 This is Tech Talk of Buona Episode 299. Follow the click. 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. Greetings, folks. Welcome to Episode 299 of Tech Talk of Buona. We got a great show lined up for you one away from 300. I don't have anything playing for 300. I probably should think of something. It is what's left of Sunday. Actually, it's actually Monday now, but we're really, really late Sunday night. April 7th going into April 8th for Tech Talk of Buona 299. Got six stories to talk about everything ranging from your browser to Amazon, to Apple, Spotify, Google, and some stuff about solar power, getting a little bit of technology stuff, a little bit of that technology stuff and with Tech Talk of Buona. Got a great show lined up for you. Enjoy the show. If our first story, we're going to talk about browsers and click tracking. This is a privacy topic regarding when you click on URLs at your favorite website. According to this article over on bleepingcomputer.com, major browsers to prevent disabling of click tracking privacy risk. Now, what does that mean? There is a tag that you can put in your HTML to link to another page. You see it all the time. You go to a web page and you click on the link and it takes you somewhere else. What these these websites can do is that they can include a ping directive on this particular tag and it will actually ping another URL without telling you. Now, up until this article or up until recently, you've been able to disable this kind of stuff, you know, because it basically is doing stuff without your knowledge. And a lot of people don't like that. This is how a lot of your clicks can be tracked by filter bubbles and stuff like that. You click on a link and next thing you know, you go to Amazon and then you're seeing ads about it, you know, that kind of stuff. A lot of us don't want that kind of filter bubbling to go on filter bubbles, which is why you search engines like duck duck go and and browsers that allow you to block this. But most browsers are not going to let you disable it in the future. Apple, with their Safari project, our Safari browser used to allow you to block it with the defaults command. If you've ever used Apple products, there's a defaults. And then you have this long string, right? com dot apple dot safari that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah false, right? So when you did that in Safari, older versions of Safari, it will disable that feature from working. Now, as of safari 12.1, that feature no longer exists. So you can't do it anymore. Same is true for Google Chrome. Current in the current Chrome version 73. It has a hyperlink auditing flag that can be disabled by using the Chrome flags if you're familiar with doing some advanced flag manipulation and Chrome. It's all throughout Chrome and Chromium products. But in the Chrome 74 beta and Chrome 75 canary builds, the flag has been removed. The current version of Microsoft Edge also enables hyperlink auditing by default but provides no way to disable it that this article could find. Like Edge, Opera is based on Chromium and the Opera 61 developer build removes the option as well. The mobile versions of Chrome and Safari haven't enabled by the fault and no way of disabling it. So that's kind of troublesome that all of these browsers are taking that away when they gave you the option to remove it. You got to ask yourself why that just removing the option is even a thing. Now there is hope Firefox and Brave are the only two browsers that currently disable it by default and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future. So if you use Firefox, you're good. If you use Brave, like I do, if you use Brave, it disables it by default and does not allow you to enable it at all. It does have the display bug in Brave where it shows the hyperlink auditing is enabled, but this is a carryover from Chrome and is not displayed correctly. So if you do look at your Brave flags and you see it enabled, it's actually not enabled. We're going to trust the article on that. I trust the guys at Brave, but I'm still going to be watching them like, hey guys, it's still unenabled, is it? It's actually enabled. And the article makes a good suggestion here. Going forward, if this is important to you, this ping flag on links where you click on something and notify something else that you click that link, if this is important to you, you might want to consider looking at Firefox or Brave because they are the only two browsers that we can find that were tested in this article because I know there's other browsers out there. I know I'm getting replies, but why not have you tried the SpongeBob browser? It doesn't track it either. No, I haven't tried the SpongeBob browser, but I'll tell you what, I'm using Brave and I'm very happy with it. I suggest, you know, if you want my personal suggestion, go with Brave. Brave.com. Be Brave. Don't be the product. That's this, that's my sellout moment of the day. Check it out guys, bloopincomputer.com to get the details. Major browsers to prevent disabling of click tracking. And you know, you want to protect your privacy, you should check this out. