WW 992: Gassy Jack - Largest Patch Tuesday in Microsoft History!

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here, Richard's here, and so has Patch Tuesday yesterday with a record number. We'll actually ask Fable to tell us a little bit more about those patches, some new stuff on the docket for the Insider program, and the big Apple OpenAI breach. That and a whole lot more coming up on Windows Weekly. This episode is brought to you by Black Hat USA. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades, it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested. More than 100 hands-on trainings taught by practitioners who actually deployed in live environments, not lecturers reading from slides. And hundreds of peer-reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security right now. AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience, and identity. 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The day after a record-breaking patch Tuesday, I give you the fully exhausted Paul Therott and Richard Campbell. It's a good thing we don't have to heft those patches manually. We can apply them automatically. Paul at therott.com. Richard Campbell at runasradio.com. You know what? It's on the mug. Run and radio. All those things. It's on the mug. Good to see you both, gentlemen. Richard is at home in the beautiful Adira Park, British Columbia, where nothing really happens. It's the loons. It's the loons. And Paul is in Macungie. That's where everything happens. It's all happening. Something tells me it's all happening in McCongee. McCongee, city of the future. We spent a chunk of the afternoon watching the Eagles fish yesterday. Yeah, exactly, as one does. And we spent a bunch of the afternoon watching Eagles in preseason football play, so it's the same. Oh, there's Eagles everywhere. So let's talk about this massive patch Tuesday. It came out during Security Now, and I think I bowled Steve over with the numbers. Wow. Wow. That's crazy. Right. So, well, I mean, yeah. He thinks it's because of AI, right? He thinks it is. It is M-dash and action. No, Microsoft has acknowledged this, yeah. It's weird to me when they make these announcements, you know, about Patch Tuesday. They don't just talk about it. They should have a post with this immediately. Like, I think this is the time to talk about this because, you know, it's a good thing. But, yeah, when we learned a few months back that Microsoft was using this M-Dash, it's really, I guess, a harness of AI models, but whatever it is, to find bugs in their software, we knew that the number of bugs fixed in each patch Tuesday over the next forever months, I don't know, we'll see, would go up dramatically, and they have, right? But, you know, like so much in life, I wrote on a different topic, I was mentioning how knowing something and then experiencing it are often two different things. Like you can prepare yourself for having a baby for nine months and read books and watch videos and do whatever you do, and then you have the baby, it's in your hands, you get to walk out of the hospital with it, and it's entirely, it's just, it doesn't matter. It's such a good analogy for anybody who's ever been a parent. It is such a good analogy. Like you can, you could be as, I read all the books, took all the classes. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Yeah. Yep. The size of a baby squirrel in its ear hands and you have to take it home. and you're not going to be prepared for that, right? So knowing that we were going to see, you know, major increases in the number of bugs fixed is one thing, but then actually seeing it happening is like, yikes. So whatever, I can't remember the number last month, but probably 100 and something, somewhere in the 100. I thought it was 300, but yeah. Okay. Well, someone's saying it's a 3x increase over last month, this month, so I don't remember. 200? Depending on who you talk to, because I've seen different numbers, they either fixed 570 security flaws or 622. That was the register and others said that one. And this is not so Google fixed so many. It does not include 468 chromium flaws, which apply to edge. And yeah, that is, you know, obviously historic and record breaking number. Have you looked at any of these, these zero days, these vulnerabilities? Yeah, I didn't break it down, but yeah, there was several zero days. I think it was 57-ish kind of critical security fixes, you know, whatever the number is. Like keys to the castle, you will have sys control of this machine. Yeah. Remote code. And exploits, we call them. And that exploit has been in there for 20 years. I suppose from Microsoft's perspective, you know, who knows, maybe we'll start doing this a little more explicitly. But maybe they want to wait a week to give it time. You know, they just want to get the patch out, have it be applied everywhere, and then start talking about it. Maybe, you know, I'm just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I would promote this. I would really talk about this. But right now we're just hearing about it from third parties. So when Microsoft announces this, there was no indication. No one, you know, the release notes of this never said, hey, by the way, yikes. Like, you know, it was just like, you know, just kind of a rote list thing of like, here's what we're doing. And it's like, okay. So, yeah, that's, you know, that's good, right? Like I said, I think this is good. But as far as it's effective, the bad guys would have these same tools, and they would find these exploits and utilize them. So while the good guys have an edge, let's close those doors. I think it's a good thing to emphasize, because sometimes I think Microsoft doesn't want to talk about saying, well, a patch means there was a flaw. But all software has patches and flaws. And this is good. The more you fix, the better. The only software is made of patches. That's a patchwork quote? 254 elevation of privilege. This is from Bleeping Computer. 254 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, 17 security feature bypass, 145 remote code execution, 102 information disclosure, 35 denial of service, and 16 spoofing vulnerabilities. But the key ones were the 59 were critical, 48 remote code execution, nine elevator privilege, one security bypass, and one spoofing. Critical means, well, they're bad. There's three. Not all of them are critical. That's what we're rebooting your computer. It doesn't matter what the schedule is. And three or zero days. And that means that they are being actively exploited. You know, if this was 20 to 25 years ago, there would be an Apple keynote where they would make fun of Microsoft for this. You know what? I'm guessing these days we're going to shut the heck up. We're in the same boat. Yeah. That's what I mean. Like everyone, anyone who wants to throw rocks. Nope. No one's going to make fun of anyone for this. Here's the question. Is this number going to keep going up month over month? When does it go back down? Okay. So I was going to bring this up because this is what Steve was talking about yesterday, which I thought was interesting. He said, and he thinks it will happen within a year, there's going to be a sore and then a plateau and then a dip. And he says within a year, you'll have very few vulnerabilities. fix. That would be really good news. I like the positivity of that. I hope he's right. I mean, it's like anything else. Like we talk about you know, Xbox sales falling, like when does that plateau? Or PC sales going up and down, when does that plateau? Like what's the natural end game for this thing? I don't, I mean, I don't know. There's one train of thought where you could make the argument that because AI is always escalating and they'll always be looking for new ways to find things that there is some form of plateau that's much higher than the average was before, but maybe lower than these first several months, because obviously this is going to be the big time to find things. I don't know. I wonder if this is the peak. Well, yeah, every month we're going to wonder if that's right. But I bet, you know what, I bet not, honestly. It's like that time I ate an edible. That one time? That one time. Yep. By mistake, obviously. I am not going to be. so I don't use and I haven't used in years no one is judging you either way when it was made legal in California Lisa and I went to we thought oh this will be interesting we'll go to a store and we bought a chocolate bar and I ate just the smallest square because I hadn't you know and I kept saying to Lisa I'm peaking right now now No, no. It's kind of like that. But here's the reason, Steve, he believes that there's a finite number of flaws that will eventually be fixed. See, that I disagree with. I think there's an infinite number of flaws in software. Look, part of this, though, is we don't know what they're looking at. Do you think they're literally throwing this at 100% of the code base at one time and running? That's a good question. You know, when Firefox started doing this, they went through, I believe, I don't remember, but I think they did something related to the JavaScript engine or whatever, and they found some, you know, big chunk of bugs there. And then they kind of moved on from there. I mean, what we might be seeing is a semi-methodical pass through, and then they'll keep doing it. But, you know, what would be the areas where, you know, the most dangerous vulnerabilities could exist? And then, you know, I don't know. I mean, like I said, they're not really talking about that or about this too much at all. In a second, we'll talk about what they have said. But, like, I would like to see this get to the point where each month when they fix these bugs, whatever the numbers are, they kind of just talk through it, you know. I think that would really add to their credibility. I can see you when that – I can sort of anticipate when that would happen. Yeah. Sooner or later, we're going to find a fix that's a breaking fix. Yeah. So people's behavior can have changed. Yeah, okay. And they need to have a conversation when that comes along. Yeah. In other words, yeah, we're doing the firewall thing again. So this is going to break some stuff. Yeah, that's when you're going to need to talk. And I wonder if they know that, and so they're literally keeping the powder dry. I don't want to flood the zone. I don't want people to get complacent here. I want to wait until we really have a problem because we know there's one out there. and we need people to help out. The timing on this is interesting because one of the things we'll talk about in a second is that they're allowing people to extend the amount of time where they don't have to install updates and rebuild their PCs more than ever before in the modern era, you know, Windows 10, Windows 11. And now we're finding more positive effort. It's like, actually, you know, you can play with the calendar all you want, But we really need to reboot that computer. Sorry. So, you know, whatever. It's whatever. It's all good, like I said. I don't know. This is not the type of thing I would bet money on because I don't really, I don't think anyone really knows. But, I mean, I just don't have, I don't have, I don't think, we don't have any insight into what's happening internally. So I am. Yeah, we don't know how much of the system they've already explored, and they shouldn't tell us because that's good info for the black hats. Right. Yeah, that's right. That's the line. Yeah, you're walking a line here. Not you, I mean Microsoft. Yep. So, look, they're doing it. I mean, you know, it's good. Yeah, I'm with you. This actually feels like good news, and it's so strange we're uncomfortable with it. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So what makes you uncomfortable? Or was it the thought that maybe it's an infinite pool of horrible bugs? You know, it's that moment where you realize you were walking along the edge of a cliff. You just didn't know it. Yeah. Or the ice is very thin on this part of the lake. And I've seen Damien Oman, too, and I know how this ends. Yeah. Right. It is scary in a way, but it would be excellent, whether it's next month or six months, whatever the time frame, if this thing did kind of peak and come down, and not because they're not doing it as much. I mean, if anything, they would be doing it more and with greater efficacy, but meaning we actually got on top of this. Like, that itself would be an incredible accomplishment, I mean, given the size of the code bases we're talking about here, because it's not just Windows, right? It's, you know, all the Microsoft 365 stuff, the Azure stuff, whatever. But, you know, this is a whole body of code to go through here. but we don't know how much they've touched. Right. And we don't know. But again, it's like these all look like it was just software fixes and we're good to go. None of them were, oh, we have to redesign Intra. You know, like there's strategies that don't work here. Somebody mentioned the Ars Technica post on SecureButte and sort of acknowledging that SecureButte has never really been secure. It was always circumventable. And so the question is like, do you just have to put a fluid that switches in place? And yeah, okay, now it's secure or is it misdesigned? Interesting. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I'm not a security expert, but there's this whole world of what they call like offline security issues where the computer can be tampered with between boots and as the system comes up, what are the integrity checks you need to make sure that the image is what it was before and, you know, did something happen, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I feel like in something like that, I mean, because PC makers are so different, you know, Lenovo in particular does a really good job with that kind of stuff. But other PC makers work on it as well, and it's in addition to whatever Microsoft does in Windows, which is always one of the weird things too. Think about how we got into the situation with things like UAC back in the day. It's like, hey, we just need to de-escalate here, and that might be great things, so I've got to put up a prompt. Like, that at least would be an interruption of workflow. as opposed to, oh, we need you guys to reconstitute all of these accounts or log them in and change them. So that's an interesting example because UIC was, I guess, a Vista debut, so we first saw it in, what, 2004, 2005, whatever year. And it blended in so well with all the other good Vista news. Yes. But like anything horrible in your life, you get used to it over time and it just becomes part of your existence. But one of the things that they've done, which they don't really talk about, is, and because it's sporadic, but every once in a while, there'll be some, like, action or thing that you might do in Windows that previously required an elevated, you know, privileges. You had to do a UAC prop, whatever, which they're starting, you know, not starting. They've been over time looking where they can to get those individual tasks out of that group when possible, right? You know, like, extend the amount of capabilities that a standard user account could do without damaging the system, et cetera. So anyway, through some combination of factors, UAC is not as annoying as it was. But that's why they have the new Windows Hello, which is even more annoying. So they figured out a way to make that really terrible. But yeah, anyway, security is not an endpoint, you know, pardon the term. It's a journey. And you're right, there will always be more because there's always going to be new code introduced. But presumably they will run it through the evaluator before they ship it and get those patches done before we ever see it. We'll see. We don't know how this ebbs and flows. Microsoft always talks about some kind of security-first development strategy. Yeah, okay. But the secure feature initiative, perhaps? Being the latest example, yeah. But over on Donnet Rocks, we're talking about these kinds of security testings as part of the CICD pipeline to start picking up more. But it's all very new. Like, everyone's still struggling with what's the right way to go about this stuff. Yeah, and that, too, will change. I mean, that's the thing. You know, there'll be best practices for now, and then six months, a year later, those things are going to shift, you know, as AA changes and whatever. But anyway, look, I know this is a big number, but whatever that number is, there seems to be some debate there. But several hundred things. It's also poking back through decades' worth of code. Mm-hmm. I hope there's some kind of, you know, most of the, well, some percentage of the people who wrote the code for these issues are long gone. And the long percentage are still there. I hope there's some kind of an email thread or however they do it where it's like, come up. Seriously, buffer overrun. But, you know, you might want to look at the bugs in Mindful. I don't know if you knew it was 2026 and we don't do buffer overflow anymore. But, yes, you managed to do it somehow. So, you know, yeah. I think that's Steve's theory is that there'll be fewer bugs introduced. So eventually you get all the bugs that are legacy bugs, and then you write code together. My entire life, the first time I found out about a computer being a thing and knowing that you could, as an individual, write software, make your own apps or games, whatever. I've said this many times. I've held on to this belief that software is just zeroes and ones. It could be perfect. It should be perfect. It is never perfect. Yeah. It is bizarre. He writes an assembly language, so he's as close to zero and one. Yeah, exactly. It's incredible. So, look, for all the – we're going to be debating AI for the rest of our lives probably at this rate. But, you know, there's the good and the bad. And this to me is still – I don't mean to say it makes it all worthwhile because that's a tough one. But this is, to me, the greatest use case for this. And it's the thing, you know, we see this with the platform makers. Apple's doing this. Microsoft's doing this. And Windows, like, taking a step back from just the relentless forward push for new improvements and evolution and whatever and just, like, fixing things. You know, like, actually making it work correctly is awesome. It's just awesome. So, yes, good, bad, indifferent, whatever. But this stuff, to me, is just excellent. So, anyway. Okay, so there is this. This has been an interesting year because, you know, what are we in the seventh month? I would say four of those months, the Patch Tuesdays have been light on new features. The three that have been big have been changes related to this pain points thing that Devon Pavolori talked about way back in, I don't know, February or whatever. And we've seen over time improvements to some of the Windows Update stuff. Just recently, this is coming up later, but Windows Search is coming, Start, Taskbar, Widgets, you know, there's all these things. But one of the big questions is, okay, I'm super excited to be doing this work. When are we actually going to see some of this stuff, right? This goes back to the thing I wanted to do last year where I wanted to do like a new feature tracker for Windows 11, which I found to be impossible. And I'd say the way they've changed the Insider Program makes it even more difficult. I want to tie this into the book so that as things change on whatever monthly basis, that, like, I can update the book to reflect those changes. So that's never going to work, but that's my idea. This month is one of the more interesting ones because I would say there are, I guess I'll call it three major features that are important. So we talked about probably all of these because they've gone through the Insider Program, but now they're unstable. So, point in time. Hold just a second before you. That's a good tease. Let me do an ad. And then. Fine. I'm looking ahead. Fine. Run the business. I don't care. The show is going to be a little heavy at the end. A little heavy at the end. That's some foreshadowing right there. Yeah. An hour and 15 minutes of actual content. I want to get the ad in now. before it gets a little leaden. No, we have a great whiskey bit coming up, and I just, I don't want, I hate to interrupt the whiskey bit, so let's talk about sleeping right now. What do you say? I've been looking at my sleep scores lately. I've been paying attention, and they're going up and up, and I think I can blame our sponsor. It's all your fault. Helix Sleep. Love you guys. 