 If you're listening to this on YouTube, this episode is one week delayed. Up-to-date, tech show but friendly episodes are on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. This is Tech Show But Friendly, Hardware Sugar's podcast with your host Anton. If you've been following the podcast for a couple of weeks, you know that my voice at the moment sounds pretty good in comparison to what it sounded like before. So not 100% yet, but getting a bit better. But we have a lot of news to cover today. You know, some weeks I struggle to find anything really interesting to say, tech news wise. I mean, there's always a lot of tech news. But to be honest, I don't find a lot of the news interesting and I really try to only put the ones I'm genuinely interested in in the podcast. But this week we have a lot starting off with some local news. So apparently one of the local eSports empires was built on alleged tax fraud. We're talking about Brent eSports. And Brent eSports is one of the biggest eSports organizations in the country. I mean, it organizes teams like Valorant. I think their mobile legends team is also well regarded and they've been doing it for a long time. So the organization has been putting together teams and then sending them to compete abroad. So they are well known in the international scene. And I first heard about them through ASOS, indirectly through ASOS. One of the earliest events that ASOS invited us to during the pandemic was to check out their special Gundam themed hardware. So I remember it was one of the first times I left the house after the hard lockdowns to go over to ASOS HQ and check out the Gundam hardware. And then nagkatawin lang at the time with me in the room or for that time slot was a reporter from Brent. So aside from being Brent eSports, they also have a media arm that does a wide variety of stuff. You know, I had never heard about them prior to that. So I wasn't aware that they were really doing so many things, gaming related, computer hardware related. And it really peaked my curiosity because the reporter they sent was brand new with the organization, but sort of the media person with her wasn't. So I was kind of eavesdropping as he was relating to her. Who's behind Brent eSports and Brent Media, Brent TV? I don't know exactly what they call their media arm. Like he's really into games, different kind of strategy games. It's important to him that the accounts he has in those games are high level accounts. And yunyahi also sponsors eSports teams. And as I was eavesdropping, I'm kind of a shy guy. You know, I should have just gone over to say hello. As it turns out actually, this particular reporter, I had never met her, but I had seen a YouTube video of her very recently, completely by random, prior to that time at ASUS. The YouTube video was that she was putting together a PC for the first time. And you know, those kind of videos are a dime a dozen on the internet. But she had charisma. Like you're watching her. It's not like she was the most technically proficient. She was very upfront. This is the first time I'm doing this. You know, I'm not super techie. But you wanted to watch her, which is like the number one most important thing as a creator, right? So she kind of stuck in my mind. And then I ran into her at ASUS and she's with Brent Media. And then the guy behind Brent Media just sounded so interesting. I mean, there's this guy who's just like throwing money left and right. And he's a super gamer. And it really seemed like games were very important to him. And I really remember thinking, who is this guy? And how did he make his money? Because the only other comparable team that I could think of in the local scene is the team of Mineski. So at least yung Mineski, again, internationally well regarded. They have a bunch of teams. They're standing here in abroad. Is well known. But it's very clear where they made their money and their connection to gaming. I mean, obviously they had a lot of land cafes prior to the pandemic. Yung here, Mineski has a great e-sports team. You're a little bit like, oh, okay. Wow, that's great for them, right? I mean, there must be a lot of money in the land cafe scene. Pero hindi ganon ka layo from their primary business to branching out to e-sports teams. But you hear brand e-sports and I had no idea what the business actually was. What was the source of the money behind all of this? Spending on e-sports teams and whatnot. Because I mean, to be frank, I can't quite imagine e-sports teams themselves being or making money. I mean, yes, you can get sponsors. Yes, you can get kind of like an offshoot of their celebrities. So you have content based on that. But it also takes a lot of money to run e-sports teams, the players, the coaches, the organization behind it, the training, sending them abroad. So the economics of having an e-sports team, I don't think is self-sufficient yet. I mean, an e-sports team on its own in the Philippines. So they must have had some kind of business, a well-earning business I thought to myself at the time. And, you know, from that point on, I always wondered, just idly, like, where does this money come from? And just last week, apparently, the charges were filed against the head of brand e-sports, Bernard Chong. Because, well, the charges are that he basically issues fake receipts. So he has this one company that has been in business for a long time, 2008, I think is what was being reported. And so basically, because as a business, if you have receipts, you can claim those receipts as expenses. So you don't need to pay taxes on them. There's VAT input and it's a business expense kind of thing, very simply put. So you go to, the allegation is, you go to this company and they will sell you a receipt. So you get to claim full credit for VAT and whatnot, and you're paying a smaller amount. And actually, if you think about that, the cascade effect doesn't make sense from the part of the selling company because now they have to report income, right? Pero sila nabahala dun, either they don't report it or they have some other means. All the buyer of the receipt cares about is that, yun