt. You should be able to look this up anywhere.
- [85:03]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't know.
- [85:04]
Leo Laporte
All right, I give up. Let's take a break. Maybe by the end of the commercial.
- [85:09]
Paul Thurrott
This says this is a site, but it says Amazon had 635 million users on its E Commerce. Oh, that's the same thing, but just said a different way.
- [85:18]
Leo Laporte
You mean regular retail customer accounts, like
- [85:21]
Paul Thurrott
on the app, you know?
- [85:23]
Leo Laporte
No, no, it's going with 300 million. So I don't know. I think, I think this is wrong. But anyway. All right, so I'm still puzzled by the four.
- [85:34]
Paul Thurrott
I'm going to write a story that's going to say Leo laporte, Amazon is a liar and using math to support this assertion.
- [85:45]
Leo Laporte
You know, I don't know where would it get. So, yeah, I just, I don't. Copilot says Amazon has 310 million monthly active users. So 465 million Paski users is a nonsense number.
- [86:01]
Richard Campbell
Well, if it's Monday active, so you know, it's not all the users.
- [86:06]
Leo Laporte
True.
- [86:09]
Paul Thurrott
Huh. I don't know.
- [86:11]
Leo Laporte
Huh.
- [86:11]
Richard Campbell
But if they're not active, why would they set up a pass?
- [86:14]
Paul Thurrott
And at least three of those customers are paying for Amazon Alexa plus.
- [86:18]
Leo Laporte
So I am, I'm sad to say, although it's jaunty, it has a different personality. No, it is. It has different. I'm using the sassy, sassy personality, but it is hilariously, jauntily wrong.
- [86:32]
Paul Thurrott
That's funny.
- [86:34]
Leo Laporte
There's nothing like jaunty AI. Let me just say. There you go.
- [86:39]
Richard Campbell
Everybody wants jaunty AI.
- [86:42]
Leo Laporte
Let's take a pause that refreshes and then we will get to the Xbox segment. Back of the book coming up. We've got some. I think there'll be something interesting because Richard is in Belgium in Antwerp. And I imagine last time you were in Belgium, you had something interesting to tipple our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. Love these guys. Actually, I'm wearing the shirt that I got when I went out to Zero Trust World in this. In fact, Richard was with me when I bought this shirt. This was from the Houston, not Houston Kennedy Space Center. See, it's got all the badges of all the Apollos and on it. Threat Locker is amazing. We love them. Their Zero Trust platform delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of Zero Trust solutions. And with the big announcement they made at Zero Trust World, they now do not only endpoints, but networks and the cloud with Zero Trust. By extending Zero Trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, Threat Locker really is going the extra mile, ensuring devices are validated through a secure broker. That means even if an employee is successfully phished, attackers would actually have to have physical possession of the user's trusted device to go any further. That's Huge. Threat Locker works in all industries. It provides 24.7us based support. It works on Windows, of course, but also Mac and Linux environments. So everything in your and your enterprise and Threat Locker offers unprecedented protection. It's quick, it's easy, it's cost effective. In fact, that's exactly what Rob Thackeray says. He's the end user technical architect at Heathrow Airport and he said this, quote, Threat Locker was the most intuitive solution we tested. And the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us, set up a demo and work with us on weekly audit reviews was very good. It's great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that is so responsive to our requests, end quote. Thank you, Rob. That's, that's high praise and it's true. That's why Threat Lockers. Trusted by Global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver, Threat Locker consistently receives high honors and industry recognition. It's a G2 high performer and best support for enterprise. Summer 2025 peer spot ranked threat locker number one in application control. GetApp gave them their best functionality and features award in 2025. And the awards list goes on and on and on. I won't read them all. Just trust me, it's the best. And guess what? We're already gearing up, Richard. And this time, Paul, I want you to go. We're already gearing up for Zero Trust World27ZTW27, where they'll host some of the brightest cybersecurity experts. It's the seventh in a row. It was so much fun last time. Zero Trust World provides crucial education and training to support IT professionals. Along with full session access. I did a couple of the hands on hacking labs. They were fantastic. There's a great after party. I will keep my costume. I'm ready. I'm ready. You don't want to miss this exciting interactive three day event. It's happening February 17th through 19th in Orlando, Florida. So please set that date aside. I want to see out there. Visit threatlocker.com twit right now. Get your free 30 day trial. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com twit. We thank them so much for their support all year long of Windows Weekly. We appreciate it.
- [90:20]
Richard Campbell
You remember when you were picking up that shirt I got the little jumper for the grandbaby that says I need my space.
- [90:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So how'd that go?
- [90:27]
Richard Campbell
I got pictures of her in it now.
- [90:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's so cute.
- [90:30]
Richard Campbell
Straight.
- [90:30]
Leo Laporte
That's so cute. Yeah, that was the best. Kennedy Space Center. And we went to Gator World and I have a gator shirt. I don't know where I want to go next time. There is apparently a Sloth World.
- [90:43]
Paul Thurrott
Of course I'm not a big fan of the only in, like only in Florida type things, but in that case, like only in Florida, like Orlando is pretty.
- [90:54]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's definitely an interesting place. Apparently Sloth World has had a problem lately. A number of large numbers, several dozen sloths have passed away. I don't know how you know it's
- [91:05]
Paul Thurrott
the new bumblebee problem or problem or whatever.
- [91:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I was reading about it. I thought, how did we miss Sloth World? We saw capybaras at Gator World, which was great.
- [91:17]
Paul Thurrott
Awesome.
- [91:18]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if they have them there for food or. Oh God amusement. But it's still. I always wanted to see a copy part. Anyway, enough of that. Let's. Let's move on to the Xbox segment.
