 This is Tech Talk about episode 304 cloudy with a chance of zombies 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 Please focus welcome to episode 304 of Tech Talk about a really great show lined up for you Got about four stories to talk about in the tech gaming industry Tech Talk of one is produced every Sunday You can also check out my other podcast at game chat with Buona, which is produced every Wednesday But this past Wednesday we didn't produce game chat one because I was feeling under the weather and I'm still kind of recovering from that So I apologize if I cough on stream or whatever you know You guys know what I'm talking about if you've been watching my podcast over the years I'm always dealing with allergies and or something Well, not always but you know, I'm dealing with things and stuff like that there We got a great show line up for you also check out my podcast on anchor.fm I'm gonna be putting some stuff up there soon. I keep saying that it's been I've been saying soon for two weeks now It'll happen. It'll happen. Got a great show. Let's get to it If our first story we're gonna talk about Wolfram alpha Wolfram alpha is 10 years old man It seems like just yesterday This web browser came up on the scene with a unique approach of science and math based queries It was kind of weird at the time and I think a lot of us when we first saw it come out We were using as experiments like hey stupid browser What's two plus two and then Wolfram alpha was get will give us like the meaning of life in addition to two plus two possibly Equaling five. It's a great video over on slash dot. This is where I found the article This is just throwback central today slash dot.org. It still exists This is a website that still exists and then they have a throwback video of the guy when he first hit the switch to launch it And he was explaining what was going on He's like I'm gonna press this button and and bunch of our data centers and our clusters that we have are gonna spin up and You're gonna see all these graphs light up and hopefully it'll go well And then all of a sudden they hit the button and all these queries Started going through I haven't been to Wolfram alpha that Wolfram alpha that common a while But I do use their stuff via API. We use it in our discord for for queries And one of the things that I notice Quite often is that Wolfram alpha it gives you too much information It's tmi the website because you get all kinds of it's like Wolfram alpha How many days until august well, there are 64 lunar cycles and then in jupiter will go across the moon 48 times and and and and several Thousand of red ants will build their quarters 17 billion times It's just like all these different correlations to different data It's it's fascinating and the cool thing is that it's independent private and still free of external Advertising according to the article over on slash talk slash dot That'll work Here's a quote says it was unique and surprising achievement when it first arrived over its first decade and it's become even stronger and more unique It's found this way into more and more Of the fabric of the computational world both realizing some of the long-term aspirations of artificial intelligence And defining new directions for what one can expect to be possible Oh, and by now a significant fraction of a billion of people have used it And we've been able to keep it private and independent and his main website has stayed free and without external Advertising as years have gone by wolfram alpha has found his way into intelligent assistance like siri and now And now also alexa It's also become part of chatbots to tutoring systems and smart tv's NASA websites smart ocr apps talking toy dinosaurs that I didn't know Smart contract oracles and more It's been used by an immense range of people for all sorts of purposes Inventors have used it to figure out what might be possible Leaders and policy makers have used it to make decisions Professionals have used it to do their jobs every day people around the world Have used it to satisfy the curiosity about all sorts of particular things And countless students have used it to solve problems and learn man 10 years ago wolfram alpha Wolfram alpha alpha alpha Alpha wolfram alpha 10 years old check it out guys over on slash dot.org. They got the details turning 10 years old And still going strong and for our next story We're going to talk about microsoft and sony and it's going to be kind of a gaming story But since I didn't have game chat one I wanted to talk about this now Microsoft and sony Have formed a cloud gaming and ai partnership according to this article over on The verge.com and they have a little sub headline calling it an unusual partnership But if you read the article like I have and you'll probably do that right you're going to read it You're going to read it. You'll see that it does kind of make sense from a business perspective Microsoft and sony are announcing a partnership the two companies will explore joint development of future cloud solutions in microsoft azure To support their respective game and content streaming services This is what microsoft said And a statement they said these efforts will also continue These efforts will also including building better development platforms for the content creator community That one made me raise an eyebrow. I'm like, what are you going to do for me? Huh They said they will share additional information where it's possible. So until then I was like, all right I mean I was reading and I was like, man, what what's going on because these guys have been rivals for years But then it says google and I'm like, oh, that's right google release stadia We talked about that a few shows ago or they announced stadia The article says it also means google a new rival a new gaming rival to microsoft and sony will miss out on Hosting on sony's cloud services Google unveiled a stadia game streaming service earlier this year and the company