 Come up on DTNS. Did your Chrome extension spy on you? Wall-A says that OS was never meant for what you thought it was anyway. And Patrick Norton tells us why it's a good time to build a video game machine. This is the Daily Tech News Show for Friday, July 19, 2019. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And from L.A. County, I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. And of course, Patrick Norton, host of A.V. Excel, and this week in computer hardware, back with us. Patrick, thank you for joining us. And I can only wish my video could join you too. Well, the people on audio don't even notice. They always imagine you in your most beautiful form anyway. Just imagine that Patrick is being very, very still. Folks, if you're not getting good day internet, you've missed a great conversation about One Night in Bangkok and a bunch of other stuff. Become a member and get the show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter would like to offer users more context about unavailable tweets. So tweets can be unavailable for several reasons. They could contain a keyword that you've muted or an account's tweets could be private or a tweet got deleted since being posted, etc. Twitter says that the new feature should give you more information about why that tweet went dark and become available in the next few weeks. Some tweets are emotionally unavailable. In fact, a lot of them. ZDNAT reports the Kazakhstan government has been intercepting HTTPS traffic from devices within its borders since July 17th. Local ISPs have been told by the government to have customers install a state authorized cert on all devices and browsers that lets them spy on you. In 2015, Kazakhstan ordered citizens to install a similar certificate but dropped those plans after multiple organizations sued the government. A parrot spokesperson confirmed to the Verge that the French company has left the toy drone market adding that a parrot has stopped the production and development of any drone, but the anulfi and its variations. In recent years, parrot has shifted its business towards commercial drone solutions in an attempt to distinguish itself from competitors like DJI in the consumer space. I really wish it was a parrot spokesperson. The spokesperson was a parrot. And then what do they do? They just repeat whatever you say? Repeat whatever you tell them. All right, let's talk a little bit more about that Huawei thing. Let's do it. Huawei SVP Catherine Chen stated that the company's Hong-Meng operating system is not being designed as a replacement for Android after all and will focus on industrial uses. Huawei Communications VP Andrew Williamson told Reuters in June that Hong-Meng was in fact testing as an Android replacement that could be in place in month following blacklisting. So what's going on here? Yeah, it's tempting to want to look at this story and say like, well, of course it was wink, wink, nudge, nudge. You're trying to back off. If you took the trade negotiation bit of this out, let's say Samsung with ties in says, oh, we have an operating system. We were thinking, oh, we might use it for phone, but we're not. We're using it for watches and TVs. That's exactly what happened. And nobody really got bent out of shape about it. So it's perfectly reasonable to construct a storyline where Huawei has been developing an operating system for Internet of Things and Industrial Use, which is why you may have heard of it's called an Internet of Things operating system. And any operating system could conceivably be adapted to any other use. So maybe there was a little thought of like, well, could we take our IoT industrial operating system and make a phone operating system out of it? That's really a lot easier to say than to do. And if you don't need to do it, then you might see a path towards your SVP saying like, oh, no, that's for industrial use. Patrick, what do you think make of this? You know, at this point, the whole Huawei thing is such a train wreck. I have nothing left to offer at this point. Would you install a Hongmeng OS in your industry? Or is this going to be a purely Chinese domestic operating system? He says knowing the answer. Oh my goodness. There's an awful lot of domestic market in mainland China and there's an awful lot of countries that have zero problems with buying from Huawei. So it doesn't really matter. They'll find some place to put it. The thing that people forget is Android is open source. Anybody can use it. The part that gets banned is all the parts that make Android particularly useful by being integrated into Google. And security updates get to the open source project later. Well, I mean, at this point, you know, the pace of security updates is not something I've found particularly impressive on anything other than flagship phones. And sometimes not then if you have a carrier that takes, you know what I mean? Like when you know for a fact that something's been fixed, but it's been in your