 This is Tech Talk with Buona Episode 290, the fall of Twitter. 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 and welcome to Episode 290 of Tech Talk with Buona. We've got a great show lined up for you. I got a lot of stories, I didn't even count them this time, but you know how it goes. We're going to try to keep the show under an hour as always as we talk about the latest technology news and stories for the past week. We will be continuing to record this show on SoundCloud, but I've got exciting news. I've got my first episode of my other podcast Game Chat with Buona up on YouTube yesterday. So we finally got our video format up and we're going to do the same exact thing for Tech Talk with Buona, so please look forward to it. So we got a great show lined up. Also I may not be doing the show next week, I'm trying to determine if I'm going to be available. My schedule is kind of up in flux right now, so we may not have a Tech Talk with Buona next week depending on what happens, but I will let you guys know on my Twitter account at twitter.com slash Buona, so give that a follow if you can. Alright, without further ado, we got a great show lined up for episode 290 of Tech Talk with Buona. And for our first story of 2017, yeah I did that, I just did that, we're going to talk about Android the operating system and we're going to look back at 2016 and how Android performed and the category we're going to look at is probably not something you thought about. What was the most vulnerable product of 2016? Well I kind of gave it away in the beginning. Android was 2016's product with the most vulnerabilities and Oracle as the vendor with the most security bugs. This came by way of a website called CVE Details that aggregates historical data on security bugs that have received a CVE identifier, commonly vulnerabilities and I think I forgot what the E stands for. But this list, I mean Android is number one, but this list is very very interesting. It's not surprising, it's not surprising that Android is number one. It's not necessarily a knock against the operating system. I think it's just, I'm going to fall into that crowd that says that. Well I think it has a lot to do with just the availability of the OS. It is widely widely widely used and same is true for the other OSs and applications on this list. Number two is DB and Linux and Ubuntu. And I think a lot of these Linux vulnerabilities may have to do with not necessarily major kernel level bugs, but I think they may have to do with IoT and just installing these to your toaster and your refrigerator. I think a lot of vulnerabilities come from that as well. I'm not sure if they include, I actually should clarify this. I'm not sure if they include that data within DB and within Ubuntu. But I have a suspicion that's the case. Is that those are widely becoming used amongst a lot of devices. IoT OSs and things like that are very very hot when it comes to vulnerabilities. And the number one application, and I put this in our Discord, I was like guess what the number one application for software vulnerabilities was? Software vulnerabilities in 2016, Flash. He'll save every one of us. Flash player number one application, followed by Adobe Reader and Adobe DC and Acrobat as applications and Reader. And then finally Chrome as an application. These are the applications listed in this list. I gotta look at Adobe. I'm going, Adobe, you might want to consider reducing that number next year. I don't want to knock the company too much because I know software, there's a lot of things that go on to introduce bugs, so it's not cut and dry. But I would make it a priority. If I was a software developer or director, I mean, or QA director, someone with some sort of a VP of software applications or something at Adobe, I'd be like, guys, look at this number. I don't want to be here next year. We're going to establish a goal that we don't want to be on this list next year. Let's get it down. That's not too much to ask for. The other thing in this story, Oracle is 2016's vendor with the most security bugs. And I'm kind of surprised. I didn't really consider Oracle to be that big of a, I know that they house Java and other applications like that. So that may be the big provider of that number, 798 CVEs. This article says most of these security bugs have been reported in Oracle products, such as MySQL, Solaris, and this custom Linux OS version. So Java is not actually on this list. MySQL apparently is bug-ridden. Who knew? I used to use MySQL a lot in a day. It's an open-source, very robust open-source database application. And Oracle uses it for a lot of different reasons, according. They got their own database, Oracle. Oracle DB is very popular for a lot of enterprise-level applications, but MySQL does definitely have its place. I didn't know that MySQL had that many bugs. But this is a very interesting article looking back on 2016 as to what was the most vulnerable products and OSs and companies out there. Android and Oracle topped the list, but Linux and Flash and pretty much every Adobe PDF application out there was on the top of the list for the amount of bugs. This comes from bleepingcomputer.com, guys. Check it out. That story is over there. They got the details. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Adobe, some more, and Flash and the history of Flash and kind of how it's kind of fallen to the brink of obscurity. It's funny how history happens. And we look back at how Flash used to rule the roost, if you want to put it that way, how they used to rule the roost at the browser level, at the application level, it was like Flash was everywhere at one point. But it kind of fell by the wayside. Most recently, due to the rising of technologies in HTML5 and other things with JavaScript that people have found to happen, I mean, this is a common thing. This is a known thing. And this is just the way technology is, is that nothing's going to last forever. But this article really takes it to the next level and looks at it from a perspective of, wow, look at where it came from. And I have some nice memories about reading this. This is some quotes from this. It says, Flash brought web-based video, animation, and interactivity into ubiquity. It allowed designers and developers to like to make a new kind of rich content that would work on any computer or browser. If both onboard systems marked the modern internet's infancy and AOL chat rooms as childhood, then Flash was the web's adolescence. It's weird writing teenage years. I love that quote. Flash wasn't just a tool or technology, it was its own genre. Quirky Flash-based cartoons and video games proliferated in the arts, identifiable by their vector art style, and striking departure in tone from traditional media. The world had never seen a cartoon quite like Home Star Runner or a video game like Quap before Flash made such things possible. Now, probably my favorite quote was this. It was like the early signals of when Flash started to, people started to take note of Flash's shortcomings because I was a loud proponent of getting rid of Flash because Flash was a common solution of a lot of my issues that I had on my systems. That Flash would be the cause of my browser crashing or even in some cases, my entire OS freezing up. And I was just like, this is nuts that a plugin could just have this much power. And this came in 2007 when Apple decided not to support it in a newly introduced iPhone. At the time, the fifth version of the HTML was about to emerge, HTML5. And it promised to replace some of the functionality that Flash provided. In 2010, Steve Jobs posted a note. You guys may remember this to the Apple website. To clarify his thoughts on Flash, he basically called it insecure and that it was not, it was not reliable. It was resource intensive and insecure and his plugin was overly proprietary. Jobs made the case for HTML5 and JavaScript because they were based on open standards. Looking back on that letter today, I mean, I don't know if some people don't remember, but Steve Jobs got a lot of criticism for coming out with that note. He was being called all kinds of names. He was being anti-competitive, not anti-competitive, it was just anti-web because Flash was so prominent, it was everywhere. Everyone was using it. One of the biggest sites out there that used Flash was YouTube. And everyone just, they just was trying to read between the lines and saying that, oh, Apple's trying to, they're trying to take everything and move it towards the Apple way because that's how they do things. When in essence, what Steve Jobs wrote here was the actual case is that moving towards HTML5 and JavaScript because they were open standards and because they weren't resource intensive and because they were more secure in theory than Flash were all good solid reasons, all great solid reasons for Flash being heralded as the system that needs to go down next. And since then, if you look at history, if you look at where Flash has come and where websites are going, I mean, right now I'm streaming live to Twitch.tv and we gave Twitch a lot of just bad, bad words. We were sending really bad notes to them on Twitter saying, hey, why haven't you guys upgraded to HTML5 yet? You're still on Flash. You're in the dinosaur years. Everyone else has HTML5. And Twitch just recently, in the last few months, they put on HTML5 beta. And people have reported very, very successful numbers in terms of resource utilization performance. Clearly there are still bugs with the system. There are still bugs with HTML5 player on Twitch. And even a while ago, like many years ago, YouTube had an HTML5 player. And even when Steve Jobs put out his note, YouTube was like, we're going to still be Flash. We're going to still be Flash. But for the most part, I'd like to think that HTML5 is still, you know, a big, big part of YouTube, even though I think a wide variety of people still use Flash. Now let's think back to that article that I just talked about, the YouTube, or not the YouTube article, the article about the most vulnerable application of 2016 was Flash Player. Insecure, that was one of Steve Jobs' notes that is insecure and it is resource intensive. This was back in 2010. In 2016, Flash