 Welcome to the WAN show! The first WAN show of 2018 and the last WAN show. The last WAN show of this week. Before CES. There we go. I forgot what was important. CES is going to happen soon! Yeah, that's, that's, I'm going to blame my mind scattering on that. So who's all going? Because this is your first year. It's my first year. It's going to be Alex's first year, Alex the Greatish. It's going to be Jake's first time away from home. Yes, away from the nest. His mom's driving him to the airport, but after that he's a free man. In Vegas, 18. I'm going to give her a wink from the parking lot there. Oh yeah. A knowing smile. Oh wow. And so, so you, Alex, Jake, Max. And then I think that's everyone who hasn't been. I'm not sure if Pella was there last year or not. He's been around. There's going to be a pack of us though. Hey Brandon. Look out. Was Pella at CES last year? Yes. Okay. So it's all just writers who weren't there last year. And Max. Cool. He was almost here. I almost jumped in front of the camera. All right. You're fine. So that's what's going on with CES. That's going to be next week. Expect a huge torrent of videos to be hitting YouTube and Floatplane. It's going to be insane. Tons of stuff coming. Excited and stressed. You should be. Already. It's a pretty insane experience. I have performance anxiety. On the one hand, I'm so stoked because as a kid I subscribed to Xbox Magazine and they were always talking about going to E3. And I was like, oh, that's so amazing. It's totally different. Sure. But I never thought that I'd go to any giant conference like that and see all this cutting edge stuff face up. CES is more insanity in terms of like. That suits me. The people on the floor where you need to go. So E3 is nicely contained in one building and they're like super, way more hardcore or at least they were. They've loosened it up a little bit. But who could go? So there wasn't a ton of people on the floor and it's all in one building. This is. Well, in the earlier days, like in the early 2000s, it was less exclusive. Yes. And then they tightened it up. You should grow your beard longer. You have so much more wisdom than I do and our beards are the same length. This doesn't make any sense. But yeah, CES is going to be insane. I'll be at CES with a mustache. No wisdom. First timer. You're taking all that off? No, no. I won't. I was like, I don't know. Either way, what we're going to talk about this week is a lot of Intel stuff, a lot of ARM stuff, a lot of AMD stuff. As you guys know, CPUs right now are in kind of a terrible spot with Meltdown and Spectre both going around rampaging things. We're going to talk about what different companies are doing to deal with this, how it's being dealt with, how it might affect you, how it's affecting other companies, different responses that are happening due to it, all that kind of stuff. We're going to talk about all that kind of stuff. And there's a bunch of other interesting things as well, like some stuff to do with Spotify. And Luke's super secret, New Year's resolution. Roll the intro for dramatic effect. Yes. I made that last bit up. You got a few minutes to think of something. I don't know. I didn't make it. To go to the gym just as much as I can. Eat about as much sugar as I usually do. Yay, sponsors. Thank you for making this show viable. Moving back. Okay, let's get into it. I'm going to post an Ars Technica thread. It was a post, an article. Article, there we go. We'll go with that. It's posted by Peter Bright. It's a very good article. Thank you, Peter Bright, for making a very nice, concise package. This is everything that's going on. It's way too long. Most people aren't going to read it. Grab a coffee and a donut to go through it kind of article. There's a lot of information. This whole story is like an onion with layers. So we're going to take you through the entire story of how these vulnerabilities were discovered and what the response from the parties involved was and kind of all the insanity that has ensued and is still ensuing today. Yes. So I'm going to jump slightly forward and explain what they are. And then we'll jump back to the start and explain how it was founded and all that kind of stuff. Okay. Jump around a little bit. It's going to be crazy tangent. So I'm going to steal some of this from Ars Technica. Again, thank you very much, Peter Bright. So there's two main vulnerabilities. And they're kind of related? They are kind of related. They source from the same type of area. So jumping to the Ars article, modern processors perform speculative execution. That's where a lot of this is based on. That is where a processor will assume what needs to be done next and do that thing, do those calculations. And then if it is wrong and that isn't what's happening next, that is fine. It doesn't matter. It ditches all that code. No big deal. If it's right, then hey, it's already done it and it's able to execute that thing faster. This is a great thing. It makes things run a lot faster. It's not a big deal that it's running some code and coming up with some answers and then ditching those answers because it's making a lot of other things faster when it does guess correctly. It's pretty much only upside. Yeah. This is a property of modern CPUs. That would be a reason why, spoiler alert, these vulnerabilities don't really have as much of an impact on older, much older chips. Yeah. So, specter and meltdown that we're going to be talking about today, it perturbs the processor state in detectable ways, which is bad. That essentially, when you break that down, means that these vulnerabilities can watch even though it doesn't have access to these code paths, these speculative execution code paths, it can figure out what they're doing, which is bad because it gives them more information. And it could result in more things down the line. Meltdown inspector is what we know of right now. So again, to break down what meltdown inspector are, meltdown, it's applicable to every Intel chip made for many years. I don't think we know necessarily right now. Actually, there is a list. There is a list. Yeah. We should show the list. I don't entirely know if the list is... You don't believe my list? Oh. We didn't do screen sharing. We have an HDMI right here. They're like the classic meme of Wanshow, which is it's late, screen sharing is never set up. We're not prepared. And audio doesn't work. Yes, except what screen is that? What? That's not up on either. That's awesome. Hold on. Anyways, there is a list. I can post it in the Twitch chat so you guys can check it out yourselves. Suffice to say, it's basically every Intel chip for the last 15 years. Yeah. Kind of a big deal. It's going to affect different chips in different ways, which is another interesting part. Newer chips have certain standards which will actually help them deal with this a little bit better than certain older chips. It also affects different programs differently. So certain programs are going to get hit by this really heavily. Microsoft has found... We'll go into that more later. But Microsoft has found that certain antiviruses have been using things in undocumented ways that utilize this type of stuff. So when they try to turn it off, again, we're going to get into that more later. I'm trying to be vague because we'll go more deeply into that later. It causes problems for the antivirus programs, which is a nightmare. But anyways, it's all a whole mess. But Meltdown... That was basically a verbal table of contents. Thank you. Meltdown... Chapter one....applicable to every Intel chip for many years listed in the Twitch chat and will be in the dock if you access the forum. So if you're watching this on YouTube or you're listening to this on