 This is Tech Talk with Buona episode 297 plain text passwords in 2019. Welcome to Tech Talk with Buona. This technology podcast covers tech news and reviews for the entire week. And now here's your host, me, Buona McCall. Freaks, folks, and welcome to episode 297 of Tech Talk with Buona. We got a great show lined up for you. Got some great news to talk about today. We got Microsoft, we got Facebook, we got some Netflix stuff and some stuff about Apple. Last episode, we talked a lot about privacy stuff. We got a little bit of follow up to that with regards to Facebook and a little bit of stuff with Microsoft, but not a lot. I apologize for that. I know some people, they don't like to hear about that topic, but it's something I'm pretty passionate about. So I tend to discuss it more often than not. This Friday, I'm recording this offline, we're not live on our stream at live.buona.tv. I'm sorry. That's the old URL. What year is it? Twitch.tv slash Buona. We're going to be bringing back some live URLs. Don't worry about that. But we got a great show lined up for you. Should be short and sweet. I know. I always say that. Let's go. And for our first story, we're going to talk about Facebook. Facebook is back in the news and it's not good. It really is a good thing. When you hear about Facebook in a headline, it's like, oh, what did they do now? This story on the verge and it's pretty much was all over the web. You may have received emails and bulletins to change your Facebook password. Well, Facebook, they weren't compromised per se, but this is kind of worse. Found out that Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text format. And that's just something that you don't hear about. This means that when you give Facebook your password, they store it in a database. Most companies out there will encrypt the password so that, you know, anybody who can open a database can see it. And, you know, they hash it, they protect it, they do stuff to it to protect your password. But apparently, Facebook has been storing their passwords in plain text, exposing them who had access to those internal, those internal files, whoever had access to that, they were able to read your password in plain text. Like I said, they have this thing called hashing, which allows you to encrypt your password. But according to the article, a string of errors led to certain Facebook branded apps to leave passwords accessible to as many as 20,000 company employees. So a bunch of employees had access to this. So if you are using Facebook still, or if you use Facebook in the past and you want to protect that password, you might want to go change it. And if you use that same password somewhere else, this is like a common thing for like the past five years. That's why we encourage people not to use the same password across multiple sites. Because all it takes is for one site to get compromised and lo and behold, that person who got your password had access to all those other places that you use the same password. So if you use a common password on Facebook, you know, you need to go everywhere and change it. And I encourage you to use password managers like key pass or last pass to to generate passwords and to store them. So you don't have to worry about using the same password on on same sites on this on on different sites. So yeah, uh, it's something that you don't like to see. And you don't hear about it too much lately, because most times if there's a breach people like hey, our passwords were hashed, you don't have to worry about your passwords being compromised, even though some people can't decrypt those passwords. It takes a little time. But this is a case of well, they were plain text and anybody who had access to the database could get your password. Check the story out, guys over on the verge.com. They got the details. Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text. Not good. Not good at all. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Microsoft and the FCC and this has to do with broadband availability in the United States. Microsoft has claimed, according to this article over on advice.com, that the FCC has been grossly overstating broadband internet availability. When we say broadband, we're talking about internet connection speed. And Microsoft has gone on record to say that the commission's broadband availability data, which underpins FCC form 477, whatever that is, and the commission's annual section 702 706 report. Yep. Yep. I know what that is. Appears to overstate the extent. This important part appears to overstate the extent to which broadband is actually available throughout the nation. And here's some examples. I said, for example, in some areas, the commission's broadband availability data suggests that ISPs have reported significant broadband availability, which is 25 megabit down three megabit ups upload speed. While Microsoft usage data indicates that only a small percentage of the consumers actually access the internet at broadband speeds in those areas. That's that Microsoft telemetry at work. They got your data, folks. They got your data. Anyway, another good example