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Go to helixsleep.com slash windows for 27% off site-wide during their 4th of July sale. extended the best of web offer, helixsleep.com slash windows, 27% off site-wide exclusively for listeners of Windows Weekly. In fact, make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Now, the offer has been extended to August 2nd. So don't delay if you're listening after the sale ends. You should still check them out. I would suggest getting there now, helixsleep.com slash windows. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. And I personally thank them for a great night's sleep. Back to, speaking of sleep, the latest in the windows inside of the room. I do sleep poorly, Leo. Thank you for bringing that up. Paul, I'm telling you, Alzheimer's, we all have to do our best to fight it, get that cerebrospinal fluid flowing. I'm sure Richard said a talk on it at one point or another. I talk about it in the context of the space station, right? Oh. Because that's one of the issues for anyone in free fall is the fluid builds up in your head. To the point where it crosses against your eyes and bends them. Every astronaut carries multiple pairs of glasses. Because their prescriptions change as they're in space. Because their eyes change shape. Is glaucoma a problem? No. No. Do some of them actually get better vision? No. Because that would be amazing. That would be awesome. Tom wants to sign up. Just like to shoot yourself at his face to fix your eyes, you know? That would be cool, wouldn't it? That's why they're all puppy-faced is that cerebral final fluid. Oh, that's interesting. It's one of the things that doesn't function. All right. Yes. So, Patch Tuesday for Windows 11, I would say three major features, right? So, point-in-time restore. I think we talked about all these really, but this is the modern replacement for system restore, which is still in there. I thought they were going to kill system restore. Yeah, everyone did. But everyone thought they were killing the control panel too. But, you know, it's kind of there. So maybe they will in time. I feel like this thing needs to become a little more, I don't know, customizable on a granular level. But for right now, it's just automatic. It's once a day. There's a max size and number that you can store. So it's never going to be more than three or four, maybe five days at most. But it performs that function that System Restore does, but you have to run it from the Windows recovery environment if you actually want to restore it. So it's not 100% ideal, but it is more modern, and it incorporates more data, including your apps and settings and personal files. So it's not just about drive or rollback or whatever, and we'll see what happens to the rest of your computer, and we'll see. So it's out now. It seems to work fine for what it is, but it is a modern replacement for something that's been in Windows for probably 25 years, I would think. And then the widgets one is just as classic to me because for the past, I don't know, five years-ish or whatever, you've asked me, like, how would you configure widgets exactly the way they're doing it now? Go in and turn off all of the notifications, turn off the news feed thing, which is terrible. stop showing little things on the task bar unless it's just like a weather display. They're doing that now by default. So nice, right? And in a month or two, and actually later in the show we'll talk about it, they're making similar changes to search as well. But this is out in stable now, so nice. The one thing I don't know, and I think I mentioned this before, is if you have an existing computer, maybe you've configured widgets already the way you want it. Is it going to change your configuration so that it's this new quieter thing? I'm guessing no, but I need to experience this across more computers to be sure. But that's good. And then the Windows update improvements are something I thought was actually already out. But the primary change here is if you go into Windows Update in the Settings app, you can – there's always been a way to pause updates for some number of days, and there was a dropdown before that was – no, that's not true. I think it was like pause it for one week, and then you can click it again. It was like 14 days, 21 days, 28 days, that kind of thing. And now what you get is a calendar control. and you can pause it for up to 35 days, and you can keep doing that as much as you want. So you wouldn't do it every day, but if you did it today, 35 days, nice, and then you waited a week and you clicked it again, you go 35 days out from that date. Like, you can just keep extending it. Now, a patch usually like the one we saw today, I'm guessing they would actually force this on you. You know, it's some day one or some zero-day fixes, et cetera. So there's always going to be provisions for that kind of thing. But also everything you've delayed up until that point, yeah, all comes crashing down on you. Right. So depending on how you have Windows Update configured, because you could do things like install preview updates. You can have it install software, other Microsoft software, so things like .NET updates. Well, actually .NET updates would be in there, but Visual Studio updates would go into Office updates, whatever else. they're lighting these things up to have the same basic milestones so that instead of you getting into a situation where maybe you have two reboots a month or maybe even more, if you do reboot and you just stick it to the normal schedule, it should be one reboot and it will be the same day every month. So, you know, a little bit more predictable and transparent, et cetera. So that's good. And then the rest of this is fairly minor. And, again, we've talked about all this. The screen tent feature, which is kind of just a color overlay. I'm not sure about that one. Some magnifier, zoom control improvements. The Bluetooth connectivity stuff, we've already talked about a bunch. You know, voice access, typing improvements. Not the feature I want in touchpads, but you can customize the size of the right-click zone now by, you know, when you right-click or, like, press and hold or do two-figure or whatever, however you do it. On your touchpad, what I want is the opposite. I want the entire touchpad to be used for right-click every time. That makes me crazy. I think I yell at my computer up to a dozen times a day for this exact issue. Like, it makes me insane. And I don't. But is it listening? Is it really listening? No, it's not. It absolutely is not. So that's irritating. And then if you have a 26H1-based computer, which means you have a Snapdragon X2 computer, You are getting the point-in-time restore feature, right? So they're starting to line those up a little bit better. But for the most part, that release is still, I would say, month behind is the way to look at that. Okay, so that's cool. As far as Microsoft discussing this, I think it was before Patch Tuesday, Pavan Davalori wrote a post detailing how Windows is using M-Dash, which the way they describe it is a multimodal agentic scanning harness. I love AI terms, by the way. It uses multiple AI models, including third-party models, right? So they're trying to talk about this a little bit. Some of this is in-house, of course, to identify security issues before they go out to the public, in addition to the ones they're fixing, the ones that have probably been there forever in many cases. Not a lot of details here, actually. And I think this ties into what Richard was saying. You don't want to provide the bad actors with too much information they could use against you, right? But in the current environment where AI is being used to discover vulnerabilities in software and potentially take advantage of that, you know, Microsoft and other platform makers are working to try to prevent that. The Windows code base is so large that in order for the Windows code base to get to GitHub, they had to submit to the Git library a mechanism for storing very large source code files. I thought you were going to say they had to physically deliver a disk of some kind because transferring this over the network would have been in violation of every terms of service that anyone has. How great is it? It's hundreds of gigs. but the point is don't point M-dash at the whole code base and go find the vulnerability because it'll never come back plus the planet drives to a halt yeah that's a really good point that's what I mean I think a lot of this well you have to look at the interdependencies as well but I do feel like the first pass or passes is individual code blocks go after the kernel go after the most exploitables but as soon as you're still making an assessment bit by bit. Yep. As you clear things out... Sorry. Some of them are chained. Yeah, that's what I was going to... Exactly. That's the interdependency thing. You know, there's going to be a code module over here that hasn't been touched in 10 years, but there's a newer one over here, and they interact, and where's the problem? And sometimes when you fix an issue over here, it either causes one over here, or suddenly you see something over here because now that thing's working properly, so to speak, or whatever. Right. A lot of... It's... I'm sure it's a mess. Like, you know, again, look, I just have a stupid book. Just updating my book is a nightmare. The fact that, you know, this thing, which is exponentially bigger and more complex. Well, and I move back to the, you know, the original story here of the 600 fixes. Over what surface area of windows? That's the thing, right? We don't know. Well, can you tell if you look at them? I mean, is it, maybe it's not enough. You know, I think you might really get some detail out of it that way. Yeah. AI, what region of Windows is there? What region of Windows? Yes. Yeah, the nether region, Leo. Only Microsoft will know, though, because they're the ones who kind of know what the chunks are. I mean, we can surmise, but they know where the libraries live. They know where the bodies are buried. Yeah. But you can also imagine just to make a forest pass through the entire code base is probably going to be many different iterations, many different copies. Well, yeah. I mean, yesterday I asked Chad GBT to look at my health records, and he said, I can't do that. There's too many. You've been alive too long. Thank you so much. I'm not saying you have endemic problems. He actually said, I'm going to have to chunk it up because I just can't, I don't have enough memory to do all of it. He said an appropriate thing to say during a health conversation. There are thousands. Well, the reason is I imported all of my Apple health records for the last 15 years or something. I didn't even do something like that. It said literally there's 10,000 Apple health records in here. So I think it made a SQLite database. We're actually going to need you to get a full-blown SQL server license for this one, Leo. So imagine, I mean, that's just my health records. Imagine what Windows, the Windows code base must look like to. You just can't get it all in context, so it just can't work on it all at once. Not to mention just the various technologies they must have used over time. You know, I'm sure there are giant code bases in C and C++, et cetera. But there have got to be also giant code bases in other things. Whatever was modern framework at the time, plus, I mean, depending on the planet, I'm sure there's a lot of assembly in there still, right, from, you know, for performance reasons, et cetera. I mean, I can't even. I don't know. It's kind of scary. But, okay. So I assume you're going to work on that, Leo, because I actually do want to. I'm kind of curious what it has to say about, like, where. I have. It's done. Oh, it's done already. It's just okay. Oh, yeah. All right. What do we got yesterday? Yeah. You want to know what my health is? No, not your health. I'm sorry. I meant the, like, where the, sorry. Oh, oh, oh, oh. You meant, oh, yeah. Let me, you really want me to do that? I could do that. I mean, I think it might be worth, I don't know. I'm kind of interested to see what it says. Who should I ask? Should I ask Fable? Should I ask Saul? Should I ask the, I can't. I have them all. Right. I'll ask Fable. Table's not doing anything right now. It's been working very hard. Oh, and by the way, I found the most of them, so screw Microsoft. Table is, we think, mythos with some limits on it. I think Anthropics basically said that. Yeah. Yeah. So it would be the one. All right. I'll – Yeah, I'm just – if you don't mind. I mean, you know, it's not – now that you said that, it's in my head. I'm kind of curious. That's a good use of AI, I think. Yeah. Table has to analyze this like this. Yeah, because I can't do it. It seems like a good, yeah, maybe, I don't know. I'm curious. I'm just curious about what it says. So, again, you know, this came up earlier, but when you think back to the pain points memo or whatever that was, the blog post from Pavon Daviluri, you know, it didn't touch on all the big in-shartification stuff in Windows, but major improvements across some of the major surfaces, as Microsoft would call them, that users interact with every day, right? So start taskbar widgets search like Windows search I just mentioned that the way they are now configuring widgets is the way that I recommended it And what they about to do for Windows Search is likewise similar to the way you know the recommendations I made and the things I do on my own computers, right? Because Windows Search, which is the thing, you know, there's a million ways to get to this. It's Access Points or Legion. You know, you bring up Start, you just start typing. That's Windows Search, right? If you have the search box on your taskbar, you can type in a little box. and that's Windows Search, right? You can just Windows Key Plus S bring up Windows Search. You can just bring it up directly, right? There are elements of Windows Search in the File Explorer, actually in Settings now as well. And Windows Search is this kind of multi-headed hydra where as you type, you can filter the results by things like apps, documents, settings, et cetera. And it searches the web by default. You know, it searches OneDrive by default. Well, it does these things that I think in many people's cases either is not wanted or definitely not what they expected, right? I think most people, when they're searching from within Windows, using UI in Windows, are searching for files, you know, documents. They might be searching for settings. I definitely, you know, because we're used to it, searching for apps, right? This is the main way to run apps. But they've been certified this thing, right? And one of the things that is not addressed, and this goes to my original point from three, five months ago, whatever that was, when I talked about this, a lot of fixes. It's good. But if you do click on a web search, you know, link or web link or whatever, it's going to open in Microsoft Edge, right? Right. Even if you've made Chrome or whatever other browser you default. They're not changing that. That's not in this list of fixes, right? And to me, that's the biggest problem here. There are third-party tools that you can use to fix that, but they're not addressing that. What they are doing is make, and this is something we're seeing actually Microsoft Edge are doing this as well, that we're seeing this throughout the Microsoft kind of client ecosystem, kind of decluttering the UI, cleaning it up, making it more what you would expect, right? So they're not going to, well, there have been controls for a long time to turn up certain things like search highlights, which is terrible or has been terrible, which is just a series of attempts to get you to click on something else when you're in the middle of doing something, which is super distracting, that you bring up a start menu, you're trying to find some Windows utilities. So you type in like Windows. And then over on the right, there's this thing. It's like, hey, it's like Otter Day. Do you want to find out more about otters? And you're like, yeah. And then you click on it, and then like five hours later. And you're like, I didn't even know the thing was still on my computer. And then you forget what you were doing, right? I mean, to me, it's like the most ridiculous, you know, but it's all about getting you in front of Microsoft's only services and advertising and tracking you. And being able to catch you as a monthly active user. Yep. And so they're just toning that stuff down. I think it's great. I mean, there's some layout changes, you know, just to make it look clear, et cetera, et cetera. They've taken some, I would say, some promotional material out of web results. But, again, you're clicking on this thing, it's going to go to edge. It just makes me crazy. So this is one, given the way things have gone, I would say with