nga, magagamit ko tong receipt nato as a business expense and I paid less for it than the expense that I'm claiming. So nakamura ko. And apparently it has been going on for so long and so many other businesses have bought from them. The total taxes that were evaded because of this one company was like in the amount of 50 billion pesos. And if this is the primary business of Brent Chong, apparently it was wildly successful because yun nga, he had a lot of money to spend on his gaming, on his e-sports teams, on other things because I didn't realize, I only realized after I started researching for this podcast when I thought that this would be an interesting news item to include is that he was also the guy behind Laika. So Laika was this failed social media. It wasn't an app, it was like a social media platform. So similar to Facebook where you could post content. But Laika's thing was that you earn gems based on how many people interact with your content and those gems could be converted into real fiat money. And I had heard about Laika before and to be honest, I was a little interested in it but we never got on Laika. It eventually collapsed because about I think a year and a half ago Brent Chong was also accused of importing drugs into the country. So this is a real rabbit hole that kind of stumbled into. I'm not sure if around that same time like collapsed like as a viable platform it was kind of related to some kind of failed drug importation. But I didn't make the connection between the name Brent Chong and Brent Esports. Although just this week also the Court of Appeals dismissed the drug importation complaint against Brent Chong saying that the particular company that was being accused of the drug importation he was no longer a part of so they were able to submit evidence showing that at the time that these drugs were allegedly imported matagal ng wala na si Brent Chong dun sa company na yun. So a happy legal victory for him on one hand but in the same week their criminal charges filed against you. Apparently he hasn't been in the country for quite a while. I think the DOJ is labiling him a fugitive for justice because that whole drug importation thing was a while back but yeah it's wild. So after two years or so or two and a half years I've at least finally know what the main business of the guy behind Brent Esports was. But if you take a look at the press releases the Brent Esports teams are still active. They make no mention of the cloud under which their founder is operating on and the main fact that they are still operating implies that they are receiving funding even though you know Brent Chong is not in the country he hasn't been in the country for a while nobody knows where he is although his lawyers in the drug case were filing things for him so he still has some contact with some people here. I'm not commenting either way on the innocence or guilt. I'm just really reporting on the news as it's reported in publicly available outlets. It's just wild to me to think that you know this has always been like a question in the back of my mind like what this guy is super successful to afford all of his hobbies to afford these Esports teams and well if that is indeed was the primary business then yeah apparently he was raking it in. He's also one of the sons or his family is the owner of New Balance or New World I think or but there's an athletic company of which his family is the founder or the owners of so it really underlines that you know Esports or gaming in general is no longer fun and games I mean there's really a business component to it and a lot of people are getting into it that maybe you would be surprised that they are getting into it a bit gangster to be honest when you think about like wild I mean like one of the prominent Esports personalities in the country may have generated his funds through this very creative I mean you do have to hand it to the alleged scheme I mean it's not as simple as just like not paying taxes or underreporting I mean these are the kind of beginner rookie ways to lower your tax exposure but you know a fake receipts business is kind of novel I hope it doesn't affect the teams I don't know maybe they'll have different funding different source of their revenue or things like that regardless at the end of the day of the truths or falsehood of the charges it'll be sad to see local Esports organization go under I think more Esports organizations is always better than less still on business but moving on to the YouTube business one of your favorite tech YouTubers has stepped down and yes we're talking about Linus who is no longer the head of LMG imagine Linus Media Group without Linus although I am hyping it up a little bit it's not without Linus apparently stepping down a CEO but he'll remain as the chief vision officer or something like that and even he himself mentioned in the video that that's kind of a silly sounding title but basically he's going back to being creative or allowing himself more time to be creative and letting somebody else take over the more business aspect of running LMG the guy that he got is somebody that he's worked with before that was his boss before he founded LMG and um actually I I'm super impressed by that move not threatened at all that you know this is a company that I built but not threatened to hand it over to somebody and I think it's really shows a lot of honesty on this part a lot of know thyself that at a certain point I just can't bring the company higher my abilities don't lean towards that aspect and it's not fun for me anymore he was saying that a lot of the things that have been bothering him really haven't gone away so he decided to make changes I don't expect things to change from the creative perspective if anything I think they'll probably get better because he'll have more time to devote to the videos and the kind of wacky ideas the zaniness that we've come to expect from LTT videos I am kind of curious like behind the scenes how they're going to navigate a budget because again LTT is known for these like oh we need to 3D print this custom CPU cooler which we're going to mount to a table I