was the most, just the most vulnerable software application out there. So it's interesting just to see how these technologies come up and fall down and how something can just spiral out of control. Something like Flash which started as such a simple idea but became a browser plugin and was powering all these games and all these other things. It just was everywhere and it just is right now is just a mess. The actual system is without lack of a better word, a mess. So it's nice what Flash gave us. But I think the lesson to be learned here is that we kind of have to be careful and we have to be cognizant of what the future can bring. And open technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript take that into account, albeit they're not perfect. I think they do a much better job than a company like Adobe. Look back at that list again. A lot of Adobe's products are on that list. PDF, portable display format, not super duper complicated. One of the most vulnerable applications out there in terms of vulnerabilities is mind-blowing. There's much more sophisticated applications out there that have a lot less vulnerabilities, but they're less widely used. Like I said, I went back to that point about Android. The more widely used these things are, the more likely that hackers will target them and the more likely that they will be used as a means of trying to exploit. But that's not an excuse. It's really not an excuse for something like Flash or something like Adobe Reader and Acrobat. It is really not an excuse. These types of things really should be taken into account. And open technologies are everywhere. I mean, look at DNS, look at the routing bind and everything. And open SSH, they've been on attack for years. And for the most part, I think they did a really good job ofwithstanding the attacks. And they are widely used as well. These open technologies tend to do much better than these proprietary ones. Check it out, guys. Over on QZ, QZ.com, they got the details about the history of Flash, how it fell to the brink of obscurity, and just a history of where the technologies come from. Check it out, guys. And for our next story, while we're talking about 2016 and lessons learned in history, let's take a look at the rise, well, not even a rise, the fall of Twitter. 2016, according to this article on Scribblers.com, 2016 was an absolute disaster. For Twitter. It was a crazy year. And if you look at some of the older episodes of Tech Talk with Buona and companies that were kind of being looked at as why are you doing this and what's going on, you can look at Samsung, but there's their Galaxy Note debacle, and you can look at Twitter. Because these two companies, I'm not going to focus too much on Samsung, but Twitter just had everything going wrong. And I think this article does an excellent job of reminding us sort of of the timeline of what happened with that company. It's scary though. This is how I'm going to read some of these lines that you can kind of go back in time with me. In late 2015, Twitter made its co-founder Jack Dorsey its new chief executive. Okay. To start the year, Dorsey decided to shake up the company, overhauling its key executives and board. This led to a revolving door where many execs decided to depart on their own volition. January, we also saw Twitter, also saw Twitter as slowest revenue growth since going public in 2013. In February, this is like a timeline. It was reported that Twitter's user growth had stalled. The company announced that the monthly visitors in the fourth quarter had improved over the previous quarters. Again, more board shake-ups occurred in April, two members being replaced. And the move was part of Dorsey's push for diversity to help represent the strong communities on Twitter. Twitter stock took a dive. It was announced in June that Twitter's head of product, Jeff Siebert, was removed from his position. This is all last year, man. Twitter's stock crashed again in July after the company delivered a disappointing revenue forecast due to a warning advertiser demand. Now, this is like mid-year. Around August, Twitter signed a landmark deal with the NFL. I remember when this happened, and it was big, that they get to essentially broadcast the live football games on Twitter for Thursday nights. It was a big deal. I mean, everybody was using it, and it actually worked. It was amazing. But that didn't save the company, perhaps, because through the summer and fall, there were reports that Twitter was trying to sell to Disney, Google, and Salesforce. And I reported on that here at Tectocobona because these companies decided not to buy Twitter because of the potential troll problem. And they were saying that Twitter had a big problem with not being able to control its users, and it was a lot of stuff that the companies didn't want to take under their wing. Something I didn't report on, which was kind of a surprise, was that there's a Chinese clone of Twitter called Weibo, W-E-I-B-O. And they had exceeded and become worth more than Twitter. They're a Twitter clone, and it's kind of embarrassing that they became worth