- [91:28]
Paul Thurrott
Mr. T. Yeah, number of things this week. If you are in, we talk about the Windows Insider program a lot, but there is also an Xbox Insider program and if you were in that, there's a new update rolling out now for insiders that has basically three new features. So one is a. A new boot time animation for the console which they had previewed on Twitter or whatever a week or so ago. There is a. They're doing like badging now. So when you have game of score milestones and the game of score is when you get achievements in games and your. The total is the game score, right. Of all those achievements, they have badges now for milestones like 10,000 achievements, I guess achievement point. Well, the gamer score points through achievements, right? Like 20,035. You can say, you know, a million, 3 million, 5 million, whatever. That's whatever. And then this just a new way to filter the game library so that too many blah, blah, blah. Who cares? Anyway, just some filtering, no big deal. I was kind of. I saw this thing, I'm like, oh cool, they're. They're racing for it. No, it's kind of small. Forza Horizon 6 is coming out soon. Unless you're on Steam in which case you could have gotten an early leaf copy and apparently it was not supposed to be leaked. It was someone, I don't know, someone figured out how to access the game early. And I wish I could remember the time frame, but I think Steam said anyone who played this game is going to be banned from Steam for 8,000 years. I think it was some stupid number like you're just never coming back.
- [93:04]
Richard Campbell
I think it's not like somebody downloading that game is like in on the scam. They saw it and they downloaded it.
- [93:09]
Leo Laporte
Come on.
- [93:10]
Paul Thurrott
I know it's crazy. But anyway, early Access launch is May 15, which is in two days. So this Friday as we record the show and then I the release, the general release I think is May. It's next week sometime. May 19th, I think. Okay. If you're a Discord fan and. Or user, I guess you would be a fan because they have Discord Nitro subscriptions. Right. And so we have many. Yeah. So Nitro is the 999amonth version, 99 bucks a year. And they just added a new Xbox related perk which is Xbox Game Pass Starter Edition. And this is the one that gives you access to over 50 games across PC and console. Actually it's the whole thing pretty much. So yeah, I mean that's cool. I mean I would personally pay for Discord. I feel like I pay for Discord every time we do the podcast because that app and that up at app updates literally every single time.
- [94:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it does, doesn't it?
- [94:13]
Paul Thurrott
Every long update. Yes, it is. Yep. They've somehow managed Electron. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so Mojang, which is the Microsoft company that owns or you know does Minecraft, they have these. I don't know if they're quarterly or every so often they have like a Minecraft Live event. They're going to do one during what's called TwitchCon Rotterdam, which is Saturday, May 30th. So they're going to announce new stuff about updates to the game, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So there's literally no information beyond that. So May 30th there will be a Minecraft announcement or series of Minecraft announcements. So we know that Microsoft's not selling many consoles, but they also don't tell us how many they're not selling. Sony and Nintendo do tell us how much they're selling and now they're telling us how much they're not selling because this most recent quarter was terrible for both of them. So Sony sold 1.5 million PlayStation 5 video game consoles in the most recent quarter that ended March 31st. Probably this is by far their smallest number of PS5 ever sold sequentially going back in time, the previous figures were 7.9 million million, 4 million, 2.5 million, 2.8 million.
- [95:30]
Richard Campbell
So they sold 7.9 million last.
- [95:33]
Paul Thurrott
It turned the holiday quarter. Yeah.
- [95:34]
Richard Campbell
Oh yeah. Which Is the prime quarter okay?
- [95:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. That's why it was so high.
- [95:38]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah. Normally this quarter, this past quarter is the slowest quarter of the year anyway, so.
- [95:44]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [95:45]
Richard Campbell
But this was a particularly year over
- [95:47]
Paul Thurrott
year, bad first party.
- [95:49]
Richard Campbell
But I'd also say hardware sales across the board. Board are off this year because.
- [95:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but it's the whole business like. Yeah, the. Yeah, right, right. For all this. Yeah. And you know, they've had to raise prices, etc. But you know the, the revenues from first party software sales are down. Their digital numbers are big, like meaning 85% of people who buy games for PlayStation do so digitally. That situation is very different on Nintendo, which we'll get to in a moment. The overall game and network services revenues, which is the part of Sony that does PlayStation were flat basically year over year. You know, like hardware revenues, 110 million yen. Last year in the same quarter, 183 million. So it's like not great. Monthly active users are good actually. So they're pretty steady and they're up pretty good from a year ago. 133 million versus 124 one year ago. So you know, the people out there are using it, I mean they're just not selling as many but they're not buying new ones.
- [96:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, this is a great year to skip it with the prices being up on all those sorts of things. So I think you see that kind of stabilizer. Nintendo sold as many they had except that I know they ran out of them over Christmas so maybe first quarter catching up.
- [97:05]
Paul Thurrott
The Nintendo one is weird to me because you know, they launched Switch 2 in I think June last year. So we don't have, you know, we don't have a full year yet. It got off to the fastest start ever for any Nintendo hardware. But I think we all kind of understood that the original Switch is by far the best. Well, not by far is the best selling Nintendo console. If you forget about the mobile stuff, it is by far the best selling. And I just, I never felt like this was going to have the legs of the OG Switch. I just don't weigh, you know, and it's kind of collapsing a little faster than expected. But, but for the reasons Richard just kind of alluded to, which is, you know, the whole component crisis stuff, all the, everything is bad. So let me see if I can come up with this. They sold 2.49 million units in the quarter ending in March. They've sold a total of just under 20 million units for their fiscal year, which also ends in March. The previous quarters were 7 million, 4.54 million and 5.82 million. And that goes backwards. So. So 7 million is the holiday quarter. It makes sense that this would be the slowest quarter of that year, but it just came out, too. So their quarter was fine financially, but they warned on the coming year, which is good. This is their only business. Right. They don't have other stuff. Sony, you know, makes washing machines or whatever they do. They have other stuff they can sort of rely on if they have to, but this is all Nintendo does. So they lowered their. They. Well, first they've raised the price, remember the Switch to. Or they're about to. I think that's about to happen. Or maybe it just happened. I don't remember it. But they've also lowered their estimates for the current fiscal year for unit sales. So previously it was about 20 million units. They were expecting. No, I'm sorry, that's not true. That's what they just sold. This year, they expect to sell 16.5 million. So they did lower their estimate, but I don't think we ever saw that estimate. I think they just said that that's what happened. They also sold another 560,000 original Switch units in the quarter, you know, down from 1.36 million. Whatever. You know, they was hovering around a million for a while. So that console has sold like over 156,000. Yes. No. Million. No.
- [99:19]
Leo Laporte
What?
- [99:19]
Paul Thurrott
156 million. Sorry, I wrote that as thousand. That's not right. That's an. You know, which is awesome. But software sales were up, you know.