Starts, Taskbar, Now, Widgets, and Windows Update, I'm guessing, and I have to guess, and this is the problem, that we're going to see these improvements in stable before the next major feature update in October. I think this is a 25H2 slash 26H1 kind of deliverable. But they don't really talk about that too much. There was one exception to that, by the way, and I don't think it's even in the notes. Yeah, I don't remember. I just saw a, oh, crap. I'm forgetting now. But there was a recent, it was in a tech community post, so they were talking about something in Windows, and this is something for 26H2. And I was like, oh, look at you guys, like actually explaining when something's going to happen. But everything they're doing right now through the Insider program, let me think about it. You know what it was? It was something tied to Windows Backup for Business, which is being renamed to, I think, Windows Backup and Restore. So this is a 26H2 deliverable. It's not in the notes. But anyway, this thing, like I said, it's good. It doesn't address my biggest concerns. This is fairly typical. They've done other things, and some of this has already occurred in Windows, where they're improving the, I would call it, reliability and performance of search just throughout the system, meaning that if you go to the FindVox and File Explorer or use Windows Search directly, whatever it is, and you start typing, it actually finds things that you're looking for quicker or at all, by the way, which is actually a huge problem in File Explorer. Or there used to be a problem in Windows Search. I'll just try this now because this is always driving me crazy. You start typing, and if you left off the first letter by mistake or it just didn't catch it, it would never find that thing. So if you typed, like, OATPAD without the N, you know, two months ago, eight months ago, two years ago, it would be like, yeah, that doesn't exist. If you left off the first letter, you've got nothing. You've got nothing. So, by the way, that works now. So you can typo it, Pat. I'm not saying it should, but, I mean, you know, that would work. Like, that's actually right now. I have typos all the time that it sees through. That is a relief. That's how it should. I mean, that's how technology should work, right? It should. You know, I just typed pad and it worked. There is the other side to that, though. Steve was talking about this yesterday in security now, that if an AI is building something for you and it doesn't know the name of a library, it can hallucinate a name. and hackers have figured out that it tends to hallucinate along certain lines. So they've created malicious GitHub repos with those names. Wow. So there may be, for instance, an Oatpad GitHub repo. So this is the AI version of like a malicious URL that's sort of like Microsoft. Exactly. Microsoft.com both of the one or something. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Same idea. Interesting. Yeah. You don't want it to make up stuff, but at the same time, you do want it to kind of understand what you meant, not what you said. The big one for me, like this is like, because I, you know, I look at this all the time because I have to write about it, right? So a year ago, I'll call it maybe two years ago, but certainly somewhere in that time frame. If you, like a brand new Windows install, if you like type C-A-L, the first result would be camera and not calculator, which is C-A-L. And you're like, what? So if you hit enter, like, because you would just knee-jerk hit enter, you're like, C-A-L enter, and then it runs camera, and you're like, why am I looking at myself? Now you have trained this thing that this is the thing you're looking for when you type C-A-L. So you actually, like, you have to, like, subvert it after that, like, by correctly choosing now the right app, and then it will, you know, kind of learn again. That doesn't correct. Yeah. So, I mean, like, that's how stupid Windows Search was. Like, Windows Search was actually really bad. So, you know, between the back end stuff, which I think mostly has already occurred, and then the changes they're making to UI here, you know, we're not getting 100% there. It's still Edge and all that stuff. But there's some big, big improvements. So if you're in the Insider program, this is – the way they described this makes it impossible to know for sure. But it's in the experimental channel. I think there are 11 experimental channels. I have trouble counting. But I don't actually know, you know – I'm so excited to see the plethora of Insider stuff happening again. because I thought we consolidated for a minute there, and I was shocked. Yeah, and you're like, oh, look at these guys. You're like, no, that doesn't. Yeah, so this one I've not seen yet. I'm going to have to – I'm leaving soon, too. I've got to figure this out. But it is a controlled feature rollout because, yeah, we're never going to solve that problem. It should be a feature flag. So if you're familiar with the new Insider program, you can go in and say, no, I actually want this thing right away. I assume it's in there. I haven't seen it yet. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. But that's good. That's good. So I'm trying to think if there's anything major they actually said that they haven't at least started testing any insider program. And I could be wrong, but I think this is the last big one. Wow. And then we'll see what they have planned for 26H2, I guess, after this. The big one. What did he say? It is July. It's the big one, Lisbeth. It's the big one, Lisbeth. Yep. It might have been the greatest show ever made. Thank you for putting that in my head. Nice. What was I going to say? Oh, yeah. So, yeah, so they're, you know, fixing these things in Windows. This is 26, sorry, 25H2, like I said, 26, I guess 24H2 as well. And then as we head into the fall, we'll have this feature update. And I suspect we're going to have kind of a round two. There's at least one big thing, and that would be the start menu, where they actually updated the start menu last year in kind of a major way. And then they are in the process. I don't think it's stable yet. Maybe it is where they've updated it as well, again, as part of the pain point thing. But then there's a bigger one coming in 26H2, and that's going to be the full update, so to speak. So, like, this is a pretty primary UI to be screwing around with so much, but they're actually doing it. And part of that, I know, it's kind of exciting in some ways. So, yeah, good for them, I guess. Okay. All right. What else have we got? Oh, and then in hardware news, the show notes linked to something hilariously wrong. Yep. Sorry. Didn't AI do that? No, that's Paul.control.v incorrectly. I want a Paul AI. No, you don't. The one that never stops hallucinating? Nice. So back in, I don't know, two months ago, probably May, Microsoft announced the latest Surface for business PCs, right, with Intel processors, the Core Ultra 3, right, which is a good set of processors, honestly, panthlake, right? So if I'm remembering this correctly, it was a – I don't know if it were two sizes each, but there were at least one Surface Pro, probably a 13-point-whatever-inch, and then two Surface laptops because they have 13.8 or 13.58, whatever that is in 15-inch, right, but running on Intel. And then a month later, they announced new versions of the Surface PCs for consumers with Snapdragon X2, which is a Qualcomm processor. So you get a choice of plus or elite processor tiers, different things, whatever. Prices obviously went up pretty dramatically. And I think in that case we actually had two models of each. So there's two versions of Surface Pro, if I'm not mistaken, I could be, and then there are two versions of Surface Laptop, different sizes, right? One of the things they said at the announcement for those is that at some point in the year, they were going to introduce cheaper 8-gig configurations because of the component crisis. And I didn't expect to see that happen until kind of the end of the year, frankly, second half of the year sometime. But actually, not that long after, they did release. They didn't say anything about it, but they just added 8-gig configurations for the consumer products. So yesterday, I think it was, or two days ago maybe, they announced more Surface for business PCs, but with Snapdragon X2. So there are 13.8 and 15-inch configurations for Surface laptop, 13-inch only for Surface Pro, different generation numbers, et cetera. But basically, they're expensive, I think is the way to say it. I mean, on both sides, the cheapest configuration is $1,650. like yikes. There are no 8-gig configurations, although you never know. That could happen. They didn't say that this time, at least. You could spend as much as, what's the most expensive one? Yeah, 12-core Snapdragon X2 Elite with 64 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage on Surface Pro. $3,700. There you go. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include the keyboard. Like, you know, it's like. Because there is that 128-gig version floating around there somewhere. but not that anybody actually has one, right? The black laptop. Right, right, right. I've never, yeah. This is kind of squirrely because, like, the Surface Laptop 15 for Business, the new version on X2 with an Elite processor, the highest-end configuration, unless I'm missing something, I believe looking at it was 32 gigs of RAM and 1 terabyte of SSD for $3,000. I mean, I looked at it on the Canadian site, and they had a 64 gig 2 terabyte version. Okay. I could have missed it. Yeah, they're expensive. And look, I mean, this is the component crisis I wrote. I think this morning I published something I had been writing called, you know, this is the absolutely worst time in history to buy anything. You know, if you need it, you need it. I wish it was an exaggeration. I really do. I didn't want to write that, you know. But you could just look at, like, I looked at Pixel because there's been a lot of leaks. So we can look at, like, what the Pixel prices were a year ago, what they are today, like how they've changed. So they're more expensive in many cases, especially the base configs that come in with less RAM. which is really weird. Oh, I know what it was. The silver one was only 32. The black one was available in 64. And I'm like, what is that about? So that's two years ago when I bought my 7th Gen Surface laptop, which is the first, you know, Snapdragon X processors. That's why I have a black one because it was the only way, in my case, it was 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage, but I could not get that in the whatever the platinum, whatever that color is, which is what I wanted, right? because I knew that if I got this dark black laptop, which is anodized aluminum, I would just scratch the edges and the silver would shine through. That's exactly what happened. You know, you want one that's like, let's make it as close as possible to the actual color. So if I scratch it or whatever, rub it with my wrists, you know, a bunch, it will just, you know, it won't look terrible. But this is, you know, Microsoft is, you know, they're not a big PC maker. They don't have this infinite, every color you want and every configuration you want is not a thing. So that might be, excuse me, why I didn't see the. Yeah, it's funny how you have to keep twiddling with the configuration. Well, once you hit a color before I can pick a round. The color changes your choice. Exactly. Wait, what? I must have left it on the base color, whatever that platinum color. Yeah, anyway, terrible time to buy a laptop. But if you're looking at buying a machine right now, you should. You are in good shape. If you can say no and just live with what you got, this is a good time for that. I mean, look, you need it or you don't. If you do need it, I mean, you can justify any of these purchases if you had to. And now you're going to use this thing for several years. Maybe even a $3,000 surface something makes sense. I don't know. But the green only comes in $16,000. You have to select black to get them. The fun colors. Right, exactly. So two years ago, the light blue one was a cool color. and I was like, oh, man, I'm going to get one of those. No, I'm not. I think it was the same problem. I think it was 16 gig only. It's like, no, I need more than 16 gig. I needed it then. Apple invented this, I think. But Apple, well, honestly, Dell invented this. Remember Dell always had this configurator thing? They have had this for 30 years. But when Apple did the thing Apple does, which is they do a really good, like they eventually, they said just models, right? But then they did, you can configure anything on a Mac, or whatever product. There's no version of you go to buy an iPhone and it's in whatever color choices and you can't get it in every storage configuration. They give you, you know what I mean? You have all the choices. This is one thing Microsoft just doesn't get well. It doesn't do well. It doesn't do at all, actually. Is it just an excuse? No, they don't have the volume to justify it. They don't... Paying to have whatever, however they fabricate these things, they would end up with a bunch of stock because they'd have to buy some minimum, and no one would want those. So the U.S. site is showing 64-gig 15-inch Ultras with a terabyte of storage, but only in black. But only, right, and how much, 37? For 37, yeah. Okay, that matches Surface Pro. The Canadian site, I just went and checked, doesn't have any 64s anymore. They disappeared. Oh, yeah. I mean, it wouldn't even show it as out of stock. It just does not show up. This is like finding the Willy Wonka pass in a chocolate bar. It could happen. But they also show 24s because, you know, why would you want a mutant memory configuration? Hey, I think 24 and 48 are going to become pretty big. Yeah. You know, there's going to be a bunch of that kind of stuff. I didn't have this in the notes because this is what I was just publishing when we started the show. But the latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which is not a Snapdragon. It's Panther Lake, you know, Core Ultra 3, whatever. Terrific, right? So this is like less than 2.2 pounds. It's a 14-inch screen. It's like, you know, it's magically light. You know, the performance is amazing. The reliability is really good. Everything's really good. The thing that's most interesting about it is they've taken, like, this sustainability to some new level, at least for, like, a top-tier PC maker, right? So there's this list of recycled materials, which is longer than I've ever seen in any laptop, which is whatever. But the amount of things you can replace yourself as a user, like as the customer, is off the charts as well. So there are things like the SSD, which is on an M2 thing, the communication card, another M2 thing, the battery, whatever components. But you can replace the individual USB ports on this thing, right, which is a framework-style option. I've never seen that in a mainstream laptop. But the RAM is started on. It's like, guys, come on, man. You've got to figure out RAM, like code DIMMs, whatever they're called. We've got to move to a world where I could buy some 16-gig RAM computer today, or God help you, an 8-gig RAM computer, with the understanding that in a year or whatever time frame, hopefully when prices go down to their sales or whatever it is, that I could upgrade that thing, right? Yeah. And one of the sides that kind of related to this with the Steam machine is you also get into a single-channel, dual-channel problem with RAM. So if you somehow, if you have like two possible slots for RAM and only one is filled, it's running at like two-thirds the speed. Yeah. You have to have both slots to get the full speed. And I believe the base configuration on Steam Machine suffers from this. Now, that one you can't upgrade. It's a desktop computer. But if you get the base configuration, whatever that is, probably 8 gigs, I don't remember, but you're going to have like, It's not just the amount of RAM that's the problem. It's the speed of the RAM. Right. Well, and that's the other thing. They're not defining it here at all. Right. And I don't think anybody wants to know what's the speed of the RAM you're putting on. Nobody wants to think about this. But it's okay because typically you never had to worry about it. No, because it's always the fastest driving that would run properly. You don't think about this, but now you have to think about this. Yeah, you do. I don't think Microsoft is going to get through. You're building up my list of why not to buy right now. Yeah, yeah. It's a solid list. It's a proud list. Because we bought before this happened, right before it happened, right? Yeah, right. So I got 128 gigs of RAM. This might be – look, I run into a thing where, like, phones is a problem, especially computers can be a problem. But I have to – I don't have to, but I do review these things. And it's like if I have to buy a device, it's like I had years where I've taken passes on certain things. I'm like, I'm just not going to do it this year. And I'm looking at whatever they're going to release for iPhone in September, whatever they're going to release for Pixel in August. And I'm like, this might be – I am going to make a prediction. I made this yesterday on MacRequake. This will be the year people do not upgrade their iPhones because Apple's already Pixel for an 11. I think I'm not going to. I was definitely all in for an X2 having missed the X. And no, I don't think so. Right. Yeah, so Pixel's weird because – I was just looking at this. and we'll see what actually happens when they release it. But there were different RAM and storage configurations across all these products, but they still had 128 gig configurations last year, which I think is terrible. Those are going away at least, so it's 256. But the base configuration, I think on every phone except for maybe the Pro XL, is going from 16th out of the 12th. Yeah. Or maybe it was already at 12th, depending on the phone. And then you have to upgrade. That's probably enough for a phone, though, really. Probably, but the problem is last year you would have gotten 16, right? So when you're buying a Pixel, for all the pros and cons, one of the big problems is the Tensive processor is kind of garbage. It's not really an awesome processor. So you know that there's not going to be a big year-over-year bump there. So it's possible. I think we're going to see this, where the base config on a Pixel Pro, whatever, 11 Pro, might fall short of what it was a year ago. And by the way, those year-old phones, they're all on sale right now. Like for up to $300 off of a configuration. Yeah. I'm just, you know, I'm not saying, like, I don't mean this as a bit of advice per se, but maybe, you know. Hey, Fable's back with this analysis. What is this thing? I don't know. You know, this is interesting. I don't know how close this is to what we wanted. It said I pulled the raw CVRF data behind that release note page from Microsoft's API. I gave it the Microsoft release note page and sliced it up. Yesterday's drop is a big one. Duh. Does it come over the number? It counted 1,150 CVEs in the release note. 622 are Microsoft's own. The other 528 are third parties riding along via Azure, Linux, and Chromium. Node, TAR, Co, XS. Okay, that makes sense. So there's stuff that's in Windows but isn't. Yeah, that actually maps to the numbers who we're talking about. It had three actively exploited zero days. We'd already mentioned that. But here's the patterns. This is what we wanted to know. Yeah. Where? Memory safety is still the whole ballgame. The CWE distribution is brutal. 