SoundCloud, which a few people do, it does actually happen. Some people do listen to this on SoundCloud. You can go into the description and there will be a forum link. If you go to that, that'll show the dock. And in the dock, there will be a link with all capital letters that says list of affected Intel CPUs. Anyways, moving on. Every Intel chip for many years, along with certain high performance ARM designs, only high performance ARM designs, this flaw depends on the way that operating systems share memory between user programs and the kernel. And the solution right now carries some performance penalty. In certain cases, really brutal ones. I believe the highest reported that I've seen is about 30%. Yeah, but I think that's more anonymous. I think it's usually, especially if I have a newer CPU, it's about 5%. Yeah. But very rarely that bad. It's also only certain processes and programs that are going to get affected by it. And it's also less as impactful if you have newer chips. And it's going to depend on what you're doing, too. I've heard in gaming it can result in like three frames per second. Yeah. But it really is going to depend. But the answer to this is to put an end to that sharing of memory between user programs and the kernel, which is why there's that performance penalty. And then Spectre, it's applicable to chips from Intel, AMD, and ARM. This is where some of the confusion came in that we're going to talk about soon, where AMD didn't think they were susceptible to anything. And then now it's just Intel's susceptible to more stuff, and everyone's susceptible to some things. And each company is trying to minimize the optics. Yeah. Yeah. And then they said this is a near zero chance of affecting us, and Intel doesn't want their stock to drop. So they're saying, yes, it does affect you. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of politics involved as well. There's a huge amount of politics in this. We'll get into that a little bit more in the future. Yeah. It even says Intel, AMD, ARM, and probably every other processor on the market that offers speculative execution, which is like all of them. It's also more subtle. It encompasses a trick testing array bounds to read memory within single processes, which can be used to attack the integrity of virtual machines and sandboxes, which is rough. That's a big deal for the cloud. Yeah. And cross-process attacks using processors' branch predictors, which is the thing that I was mentioning earlier, where it can take little bits of resulting information to figure out what it was actually doing. Fixes for some aspects of Spectre appear to have been developed already, but protecting against the whole range of fixes will require modification or at least recompilation of at-risk programs. And that is also a very rough part, because that brings way more players into the space, because now you're talking about programs too. So do you think it's fair to say that the only true fix is new chip architecture? No. One it depends on what we're talking about. Unfortunately, the sketchy one that requires the most amount of tinkery level fixing for the most amount of people is Spectre, which affects everybody. Everybody that has speculative processing. So that's really annoying. But you can, on a single system, know that you're OK if you go through everything. Make sure everything has been modified or recompiled that is affected by this. Make sure your OS level is happy. All that kind of stuff. Turn on Windows updates, guys. At least. Yeah. It's kind of a nightmare. So how did this first get discovered? You want to jump us there? I thought I was going to be an interviewer. But I can clarify some things, because you know. OK. So the way this was discovered was through Google Project Zero. Project Zero is one of those little Google subsidiaries that has a specific task. Their task is to find what are called zero-day bugs or vulnerabilities. That's where the zero from Project Zero comes from. That's right. So basically, you're finding a bug as soon as you can, as fast as you can, and fixing it as soon as it's found. So the way this works is there are bug bounties, a certain amount of money put up if bugs are found. So all these freelancers, Joe Schmoes, hackers, white hats around the world, are actively searching for bugs among the suite of software and hardware that is on Project Zero's list. So a company can say, we're on your list. We want your freelancers to find bugs for us. So a person or a team found this vulnerability, I believe in the summertime, actually. It's been a bit. People have been working on this for a little while. And they notified Intel at the time. But it's only just become known to the public this week. One quick thing, someone in the chat was like, idiot, this doesn't affect iPhones. Apple has already issued, Apple has updated both iOS and Mac OS to use dual-page table mappings. I believe specifically for Spectre. Yeah. So it does affect it. The thing is, it's such a low level vulnerability that if Apple is going to patch it, they're doing it at a higher level. So they're only going to be able to defend from certain aspects of it. Yeah. Well, and there's some nice stuff. Like we're jumping around all over the place. I know it's going to be a little bit hard to follow. I would highly recommend checking out the Wanshow doc on the forum for this, reading a few of the different actual articles that have been properly posted. We're trying to talk live. The ours article is really good. But also with something like this, you should cross-reference information just to make sure you're getting everything good. So if this is affecting you or you're really interested in this, I would definitely recommend diving into it. But people like Amazon with S2 instances are pushing updates of their own, which is like handling everything on their side, which is really nice. But that's not the case in all situations. But sorry. Continue. Well, you continue. So what happened after that? They found it. Moving after that. The universities, they made a nice white paper about it. Yeah. So universities from America. I remember it because it's three A countries, America, Austria, and Australia. Oh no, it did this thing. Randomly when we're doing the Wanshow, I get signed out of my Google account and I have to it's okay. I don't actually need it this second. I'll get signed in while I'm talking. Oh, last pass. Oh, this whole thing. Your spirit. You're going to need your YubiKey and everything now. Hopefully not. We'll see though. But yeah, universities from America, Australia, and Austria, and Google Project Zero, and people working at Microsoft, and Google, and Amazon, and all these huge companies all came together to try to work on this. And they've been working on it actually for quite a while. This is where we get into there's a lot of different information and it's a little bit confusing what happened next. But the public figured out. And the public figured out not that long ago the main article that really blew up in a lot of people's minds because it was much more public facing I believe was the register article, register.code.uk which is posted in the WAN doc if you want to check it out on the forum. That was as far as I know one of the biggest explosions in terms of more people knowing. There was talk about it on more like programmer focused back channels. This was a big news outlet bringing it on. I could be wrong about that. It could have been someone else first. This is the first one I saw. Same. And I think it's the first one most people saw. It got to there as far as I know because a programmer at AMD pushed code to the Linux kernel. Let's see here. So there was an embargo on all this kind of stuff