- [99:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [99:29]
Richard Campbell
Like I said, you know, the markets are so. Are. Are the. The work is soft and stuff. So people are going to play their machines, but they're not going to buy them.
- [99:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So, yeah. So the two other data points are. About 55% of switch software cells are digital, up from about 54% a year ago. Yeah, I think it's low, too. But, you know, they come on these fun little card things, like. I don't know, it's kind of like a. It's kind of a thing in that market. And then Retro. Yeah. Yeah, it is, right?
- [99:56]
Richard Campbell
I mean, I want my games on vinyl.
- [99:59]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you want like a fun little carrier like you would have for CDs, but really small because these things are tiny. I don't know if it was last year or two years ago. There was like a. Like a Super Mario movie or whatever that did. Awesome. And it actually really helped him a lot, which they really needed at the time because, you know, the original Switch was winding down, but this year they have a Super Mario Galaxy movie that's out, that's sold, you know, has made 100. I'm sorry, 800 million in revenues in its first four weeks. Who watches these movies? Is wrong with you?
- [100:27]
Richard Campbell
Apparently. I mean, the great thing when you get a good kid movie is the kid wants to just keep going.
- [100:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what it is. It's why baby shark is so big. Okay, so just play it over and
- [100:38]
Paul Thurrott
back in my day, we just. Not my day, my kids day. We had Caillou, we had Dora the Explorer. We had the Teletubbies.
- [100:44]
Leo Laporte
It wasn't the same Teletubbies. Oh, my God. We had Barney the Barney.
- [100:49]
Richard Campbell
Barney.
- [100:50]
Paul Thurrott
That was before My Kids. Yeah, Barney, the time.
- [100:52]
Leo Laporte
You're so lucky.
- [100:54]
Paul Thurrott
Well, but we did have the Teletubbies. The Teletubbies is like Curious Storage, where they screw up constantly and then some adult figure. In that case, the new, new vacuum cleaner cleans up after them, and they never learn any lessons. And I'm sorry, as a parent, I have a huge problem with this. Like, I always hated this. I hated this so much. If I could take out Curious George with a sniper rifle, I would do it right now.
- [101:17]
Leo Laporte
Oh, my God, he's joking. Kids. He's making a joke. He just turns.
- [101:21]
Paul Thurrott
Is a cartoon monkey. It's fine. It's not a person. It's okay.
- [101:26]
Leo Laporte
Has no tail, by the way, despite what many believe.
- [101:29]
Paul Thurrott
Like we said, curious. So not a monkey then. Oh, no. Anyway, let's move on from that. So I, like most normal people with brains, I get excited every time this Apple suffers illegal defeat. But in this case, what happened was the US Supreme Court said that it would be not review this awesome remedy thing that's occurring in the Epic v. Apple case. So the next steps are that they will get in front of Judge. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez. Roger. Who, by the way, is the judge in Elon Musk versus Open AI.
- [102:02]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [102:02]
Paul Thurrott
She's awesome. Yeah. And determine how much Apple can charge for the services it offers through its App Store. And I'm guessing it's not going to be 30 and 15%, but we'll, you know, we'll see how. How low can we go? We're gonna find out.
- [102:15]
Richard Campbell
How did Apple get here? Honest to goodness.
- [102:18]
Paul Thurrott
Talk about by being belligerent jerks. Is that. Yep, that's how we've invented an arbitrary price. And then we defend it to, you know, like, as if it were sacrosanct or something.
- [102:28]
Leo Laporte
Now. Now it's going back to Judge Gonzalez
- [102:30]
Paul Thurrott
Rogers, who is not happy with this company, she referred an executive of the company to the attorney attorneys general for lying. Lying under oath.
- [102:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [102:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, that's Apple.
- [102:43]
Leo Laporte
I don't think she's gonna be that sympathetic.
- [102:45]
Paul Thurrott
What happens? Your iPhone stays in Apple's pockets. Oh, no, that's not the phrase. Sorry. It's. It's fine. It's fun.
- [102:54]
Leo Laporte
That's a billion hands in your pocket. Y' all
- [102:59]
Paul Thurrott
should have made a deal.
- [103:00]
Leo Laporte
All right, you know what's next? I'm so excited. The best part of the show, the back of the book, is just around the corner. Before we do that, though, I'm going to make you pay. I'm going to make you join the club. $10 a month. Now, this is a good deal. $10 a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows. It gets you special program we don't do anywhere else. Including, by the way, especially by the way. Because I don't, you know, look, I'm not a paywall fan, so we don't really paywall anything, except we've been forced to paywall the keynote speeches. Because every time we put Apple's keynote speeches on YouTube, they. They threaten us with a strike and a takedown. So we decided rather than jeopardize our YouTube account, the keynotes from now on will be club only. So there's one coming up Tuesday. That's w. No, I'm sorry, Google IO. That'll be 10am Tuesday, this coming Tuesday. And that will be only visible to the club members. Sorry, everybody else. Normally what we do is we stream everything in public. And I believe in that because I don't want to keep anybody who can't afford to join the club out in the cold. I'm not that kind of person. But we do need your support. I mean, that's what keeps us going. So we do want to reward people who join the club. So the reward is no ads, no plugs, no begging. You get ad free versions of all of our content. You get access to the club. Twit discord. Now that is fun. It's. It is nice to be in a social network where people have to pay to be there. The quality just soars because of that. And you don't get the. The bots, you don't get the spam. It's just really a high quality social network.
- [104:46]
Paul Thurrott
I love it.
- [104:48]
Leo Laporte
You get all that extra programming. Stacy's book club is coming up on Friday. Great book, by the way. I can't wait to discuss that. We've got The AI users group. All sorts of stuff happens in the club, but the most important reason is you're supporting independent podcasting not owned by a big company. Not beholden to anybody we cover. The only people we work for are you, our viewers and listeners. We appreciate your support and if you're not a member, I'd love it if you'd join Twit TV Club. Twit. Enough said. That's all. Just wanted to say that. Now let's return to Windows Weekly and Paul Thurat with his world famous.
- [105:28]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, I hate the pressure that you put me on.
- [105:31]
Leo Laporte
Actually, you did the Xbox. It's the world famous tip of the week. World famous in my world.
