I Will Sell Him This Neo - WAN Show March 6, 2026

16:44Luke Lafreniere:hey welcome

16:46Linus Sebastian:somebody just left their laptop wide open in front of me

16:49Luke Lafreniere:this is Rob okay that is a very good thing for you to notice and for us to give him a little, you know, one of these for. Rob is the chief product officer or, sorry, excuse me, chief podcast officer for ThreatLocker who took over the show today. And he's here to talk to us a little bit about Zero Trust World. You guys are right in the middle of it. And I'm going to, I swear, I'm going to let you talk. But this is the co-hosting with me experience. Really? I just kind of keep going. And then you've got to, yeah, just like that. You got to just jump right in. That's okay.

17:18Linus Sebastian:That's okay. No, I appreciate you having us on.

17:21Luke Lafreniere:I want to talk a little bit about what's been the huge news at Zero Trust World this year other than, you know, the chief technical officer of a large media company just leaving his laptop on the desk. Completely unlocked. Does it have Threat Locker on it? It does have Threat Locker on it.

17:37Linus Sebastian:Touche. Okay, you're fine. You're fine. Got him. Got him. Yeah, nice. So what have you guys been up to? A lot of shaking hands and kissing babies and some shaking babies and kissing hands. just basically pounding the flesh, talking to people, meeting people, doing a bit of talking, doing a bit of podcasting, releasing some new products. Yeah, why don't you tell us about that? New products are awesome. So they fundamentally two parts. We've got Zero Trust Network Access and we've got Zero Trust Cloud Access. Start with a second, I suppose. Zero Trust Cloud.

18:12Luke Lafreniere:I'm going to have you go back and I'm going to have you tell us about the concept of zero trust. We've actually talked about it on the WAN show before, but I'm sure we have some new viewers this week.

18:21Linus Sebastian:I mean, you can sum it up really simply, which is to, well, in my mind, it's to deny by default. You think about cybersecurity for the last 20 years. Fundamentally, it all operated in the same way, which is to allow everything except those things we know to be bad. The mechanism by which that was done has changed. So it started off with antivirus, with definitions and, you know, keeping definitions up to date based on everything bad that's out there.

18:47Luke Lafreniere:Then we started to recognize the behavior of this software. Correct. We started to proactively.

18:51Linus Sebastian:We started getting into EDR territory. But, I mean, fundamentally, they still allowed everything to happen except bad stuff. Right. The idea being you have to detect and respond. But, I mean, fundamentally, detection assumes, well, it is breach because something bad has gone into the environment. Something bad is running in the environment. and you're hoping that whatever tool it is you're using is going to recognize it, i.e. detect it. UAC will save us all. UAC will not save us all. It will not save us all. You would be amazed. I have spoken to people who think that I've taken away admin rights from my users.

19:26Linus Sebastian:We're not going to have to worry about ransomware. I'm like, you do realize that anyone can run ransomware, don't you? Oh. So, yeah, it's a common misconception.

19:36Luke Lafreniere:UAC is not going to save us all. Okay, so now tell us about the new Zero Trust products. Sure. So I will, but I'll sort of mention the other thing.

19:46Linus Sebastian:So to sort of finish the thought about Zero Trust, Deny by Default is one way of looking at it. Assume Breach is another way of looking at it. It's effectively about controls rather than making decisions on what's good or bad. I mean, fundamentally, we don't care about what's good or bad. We're about applying controls, whether those controls be allow listings. so blocking things by default from running. So malware can't run, ransomware can't run, but also good things. Other things that could be misused are going to be blocked from running. We extend it, and that's the one place where ThreatLocker Excel is.

20:19Linus Sebastian:We extend that concept of deny by default so it's not just about what can run and what can't run, although that is important because what things can do when they are running is almost equally important. So things like PowerShell, weaponized all the time because it is so powerful. It's so powerful. It's right in the name. It is literally right in the name. Don't worry about it. It's a thing. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, you can run remote code. You can download an execute payload. You can exfiltrate data. You can reverse shell with PowerShell.

20:48Luke Lafreniere:You can do quite literally anything.

20:49Linus Sebastian:Pretty much, yeah. So, and it's on every Windows machine. It's just there. So, if you're an attacker, it makes sense to use it. But the way to stop it from being weaponized is to say, well, look, it can run, but it can't access my files. It can't access the internet. So, it can't run remote code. It can't exfiltrate your data. It can't download payloads. And we apply the same concept to network access as well. So basically, same principles, deny by default, permit by exception. So you're allowing those things that need to connect to stuff to connect to stuff and blocking everything else. So it stops compromised VPNs or vulnerabilities in firewalls or somebody spinning up a VM on a machine and trying to attack via that.

21:27Linus Sebastian:All those things. And again, you'll notice everything I've mentioned so far, none of it requires decisions on good and bad. All of it is just purely around controls. And there's a bunch more stuff we do at the platform as well. So we've got network control. We've got patch management. It's an entire Zero Trust platform. Now, the new stuff, the sexy stuff, the stuff everybody is going to want to buy like yesterday, Zero Trust Cloud Access. So the idea being that MFA is good. Yeah, it is. MFA is right. People should use MFA. MFA is not a silver bullet. MFA can be bypassed.

22:06Luke Lafreniere:Oh, we know all about that. Yes. We had our channel stolen by a session cookie hijack once. Oh, really? Okay, that's interesting. So they didn't even need to use our MFA.

22:15Linus Sebastian:You need our new product in that case. I also am painfully aware of this because I spent many, many hours at not last year's Zero Trust World, the one before that, where we used evil jinx and Wi-Fi pineapples to basically snarf credentials and cookies. Right. And it showed that while MFA is great, MFA is not effective all the time and can be bypassed. So what does this do? It basically routes all... So the likes of Office 365, for example, or Google or Salesforce or any cloud service you care to mention, allows you to limit access by IP address. So by default, the entire internet can access an Office 365.

22:59Linus Sebastian:Now, a lot of people will use conditional access, But they'll do, say, conditional access. We're here in America. They'll say, okay, I'm going to lock it down to American IP addresses. That's fine, but America still has a lot of IP addresses.

23:10Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, and you could just route through a data center or a random infected machine.

23:17Linus Sebastian:Okay, I've just bypassed that control. Last year, we took a stab at what we call cloud control. And cloud control, basically, the idea was that I'd have an app on my phone. I've got a ThreatLocker agent running on my machine. I can gather all those IP addresses and then I can add them to a named location in Office 365, for example, and apply conditional access based on that. So we've gone from all the IP addresses to an entire country's IP addresses to three or four thousand maybe in a reasonable size organization IP addresses. That was great, except Microsoft, because what would happen is we'd gather all the IP addresses, we'd upload them to Microsoft, and Microsoft would take their sweet ass time updating conditional access policies.

23:58Linus Sebastian:Right. So that was a great idea. It was well executed, I thought, on our side. But then when Microsoft entered the room, it basically all went to, am I allowed to curse on this?

24:09Luke Lafreniere:You can say it went to pot. It went to pot.

24:13Linus Sebastian:So we went back to the drawing board and said, well, what's the other way we can do this? How can we stop businesses from suffering business email compromise or, you know, people who shouldn't have access to stuff getting access to stuff? Cookie session. Cookie session. hijacking, etc. So basically it is a way of routing traffic through us. So instead of thousands of IP addresses or millions of IP addresses, it's one IP address. So in your Office 365, in your G Suite, in your Salesforce,

24:43Luke Lafreniere:you basically just allow one IP address to connect to that. All others are blocked. And that way you guys have the nimbleness for us to go, okay, here's our ranges, make sure this is updated so our people can access their stuff. Everything is going through us. Microsoft or Google or whoever, any of the slow-moving giants, they just don't really need to update anything.

25:01Linus Sebastian:They don't need to update anything. It's literally just an address is all that needs to be allowed.

25:04Luke Lafreniere:Now, this might be a little uncomfortable. I know you guys sponsored the show today and everything, but, I mean, I have to ask. Talk. Try me. You say zero trust, but it sounds like I need to trust you. It's a tiny bit of trust. Okay. Okay. No, the phrase zero trust has been around for some time.

25:20Linus Sebastian:It is somewhat of a misnomer. I mean, look, the fact of the matter is zero trust means computer turned off, locked in a vault, never connected to anything. Yeah, that is fundamentally zero trust. That is not practical. That is possible, but you're not going to get a lot of work done.

25:36Luke Lafreniere:You're not going to get a lot of work done and businesses are going to go into a hole. So that's kind of impossible. OK, so a little bit of trust then. Tiny little bit of trust. Tiny little bit of trust. Now, my second question then is never mind the trust. Let's say I trust you, but it sounds like there's a single point of failure for access to all of my cloud services if your server goes down. So what have you guys done to build resiliency into this?

26:00Linus Sebastian:Redundancy. It's not one server. It's multiple servers. In fact, it's four servers basically for each organization or each company that's using it.