through the Google project zero platform. Not everyone agrees with having embargoes on these types of things. Some people position themselves with like all information should be open. Everyone should know everything that's going on. And your opinion on that is whatever is ease. But there was an embargo. And it wasn't like technically broken. You can frame that however you want. But yeah, so it's true that AMD didn't actually reveal the details of the flaw before the embargo was up. But one of the company's developers came very close and close enough to infer what was actually going on. An AMD developer contributed a Linux patch that excluded AMD chips from the meltdown mitigation in the note with the patch the developer wrote, the AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references including speculative references that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault. So with that information, knowing that people are writing code and it's extremely important, having that basically is like we are not vulnerable to this and knowing that people are working on something very major and he's like excluding themselves from it, you can kind of figure out what's going on. But then the guy kind of got murked by a but wait, there's another more. Yeah, so there's always two. This is where the politics part comes in because and okay, this is where it gets confusing too, because I have also heard that there was stuff at Google that was leaked. There's also been some emails that have been leaked. There's been tons of different stuff. I'm not entirely sure which spark was lit first. This is what I read in the Ars Technica article. There's other stuff that I've read. Who knows? Anyway, it got exposed to the public at some point. And from there, people started freaking the hell out. And that was mostly based around meltdown. That's where we got most of our information about meltdown, which AMD is essentially as of right now, as far as I know, as far as I've seen published everywhere, they're excluded from that. They're fine with meltdown. That's why there's a bunch of confusion even when you Google this, because there's a timeline here where the first part of the media wave was everyone responding to meltdown and saying like you're going to read articles that say AMD is not affected. It'll say that in bold, but it depends when that was written. Yeah, like the register article, which exposed a lot of this stuff and really started exploding things like I was saying earlier, specifically says Intel CPU design flaw. And there's another one by the inquirer that says Intel ARM and AMD all affected by meltdown and Spectre security bypassing CPU design flaw in the freaking title. So who knows? Because that one says that AMD is affected by meltdown, but then almost everything else is saying that AMD isn't affected by meltdown. I'm kind of going with the isn't side of things. But then this is where it gets political because AMD goes, ha ha ha, we're not affected. Everything's fine. And then Intel releases super vague, really confusing details. Like one of my favorite lines, it's it's in the ours article. The company's initial statement produced on Wednesday says, for example, these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data, which is great because that is completely not the point. And no one claimed that it did any of those things. It's like there's another CNBC article, someone in the forum linked where it's like, this doesn't affect Nvidia. But it's just a relevant title for all those or AMD graphics, like all the non techie people who just bought Nvidia stock because it was going gangbusters this year. Yeah. Thank God. Computer stuff. We're safe. Yeah. So it's it's it's confusing for a lot of people. Again, I would highly recommend that you read these articles, but we'll do our best to go through stuff. But anyways, that's where it started getting political because AMD is trying to sit over here and be like, yes, it's not us. And then Intel is responding to that by being like, confusing statements. And then I like that AMD dance he did. But then Spectre comes out of nowhere. And now it's everybody, everybody's included. Everyone who uses speculative processing, not even just ARM, Intel and AMD, which is all the ones we largely know. But like basically every chip maker that uses speculative processing, you're screwed. Lock up your daughters and shoot your sons. That was a grand theft of a reference. Yes. Yeah. So I want to talk about what how how affected is the average person here? What can they do about it? Because I've I have heard slash read that even though the vulnerability does affect all these chips that we all have, this isn't something that you can really exploit willy nilly. Does it take quite a bit of work to as far as I know, it takes quite a bit of work. Most random people are not going to be targets for this. As far as I know. Again, this is really early on, especially right now. And I'm juggling a lot of different conflicting information. But especially if you were adept at exploiting this right now, you're going to go for the highest value. Juicy targets, not not for Bob Schwarm as his battlefield for gaming PC. I just can't believe that name. I like it, though. It's pretty sweet. It's like that a gamer. He's got a restaurant. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I just swore. Okay. Yeah. Oh, nice. He gets it all the time. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Like it's very unlikely that your personal PC is going to get attacked. It's very unlikely to tie back to that dude calling someone an idiot in the Twitch chat that your iPhone is going to get attacked. But essentially all these processors are susceptible to Spectre. There are updates that are coming. Certain programs are going to have to be recompiled or modified. Those things are going to happen, especially for major mainline programs. So we can look forward to a lot of blue screens at CES. You look forward to a lot of updates. Windows updates, program updates, lots of different things are going to be updating. This is where we're going to tie into what different companies have done. ARM has released a really, really nice white paper detailing how it affects their processors and all this kind of stuff, which is going to be uninteresting for almost everybody in this audience because those are, for the most point, not consumer level processors. And what I mean by that is not consumer serviceable processors. They're things like in your phone or in your IoT devices or all these other kind of things. I doubt that you're running a desktop setup that has an ARM processor. But you know, you might be doing something weird. It's possible. You could plug in your phone. If it's possible, it exists. It's out there somewhere. You could plug in your phone and use external keyboards and do weird stuff. I doubt anyone watching has that set up, but it is possible. Are you ready for this aspect? Let's jump there in a quick moment. So yeah, Apple is already releasing updates for iOS, Mac OS, and dealing with some other crazy things. Microsoft is going ham. The Microsoft section of this article is super long. One thing that I really like that they did, Microsoft has already published a PowerShell script that describes the current system protection against Meltdown Inspector on your computer. So if you're into PowerShell, if you're comfortable with that, check out the ours article. It's linked in the forum link in the description. If you're watching this on Archive, if not, I've already posted it in Twitch chat. There you go. And you can check out what's going on on your own system. They're releasing updates for Edge, Internet Explorer, Windows itself. Mozilla