mean you know these kind of like off the wall projects that depending on what you want to do can cost a lot of money they got an entirely new space for their new testing labs which are still getting off the ground so I don't think any of that will leak out into the videos but but just from a business perspective I'd be kind of curious to see how that plays out if the new CEO will show more financial restraint because while Linus was distracted by the business side at least he was still the one calling the business shot so if he wanted something for a video nobody would tell him no if he wanted to set up a lab which is like crazy expensive no one would tell him no but now someone is authorized to tell him no and again that just really goes back to props to him for having the guts to say okay yeah that that's what being CEO means and you can pull that trigger I'm giving you the gun which you can pull but go to Linus for figuring out that this is the way that I want to go moving on to another tech YouTuber in the state Jay's 2 cents had to delete a video had to unpublish a video so this is the 4060T iReview video of theirs but apparently it only came out last Wednesday but it got pulled right away the context of the video was that Jay was not involved at all apparently he just had major surgery so he was not the host I don't think he was involved in the data collection even and he had not seen the video before it went live but apparently the video was a bit controversial in the sense that it was too flattering in a sense to the 4060Ti card which we'll talk about in a little bit the comparisons weren't exactly on point in an interesting twist you can actually find the original video that they deleted in one of the local Filipino Facebook PC groups I just saw it online a while ago as I was surfing I forget which group but one of the groups has a copy of that video and don't quite know like kung naisip nila oh the download ko to kasi nga madatanggal to ko aga there's something the internet really never forgets but Jay himself came out in a short video and he does kind of look very haggard he explains that he just came out of major surgery and the poor guy does look kind of beat up but basically he says that no excuses we pulled the video and it's a learning experience and things like that just last week I mentioned that I don't really follow Jay's 2 cents I find the personality a little grating because he always seems kind of grumpy when he had the latest announcement where he was like I would no longer accept sponsorships from ASOS I felt that was kind of gratuitously on the bandwagon of the whole hating ASOS train cost by the gamers nexus videos so long story short I'm not a big fan but I am a big fan of how he acted here where he was like well you know this really did not meet our expectations we pulled the video we're very sorry and we want to continue keeping your trust props to Jay for that I mean not an easy thing to do to so publicly delete the video and then have to explain it and things like that I'm sure it must be a major headache but props to him for the quick response and the type of the response and what's so bad about the 4060ti which just came out a couple of days ago well depending on what game you play the 3060ti might even perform better and that's really what has a lot of people really upset I mean you have the 3060ti versus the 4060ti the newer card should basically be always better right than the previous card than the previous generation but performance in a lot of games has been quite close with the 3060ti even conceivably outperforming the 4060ti of course the 3060ti doesn't have the lss3 but even with that even just based on raw performance you're really left scratching your head wondering what happened here this is supposed to be the next generation literally and yet its older sibling can basically run as fast and maybe even kick its ass depending on the game another thing which a lot of reviewers pointed out is that the current 4060ti only has 8 gigabytes and a lot of people now find 8 gigabytes just just too small to run modern games at a decent 1080p let alone higher resolutions i'm a i haven't really tested that for myself like is 8 gigabytes just too little anymore to be honest i have a 3080 with 12 gigabytes so i haven't felt any pinch but i also have not been playing quote unquote modern games like in tipong jedi survivor so which actually is also super poorly optimized so even if you have a monster card like a 4090 you still might see some stutter so i'm not saying i completely endorse this whole like 8 gigabytes is just too little nowadays but a lot of people do fall into that camp and it mystifies a lot of people why invidia would hobble their latest GPU with only 8 gigabytes of memory actually i should say that it doesn't mystify anyone because invidia's already announced that a 16 gigabyte version of the 4060 ti is coming out in july so the current 4060 ti with 8 gigabytes is at 400 dollars with the 16 gigabyte rolling out in july for 500 dollars and the 4060 also comes out in july for 300 dollars kind of difficult to argue where at what use case at what value point the 4060 ti 8 gigabytes would be any good at like in what realistic scenario would you tell somebody oh yeah you should get the 4060 ti 8 gigabyte in fact a lot of 3060 ti users are patting themselves on the back now thinking that yeah it's great that i bought this card like a year ago and i didn't wait anymore because look at what kind of bs crab they eventually sent down the pipeline it's good thing i didn't wait for that crap speaking of 3060 ti we have just got that back in stock pin hardware sugar just saying so we're gonna end this week's podcast with two black eyes one black eye for asus again sorry asus and one black eye for msi and the first black eye goes to asus because about a week ago apparently there was a mass crippling of asus routers where for some reason they just wouldn't connect to the internet and a couple of days later the reason was found basically the routers were trying to download updates and they were getting a corrupted version of an update so it was