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Amazon. Amazon is planning to launch over 3,000 satellites to offer broadband internet. This comes by BraveRooters.com. That's right, Amazon on Thursday confirmed its plan to build a network of over 3,000 satellites through Project Cooper, K-U-I-P-E-R, Cooper, I think I pronounced that right, to provide high speed internet, it will launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will provide low latency, high speed broadband connectivity to people globally who lack basic access to broadband internet. Now, obviously this is a good thing if you think about it from the perspective of, hey, let's give people internet who don't have it. And at first glance, you know, that's my takeaway from it as well. But I start to think about it. I'm like, Amazon, Amazon, Amazon is, you know, they like data. They're one of the shadow brokers out there. They like to get your data. So I imagine that if this is going to be offered for free, there's going to be some caveats with providing your privacy. Nothing is free. So I'm going to keep my eye on the price tag and whether this is free or not. There is competition that this is not the first time I've heard of it. This is probably not the first time you've heard of, you know, low orbit satellites to provide internet. They got competitions from Elon Musk, SpaceX and Airbus back to OneWeb. And in February, OneWeb launched six satellites. And companies like SpaceX, LeoSat, Enterprises and Canada's Telesat are working to enable data networks with hundreds of even thousands of tiny satellites that orbit closer to Earth than traditional communication satellites. So satellite internet is getting a boost in the arm. It's getting a shot in the arm. And that's good because traditionally, you know, we talk about broadband speeds in the US and how the US is lacking and how a lot of people in rural areas. I hate that word. Rural is like my mouth doesn't want to do it. People out there on the farms, people out there with not a lot of the city folk. I'm from the country. So I can say that I have a license. Just the rural areas don't have the best internet a lot of times because, you know, the fiber cables and the copper, the AT&T and Verizon and all these ISPs provide, they don't usually go out that far. And there's also, you know, distant limitations when you talk about where you're going from different hub centers and that kind of stuff. So traditionally, we look at satellite internet is like, no, that's not that's not sufficient because it's usually worse than like DSL. So if you get one megabit up or down on satellite, that's generally like, oh, wow, that's pretty good. Even mobile carriers are really making a lot of the satellite internet look really bad, you know, the mobile, especially with 4G and LTE looks really, really good compared to to what satellite generally offers. So satellite has a bad name overall, but it's getting better. So we're going to be watching this one very closely with as Amazon enters the fray, but 3,000 satellites is a lot. That's that's world domination. That's that's a lot of satellites. And you got to wonder, like I said, man, there's there's there's motivation behind this. It's not just hey, we want to give you internet. There's something to promote Amazon's business model. You can guarantee it. There's always a catch. So watch it very closely. I mean, some people don't have a problem with the catch, but be prepared to become educated on what the catch is. That's all I asked. Check it out guys over on ruders.com. They got the details. Amazon plans to launch over 3000 satellites to offer broadband internet. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Apple and Spotify. We recently covered Apple and Spotify and their little spat that is quickly becoming the the slash popcorn story of the internet. These two juggernauts are going at it with no holes barred. And the story I'm going to talk about today is from ours, Technica, and they state that more people are paying for Apple music than Spotify in the United States right now. But Spotify still reigns supreme worldwide. And you know, they they these two companies, I didn't see this coming, even when Apple music first came out. I mean, I knew that it was a source of contention. I knew it was a competition point. But I never knew it would come to this. Apple and Spotify have become more competitive than Apple and Google, I got to say right now, because they're they're vying for your service money for music services, which are very, very popular. And Apple making the move to this to like your watch into Apple TV into your devices into your Mac, you know, they're branching out to their entire ecosystem to get you to pay them that money every month. And it's taking away from Spotify because there, if you think about it, if you pay for Apple music, you don't have a big reason to pay for Spotify. You know, this is a one or the other thing that's that's kind of the definition of competition. So here's here's the thing it says it's unlikely or the sources claim that Apple music is expanding more rapidly to the in the US and the rate about 2.6 to 3% Spotify's growth rate is reportedly 1.5 to 2% is unlikely that Apple will claim this as a victory because it likes Spotify doesn't publicly break out regional subscriber counts. However, if these estimates are accurate, they show that US customers are embracing Apple music as much as and possibly more than Spotify. But the numbers in the report only reflect paid US subscribers Spotify and which claim 207 million active users globally in December remains the leader of music streaming of those 207 million users 96 millions are paid subscribers or users currently in a trial that will lead to a subscription. Unlike Apple music, Spotify has a free ad supported tier. Globally, Apple music has 50 million pay subscribers. Therefore, the numbers in this report show that more than half of Apple music subscriber count comes from the United States. So yeah, that's a good point that, you know, Spotify has the free ad supported model that Apple doesn't. So, you know, Apple's numbers are pretty cut and dry. There's there aren't many trial numbers. There aren't any aren't many people that are in flux. It's you either paying for it or you're not, even