is trying to copy some of their... Mozilla. Mozilla. Mozilla. Whatever. They're trying to copy some of their approaches to different things. There's tons of stuff going on. Microsoft has already updated its Azure Cloud computing platform, which is awesome. I would expect that Google was updated before you even heard about this. Oh, they've been on top of this for a long time. Yeah. Amazon has already started rolling out patches for EC2 in terms of Meltdown. Again, Spectre is going to be weird for all this kind of stuff. I'm mostly talking about Meltdown. Google's two consumer-facing operating systems, Android and Chrome OS, both depend on Linux kernels and that's already been being worked on, as I mentioned earlier, the AMD guy working on Linux kernels. But most Android hardware and most Android is a weird thing to think about because there's a lot of really low-end Android devices most people don't think about. But isn't susceptible to Meltdown yet, but that's going to change probably. Anyways, right now, it's a huge mess. Everything's a mess. It's mostly a mess because it was leaked. And when it was leaked, everyone had to scramble super hard to solve it instead of trying to take their time and be very coordinated about everything and bury behind the scenes. And then one day you just get a Windows update, you don't even know anything was ever wrong. No, instead of that, everyone's freaking the hell out and trying to solve all of this at once. Speaking of how this was very behind doors for a while, Intel CEO sold, what is it, like 49 or 24 million dollars worth of stock. Right. So he knew about this. Google told Intel about this in the summer. So the CEO knew that they were going to have a fiasco once the public found out about this. He knew the gravity of the situation. And then before this became public, he sold 24 million dollars worth of his stock in the company, which was a majority, I think a majority of his stock. So that doesn't look very good. No. But I think this is actually kind of click baity because Intel says that the stock sale was unrelated to the vulnerability and came as part of a planned divestiture program. And those things are things. They exist. The other thing is Intel stock price has only fallen about two bucks since this fiasco kind of hit the public. So that's it's not like a tank. And this is like a huge insider trading thing. Granted, two dollars like with the number of shares outstanding, it's still like millions of dollars coming and going. We're mostly going from Intel stock right now. So it is it is huge. But I think this is a little click bait. It's it. It really depends. I'm sure there's going to be legal oversight into this because like, man, if if if that was planned without insider trading and this was just routine, whatever the timing on that. Yeah. Like you couldn't be worse in the last huge amount of years. It could could not be worse timing. So it could be an unfortunate coincidence. I think people claiming that it's insider are you can't really hammer on them too hard because there's a lot of things, a lot of red lights going off in terms of timing, in terms of how much it was. Twenty four million dollars is quite a bit of money. I also read this is why this is so confusing. I read a number that was over 40. But like I'm not even saying it's right because I just read that like. Well, actually, if this program, it could be multiple phases. So that was the number that went out recently in December. So it could be over 40 like since summer, since he's known, maybe. Sure. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's a mess. But potentially looking into his legal ramifications for what that might potentially end up being in terms of insider trading or not. And I'm sure if it was planned, he has tons of documentation for it. And if it goes back before this bug was released to them, he's going to be fine. If it doesn't, that's going to that's going to be a little. But if it was planned and it is fine, you're probably not going to hear about it because no one's going to click on that article. Yeah, it's just it's going to be boring. It's not a story. It'll be too boring to bring up on WAN show. You know, it's not boring until getting sued over this vulnerability. Super hard. Yeah. There are multiple lawsuits. Hold on one quick second before we go forward. This article is posted by SC2 Mitch on the forum. The previous one was found by James and the big whole entire thread. The source that we have for that is Dr. Who 1975 on the forum. He's getting the credit, but there actually are like 60. I'm sure there's a lot and I'm sure there's going to continue to be more. Thank you to everybody who's been posting about this stuff. And that's not to say the duplicate threads. There's just so many. Yeah, there's there's and there's conflicting ones and there's ones that grow on other ones. And it's a nightmare. Our forum is a happening place. If you don't go there, you should. Yeah, it's cute. The people who are suing Intel, do you think so? Here's the grounds of at least one of them. OK, the lawsuit, this lawsuit particular, I think it was maybe the first one Garcia v Intel Corporation filed on Wednesday, January 3rd. The suits plaintiffs, plaintiffs alleged that the computer chips containing the fatal security flaw. There's a lot of F's here. They violate California and Tennessee law. Finally, the plaintiff spring claims for breach of warranty and violations of consumer protection statutes alleging that Intel's selling of computer chips with this fatal security flaw misled consumers about the performance and reliability of the computers operating with this hardware. My first thought, like they have a quote here saying that they look forward to holding Intel responsible for exposing millions of Americans to unnecessary data and security risks or data risks, data security risk. So that sounds noble. It's like, yeah, stick them, rake them over the coals like someone's fighting a good fight for us. But my first thought actually, when I read this was like, I think these people might be those like professional sewers. Yeah, because there's a very fast reaction. There's also constantly security issues with this type of stuff. It's just usually handled. It's usually much smaller and it's usually handled much more quietly. Like if you could sue Microsoft for having a security vulnerability in Windows, Microsoft would be gone. It's just it's obviously because of the scale. Yeah, scale is why this is a big headline and a big deal. Scale is huge. And and suable. Yeah. Someone said it's usually handled by the NSA. I have no freaking idea. Someone said in the chat, he sold them shortly before IME vulnerabilities became public in November. Yeah, that's not what we were talking about though. If it was planned far beforehand, if if if he comes in one day and board of director guys and his or his financial advisors or whatever the heck, I don't know. I'm not into this kind of money are like, hey, we should downscale our stock, whatever that thing that you said. It's not going to happen the next day. It would be planned on paper for a while. It's he's moving a huge amount of stock. It's going to happen over time. Yeah, anyways, that's about it for that. We did it. I hope we did it. Again, there's a huge amount of information. If we actually want to go over every single little tiny bit of it would take us the entire show and more. If you do want to know more and if you're into computers and hardware, this is super interesting. I'd highly recommend you read more. Come up with your own opinions about it. All that kind of stuff. Check out the links that will be in the forum. The doc thing that I'll be posting that will be in the description