26:08Luke Lafreniere:So there's no single point of failure. It is multiple. And that's the biggest launch this year then?

26:14Linus Sebastian:It depends on how you look at it. That is the one with the potential biggest reach because that is where the biggest problem lies. More organizations and most organizations need help. They need more than just MFA. The Zero Trust Network access comes from an unbelievably common question asked to us by customers. So we listen to customers' feedback. I mean, Zero Trust World, apart from all the baby shaking and hand kissing and all that stuff, one of the best parts about it is we get to hear customers both good things but probably more importantly bad things.

26:51Luke Lafreniere:We're running up against time a little bit. So give me the short version of why I need this instead of Windows Firewall.

26:57Linus Sebastian:Because you don't want to be opening VPNs to the internet because VPNs open to the internet are bad, they're exploited, they're a compromised credential or a vulnerability in the firewall

27:06Luke Lafreniere:away from being exploited. So in the same way, are we routing everything through you guys then? Effectively, yeah. Both sides, effectively.

27:14Linus Sebastian:So you have a resource in the office that you want to share with your users on the road. You basically just publish that. It's not published on the internet, but basically any devices that you say should be able to connect to that will connect to each other via us.

27:27Luke Lafreniere:Very cool. Well, hey, you know what? It was really nice to meet you. It's been a pleasure. We forgot something. Thanks for coming on. We did? We did.

27:33Linus Sebastian:There's somebody who's probably watching right now, and it's going to break his heart that I'm sitting here talking to you.

27:40Luke Lafreniere:Oh, that's right. Hi, Ben. Hi, Ben. Okay, that's it. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. Take care, man. Cheers. All right, that was Rob, Chief Product Officer for ThreatLocker, who sponsored the entire WAN show today. Now Luke's back. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. That was absolutely awesome. And let's jump right into our next topic. Mr. Luke, do you want to talk about Linux misadventures or do you want to talk about ratings going paywall?

28:07Linus Sebastian:So I left my laptop open and he left his badge on the desk. Yeah, ratings.com changes their membership program, places tests behind paywall, sort of. Ratings.com has announced substantial change to their website, citing a loss of organic search traffic, similarly to how we've been talking about the lab site. Seeing their numbers, actually, the chart looks very similar. The numbers are a lot higher, but the shape of the graph looks very similar.

28:38Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, where everything was going, kind of like it was going, where you're getting referrals from Google search. And then all of a sudden, AI summaries start scraping all of your data and just presenting it directly to the user.

28:49Linus Sebastian:The impressions go up, the clicks go down. Yeah. So they also highlighted how AI is scraping the website and using their results without attribution. The website hopes that the new membership will provide them with the funds to continue their testing across a growing number of categories. And they are like constantly adding new things. It's awesome. Ratings previous premium tier called Insider Access limited readers to not, okay, the subscribers Insider Access weren't limited. The non-subscribers were limited to 10 individual product articles per month, but allowed you to see the full test results and scores and all that kind of stuff.

29:28Luke Lafreniere:Of those 10.

29:29Linus Sebastian:Yes. The program also provided early access to product. The program itself provided early access to product reviews and allowed users to provide input into developing testing categories and kind of like vote on what things you wanted them to review. It's actually a very cool system. The new membership, it unlocks test results and scores for paying use. Unlocks test. This is a...

29:52Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, because free users can no longer see individual product scores, individual test results, or individual test scores.

29:59Linus Sebastian:Unless you're a paying subscriber. Unless you are a paying subscriber. Free users can still see ratings best in categories lists, which as far as my understanding goes, is like where a vast majority of their traffic is. So for a lot of people, this won't necessarily change that part of it. The overall summaries they can see, as well as subcategory summaries on product pages. For example, how a headphone performs for travel, office work wired gaming audio reproduction accuracy stuff like that and educational articles like their tv burn and test anc explainer and wi-fi 7 multi-link operation articles which are very cool um so the the problem is the the like new bit sorry i'm not sure where this is but i swear it was in here earlier the the new bit just riffing um is that some of the the the like graphs

30:49Luke Lafreniere:will be blurred out oh yeah stuff yeah yeah and and even like the numbers yeah like a lot is going to be blurred out and i'm gonna i'm gonna get out ahead of this one here and i'm gonna i'm gonna throw in my my hot take i see a lot of people really upset about this this is this is the reality this is the reality i have i have absolutely no negative sentiment whatsoever towards ratings over this move. No, no. And if you have any negativity towards ratings for what they're doing right now, you've got to point it at the right place. I feel like this is what we were kind of talking about when we did that video recently on LTT and we had that conversation on WAN Show about be angry, but be angry at the right people.

31:39Luke Lafreniere:You know, by all means, You know, be angry about affordability issues in tech. Be angry that a site like ratings will not show you the rating of a product anymore. But don't be angry at ratings. Yeah. Be angry at the AI giants. Be angry at the AI giants that are scraping, that are stealing the hard work that real actual human people with blood flowing through their veins are doing to test this stuff and just putting it in an AI summary and profiting off of it, benefiting from it, and not paying for it. And I know I don't have to tell you guys, be mad about AI. But seriously, be mad about AI. Because whether it's ratings.com or whether it's House Fresh, that's that air purifier test site that has really struggled with a bunch of issues we did a great video a little while back, you guys can go check it out, talking about everything that they've gone through with respect to manufacturers trying to make their lives really difficult as well as AI summaries coming in and basically just nuking their source of revenue and stealing their testing our Our discussion question is, what does this mean for labs?

33:06Luke Lafreniere:Because that was our goal, was to do kind of a ratings-style thing over time. We knew it was going to take time. It's taking longer than we want. But we knew it was going to take time and have a ratings-style product page, but more for IT tech, GPUs, CPUs, that sort of thing.

33:24Linus Sebastian:Every component in the computer was the original goal.

33:26Luke Lafreniere:What are we supposed to do in this environment?

33:29Linus Sebastian:concern that we had was okay they're written articles and people are less interested in written articles now therefore traffic will not be super high when we first started the lab site these AI scrapers to this degree didn't exist when we first started trying to do the lab site so now it's I don't know it's a difficult pivot I my heart goes out to the ratings team hopefully this works for them this the vibe I got

33:56Luke Lafreniere:it will work and look and look if we say yes we think it will work and you see any value in it whatsoever you should go subscribe and be part of that and if we say no we don't think it will work and you can spare a little bit of pocket change then you should probably just go subscribe anyway prove us wrong make us wrong so whatever he says you know they're doing great work over there I think they're our Canadian bros by the way I don't know if you guys know that

34:25Linus Sebastian:I really really really hope they make it I am keeping in mind though that i'm trying to be objective as possible i think this will work but with a pretty big and bold asterisk on the end of it yeah of like i don't think they're i don't know i really hope they do genuinely but i don't feel like this is going to lead to the growth or the good sustainment that they probably need and i think it's gonna hurt for a while and I think the ratings that we see in five to ten years is probably going to feel a little different than the ratings we see now but I would so love to be wrong yeah that would be so awesome

35:06Luke Lafreniere:I don't think it's gonna work but I understand why they're doing it and if I was in their shoes then gosh darn it I would try yeah oh totally you ought to do something because what they're doing is important but what i worry about is that it's gonna take too long for people to realize

35:29Linus Sebastian:how important it is they might have nailed their mix though the fact that you can still get their best of pages and things will still be in the right order you don't have the scores but it's

35:39Luke Lafreniere:right order and like i mean honestly dude like i'm looking at it going this isn't gonna stop ai bots from scraping them no they'll buy a subscription for a few bucks scrape everything anyway like i'm just yeah i feel like quality data and quality information is just kind of

35:58Linus Sebastian:doing incentivize anymore no one actually goes the whole way they just search it and stop and we can complain about that all we want it's going to keep happening it doesn't matter um there's no way you're going to get the zeitgeist twisted on that uh one question in here why don't we uh use number scores for reviews that's because i decided many many years ago i thought it was an

36:20Luke Lafreniere:oversimplification and that people need to watch the whole video for the nuanced take. Was I right? Yes. Does that matter? No. Because not having numbers or Editor's Choice Award or Gold, Silver, Bronze Award has - Makes websites like unusable. Significantly harmed our ability to communicate in the way that people want to be communicated to.

36:46Linus Sebastian:yeah and sometimes it's really hard because like how do you ultimately differentiate between these two things that are like basically equal um so we we also don't have experience with it but yeah in a web format everyone wants the best of list and they want to click on the one at the top and

37:02Luke Lafreniere:eGadget guy says so every game in the world being a three out of five is wrong slash s yeah like i i've always fundamentally disagreed with just summarizing something as complex especially as a game oh my god a game in just one number it's it's ludicrous and yet i find myself doing it sometimes in fact no i think i did it today who was i talking to that i was like okay tell me what are how much you like it or what are the odds of you doing this out of 10 i think i think i did that to someone today are they in this room was it you i have no idea okay i don't remember because because that's what we want.