will use youtube to push it to the masses stadia is a threat to both microsoft and sony and it looks like the companies are teaming up So sony has some underlying infrastructure assistance to fight Back stadia is going to be on chrome browser chromecast and pixel Devices sony already has a cloud gaming platform. You guys know that if you don't they do and microsoft says they're going to be doing their own xcloud Gaming services. So sony and microsoft are joining forces to fight the behemoth known as google in their stadia platform stadia promises to to change online gaming And that's microsoft and sony's arena and google's the new players. So if you are a ceo or if you anybody And so in in in the business world and google enters your space It's time to have an emergency meeting. It's time to have an off-site You know, let's let's go to the rockies. Let's go. Let's have a ski resort. They have a shut-in You know how they do that when there's an emergency they spend a lot of money Let's let's go to off-site on the moon and let's discuss what we're going to do It's a combat this new This new threat known as google it's going to be interesting to see how far sony and microsoft go to To do this and how far they're going to go and sharing information and how much of the bad blood they've had over the years I wouldn't call it bad blood. It's just fierce competition fierce competition between them in the console arena But when it comes to windows and when it comes to other microsoft products, I don't think microsoft has only have That that much of a divergent philosophy. I think I think both companies have very similar philosophies and um You know, they you know, they they differ in the consoles, but I think in this world of cloud they they're smart enough To come together and agree Um, but I don't know how long that's going to last and I don't know how much the google threat Is going to even even justify this Because I don't really see google stadia taking off as much as people think it will Um, I think when it was first announced people were saying that everything's going to change. This is a game breaker pun intended. This is a game breaker um game changer But cloud gaming is forever going to have issues because a lot of the a lot of the problems are independent of the provider It's all about the network And google has no control over the network So that's a core single point of failure right there Well multiple points of failure if you think about how crazy networking can get and how and how different companies have to deal with it from a support And just infrastructure perspective, you know, how are you going to deal with bad connections? Like all the time it's going to when you're talking about low latency over the internet connections The the smallest packet loss could cause your your character to die in a video game And that's when we rage quit and throw our controllers into the into the wall Right When inputs lag when it's not your machine, you know, because you're you're doing cloud gaming And you have lag inputs or you know, you have a lag spike and you wake up dead in a competitive game or something like that Even a single player game you're in a hard part of the single player campaign And you get to a part where you have to do some some some skillful movements and all of a sudden your inputs are lagging because I don't know some random node on the network decide to drop So we'll see how stadia stands up. We'll see how azure stands up too with microsoft's cloud platform Um, I think they still are kind of in the niche category. Well, oh, that's nice to have here's a side thing But I don't think that cloud gaming is ready to take the forefront until those networking Infrastructure issues are addressed because especially in the u.s Especially in the u.s. It is very very sparse and It's not going to really take off for the mass market It is a good niche thing and I think it is the future Of gaming but our internet and our network and network infrastructure has to catch up. Check it out guys over in the verge.com Sony and microsoft joining forces for the azure cloud solution Possibly to fight the google stadia juggernaut. That's forming and for our next story google Google is using gmail to track a history of the things you buy. Did you know that over on cnbc.com? i'm not surprised This article uh was posted in a bunch of different places, but this was the first one that crossed my radar I think the verge had it some other people had it and there's this new It was not necessarily a new thing, but there's a page that google has Which actually shows your purchase history based on the emails you got in your gmail Um, and it goes way back if you've been using gmail a long time I looked at mine if you had a my account google.com slash purchases That's the url. It goes pretty far back and it's the more I scrolled the more I was like, oh Okay, I didn't know this this was a thing, you know um it shows Surprisingly accurate list as this article points out and I I think I was surprised too. I was like, man, I forgot I bought that. It's like going way back to 2012 um And some of them were inaccurate like I know there were some things on there I was like no, I didn't buy that I think it was probably either a spam message that got through or some kind of uh, I don't know Offer that it misinterpreted, but it wasn't completely accurate But if you go and check out that page you can see all the things that you that you bought now google says that You can easily delete it, but I think that's kind of misleading Because as as our as this article points out you have to go back and individually delete the emails that have the messages in them If you go to the purchases interface, they have an interface there where you can delete it, but it's one at a time I don't see anything in here to remove them all Like if you just want to wipe it out, um There's no thing to delete all you can't opt out of this. I think there was an option option