on YouTube and yeah, good idea on YouTube and SoundCloud. There we go. That's it. That's the giant, not just Intel, definitely everybody, but mostly Intel and people are trying to obfuscate information and some information is out there and crazy stuff and no official information completely entirely yet. Put your head in the sand. What can you do about it really? It's probably not going to affect you. Update Windows. Live your life. Am I right? For the most part, yeah. There is a loud minority who's going, oh, you're not right. You're not right. It's insane. It's definitely affecting some people. It's affecting Float Plane and it's going to affect other kind of businesses as you've seen Google and Amazon and Microsoft are all tweaking out right now. Yeah, anyways. And now a word from our sponsors. Yeah. Give me a second. Threshbooks. All right. Why is there no lower third? All right. Well, there just isn't one. How's it going? Threshbooks is the small business accounting software that you need if you want to do awesome stuff like run a VPS hosting company. Or run two VPS hosting companies. Or run a dog grooming shop or a plumbing company. Any, like I know a lot of people in the audience run small scale computer hardware technician service companies. I know I did when I was younger going around doing small scale IT work for some businesses and building computers for people and doing IT stuff around as much as I could while I was going to school because the hours were all nice and flexible because you're working for yourself and you can often just remote into machines and fix them from home and all that kind of stuff. And you can manage the invoices and finances that are a nightmare. I can tell you from personal experience are a nightmare. If you don't have Threshbooks. If you don't have Threshbooks. You can generate invoices in an extremely short period of time. You can check if those people have seen the invoice. This is all super helpful because you don't want to spend all your time while you could be studying or working or doing other more productive things, chasing people down for invoices. It does it for you, which is great. You can set up online payments with just a couple clicks, which is awesome. And you can get paid up to four days faster, which is super cool. So yeah, stop the guessing games, get paid for an unrestricted 30 day free trial. Go to threshbooks.com slash tech tips and enter Linus Tech Tips in the how did you hear about a section. Threshbooks is great. And moving on. If you are doing what I just said, running a small scale IT business thing, you might want to bring a laptop somewhere and have that hooked up and be able to use your laptop and the other computer all at once. Or there's tons of other use cases for this. Say you go to work and when you're at work, you work on a laptop. I know I was at the Twitch offices. We're on Twitch right now. Is that the Twitch office is not that long ago. A lot of people worked on laptops there. You'd be able to pick up your laptop from work where it's connected into the monitors and all nicely hooked up, bring it home, put that on a dock or something like just I have a little laptop holding arm, plug it into power or whatever. And over the network, your keyboard or mouse will connect from your main computer to your laptop. What are you talking about right now? You can drag and drop documents. What business are you even talking about? Synergy. You didn't say that yet. I did. Synergy 2. Synergy 2. The sequel. Yeah, this is Synergy 2, not Synergy 1. Synergy 2, instead of just having all the awesome stuff that Synergy 1 has, and it has as well, like mouse and keyboard going from computer to computer, like being able to drag and drop files, working over the networks. You don't have to plug them in through USB or anything. You just have to be on the same network. It also has stuff like Cloud Bridge so it can work across VPNs and tricky home networks if you have a weird setup. And if you get the pro version, you get to access other cool features like clipboard sharing, drag and drop files, copy and pasting, lock screen sync, and tons more, which is great. It has SSL encryption, which is nice. You're not going to get jacked into all the time. Share anywhere. You can actually control any computer without reconfiguring, which is really nice. One thing that Synergy 2 is apparently a lot better at is detecting computers, which is nice because Synergy was a little bit harder to set up before. Oh, it's good now. It should be easier now. Yeah. So you can go to this link right here, seamless.com slash Synergy slash WAN 3 specifically. That 3 there is important. And- And save 50% when you do that. Oh, wow. Really? Not bad. Save 50%. Okay. And then last but not least, we have Squarespace. We've had Squarespace for a long time. They have 24-7 live chat and email support. So if you're running your little IT business thing, you have Synergy, you have FreshBooks, all that is running nicely, and you have your little website advertising your services, and you have troubles with your site, you can call their IT support or you can live chat or email their live support. And it's only 12 bucks a month. You get a free domain if you subscribe for a year, which is cool because domains, you usually rent them for a year anyways. So if you want the domain for a year, you subscribe for a year, they come together, it's all nice. They have a commerce module so you can use their free online store. They have cover pages so you can have one nice beautiful page if you want that set up. Or you can even, if you want to have some type of blog or something like that, you can publish content in Apple News format directly from their blog module, which is cool. And if you go to squarespace.com forward slash LTT and use offer code LTT, you get 10% off your first purchase. So there you go. Someone in the Twitch chat was scrolled by, it was like, what are those glasses? You fool! You don't even know your own folly. Oh dear. All right, what do you want to talk about now? Some fun stuff here. Yeah, let's go forward. Pick one. I believe. No. Boring. Yeah. No. Okay, screw it. If you have an HP laptop, this is me not talking about this one. It might be getting recalled right now. There's a big list of Probooks and Zenbooks that are getting recalled because of the battery. You can get a free battery fix from HP if you send it back in. Don't bring it to a third party fixer guy because these aren't actually supposed to be user fixable batteries. So give it a Google, look it up, see if your HP notebook is one of the effective ones, and get that puppy fixed. And no reason to bring it to a third party anyways because this is an actual recall that HP is asking you to contact them about, so they should be handling everything. Yeah. Yeah, so I wouldn't worry about it. We don't want to have a Note 7 situation. Just send her in. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. This one next? Spotify? Sure. Alright, so Spotify, they're possibly on the hook for a $1.6 billion copyright lawsuit. But, but, but, but, but, billion! That's a lot of money. Why? That's a huge amount of money. Why, you might ask? Because they've been streaming songs without giving money or getting consent from the owners of those songs. Yeah, pretty much. So it's, what's the name of the company? Wixen Music Publishing. Yeah, they've got Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Rage Against the Machines, Tom Morello, and many more. So that's some pretty major names. Last summer, Spotify faced a suggested $43 million settlement, which is still yet to be approved in court. And they also agreed to a $30 million settlement with National Music Publishers Association, NMPA, for unpaid royalties in 2016. So they're just getting stomped on. You gotta license that content, bro. Yeah. Speaking of music streaming, rumor has it that YouTube, a grown YouTube, is going to launch a music streaming service. Why you might ask, since Google Play Music already exists? We don't know. This would actually be Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube. This will be their third attempt at a music service, actually, because Google Play Music launched in 2011, and to my estimation is doing just fine. But on top of that, they had something called, yeah, I just switched to it from Spotify, actually, and I am digging that algorithm. That's pretty good. Of course the algorithm's awesome. Yeah. Of course. Why would you think that someone like Spotify could beat Google, who owns YouTube? YouTube by the way, being the second largest search engine in the world, it's bigger than Bing, YouTube search engines is huge. Their algorithm for what to play next keeps you on YouTube for hours doing not what you're supposed to do. Have you noticed the, yeah. So obviously their music algorithm's great. You can search a song and it'll just go for the rest of the night. It's awesome. Oh, someone said Google Play Music streaming service is not supported in my company. That pisses me off a huge amount about YouTube Red. Oh my goodness. I want to watch, I think it's called Minefield. Yeah. It's by Vsauce. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Vsauce. It's on YouTube Red. I can't do the thing. Yeah, they want you to, that's the teaser. They give you one episode to watch and then you got a YouTube Reddit. I think I might like subscribe temporarily while we're in Vegas and just try to like binge the entire thing. You don't have time. Yeah. Do you? No. If you have time to watch that then that gives me a, that puts me at ease a bit. No, no I don't. Let's go back. Every time that I go to CES I'm like, oh I'm going to do all these things. I'm going to bring my personal camera. I'm going to take cool photos. I'm going to do all this kind of cool extra stuff on the side. And then it's like, nope, you work from like eight to like three and then you sleep for a few hours and then you get back up and keep going. I'm really hoping just to eat meals. That's all I want. I want to go to Vegas and actually be able to hit at least one buffet. I'll probably average one or two a day. Yeah. Okay. Meals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to just have to eat that Sparrow pizza that's in the convention center the whole time. Yeah. There is, okay, there's some hidden spots in the convention center on floor two. Teach me your ways. Yeah. Don't tell them, don't tell everyone here. It won't be hidden. That's a good call. So back to the chronology. After Google Play came out in 2011, a thing that I had never heard of called YouTube Music Key came along in 2014, which gave subscribers ad free music videos, which is awesome because obviously a ton of awesome music and remixes and everything are on YouTube, but you hit play, you try to put that on a party and then ads interrupt it and you look like a dork. But then YouTube Music Key kind of just turned into YouTube Red in 2016. Yeah. Which expands to letting you watch any video without advertising and now it's just kind of like its own thing. So they keep just changing stuff in super weird ways. This service, this alleged rumored service is internally referred to as remix. It's going to have on demand elements like a regular, like a Spotify, but it's also going to have some YouTube elements, maybe like some video clips, maybe some lyrics on screen. That'd be nice. I can already do YouTube music videos through Google Play Music, but all right. All right. I don't know. I think part of this might come from the supply side. Apparently some of the creators whose music is getting listened to through YouTube, they don't feel like they're getting compensated as fairly as they would be on dedicated music streaming services like Google Play Music or on Spotify. So it might be like a money thing. Okay. They put it on there. You give them an inch. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. As for deploying this thing, Warner Music Group is already on board. They're one of the big three in the music business and the other two of the three already in talks with YouTube. That includes Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. They're also talking to Merlin, a consortium of independent labels. So hopefully they'll have a good spread on content. Yeah. I don't know. It'll probably be good. It seems weird because it seems like Alphabet is now creating things to compete against themselves. Yeah. This is like a Hangouts, Allo, Duo. Yeah. That's a good call. So maybe it's not that weird for them. It's because they're so federated that they don't talk and they step on each other all the time. Yeah. Anyways, going back to the Google Play Music thing, one of my favorite things about it is just how creepy it is. It'll pull in a lot of data, which is unsurprising because it's Google. So it'll know when you're at the gym. Yeah. Yeah. You can turn on location services. Location services. Location services. Location services. So it's like, huh, I see you're in the border lineup. I'm going to play a gangster app to make you look sus. Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. I'll just jump into the different playlists that it recommends for me to try to see where it's trying to take me. And sometimes it'll go off in totally a weird direction. I'm like, I don't like any of this stuff. But often it's pretty good. I've been happy with it because I had two problems with Spotify. The first was the Discover playlist was just stuff I didn't listen to at all. The second was, now maybe you can do this on certain services with Spotify, but I usually use this with my TV and my Google Home. And what I want to do is I have a song in my head and I'm like, I want to play this song and then that's all I want to do. And after that, I want it to just go forever playing related music. And Google Play Music is wicked at that. It's very good at that. Not only will it play other songs that you'll like, they might not even be from bands you know of. Yeah. I started with a Nine Inch Nails song the other day, Nine Inch Nails, Die Hard. The next 10 songs are from bands I never heard of. I didn't skip a single one. They're so sweet. I actually really like doing that sometimes. Yeah, it's wicked. If you try to do this on Spotify, guess what the second song will be? The second song will be the same song again, because instead of playing the song you search for and then a bunch of related songs, it will play all the search results. So it'll be like, so you try to put on. So it'll be like that same song or like remixed by someone else. Yeah, you try to put on Starry to Heaven. You get Starry to Heaven, then you get live, then you get cover. It's like, yes, yes, Spotify, this is what I wanted. No one's ever wanted this. I'm going to hopefully troll at least one person. Okay, Google, play that hipster song with the whistling. Okay, so that's in one of their. You jerk. Did it work? No. No, dang. Oh, I should have said with Google Play Music, sometimes it gets confused if you don't include that. I don't know why. It's because you have a different default music player. Yeah, yeah. So if you have two installed, it might have to like ask or whatever. But you got me. It did it. Yes. Some people got it. Okay, now let it keep going. You can even mute it and leave it off on the side or whatever, but let it keep going. It does a pretty good job and it doesn't just. It'll continue to play hipster whistle songs or what do you mean that good