37:42Luke Lafreniere:Sometimes we don't want a long explanation. We just want the gist of it.

37:46Linus Sebastian:And some people have pointed out in the past, like expecting that I or we or whoever would have some amount of animosity to ratings because they, you know, they have a website that covers keyboards, I guess. That's like our main crossover, keyboards and mice. In terms of the website.

38:02Luke Lafreniere:Bearing any kind of ill will or having any kind of animosity toward anyone else who's trying to test and provide valuable information to consumers is like borderline villain behavior, quite frankly. And it also, I think... People need more sources of information, not less, in an ever-shrinking... And third-party ones, too. Consolidating media landscape.

38:30Linus Sebastian:This is part of the... Every single time we ever talk about this topic, we say, you know, check multiple reviews, check multiple perspectives. this is a valuable part of that pie.

38:40Luke Lafreniere:If you manage to develop like a weird hate boner over someone else trying to do product testing then you might be the problem. Yeah, so... Not going to name anyone.

38:50Linus Sebastian:Good luck ratings. I really hope it goes really well. Genuinely. They're still keeping the YouTube channel open and pumping. Cool. And there's no real change there so hopefully that goes well. I did notice that part of the announcement was a YouTube video. A pretty good YouTube video. So hopefully that goes well

39:11Luke Lafreniere:Alright We don't have a ton of time today So why don't we jump into Linux challenge updates Yeah I shared a file with myself Naturally Even though part one is not even out on YouTube yet It is out on floatplane Talk a little bit more about that later I did see all of your comments That I was a fool You fool You've chosen PopOS After everything that happened with PopOS last time I'm not going to be gaslit on this What happened last time Was that PopOS was Like the Flavor du jour And I went with it because it was The flavor du jour Especially if you were running a GeForce card

39:57Linus Sebastian:It was recommended a lot back then

39:58Luke Lafreniere:The issue that I had with it Was blamed on me super hard. And as I've talked about in the past already, there was absolutely an element of user error. Absolutely. There also was an element of a random, bizarre bug that no user should have ever seen. And even after that came to light, so right out of the gate, I was blamed hard for 100%. And even after the bug came to light, the presentation to me across like the entire internet was what an idiot pop os is goaded how could he have managed to screw this up and then i didn't use pop os so pop os i didn't have like a bunch of problems with pop os i had one problem that was attributed to a bug weren't you like out of there like an hour yeah i used manjaro yeah for like the whole challenge so so there's like there's like deep deep threads discussing how i could have possibly gone pop os after last time when what actually happened last time was a i didn't go pop os and b the one issue that i had with it was blamed 100 on me the third part of the narrative that i'm not gonna allow to happen here is that how could he possibly choose it nobody recommends pop os anymore uh yes yes they do as you guys will see in the video, whether it's listicles, whether it's asking an AI.

41:28Linus Sebastian:I actually did something after last WAN show and Linus was there. I could probably bring it up right now, but I ask my chat jippity, like with what you know about me and remove the fact that you know which distro I'm using right now from your memory for this, from what you know about me, which distro should I use? and it gave a top three and Pop! OS was in there.

41:54Luke Lafreniere:And you can go, yeah, well, AIs are stupid. They just like hallucinate that it's good. No, AIs are trained on the web at large. So if you're going to have a little headcanon narrative that nobody recommends Pop! OS, lose it. Just lose it. Go be part of the solution. Write a really great article on top Linux distros and get some good SEO and be part of the solution. Otherwise, you're not really doing anything other than just making noise.

42:22Linus Sebastian:Yeah, it's recommendations where number one for me was OpenSeus Tumbleweed. Fedora Workstation was number two, and Arch was number three. And then I was like, remember, I'm going to play games, and it still did OpenSeus number one, still did Fedora number two, and did Pop! OS number three.

42:39Luke Lafreniere:Now let's have some fun. Let's have some fun because obviously, even before seeing any feedback on my choice of Pop! OS, I haven't been thrilled with Pop !OS. Oh, man. Oh, sorry. That's another part of the narrative that's just driving me crazy. How could he use that cosmic desktop environment is, like, functionally in alpha? Dude, when I go to their website and I download LTS, and it doesn't mention anywhere that it's in alpha or beta, also it isn't, it's v1.something, like, don't. You don't get to say that. If I download an LTS, that's not on me. that's on system 76 at that point if it's not good no no i'm not i no uh but anyway my experience with it hasn't been great so before anyone even was like why do you choose pop oz of course i was the first one asking man why did i choose pop oz anymore i seem to be just cursed with pop oz because you got to remember for me i i've never had any information other than my issues with pop os were clearly user error so i was already exploring other distros and guess what luke it turns out the curse carries over do you want to see i spent one i spent one evening i was probably at it for about two and a half hours in between work and going to our our badminton night and uh dan can you throw up uh can you throw up my system here uh trying to get a couple of my systems um so fascinating tux pilled i haven't spent two and a half hours fixing anything so i wanted to do i wanted to do my home theater system this time because um i actually like just actually come back to me for a second dan i wanted to do my home theater pc because i like just had to do some tomfoolery with my old harmony remote and i like got it one button go set up again which required a combination of cec and infrared um just just yeah and i uh and so i wanted to get the the theater machine working and i also it was a great opportunity because now that i've given up on running pop os on everything already i was like okay well that's a perfect place to run bazite and bazite has an nvidia build so theoretically it should be fine also the other machine that i wanted to do was because I was already a week into the challenge and I hadn't done my work laptop yet which is kind of a hack because that's the system that I use 97 % of the time so I was like okay I really need to get Linux on my work machine so I was working on both of those all right um Dan go ahead and hit me nope okay so this is me kind of wrapping up oh okay do your thing

45:29Luke Lafreniere:blah blah blah he's talking he's doing talking things i don't even know if this is going to be part of a video at this point i need to go it's badminton night okay that's my face here's my systems that's bazite on the left and that's kubuntu on the right what is even happening over there nothing luke i recorded i recorded everything i did i recorded everything i did i am literally quite literally no other word for it cursed

46:11Linus Sebastian:Okay, so for a little bit of contrast for mine, since the video that released, nothing has happened negative on my system, literally at all. Good for you. I was surprised I mentioned it in the video, but I still have the problem where when I restart my computer, I have to restart my mixer or else it won't detect in anything. That might be solvable somehow. I've put zero minutes into trying to solve that. Everything else is working great. I was on my work laptop in a meeting and I had Windows on it because I had to prove to Lenovo that Windows wasn't the reason why my laptop had constant errors ever since I got it.

46:47Linus Sebastian:And I did. So I didn't need Windows on it anymore. And I was pressing the start menu and the start menu would show up. But I couldn't interact with the search in the start menu at all. It wouldn't work no matter what I did. And I crashed out in the meeting and just like live installed Mint. And it has been flawless. the only thing i did i installed mint switched it to nvidia drivers which like you click a thing in the first pop-up menu that comes up that's like let's get started and there's a driver manager you click that you click nvidia and it just downloads it and it's done so like the whole like this is made for nvidia distro thing i think is a little oversold sometimes yeah in my experience at least and then uh on the flight over here slay the spire 2 launched yesterday morning So, no, like it came out into early access yesterday morning.

47:38Linus Sebastian:It has had no time for anyone to like optimize it or anything. I downloaded it, ran it, instantly worked. Zero issues. I Bluetoothed my headphones to the laptop in the flight. Good for you. Happy for you. No problems. I'm so happy for you, Luke.

47:51Luke Lafreniere:I had just less problems with it than Windows. So the Bazite system, rebooting did not fix that because I kind of assumed that would be it. Also, it's surprisingly functional. in that state. Like it'll go to sleep after a while. With it looking like that. And then it'll wake from sleep and look exactly like what you saw.

48:10Linus Sebastian:That's so nuts.

48:10Luke Lafreniere:So it's very installed. That's so crazy. And then the Kubuntu system that was on the right was like that. Just with the black screen, with the Kubuntu logo for, I think it was probably a solid 10 or 15 minutes before I had to leave. And then I didn't check on it again after I got back from badminton. I came back to it in the morning and I am now Kubuntu-pilled. Oh, okay. However. Interesting. However, I'm about to show you something fun. I'm going to go ahead and click the not start menu and I'm going to restart my system. Yes, I mean now. Okay.

48:50Linus Sebastian:I have noticed it won't really prompt you, but after you install, I'd maybe give it a restart or two.

49:01Luke Lafreniere:Oh, I've restarted a few times

49:02Linus Sebastian:No, I'm not I'm more talking to them I don't think anything I can say is going to help solve Your curse Dude, it's wild

49:11Luke Lafreniere:It's wild Okay, wait for it Oh, hold on, it didn't do it Hey, progress The first few times I rebooted this system It's prompted me Do you want to try a live environment or do you want to install? Even though, and I have this on camera So I don't need you guys to believe me. I got proof. Even though there's no installation media installed in it. And the operating system is installed. Okay, I'm just going to enter my password. I'm going to see if it does it after that. Yep, there it is.