though Apple music probably does provide a trial. Now this comes on. There's some other news that I'm not talking about in this story. But now Spotify is removing their support. They're not going to not removing Spotify is not going to include their service in Apple music plus in their I'm sorry, their Apple TV plus thing. You know how I talked about this on my video. I don't know if I talked about on tech talk. I did a video on the Apple press conference and Apple TV plus is going to include the ability to bring in things like Hulu and CBS access, all access and consolidate them under one umbrella, which is really cool if you use multiple services. Netflix is not going to be a part of that. And the reason why is Netflix is came is claiming that they have. Well, the official word on the site is it's a technical limitation. But the real reason that Netflix is surprised is providing is that Apple TV plus and their current iteration do not provide the making model of the smart TVs they're deploying to because if you remember correctly, Apple the Apple TV announcement included smart TVs, which is a big deal because, you know, that's a big market these days. And they don't report to make a model. So Netflix is like, we can't certify that these are that these are certified devices. We can't certify the devices. So we're going to pull it completely. It's getting really, really tense between these two. I mean, to me, that's a very weak reason to pull it completely. Sure, that's a technical limitation that, you know, can be addressed at some point. But in other services, I don't know if that's enough reason to pull the app completely from Apple TV. It's getting tense. And I made this statement. And I think in our discord, I was saying that I have a feeling that this is going to start to bleed over into iOS as well. I really have a feeling that if you want to use Spotify, you're going to have to use Android real soon. Spotify is not pulling the punches. I mean, they got their big anti Apple campaign going on with merchandise and logos. And you can tell they spent millions of marketing dollars on this. This is some professionally made hatred of Apple because of the Apple Apple's tax on the iTunes app store. Spotify is not happy with the way things are run. Apple is basically saying, well, you you're getting what you pay for. You got to you got a freemium app and you can't expect not to pay anything. And blah, blah, blah. They're going back and forth back and forth. And the gloves are off. This is just another tale in that story. We're going to be watching this one closely. I imagine there will be an Apple Spotify story, at least twice a month on tech talk of Warner as we follow this news. Check it out, guys. Over on ours, Technic.com. They got the details. Apparently more people pay for Apple music in the U.S. And that looks to be it looks to be the future of the service for Apple music, but Spotify still maintains the worldwide lead. And for the next story, we're going to talk about Google. If you use Google services, you might want to pay attention because Google is about to axe a bunch of stuff. According to this article over on PC World, no joke, Google is killing off the Pixel 2 inbox. The Google URL shortener and Google Plus all this week is true is true. And this is the first sort of the first story. I'm sorry, the first sentence in this story is so true. This is what caught my attention. It says, if there's one thing Google doesn't joke about, it's the killing office products. I know I've been a victim of getting attached to many Google products and having them just basically yank from me. Google reader comes to mind. Anyone? Anyone? As someone who reports and consumes a lot of news on both gaming and news fronts, Google readers might want to stop shop for RSS new aggregation. And they just, really, for the life of me, it boggles my mind that they removed that product because it was one of their better products, if not their best product I've ever used. I don't use a lot of Google services anymore. Matter of fact, I don't think I use any anymore. I've migrated off of all of them for such reason because they have a track record of removing things that I get attached to. But anyway, let's start with the Pixel. The Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL, they've been out for a while. Now Google is selling the Pixel 3 and the 3 XL, but the Pixel 2, it has a pretty good following. People think they're good phones and you can get them at discounted prices, but they're going to be stopped. They're going to be stopping the selling of these. These are going to be stopped. They're going to be yanked through their online store. So if you still, you'll still be able to find some for a while because companies and brick and mortar especially will probably have some remaining stock. And of course, there's eBay where somebody's going to buy up all that remaining stock and sell them for a premium. You got to get in before you want that to happen. So the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL. And then there's Inbox, which was a reimagining of the Gmail app. And I actually liked it because it put things in a task-based light. Everything was task-focused. And I got used to it after a while. But then I got wind that it was going away like a long time ago. It was like, you could tell they started pulling it away. You know, it wasn't featured anywhere and features stopped being added. And I was like, well, I'm going to stop using this because I know they're going to yank it. And sure enough, I was correct. They did, however, move some of the features over to Gmail. Some of the styling features and the look and feel of Inbox kind of make their way to