142 use after freeze, 117 heat overflow, 6T out-of-bound reads. These are all human mistakes, right? Oh, of course. Race conditions I wouldn't necessarily say. I would say also like kind of language compiler choice too, right? I mean, look, you're going to have this. One of the key learnings here, I bet, is Mark Rezinovich, whoever is looking at this, is going to be like, you know, if we move to Rust, we would solve like 80% of these. It said, it said, 70% of the classified bugs are classic C, C++ memory corruption in kernel mode and driver code. So that's the first thing. It is kernel mode. Yeah, this is ring zero. Ring zero. And that's where you would want to point the tool at first, everything running in ring zero. Exactly. And that was per the conversation we had earlier. It's like if you're looking at the code base, like where do you start? You start there. You know, the most vulnerable part, the most important. Privilege escalation, a lot of it. They say that's what attackers need from Windows bugs, the step from user to system. File systems are getting fuzzed hard. NTFS, there were 21. REFS, 12. Cloud Files, mini-filter, brokering file systems. Can you imagine REFS is a big uptick? 58 CVs in storage and file system drivers. Wow. A huge Office document parsing cluster, 104. Cluster is the right word for the Office. I won't give you the second part of that. 104 CVEs in Office, Excel board, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Exchange. Okay, so it pulled out Office stuff, too. Yeah. Excel alone has 34. Yep. Server-side network services took a beating. This sounds like a, you know, sports night. Server-side network services took a beating. multiple critical RCEs and DHCP server for exclamation mark. I love it. You know, Fable has some personality. DNS, TCPIP, SSTP, RMCAST, multicast, wormable class bugs and unauthenticated network listeners. If you run Windows Server infrastructure, this is the patch first tier. The AI attack surface is now a regular category. So, co-pilot, Azure OpenAI, GitHub co-pilot VS Code, mostly cloud-side and auto-remediated. That's nice. The one-line story, Microsoft is patching the same two structural problems it always patches, memory unsafe code and the user-to-system escalation path. Just a lot more of it. Yep. While the in-the-wild action has moved up stack to identity infrastructure, SharePoint ADFS, Centra and adds. That's the AI part, which, you know, cloud-based, so it's instantly remediated, meaning they fix it once in the cloud. Everyone doesn't have to install that patch, right? Yep. Except for a show summary, because it knows we're doing Windows Weekly somehow. Patch SharePoint and ADFS today. DHCP DNS servers this week and everything else in the normal cadence. Here's a script you can use to, you know, just like uninstall all of the useless crap on your Windows 11 computer. I just want to point out, when I read this, the notion that this is spicy autocorrect goes right out the window. I mean, this feels insightful. Am I wrong? Leo, EA doesn't create anything. I don't know how we have to keep telling you this. No, I think that's incredible. You know, this is good information. It's good that it's doing this. It's a great summary. Decision makers at Microsoft, like, you know, whoever's in charge of this stuff, this is good for them to help them kind of focus on the most important, you know, trends that we're starting to see. Because we're looking at, like, a month of data here, essentially, or whatever, one thing. But they probably have several months. Well, they have forever, really. But, you know, they can kind of compare this month over month. And they're going to see trends like that. And the memory safe stuff being number one does not surprise me in this life. Not at all. That's exactly what you expect, right? It goes back to that exact conversation around Rust, and it's like, oh, they're never going to redo the Windows kernel in Rust. And it's like, I bet they're doing it right now. I bet they're doing it. Well, especially because that's the thing an AI is very good at is translating from one language to another. Yeah, and when you say patch, did you just mean replace that code base with one that hasn't got the flaw in it that happens to be in a different language? Maybe rewrite. That's what I'm in the process of doing. we have an old ad sales system we've been using, limping along for 14 years, mostly MySQL and mostly MySQL queries. And I'm rewriting it in Go. And the nice thing is it gets all the business logic from the MySQL database schema, from the queries, and it's easy for it to translate that. And Go is a language. Go came out of Google, right? Yeah. Is this somehow related to – it's not related to Flutter in any way, is it? No. It knows I like Go. I could easily have done this in Rust or some other language. But what was the impetus for Go? Oh, why did they write that? It was a cloud-first language. Yeah. It's also, concurrency is very good. Yeah. So it's all about scalability, commutability, like just that mindset of you're living in the cloud, there's going to be lots of everything. What do we do? Yeah. And it's super fast. And one of the things I wanted was, you know, Lisa was complaining was how slow it was. Because the database is big if you include every ad we've sold over the last 20 years. so she wanted speed. Go was a good choice for that. Plus, it's going to run in the class. It's going to run on Azure. In fact, it is right now. We put it up on Azure for testing. It took it a week. Only because I was being really super cautious. I could have probably one-shotted it, but I said, no, I want you to find it. The phone rang some guy from Azure. He's like, hey, stop it. We're running on a cheap Azure instance running on ARM because it was easy for it to, I mean. Now, when you say running on ARM, it's almost certainly those Microsoft, whatever it is, the Maya processor, whatever those are, because those are all ARM-based data center processors. And it's fairly cheap. It's a small instance. But it can write it in ARM. It doesn't care. It can compile to ARM. So, you know, and I don't know if we're using MySQL. I think we're using PostgreSQL, but I'm not sure. So I should check. But okay, this is the good and bad of doing this is I don't know what it's doing. Let's just do it fast. We're doing what we call BDD, behavioral testing, right? Does it look? It's saying things like, have Lisa look at the spreadsheet. Do the numbers look right? We need a little more guidance than that. We went to our accountant today because we do taxes later or whatever because we're away. But Stephanie said to this guy, like, where did this number come from? This is you, right? Like, you made this up or whatever? Good question. And she's like, I don't understand what this came from. And he's like, looking at it right now, neither do I. I was like, that's confidence inspiring. Ship it in. It's fun. Let's just send it to the IRS. He will just say. No, just see what's possible. You're watching Windows Weekly. We're glad you're here every Wednesday with Mr. Paul Therott and Mr. Richard Campbell. And the latest Windows News whiskey is coming up. I know you're all waiting for that with bated breath. But, you know, maybe we should talk about, since we've started already, AI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never know week to week where we're going to go with the AI thing. But this is a fun week. So if there's anything better than two gigantic companies going at it, I have yet to know what that is. But in a kind of a replay of the we're going thermonuclear on Google thing from whenever that was, 20 years ago, whatever, 15-something years ago, whatever, Apple sued OpenAI. Also, I.O. Products, a Johnny Ive company that OpenAI owns now. And two former employees, which really does little to describe how important these people were to Apple. OpenAI partnered with Apple about two years ago, right? And I think to this day, if you use an iPhone or an Apple device and you're using Siri, whether it's the old crappy Siri or the new one that's actually, by the way, pretty good. We'll get to this. And the settings app is configure it so that you can hand off things that Siri can't handle to OpenAI, ChatGPT, and only ChatGPT, right? Now, the number of things that Siri can't handle is approximately all of them. So if you configure that, you can opt in to not send them any of your information, or you can log into your account if you're an idiot, although I guess you would get higher usage numbers, whatever it is. And the point of this was for Apple's side to help with an AI thing that was not working, and on OpenAI's side to get traffic and potentially paying customers. There was a rumor, I don't want to say two months ago, where OpenAI was apparently unhappy with the results they were getting from Apple usage, right? And I've rumored that they were going to sue Apple because of this and try to get out of this partnership. They're not going to have a problem getting out of it now because Apple sued them. OpenAI has poached over 400 former Apple employees, including some major executives, one of whom, by the way, has been at the company for over 25 years. He is as senior or was as senior in leadership as you could pretty much be without us ever having seen him on a stage, right? And this is, like, astonishing. And there's been, like, a systematic campaign on OpenAI's part to bring people in from Apple, to have them bring prototypes of Apple devices that haven't been made yet or blueprints or whatever they can steal out of there and use that during the interview process as incentive for OpenAI to hire them. Now, look, these companies are all terrible. I get it. I'm actually not 100% sure what the legality is here. In other words, if the employee has an agreement with Apple that they've signed, a legal agreement that they're never going to do something like this and they do it, yeah, that's probably illegal. But on OpenAI's side, just enticing them to do that, I don't know. I'm actually not sure. Like, is that actually a legal problem? I mean, it's the Apple guy breaking the law there. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I mean, a company, you know, creating a circumstance for someone to break the law is definitely liable as well. Yeah. I'm going to ask the question, like, why are these Apple guys going for it? Like, what are they? Money. A load of money. So that's the thing. So, you know, one thing that Apple and Microsoft historically kind of had or have had in common or whatever is that from just a pay package perspective, the base pay is not all that great. It's just the kind of industry average or even below whatever. In both cases, I think you get into stock options and things, and it might pay off over a long period of time, which makes these long-time hires, them leaving, actually it was 24 years, sorry, but in one case, they have to be backing up the money truck, right? I mean, that's why. In the sense that everyone has another rising side of the AI hype bubble. Yeah. These companies have too much money. Yep. and zero morals. So, you know, you're an Apple guy. You've been there for, it doesn't matter, two years, 24 years. Who cares? Whatever it is. And OpenAI is like, hey, we'd like to hire you. And you're like, yeah, I don't know. And they're like, we're going to give you a lot of money. And it's like, yeah, I don't really care. And they're like, actually, we're going to give you like millions and millions of dollars. They're like, yeah, I'm listening. And, you know, then you get into that kind of weird conversation, right? But the thing that is so beautiful about this, the Apple, I don't know which is stupider. So the Apple claim is that they reached out to OpenAI in February to raise concerns about all these practices and never heard back. Okay. You saw what happened. OpenAI's response is beautiful. They said, you reached out to one of our employees who has a name similar to the person you thought you were reaching out to, and you sent that email to the wrong person. They sent it to Chang, not Wang. Here's the thing. I'm sorry. Have you, as anyone, look, I think all three of us have been involved in some situation where it's, I don't know, some kind of a legal thing or a money thing or whatever it is. When those people are trying to reach you, they do not stop. You don't get one email and then we're done. So the notion that Apple emailed one time and then was like, oh, they ignored us, screw them. I mean, these companies, they're not some random supplier. They have connections at the uppermost levels of both companies. Like, it's kind of, that's kind of incredible. So to me, that's the fact that Tim's got Sam's phone number. I'm just guessing. I can't imagine that. Well, not anymore. But, I mean, yeah, they had them texting all the time, right? Yeah. And I think the others. And then OpenAI was like, I mean, we did reply. Like, okay. What are you, kids or something? What is this? So I don't know what comes out of this. Given the secret nature of both these companies, it would behoove them to settle this. Like, nobody wants this to go to the core. At some point, a judge is going to go, what are you people doing? It's insanity. And again, they haven't responded well to that advice before, and I'm saying specifically of Apple. Yep, that's absolutely true. Yep. Yeah, this is the end of the notes because it's not really, you know, on point for anything. But sometime this summer, Google in the United States is going to allow multiple, any number of third-party stores through Google Play because of that thing with Epic. And Apple is going to fight that tooth and nail until there is no Apple left. Like they just, you know, if they ever are forced to do that, which they have been in certain regions or countries, like in Brazil, for example, they just do it there. Right. Like Google is just like, all right, we lost. Like Apple does not accept this. Yeah, where is their Brad Smith? Where is that rational legal mind that goes, these are stupid fights? Right. Weirdly, the Apple attorney wasn't an in-house attorney. It was some outside guy. I'm sorry. The whole thing to me is so ludicrous. The fact that they've named lawyers and they talk about specific communications, like I said, there's no way that Tim Cook did not reach out to Sam Altman about this. There's no way, like, Sam Allman, like, the notion, like, well, maybe he didn't know. You're like, really? Really? Well, all of this will be revealed. Yeah. I mean, the real world. Or it gets settled and it will never be revealed, which I think would be the better outcome there, frankly. But not for me. I would love to see this. There's lots of questions about this. We've talked a lot about it on MacBreak Weekly. But one question is, what is Apple's intent here? Is it to stop opening up from releasing advice? Yeah. So the thing we just mentioned is tied to this, I believe, which is. However, they hired, they bought Johnny Ives' company. That's how they got Tang Tan. Yeah. And they spent $6.2 billion for it. Right. So, look, Microsoft did this historically. You know, think about pen computing in the 1990s. It actually was called Go, right? Go was the name of the company back then. Bill Gates finds out about this. Customers are asking about it. They're like, oh, no, we're doing the same thing. Yeah, we got a tablet. Just saying that is you can push it back. You know, you just carry it. And they did something garbagey, but whatever. Eventually we had tablet PC, but that didn't happen until like 10 years later. So Apple's stalling tactics with antitrust regulators and governance is designed to ensure that they keep collecting these ill gains from app store fees for as long as possible because this is a huge revenue stream If they can prevent a competitor from entering the market and potentially disrupting it with sort of a new device that might be the end of the iPhone, you never know, it makes sense to do that. Microsoft did this to Netscape, right? They went to federal antitrust court over this. So, yeah, this is a known good tactic. You know, both companies technically, I guess, have a lot of money. But Apple has real money, and they will and can fight this as long as they have to, just to put this stuff off. Now, oddly, OpenAI has also said, I believe this was just reported, because we need one of these and it makes sense, but they could release their first smart device or at least announce it by the end of the year and then release it early next year. And the goal is to prevent that from happening. Not that what they're talking about, like a smart speaker, essentially, which sounds ridiculous to me. But, yeah, whatever. But I think there's some few, look, something eventually will disrupt smartphones. It may be some implantable things. It might be some combination of smart wearables, whatever, their rings and glasses and blah, we don't know. But it could come from an AI company, right? And they did buy Johnny. Johnny, I was kind of a known good quantity. So we'll see. I just, I don't know. Look, Apple, when Steve Jobs was still around, threatened to go thermonuclear on Google. Right. Apple then, they sued Samsung and did okay there, but they never really went after Google. And then they had this incredible partnership where, I believe this year, Google probably pays Apple $25 billion or more for search placement. Yeah, thermonuclear. It's going to be one of the biggest partnerships in technology, right? And now they're partnering with Gemini on Siri. So I don't know. I mean, like, whatever. I guess we'll see. I don't know. I don't think we're going to learn as much as we want to. Tied to the release of GPT 5.6, which is the latest, like, Frontier model or whatever from OpenAI, which, by the way, releases new products every day. Like, they're