49:48Linus Sebastian:That's funky. You don't have installation media in anymore? Nope. Weird. I've never tried Kubuntu.

49:56Luke Lafreniere:What, Mr. Besser? Show us on this game. Oh, I can show you on. Yeah, sure. There you go. So every time I boot this machine, I get the try Kubuntu, like a live boot environment, or install Kubuntu. And then if I click install, then it just dumps me on my desktop.

50:16Linus Sebastian:Yep. Nice. I'm like, why?

50:22Luke Lafreniere:Random. And people are going to ask me. They're going to ask me. People always ask me. They ask me all the time. What did you do? Nothing. I didn't do anything. I just have that. I thought you, yeah, interesting. Is that wild or what? Now, I've got a follow-up. It's pretty easy to pass. I've got a follow-up. Okay. Because I managed to break a Linux system that wasn't even mine. Oh, yeah, this is funny.

50:51Linus Sebastian:I got a message about this.

50:54Luke Lafreniere:So Dank Pods was up for a visit recently. And one of the things that happened was his system for Whaleland, well, he didn't, he was ready to blame the airline or the airport. I blame his packing job. But he got it here and he shook it and it went rattle, rattle, rattle, rattle, rattle, rattle. And we were like, okay, that's content, baby. Let's do a video Linus fixing Dank Pods' computer. so he's a bazite guy you know i get the system i find some problems with a gpu support brace that was very diy'd along with some screws that have fallen out some inadequate packing foam i rip the system apart i throw it on a test bench i re-bend some you know vga back plates and stuff like that i give him a new cooler i get him a second stick of ram because he was running single channel and times are tough out there.

51:55Luke Lafreniere:Got to take care of your boys, right? Throw the system all on test bench. I go, okay, where's your boot drive? And he hands it to me. He goes, yeah, this is running Bazite. And I go, okay, okay, is that like Marmite? And he's like, no, no, it's a Linux distro, bruv, or whatever. But like Australian accent, you get the point. And I knew what Bazite was. Just don't worry about it. The point is, we put it in, fails to boot. Immediately. And we've got it on camera. We've got the whole thing on camera in the fixing Dankpods' PC video that's going to be coming soon. Fails to boot. He does a thing. He presses enter to continue or something like that.

52:35Luke Lafreniere:And then it reboots. And it fails even harder. We didn't change any. The only thing we did was I added a second stick of memory. And I enabled DOCP or Expo, like the faster memory profile. We then tried un-enabling the faster memory profile. and that didn't, I didn't even take the CPU out of the socket. Okay? Like this computer is the same computer he brought here that was running Bazite, had all of his games installed. The sheer act of me touching the drive seems to have nuked his install. I grab a Windows drive that's just lying around, throw it in the exact same M.2 slot, instantly boots up.

53:16Luke Lafreniere:Machine's totally fine. I can't explain this stuff, man. I don't know.

53:21Linus Sebastian:I don't know.

53:22Luke Lafreniere:I can't explain it.

53:22Linus Sebastian:I don't know. I also can't explain why this stuff just seems to mostly work for me. We were talking at Whaleland, right? Like, sometimes that's actually more terrifying. Yeah. I don't know. It just works fine. I will say, so far, the experience of having Mint on my laptop again has been, like, really positive. and some of the little added bits of like, okay, I can totally do this thing, but I have to jump through like four hoops on Cash EOS when it's one hoop on Mint is like, ooh.

54:03Luke Lafreniere:I'm starting to think flavor of the week is just not a thing. I'm also starting to think that long-term distros like Kubuntu are not a thing either for me, but your mileage may vary. Anything might not be a thing.

54:15Linus Sebastian:I think the flavor of the month thing is if you're into hyper-optimization like that, it can be fun. There's some performance stuff with Cashi. I was dialing in Bothersgate and was able to get some real smoke. It felt great, but I did some custom things to get it there. If you want to do that, I think it makes a lot of sense. but yeah when I booted up Mint on my laptop it was just nice like I think I showed you the store I showed somebody on the plane in the store and I was like yeah it's just easy yep

54:56Luke Lafreniere:I think there's just a god of irony somewhere that when I was being born was all like wouldn't it be funny if there was like this tech media guy and he literally just couldn't use the operating system that was like almost his name.

55:19Yeah.

55:23Luke Lafreniere:Now's the time for us to talk about... Or you're just going to end up

55:26Linus Sebastian:getting really good at it. No.

55:29Luke Lafreniere:I don't have time to get really good at stuff that is actively fighting me this way.

55:35Linus Sebastian:Like, I can't. I can't.

55:37Luke Lafreniere:Do you want to bring up the store?

55:38Linus Sebastian:Sure. I always want to tell him to go try mint, and then I end up stopping myself because I'm like, I don't...

55:45Luke Lafreniere:Do you really want me to break it?

55:47Linus Sebastian:Exactly. Yeah. I'd almost rather he did it.

55:52Luke Lafreniere:I'm on it. I'm on it. All right. You guys asked for zip-off pants. We got you. Zip-off pants. Dan Luke screen, if you don't mind. If some of you remember, about a year ago, Tatiana from the fashion team roasted the Zip-Off pants in a video about reviewing their boss's setup. The comment section was flooded with replies that you love Zip-Off pants and that you would get them if we sold them. Well, guess what? Here they are. the Zip-Off cargo pants are built with the same fabric and same construction as our regular cargos, feature a total of nine pockets, and now Zip-Off when you want to switch them to shorts.

56:37Luke Lafreniere:For those who commented, you can get yours now at lmg.gg slash Zip-Off Pants. Speaking of cargo pants, if you're not a fan of the Zip-Off feature, guess what? We just launched two new colorways of our regular cargos. They are now available in Olive Knight and Naval Academy. They feature 21 pockets total, including four zippered pockets and two magnetic cargo pockets, plus two hammer loops, and as one reviewer put it, an incomprehensible amount of pockets. You can get yours at lmg.gg slash cargo pants. But wait, there's more. This week is all about utility. And the next item we launched is the lightweight packable jacket.

57:30Luke Lafreniere:Okay, this is super cool. And somehow the coolest thing about it did not end up in the dock. Maybe it's on the page. Does it say where the design was inspired by? Are you, you've got to be kidding me You've got to be kidding me We don't talk about it? Ah! Okay, well, let's start with We made the lightweight packable jacket Because if you live somewhere like Vancouver You know the weather can turn on you pretty fast The whole jacket packs into its own little pocket With a loop and a carabiner So you can clip it onto your backpack Or your carry-on We also added a small embroidered screwdriver on the pouch Just for fun It doesn't screw anything It's just a little embroidery thing It's decently wind resistant And it is treated with a PFAS free DWR Or durable water repellent So it handles drizzles and light rain It's perfect for hiking, running, traveling Or just when you're on the go I am going to call Ms.

58:35Luke Lafreniere:Bridget To get an answer to this But you can shop the Packable Jacket at lmg.gg Slash Packable Jacket Fashion team's been absolutely killing it.

58:47Luke Lafreniere:Let's see if she picks up. She might be busy. She's a busy lady. The design, though. The design is inspired by something really cool. I just forget exactly what it is. It's like a microscopic or like electron microscope view of something. Alright. Darn it. well I'll have to find that out for you guys next week it's super cool what else we got this week oh more topics I guess Luke you want to pick one yeah sure hold on I'm about to do a thing go for it oh wait no I was supposed to talk about merch stop it sorry sorry checkout messages comms if you guys are into interacting with you know live streams or whatever You're probably familiar with the concept of throwing money at your screen and then maybe they acknowledge you.

59:45Luke Lafreniere:Or maybe they just, I don't know, don't. Or, you know, whatever. We're not into that. That's why we created checkout messages. If you guys want to send a message into the show, either to producer Dan, who can reply to them or forward them to someone who can help you out. Do we not have a Dan cam? I'm over here. Oh no, we have no Dan cam. Okay, Dan, you'll have to come on over here and wave. What is happening? Why did you do that? We can't see you, Dan. Okay, so it'll either go to producer Dan. Hey, there it is. Nice. Solid. Run! Who will reply? Fly, you fools. Or he will curate it, and Luke and I will respond to it.

1:00:26Luke Lafreniere:So, Dan, do you have a couple curated checkout messages for us this week? I do. All you got to do to send one is go to lttstore.com, add something to your cart. You'll see the interface for our checkout messages. Bippity boppity, there it is. Go ahead and place your order, and it will go to Dan. There, that was not the most organized we've ever been, but very cool. Wow, super professional. You're great at this. Thank you. I've been doing it for a very long time, unironically, though. Wow. Hi, LLD. My MOBO died. I have a$11 ,400K. Should I pay$100 to$200 replacement or wait for the new Intel and get a microcensor bundle, which was the original plan?