Gmail, which people didn't like. You know, the internet has a problem with wasted white space. I don't have a problem with white space as long as the information I need is readily available and easy to see. But anyway, and then Google URL shortener, which I've used a couple of times. I tend to stick with Bitly, but Google's URL shortener, which came out in 2009. It's been 10 years, but apparently people haven't been using it. I don't know, man. I guess Bitly has cornered and captured that market. Yeah, that's something right there. And then finally, Google Plus. This is the big dog right here because not only was Google Plus their next step in social networking and their answer to Facebook, and Twitter, and everybody else, but they integrated Google Plus into YouTube so much so that it broke the site. It broke so much about YouTube and it broke a lot of other services as well. And I think the part that affected me the most is that when they started removing it, YouTube just stopped working. A lot of things just weren't right. You weren't getting notified. Your subscriber boxes would, they'd be gone and your comments would stop working and the site was just one load sometimes. It was like a good three or four months where the site just was broken. I was like, what's going on? And it started to get a little bit better. I think Google is recovering, but Google Plus has officially sunset it. I believe as of April 4th, it was a few days ago, but it's gone now. They did email me some options about getting my data off of there. I really didn't care. I started using Google Plus and I liked it, but again, I caught wind of the end. I'm starting to learn what Google does and how they do things and when things are gonna go. And I caught wind of that. I was like, I'm not gonna invest in this platform anymore. So pretty much that's a lot of services just going away in one week. You got a phone, you got an inbox, you got the URL shortener and you got Google Plus, which is a big one, all going away from Google. So Google continues to act services. So be careful. If you find yourself using something from Google, especially one of their newer products, you need to look for the signs because they don't have a problem just completely killing it off. Check it out guys, over on pcworld.com. They got the details. No joke, Google is killing off a bunch of services and products. And for our next story, we're gonna talk about antivirus and on your mobile phone. We're gonna talk about Stalkerware, Stalkerware. And this came by wayofcnet.com and Kapursky Lab has said that they will warn you now if your phone is infected with Stalkerware. Yeah, so on Wednesday, they said that they will start flagging Stalkerware as malicious and warn people through is Android app when Stalkerware is installed on their phones in 2018, according to their article, they detected on Stalkerware on 58,487 mobile devices. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a ton. That's not a super high amount. But it's still something to raise an eyebrow and be concerned about. So the first thing I thought was, what about iOS? I was like, well, they're talking about, you know, you know, Stalkerware, and I'm pretty sure there's some on iOS. And they were like, no, they said that the protection is available on Android devices because Stalkerware isn't as prevalent on iOS. There we go again. Mac has no viruses. Well, wow, because nobody uses Mac. That's why Mac has no viruses. Well, that's why we don't have viruses because nobody wants to use a good computer. You know, the nerd argument continues. I have some memories of Mac versus PC arguments. It's pretty funny. So Symantec, the company that owns Norton said it also blocks spyware and Stalkerware, which the software considers malicious. One type of protection it offers is flagging when location information is being sent from apps, said Symantec person. Malware bites also said that they are going to be doing it. Lookout, a mobile security app, says it's been tackling a serious security threat. We've been flagging and fighting this kind of spouseware, Stalkerware, at Lookout for years, as it is a constant problem in the mobile security space. So yeah, a bunch of people are chiming in on this because it's becoming an issue. And you'll see the stuff on TV, you know? And I'm one of those people that, when you start to see things on TV shows and stuff, that means it's probably already been happening for five to 10 years. It's like when you watch NCIS and you watch like, you know, any type of spy show or somebody's snooping on a mobile device using Bluetooth or somebody's using some kind of a back door, it's probably been used for by five to 10 years in a real world, maybe 20. If you start to see it on TV, it's like, well, it's on TV. That means, yeah, it's been happening for years. That's how I feel. So yeah, the subscription plans are $68 a month, by the way. That's where the, oh, I'm sorry. I thought this was a Kipursky subscription plan. Scratch that. This is stalkerwares. They were talking about the stalkerware you can buy on the internet. They have plans at $68 a month or something like that. So people pay for this stuff to essentially install these malware apps on your phone and they can track your microphone, what does it say? They track your microphone, your camera, your text messages and your audio of your phone. It's pretty much a total snooping thing that's happening on, according to Kipursky, more on Android than anything else. Which doesn't surprise me, you know, given the nature of Android. I tell people this all the time, it's a trade-off. You know, you get the openness of Android and the Android community and you get a lot of freedoms for what that freedoms comes