more than Twitter. I mean, it's China. It's just an insane amount of people at a huge market, but still. That's kind of embarrassing. In October, Twitter announced that they're going to be laying off 9% of their workforce, 350 employees, to fully found their highest priorities. Twitter came on the fire during the presidential campaign, and also Facebook, due to the proliferation of these fake news articles that were trying to dismay users and trying to just throw a lot of foot into the water. And then, the latest news, two more Twitter execs announced that they would be leaving, and it just kept on going and keeps on going downhill from there. So I'm a little sad, because Twitter is my primary social media. I use Twitter all the time, every single day. I don't like Facebook. I hate Facebook. I don't use it Facebook. I'm forced to use it when my family puts stuff on there. I'm like, stop using this site. It's stupid. I hate it. And I don't use Google Plus anymore. I don't use anybody else. I use Twitter. That is my social network. Coupled with Twitter, I use Discord with my community, but Twitter is my primary source of getting the message out. It's a perfect social media outlet for what I do. Here's my show. It's out. I squelched it out. People get it on their timelines. Twitter first came out. It was a brilliant idea. And the fact that the company's in trouble is troubling to me, because you would think that they would be with the amount of pool they have, with the amount of celebrities they have. I truly believe Twitter has a larger pool with celebrities than Facebook does. It's very, very troubling that the company just can't seem to get back on its feet. They made a lot of mistakes though. As much as I love Twitter, as much as I love the technology, the company has made a ton of mistakes which I have gone on record to say was critical errors. The biggest one being what they did to their third-party developers years ago when they just basically gave them the boot and shut the door behind them and gave them a back lunch and said, I'll see you later. The way they handled that was there's still a lot of developers today that just hate Twitter for that. I don't think it was the reason for this downfall. I don't think it's the primary reason. It contributed, that's for sure. I don't think it's the primary reason though. But man, I don't want Twitter to die. I keep saying this. Every cast, every time I go over one of these stories, every time it happens, I always say I don't want Twitter to die. Please, don't die. Claire, please, let's get it on life support, man. Because if Twitter were to go away, I asked myself this like maybe once or twice a week. If Twitter were to go away tomorrow, what would I use instead? I can't think of anything. I'm just like, I don't know. I'm not going to use Facebook. I'm not going to use Google+. I don't know. I guess I'll use nothing. That's the only thing I can come back with. I'll just use nothing. I'll use my Discord. This is my primary mechanism. I'll tell everybody to come there, join our Discord server. And that's about it. As far as a global social media network, I don't have any replacement. I mean, this makes me sad that a lot of the Twitter, a lot of the Twitter clones that came out kind of died. Remember Identica? Remember Jaiku? And they just all died. They couldn't keep up with Twitter. Man, 2016. What a year, right? For Twitter. It's absolutely crazy. So check it out, guys, over on Scribblers.com. It's a great history lesson. If you haven't met up on what happened with Twitter in 2016, this article is excellent for giving you kind of even pointers and some keywords to search on your own to see what happened with this company. And hopefully it will not die. Please, Twitter, do not die. All right, let's continue with the Twitter news. And let's talk about what Twitter's trying to do to improve the company. We looked at 2016 and what the company did and just what a disaster it was. This is a disaster, pretty much. But according to this article on The Verge, Jack Dorsey put out some tweets to kind of pull his users as what they can do better in 2017. Here's a tweet. He says, following in the footsteps of Brian Chesky, what's the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017? And it's kind of a meme, almost. It's like a long-running joke because I've said it. I've seen other prominent people say it. It's like, why? It's the year 2016. This is when we said it. It's the year 2016. I still can't edit tweets. So that was the big topic of this article on The Verge as to why or when are we going to be able to edit tweets. And according to Jack Dorsey, he wants to have it, but he claims that it could be a little bit complicated. And I'm a little bit in disagreement with him. And this is what he said. He says that in his tweet, let me just read the article to set it up. He says, editing tweets while seemingly an easy thing to introduce requires work on the back end. You don't say. What if someone edited the tweet months later and you had retweeted it? It could be like you're endorsing something totally different than you