- [105:37]
Paul Thurrott
Two tips I One is I've been working on the Switcher series of articles since the beginning of April. Actually it's probably the end of March. So this one, it's extending into this month. It's going to be a busy month because, because we're going back, we have some travel and whatever, but I'm going to expand it beyond like OS platforms to include things like applications and services. So I wrote something up about web browsers. And by the way, part of the advice there is use a third party password manager, obviously. A couple weeks ago I mentioned Helium, which is one of the newer kind of chromium based browsers, privacy security focused. It doesn't even support like account sync of any kind. I love it. Like, I love this thing. It's almost like it's basically Brave, but even like more lightweight and with less going on in the ui. So you know, in Brave you kind of want to turn certain things off if you don't want like their wallet thing or their VPN or whatever they offer. This thing has none of that. It's just really stripped down and light and I love it. And then this is, this is so random. I have no idea why this was promoted to me on YouTube, but I was, I just went to YouTube the other day and there's something there called Cloud FM, which is described as music for thinking and building. And it's that little crab character from the probably open Cloud. But the, you know, the cloud code thing.
- [106:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's Claude. The code.
- [106:55]
Paul Thurrott
That's the little. Yeah, so he like, he, he fries an egg or whatever and he flies. He flies in space.
- [106:59]
Leo Laporte
He plays a guitar that's going too far now.
- [107:01]
Paul Thurrott
But he, but, but it's all. It's eight bit and it's cute. But the thing is it plays this kind of ambient music in the background. It kind of Reminds me, you know, like, Richard does the Net Rocks podcast with Carl Franklin, and Carl has recorded a lot of music to code by.
- [107:18]
Richard Campbell
Like, you know where you put 27 tracks of it?
- [107:21]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, like, it's grown over time and it's. It's kind of the same theme in a way. There's a lot less of it from Anthropic so far, but it will. I showed my wife.
- [107:31]
Leo Laporte
He's making green eggs and ham.
- [107:32]
Paul Thurrott
We sat there and watched this for like half an hour.
- [107:35]
Leo Laporte
I think I can play the music right. This is generated.
- [107:38]
Paul Thurrott
So. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. It's.
- [107:41]
Leo Laporte
This is music to code by. What makes music good to code by? No list lyrics? Probably.
- [107:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [107:46]
Richard Campbell
20 minute units and, you know, one of the things I've noticed with music, certain tracks that I like the most, and literally it's now in my psyche to send me into the zone. Into the. Hear it.
- [108:00]
Paul Thurrott
No. That's great. So it's actually working for you.
- [108:03]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [108:03]
Paul Thurrott
I find. I find any music to be distracting when I'm writing, especially unless I'm on a plane, oddly than I do.
- [108:12]
Leo Laporte
I was listening.
- [108:12]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know. Yeah. I can't explain that, but there's some. Really.
- [108:15]
Leo Laporte
Because you're using noise canceling headphones. You don't want to hear the jets. You don't want to hear the babies crying. So you got to have a little background.
- [108:21]
Paul Thurrott
There's the last album that. Yeah. Pink Floyd put out was all instrumental. And like, that's an. It's like. It's called like the river or something. Or the river something, something. But it's a. It's just a great. You know, it's. It's nice for that. Like in this.
- [108:36]
Leo Laporte
You know, I saw a tweet from somebody who said he's been coding for 20 years listening to fish.
- [108:41]
Paul Thurrott
Okay.
- [108:42]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [108:42]
Leo Laporte
Which would probably be. Okay. Code.
- [108:43]
Paul Thurrott
It's just all Ozzy Osbourne, you know, jam band.
- [108:46]
Leo Laporte
It's like, you know.
- [108:47]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [108:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [108:48]
Paul Thurrott
I thought it was kind of cute.
- [108:49]
Leo Laporte
This is a little soporific, a little repetitive, but I guess it's. The idea is to get your add Mind.
- [108:54]
Paul Thurrott
Right. Right.
- [108:55]
Leo Laporte
Calm down.
- [108:56]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. That might be what attached me to it. I don't know.
- [108:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [109:00]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, I already mentioned helium. Like an idiot. So two things on the effort I mentioned helium are. So helium is only on the desktop. So one of the problems is there's no mobile client. But I think you can mix and match pretty easily with that kind of thing. If you are on an Apple device, there's a mobile browser called Orion, which is similar, although they have sync and so forth. And Orion is another one that offers kind of a nice experience, but on mobile, but only on the Apple side. So far. I had forgotten about this app. I. Maybe I'm wrong. I feel like I use this on Windows Phone or, you know, I think I did like back in the day or. But Snapseed, which was made by an individual, it's a small company or whatever, originally for the iPad. So the year the iPad came out, it won the award for like best iPad app. The first year they did it, then it went to iPhone very quickly. Then it went to Android and then Google bought them and they don't release major milestones all that often. 3.0 came out last summer, I think, but only on the iPhone. But now 4.0 is out and it's more full featured on Android this time than it is on iOS. But I've been looking at camera apps and also photo editing apps on mobile. This one is. This is. This is really impressive. Like, I've not looked at this in so many years. It's astonishing, like, how many tools and fixes and things there are in this app. It's really, really good. It's worth looking at if you've never heard of it or haven't thought about it in years. Like me, I know it used to be on Windows. I feel. I swear to God, I use this on a phone, but it was a million years ago. I don't remember. Anyway, it's worth checking out. It's free and it's astonishingly powerful. Like, it's really, really good.
- [110:43]
Leo Laporte
You're working me. You're working me. I know, I know.
- [110:46]
Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry. Yeah. Also, just. Leo, since we're talking, please install a new web browser every freaking week.
- [110:53]
Leo Laporte
My God.
- [110:54]
Paul Thurrott
I know, I'm sorry. Yes.
- [110:57]
Leo Laporte
All right. Helium is good. I did. I installed it some time ago.
- [111:01]
Paul Thurrott
It's a good one.
- [111:02]
Leo Laporte
It's good. I'm.
- [111:03]
Paul Thurrott
I would love to see.
- [111:04]
Leo Laporte
I feel like everybody needs a Chromium based browser as at least your second. I use Zen, which is a Firefox. I really love it. But everybody needs a Chromium browser in the back pocket just in case. And Helium's probably.
- [111:18]
Paul Thurrott
If you want to.