a lot of risks. You know, you get the Apple Wall Garden where there's a lot less freedoms, but you know, the risk goes down. You know, so you got to pick and choose and people, I hope people are aware of this now that when you choose your garden, you need to be aware of the risks. Do you want to risk this stuff or not? Am I saying Apple and iOS doesn't have viruses? It does. Anybody with an inkling of technology will tell you, yes, macOS has a ton of viruses and yes, iOS has a ton of viruses and malware as well. But when you compare it to, you know, I think it's safe to say Android's going to come on on top. Especially when recently, stories come out about a lot of apps and spyware. I think they talk about them when I'm on this show. You know, government spyware, I think I talked about that last week or the week before, you know, apps that were up on the Android Store that had backdoors and root kits and viruses and spyware on them, which were sanctioned by governments. Check it out, guys. Over on CDAT.com, they got the details. Do you have stalkerware on your Android device? If you do, Kapersky Lab will warn you if you do and other antivirus providers are doing it as well. And for our final story, we're going to talk about the gray state that I live in in Florida, otherwise known as the Sunshine State because the sunshine's a lot here. This comes by way of floorthtrend.com. Florida Power and Light, FPL, one of the energy providers here, announces plans to build the world's largest solar powered battery. That's right. The largest solar powered battery. The future FPL manatee energy storage centers will have 409 megawatts of capacity. To put that in layman's terms in a perspective, this is the equivalent of approximately a hundred million iPhone batteries. So when it begins serving customers in late 2021, and will be charged by an existing FPL solar power plant. Now, this is pretty cool because, you know, solar power as we all know, if you even played video games where you have solar power, you know, you got to deal with the situations where the sun's not out. And most times you store that energy into batteries to be used during night, during nightfall or during like cloudy days or something like that or during storms where the sun is not as prevalent. Here's another quote from the CEO. He says, even as we aggressively scale on our plan to install 30 million solar panels by 2030, that is a lot of the panels. We never lose sight of finding innovative ways to bring our customers the benefits of solar energy even when the sun's not shining. Replacing a large aging fossil fuel plant with a mega battery that's adjacent to a large solar plant is another world's first accomplishment while I'm very pleased with that fact. And what I'm most proud of is that our team remain committed to developing this clean energy breakthrough while saving customers money and keeping their bills amongst the lowest in the nation. Well, I don't know about that last part, the last time I checked for a PL. Y'all charged a little bit over there. I haven't been on a PL in a while, but I remember growing up in, you know, they serviced my house when I was growing up. So yeah, it's going to be a pretty big battery, pretty big battery that's going to be installed and available to customers in late 2021. So about two years from now, more than two years from now. Pretty cool. I like solar energy. I really do. I've been, you know, there's a lot of companies here and a lot of incentives and tax breaks to get solar energy installed. And it does cut your power bill by a great deal. The problem is the startup costs. And I think anybody who can tell you this, you know, investing in a decent and reliable company to install the panels and get everything up and running can be a nightmare sometimes, especially with a lot of scams. If you ever live in Florida, you know, there's scammers like to come here. This is where they live. It's a scamp central right here. So you have to be careful that you don't get a bad company. And you got to be able to take care of those startup costs. There's people that'll help you with the startup costs, but again, those can be scams as well. So we're hoping that solar power takes off here in Florida, the Sunshine State. Check it out, guys. FloridaTrend.com, they got the details. FPL, it's got to build a big battery powered by solar power, the Sunshine State. With the sun. Yes. And that concludes episode 299 of Tech Talk with Buona. Thank you for listening to the show. Follow my Twitter at twitter.com. Slash Buona, where you can find my musings about everything, about everything and anyone. And I also post these episodes. And when I go live on my live stream at twitch.tv. Slash Buona. And also, you know, you can follow me on Instagram. I've been posting a little bit of photos over there. Instagram.com slash Buona. We also got merchandise. Go to shop.spreadshirt.com slash BuonaTV. Buy yourself a t-shirt. That'd be nice. That'd be very nice. I appreciate that. So thank you so much for being so awesome. This podcast and Game Chat Buona, you can find at buona.tv slash podcast. And you can subscribe to those on Spotify, iTunes, and the Google Play music thingy, Mastore. Thank you all for listening. We had a great show today. I'm really proud of the content and the stories. I thought it was a good selection and variety. And there's no Facebook, man. I've been good. I've been good, guys. I've been really good about not bashing Facebook. Because I'm tempted, man. I jump over all over Facebook all the time. You know me. You know me. All right, that concludes episode 299 of Tech Talker Buona. You guys have a great week. And I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening. Bye-bye.