intended. That's one of the more obvious concerns. I disagree. I think they're making a big deal out of this. And if they want to have control over the history on retweets, then I don't know why they're in the social media business. I mean, look at anything. Look at Reddit. Look at forums. Look at even look at Facebook. If you go back and edit something, it gives it a tag as edited. Thereby, giving the user indication that this particular content could have said waffle bananas before. So if it has been edited, the integrity of the tweet or the tweet chain has already been tainted. And as a social media user, I kind of am used to that. If I go to a reddit post or something and I see somebody's comment was edited, I'm not going to focus on what they're saying in that particular tweet or that particular comment because it could have said anything. So if you go back and look at the original, be like, all right, what was the original? And some people even on Reddit, there's a reddit that says, this is why you're editing. They'll say edit, grammar, edit, spelling mistake. That kind of stuff. I think the ability to edit tweets or the correct tweets out Trump's, essentially, the ability to maintain the integrity of a tweet timeline. Because let's be frank, ever since Twitter came out, I've been a big person that just says, it's really tough to have a conversation on Twitter. Twitter is not a conversation social media. It's not. I mean, you can reply, but if you want to have a conversation with multiple people, Twitter ain't the place to be. It's just saying, I remember when I was a big user of friend feed and I talked about how friend feed encouraged conversations because you can see the thread. You can see everybody talking about the particular thing. If you go into Twitter conversations, it's a hack. It's nowhere near where it needs to be. So the fact that they want to maintain a conversation on a platform that doesn't really provide the means of having a conversation is kind of a moot thing. Give us the ability to edit tweets. Don't worry about the integrity of the retweet or whatever. If the original tweet has been edited, then so what? Social media will deal with it. If you give it an edited tag. Now, if you edit a tweet and it doesn't show anything, you don't have any kind of indication that the tweet's been edited, then that's a problem. That's going to be a problem. I mean, you can't really quote anybody on anything if the tweet has been edited. What do people do today if they don't want, or if they want to change a tweet or if they want to update a tweet? You know what they do? They delete the tweet and then they add it again or sometimes they don't even add it again. They delete the tweet. You know what social media does? They go to archive.org or they go to some sort of site that snapshots what the tweet was or they have screenshots of the original tweet. They will find a way to get the original. No matter what, the fact that you can delete today and cannot edit is irrelevant. That part is irrelevant. Everybody's going to, they're going to find a way. So the fact that they're using that as an excuse to say, well, it's going to be complicated, blah, blah, blah. I don't buy that. I don't buy that. It's not a huge deal to me. It's not going to prevent me from using Twitter. But like I said, man, not being able to edit the tweet in 2016, that was the meme. But not being able to edit the tweet in 2017 is going to be kind of cringe-worthy. It's a little bit... What year is it? I mean, you can't update a database field? Come on. Check it out, guys. Over on theverse.com, they got the details about Twitter trying to make the site better. And the first thing that they're mentioning in these articles, how to make tweets editable, but they think it's a little bit too complicated and the history may be tainted. I disagree. What do you think? I think I'm going to have to rename my show to the Twitter podcast because we got yet another Twitter article. But again, this is on the positive front. And this is something that I think the site absolutely needs. It's a new feature. And it's going to be, you know, by way of their acquisition of Periscope. You guys remember Periscope, right? The site that allows you to live stream from your mobile devices. A very common thing these days that people like to do. But one of the things they added is probably the coolest thing I've seen Twitter do or even Periscope do in a long time. Live interactive 360 degree videos from interactive live broadcasters. And then when I first saw this, I was like, huh? But what? And then I went to the site and I actually clicked on the video and I started dragging my mouse around. And I was like, oh, well, okay. And now, now I understand you. Okay. It's actually very cool that you can watch a live video and while the video is playing, you can essentially pan around what's going on. It's very cool tech. Now this is the way I looked at it from the initial perspective. I was like, wow, that's some really, really cool technology, man. How are they doing that? And I went and looked at it and saw that they're using