1:01:05Luke Lafreniere:I'm currently on a good enough laptop Ooh Dan do you want to come back to us? Uh sorry Nice Normally our producer doesn't have to actually handle Producer things like camera switching So Understandably he's a little Behind I have a few things to worry about right now Oh man 11400K Is still a very decent gaming chip You've left out some information that I could Really use like what games you play And what GPU you have Pretty important I think the bigger question though is Should I be spending$100 to$200 On such a dated platform At this point 11400K is What is it LGA 1200 If I recall correctly So if we go on eBay I wouldn't buy a brand new board for it That's for sure LGA 1200 motherboard Can I get something for less than$100 -$200 yes i can so that would be my answer to you is finding something between now and when intel's new stuff comes out won't drop in value by that much so you should only be out shipping and then seller fees when you get that new board and then resell it probably alongside your 11 400k because that is still new enough that it is going to be very usable for someone who just wants to play not necessarily the very latest most AAA games with their RTX 6090 or whatever it is that we're looking at by that point.

1:02:43Luke Lafreniere:Playing the second hand hardware game can be a phenomenal way to get the best value out of your system as you're upgrading. Oh boy. Are we dead?

1:02:57Linus Sebastian:Are we local recording? If so we should just keep going. We're not?

1:03:04Linus Sebastian:Do you want to tether your phone?

1:03:25We're back?

1:03:27Luke Lafreniere:We're so back. All right. Why don't we jump right into our next topic?

1:03:35Linus Sebastian:Luke, you want to pick one? Yeah. Meta sends intimate Ray-Ban AI glasses footage to human workers in Kenya. There was a joint investigation by Swedish newspapers SVD and Guttborg's Posten. I butchered the heck out of that. Good job. Found that Meta sends user footage from its Ray-Band AI glasses to data annotators at Sama, a subcontractor in Nairobi, Kenya. Over 30 workers were interviewed. Workers said they regularly see footage of users on the toilet, undressing, having very fun alone with one other person time, and exposing bank card details. One said we see everything from living rooms to naked bodies.

1:04:21Linus Sebastian:They risk losing their jobs if they refuse to label said content. So they just got to dive on in. What? There is a third person in the room with you and your really good roommate. Meta says that faces are automatically blurred before reaching workers. So what? Are they going to blur my strawberry? Just faces. But employees said the blurring frequently fails. Well, yeah. Former Meta staff in the U.S. confirmed that algorithms sometimes miss. meta's ai terms of service state the company can review user interactions and that review can be automated or manual the only solution offered is telling users not to share info they don't want retained the teams don't say how long data is stored or who sees it the reporters found meta's wearable privacy policy buried behind multiple links swedish retailers gave contradictory answers about data handling, with several incorrectly claiming data stays local.

1:05:27Linus Sebastian:Yeah, right.

1:05:27Luke Lafreniere:On anything meta, data staying local, please. Yeah, big time.

1:05:31Linus Sebastian:Testing showed that AI requires server-side processing and cannot work offline. Well, yeah. The UK's ICO called the findings concerning. Yeah, I'd hope so. And is writing to Meta, EU lawyers flagged potential GDPR violations. Yeah, I think so, since there is no adequacy decision recognizing Kenya's data protection. Yoiks had to look up what adequacy meant. So I'm dropping that here in case it's useful. It's a legal term indicating that the European Commission can officially declare that a country outside the EU has data protection standards equivalent to EU standards. Yeah, I wouldn't think that Kenya would fall under that.

1:06:13Linus Sebastian:Totally. If a country has that, EU companies can freely transfer personal data there. Kenya doesn't have one yet. Apparently, they're trying to get one, which means sending EU user data to SAMA in Kenya may lack the required legal basis under GDPR, at least as of right now. Meta is rolling out Name Tag, a facial recognition feature. They should have Dong Tag. A facial recognition feature for the glasses. An internal memo obtained by New York Times said Meta intentionally planned to launch the feature now during what they called a dynamic political environment when civil society groups would be distracted by other concerns.

1:06:59Linus Sebastian:So between the data collection and facial recognition, this feels not great.

1:07:05Luke Lafreniere:the funniest part of this to me there's lots of funny parts of this to me not least of which would be dong tag but the funniest part of this to me is every time we've talked about what the killer app would be yeah for us to go smart glasses it was the like creepy dystopian yeah facial recognition and like oh yeah this is this guy you had a meeting with him six months ago and he has a dog named this.

1:07:35Linus Sebastian:I would love for it to only be local, but it will never be from meta.

1:07:38Luke Lafreniere:And it would, for me to be comfortable with that thing that would be very useful to me existing, it would have to be opt-in, it would have to all be voluntary, it would have to be consensual with the people that you're, you know, identifying, but I could see it being great for things like trade shows.

1:07:55Linus Sebastian:It'd be cool if it was like you have a name tag request and you'd be like, yup, and then it like shares your, in a similar thing to like the iPhone touch. Yeah.

1:08:04Luke Lafreniere:Like social media, but like IRL. And like before it went crap, like if it was actual social network. That would be actually really cool. That would be very cool. Unfortunately, Meta moved past being a social network and became an advertising monstrosity. An anti-social demon. Many years ago. Yeah. Many, many years ago. Our discussion question is, is privacy dead? The answer is yes. For sure.

1:08:30Linus Sebastian:But there are things that you can do. There are things that you can do.

1:08:34Luke Lafreniere:Like not wearing meta glasses? Yeah, and avoiding... I've even wanted to try them because I think I've talked to you about this. I felt kind of out of touch because the new gadget hotness, I'm just not using it. I'm not completely ignorant. I used them a little bit on my trip to Cabo for Christmas. David and I used them when we shot the Costco PC. So we just had one pair of glasses. Totally inconspicuous, right? because we were just stealth filming. So we had one pair of glasses and we would like switch depending on who was on camera and just share them.

1:09:12Linus Sebastian:That's pretty funny.

1:09:13Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. So I've used them a little and honestly, I've got to say, they do some pretty cool stuff. Yeah.

1:09:20Linus Sebastian:But this is horrible. Yeah. But I mean, there is still stuff you can do. Like we were talking about earlier, you have Linux on one of your laptops. That can help a lot of people even outside of the either, you know, pirate hatwares tricorns or uh people that are like oh my god i'm i don't want the the the government seeing all my secret informations um even people outside of those spheres are just getting a little tired of like videos of them going to the toilet being sent to kenya okay like maybe maybe i just want my data to be my freaking own and they're just self-hosting hear me out we all start wearing hijabs

1:10:02Luke Lafreniere:I'm good You can't steal my face If I don't show my face in public

1:10:07Linus Sebastian:I think you can have it at that point You think so? Yeah

1:10:16Linus Sebastian:It is what it is

1:10:20Luke Lafreniere:Magical8321 says I'm in

1:10:26Luke Lafreniere:Oh man And, oh, apparently we're supposed to do sponsors. I thought the sponsor was just ThreatLocker. They already had a whole segment on the show, Dan. How much did they pay for this? I said Floatplane announcement first. Okay, Floatplane announcement. Go ahead. Or should you want me to do it? Okay. The first part of the Linux challenge video is out early on Floatplane. The video fully goes over everyone's reasoning. So it's me, Elijah, and Luke, our installations, and... we go through Pop !OS continuing to be Linus's downfall. Sammy writes, Personally, I can't wait for people to clip Linus using chat GPT out of context and say, Why is the biggest tech YouTuber using AI summaries to find the best Linux?

1:11:11Luke Lafreniere:You deserve the downfall. You're just the best for my hen anime. That's a direct quote from Sammy. I do not take responsibility for that. Also, if you guys enjoyed the reboot video, We've got extras. It is 27 minutes of raw, hardcore hardware fixing the D1 deck with Mark.

1:11:34Linus Sebastian:Oh, no, it's cool. I watched the whole thing.

1:11:35Luke Lafreniere:Oh, you watched the behind the scenes? Yeah, that one I watched for sure. Dude, it's like... Oh, the behind the scenes I haven't seen yet. I watched the whole main video. There's 27 minutes of us just like working on the D1 deck. Mark is so knowledgeable and he's so well-spoken. He did such a great job. He's got a great voice. Not just of doing the work to make Reboot Rewind happen, but of explaining it. Because a lot of the time you get people who are just like, let's say, super focused. Let's use that word. And they're really great at doing incredible stuff. But people don't properly appreciate it because they don't know how to present what they've done and communicate it in a way that relates with people.

1:12:23Luke Lafreniere:Mark, he's got the whole package, man. And so as he's walking me through everything we're doing on this old, like, third of a million dollar tape deck, it was so much fun. There's so much to learn. And he just did such a great job. It's totally worth watching. You can go check it out at lmg.gg slash fpwan. The show is brought to you today by ThreatLocker. Every day, hacks and data breaches are happening at companies all around the world. And it would be nice to think that multi-factor authentication would be enough, but phishing websites have gotten pretty good at mimicking MFA sites. But our sponsor, ThreatLocker, uses zero-trust enforcement.