that I think is they mentioned that if only one house in an area here it is says the FCC's methodology has long been criticized as well. As it currently stands, the agency declares an entire zip code as quote unquote served with broadband if just one home in an entire census block has it. So if one house in an entire block census block has broadband, then that entire zip code is marked as pretty much done, which I think is very inaccurate. Microsoft has some they have some motivation with this. They're trying to push their their technology, which is going to be using some some some unused radio waves. See if I can find the name of it. Yes, it's called White Space Broadband. They're going to be using a technology called White Space Broadband, which would utilize the unlicensed spectrum freed by the migration to digital television to create an entirely new wireless broadband alternative well suited to rural and underserved areas. So they're going to try to make use of that unused broadband wave to essentially provide internet. While the FCC and a lot of other companies are really pushing for 5G, you probably have noticed a big, big push for 5G internet and stuff like that. But there's a lot of people out there, including myself, that thinks that 5G is not going to be all that. So yeah, the FCC and the I believe the NB National Broadcast Association in the NBA. Yeah, in AB, National Association of Broadcasters don't really like this whole idea of this white, white space broadband. So I think Microsoft is pitching it to the NAB as well to get it, try to get it approved. But it's pretty much 5G versus versus this white space, 5G versus white space. But I gotta agree with Microsoft, even though they got their own intentions and their own agenda, I gotta agree that the FCC is definitely under underreporting the the actual existence of broadband in the United States. I think they're over overreporting, I should say. There's too much of assumptions, too many assumptions being made that everybody has broadband. Whereas there's a lot of people who have very, very slow broadband and they don't they don't really qualify as broadband anymore. I mean, DSL these days, it's like the like the 56K modems of old in terms of, you know, speeds and data availability and what you can do on the internet. Now, the speeds are evolving as internet becomes more and more robust and and more people are using it for different reasons. The speed requirements goes up. And if you have DSL or satellite internet, or even if you're still on dial up, you are falling way behind, falling way behind. I think they made a good point in this article here as well talking about how it took 50 years, 50 years to electrify the nation. And we really, really need to speed up the internet improvements because internet has become as an important utility as you can think of. I mean, it's more important to television. It's more important to radio. It's more important than just about anything, just anything that's important these days is communicated via the internet. And I think it really needs to be treated that way. Check it out guys overonvice.com. Microsoft said the FCC is overstating broadband availability, and they really want to push their white space technology versus 5G. And for our next story, we'll talk about Netflix and the plight and fight of online video streaming. And this is a very, very dear topic to my heart because I spend a lot of time watching online video much more than I do TV these days. I can't remember the last time I watched normal TV. Actually, it was during the hurricanes where I had to watch over the air television because, you know, reasons, you know, you want that news to hit you as soon as you can get it. So we had to break out the antenna. Anyway, we're going to talk about this article over on bloomberg.com and it reads, it takes deep pockets to fight Netflix. And it's talking about all these companies that are coming out with their own broadband technology in their own broadband. I won't say technology their own broadband services to combat the juggernaut known as Netflix. And we've been talking about this in my community and a lot of places about how back in the day we we really, really wanted to get away from cable. We wanted to to have online services so that we can pick and choose what we want. We can go Alucard and pay a lot less. Now we're stuck in the situation where we've got too much choice. And there's like Netflix, Hulu and there's CBS online access. There's Disney coming out with their stuff. There's ESPN, there's HBO plus there's showtime. All these different all these different packages that you can get in different forms of fashion is it sounds it's exactly what we asked for back then. But it may be be careful. I guess you go to your adage. Be careful what you asked for. You just might get it. Maybe too much choice. But this article has some great points. It goes into how it is very expensive. And some of these numbers really, really shocked me. First off, they have a graph here talking about how Netflix is closing in on domestic US pay TV industry in terms of survival. I'm