some hardware devices. Periscope is offering this to a limited amount of users. It's not available for everybody. And then I got to thinking, wait. This kind of changes things because if you're taking video these days, most times people can see what kind of video you're taking. Like if you're pointing your phone at your face or you're pointing at something and you're looking at something, you kind of got a line of sight. You can see what they're looking at. Either you're looking at themselves or they're looking at something else. This may present some privacy concerns because you can have this thing out. Excuse me. You can have this thing out and pretty much anybody on the web can just pan around and look at everything that's in that area. There may be people that or systems or businesses that may not want to be filmed. And with a 360 degree camera, they may not have a clue that they are being filmed. I mean, these days you can just see somebody pointing a camera at something or like I said, line of sight. There may arise some privacy concerns. Other than that though, it is some really, really cool tech. I got to say this is pretty nice. I remember the days when Logitech came out. It may not have been Logitech. It was some webcam maker. They came out with the software with webcams. I don't know if you guys remember the old days of webcams where we had web sites with webcam images on there that would update so often. And they had these widgets to where you could rotate the camera from the website. That's what this reminds me of. But it's like the 2017 version of it where you can pretty much just drag the video around. This stuff is common for security cameras and IP cameras as well. You know, you can pan around, look at stuff via software. But this makes it feasible via live video and it's dead simple to use. You can't get easier. And this is a mobile device or a mobile app. So you can actually swipe your finger as well. It is so easy. So easy to just look around and pan around. So Twitter is doing something really cool here. Isn't enough to save the company though. We've been talking about the doom and gloom that's approaching Twitter. I don't think it is. But it's still cool tech nonetheless. Check it out guys over on the Twitter blog. They got the details live 360 video from Twitter via Periscope. That's some really, really cool tech. And for our next story, we're going to talk about Microsoft. We're going to finally get off that Twitter train and talk about Microsoft and Windows 10 updates. If you talk to anybody who's using Windows 10 and you ask them where they're top five things that annoy them about Windows 10. There's a high probability that they're going to mention Windows 10 updates because Microsoft did some controversial things with Windows 10 that made it almost impossible to prevent Windows from updating. Microsoft has good intentions with this. I got to say. Because they know firsthand that lack of security updates and lack of software patches is a primary reason why a lot of people get hacked and get compromised. Especially in older operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 7. A lot of botnets pretty much proliferated this way. So Microsoft put forth an initiative of Windows 10 to try to alleviate that to make it as forceful as possible while showing the illusion of choice. Because essentially in the underpinnings, Windows 10, it was going to update whether you liked it or not. You had some options and over time some of these options grew. But I'm happy to say that according to this article on onmsft.com Microsoft has finally given us the ability in this particular build of Windows to pause updates. There's a caveat. There's always a catch. Always a catch. But the good news is that once in advanced settings you can pause the Windows 10 updates simply by clicking the button slider under pause updates. Once activated. Here's the catch now. Once activated, all main Windows 10 updates will remain paused for a maximum of 35 days. But important security related updates such as Windows Defender definition updates will continue to download. These are usually fairly small though and shouldn't be that much problem for most users. Let me tell you though. Let me tell you something though. The most annoying thing for Windows 10 and Buona is Windows Defender's updates. You know why? Because it pops up a little thing. Windows needs updates. I'm like, oh really? Windows, do you need updates? What do you need updates for? Click the little thing. Windows Defender needs a definition update. I'm like, I don't care. Next day. Windows needs updates. Okay, what Windows, what do you need? Windows Defender definition update. I don't care. It interrupts my workflow for a definition update. Now, over the years, I've used antivirus products, anti-malware products. They just update. Just do it. Just update. I mean, and one of the things I want Windows to do is take Windows Defender updates out of Windows updates. I know they won't because this is a unified kind of a streamlined look at the OS. Windows Defender's baked in. But if I just consider Windows updates