1:13:05Luke Lafreniere:So it makes sure your device is validated through a secure broker before connecting to different services. Even if you get phished, then, there isn't anything attackers can do without using an actual trusted device. With secure network and secure cloud access added to ThreatLocker zero-trust platform, organizations can implement zero trust controls across applications endpoints networks storage and software as a service within a fully integrated and easy to deploy solution so don't wait proactively keep your business safe today by checking threatlocker.com slash ltt go back to the two hey there we go and you can see we're actually here in their in their studio today we were just at zero trust world on stage i thought we did okay adam savage was talking and i have once again managed to not meet him.

1:13:52Luke Lafreniere:I don't know how I've traveled in the circles that I've traveled in while he's been traveling in the circles he's traveled in and I have somehow never managed to cross his path.

1:14:03Linus Sebastian:He's a pretty cool guy.

1:14:04Luke Lafreniere:I'm looking forward to it though. Yeah, he's met him.

1:14:06Linus Sebastian:He likes the screwdriver. Really? He also really liked the really big screwdriver. He likes the screwdriver. Yeah.

1:14:11Luke Lafreniere:He also really liked the really big screwdriver.

1:14:13Linus Sebastian:I know, you know.

1:14:14Luke Lafreniere:I mean, he's a man who knows tools. He actually, he turned me on to... He turned you on. to a particular tool. I'll accept tool file, but I don't know if I'm a savage file. But he turned me on to, what are they called? Basically, they're like a special plier. It has like a grippy locky thing here. And then you put like, I think it's called aircraft cable, just like that wire that's great for like making hooks and hangers and stuff. And then you just like pull a thing, you pull like a plunger and it twists it and makes it into like a twisted thing. Someone, anyone? No, not forceps. For crying out loud, you guys.

1:14:59Luke Lafreniere:Safety wire pliers? Safety wire pliers, is that it? No idea. I think that's what they're called. He made a video about them, and it like seriously, yeah, yeah, yeah, these are the ones, and that seriously helped me with my motorcycle painting project. Are you going to show the screen, Dan? He's not going to show the screen. He doesn't want you to see it. No, Dan doesn't want you to see it, so I'm going like this. There. Forget it. Forget it. We're over it. But those are super cool. He's so petulant.

1:15:31Linus Sebastian:Petulant man.

1:15:32Luke Lafreniere:You know what else is super cool? Lego's smart brick is here. And it's got some actually kind of neat tech. I had really wanted this for tonight's show. I thought this would have gone pretty hard. It would have done pretty well. Lego has released their new smart play sets, starting with eight Star Wars builds like Luke's Red 5 X-Wing and Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. Weird, it's like they know the popular stuff. I don't know. Each powered by a new electronic smart brick that adds lights, sound effects, and interactive reactions. Inside the smart brick is essentially a tiny computer built around a custom ASIC chip smaller than a standard Lego stud.

1:16:12Luke Lafreniere:The brick also includes motion sensors, a speaker, and LEDs so it can react when the model moves, fires, or interacts with characters. The system also uses smart tags and smart minifigures, which contain unique identifiers that the brick can detect using near-field sensing through internal copper coils. That makes sense. When a tagged figure or piece is placed nearby, the brick will trigger the appropriate sound or lighting effects. How cool is this? Multiple smart bricks can also connect together wirelessly using a Bluetooth-based system called BrickNet, allowing different sets to synchronize effects and interact with each other.

1:16:58Luke Lafreniere:Okay, now, our discussion question here, though, is one for the ages. Does adding electronics and wireless connectivity Make Lego not Lego anymore? Does it take the imagination When you're not doing mouth sound effects for the X-Wing Have we lost something or have we gained something? Come on guys, hit us up in the chat I want to know what you guys think about this

1:17:23Linus Sebastian:I have kind of a two-pronged answer I think for kids you lost something I think for adults you might have gained something I think the ability to have fun with the, I'm going to do the Vader voice and do all that kind of stuff, kind of fades a little bit. But I think it would actually be worse and less mentally stimulating and stuff for kids who would naturally engage with those things, making the noise effects themselves. All right, I got some bad news for you. Here we go. Is it specifically targeted to kids?

1:17:52Luke Lafreniere:They seem to be, for the most part... I mean, it's old Star Wars references, so it might not be. That's true. That's true. Okay, let's have a look here. Okay, Dan, you've got my screen? Yeah, here we go. Oh, my God. Okay, so there's the smart brick. Okay, blah, blah, smart play system. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Okay, show me some smart sets. They're pretty small. Pretty small. So there's kind of, I can see what you mean, Luke. There's kind of conflicting, there's some conflicting,

1:18:31Linus Sebastian:information factors. Because a lot of adults that I know that are into Lego build them very much as showpieces. Yeah, this would not be a good showpiece. They buy a kit, they build it exactly as it's supposed to be done, and then they leave it exactly as it is. A lot of kids, like when I was growing up, I didn't care about the kit at all. I wanted the pieces, and then I'd just build random stuff. So it's like two extremely different ways of engaging with it. And if you're just building a kit and you want to look cool and sound cool, smart brick, sweet. Sounds good. This is looking pretty rough, dude.

1:19:02Luke Lafreniere:Not going to lie.

1:19:06Luke Lafreniere:$90 for this. Three stars. Three stars, boys. That smart brick is expensive. Okay. Where are the low reviews? Good idea. Poor execution. The X-Wing looks like a 4-plus set. They mean age And the integration of the smart brick Compromises the look of the fighter too much The back of the R2 Looks terrible to accommodate the smart tag Yeah And that price Ooh Ooh Ooh, okay

1:19:47Okay

1:19:48Luke Lafreniere:Oh yeah Okay Alright yikes well that's unfortunate you know what else is unfortunate an Amazon change means that wish lists might expose your address Amazon is changing how they work starting March 25th and the company is removing the option that allowed users to restrict purchases to only items sold by Amazon meaning that items on your list can now be fulfilled by third party sellers even if you previously blocked them. This change means that those sellers will receive your shipping address in order to fulfill your order. And because these independent merchants handle their own shipping and tracking, your full address could appear in delivery updates or tracking information that buyers see.

1:20:42Luke Lafreniere:Amazon says the goal is to give buyers access to a wider selection of items, but it is warning users to switch their wishlist delivery address to a P.O. Box or non-residential address if they share lists with the public. So by buyers, they mean the buyers who are, like for your gift registry, for instance.

1:21:01Linus Sebastian:No, I understand. But my brain immediately went to gift registry, and I was thinking most of those wouldn't care too much. Unless you're a Twitch streamer. I suspect it's Twitch streaming. Or something. And a lot of the or something. Yep. I think it's mostly the or something.

1:21:17Luke Lafreniere:I shouldn't need a P.O. Box? no it's not a bad idea to have one but i just you know wish i didn't need one you don't

1:21:28Linus Sebastian:i just mean in general okay yeah yeah you still don't though what would you do your office is

1:21:34Luke Lafreniere:i would just ship it to the office oh what okay i know i just i was talking from like a like a more a more general sort of standpoint i never had a wish list i think most of the wish lists are the

1:21:45Linus Sebastian:or something category, which I'm for sure not in. And then in that case, I mean, I'll just flip the thing, right? Can you clarify what you mean by or something? Cause I'm, I think I'm losing you here. like OnlyFans and stuff.

1:21:58Luke Lafreniere:Oh!

1:21:59Linus Sebastian:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:22:01Luke Lafreniere:Oh, Lordy.

1:22:01Linus Sebastian:I think most of the usage out of this outside of registries is going to be that. Is it, is there something else? Is that a thing? I don't know. This is genuine safety hazard for women. I don't think like I don't know Okay

1:22:20Luke Lafreniere:It's not just us A thousand percent OnlyFans Yes it's a thing Buying gifts But like money is so easy to send Isn't that more convenient

1:22:34Linus Sebastian:I have no idea dude

1:22:35Luke Lafreniere:They're saying it's a thing

1:22:37Linus Sebastian:I don't know the reason Like I just I don't really Most models have a public Amazon wish list Why? I have not a clue

1:22:49Luke Lafreniere:Are people more likely to stretch and spend a little bit more If they buy you a gift versus if it's money? It's been a thing for Twitch streamers for years and years

1:23:04Luke Lafreniere:Okay Okay

1:23:07Linus Sebastian:Yes, it absolutely is Exposing the person's address is especially dangerous Okay. Totally. Yeah. For sure. Feels more personal. Remember, these are people looking for a connection. For professional work, you can probably get a P.O. Box.

1:23:26Luke Lafreniere:Right. But a P.O. Box is inconvenient because you have to go to it. And like, you know, going all the way somewhere for the things that people bought you.