maddening. they released a new version of ChatGPT, which I think points to this future of – we're starting to hear this term like super app. Microsoft has used this term, right? There were rumors that Microsoft was working on a super app that would combine, you know, Copilot and the co-work and whatever other features they have in there into one thing, which would be a Copilot, which, by the way, to give them a little bit of credit, is something that's been thrown out as a possible, like maybe this becomes the Windows user interface. Like instead of going to start, we go to co-pilot, and you type things in, and it does the right thing, right? Like that actually makes some sense. Satya Nadella three years ago, two and a half years ago, said that he saw co-pilot as the new start menu, right? He might have not been speaking, you know, vaguely. He might have been specifically like kind of previewing this idea. Chat GPT, or rather OpenAI is doing that with Chat GPT. So they've had codecs for a while. Like Anthropic, they were using their codex, in their case, for productivity as well as programming. They, a week ago, whenever it was, announced something called Work, which is basically codex, but just for productivity. So they actually have a new offering or product, whatever you want to call it. And they had this thing. I think it was only Mac. I think it was just on the Mac, and I don't think that ever changed. But sometime late last year, they announced their Atlas AI web browser, which they're now getting rid of. So the new version of ChatGPT incorporates all those things they just said. So it's got an in-app web browser based on Alice, ChatGPT and the chat functionality we all know and love or whatever, Work, which is new, Codex, right? And this is the Super App. They're not describing it, but the rumors were they were doing this, and this is all those pieces. It is what Microsoft has said they are doing as well, and that makes sense. They know what OpenAce was going to do. And the thing that's changing is that, you know, we think of these things, or I do anyway, as like chat box. Like you get a chat bot and there's a sidebar, and then you go over here and there are options over here that in their case would be things like work and codecs and whatever else, and Microsoft, you know, they have projects and whatever different things that are over there, whatever the options are. But the primary interface is this chat box, right? And that's what's shifting here. Like this is becoming the UI, if you will. Like this app is not chat. Chat now isn't a sidebar. It's this other stuff, you know. And, you know, when you think about it, like, we're going to have this kind of natural language conversation with these things. You know, these companies are starting to kind of rethink what it means and what it looks like to interact with the AI. It's like, well, how are people solving problems? How are people getting work done? How are they getting from question to answer, whatever it might be? Chatting is still part of it. This is going to be a chat box, I mean, probably forever. But they're doing that work, and that's kind of interesting. So this is kind of a space to watch. The other one, in keeping with my, you know, my observations so many times, is like any major AI company that announces any feature, whatever it is. So it could be Code or Codex or Work or Co-Work or whatever the names of these things are in different AIs. If one of those companies announces something, within 24 hours, at least one of the other competitors will announce the same thing. And God help them. Anthropic, less than 24 hours after this announcement, was like, we have an in-app web browser, too. It's like, of course you do. Of course you do. You know, like, is these TVs as the Phoebe Batiste outside app model? Yes. But the differentiator, though, and I guess it's just the thing, like, you come at it from a certain point of view, so you don't really kind of see this future. When you talk about things like side-by-side apps, like the outside app, right, which is a co-pilot model, right, you're like, okay, I get that. Like, I'm using this computer. It could be Windows. It could be a Mac. It could be a phone. It doesn't matter what it is. Whatever I'm doing, this thing is over here on the side. Like, hey, buddy, you know, it can help you out. Like, neat. That's the B side model. I think that's the original. Yeah. And then you're like, okay, but we're going to evolve the software. You're like, yep, got it. So the Microsoft Office apps are a classic example. Like, because you'll have a sidebar. Does that make sense? We'll add that first. We can do this. Okay, here we are. You don't have to switch contacts. We have all these terms to this. But ideally, this thing adapts or is evolved to the point where AI is integral to the way it works internally. Or maybe we have new apps, whatever. But the AI is inside. It's not like a little side thing. It's the inside model. The inside model. But when you hear about AI, I guess, outside or the third model, we're still thinking in terms of the thing we're already doing. Right. So in this case, Windows. So we're like, all right, we have Windows. And I guess we can have, you know, we have agents. We're going to have agents on the taskbar. And those agents are going to go off and run autonomous tasks and do it simultaneously, et cetera, et cetera. And but you still you still have the same basic usage model. Like the part of the the transition there is that it's making it work within the thing, you know, and understand. So agents work like apps and they put up banner notifications if they need you. And it makes sense within this thing that we know. But if you're Anthropic or OpenAI or any company that's not Microsoft, Google, or Apple, you don't necessarily think about it this way. You have to get your stuff where people are now. That's why we have browser extensions and apps on platforms and whatever. You have to integrate with everything that you need to integrate with. So we have those back-end things like MCP, et cetera. But this, to me, is looking at the next thing, which is still, I guess, outside. but it's also like, do we actually need Windows anymore? You know, do we need, like, you know, like we would joke maybe two weeks ago because this goes so fast, like some future day you'll have like an iPhone and it just boots into chat GPT and that's your interface and ha, ha, ha. But that's really kind of what they're talking about, right? Yeah, that's what the outside model was really about is, hey, I need a proxy for whatever work. I just declare what work I need to do. You can't just go to it immediately, right? You have to – all the work we've seen integrating with apps on Android, whatever, Apple systems and Windows, integrating with back-end services, which is fairly straightforward, whatever those things are, that has to happen because the world of work is occurring or whatever it is. We use apps and services, and that's what it is. It has to work with stuff. It's also how people think about the workflow too, right? Right. When the cloud first came along, we wanted virtual machines because that's what we understood. If you brought us serverless at the beginning, which people are so excited to do, people didn't know what to do. Not that it was perfect. That's a good example, actually, because I bring this up from time to time, but when they first announced Windows Azure, it was originally called, I didn't understand what they were doing. I didn't get it. I was like, so this is Windows Server running. We didn't even pronounce it. No, right. No, I mean, I just didn't. I really struggled with it. And that's where your experience, which is usually your advantage, can work to your disadvantage. Right. Because the world is changing, and you're not ready for it. You're used to this thing. So, again, this is baby steps for right now, but they're very clearly working toward this. I don't know. Let's make a simple example, and I'm just making this up. But you're a Microsoft 365 customer. You have access to Word, Excel, whatever else, and you can access it on your computer, your phone, whatever. One of the things you could do right now is use any of these AIs and go to it and say, look, I have this backend data source, whatever it is. I want to make a nice chart, which maybe you might have done in Excel previously. You just ask it to do it. It just does it. It's beautiful. You can talk to it and change it and whatever. Did it use Excel? I don't know. You don't know. But at some point, you're going to have this conversation with yourself or maybe with the money people at your company, and it's going to be like, why are we paying for Microsoft 365? I believe that this thing could do this, and I don't need to pay for that thing. And the thing you pay for becomes the AI, not the Microsoft 365, you know, a simple example. But the AI is planning is just a speaker. Yeah. The first product. Which sounds stupid, right? Yeah. Maybe not. No, I mean, on first blush, you're like, oh, great. Smart china. It's just a little fall. Do not put that in front of my camera. You just put a virus in my house. It connects. Comrade Xi likes your citizenship score. They're doing fine. It's got a little tinnies. By the way, that's the next, interesting you said DeepSafe, right? That's the next big disruption in the space because when this comes down to money, we're actually charging customers for usage. And China's like, hey, they've got lots of power. We can do this for one-tenth the price. Great articles already saying, you know, what's the price per million tokens. And the natural. DeepSeek is, so let me give you an example. So Fable is $10 for a million tokens in and $50 for a million tokens out. That's the answer, the results. DeepSeek is, I think it's $0.14 for a million tokens in and $0.50 for a million tokens out. So let's say, Leo, you're a patriotic American. And you're like, you know what? Screw that. Those guys stole from American companies. I hate it. I'm not doing that. Here's the problem. Yeah, so did OpenAI and Anthropic. They've also stolen. You're going to get up about the stealing from thieves? Like, are you kidding me? Like, I'm sorry, but, like, in the sense that everyone has their price. Like, if this goes from being unaffordable to, like, anyone can afford it, I don't think anyone's going to question what country this thing is coming from. I'll give you a great example. I asked my AI, okay, all the tokens I used, all the work I did last month, and, by the way, I'm doing 10 times more this month, but all the work I did in June, And if I'd been doing that with Fable, with a top-end model from Anthropic, how much would it have cost? It said $5,771 in one month. I said if I used DeepSeek, how much would it have cost? $117. They're like, actually, we would have cut you a check. Yeah, we'll pay you. Yeah. Now, admittedly, China may have an agenda with all that. By the way, agenda? There is a company in our country called Intel. You might have heard of it. They used to be great. Actually, I'm not sure they were ever great, but whatever. They were great. They're a terrible company. They can't do anything right. But because they are backed by the U.S. government now, they're getting deals for companies to do stuff supposedly, and no one's ever actually done anything yet, but whatever. The United States government is artificially holding this company up to make it more successful. It's certainly been successful in Wall Street. This is the complaint we have against China. I'm sorry, but we're just doing exactly the same thing. Like, what are we defending here? So, look, I don't know. At the end of the day, I think we just want to get the job done. If you're going to be exploited, be exploited by your own government. They're less likely to turn off all your stuff. I kind of like the government I'm being exploited by to be further away, you know, actually. I mean, you think about the push against Huawei when 5G was being deployed. And the British did the analysis on their software and said, we can't tell what they're doing here. This software is so obfuscated. And basically the Western world said, okay, we're not going to use Huawei 5G gear because we just don't know what's going to happen. Yep. Yep. So, look, I'm not defending China. I don't mean it like that. I hope this is taken with the proper comedic approach or whatever. But I think AI is going to be very disruptive. So we see that, like I said, keeping it to the topic we started with, You're seeing the super app kind of idea kind of evolve. And when you're a platform maker, whether you're Microsoft with Windows or Apple with whatever they have or Google, these are companies that are all involved in AI to some degree, a great degree in many cases. But this is disruption. When you're Apple, you have a history of, in their case, disrupting themselves. They did the iPhone because they didn't want the iPad to be destroyed by some other company. So there's a certain amount of bravery to that, for sure. That's a rare exception. Most companies, you know, Google is. No, no, that's what I mean. Usually it comes from outside, right? Yeah. And Apple is not going to bat 1,000 on this. I mean, it's possible. This is why they're going after OpenAI. They see the potential disruption here and install that as long as possible is what makes sense. They may also really be pissed off. Oh, they're clearly, clearly. The language in that thing is amazing. Yeah. The Apple lawsuit is classic. That's great. See if we can find this thing. It's like coordinated pattern of misconduct and OpenAI's recent, I'm sorry, nascent hardware business rests on the shakiest of foundations. Rotten to its core, which is a nice term from an Apple, by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets. Sure. Wow. I mean, what's the difference between this case and the Elon-Sam case? Like, they both seem like, which is thrown out, by the way. Or the many decades of various cases involving big tech companies that are poaching employees from each other that have been occurring since the beginning of this industry, and sometimes it flares up in a big way. Steve Jobs used to get involved in that stuff personally. He didn't want certain companies stealing from him. Yeah, he had a deal with, I can't remember, was it Microsoft or Intel? that I won't poach your employees if you won't poach your mind. I might have been Google, actually. I think it was Google. And that's illegal. You can't actually do that. So the opposite of that is we're just going to poach 400 of your employees. It's unbelievable. It's just fascinating. It's good to be on the sidelines. This couldn't happen to a better company. Yeah, so that's great. It also plays into people's kind of general sense that Sam Altman is a little weaselly and squirrelly. A little weaselly? Look, the only thing that Sam Altman has in common with any of the people running any of the big tech companies now or in the past is that he is an absolutely terrible human being. He fits right into this. Let's face it. So was Steve Jobs. And that's what I mean. So was Bill Gates. No, not to some degree. To every degree. Are you kidding me? The big difference here is he hasn't made a wildly successful product. True. Yeah, well, I mean, he's got a whole lot of other people. I actually don't know if I'd agree with that. I think that's a good model. Well, a successful being actually could pay for his money. Oh, making money. Oh, yeah. He's no Elizabeth Holmes. He's not faking it. Yeah. You know, he's a product. Yeah. He does, you know, people use it. I mean, I'm not saying it's like a good business model per se, but I mean, it's, you know, it definitely works. So it's not like he's faking blood tests or whatever. But, you know, give them time because they'll eventually expand into that market too. They're just terrible. So, I don't know. They're all terrible. Maybe that's the central point. Don't ever forget it because it's like don't over-romanticize any of these companies. They're all terrible. And then just real quick, like Apple just the other day released the public betas of their OS 27 releases. So, I've been using these things since the first developer betas. And I'd say Siri, which is a laughing stock. and deservedly so, and still has its, like, just stupid stuff. Like, I literally, stop, it just came on. Would you shut up? So after I wrote about Siri, I was working one day, and it said something like, this drives me crazy. Everyone talks about how awesome the Apple ecosystem, everything works together, right? So on my iPhone, actually, it just happened again when we were starting the show. So on my iPhone, if it's a potentially spam call or whatever, they're starting to do a slightly better job about just not showing me that. Like, it will still pop up as a notification, but it's a silent notification, and it doesn't, like, appear in the main screen of the phone or messages app. Like, it kind of hides it, and it's like, okay. It's not as good as Google. Google has an awesome job of that stuff, but it's better than it was. So if you're in the Apple world and you see this, you're like, oh, nice. They've done a really good job. But every time one of those things comes in, my Apple Watch is like, burp, burp. I look down, and it says the phone number, and it's like, this is, like, over my phone, and the phone's like, oh, this is probably spam. I'm like, why are you telling me about it on my wrist? Like, it's ridiculous. The weirdest one of all, though, is just the other day, I was just sitting there working, typing my watch burbles, and then it starts talking. It's never done this. Siri is talking, don't wake up, is talking out of my watch. And it says, I don't remember the name, it says something like, Matthew somebody has left a very long message. Would you like me to read it? And I'm like, what? And so I assumed that maybe it was like an email or something. So I look at my phone. It's a spam message. And I had to go into the spam view to see it. And there he is. Matthew's in there. Let's look at it now. It's crazy. And it's just like, you know, you qualify for $329,000 in, like, business loans from digital. And why would you tell me? So there's still problems. But I will say this. So if you, I'm not saying if you're an Apple person, like, you should install these things necessarily. But if you have been kind of angsty about Siri and how terrible it is, which you should be, this new one, the way it works, I like the way it looks. You can do the chat bot app thing, and you can ask questions. Like the types of things people use AI for today typically, right, maybe like a travel itinerary thing being the kind of canonical example these days. It's pretty good, you know, and