- [111:19]
Leo Laporte
I mean.
- [111:19]
Paul Thurrott
And. Oh, and I should say so there's a site, you know, cover my tracks or cover your tracks, which is the. The ef.
- [111:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. From eff.
- [111:26]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [111:26]
Paul Thurrott
This is the only browser I've ever seen out of the box where it comes up green for everything. Like it. Even. Even the Fingerprinting thing comes up. I've never seen that before.
- [111:34]
Leo Laporte
Like, yeah, you block origin built in, I think.
- [111:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Oh, right. Actually. So there's the caveat, I guess. Yeah. But it works really well.
- [111:43]
Leo Laporte
Well, there you go. And if you only use it as a secondary browser, the sync isn't important because you're not really bookmarkings. I mean, Zen has all my very elaborate bookmarks and tabs and workspaces and all that stuff.
- [111:56]
Paul Thurrott
There's an astonishing photo that Joe Esposito has posted to the Discord.
- [112:00]
Leo Laporte
I have been, unfortunately, missing. There have been so many good photos coming over the transom here, and I've been missing a lot of them.
- [112:08]
Paul Thurrott
This one. This might be my new profile photo.
- [112:13]
Leo Laporte
This will be a new segment on the show where we show what's going on in the Discord because we have a lot of AI guys.
- [112:19]
Paul Thurrott
This is a good one.
- [112:20]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. There you are sniping Curious George.
- [112:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [112:25]
Leo Laporte
You look a little worried, like you might.
- [112:27]
Paul Thurrott
I'm like, I want to get it right. I'm like, you can thank. You can thank me later, world.
- [112:31]
Leo Laporte
Oh, my God. With his 50 millimeter cannon. Let's see some other good ones. If you go back, I know they've been putting a lot of good stuff up here, and I haven't really been
- [112:41]
Paul Thurrott
showing my show should. This spectacular.
- [112:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I really should, because these guys. This is. This is why I love. Oh, this is a fun one. When during the club twit thing, I'm.
- [112:52]
Paul Thurrott
I'm a little disturbed that you're promoting a trash 80 there, but it is.
- [112:56]
Leo Laporte
This is an old Radio Shack ad. Joe Esposito is a Photoshop wiz, not an AI guy. So he takes original ads and then puts our own, you know, content in there. It's pretty good. He's really good, I have to say. There we are as Teletubbies.
- [113:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [113:10]
Leo Laporte
That's always.
- [113:12]
Paul Thurrott
And then they run around in circles.
- [113:14]
Leo Laporte
You know, which one of these is the girl Teletubby? I don't remember.
- [113:16]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, boy.
- [113:18]
Richard Campbell
I think they're all.
- [113:20]
Leo Laporte
Are they gendered?
- [113:22]
Paul Thurrott
I think. Yeah.
- [113:24]
Leo Laporte
Okay, there's Barney the purple dinosaur. Okay, here's Mario. I think I've got.
- [113:30]
Paul Thurrott
People need to keep themselves entertained while they're watching this.
- [113:34]
Leo Laporte
Here we are with the sloth visiting. Actually, they've closed Sloth World, I'm very sad to say, because of. Now 55 sloths have died in Sloth World, including Dumpling, the much beloved Dumpling. So I think that there is something. Here we are in our Space outfits. Thank you, Darren. Okey. One of these will end up being the thumbnail for the show. You know that, right?
- [114:05]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [114:06]
Leo Laporte
Here's a sad story of Dumpling, the 55th sloth world death which now has
- [114:11]
Paul Thurrott
caused sloth launching a Florida state investigation into the death of Dumpling.
- [114:18]
Richard Campbell
How do you. Can't get much more Florida than that.
- [114:20]
Leo Laporte
Really.
- [114:21]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly.
- [114:22]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry if your kids are watching this. That's probably pretty upsetting.
- [114:25]
Paul Thurrott
Sorry about Dumpling, guys.
- [114:27]
Leo Laporte
Now, ladies and gentlemen, Richard takes over. An adult finally in that room.
- [114:32]
Paul Thurrott
It had to happen eventually. Unlike with the Teletubbies.
- [114:37]
Richard Campbell
They're all Teletubbies in the end.
- [114:39]
Leo Laporte
What's coming up on Run as published
- [114:42]
Richard Campbell
today was my conversation with Vaishnavi gudur about production LLMs. Now what do you figure is the largest LLM application like that uses that? It has LLMs embedded in it runs every day. I think it's teams because every teams call, does transcripts, summaries, multiple languages. And Vaishnavi is one of the ladies that operates that system and just talked about what it means to manage 500 million teams calls. Wow. And what that. What it takes to scale systems, to run those kinds of language models on all those things and also cover all the rules of the countries, all the regulatory bodies for that kind of data transcription. Like it's a huge problem and just it's one of those things where you come up the other side of it going a, I'm glad I don't have that job and B what you're doing is easier than what they're doing.
- [115:45]
Leo Laporte
True, true.
- [115:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [115:47]
Richard Campbell
Anyway, it's a great opportunity to talk to just an extraordinarily brilliant lady who just cranking on a hard problem with a great team.
- [115:56]
Leo Laporte
Run as radio episode 1036. You get it@runnersradio.com and now I'm wondering, do you have something from Belgium?
- [116:07]
Richard Campbell
I went shopping in Belgium because you know. And it's Belgium. You know about Belgium. Nobody likes Belgium.
- [116:15]
Leo Laporte
Beer. They're famous for beer.
- [116:17]
Paul Thurrott
Mannequin piss.
- [116:20]
Richard Campbell
Benelux, right? Yes. Part of the low country.
- [116:24]
Leo Laporte
You put the bar in Benelux, you
- [116:26]
Richard Campbell
put the butt Benelux, you're Belgium.
- [116:31]
Paul Thurrott
What's that? The beer with the pink and elephant is from there.
- [116:36]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I'm talking about that later because it falls into the story. Yeah. The. The tremis. So Belgium is Flanders in the north, which is the Dutch speaking spot, although they are their own variant called Flemish or Belgian Dutch. The south part is Wallonia which is much more the French speaking Part. And then there's of course there's Brussels, which is actually in Flanders, the Dutch part, but they mostly speak French.
- [117:00]
Leo Laporte
There is Antwerp in the Flemish part. Where. What is Antwerp?