1:23:34Linus Sebastian:You might be able to get a courier service. That's terrible. No, you totally could. You totally could. you could get the uber package thing to go to your p.o box and bring it to your house you could totally do that you could definitely oh man i think the big problem is well it's saying like uh that it could be from third party people now uh and you'd have to update your stuff but i don't think this is gonna screw over anyone that's currently on there because they would only have things that are fulfilled by amazon is that right yeah so it would just be as you're updating your list, don't add things.

1:24:08Linus Sebastian:Not fulfilled by Amazon.

1:24:09Luke Lafreniere:It could be fulfilled by anyone. That's the problem.

1:24:11Linus Sebastian:No, I know. That's the change. So what I'm saying is if you already had a list, I don't think it's going to suddenly compromise you. Because I think you would have only been able to add things that were fulfilled by Amazon.

1:24:22Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, but you can't control where things are fulfilled by. Sometimes it changes.

1:24:25Linus Sebastian:Okay, so you don't add a specific listing. Because the specific listings are fulfilled. It's fixed fulfillment, right?

1:24:32Luke Lafreniere:I don't think so. I don't know. Yeah, no, I think a listing can be fulfilled by multiple places. Do the Amazon. Graphene OS is coming to Motorola phones in 2027. Motorola made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress earlier this week. For those unfamiliar, Graphene OS is a security and privacy-focused fork that features significantly improved sandboxing, exploit mitigation, and permission models. The deal depends on Lenovo-owned Motorola producing hardware that satisfies the unique demands of GrapheneOS, which is a standard that most current Android hardware doesn't meet. Currently, GrapheneOS is supported on Google Pixel 6 through Pixel 10 devices.

1:25:16Luke Lafreniere:According to a post on GrapheneOS's Twitter account, support for Motorola devices is expected to start with 2027 flagship devices and may expand to a broader range over time. Our discussion question is, Linus tries Graphene OS episode 2 when? I would actually... I think this is genuinely compelling. I would love to give it another shot. Yeah. Genuinely.

1:25:38Linus Sebastian:I think this is really cool, actually.

1:25:44Luke Lafreniere:I probably won't yet. There were a lot of things that I ran into with Graphene OS that just were not really compatible with all the services and all of the applications that I use, at least with the amount of work that I wanted to put into getting it all set up and working correctly. But I think they can get there.

1:26:05Linus Sebastian:Do you think that's a normal amount of resistance? And your answer is very likely just going to be like, yes, to be clear. But do you think that's a normal amount of resistance to work for an average user? Or is that a resistance to work because you switch phones every freaking month? Oh, definitely. So you think it's more that? Oh, yeah. So you'd be more willing to if you were not switching phones.

1:26:28Luke Lafreniere:If I was not switching phones all the time as a tech hardware person, and if my job wasn't so dependent on my phone, if I just used my phone as a phone. Which for a lot of people is fairly true. Totally fine. Then I would be strongly considering Graphene OS at this point. Nice. Seagate is shipping 44 terabyte drives to the data center. 10 platters that's all that's all I really wanted to say they use hammer so it'll heat a tiny section of the disc to over 400 degrees celsius in nanoseconds which temporarily reduces the magnetic coercivity to allow data writing hammer allows for higher capacities and more stable storage than conventional magnetic recording or shingled magnetic recording freaking hard drives are still they're still doing stuff hammer drives are so sick they're so cool it's actually so cool it took forever they were so far behind roadmap but now that they're here well sort of here i mean you can't buy a hard drive to save your life ploof is working on a like an i built an ass video and it's funny he actually had a line in the script that i i like i turned to him and i was like really because he said something along the lines of like i've never done a storage or networking video in the five years I've been at LMG.

1:27:51And I was like, oh yeah.

1:27:55Luke Lafreniere:I mean, not everybody knows everything. The man owns the display, certainly. We could say that with absolute perfect certainty. But owns a NAS, we couldn't say until now. So we're doing that NAS video anyway. And he had to go all the way to, it was either Calgary or Edmonton, one of the Albertan cities, to find hard drives. It's not just a question of price. It's a question of in stock at all. Can I find a hard drive right now? It's getting pretty nuts because just everything is going to the data center. And just like with RAM, where you might think intuitively, but I don't need the server RAM.

1:28:41Luke Lafreniere:Surely the desktop RAM would be perfectly not supply constrained for hard drives. Okay, even though consumers don't need to buy 44 terabyte hammer drives, well, yeah, but those same platters could be used to build a lower capacity drive. Now they won't. Get rekt. Yeah. You're done, bud. Yeah. Speaking of the ongoing memory crisis, analyst firm Gartner is predicting that entry-level non-gaming PCs under$500 will have, this is a quote, disappeared by 2028. And they predict that worldwide PC shipments will decline 10.4 % in 2026. The firm expects memory costs to rise as much as 23%, to be as much as 23 % of the total bill of materials price, up from 16 % in 2025.

1:29:45Luke Lafreniere:However, not everybody agrees. tech radar writer Desire Atho reminds us that Gartner also predicted that Windows Phone would overtake the iPhone by 2015 and that NFTs would be foundational to the brands of 50 % of publicly traded companies by 2024. So yeah, just throwing that out there. That's a pretty good thing to point out. And also, you know, Apple just released a MacBook that is technically sub$500. if you jump through the, from my understanding, educational hoop, fairly small hoops to get the educational discount. Yeah. That's something that I actually wish I had emphasized more in our launch day coverage, that you can get this thing for$500.

1:30:29Luke Lafreniere:I didn't realize how apparently, this is just from like Americans commenting on the video, but how apparently like trivial it is to get the educational discount, even if you don't happen to be a teacher or student.

1:30:43Linus Sebastian:fantastic topic Microslop bans the word Microslop in its Discord server Microsoft has been fighting a losing battle against the community in its official co-pilot Discord server and have filtered the words Microslop from use in the server. Users quickly circumvented the term with elite speak so Microsoft began locking access to certain parts of the server and disabling posting permission for some users and now Sloppy Soft is in the news for it Why would they Streisand affect this? I don't know but I love it. When I saw it I was like I'm so happy about this Anyone who gets banned from that server is like that's a badge of honor.

1:31:26Linus Sebastian:That's so sick. I kind of want to go over there and just see if I can get banned from that server

1:31:31Luke Lafreniere:Now that they're drawing attention to it by banning the word and by and by taking action against their community. It's so much funnier

1:31:39Linus Sebastian:Oh, it's so funny.

1:31:40Luke Lafreniere:It's gone from like, that's pretty clever to like,

1:31:44Linus Sebastian:Oh, Microsoft. Maybe if someone tries to tell me Linux takes, I'll just be like, are you banned from the Microsoft official co-pilot Discord server? If not, I'm not listening.

1:31:55Luke Lafreniere:Forget it. I don't have to listen to you. You're not Linux enough.

1:32:01Linus Sebastian:What else we got here?

1:32:02Luke Lafreniere:Yahoo is selling Engadget. There's a couple of key things to take away from this. One is that Yahoo still exists. And the second is that, bummer, because Engadget was decent at some point and more consolidation of what precious little remains of independent tech media sucks. Our discussion question is, has Yahoo ever sold a company for more than what they paid for it? I genuinely don't know the answer, but it's a hilarious question.

1:32:37Linus Sebastian:Calm down, stock. info app.

1:32:39Luke Lafreniere:Now Dan is going to have an aneurysm if we don't switch over to checkout messages, but there's one more thing that we really wanted to talk about really quick here. Hours after the government blocklisted Anthropic for refusing to let the Pentagon use cloud without safety guardrails, and yes, that's how I like to pronounce it now. Cloud? Boot sommelier Scam Altman, love it, swooped in announcing that OpenAI signed a deal with the Department of War, which is not actually renamed, but that's what people are calling it. ChatGPT uninstalls surged 295%. Cloud shot to number one on the App Store, and OpenAI employees signed an open letter supporting Anthropic.

1:33:28Luke Lafreniere:Altman admitted that the deal looked opportunistic and sloppy. It was. And said that OpenAI is amending the contract to prohibit domestic surveillance of Americans and to bar intelligence agencies like the NSA from using OpenAI without a separate contract. Okay. According to The Verge, though, the Pentagon never budged on its terms.

1:33:52Linus Sebastian:Yeah, as far as my understanding goes, their contract just isn't as tight as... I got this from Lemonade Stand. And I think their contract just isn't as tight as Anthropics. And what it says is that it doesn't say that they can't do that.

1:34:08Luke Lafreniere:It says that they have to follow the law. Well, OpenAI's former head of policy research came out and said that employees should assume that OpenAI caved and is just framing it as not caving.

1:34:20Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Yeah. But like the way that they caved is that they said that they have to follow the law. But then if I remember correctly, the Pentagon can just like not. So it actually just means nothing. I think that's how that works.