it does like a nice presentation. It will read it to you. It's like a beautiful-looking report. Yeah, it's using, I guess, Gemini in the back end or whatever it's doing. Who cares? But, like, it took them years, you know, but I think they've, like, they're going to, it looks like they're going to kind of get there. So I'm actually, I'm kind of surprised, you know. So they were doing flowers for Algernon for a while there, but now it's, you know, it's getting there. And for whatever it's worth, I mean, honestly, day to day, like, to me, the biggest single thing on a phone for AI is the visual intelligence stuff, as Apple calls it, but every phone has some version of this where you point the camera at something, it tells you what it is. And if it's a product, it tells you how to buy it. If it's a building or a monument, it tells you the history of it. That stuff is awesome. That's a really cool thing to have on your person when you're out in the world. And actually, that's something Apple has been doing pretty good for the past couple of years. It's interesting because it turns out to be a really easy thing to do, a small purpose-built model to do that very well. I have a Chinese Quen model that does visual. You're all in on China, man. I'm all in. I tell you, they're inside everything I got. Well, actually, they're inside everything. You got one of those little Chairman Mao hats. But you get back to the reality here is, as you see, there's this cult going on that believes that we keep making it bigger, just like science fiction tells us, that it'll mysteriously turn into a self-aware piece of superintelligence. Meantime, the engineers are like, what's the smallest, lowest cost working unit that can do something useful? Right. Prism ML is a good example. They've figured out how to get a good model down small enough to run a few gigabytes of RAM. In fact, that's this Chinese model. It's analyzing all the input from my cameras. You know, I have all the security cameras. And it just analyzes it. And it's like a couple of gigabytes. And it's really good. It says a woman in a brown hat and yellow shorts is walking down the street with a package and a baby. And it's surprisingly good. Those things are not as hard to do as that whole general purpose. But there's 10 trillion parameters. They can be very useful, though, right? Yes, it's not practical. It uses a lot of energy. No, I mean, just the general stuff. Those are nice. They're fine. I still, you know, Google is probably better than anyone at this. But, you know, if you're like, I can't see a screen on the phone anyway, but some photo on a phone. That's a very good use for it. I want to get rid of this person in the photo and we can replace them with a smudge mark. Is that okay? And you're like, no, like, you know, like you kind of want, you know what I mean? Like you want it to be a little better than that. But I mean, I feel like that will get there eventually. They're moving hard. And I think that that is really one very interesting direction is these small purpose built models. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to see a ton of it. The truth is we already do, right? And it will only grow. It's driven by the desire to get them onto devices. Right. Yep. Yep. And not get the cloud costs happening, right? And the costs and the energy. And the data centers. I've had some good conversations with folks leading software projects. We're going to end up with a dedicated LLM in each app for doing modifications. That is constrained by the architecture of the application. Which is good for that app, actually, in the way you're using it, because that's what you want. You don't want it to be like, I found a random web result that might apply to what you did. No, I definitely want you to use the thing. Exactly. Let me convert all this code to Rust while we're at it. Yeah. Steve's been saying what you're going to get is small, for instance, coding models that they're really good at writing Go. Yes. That's what they do. Yes. One of the questions Lisa had for this new ad sales system is, well, what happens if you're on the air and it's broken? Who's going to fix it? And I think I'm going to build a little purpose-built AI model into a little chat bot in the corner that she can say, hey, something's not working or, hey, you know, what did this company buy in the ads last month? So that kind of thing. If you pay attention, and you guys do, but to anyone listening, if you pay attention to what's going on with, like, CLIs this year, it's kind of incredible. So there's, like, an Android, a CLI for Android development. There's a window. I don't remember the names anymore, but there's CLIs for Windows. And the point of this is it's not because there's literally a single model that is for that language and framework or whatever, but you can ground it in just that, and that gets you, you know, there. And that solves some real problems because, you know, its ability to grab information from everywhere is wonderful on some level, but it's also the problem. Like everything you guys just said is like you're talking about in APRA. I want it to be grounded in the app, and that's it. You don't get to see outside of this thing. There are ways to corral AI today to do that. But I do think purpose-driven models that are relatively small in size and specific to that use case, we're going to be swimming in these things. And, by the way, before anyone freaks out too much about that, every one of our devices already works this way to some degree with all these background processes and things. Every computer system of whatever kind has apps that we see, but they also have all these apps that run in the background, essentially, that you don't even know about. And it's going to be that kind of thing. And it's the new background processes or whatever. But I think it's, I don't know. There's no way this is going to exponentially increase. It's insane. One of the fun experiments I do is comparing these expensive cloud-based models with a local model. I'm running a local model that is a kind of distilled version of the Chinese model. It's called Ornith. And it's small, and it's running on my machine. It doesn't go out to the cloud. And for probably 90% of the stuff I do, it's plenty. Yeah. So if I'm going to analyze the Microsoft code base and tell you what they've solved, that I would use Fable for. But for a lot of other things that I do. Maybe in six months you won't. Right. It's interesting. Like, I feel like we talk about this a lot, but at some point there's that orchestration thing where the 90%, yep, but then you have whatever rules where if it can't, like, it's like there's a – We already have them. They're agent writers. Yeah. We have an unsus. Like I just mentioned, the iPhone will hand off the chat GPT, right? Exactly. That's a stupid, unsophisticated version of this, but that's essentially what it is. You can say, look, maybe you have to prompt me if it's going to cost money or whatever it is. But at some point, if we're online and we can access that model, you can't do whatever that last 10% is. Go up and make that happen. I'm going to rename this show Intelligent Machines and then give Paris and Jeff Windows Weekly because you guys, you're good. But you get it. By the way, the chat room is saying I should call this little window in the Twitter ad sales thing Bob. I don't know why. Clippy. Clippy. Clippy. It looks like you're trying to sell ads. Can I help? Yeah, yeah. That's right. My ad sales are up 110%. If I could figure out a way to do an AI podcast sales agent, I would, believe me. Goodness. I'm pretty sure you could, actually. That's the world. Yep. What do you think, Richard? You do all your own. Sign me up. Yeah. This is what they do. Look, we're making fun of it, but really, at the end of the day, it saves you money, saves you time. Are you telling me you wouldn't want that thing? I mean, right? Yeah. For a job, we really started the rewrite, and I think I've kind of won her over because I ran through it a little bit. She said, oh, okay. Right. And now she's making me videos of the old system and saying, this is what I like. Get rid of this. Because now we're changing the user interface to magic. She doesn't know it, but she's vibe coding it. She's over. Yeah. Don't tell me. I know. I'm just, you know. That's exactly what she's doing. But this is that moment we all will have at some point. Because even the biggest doubters, the haters, whatever, there will be, you know, like even the people who hate it, we keep talking about these bug things. I mean, come on. Like, I don't care how much you hate this stuff. You have to agree. Like, this is great. Well, and somebody's written, I think it's called Nobili or something, a kind of headless Excel for Mac that can read and write Excel. Yeah. It doesn't, but you don't use, it's for an agent. So one of the things Lisa does is output all the sales into an Excel spreadsheet. Guess what? That's trivial. This is what I was talking about earlier. In other words, you might not care, but maybe you do care because you're paying for it. You don't care if it's actually using Excel on the back end. If it's not, that means you don't have to pay for Excel, meaning you don't pay for Microsoft 365, which means you're saving $100 a month or whatever it is. It does all the formulas. It understands. I mean, it practically excels. It's very close. Yep. And whatever output format you want. Like even like the dumb version of this like 10 years ago, 20 years ago would have been, I work for, I write books. I have to publish, you know, I have to go through a publisher. They have to take, it has to be doc format. You have to use Microsoft Word. And if you're a real idiot, you can be like, well, I'm going to use LibreOffice or some other thing, and then I'll put it to Word document format at the end. The modern version of that is you don't even think about the tool, but it does put it to DocX or whatever it is at the other end, and it's perfect. So who cares? You know, like, it doesn't matter what you use to get there, and that's, I think, what AI is going to change, or is changing literally like right now. So I don't want to talk about Spotify, but I just want to mention I hate Spotify so much, and now I can tell that I hate it because it has AI built into it because God knows why. Because everything has to be conversational. Because everything else has to be conversational. Because what I want to do when I'm listening to music is talk. But you know what? It's okay. I get it. Like, everything's going to do this. So they've had AI playlists. I think there's an AI DJ. Speaking of which, the last thing I want to hear when I'm listening to music is DJ talking, which YouTube is starting to do and YouTube music is starting to do in their playlists, which I hate so much. But you can start talking to this thing. So you can, you know, I'm sure it's going to go in this direction where it's like, I really like, you know, Van Halen or something. These are things we already kind of do, right? Like Spotify already does. You play a song that you really like. And it follows it up with songs you think you're going to like. Yeah. So by now you can do it explicitly, I guess, or something. I'm not going to do it. Spotify was one of those things. They just had to answer the question of the board. What are you doing about it? Exactly. That's why you nailed it. What would you say your job is here? I'll tell you what my job is here. It's to say you're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Farat and Richard Campbell. We do the show every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can actually watch it live. We stream it into the Club Twit Discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. And if you're here at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC, watch it live. Chat with us live as we're doing it. And actually, Richard and Paul both go into the Discord chat. When Richard gets bored, he starts chatting with the people. They're poking me. They're poking me with stuff. On we go with the show because, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, it's time for the vaunted, the revered, the beloved Xbox segment. And that introduction is longer than the section. But the music is especially appropriate. Some weeks it's big, and last week was, you know, our date with Destiny, or however you wanted to describe it. This week it's been pretty quiet. That makes sense. I think just like kind of a trauma lull. I actually went up to the Xbox wires, and I'd just be like, did I miss something? Like, what's happening? Nothing. Do you think this would be a good time to try to buy a house in Seattle? I'm thinking there might be some vacancies. Yikes. Yeah. Too soon, man. I'm sorry. I don't recommend that. You think they just let go of all the people who know how to post on the news feed? That might be it. Is it quiet suddenly? Very. Oh, interesting. That's interesting. Maybe they did. Sorry, I don't know where to go with this. So we talked last week, I guess, about some of the studios that are leaving. Some of them are going with their original team and going to be independent. Some of them are going with as-yet-unnamed other companies. Some of them are still looking for a home, right? One of the ones that's sticking around but suffered pretty dramatic laughs is Obsidian. And I don't understand why this is news per se, but they've been directed to make a new Fallout game. Yeah. With the best of the show, you would think they would have been on it immediately. Yep. You would think we would be swimming in Fallout content, that there would be Fallout games on PC, console, mobile, you know, whatever. So what would these guys do? I don't know. I mean, yep. So we'll see what happens. I mean, they have games. You know, they have avowed, I think, The Outer Worlds, I think, and some other things. But, you know, when you look at Microsoft, well, Xbox, sorry, today, which is, you know, Microsoft gaming, essentially, other different studios you have. And you were to make a list of the top five, ten, whatever you can say, whatever you want, whatever game or franchise. I mean, Fallout is right there. This should be job-wise. This should be just something they're doing. But anyway. Fallout 76 was a disaster. Yeah, why, though? Like, it was just wildly buggy. It just was nowhere near the comparable story. How old is that game, though? Like, when did that come out? I feel like that was a really long time. Jeez, yeah. Yeah, I feel like this needs to be – look, nobody wants the yearly Call of Duty model for anybody, including people who play Call of Duty. But I feel like there needs to be a more regular cadence for these games, or at least for whatever – if they support them with DLC or whatever it might be. Yeah, I think what they're really missing – They're missing the visionary that paints the larger picture of that universe so that you can pick places to tell stories. You know, we've done some Nevada. We've done some New England. We've done D.C. Was 76 the Boston one or New England one? Or was it? Yeah, I think it's the New England one. Well, four was really the New England one. Okay. Yeah, I don't remember. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe AI could play that role, he says, too. Nice. the influx of tomatoes coming toward him. I don't know. Anyway, that's all I got for X-Files. There was really nothing. Last week was terrible, so this week is like, eh. Yeah, and I'm sorry. I just shouldn't have made light of this. That's a terrible thing for everybody who's laid off. And I only was thinking of it because I literally saw an article from the Seattle News organization saying how everybody was leaving Seattle because it was getting so busy. They're all heading to Silicon Valley, baby. where everything, oh wait. Yeah. You know, they could pull a commoner, bring everyone to Pennsylvania. That'd be great. Maybe this is a good opportunity. I've seen this in the past where cities say, you know, we want to be the next Silicon Valley. Oh, 100%. Yeah, there's a bunch of places like that, I'm sure. Nashville is, we were just there, so I just happened to see this. It's a big place for startups, you know? Yeah, sure. If you can stand like a thousand percent of humidity, it's a great choice. Many years ago, probably like 30 years ago going to NASA in the Bahamas. And they said, just like we were where the pirates went to hide their booty, we want to be where the tech companies go to hide their intellectual property. Or at least our revenues. They were installing like undersea cables so they would have high-speed Internet. I mean, they really wanted to be a data haven. I don't know. That was a long ago. So there's a book called The Millionaire Next Door, and it's about personal finance. We need a book called The Billionaire Next Door, and it's about why you have such crazy high-speed internet in your stupid town. That doesn't make any sense. And it's like, yeah, there's a guy over here who lives in a castle. I don't know. Our internet is awesome. There's a bunch of places like that. It could be a short book that says simply, you don't have a billionaire next door. They bought up all the property around them. Right. They bought the block. Exactly. They put in a moat and a wall. It's city over. Yep. Yep. You're going to need a trebuchet to get through that thing. Yeah, the billionaire in the next city over. That's more like it. Yeah. Yeah. This is Windows Weekly, and it is brought to you by not only those fine sponsor, singular, but by the many, many of you who are in Club Twit. And we are so grateful to all of the Club Twit members. They make this all possible. Lisa started it during the pandemic. Remember that? I think that happened a few years ago. I've blanked it out now. But we were very concerned at the time that we would need the support of people who listen to the shows to stay alive. And she started the club, and I'm glad she did because it has made all the difference. About 30% of our operating expenses are paid by club members. Without you, we would have to cut way back on the shows, on the personnel, and I don't want to do that. We've already done that. I don't want to do any more of that. So if you like the shows you hear here, if you want us to continue, if you want the benefits of membership in the club, you get things like ad-free versions of all the shows. And all those ad-free versions, by the way, have chapter markers. So you can skip around if you want. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a party. I guess that's the best way to describe it. It is a lot of fun. We have creative, smart, interesting people in there who do all sorts of things. Like Joe here. Joe is, he doesn't do this with AI. He does this with Photoshop. He takes it with AI, but it's actual intelligence. Actual intelligence. He takes old ads. This looks like an old Commodore. What is that Is that a C64 I don know what that is That a 64 Yeah C64 ads It looks like you absconding with something there It does I think Is this the one where they had a mime Because he's wearing white gloves. Yeah, it looks like white. That's funny. He's adding a printer. Anyway. He's adding a printer. He stole a printer from someone else, and he's leaving it at the house. He's tiptoeing in silently. But Joe is part of what makes this wonderful club Discord so much fun to hang out in. I just love it. So if you want to join the club, just go to twit.tv slash club twit. There's all the information you need there about joining. Ten bucks a month. I think there's still a two-week free trial. There's family memberships if you have multiple members of the family who want to be members. There's corporate memberships, too. We'd love it if your company took advantage of that. And just know that besides the benefits, you're really helping us stay on the air. And I think if you believe in independent journalism covering technology, we're not owned by any big company. We operate without fear or favor, just like Paul, at therat.com, just like Richard is runnersradio.com. I think it's really important. Support independent podcasting, independent blogging, because it makes a huge difference. I think it's very important. And if you can, support Twit, twit.tv slash club twit. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for what we call the back of the book. We'll kick things off with Paul Ferrat's tip of the week. Yeah, so Tony Redman comes up once a year now, at least, because he does a new rev of his book, which is incredible. And by his book, I mean it's an incredible group effort. and is now multiple books because Tony has so much to teach me about breaking up content because this is a problem I've been having too. So what used to be called Office 365 for IT Pros has now finally been renamed to Microsoft 365 for IT Pros. This is the 2027 edition. You can buy this book at Gumroad, and there are sub-books or other books that go along with it too, right? So they split it off where there's a – what is the thing? There's a preview book for IT pros, right, Power Platform, and also automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell. So they pulled it out of the main book to keep the main book manageable because the main book is, you know, over 1,000 pages long. It's a big book. So Tony is the, I guess, the editor. And then this reads like a who's who of always to work with, like Paul Robichaud's lead author, sorry, Brian Desmond's in there. He's a great guy and a bunch of other people. So as a Windows Weekly listener, you can get, what is the deal? I think it's 20% off. 20%, yeah. Yeah, so if you use the code WindowsWeekly27, a capital W in both cases, you can get 20% off the book if you buy it directly from Gumroad. And then you've got the year of support, you know, for whatever updates. They say you get updates as Microsoft keeps on changing. Every month. Yeah, yeah. And this covers the whole game. Yep. Yeah, well, like Microsoft. Look, you take on Windows, you're like, this is a big topic. What would be a bigger topic? I don't know. How about Microsoft 365? You know, astonishing. And Tony's put together a team that just works on it constantly. It's amazing. Yeah, exactly. So, anyway, great guys. The ones I know, you know, there's a great group of guys. Tony's fantastic. He's a regular on Run-Az, too. Every so often I need my Exchange connection fixed. And then the app pick, so I've been working on the series, which it doesn't seem to lend itself well to app picks per se, but this is the friction thing, like adding friction to some technology interactions. So I removed a bunch of subscriptions. I saved like $100 a month. I've written some articles about alternatives for reading as opposed to, say, just buying books from Kindle or Audible or whatever. I've written some about music. There will be actually more there, movies and TV shows, et cetera. So it's kind of a whole thing. But in the process of going through this and trying to, like, think through strategies for different things, because different types of content are different. Like a movie or a TV show or a book is like this, where oftentimes you just have the one time and you're done, right? And so buying that thing at full price and owning it doesn't always make sense. Like, you know, a lot of people like us and people listening here, the types that like to collect things, they want to have a bookshelf full of whatever it is, CDs or books or whatever. If it's electronic, you want to, like, you squirrel away all this stuff. I probably have over 1,000 Kindle books in my library. I have close to 1,000 Audible books. I have close to 1,000 movies from Apple, which is stupid. So I'm trying to rein that stuff in. And music is different, though. Music is the one where, especially if you're trying to find new music, keeping a music subscription service makes a lot of sense. It's super easy to, you know, test something and say, oh, like, I like this song. But I'm looking so bizarre. This feels like it's something from 30 years ago. But I'm trying to figure out, like, locally owned, like, I'm going to call it MP3, but a lot of it's black. But just local music. Like, what does this look like? Like, what could this look like? And I found this app. It's not, like, great looking, but it's awesome for correcting all of the metadata problems, like, that we always have with these files. You know, correct album art in the thumbnail for the file as well as, like, in whatever application you use in the playback. It's called Music B. It is free. It's actually fairly fantastic, like the way it works. I haven't thought about this type of thing in such a long time. And, you know, I think one of the daunting things about if you're going to buy music and, you know, store it locally, put it on NAS or however you're doing it, you have to get it to the vice. There's a whole story there. And this may, I'm sure this will come up again. But, you know, you want to get it right, you know, before you put it anywhere and then start using it. So this is a great way to make that happen. and this is just minor, but two, three, whatever weeks ago, Vivaldi 8 came out. There's a huge update. 8.1 is out now, and it is not a huge update. And this is a good example of, like, this company doesn't care about AI, and they're like, look, we're just meeting your needs. This month we're focusing on refinement, but also just, like, fixing bugs and quality and everything. It's like we don't have a lot to say about it. It's just better than it's ever been, and, like, God love them. I love to see this kind of thing everywhere. So if you are interested in Vivaldi or just an alternative web browsers, you definitely take a look at that. And then, Richard, you now have 50 straight minutes, my friend. I will mention coming up in 50 minutes. So you've got lots of time for whiskey. We are going to cover the big Mozilla announcement a couple of hours ago on the state of open source. So we have the CTO of the Mozilla Foundation joining us to talk about the state of open source. So that should be very interesting. But that means there's a lot of runway for you, Mr. Richard Campbell, starting with Runners Radio. Yeah, bringing back one of my favorites, Sammy Leho. He's a security professional out of Finland who scares the snot out of me on a regular basis. As any good security pro should. some of the stories if you go back and listen to the catalog of Run As with Sammy it's things like he helped fight an exploit for the healthcare system in Finland where he was both the prosecutor to find this guy and also one of the victims because his own data had been stolen by this guy he was involved when the Ukraine war started off separating companies that have offices both in Finland and in Russia So doing the thing that Active Directory was never meant to do to actually split the two things apart, you know, crazy. And so I bumped into him at a conference recently and said, what do you want to dig into? And he said, well, I'm really looking at what's going on with MDash and Mythos and like all of these vulnerabilities. And so we sat and chatted for a while. And again, it frightened the heck out of me. But, you know, great conversation about where the vulnerabilities lie, what these tools are good at and what they aren't at and what the rest of us should do. You know, the big, big companies are doing things, but I'm talking to plenty of mid-tier and smaller software providers who they all run risks of being exploited too. And so there's different tooling and other opportunities to just try and use these tools to get ahead of the exploits that are coming. Nice. I want to get him on an intelligent machine, so that sounds really. Great conversation to have. But just, you know, this whole idea of you've got the CVE engine out there pulling up exploits. Like you, as a person, don't have time to read all of them, but you really ought to have an agent aimed at that so that you are evaluating your own software as quickly as they occur. You know, Sammy was also, in another show, was the one who said, stop testing the Windows updates, deploy them, and then worry about the fallout. Because the time to exploit is so short now. Now for sure. Yeah, we just don't have the time. You know, that being said, over on the dev side, we've also come to realize, hey, you probably shouldn't take the updates of an open source library until they've been around for about 48 hours because black hats are pushing changes in and it takes time for the good guys to find them and remove them. So, you know, don't be too quick there. But I have limits on all of my libraries that you can't use them for two weeks. after they come out. Yeah, it's just amazing how that 48-hour window seems to be the thing you need. It is a weird time in security, so it's great to go back to the touchstones, folks that have been fighting the fight for a long time, and they're just rolling with the punches. Love it. Alright, I think it's time to talk whiskey talk. You're back in Canada. Do you have a Canadian whiskey? I do indeed have a Canadian. And look, what a pretty bottle. Well, and look, it's almost half gone. Yeah, oddly enough. Yeah, I've had this one for a little while now. Or half full. I had some friends up. Not half full. You know. The folks that I went down and spent July 4th with came up and spent the weekend with us. So we were drinking some Canadian and a bunch of other weird things. Because, you know, I have a bunch of weird things in my closet. But this particular one is a BC. So not Alberta, not Ontario. This is a real British Columbian whiskey called Sanctuary. and so this is my backyard, right? We're on the east side here. You've seen the view out the window there across to the west side because these guys are at the southeastern end of Vancouver Island on the Saanich Peninsula right in the city of Victoria. Now, if we're really going to get our head around this, we've got to go back a ways. So say 25,000 years ago at a period we call in this area the Fraser Glacier Nation. Oh, my God, you weren't kidding. I wasn't kidding. Because this is what makes the shape of the ground and a lot of the culture that this whiskey ultimately comes to depend on. And as my geology friends have said, you know, the ground I'm on here is the rock that the ice couldn't crush, which is why it's so hard to build anything here and why we have above-ground wiring for everything. Like, what else can you do? So if you go back to 25,000 years, there was over a mile of ice here. And there were mammoths and bison and musk ox and the giant short-faced bear. Don't know if there's any people then. We're not entirely convinced of that. About a few thousand years later, about 22,000 years ago, there's a warming period and the ice melts back. The Saanich Inlet, which is where Victoria is, becomes a large glacial lake that eventually has an ice dam failure. And we have this in the geological history. And that burst creates this thing called the Coalwood Delta, which is a source of a lot of sand and gravel even today. And then it cools down again 16,000 years ago, and we get the glaciers back, but bigger than ever. These are the ones that push all the way into Puget Sound, down to Seattle and Tacoma. And the weight of that ice is so great that what we would currently consider sea level, this land, was about 150 feet further down. That rebound is massive. After the ice retreats again at about 14,000 years ago, it'll take 10,000 years for the land to sort of come all the way back up. Now, the reason that ice is such a big deal is it's actually what carves out the Salish Sea and Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. So they're so very deep, right? That water, you know, we're only talking five kilometers over to Texas Island, But the bottom, that's 200-plus meters down. So it's very deep water, and it's part of the character of this area. It's very fjordish. But also, when that ice retreat happens about 14,000 years ago is when humans started to come down, the ones that we know of now. And we know they come out of the north, so there's plenty of evidence to show that came across the Bering Bridge. When you get into archaeology that old, it's mostly down deep in the ground, and its old fryer pits and things like that. So they're really just doing carbon measurements. There's not a lot of detail, not a lot of artifacts. Of course, also the people of that area very much lived on organic materials, right? Bone and stone and wood, and so there's just not a lot left. You've got to fast forward a bit more there. Of course, this land was incredibly prolific as the ice all melts off and there's all this freshwater flooding. It makes a lot of grasslands. The bison move in. The megafauna are gone. And, of course, the humans come down. And the salmon always ran in this area. And they just get larger and more plentiful as the rivers grow bigger. Now, as I am a buff of archaeology, and I do love this part of the world, I've spent some time on this. So when we talk about known archaeological eras, and these are not based on people per se, but more about the technologies, right? Like what did their art look like? What kind of, what's the sophistication of the technology? So the earliest defined era is a time we call the St. Mungo phase, which is just like 3500 BC to 1500. And a lot of this comes from an area known as Locano Beach, which is right in Vancouver today, which on the other side is Hale-a-Shea, but they were traveling all over this area. And this is very much subsistence survivors on salmon, shellfish, sea mammals. They do woodworking out of wood and bone and antler, pretty straightforward stuff. And as that period, a couple thousand years goes by, you get in what's known as the Larkano beach phase, which is when the woodworking really evolves, and they start to incorporate things, making bone chisels and using nephrite adds blades, so stronger, more complex materials. The construction gets larger, so they're starting to make big plank houses, larger canoes. There's also evidence of spear throwers. So these are pieces of wood, essentially, that you place on your arm to increase the throw on spears. You know, it's an amplifier of strength. You also see the mythic creature masks and sort of the mythologies and shamanism emerges from there. The Marpole phase is the last defined phase. This bridges across from BCE to CE times, so 400 to 450, going up into the Roman periods. And that's where we have quite complex societies living around the Salish Sea. So this is large plank houses, long-duration habitation, as evidenced by these midden piles, huge mounds of shells from people feasting and partying in different areas and so forth. Their woodworks are complex. They have more advanced tools all around, harpoons, sophisticated spear points. They're whaling, and they're very successful people. And there's many different cultures spread across all the lands in here. So when we talk about Victoria per se, we're talking about the Likawungan people, which originally were on the east side of the peninsula. Today, that area is known as Oak Bay, and there was estimated more than 10,000 residents by about 900 A.D., which is important. The town name is remembered. It's called Sathathlam, but it was destroyed in a tsunami in 930 A.D. There was a major earthquake, and it kicked a five-meter tsunami up and down the strait and destroyed a huge amount of the homes and villages along those areas. most of which never recovered. The land was finally changed to this. A lot of it became marshy, literally textured in the title marshes. And so the people that did survive moved inland. They moved to more sheltered waterways and things like that. And in the case of the Lekwungen people, they moved into an area we now know as Inner Harbor of Victoria. So it's across the peninsula in a more sheltered area, closer to the river, it's a little safer all around. There wouldn't be another event like that, a major earthquake, according to the geological record, until about 1700. But at that point, even though it had been 800 years, people still were staying away from the coastline. So these tsunamis just didn't have the same effect. And the largest state in place. And remember, this is all oral history matched to the geological records. So the evidence is pretty clear. So we don't get Europeans into this part of the world until 1774 when the Spanish make their way up here. This is Juan Perez and Bruno de Hecate. And they don't actually come in here per se. They're mostly up the outer coast, although they come to the conclusion that that landmass, what we know as Vancouver Island, they call the Isla de Cuadra, after one of their commanders, is an island. So they do the mapping, but they don't stay. The first evidence of a smallpox epidemic is in 1780, which did not come from the sea at all. It likely came through continental routes. It is completely devastating. 