- [117:03]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's for, yeah, very much up against the Dutch border here. So I actually flew into Amsterdam, took the train down, only takes about an hour. It's a, it's a great ride. Easier than flying into the Brussels airport. I swear. This is also the country that just doesn't have government sometime. You know, in 2010 their election was so bro. Their election had so many parties involved they couldn't get a coalition together to actually make one for 541 days.
- [117:29]
Leo Laporte
What?
- [117:29]
Richard Campbell
Which seems like a lot, except that in 2018 the same thing happened again. They didn't actually have a government for 652 days.
- [117:36]
Leo Laporte
What?
- [117:37]
Richard Campbell
And you know what happened in that time? Nothing. They were fine.
- [117:42]
Leo Laporte
That tells you something.
- [117:43]
Richard Campbell
Belgium. Yeah, they're kind of chill. At one point during that, that long break they talked about actually splitting the country up. Flanders going to the Netherlands and Wallonia going to France. Like let's not be a country anymore. But of course Brussels make that all impossible. This is the headquarters for NATO. Since 1967, this is the de facto capital of the EU. Normally there isn't a capital of the EU, but there are some major centers and the one in Brussels is huge. And like you said Leo, it's all about the beer. The trappist, the lambics, the whit beers, the saisons, the strong ales like the Christmas beers. So many goods.
- [118:21]
Leo Laporte
So if you're so good, if you're
- [118:22]
Richard Campbell
going to talk about a whiskey in Belgium, it only makes sense that it's a 15 year old distillery attached to a 500 year old brewery. But maybe, maybe we should go to the start. We're talking about the low country lands here, this area that they now call Belgium. And there's evidence of human habitation going back a hundred thousand years. So that's mostly Neanderthal. They even in the Neolithic period, this is the western edge of what they called the LBK or the Linear Pottery culture, so named because their, their pottery has a very distinctive style with bands on it. That was about 7,000 years ago. So 5,000 BC they were doing agriculture here fairly early on. One of the very first agricultural societies anywhere that actually collapses after a thousand years. And literally for 2,000 years there's no evidence of farming in this area whatsoever. We don't see really permanent farming culture around here until about the end of the Bronze Age 1750 or so the Celts show up in this part of the world about 500 BC. They were the big traders, of course, so they're trading into the Mediterranean and so forth. And Julius Caesar himself arrives in this area, where he refers to them as the Belgian during the Gallic Wars. And it is Cometare de Bello Galachio. He describes these residents as a fierce confederation of tribes that of course, they've won over between the Seine and the Rhine rivers. And this area remains part of the Roman Empire and subsequently the Holy Roman Empire, until the collapse of the Western Empire in 500 AD. So 500 years, this was Gallia, this was the Roman part of the world. As the Western Empire collapses, we get the Merovingian dynasty, followed by. By the Carolinian dynasty. They actually fight back and forth and have control in different times. Around 800 AD, you get Charlemagne in the area. And then after his death in 1840, 814, there's a conflict for the better part of another hundred years until the Franks dominate. The French sort of take control of that, and that largely breaks down into a series of feudal states for the 11th and 12th centuries. And so by the 1200s, this area is basically tested between the French and the English, going back and forth repeatedly, while trade goes on through the Hanseatic lead. Which leads us to the story of this particular whiskey which is actually made. It's the Golden Carolus. This particular one's the Port Oak. And this is from Mechlin. It's just south of here, outside of Antwerp, particularly in the Groot Bengal. So Mechlin is a small town, or not that small anymore, but back then, and there were these areas, these colonial areas, big ideas. And this is the grand one. This was a religious, a lay, religious women's community. So it didn't want to be nuns, but they did have a strong Christian influence. And the community was founded in 1232. So this is old doctrine, old culture. And this particular one is seven and a half acres, over 100 buildings, now considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And this group of women were running a hospital, but they also brewed beer as part of their charitable mission. And in 1471, Duke Charles the Bold granted that group a tax exemption for their beer. It's always about taxes in the end. And they had operated continuously in that form for the next 400 years. It's not until 1872 that the van Breedem family were distillers in Blasfeld, further to the east. There acquire the brewery because they want the tax benefits. And of Course they focus on ales because a lot of Belgian beer is ale based. And by 1904 the breweries known as the Het Anker or the Anchor as it was such a important part of the city's past. And it's always been there, always been part of the process. And so the name Golden Carolus actually comes in 1960 after a flagship beer. Remember this is a brewery this whole time. And they Golden Carolus actually mentions is about the golden coins that are emitted during the reign of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. And Charles the Act. The man himself had spent his formative years in Mechlin and so was effectively the brewery's patron Saint. So by 2010, so again they've been making beer all along. Van breed them in the bay and the Le Clef families finally build a distillery they call Distillery de Mulenberg on the back on in blaspheld in their 17th century farmstead which is had once hosted the family's Geneva distillery. This part of the world made a very an early variant of gin called Y never still aged with juniper and so forth. But that had long shut down. But they already had the space so that's what they used. It's a common product. They moved that distillery to Mechlin in 2024, so very recent. And Charles Leclef, which is the current managing director, represents the fifth generation of the Van Breeden Le Clef families that have run the brewery and now also the distillery. But it turns out he's the last. He has no family successor and so he's actually at the end of 2024, sold the entire facility to the bourgeois huge out of Mel, which also is a 300 year old brewery, but never got into distilling. But they're famous for a beer called Delirium Tremens, which is the, you know, name for severe alcohol withdrawal. It's a strong blonde ale.
- [123:59]
Leo Laporte
It's a good beer drinks.
- [124:01]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's been made a great label too. Well, because they call it Delirium Tremens, it actually upset a lot of people. It was banned in the US for a while there. So they changed the name but they put the pink elephant on it and that's where you get the pink elephant from. So this is a very modern distillery and say, you know, built a modern way. They actually bought stills from Forsyth of Scotland. It was the first in Belgium because whiskey culture is not. Has not been around here for very long. It's not a big thing. But when you got a 500-year-old brewery and you're going to make whiskey. You start with beer. So they literally use the same process that they make the Golden Carolus triple, which is a 9% blonde, Alex. And at the point at where you would add hops to it and it becomes the ale, now they actually diverted into distilling, which has some interesting consequences. And I want you to notice this bottle is mostly empty because I was hanging around with a group of miscreants last night and we just had to taste it.