1:34:30Luke Lafreniere:The autonomous weapons ban is similarly weak. It only applies where current law or policy requires human control, and current policy doesn't. This is exactly the point. Oh, no, we were getting to that. We were getting to that. All right, Dan, do you want to hit us with a couple of checkout messages?

1:34:52Luke Lafreniere:Let's just make sure my... Wait, there's no way you can change the lights here. Can you? Purple, please. Is that a thing? no no purple no that's fine uh how's my mic let's see here maybe make bring that up a little bit hey he's working on it hey lld i need a tech tip should i be worried about added latency when using a kvm sharing a desk with the gf and want to share peripherals but not at the price of my absolute gaming prowess i don't believe so okay to be clear there from my understanding are KVMs that do add latency. However, here we go.

1:35:35Linus Sebastian:Apparently, Wendell. I suspect Wendell's are like virtually zero.

1:35:39Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, Wendell has replied to this user, SlyJoker, over on the Level 1 text forums that Dan is eventually going to, there we go, saying, I would try moving the Logitech stuff to USB 3. Usually what you're describing is a symptom of problems on USB 3. Blah, blah, blah. I get that you have the mismatch of installed version of Logitech Utilities could cause issues. So from his understanding, it sounds like no, latency should not be an issue if you are using a quality KVM. And I have not personally noticed a difference using the Level 1 Text KVM. It is not cheap, but it is a high quality piece of kit and high quality stuff sometimes isn't cheap.

1:36:20Luke Lafreniere:No apologies for that.

1:36:21Linus Sebastian:I have experienced very, very old, very, very cheap KVMs.

1:36:26Luke Lafreniere:Are you talking like those purple ones? I barely even remember. With the PS2 and the VGA? I mean, PS2 probably wouldn't have any additional latency anyway.

1:36:33Linus Sebastian:It was a long time ago, and they definitely did add some.

1:36:37Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, we got VNG Supernova in chat saying, I use a level one text KVM and have no noticeable change.

1:36:42Linus Sebastian:I also have a level one text KVM and I've never noticed a problem. Cool.

1:36:47Luke Lafreniere:Love the precision kit. That's probably a bit too quiet there. Love the precision kit. Buying one is a grad gift for a student worker. What do you like to keep in your tech sack? I don't even have it.

1:37:05Luke Lafreniere:He's checking. He's checking. I'm checking. I'm checking.

1:37:12Linus Sebastian:Yeah, someone said buy once, cry once meta. My level one text KVM is like old and also flawless.

1:37:19Luke Lafreniere:All right, so in here I have a scribe driver. That's not really the like designated pen spot but I like it there because I can access it without opening up this monster and having to dig through it. I carry one of our little bit sets with all of my not in the screwdriver bits. I've got my metric hex, my imperial hex, and all my most common torques sizes. Those are the ones that really come up for me in daily use. I got my pliers, my side cutters, a regular screwdriver, a stubby screwdriver, one of our extensions. I apparently also have one of our, another one of our pens. Whoops. Okay. Well, that's not supposed to be in there.

1:38:04Luke Lafreniere:Get, get, go on, go on, go on, go, go on, get a thermal paste. We've got a chalk marker. That's only in there because of a recent video. So that's not going to normally be in there. I'll take that out. I've got a 2.5 gigabit framework Ethernet adapter. That comes in handy way, way more often than you guys would think.

1:38:22Linus Sebastian:You can use it with anything USB-C. It doesn't even have to be a framework. It's pretty freaking useful.

1:38:26Luke Lafreniere:I've got this ancient Patriot 64 gig. You recognize that. I've used that a bunch. I've got a little, this is a Sabrent 4 terabyte, if I recall correctly. So I need to move bulk stuff fast. I've got, dude, do you recognize this? Oh, yeah. My Molex stripper that was given to me by Charles Harwood, the creator of Murderbox and Proforma, Forma X, whatever he rebranded it, that crazy, super expensive case. I've got, oh yeah, always one of these. So a little three and a half millimeter breakout in case you have a recessed port that you can't get at. I have, of course, our precision screwdriver set. I've got some medical tape.

1:39:13Luke Lafreniere:This is great for attaching lav microphones. I've always one of these USB to four pole audio three and a half millimeter. You never know when you're just like not going to have audio.

1:39:26Linus Sebastian:That's another one that you've been using this for like over a decade easily.

1:39:30Luke Lafreniere:Oh yeah.

1:39:30Linus Sebastian:Probably closer to. Oh yeah buddy.

1:39:32Luke Lafreniere:Mechanical pencil. This is in the wrong thing. Okay there you go. It's one of our scribe driver mechanical pencils. You probably recognize this. this is a tool for just like the other one from Molex this is for depinning ATX and EPS and PCIe connectors it has saved my bacon so many times I've got a dead SSD that is probably dead because I keep it in my tech sack without anything around it that's the one that I tried to install Linux on and did not work so that's unfortunate I've got USB-C to DisplayPort framework thing. That was from when I was daily driving the framework. I haven't been lately, but it was in case I needed a DP out.

1:40:14Luke Lafreniere:I've also got, what's this? Oh yeah. Emergency micro SD and emergency SD card. Always got to have that in case the camera ops forget. This is my old portable drive. I've forgotten to take it out of here. That old angel bird one. Finally, I've got a USB two drive. You never know when a motherboard is not going to accept a USB three drives. It really just boots off usb2 for bios flashing yep yep and then i've got uh a handful of more ssds that are for installing more ssds for the linux challenge there that's my tech sack you're welcome

1:40:47Linus Sebastian:nice hello linus luke and demand linus as an fft fan playing chronicles how do you feel about

1:40:56Luke Lafreniere:things like the jp scroll glitch being fixed does this improve the game or take away nostalgia you oh i am not familiar with the jp scroll glitch um what is it you could glitch the game to give certain classes to instant 9999 job points so you could just learn all the abilities i mean i i would have fixed that if i was them that's not like uh oh man i don't think you bother

1:41:31Linus Sebastian:if you have to go way of your way to solve it as a single player game who cares

1:41:40Linus Sebastian:yeah i guess i never minded the the grind like that thing tactics you go to the doctor and you're like when i punch myself in the arm it hurts and they're like don't do that yeah

1:41:56Luke Lafreniere:uh can it just uh i've beaten it without man this is a tough one because the only people who need this glitch would be probably people who are playing on like tactician difficulty but don't want to grind because you don't need to grind if you're playing on a regular difficulty but then i think the definition of grinding has changed a little bit these days in the in the remaster you can skip random battles. So in the days when you couldn't skip random battles, there wasn't really, you didn't have to grind to beat the game at normal difficulty naturally. But now, if you were to skip random battles and do only story battles, and you just wanted to have lots of cool abilities and fight through the story, I could see them fixing the glitch, but I could also see them doing something similar to what they've done for some of the re-releases of other older Final Fantasies.

1:42:50Luke Lafreniere:Like when I played through FF9 on PC, it had just like a 9 ,999 damage mode that you could just like toggle at any time if you're just bored of a fight and you just want to finish it. I could see them just having like a cheat that you can just enable, like an assist. We don't call them cheats anymore, we call them assists. I could see them re-implementing it that way. Hi, WAN.dealer. Love the content. but gotta save up for the produce. Would love to get some of the cargo pants for work, but I must have black work trousers. Why no black? Feel like 250 characters would be better.

1:43:29Luke Lafreniere:I gotta be honest with you, we just didn't. I don't have a good reason for us to not have black cargo pants. Maybe someday we will. I like black cargo pants. Yeah, black cargo pants would be pretty sick. It won't be anytime soon though because we just launched, as you know, two new colors.

1:43:48Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

1:43:49Luke Lafreniere:But yeah, maybe. Last one I've got for you today. Cool new set. Linus, do you remember the first PC slash part that you toasted? I do. It was a sound card. I didn't realize that the CD audio connector was not a floppy power connector. Oh my god. So I plugged a floppy power connector into it and I released the magic blue smoke and I learned. I learned all about not to plug in a thing That I don't recognize into another thing I don't recognize It fits on The spacing's right I think

1:44:24Linus Sebastian:I think mine was one of your motherboards Thanks for that

1:44:32Linus Sebastian:I'm not even kidding I know that I had mineral oil On my hand at one point And I was handling a hard drive And it slipped out of my hand and hit the ground but I have some memory that it like still worked they're surprisingly resilient for how yeah because it wasn't like running it might have died I don't remember yeah

1:44:52Luke Lafreniere:you know what else I don't remember ending the show because you haven't yet that thing you do at the end of the show can you do it um I think you have to do yours first

1:45:01Linus Sebastian:I think it's an order for operations problem you think so? I think so

1:45:03Luke Lafreniere:so first I would have to say we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel and then I would say bye

1:45:14Luke Lafreniere:Wait, did this dream die?

1:45:40Thank you.

1:46:24Luke Lafreniere:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.