being stored in memory and then they were running out of memory and then this cost it to be unable to connect to the internet or in a even more simplified version they kept getting garbage from the central server which eventually cost garbage to pile up with the router which resulted in the router not being able to connect to the internet and so this happened to such a wide variety of people I mean this is like worldwide where people had asus routers and they were like what hey I suddenly can't connect to the internet as has been typical with asus lately there was no official statement regarding the matter or regarding the reason behind the matter except to explain a little bit on how to finally solve the problem which basically just entail the restart after asus published a proper update so instead of getting garbage from the central server now the routers were getting good food for example now fortunately I do use an asus router and we did review it before a couple of months ago I think it's called the rapture I mean it is an insane router and that's my primary router and then I have their zen wifi a x mini pod scattered around the house to increase the wifi strength so basically my house is an all asus show for internet connectivity I did not get hit by that so nakonwood but I understand a lot of people did and there was a lot of frustration again for the lack of quick communication from the company and asus has been really taking body blows left and right from the whole fiasco with the x570e motherboards and then the warranty where they were like oh we won't cover that and then like a u-turn like oh we will cover that so it's been a bit of a mess for the company the past month or so so I'm hoping that they can regroup and the second black eye for this episode goes to msi and this incident apparently happened in april but I haven't seen a lot of news coverage about it in april msi was hacked and the cryptographic key which they used to verify firmware updates so the kind of key or algorithm that they used to prove to msi hardware that yes this firmware update is from msi is in the hands of third parties so they were hacked they got the key and now they could conceivably write an update and then sign it correctly and it would be accepted by msi hardware and this kind of attack is super serious because it can lead to other attacks so let's say you update your motherboard and the update actually wasn't from msi it was from a third party but you don't know that because you had it on auto update and that update is genuine I mean it's not even fake in the sense that it's improperly signed it is improperly signed because the hackers have the proper key I mean it is fake in the sense that it's not from msi but it's genuine in the sense that it's a valid update at least from the point of view of the hardware and now you have malware running on your system the third party can install a backdoor get access to more of the computers on the network that may not be running msi so it's a big deal and apparently msi doesn't have an automatic patching process where they could tell their hardware that oh oh wait we need to update and we need to change keys apparently a lot of the other larger manufacturers have that for instance Dell but msi doesn't so it is no easy way of revoking the authenticity verification of that key and it's kind of annoying in a way because as users we're usually trained to update if there's a problem update firmware update BIOS update drivers update it's ingrained into us already that one of the very basic steps of troubleshooting is updating but now you might not want to do that if you have msi hardware because you might not quite be sure where your update is coming from there's also a fear that the hackers might be able to push out updates automatically to msi hardware now i mentioned that msi doesn't have an automatic patching system but i think that refers to changing the keys involved changing the cryptographic signatures involved between the issuing side let's say the party issuing the new firmware and the hardware accepting that update but it's possible that there are auto update features in place where the update just pertains to checking a server oh there's a new file i'm going to get that file and i'm going to install it so msi has been quite hushed about this i mean they did acknowledge the hack but there's no advice on how to proceed on my own computer i actually don't have any msi devices right now in the shop we haven't noticed anything fishy i mean at just at least in terms of volume of people let's say coming to us and suddenly like oh my msi motherboard seems to break or something like that or i'm experiencing weird behavior with my system also no major reports that i could see online that there's been a rash of infiltrations into systems with msi hardware but it is good to keep in mind that you might not want to update currently any msi hardware that you have or at least double triple check that the update really is coming from msi yeah so a lot of different companies nowadays in the pc space having a lot of issues but not really communicating with their customers on those issues and i mean i like asus as a company but i don't think they would have been as up front and a lot of people would even claim that they were in up front with the whole motherboard debacle if gamers nexus hadn't been so on point with it definitely i think because now they're saying that yes it is covered by warranty if suddenly your processor goes up in smoke and you're using an asus motherboard but initially it wasn't covered by warranty and i do think that gamers nexus was instrumental in making them change their minds so a lot of news this week a lot of interesting news my voice is not quite there yet but we're getting there thanks so much for listening to another episode of tech show but friendly if you like what you heard please do leave us a comment especially if you're listening to the podcast not on youtube leave us a review on apple podcast or google podcast spotify wherever the heck you're listening on thanks for lending me your ear have a good one guys till next week