carrier for four and a half months after the fix has been shipped before it actually shows up for a physical... You know what I mean? I just... Well, yeah. Now, add on top of that, Huawei can't put the fix into their own version of the OS to give to the carrier until it gets to the open source project. That was one of the hangups there. I mean, it sucks. But it's, you know, I feel like that whole ship is sank or that train is passed or that that ship has left that train has passed like, you know, insert name of strange mid 20th century, you know, it's kind of over whether it's over or not at this point, at least in the U.S. All right. Security researcher Sam Jidali discovered a browser extension vulnerability for Chrome and in more limited cases on Firefox called Data Spy. I called it Data Spee earlier today because it's two eyes at the end, but I get what he's trying to take personally identifiable information and make it part of the Data Spy thing. So we'll call it Data Spy, but it is spelled S-P-I-I. Affected extensions, collected URLs, web page titles, and sometimes embedded links of every page the browser visited. The histories were published on a fee based service. In other words, a service you pay for called Nacho Analytics. Links often included tokens that allowed access. And if shared would give anyone with the link access. So it's the kind of link that has the token built into it. You're only supposed to generate that link when you have authenticated, but hey, if you copy the link and give it to someone, they're going to have it. Of course you would never do that, but if your extension stole it, you wouldn't know that, right? Nacho Analytics had collected pages that included surveillance videos, even from some Nestcams, tax returns, medical records, a whole lot more. Some pages wouldn't load, but the page titles would reveal information. So a lot of corporate pages that were password protected still leaked out the actual name of the page. So Tesla internal product development, some Apple internal product development, other corporate secrets that you could glean from just the title. The privacy policies of the extensions themselves said that data collection would happen and would be shared with third parties. Nacho Analytics claims that data collection was opt in and that data is scrubbed of names, locations, and other sensitive data. Although the more ours, technical and other outlets talk to Nacho Analytics, the more they said, well, we try very hard to scrub because it was becoming clear that the scrubbing wasn't catching everything. Nacho Analytics CEO, Mike Roberts told ours, that his company has now stopped new signups until it gets more information on the issue of sensitive data still appearing. He still claims that you had to hit a degree button to share this stuff anyway, but they want to be good citizens and not have the sensitive info now that everyone knows that the sensitive info is there. Mozilla and Google have removed all of the extensions that were reported by Jadali from their stores. Two Firefox extensions still appear to be available from the developer websites, even though they're not available from Mozilla. And Google has remotely disabled its extensions as of July 8th. Interestingly, five days after July 8th, Robert said on Twitter that Nacho Analytics had an upstream data outage. And we don't know if that's connected in any way or not. But yeah, kind of a complex situation, but if you didn't quite follow that to sum it up, extensions were logging every URL you visited and giving it to this analytics company, which its main product was to say, if you want to find out statistics about domains, you can pay us for those statistics. So I want to find out what kind of people are visiting my competitor. I could find that out. But as part of that offering, you could also see all the URLs that were collected. And sometimes those URLs, as I said, had sensitive information in them. Yeah. And even if they didn't contain sensitive information such as passwords, just browsing history in general. Well, yeah. And possibly not associated. They are anonymized. Nacho Analytics says they are anonymized, and they were. But sensitive information in that, you know, it's a link to your tax records that no one would ever have otherwise unless they'd gotten into this database. It is the way the web works. The CEO told ours technically, like, we're just, you know, we're using the way the web works. It is probably a wake up call that, you know, a kind of security through obscurity of saying, well, this link was generated after authentication and nobody else can get it. Isn't good enough because I don't think Nacho Analytics was being actively malicious. They just turning a blind eye. Hopefully no one would notice. Yeah, of course. I mean, this is information that was helping that company extensively. So, by okay, our chat room says, sorry, you got cut. It's just the way a knife works. We're a knife. What else are we going to do? Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot to parse on how this happened. But in the end, this is not okay anymore. The old way was we just collect a lot of data. Most people won't notice what's in there and we'll get by these days. That doesn't work. The fact that the internet works in a way that reveals personal information is not washing with the public anymore. Yeah, even anonymized, you know, at one point you're like, okay, well, they can trace it back to me, but that doesn't really work either. It turns out if you have all the or all the resources of the internet. Yeah, you can still kind of, yeah, like point it back to certain people depending on usage. Well, on a happier note, perhaps Google Stadia director of product Andre, Andre Dorenchev answered questions in a Reddit AMA on Thursday comparing Google's commitment to Stadia to that of Gmail, Docs, music, movies and photos and said $10 a month subscribers will get roughly one free game per month, give or take. Dorenchev also said that the UI will be revealed in November with friend lists, party creation and platform level voice chat will be ready at launch as well. Achievements, Bluetooth audio for the controller and family sharing won't arrive on Stadia until after launch, however, Stadia will offer full support for all HID compliant game controllers. So we've got a little bit more information here. The idea that you're going to, you know, he's bolstering the idea that you'll get at least one game a month for $10 a month, which, you know, games cost $60. So conveniently that would make it worthwhile. He's also reaffirmed the idea that you buy a game. Even if Stadia goes away, you'll still own that game from the company. They'll figure out a way to do that. Trying to assuage people's fears that Stadia would go the way of Google Reader or Wave. I think he has a good argument that Stadia is more of the stature of Gmail and Docs, not of these, you know, not Google Plus, but yeah, Patrick, what do you make of this whole Google Stadia thing? I mean, one, this will be the second time I've brought up killedbygoogle.com in a podcast this week or in the last seven days. And two, I'm very curious, everything we've seen that's tried to do this, the streaming of games, has mostly been disappointing when it hits the real world. Google's going to throw ridiculous resources at it, which may actually solve it. You know, I love the $10 a month subscription fee. I'm very, very curious to see what the quality of the games are. You know, but it's super early and I want it to work. I want all of the streaming services to work, so I won't be disappointed. But you know, this is just going to take a huge amount of time. I guess, you know, it's just, I'm curious. I'm even more curious now. I love the price. I think that's just what I want to say. Now I really want it to work and I want the games to not suck. Yeah, I'm actually fairly confident it will work. Whether it will work well enough for every gamer, I mean, that's a whole different story. There's going to be latency and lag. It's the amount of latency and lag that maybe only professional gamers will notice, right? What Stadia is not trying to say this is for pro gamers. Yeah, I mean, I would be thrilled because, you know, I've seen professional gamers where they're like, and you're like, I can't feel this. And they're like, that's why you get fragged all the time. I don't want to say that. But I just want to see it not be irritating to me. Yeah. And if you have it again, it's going to depend on your internet connection. Some people's internet connections will not be good enough for this, even though they're saying something ridiculous, like 25 megabits per second, which seems low to me. But, but I think a lot of people will. And then it becomes a matter of whether the policies work or not. And it's kind of the worst of both worlds in a way of saying, Hey, you get a monthly subscription price that you keep paying for access to nothing. Cause you still have, I mean, yeah, you'll get a game free, but, but you have to pay for everything else. But, but it is a subscription. And, and I think it was in Gadget or Ars Technica that pointed that out, which is Netflix says monthly access, but you get everything. Right. Or it's, you know, some kind of situation where you buy things like on steam and keep them in the cloud, but you don't have a fee. Well, you know, and if they could just give you of like, if even if it was 20, 20 bucks, 25 bucks a month, but it was access to the entire library, I would pay the 25 bucks over 10 bucks over the current system. Yes. For all the things. Well, and I think we're going to see some versions of that, some of them even on Stadia where it's like, well, you're paying your $10 for your Stadia and then $15 for complete access to the EA library. Let's say or somebody, whatever. I think I don't think we'll see EA do that, but I bet we'll see somebody try that Microsoft