30 to 50 percent of the indigenous people living in this area died of that first smallpox epidemic. So you're comparable to what happened to the Aztec and the Inca several hundred years earlier. It just took longer to get here. The first real establishment in this part of the world by Europeans is 1789 with Fort Nootka. This is on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Again, it was called Isla de Quadra, and it's really the first fort, and there's not a whole lot left there. The full mapping of the Strait of Chittas and comes until 1792 when one George Vancouver, yes, that Vancouver, arrives in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in April of 1792 with the discovery in the Chatham. He had thought that the Strait would just turn into a river. He did not expect an inland waterway, but when he finds out that it is there, he sends his people all over the place. A guy named Peter Puget heads south to map all the way down to Tacoma, Olympia, which is why it's called the Puget Sound. He also encounters all the Salish peoples that are far more in the inside sea where it's much safer. And so there's lots of trade to be done. Later that year in June, he does actually meet with Juan Francisco de la Bodega de Cuadra in the Nutka Sound establishment on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It could have easily ended up being the beginning of a war between Spain and England. Remember, they're at the farthest reaches of the empire. They're farthest away from everything. And they're more like each other than different. So they get along really well and decide. That's not a huge loss of that, but they decide to, let's name the island Quadra and Vancouver's island. In the meantime, he spends the rest of the year fully mapping the Salish Sea, proves that passage all the way around Vancouver Island is navigable. And so Vancouver goes down in history and is wildly famous. The waves of disease continue to run through this area for the next few decades. smallpox, measles, peteria, you name it. The next major colony or establishment actually comes from the Americans. This is 1811. Fort Astoria is established in the Pacific Northwest. It's done by one John Jacob Astor. Do you recognize the name? So John Jacob Astor is the original American multimillionaire. He creates a company called, it's his great grandson, John Jacob Astor IV, that'll die on the Titanic some hundred years later. But he creates a company called the Pacific Fur Company and sends out two different routes to this location on the mouth of the Columbia River. He sends a ship called the Tonquin and also an overland expedition. They're supposed to arrive at the same time, but they don't. The Tonquin gets there well ahead and it has most of the supplies. So they construct this fort at the mouth of the Columbia River. This today would be Oregon. It's on the south side of the river, calling it Fort Astor. And then because the overland expedition hasn't arrived, they decide to do some trading and the Tonquin heads north and ends up encountering a group of folks. They end up in the violent confrontation home and most of the crew is killed. And in a panic, one of the surviving clerks blows the ship up, leaving no survivors. By the time the overland expedition actually arrives at the fort, The ship is gone and won't be back. They're already starving because they took far longer to get there than they planned. And so the establishment is basically crippled and begging for help right when the War of 1812 starts. And that doesn't go particularly well for the Americans. The British burned the White House. And so most of the aspirations in the Far West die off for several decades. And so a rival company to Hudson's Bay called the Northwest Company actually convinces the U.S. to sell them Fort Historia, which they can't support anyway. They rename it Fort George, and they're doing the operations in fur trade and opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. That'll end in 1821 when Hudson's Bay Company, the wealthier larger company, buys out the NWC, it merges together. But they also recognize that being on the south side of the Columbia River with the Americans coming back isn't a good idea. So in 1825, they established a new fort further inland on the Columbia River and on the north side and call it Fort Vancouver. Today, there is still a town called Vancouver there across from Portland. Now, this is part of Hudson's Bay Company. It actually becomes the headquarters of what they call the Columbia Department, which is really Hudson's Bay's interest in running all the way from California to Alaska and into the interior all along the West Coast. And yes, this is why British Columbia is called British Columbia, because it was the British side of the Columbia River. Now, still recognizing that there's pressure being put on by the Americans to push further north, the HBC sets up another fort further north in 1827 called Fort Langley. This is up the Fraser River, a part of the system that Vancouver himself didn't particularly explore. They did out-of-the-fetify the mouth of it. it's further inland. It's right on the fur trade routes. It's at the point where the river gets very difficult to navigate, but otherwise it's a very large river. But it is all supported by Fort Vancouver. It's kind of the outpost in the original European settlement, or at least the British settlement in what is now known as British Columbia. Fast forward a few years in 1843, recognizing that the Americans are coming back strong 30 years after Fort Astoria, and they actually have this chant 5440 or bust, like they want to push the line up that far north. And so they build another fort, Fort Victoria, on the southern end of Vancouver Island. It's also an HBC trading post. This finally gets all resolved in the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which draws the line between the British lands and the American lands along the 49th parallel. So that's where the Columbia River is now, between the Columbia River and the 49th Parable becomes Washington State. We probably should mention as a kind of footnote that 54, 40-year bust was all about extending slavery into more territory. That, too. I mean, there's a whole bunch of dynamics going on there. This is coming into the Civil War. Like, all of that play is happening at the same time. It's fascinating. It's in British history, really. It is. And what's interesting, it's really formed Canada, too. I mean, it formed a boundary for Canada. But that line gets drawn with the British, and Canada is still several decades away from actually forming. And part and parcel of this whole dynamic is this recognition that Vancouver Island was more important in many ways to the mainland. So the colony of Vancouver Island is actually established in 1849. This is when they finally dropped the name of Quadra and Vancouver's Island to just Vancouver Island. It had been like that for quite a few decades at that point because the Spanish haven't really been involved. Although in the 1850s, they will name another large island, not as big as Vancouver Island, but a big island in the inland water body, Quadra Island, which is still called that today. I've been there. It's a nice place. The colony of British Columbia doesn't get foreign until 1858, so almost 10 years later after the colony of Vancouver Island. And that's really only defined because of the gold rush. When gold is discovered in the Yukon Territory and up the different riverways, including the Fraser, Americans start coming up en masse and they start wanting to change the rules and have it controlled by the U.S. and so forth. And the Brits freak out. This is a long way away. You know, they're way out there. So in 1858 at Fort Langley, they declared the colony of British Columbia and that it is part of the British Empire. But then they also set up a different capital than Fort Langley. They used New Westminster as the capital. This is on the Fraser River, but closer to the Salish Sea. And it's good land, good rivers, has all the features needed. So it's the capital of the colony of British Columbia. And by 1866, just less than 10 years later, the colony of Vancouver Island and the colony of British Columbia actually merge. And when that happens, they manage through some finagling to actually make the unified capital Victoria rather than New Westminster. And then 1867 is the Confederation of Canada, but British Columbia doesn't immediately join. They won't join until 1871. And, of course, a key part of British Columbia being part of the Dominion of Canada was the railway. And so the Canadian Pacific Railway is trying to push through the Rockies to actually get a railway all the way to the west coast and the Pacific Ocean. Initially, they pick a location at the end of what's called Burrard's Inlet. They were going to call the area Port Moody. It does exist today, and it was going to be the original termination of the rail line. But the owners of the rail line don't love the site so much. And so they actually look further down the coast to a logging area known as Granville, which also had a little bit of a town around it called Gas Town after a guy named Gassy Jack, who was a saloon operator and riverboat operator. And it's a lovely part of Vancouver. Yes, it is. And I bring up that point to say we don't get the city of Vancouver until 1886, much later in the equation of all of this. or, you know, Victorian U.S., all that have been around for decades. And at that point, it's only about 1,000 people, mostly loggers, and within the first year, burn the entire place down because they're using fire to clear the land and lose control of it. But there's so much money in the system now to get the railway up and running that within a year, they've completely rebuilt. In fact, it's even bigger and more people have moved in. And the train actually makes it to Vancouver in 1887. And so that kind of sets the terrain for, if you think about how the Civic Northwest works, remember Vancouver's a newcomer, Victoria's one of the oldest locations, still actually important and became the capital, and that's where Phillips Brewing and Malting sits. So in 2001, a guy named Matt Phillips, who had been working in the brewing business for quite a few years, decided he really wanted to make his own, including he worked at a company called Whistler Brewing up in Whistler. And he really liked the beer culture in and around Victoria, so he sets up a brewery there. He's not the first. There's a bunch in the area. In fact, there's enough that the banks don't want to play. He can't get a loan, so he pretty much funds it himself. He has a degree in biology, so he sort of understands the chemistry of making beer. But he turns out to be really mechanically inclined and constructs his own equipment, in fact, builds his own bottling system. I found a video of him from 2002 where he's literally hand-sticking the labels on his beer bottles. He specifically focused on large format like 650-mil bottles, which we call bomber bottles in this part of the world. Although there's a glass shortage in the early 2000s as well, and he ends up buying a whole bunch of bottles out of Portland. that were what we call stubbies, the little brown bottles, short necked. They're not very popular today, but his first product that sells decently is a thing called Phoenix Gold Lager. And from there, his real hit becomes a product called Blue Buck Ale in those big bomber bottles. It's successful enough that by 2008, he moves into larger premises. And while he, before he even moved, he managed to get a distilling license. So he always had an eye to making whiskey because he was already working in beer. But he didn't have the equipment. He didn't have the time. But he managed to acquire an old English pot still. They call the still Old George. It had been built in the 1920s and shifted into the Okanagan, which is in the interior in the 1950s, where it had spent about 20 years making cider. And then that operation shut down. The still was essentially abandoned. So by the time he finds it, it hasn't been used in several decades. It's in a state. So he gets it to his new facility where he has a space for it. but he doesn't have any equipment skills or time to actually do anything with it. So it sits for a few years until he runs across a guy named Laurent Lafuente, who is an experienced distiller. He's Swiss, and he's worked all over the world. And that guy cleans up the still and starts building out the equipment to put together the company. Now, he wants to call it Phillips Distilling, but there already is a Phillips Distilling in Minnesota. So instead he calls it Firmatorium. So in 2014, he forms Firmatorium Distilling, and the first thing they do is make gin, which makes sense. It's a quick product to make. They make with local botanicals, running it through this still they call Old George with a couple of passes, although eventually they buy a German Müller-Brennig combination, call them pothole, which is really good at making gin. He also starts working closely with the local barley farms up and down Vancouver Island and in the peninsula as well. Enough that he recognizes buying local barley, the malting processes are somewhat limited. He wants to do more. So he sets up his own malt works. So in 2015, largely built his own craft scale malting work. So shaker and cleaner system for getting the barley prepped, his own grain elevators and conveyors for the storage. They've got six grain storage silos for finished malt and for barley. Steeping tanks, aeration systems, germination systems with the rotators to keep it at the right temperature to grow out. And then the kilns to do the drying. And especially in the beer world, some toasting as well. He'll actually cook the malt for longer to add additional flavors to it because he's making a bunch of different kinds of beers. He's also now selling the matured malt to other companies. And then that actually gets him into doing some whiskey making as well. Now, he already had been buying bourbon casks because he was doing bourbon-finished beers. So he had a relationship with Heaven's Hill to buy their casks and get an age of their beer in it too. Now he starts to make whiskey and has a bunch of interesting storage locations, very typical rack houses, wooden racks on the sides, but he's doing mixed barrels. And that's where we get to this particular whiskey, which is their reserve edition. So they make three different no age statement sanctuary single malt whiskeys. One's called reserve, another one called signature and a classic edition. And this is the reserve. So it's a hundred percent BC barley, The yeast you use, and I'll notice this right away when I tasted it, is a London ale yeast. And coincidentally, I know this just like today or yesterday, we published the Carolus whiskey, the Belgian whiskey that had that ale flavor in it. Well, this one's got it too, that sort of, that chewy kind of foamy ale flavor. Oh, this is good. Let me tell you. So the way they distill it is they use that old pot still, Joel George. They do two pass and then six to eight years, but they split the addition up into three different sets of barrels. There's Heaven Hill bourbon barrels, but they've also got a relationship with Twisted Oak, the winery, and they use ex-rose wine barrels as well as the Phillips beer stave us barrels, which is an imperial stout. And then from that they've combined together to make this whiskey. Wow. So the fruitiness of the wine comes through really clear. It's absolutely got some bourbon notes in it. It's like it's warming. This is about 46% or 42%. But it's got that aily kind of yeasty flavor to it, which I've just come to really admire as a cool way to make a whiskey. For no age statement, they've really just done a great job of making a really interesting whiskey out of it. And so right away, my friends tasted this, and they're like, that's neat whiskey. Like, very interesting. Unfortunately, only distributed in B.C. and Alberta. In a 750-mil bottle for about $70. Oh. $70 Canadian. So what is that, $1.50 American? That's not much, yeah. But, yeah, you may have to come over to get it. But believe me, that's the question. You're no peso. That's all I'm saying. That's it. But here I was thinking it was only the Belgians that were clever enough to use an interesting yeast, and almost immediately I find a BC version of that. So, I mean, good on them. They've been doing this for 25 years. They're starting to figure it out. They've only been making whiskey for about 10. I can't wait to see what a 10 or a 12 in this looks like, but they've definitely got a great dynamic going and an excellent product. Somebody asked on the, how is it compared to Shelter Point? Both of them are good. I would drink either one in a second. I think Shelter Point goes much more traditional. These guys have done a clever yeast and a clever set of barrelings, and it's come through in the flavor really nicely. Yum. Yum. Sanctuary Reserve Edition single malt whiskey from British Columbia. There you go. Water. A quick 25,000 years of history just to make it easy. I love it. I am heading for the war bar. But, yes, water for now. Richard, you did it again. Something weird from his closet. You can find all of these at somethingweirdfrommycloset.com. But, actually, the easiest thing is go to trip.tv slash whiskey. The wonderful Kevin King, our producer and editor, has been working to catch up. He's still a few behind, but we have a lot of those. He's getting closer. I think we're down to, like, eight weeks behind. We're very close. Carolus was not that long ago. It's really good. Good job. Good job. Trip.tv slash whiskey. Spelled with an E or without an E. We've got both. If you're Irish or Scottish or Scots. Richard Campbell, you'll find it at runnasradio.com. That's where his podcasts are, including .NET Rocks. And I can't wait to listen to that new one about security and AI. You'll also find him here every Wednesday for Windows Weekly, as you'll find Paul Therat. He is at therat.com. His books are at leanpub.com. But, hey, here's a little tip. If you become a premium member at Thorat.com, you'll get all the books for free. That includes the Field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere, and the new one, the Inchidify Windows, which is probably worth its weight in single malt whiskey, I would guess. I don't know. It's a pretty way weight, but, yes. What was that campaign slogan? 84 proof for fight? I think it was that one. No. 84 proof for fight. I think 54 is plenty strong. 54 is just fine. We do Windows Weekly, as I mentioned, every Wednesday. You can watch us live, but if you don't have access to your work in or something like that, you can always go to the website, twit.tv slash www. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great way to share the video. Everybody's got YouTube. You can share little clips even. Or simply go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe, and you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. audio or video. And of course, your club members, you have a special URL just for you for the ad-free versions of the show. Thank you so much for being here, Paul and Richard. Thanks to all our winners and even those of you who fell asleep, you dozers. You missed the whiskey bit. We will see you. Bye-bye. .