to be patches and software upgrades and vulnerability things, when I think about definition updates, just do it. I can't think of any time where I don't want a virus definition update. I can't think of any time where I just said, no, I don't want a definition update. You keep it. I don't want it. Just do it. Or give me the option to turn it on to where it doesn't bother me. And I couldn't find an option for that. If there is, I apologize. But it just always bugs me that I have a Windows update and it's just freaking Windows Defender. So the fact that Windows Defender is still going to go, even if you pause updates, it just irks me a little bit. It doesn't, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't make me upset or anything because that's actually not a bad thing. But it just makes my skin crawl a little bit because it's just annoying. It's just like, Windows needs updates. Oh, let me see. It's one of the defenders. Oh, gosh. So yeah, once activated, all main Windows 10 updates will remain paused. I already read that. The automatic download of Windows updates and Windows is something that sounds good in theory, as it means that all users will consistently have the most up-to-date operating system. And again, that's why I say Microsoft has good intentions with this. The execution, however, has been flawed on many, many different levels. And as we get more iterations of Windows 10, we were seeing Microsoft address these flaws, which is good. I'm a fan of Windows 10. I use it all the time. I've had it since launch. I had my first blue screen with it ever yesterday. And I still don't know what's going on with it. I think I got some hardware problems going on. Or maybe software, we'll see. But I had my first blue screen yesterday and I was shocked. I was like, I've forgotten what this feels like. I haven't had a blue screen in so long. But I'm really happy with Windows 10. Again, the updates are probably the most annoying thing about it. Playing games and doing day-to-day stuff, it's been rock, freaking solid. And I tell people all the time to say Windows 10 sucks. I'm like, you have no idea what you're talking about. Sure, some of the underlining privacy concerns and what Microsoft is doing is controversial. But the operating system itself is probably the most stable Windows I've ever used. Now, philosophical stuff and the data gathering and what people think they're doing with that and some of the things they are doing with it, I can agree that's the reason not to update the Windows 10. Even if you don't like their update principles and how they're doing stuff, I can agree with that. But the operating system itself is pretty robust and sound. And I'm quite happy with it. So check it out, guys, over on on MSFT.com. They got the details about Microsoft finally let you pause your updates, but some things are still going to download like that Windows Defender definition update. Check it out, guys. And for our final story, we're going to be talking about something that's a little bit troubling and it has to do with negative reviews online. This has been in the big news. This has been big in the news lately because there's a federal law going into effect next year that will limit a lot of people or a lot of companies from taking negative actions like as users that post negative reviews against companies. And this is a very troubling article about a ham radio application. And a user reported this is coming by way of TechDirt, by the way. A user posted a negative review of the software on eham.net. And the company bricked his user software until he recanted or they threatened to say, you know, we'll unbrick your software if you recant your negative review. Yeah. So he posted a review and it's an interesting article because he posted a review talking about how you had to do all kinds of things with the registry and do a bunch of things that you shouldn't have to do as an end user to get the software to work and how it conflicted with Office 365 and so on and so forth. And he ends the review saying, sorry guys, I tried to love it. It just isn't worth the price. So later on, he put in a ticket with the company and they basically replied, you know, after he got, you know, he put in a ticket. He said, I'm trying to launch the application, but it just closes on me. The company said, this is their reply, actually. He says, we would also like to request that you not renew your support nor use our software due to the review you placed on eham back in September. Remember that. And they link his review. And then the customer report supplied that if you remove the eham review, which is blatantly false, we will remove, this is a, I think this is from an attorney. No, no, no, it's from them. We will remove the blacklist from your call, from you call. You are not buying software. You are buying your call size access to the software. The so-called buggy reported is not one in HRD, but one in the cat commands of the FT 3000 radio, which has been verified with you. So again, refer to section eight of the toss, which was written by our attorney. So as you could probably imagine, the