job? Well, it continues to play hipster kind of songs, but that actually sound kind of similar and fun with the same tonality and all these other kind of things. It does a pretty good job. I ended up already canceled some people like, no, screw it. Someone actually said it didn't recognize the voice. Yeah, I've got that recently. Someone tried to troll me and then Google was like, that doesn't sound like James. Yeah. My girlfriend even trying to impersonate my voice couldn't get into my phone using voice commands. That's not surprising. Yeah. Yeah, I know, but it's interesting. It did a pretty good job. I would love to hear your voice. Three devices are... Some guy said three devices are playing that song in my house right now. When I did the... There was a previous ranch show where I did a similar command with some weird Russian song that goes... Yes, yes, yes. People kept tweeting me like, man, it was 1 a.m. My whole family is awake now. Yeah, it's pretty bad. We put a lockdown on that recently. Okay, so maybe that was bad. You did it on purpose. I did. It's the accidental ones we're looking out for. Hey, there's actually an Amazon Echo topic here we can go right into. Sure. This has to do with Amazon trying to monetize and place ad units into Echo devices. There's a thread on the forum by Mankes who actually pretty much supplied a lot of... Almost all of the threads today. Thank you, Mankes. Thank you very much. However, I kind of think that your- Mankes. Your title for this is fake news because as far as I read, it's not the case that your Amazon Echo is going to be reading out ads to you. That would be so brutal. As far as I've seen, I don't think that's what they're trying to do, but what they are trying to do is have brands be the sponsored search results. Just like when you Google something, if you Google new truck, there's going to be a Ford ad at the top of your search results page, right? Now we're talking about voice, so there's no page. There's going to be a suggested product. If you ask... There's an example here that says if you ask A-L-E-X-A, because we're not trying to trigger the vocal commands anymore, good idea, to add an item to your shopping cart, it will suggest you buy a particular brand. I think that means A-L-E-X-A, can you add some toothpaste to my shopping cart? It'll be like, okay, I can look for a brand like Colgate, would you like that? If you're like no, it can find some other stuff. The default matters because a lot of people are going to be like, yeah, instead of being like, no, actually, I would like Sensodyne Complete, because I got a little wimpy teeth. Don't floss. That is really interesting. It's pretty problematic. Yeah, so apparently it might suggest it based on your previous purchasing decisions, which is not that bad. That would be a situation like, hey, A-L-E-X-A, I would like some surface cleaner. They know that you bought a Clorox product in the past, so they'll say, okay, do you want Clorox Pine Sol? That kind of makes sense. It's going to keep people in a little bubble, which is maybe not great, but if you're just trying to order something with a voice command, you're probably not trying to shop around. You're probably just trying to stay within your bubble. You probably just want the transaction done faster, so that's maybe not a bad thing. I'd be interested in hearing what other people have opinions in terms of that. If I'm making a purchasing decision that I'm even remotely unsure of, I always research. This is probably for your second time buying something anyway, right? And it says that it's going to suggest things based on what people have previously bought. If you've already bought one of these and you're like, hey, I need some toothpaste, and you've been buying the same toothpaste for freaking ever, and it's like, hey, do you want the same toothpaste that you've been buying for freaking ever? You'll just say yes, and it'll show up. Well, that's what we want, but now we're talking about that not happening because of sponsored posts. Yeah. Do you want the thing you've always been getting, or do you want this new featured product that maybe sucks, but they paid money, so that's what is going to be the default? Yeah. Interesting. It would be cool if they had a voice command for like, no, I'd like the usual. Ah, the usual. You know what I mean? Well, if you're a usual... All the usual. Yeah. If you're a usual customer at a restaurant, they might know what you want, like the dude at Mucho Burrito knows my order. The people at Subway over here, they know me too. It took them like six months. I have a very simple order. I get everything for the veggies. Everything. So it's like they have two decisions. Anyway, they're on it now. Here's my question, and I think this is interesting. I don't know. I think if you're a glass half full person or a glass half empty person, you might have two answers here. Is it likely that Google will also seek to monetize in similar ways because Google has... I wouldn't be surprised if they already are. They're the main advertiser in this space, right? But is it antithetical to Google's mission statement or corporate culture, given that they're coming from a place where they're taking the world's information and putting down onto one search result page. They're giving you options. It's democratic. It's supposed to be based on the link juice of the internet, the democracy, the popularity contest of the internet here. When you get into voice, you only get one answer. So does Google do the same thing Amazon's doing, or do they never do that? I suspect they will. Gotta get that green. Yeah. Paid advertising is Google's whole thing. I would highly suggest they would. This is just making me think we need more competition for Amazon because with Google's situation, what is it going to suggest you buy? Can you even auto buy things through voice with Google? Walmart. They have a partnership with Walmart. Walmart. Oh. Ew. Well, it's the same situation with Amazon, where it's just some giant, massive company eating everything up. This is going to take more purchasing from other random companies. I don't know. Alibaba is coming soon. Yeah. That will be big here. Yeah. The usability of Alibaba is not there compared to Amazon. Google has its own Shop Express? Yeah. Come on, man. It's not there. I mean, on the same scale in terms of usability, trust. If something is a prime product on Amazon, if it's shipped by Amazon, it's a prime product. It's highly likely that you're going to get it on time, that you're going to be able to have an easy time with returns and warranty and all that other kind of stuff. I don't know. It shelters you like most normal stores do, and a lot of online situations don't do that properly. And their shipping sucks and stuff. I understand why Amazon's where they're at, but they need better competition. One more? Well, we got to do flowplanes, so let's do flowplane and one more. I don't even know if I can squeeze share. Maybe you did the wrong guy. Yeah. Let me try that. You can find me in the club. We don't call it that anymore. It was flowplane club. Come on, man. Crowds are full of bub. It's still not. I don't know if we're going to be able to show it. Well, either way, screen sharing is not happy right now, but flowplane has a bunch of really cool stuff on it at the moment. There's even one thing that doesn't happen that much. There's a poll. There's a discussion poll asking you guys how you guys want us to share CES content on flowplane because there's a few different options there. Good question. Usually we don't care what you think. It's still not working, so we will not be able to screen share. Oh, I bet you I know why it's not working and I could fix it if I had more