- [125:02]
Leo Laporte
Now who's got delirium tremens? Oh, boy.
- [125:05]
Richard Campbell
I call it being at work, but okay. But otherwise the stuff still is a classic, modern still. So stainless steel, mash tons, ladder turns. They do the double distillation in copper pots. They of course use ex bourbon barrels for their primary aging. And then they this, in this case of this one, which is the Port Oak, they do their finish in Portuguese port wine casks. It's warehoused in Mechlin, which has got a good climate for this. Relatively cool winters, mild summers, steady humidity. So they actually have a very slow Angel's loss. They typically distill up to 68. They barrel at 63.5. This is bottled at 46, I think I wrote down here, but it actually says 48, so I probably misread it. This is the 48. And this is only a 500ml bottle. It's a small bottle. There aren't a lot of rules for Belgian whiskey because it is a relatively new thing. They've only been really making it from the 2000s and so they're pretty relaxed. They don't care about what grain you use, although admittedly this is all barley because is they do make it from beer and. Oh no, I had to pour it all into my glass. That's so sad.
- [126:10]
Leo Laporte
It's all gone.
- [126:12]
Richard Campbell
It's not all gone. It went to a better place. Their original Head Anchor whiskey was a single malt and it immediately won best Belgian single malt. Which is not much of an achievement when there's only two, but okay. This Port Oak edition is a much newer version. Now this beer is of course, because it's a port cask, it's got a lot of color in it, right? That's just cheating because you've got the board, it's gentle nose. For a 48, it should be more fiery. It's just not. And that's typical of, you know, Belgian beer is 8, 9, 10% and you don't notice it till you drink too many of them.
- [126:49]
Leo Laporte
And they come in nice big bottles just so you can come in nice big bottles.
- [126:53]
Richard Campbell
Here's what's really cool about this whiskey. It's got a beer note to it. It's kind of beery. It's got that sort of sudsy feel at the back of your throat. I mean, it's still heat going down. Like I'm definitely drinking whiskey. There's no ways about it. But the same way when you take a big slug of ale, even after you swallowed, you've got sort of a juiciness in your mouth. It's like the beer suds, it's in there. And I figured out why. It's because they're using the ale yeasts, the normal yeast that they make the triple from the usual distillers yeast, which is also an ale style yeast, right? Like there's ale yeast and there's lager yeast. The lager yeast are bottom fermenting and they're slow. They're for preserving beer, for making lagers. Ale yeasts are fast, they run hot, they, they cook off quickly, short duration and so forth. But distiller's yeast, the type that the Scottish use, are very neutral. They don't have a lot of flavors in it. But man, this is Belgium and Belgium takes their beer really seriously. So this is a bright, flavorful yeast that's in that this whiskey was made from. And you can tell, you can tell immediately. I swear to you, if you put Belgian whiskeys and there's two that do this, that use the ale yeast. There's also one called Belgian Owl which we'll save for next year because I'm probably going to be back, I'm telling you, you'd know right away. There's something so distinct about this and it makes me laugh because there's so many countries that are trying to make whiskey that you can't distinguish for Scottish whiskey, right? We've tried them all, we go to all kinds of places but all of a sudden like, wait, this is Belgian whiskey. And you know right away, because the Belgians aren't afraid of serious yeast. And that's what they've done here. And it's made something super special. Now I picked up this bottle at Husverloo, which is just down the road here. Guys were very nice, easy for me to work with, cost me €51. It's about 60 USD and admittedly that is only a 500 mil bottle. So if you're going to balance that number out for tickle 750, we're talking about about a $90 bottle of whiskey and unfortunately not sold in the US. You can get Golden Carolus beer in the US. They've never exported the whiskey.
- [129:09]
Leo Laporte
Is that because they don't make enough?
- [129:11]
Richard Campbell
I think that's part of it. I think the licensing is complicated. I think this is still a relatively new product and it's just changed hands. So the new guys who, who don't have a distillery at all, they're still going to figure this out. It'll be interesting to see what happens going forward on this.
- [129:26]
Leo Laporte
But I'm a fan of port barrels. I really love port.
- [129:29]
Richard Campbell
Port aging is great. And they're regular single malt. This won multiple awards and it's in. And by all means, people say great things about it. But I'm telling you, the secret of the Belgian whiskey is that ale yeast, that's made it just a thing that you would know immediately that it's Belgian and that's, I mean, good on Belgium, you know, they've came up with a way to make their whiskey theirs and I'm delighted. Delighted.
- [129:56]
Leo Laporte
Isn't that nice?
- [129:58]
Richard Campbell
And now it's, you know, 10 o' clock at night here, so I don't feel bad having a drink or two.
- [130:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I mean, by the way, Richard will take one for the team no matter what time of the day or night. Sometimes 5am, 6 in the morning. He doesn't, you know, he's. He's that kind of guy. He's very selfless.
- [130:15]
Paul Thurrott
It's not even day drinking. It's like early morning drinking.
- [130:19]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I, I usually take a very small sip early in the day.
- [130:23]
Leo Laporte
That's probably why.
- [130:24]
Richard Campbell
No, this is the end of my day, so enjoy.
- [130:28]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, that's the end of it.
- [130:29]
Richard Campbell
I'm delighted to find this whiskey just very.
- [130:32]
Leo Laporte
I bet it's really good. I'm. I can taste it.
- [130:34]
Richard Campbell
Oh, you don't get surprised very often.
- [130:36]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [130:37]
Richard Campbell
Genuinely. And then sort of unravel the whole plan and go, okay, I get what you've done here and I'm here for it.
- [130:43]
Paul Thurrott
Cool.
- [130:43]
Leo Laporte
Very nice. Very nice. Richard Campbell, besides being our whiskey expert, also does a couple of really interesting podcasts run as radio and with Carl franklin.net rocks. If you're a net fan, I'm sure you know about that. That's the net podcast. Both of them are@runasradio.com Paul Thurat has a very famous website called thorat.com. it's coincidental he has no relation to Thurat, but. No, he does.
- [131:14]
Paul Thurrott
It's his. I mean, I.