mentioned in here Uh Yeah, I think they said that there's an active in activities controls you can turn it off, but you don't have any ability to to delete it all Google says it doesn't use your gmail to show you ads and it promises it does not sell your personal information Which include your gmail google account information and does not share your personal information with advertisers unless you have asked us to So you can rest assured that google has your back Wink, I don't know if that's true or not Um, I think google is in the advertisement business. That's what I think So I don't think they're evil. I think they're in the advertisement business I think they just they that's how they make their money And your data is a very very potent fuel Your data is a very very potent I don't know catalysts for making some serious money There's a lot of money to be made with user data these days In conjunction with advertisements, so I I like I said they're an advertisement company So if you buy a phone from google if you use a google product, just know That they're in the advertisement business. They may not be you know, it's a lot of people said you're selling yourself to google What you kind of are And google is trying to trying to get better on privacy. I'll give them that they're they're making they're taking steps in the right direction But at the end of the day a lot of what they do is to sell ads And your data feels that it's very very strong um So check this article out guys. There's a lot a lot of uh Concern around this because this purchases page. I don't even know how long it's been here I think it's people just started to find it. Uh I'll have to check the article on that to be sure but it's kind of To me. I wish there was a way to just delete all like delete all of these purchases And just get rid of them so I don't have to worry about in the future But there isn't it seems to be a one at a time thing and I think that's the biggest problem where the so far I don't necessarily mind the purchases because like I said, they're an ad company I kind of assume that they're taking this data and using it anyway for something Which is part of the reason why I don't use gmail anymore Um, but I have used gmail for many many years and a lot of my data is in there Uh, but I didn't know that they were they were tracking purchases now. Let's speak. Let's be clear purchases If you talk to any advertiser out there and you could promise them Or you could tell them that I have this user's purchase history They will salivate until they need a bib Because that gives them so much information on how to market towards you You've bought a coffee maker in the past. Oh my god. I'm gonna toss 6 billion coffee maker ads in your face Um, you bought some some pet products all of a sudden you're gonna see pet ads everywhere So they they they they they grovel at the mouth all you all you have previous purchase history You know, that's how amazon you notice if you buy something from amazon, that's how they get you, you know, but it's Sometimes I'm not gonna say all the time sometimes They they use that information to show you future amazon suggestions and results And sometimes it's contained within amazon, but sometimes it follows you around the net That's that that digital footprint that we've been trying to get rid of that. Don't track me bro We talked about that in that podcast with uh with duck duck goes campaign to introduce a new law to prevent To to for do not track to actually do not track That's what that law proposal is all about because you can put do not you can turn on do not track option in your browser But websites don't have to honor it. They can just say that's that's that's nice. I'm going to track you anyway Um, and that's the current directive But this law says that if you have that turned on that companies would have to Disable tracking or be faced with the consequences. That's what that go wants to go for So this is that road that this article is kind of kind of moving towards and pointing towards is You know if you got a page A public page that shows all of your purchases. You just think about what you can't see What type of data correlations and database queries are happening behind the scenes on all the data in your email google says they don't do it though But google says they don't do a lot of stuff Like they don't track you when you turn off When you turn off location tracking, they say they don't track they don't track you But we found out many many times that they still track you Even when you turn off location tracking, you're still being tracked. So they'll they'll say they don't do stuff, but They've been caught doing it anyway so So you got to be careful when you use google products. Just know that's that's the moral of this story chat people of the world podcast listeners and llamas and frogs is that This is an advertisement company that you're giving you data to So they're gonna use it in some form or fashion To make money off of ads check it out guys over on cmbc.com. They get the details google gmail tracks a history of the things you buy And it's kind of cumbersome to delete if I find the story. We're gonna talk about zombie load. Oh my gosh It's back Intel chips, man I'm an intel boy and every time I turn around past couple years There's some major security flaw Oh, man, this was called zombie load right and big tech according to tech crunch calm is step it in to patch This newly disclosed security flaw affecting almost every intel chip since 2011 And uh, yeah, it's it's bad There's there's no other way to say it. It's bad Uh, it's called zombie load or micro architectural micro architectural data sampling mds As its technical name which can leak sensitive data stored in the processor such as passwords Secret keys and account tokens and private messages. You know all that stuff that you you kind of don't want to get out there Yeah, um, but the good news is that according to this article a bunch of major