announced in Q4 its revenue grew 12% on the year, marking the ninth straight quarter of double digit growth for the young upstart Microsoft. Congratulations. Good work, kid. Microsoft's intelligent cloud business, which includes Azure, Windows server and GitHub, but mostly Azure generated $11.39 billion in revenue. Although a lot of that does probably come from office for the enterprise. Azure grew 64% on the year, which is good. In fact, this is the first time that the intelligent cloud generated the most business unit revenue at Microsoft. We've been talking about Microsoft becoming a cloud company, but this is the first quarter that it really became predominantly money making a cloud company, but that 64% growth is slower than last year. And a lot has a lot of people starting to say, well now we're starting to see sequential quarterly slowing. Azure is growing every month, but it's growing, or every quarter, but it's growing a little slower than it did the previous. Now that could just be the law of large numbers. When Azure gets big enough and they don't report Azure numbers separately, it just gets harder to have a higher percentage growth. And Microsoft says the margins are better than ever thanks to multi-year contracts and multi-year contracts lock in revenue, but they don't add to growth, right? Because that's already in there. Also, Windows revenue rose 7% on the year. We'll see how long that sticks around. A lot of it's strong OEM sales in advance at the end of Windows 7 support on January 14th. And after that... I mean, give me the gave away, the operating system, most of the consumer base, like anytime they make money on Windows at this point is kind of fascinating. Well, they're making money off enterprise, a lot of money off enterprise, but they're also making money off those OEM sales, right? It's free for you to upgrade your Windows, but it's not free for you to build a computer for sale to use. Right. I mean, though, for a while though, a huge potential source of revenue, they just ignored. And, you know, I'm also thinking because, you know, we had like two years of, you know, analysts telling us how the PC was dead and the PC was dead and the PC was dead. And it's like, oh, well, actually the tablet died except for, you know, fringes here and there. And the PC still seems to be going. It's just kind of peculiar to watch. I actually think we're going to see the same thing with tablet, right? The PC didn't die. The PC reached its saturation point and then it kind of fluttered around until it found its new level. And that's kind of what we're seeing now. I have a feeling tablets are in the middle of doing the same thing. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right. AMD Ryzen, GPUs, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060s. There's a lot of choices out there. Patrick's going to help us break it down because what you were saying, if you want to build like a video editing PC or a gaming machine right now, it's a good time. It's a great time. We've been talking about this a lot on the speaking computer hardware. Sebastian Peek, who is my co-host on that show, he's the editor over at PC Perspective. And it's been kind of crazy because in the last couple of weeks we've had AMD's Radeon 5700 and 5700 XT, you know, basically get announced. Benchmarks are out. You probably can't buy one until the end of this month. And then of course NVIDIA has dropped the GeForce RTX 2060 and 2070 Super because Super is better than just having a number. And of course, the big announcement at 777 2019 was the Ryzen 3000 series processors, which are really awesome because they are reducing power consumption, delivering huge performance. And I'm just kind of fascinated by watching what AMD has been doing over the last couple of years. If you are building a video editing PC, a workstation, man, it's really easy to look at the Ryzen 3000s and want those desperately. They're on the seven nanometer process. That's given them some performance. It's given them some, you know, some lower power consumption. The real sweet spot at the high end is the Ryzen 73700 X, eight cores, 13 threads, $329. If you can actually find one, the Ryzen 93900 X is $499 is a 12 core 24 thread processor. Processor, it's a really weird way of saying that. But I was looking at, you know, the 3700 X is I think 33% or 34% faster than my 1800 X. The Ryzen 93900 on stuff like video rendering is going to be twice as fast as my 1800 X. That is a huge jump in performance, mostly because of the huge number of cores that they're putting on that for the money. For comparison, like a Core i9-900K entails flagship, eight cores, about $500. And there's some fairly inexpensive Ryzen 5 CPUs, which are also six core, 12 thread parts. So if you are, there's a whole range of prices for these. They're just a phenomenal value for the money in terms of doing anything that involves lots of cores. Install still has a gaming lead over AMD, the Ryzen