sorry, subscribers, domestic subscribers. And over the years, it goes from 2012 to 2018. And it says that Netflix has 60 million subscribers, whereas domestic pay TV subscribers is about 90. This is from S&P's Kagan report. And we see a we actually see a trend to have Netflix increasing and domestic pay TV declining. Now here's some of the numbers that really shocked me. Disney lost just under 100 million on streaming in the first quarter and expects to lose an additional 200 million. This is just to develop their ESPN plus subscription sports channel. That's 300 million lost right there. That's crazy. They're also going to surrender about 150 million operating income. After cutting off licensing to competing services, you may have heard these movies like Avengers and Captain America and all these other Marvel movies and Disney movies. And this is this came from a February call Captain Marvel, the movie that just came out and in theaters is going to be the first movie from Disney in years that won't eventually show on Netflix is going to be on their own thing. But here's some more big numbers that shocked me as well. They expect Disney to lose more than one billion this year and another billion next year by foregoing licensing deals. I didn't know they made that much money off of licensing. This is nuts and investing in this online video business. I got it. I got to wonder what the balance sheet is like, like, OK, we're going to lose a billion, two billion over two years. But if we build this video service, we'll make X amount. I wonder what that X amount is because that's this is this is very expensive. And then the article goes on to talk about other companies like AT&T, which bought Time Warner. They for 85 billion last year, they're looking at a minimum of one billion in new annual costs for added programming that it wants for HBO. Oh, gosh, HBO spent about 2.2 billion in programming in 2017. And AT&T said it will boost the network's budget by 50 50 percent. This is expensive, man. Discovery expects to sink 200 million to 300 million in its digital efforts. They do stuff with HGTV and Animal Planet. You guys watch those and stuff like that. I watch a lot of HGTV element. That's crazy. Viacom, 340 million to their service called Pluto TV. And there's some quotes in here about, you know, how it costs more to hire developers for these days. You don't have to just build a set top box and get a signal off of the satellite. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. You got you got to invest in the in the in the costs. CBS all access with their $5.99 month thing. Their Star Trek Discovery flagship program costs 800. I'm sorry, it costs $8 million per episode, making it one of the most expensive shows in TV history. I had no idea. And the show is average. It's not it's not super good. It's an average Star Trek show. And it costs $8 million per episode. I am just the amount of money going into these streaming networks is incredible. Incredible. They don't mention Hulu in here, but Hulu is also a player. I'm pretty sure they're spending a lot of money. It makes you think man, like Netflix is king. But how much money are they spending? How much money have they spent to get to where they are now? These companies have to invest so much to even try to catch up with Netflix. Man. And now, now you think about it, I think Netflix has raised their subscription price like four times in the last four years, I think I remember three times very, very recently. Hulu just recently raised their price. I imagine CBS and I think Disney might come in at a higher price as well. Apparently, this stuff is expensive. I'm curious as to what is all going to because you would think it's not. You know, I think you would think from a from an armchair, you know, a sofa armchair of analysts, you would think that the money, most of the money would go into producing custom content. Unique content, you know, like Netflix exclusives, you would think that that would be the money. Not really operating costs, not servers, not technology. Sure, that's going to have a hefty price tag for all that bandwidth. But when you talk about 100 million, 200 million, billion dollars a year, that's crazy. Something's something's up. This is very, very odd that it costs this much to fight against Netflix. Check it out, guys. It truly does take deep pockets to fight Netflix. Bloomberg has the article. You can check it out over there. And for the next story, we're going to talk about Apple. Apple is in the news as you know, as it always is. But this is not good news. This is actually bad news. And it has to do with the newer MacBook Pros and MacBooks and notebooks that are coming out of Apple. I haven't had a chance to use a MacBook since over 10 years ago. So I've been out of the loop on the quality of the hardware of these new Apple notebooks. But apparently there's something called Flexgate, where there's an issue with the new notebooks that causes the backlight to misbehave dimming at regular intervals at the bottom of the screen. So it's like this is these these darker areas at the bottom of the screen that you can really