forums went nuts. People went, they were livid that they would break the software based on a negative review. I, I was, I was just like, I can't believe that just happened. I can't believe that just happened. So again, there's going to be a law in place to prevent this stuff from happening next year. There's a federal law going into effect next year, but these guys basically break this guy's software. They, they prevented it from working and said, we're only going to remove it if you remove your negative review. Now granted, here's here's some, just some facts about the information. The company could be absolutely correct. And, and concluding that the guy's review was false information. I think the problem here, and I think most rational people can understand is that the reaction that they, they took to break his software was probably the wrong course of action. You probably could have just posted on the review site or just, you know, put up a message saying that if you're having this issue, then do this and leave it at that. You don't have to, you don't have to target your users like this. This is very, very anti-consumer. God, I heard your reputation pretty much forever. One stupid action like this probably is going to ruin many, many years of good software, good support, good company, great people. This is going to be ruined by a dumb action like this. The fact that they, they, they, they wanted to take this sort of extreme action. It's kind of troubling. I've never, again, this shocked me. I've never thought a company would go as too far as to say, we're going to block your access because of a negative review. Just think about it. Just think about video games for a second. Like if you go to Steam and you post a negative review for a game, what if a company said, oh, you, we're banning you from the game? You're banned. You can't, no, you can't play anymore because of your negative review. Okay. Now there's a, there's a fine line between reviews, negative reviews. Like this guy's review was, wasn't, wasn't very vitriol at all. It was, it was actually pretty well, well worded. It's a difference between harassing a company and, you know, doing a lot of just harass, the best way I could think of is harassment because you're going to be posting a lot of stuff that's not necessarily helping the situation, but you're just attacking people. Now if a company wants to ban you for that, they can. It's part of their TOS. But for saying that the software is bad, if, if there's some wording in your terms of service that says, they even hints towards, we can terminate you because you say our software is bad, I don't think, I don't think I'd want to use your software. Now there may be a lot of wording and a lot of TOS's that have this, but companies don't necessarily enforce it. But yet and still, I just can't see myself behind the company that does this. Check it out guys, over on tech, they're very troubling. I'm glad that this federal law is going to affect to prevent this from happening. But this ham radio company, man, they e-ham.net is the company. Their reputation is permanently tarnished. They're not going to return from this. The internet won't forget. And yeah, over on tech dirt, I think it's just going to proliferate their negative, a negative reputation. And this podcast talking about the story is going to proliferate their negative reputation. Check it out guys. I can't believe they did that. Check it out. And that concludes episode 290 of Tech Talk with Buona. I want to thank everybody for coming by today. Please follow me on Twitter at twitter.com slash Buona where I post my musings about what's going on in the life of Buona. Also when I go live on my Twitch stream at twitch.tv slash Buona, where I stream every day. We're doing a morning and afternoon stream now where I stream about 8 a.m. each. Yeah, ish I guess. 8 a.m. Eastern until probably like midday to like noonish and one o'clock. And then we come back later on about 8 p.m. Eastern and then we do a night stream where we just play games and hang out. We're doing that now. That's something that started yesterday. It turns out to be pretty good. It was actually pretty fun. We're producing this podcast live right now on Twitch. We're recording it. We're going to put the video format up and everything. So please follow the stream over at twitch.tv slash Buona. Also on YouTube at youtube.com slash Buona. You can check me out there where I'm posting the video of this and game chat with one of my other podcasts. Soundcloud.com slash Buona TV for the audio format. So if you want to check those out and also, excuse me, I don't know what's going on in there, also check me out at mixcloud about mixcloud.com slash Buona TV for audio only formats as well. Again, stay tuned on my Twitter. Whether we're going to have an episode next week, I do not know. That's still up in the air. I'm still trying to find out the final details for that there endeavor. All right, guys, everybody have a great day. Happy New Year and I hope you all enjoy 2017. That is episode 290 of Tech Talk with Buona and I will see you all next time.