- [131:17]
Leo Laporte
It's eponymous As a matter of fact, T H U double r o double good dot com. His books are@leanpub.com although I'll give you a hint. You can get them for free. Windows Everywhere. The Field guide to Windows 11, and of course, the new D and Shitify Windows. If you become a premium member@therot.com so it's well, well worth your money. I'm a proud premium member. And I guess Paul's heading back to Pennsylvania tomorrow. Wow.
- [131:49]
Paul Thurrott
Friday.
- [131:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, Friday for a couple of months. Richard, where are you headed next?
- [131:55]
Richard Campbell
Berlin.
- [131:57]
Paul Thurrott
Ah, that I am jealous of.
- [131:59]
Leo Laporte
I'm so jealous. So many great places. Yeah.
- [132:03]
Richard Campbell
And I'm really looking forward to it. The Germans make some interesting whiskeys too, so I'll be doing some searching on Monday.
- [132:09]
Leo Laporte
Are you flying or training?
- [132:11]
Richard Campbell
I'm gonna fly. I'm taking the train tomorrow up to Alkamar to spend a few days with a buddy of mine and then Sunday, fly to Berlin and home on.
- [132:18]
Leo Laporte
I just love the trains in Europe. It's so easy to get around. It's so great. So great. Well, we will be back. We do the show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you're in the club. Course in the club. Twit, Discord. But if you're not in the club, you can still watch on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. We want to be wherever you are so that you can listen and watch live. And if you're in any of those places and you're chatting, I see your chat and I appreciate it. We love having you in the chat after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at TWiT TV WW. That's our website and we have audio and video there, so you could take your pick. Everybody seems to be liking video more and more these days. I still think audio is a dominant podcast medium, but. Yeah, but video's up and coming. I hear this YouTube things.
- [133:15]
Richard Campbell
It might.
- [133:15]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [133:16]
Richard Campbell
It might catch on.
- [133:16]
Leo Laporte
I don't catch on. You never know.
- [133:19]
Paul Thurrott
We'll see.
- [133:19]
Leo Laporte
You never know. We are on YouTube. We have a Windows Weekly channel there. The nice thing about that, besides making it easy to watch, is you can share clips from it. You know, you can actually jump to a part of the video and share it with somebody. And Everybody can watch YouTube. So that's kind of a good way to tell people about the show. We appreciate it when you do that. But for somebody who watches every week or listens every week, probably the best way to get it is. Subscribe now. If you're a Club Twit member, you'll have a unique URL just for you. That's the ad free version. Everybody else put the, you know, just search. Go to your favorite podcast client and search for Windows Weekly. You'll see it right there. You have a choice of audio or video or both. Actually, if you search for Tweet, you'll find that and all the other shows, something like 15 other shows that we do, all of which are subscribable. If you want to comment on this show, club members, of course, can do that in the Discord. There's a kind of mini forum for all the shows in the Discord. But everybody, it's open to the public, can go to our forums@twit.community I don't mention them enough and I, I think it's a great way and it's the only really way that you can directly comment on the shows. I read those comments and we appreciate those, positive and negative. You can also participate in our Mastodon instance if you're a fan of the Fediverse. That's at Twit Social. Both of those are open to Twit listeners. So when you sign up, you won't get, you know, I have to approve it because there's a lot of spam and bots out there. And I finally figured out, I saw
- [134:48]
Paul Thurrott
your post about this.
- [134:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I finally figured out how that happened. So there is a organization called IFTAS that, that looks for disinformation on social networks. They sent me notifications a couple of days ago that there were like a dozen Russian bot accounts on Twitt Social. And I thought, well, I have to approve all accounts. I can't. Couldn't figure out how they got in. And then I looked at their application and they were invited by somebody. So that was a little loophole where you could invite somebody to join.
- [135:19]
Paul Thurrott
Okay.
- [135:20]
Leo Laporte
And then I wouldn't get.
- [135:22]
Paul Thurrott
Sorry about the Russian bot thing. I, you know, I'm not really good at social.
- [135:25]
Leo Laporte
Don't invite Russian Bot. Well, I turned off. So that ain't going to happen anymore. You will have to. You can't get in via invitation. You just go, I'm inviting you Twit Social. All you have to do is say, I listen to Windows Weekly or any, you know, just as mentioned before, the
- [135:41]
Paul Thurrott
twats are like vampires. They need to be invited in. And then they can get in by
- [135:46]
Leo Laporte
Waterloo, says, I only invited him for the free vodka. They were nasty too. I mean, the stuff they were posting, it wasn't nasty.
- [135:55]
Paul Thurrott
It was.
- [135:55]
Leo Laporte
It was disinformation. It was real propaganda. It was actually kind of interesting. And I thank you, Iftas, for catching them. And I think I've purged them all. At least I've turned off the invite capability. It was a. Julie invited them all. Thank you. Julie was also.
- [136:12]
Paul Thurrott
Julie was the.
- [136:13]
Leo Laporte
Oh, Julie was a disinformation bot as well. So somehow she got in. I must have overlooked it.
- [136:19]
Paul Thurrott
Well, people sometimes, you know, they can masquerade as a person and they lurk around for a little while, everything's fine,
- [136:24]
Leo Laporte
and then all you have to do is say, I listen to twit. I'm not, like, vetting everybody.
- [136:28]
Paul Thurrott
But you're not doing a background check on every single person.
- [136:31]
Leo Laporte
But most spam bots don't. Even though it says when you sign up, why do you want to join? They don't ever enter anything in that field. All we'd have to say is, I like twit, and then be in.
- [136:41]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [136:42]
Leo Laporte
So.
- [136:42]
Paul Thurrott
Well, now that you give them the recipe for getting in.
- [136:45]
Leo Laporte
Well, I don't think the bots listen to Windows either.
- [136:48]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [136:49]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, I'm hoping. But we would love having you in the Discourse, the Discord if you're a club member, the Discourse if you're not. That's a twit dot community. And the Mastodon at Twitter social, we, you know, we, we, we pay for them. I moderate them, I keep an eye on them, and it's, you know, I keep forgetting to mention them, so we'd love to have you in there. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Have a great week. Safe travels. We'll see you all right back here next Wednesday for Windows Week.
- [137:17]
Paul Thurrott
Bye, Sam.