processors, but the gap is much narrower than it used to be. And it's not going to be as important. If you're not, you know, playing at 1080p with 140 frames per second, it may not make much of a difference to you. They released a new 570 chip set with a new Ryzen 3000 processors. There's been some issues getting that kind of up and running for overclocking and stuff. They've done a whole bunch of firmware updates. That's kind of similar to what happened when they launched Ryzen. There were some memory issues with the firmware. But generally speaking, it works great. And oh, by the way, if you already own one of the earlier Ryzen processors, you will be able to drop these newer Ryzen 3000 processors in there. You're just not going to get some of these super cool features, which are mostly necessary for people who want to overclock. 2060, 2070 Super, those are the new GPUs from Nvidia. They're essentially replacing the 2060 and 2070. The 2060 Super is basically a 2070. The 2070 Super is delivering you like 2080 performance for $200 less. This is where a lot of folks think RTX cards should have been priced at launch. And these are great prices until you realize that AMD's dropped the 5700 and 5700 XT. If you've been looking at a Vega 56 or 64 card, don't stop. Don't. Vega is dead. All right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, bye. Don't let the door hit you on the ass. The 5700 series card is going to be cheaper and faster. A lot faster. A seven nanometer process is helping them out big time. Performance on these two cards is between the 2060 Super and the 2070 Super. And like the 5700 XT is often faster than 2060 Super at the same price. So right now AMD, the 5700 XT is looking like a really amazing card for the money. None of these AMD GPUs have ray tracing. I don't particularly care. I don't think ray tracing is going to be super obvious for most gamers. I don't know for another year or so. I think it's still something that's slowly being folded into game development. The other big news that came out or the rumor that's floating is that the Ryzen 7, which was announced at CES 2019 is probably end of life. It's a great article on Tom's hardware. You know, AMD gave this great response. It was like, you know, there's plenty of cards in the channel. They're not denying that it's end of life. They're not confirming that it's end of life. They're just saying there's a whole lot of unsold cards out there. We're just not making anymore. But don't say that. Yeah, we didn't say that. But when you look at gaming performance, this is where the majority of these cards are going to gamers. That $399 5700 XT, same gaming performance as the Ryzen 7, but it costs $300 less. Ryzen 7 is really a professional card for, you know, particular content creation needs. Most people don't really need that card. And I think that's why it's sort of vaporizing away. So, yeah, at this point, it's kind of amazing the deals. By the way, another side note, if you're thinking about buying an SSD, go ahead and buy one. The prices are as low as we've seen. And the rumors are that SSD prices are going to go up in the none in the future, either because of manufacturers working together to artificially raise prices, or because there's actually going to be an increase in demand and a lack of supply. But SSD prices probably aren't going any lower anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense too, because we're not sure what that Korea-Japan dispute is going to do to prices, but spot prices on I think Ram are already starting to rise a little bit. So, I can't imagine that that wouldn't affect some other markets as well. It's such a weird situation. Remember, like just a year ago, we were talking about like, oh, is the high price of video cards ever going to end with these minors? And now video cards are like, oh my gosh, they're within range. You can actually buy them, but hurry up and buy your SSDs in your Ram, folks, because that might be the next one to go up. It's been a little odd to watch. Like, you know, the RTX 2060 and 2070 Super Cards are out or at least 2060s are easy to find. Those 5700s aren't going to be available to later this month. But yeah, definitely if you're thinking about Ram, if you're thinking about an SSD, just go ahead and upgrade that now. So it sounds like the short version of this, sorry, Sarah, is get yourself a Ryzen CPU and then look at the NVIDIAs and the AMD 5700s. Yeah, it's really tempting. If you're going to spend $350 for, you know, a GPU, you probably don't need to unless you're gaming at a higher resolution than 1080p. But if you are looking at that and you aren't particularly obsessed with ray tracing, i.e. the RTX stuff from NVIDIA, those 5700s are looking really sweet right now. Yeah, I guess my, before we move on, Patrick, my question is gaming, well, I don't care so much personally, but I definitely do care about video editing. So of all of the options that we ran through, if somebody