manufacturers Of hardware and software are patching their products to protect you as much as they can Against zombie load first up is apple. They've put out a fix um Let's see. Let's say the tech giant said in an advisory that any system running macOS mojave 10.45 release monday Is patched so the monday patch Got you covered over there. This will prevent an attack from being run through safari and other apps And it says most user won't most users won't experience any decline in performance But some people can face up to a 40 percent performance hit if they opt into a full set of mitigations And that's the thing with this this whole this whole zombie load stuff is that The fix causes extra performance on your processors depending on how much you're trying to do So the software solutions are not ideal um And that is very similar to the previous the previous Oh man, I'm just having flashbacks google patches at android and will update chrome So a vast majority of android devices aren't affected but intel only devices will need to be patched Once device makers make updates available chrome os devices such as chromebooks are already protected in the latest version And permanent mitigations will be pushed to devices in the next version um mozilla Plans a long term firefox fix they've applied mitigation recommended by apple on mac os And the mac os limitation will be part of your upcoming firefox release release 67 And extended support release update 60.7 both scheduled for may 21st, which is next Tuesday yes And firefox beta and nightly are already included in the change microsoft has rolled out some windows updates I think this is going to be the one that you guys want to pay attention to the most um In a tech night article the company said that uh customers may need to obtain directly from the device maker microcode updates for their processor microsoft is pushing many of the microcode updates through windows itself through windows update, but there's also um But they are also available from its website and the software will be released Tuesday, which is also may 21st through windows update on patch on apatch tuesday. I'm not gonna say patch tuesday um microsoft azure customers are already protected and finally amazon Patches aws So aws is being uh addressed it has designed implemented its infrastructure with protections against these types of bugs And has also deployed additional protections for mds All ec2 host infrastructure has been updated with these new protections and no customer action is required at the infrastructure level I also got an email from from digital ocean and there's some other people out there that are implementing patches and mitigations as well, so It is It is patch time. It is time for you to look up if your chip has been affected Uh, number one. There's a bunch of sites out there that will test your chip Uh, and I believe that it affects, um Everything prior to the generation 8 I think will be affected. I think the generation 8 and generation 9 are already protected, but the older processors Uh, I have to double check on that, but I believe that's the case at any rate No matter what processor you have go check and see if you're affected because this is a big big big big problem I mean, this is hardware security flaw and Linux macOS everything phones everything's got to get updated Otherwise you're going to be open to some really serious stuff. That's going to be hitting very very soon Check it out guys over on tech crunch.com. They got the details apple amazon google microsoft and bozilla Have released patches for the zombie load chip flaws, but there's going to be more Updates coming in the future. So keep your eye out And over there and that concludes episode 304 of tech talk with one I want to thank you all for listening to the show Please follow this podcast and my other one game chat. We want to over at buanna.tv slash podcast You can subscribe over there on spotify itunes google play and all that kind of good stuff I also have another podcast on anchor.fm called be rinse be rinse Where I just rant about various things and I'm on episode three or four on that. So that's that's kicked off Very nicely also follow my youtube at youtube.com slash buanna where I cross post these podcasts in an audio only format with thumbnail So if you prefer to use youtube as your as your platform of choice for ingesting podcasts I am available over there on youtube e.com twitter.com slash buanna instagram.com slash buanna and finally Check me out at buanna.live aka twitch.tv slash buanna where I have my live stream Where I stream practically every day. I'm actually streaming right now On my quote-unquote day off from streaming Um, and I stream every day starting from 3 p.m. Eastern onward. So you can check me out over There like I said look for new podcasts on anchor.fm I'm going to be producing I still got to do my episode on On the avengers. I'm going to give a be rant episode on the avengers I'm giving people more time to watch it because it's going to be it's going to be spoiler heavy so I don't want people to get upset even though you put spoiler tags on stuff people They find a way to get spoiled And what podcasts is kind of easy to get spoiled because some people just have podcatchers where They just play episodes back to back to back. They don't look at the titles. They don't look at the show No, so just listen So with podcast you got to be extra careful To to introduce spoiler content. You can make a lot of people upset and unsubscribe. We don't want that We're trying to grow the growing is to go back to where we were in this space And get some sponsorships and stuff like that. So we got to keep we got to keep everybody we can man We got to figure out how to keep them all All right, that concludes this episode. I'll see you guys next week same time same station We've reduced this podcast every sunday game chat and wanna on wednesday. You guys have a great day I'll see you next time. Have a good one