tell if you look at the article on the verge.com, they got a screenshot of the issue in action. So this is all coming from, you know, reports across the internet, but the I fix it, put up a post talking to me talking about this. And that the problem stems from a faulty cable design, that the cable design, I believe the cable is too short. Yeah, the new cable, the old cable is short and it's like a cable that connects near the monitor or where the screen is. And the newer cable on the newer models of the MacBook is longer. So they kind of did it like a stealth, stealth fix to it. But apparently it's still going on. And this is this is very, very bad, because Apple is refusing to acknowledge the issue. In general, you would think that Apple would would come out and say that this is an issue, they'll be repairing it, bring it to your local Apple store, we'll fix it for free, yada, yada, yada, but they're pretty much ignoring it. And I think that's why it's becoming a bigger, bigger issue as time goes on. Here's a quote that says Apple seems to be aware of that this is a problem in a follow report. On the 2018 MacBook Pro refresh, I fix it, found that Apple had elongated the display cable design ostensibly to get rid of the defect that plagued the 2016 and later laptops that preceded that update. That change happened without any public acknowledgement. And to this day, Apple continues to act as if Flexgate is not real or widespread problem. There's a petition now numbering more than 15,000 people that would beg to differ. It calls for Apple to publicly recognize Flexgate as a design flaw and to commit to repair all MacBook Pro laptops affected by it. So yeah, it's actually a pretty big issue. And this is a quote that kind of speaks to me. It says that I fix this Kyle Wines tells me that MacBook reliability has all been downhill since 2012. And the last MacBook I had was before that. So I can't really speak to personal experience here. We won't purchase these machines for employees to unreliable. Wow, Apple's obsession with thinness has removed all margin for error, calling it design anorexia. When you sacrifice sacrifice repair ability, every other mistake you make is magnified dramatically. So check this story out, man. There's a lot of things going on with butterfly keyboards and batteries and just stuff that Apple is is you know, failing lately. They're sacrificing quality for these really super thin laptops and they're essentially just failing. What do you guys think? I mean, if you own a newer MacBook from 2012 on, have you seen more problems in the past? Because I remember my MacBook Pro from a while ago was like super duper solid. I think the only thing it had problems with was heat. It had the the the heating issues which mine didn't exhibit as much as other people. But Apple acknowledged that. So these are issues that Apple used to acknowledge. This was back when Steve Jobs was still alive. So check the story out guys, the flex gate problem. I want him comes up with these names. Why they put gate in the stuff? I don't know. We need to come up with something new. We should assign a petition to ban the word gate from controversies. Check it out guys over on theverse.com to get the details. Flex gate man. What is Apple going to do? We'll see. And that concludes episode 297 of Tech Talk with Warner. Thank you much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. We're recording this offline again in my lovely home in the wonderful United States of America. 297 episodes man. We started out as Warner.org radio. We're still going this new name Tech Talk with Warner. If you guys can please follow my Twitch stream at twitch.tv slash Warner ice cream pretty much daily. We have fun. We have we have technology talks as well as for play games. I'm also a one of that TV. That's my blog hub and podcast hub. One of that TV slash blog for the blog and one of that TV slash podcast for this podcast and my other podcast game chat with one of which both share the same feed. Now I've renamed my feet to one of that TV podcast. So Tech Talk with Warner and game chat one are now on the same feed. So that's cool. I'm also cross posting these up to YouTube in a audio well audio only format with just a thumbnail. So if you listen to your music or whatever else on YouTube go over to youtube.com slash want to subscribe to my channel there and I do have game chat with one and Tech Talk with one and posted up there as well as a bunch of tech news and reviews and gaming stuff gaming reviews recently posted an article posted a video on the division to Tom Clancy's division to first 20 hours and yeah check that out if you can. Patreon please support me if you can. This is how I make my living. I'm a full time content provider now. So patreon.com slash one is how you can help me help me out. You can give me as well as a dollar a month to contribute to the success of the show. Thank you so much for listening. I almost said watching because I do a lot of video. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you all next week same time same station. This is Tech Talk with Warner. Have a great day.