time, but I don't. That's okay. Yeah, there's a poll asking how you guys want us to share content, and essentially the decision was with something like YouTube, we have to time out our releases or YouTube's algorithm is going to be like, no, screw you guys. And they're already going to do that a little bit because of just the nature of how rapid fire we have to do CES content, but we're going to do our best to spread it out and make the YouTube robot happy. But with flowplane, whatever, it doesn't matter. We don't have to fight any weird algorithm. So you guys have so far decided, post it in the main section and just fire it. Let it rip, fire hose. Let it go. So right when it's ready, we're just going to post it up. You guys are going to get the content a little bit faster. It's not going to be the one week window that it normally is because that would be terrible, but it is going to be a little bit faster in general. We're going to give it up to you guys right away. It's going to be good. You can look like a Twitter magician. Yeah. You're going to be in the know, hours ahead of other people. This video's coming. It's going to be awesome. So on here, regardless, outside of the poll, there is a tech wiki for why is Windows display scaling so bad. I'm excited for that. I know a fair amount about it because I did the Surface Studio review and there's a lot of really interesting information in that as to why the screen is the resolution and aspect ratio and stuff that it is. It seems to me like a topic that's like, yeah, it sucks, but it has to be this way. Yeah. I haven't thought about it as hard as the engineers. There's the OnePlus 5T review now in white. If you haven't seen the ad for that, it's been everywhere, so I'd be surprised. There's a Flowplane exclusive behind the scene from right before Christmas that just got released. So I don't know if that got released now, but either way, it just came out. I will not spoil it. So the behind the scenes thing, I know some people are salty that we don't release this in other places, but YouTube would destroy our searchability if we did that because most people don't care about these things. I think they're awesome and the people that do care about them are pretty hardcore about it. But anyways, there's the 13 GPUs in one PC mining adventure part two. This is a very large departure from the kind of amateur hour mining adventure part one. Just, you know, you know, there was some comments. They were accurate. We're just, you know what? We're just tired, but we're moving forward. Part two, strong return. Part three is going to be even stronger of a return. So we're coming at you with some really interesting mining adventure videos. They're coming. PCI Express 4.0 as fast as possible. John, back at it again with the epic videos. An LTT handmade, there's an LTT video of a handmade portable arcade box. Not an LTT handmade one. That's made by Kari42 as far as I know. Check it out. Super cool. And there's also some like extra footage from the Chiller Resurrection, which is super cool. So if you're into that, there's extra footage, the untold story of the Chiller Resurrection. Again, stuff that if we threw this on YouTube, people wouldn't care as much. It would hurt the channel. So we're just throwing it on Flowplane for the super hard course. And that's it. We're done moving on to the next topic. Now this weekend, there's going to be another keyboard video. Oh. Zany keyboard video. I think we almost did every one of them. The zaniness is ending here. Okay. We have another one in us? Yeah, I think so. Well, this is a little simple guy. Yeah, sure. Let's just do that. Unsurprisingly, if you think about it, 2017 was the biggest year ever for electric car sales. Wow, I'm super surprised. Actually tell me more. There was a time in like in the 30s, like before the Model T where electric cars actually were the main, had the most market share above combustion engines. But since then, this is the biggest year ever. Someone asked about the dust video. I'm going to just say this right now. The dust video is going to happen. I'm going to be in it. Linus is going to be in it. There's possibly other people that will be in it. Is this a Counter Strike thing? Possibly not. I don't even know what this is. Oh, that's pretty, I understand where you're going with that. But no, it's the dust computers that are up in the corner. I'm not going to be in it, guys. You should just walk through the screen at some point. Hey. Yeah, it is going to happen. We haven't filmed it yet. It means it's not going to be filmed until at least after CES. So it's going to be at least another week until it's filmed. But it's going to happen eventually. Anyways. Let me chuck some numbers at you here. December marks the 27th month of consecutive sales gains for plug-in vehicles, meaning EVs. So in 2017, there was nearly 200,000 EVs sold in the US. So there's 399,826. This compares to 158,614. So what is that, like a 30% increase? Pretty decent. So if you break that down by the top five brands that were sold, the Tesla Model S was the number one seller at 27,060. Next in line, Chevy Bolt. Chevy Bolt, the electric version, at 23,297. Next in line, back to Tesla. It was the Model X. Over 21,000 of those sold. And then what was that? I read the last bullet point. Sorry, keep going. I thought you were like Model X. No, no, no. That's so cool. I love that. I love the Model X. So the front. The fourth one was the Prius, Prius Prime from Toyota. Over 20,000, almost 21,000 sold. And everyone wants to know how many Tesla Model 3s got delivered in 2017. And it looks like it was about 2,000. About 2,000. They're doing what, 1,000 a week now? Which is less than a previous promise that they'd be doing 5,000 a week by the end of the year. They're now hoping to hit 5,000 a week by this summer. In terms of production estimations, that's pretty standard from what we've been able to expect so far is there's the estimation. They won't hit it, but they'll do pretty darn good. And that's cool because they'll figure it out eventually. Someone said in chat Streamlabs is releasing their own kind of version of OBS because OBS is open source. That is a thing. I'm going to be screwing with that on my personal stream. I believe Colton is as well, but I don't know if I'll end up using it. We'll see. That's another interesting news bit though because if you're into streaming, it streamlines a lot of, haha, get it, streamlines a lot of different stuff, which is cool. And I think we will see you guys. At CES. We have so far never missed a WAN show at CES. So theoretically there will be a WAN show at CES, but every single year it's super random. How it works is super random. Who's on it is super random. Where we are is super random. What time it starts. Not that that's different from normal, but it's pretty random. That'd be pretty cool if we did it from a plane. Like we have wifi on the plane. That'd be dope. You might even be able to get by with like a super crapo resolution. If we get like everyone else on the plane to not use wifi, you might be able to get by with a super terrible resolution. If you think sitting beside a baby on a plane sucks, wait till you're beside two podcasters. I think it would just get rejected from Twitch though because of the latency. Because like I connected to a game while I was on a plane just to check out my latency. And it was like quite a few seconds between input and what actually happened. Well we can always do another pre-recorded one like this one was. Oh why? No. I'm joking. I'm joking. Look, it says Friday January 5th right there. Oh JK. No. The joke. I gotta go man. Anyways, I'll see you guys. CES video, CES WAN Show next week. See you later. BYE ce