was going to, I don't know, build a rig from scratch and I know in my case, the editing itself doesn't really bog me down too much, but the encoding does. Where would you point me? I would point you towards the fastest or the most number of cores you can get on a Ryzen processor. When I went from my last Intel processor on my primary desktop to the 1800X, my render speed, I want to say, was like 50% or 75% faster because I was throwing so many cores at it. You know, from my 1800X, which is a pretty fast processor, if I go to a 3700X, it's going to render video 33% faster. If I can, you know, if I can find the 3900X, they're really difficult to find right now. That's the $500 processor. I'm going to render twice as fast. And so depending on which processor you're running right now, it could be twice as fast. It could be, you know, two or three times as fast as the processor you're running now. So for me, that's like, you know, going from a 10-minute render to a five-minute render. And that's huge. Well, gamers and video editors alike, thank you for participating in our subreddit. You know who you are. You can submit stories and vote on others. Any tech news story applies at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook. Join our group if you haven't already. Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. We also get those electronic mails, don't we? We do. And in fact, we got one. It's funny that you mentioned it, Tom, from Alan, from the cornfields of Southern Illinois. So I don't know if he's your rival or he's your peer. I'm from the soy field. So, you know, yeah. All right. He's pretty cool. He's cool. All right, cool. Alan is invited to the barbecue. Alan says, I found it interesting that you have issues with a robot bartender, but not a robot car. As always, I love your tech show. Keeps me in the loop. I love your artwork. And to Alan, I say, whoever said that we have no issues with robot cars. But all we do is talk about the issues with the robot. Yeah, I will say for myself, I probably expressed slightly more skepticism of the robot bartender than the robot car than the autonomous cars because I feel like so many people criticize the autonomous cars. Right. Right. Yeah. We had a few people writing about this and kind of, you know, reemphasizing Roger's point about like, yeah, this is, this seems to be for restaurants and, you know, and agreeing with the idea of like, if it's not a professional bartender who knows what they're doing, I'd actually rather the robot make it. Maybe. Yeah. Seems like it would just, I don't know. It would be more consistent perhaps. You know, don't have to worry about if robots having a bad day, poor is going to be the same until, you know, we reach the point where robots take over and then it's a whole different story. The idea of a robot bartender put you off, Patrick. I, you know, I, uh, there's a whole series of science fiction stories from the forties about a sort of blackout alcoholic inventor. I found this massive 1944 book of anthology of science fiction stories. Um, so I'm laughing because a, I turned out to be an alcoholic blackout drinker and be, uh, one of his great stories involved him inventing a, a liquor organ where he would type in the recipe on a keyboard and the alcohol would fly out. So I'm just always delighted when technology catches up to the science fiction I read when I was eight years old. Oh, you know, uh, you know, it's, it's, I'm an Alki. You know what I mean? Like if the robot's going to shut me down, it's just as big a pain in the ass as the human robot. And by the way, the robot's probably not going to spot me like a free drink on every third order and it probably doesn't have a heavy thumb. So screw the robot overlord bartenders. We could all, I mean, we could also, we could apply this to, you know, the, uh, the kale avocado smoothies. True. Right. You know, do what, I don't have a robot for giving me the perfect smoothie. Well, uh, to, to Patrick's point, uh, Len Peralto couldn't be with us today, but he did illustrate the show ahead of time, uh, about this email, the art is titled Robo car versus Robo bartender. And is a robot in a car with the words, don't mix and drive. Please. Nor, nor should you, your robot bartender should not be operating the robot car. The robot car should have its own AI separately. I think that's important. Uh, and if you'd like to get a copy of lens print, go to Len Peralto store.com. Or if you're a patron of lens at patreon.com slash Len, you already have it. It's there in your Patreon. Go check it out. Patreon.com slash Len. Yeah. We miss you, Len Peralto on the show today, but thank you for supplying your art. You are a genius as always. Also a genius, Patrick Norton, Patrick Norton, where I can people keep up with the rest of your work. Uh, tweet.tv slash Twitch is this week in computer hardware and a b Excel.com is a good place to go. Excellent. 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