307: I Hate Smishing

Brad, I posted a podcast from the sky this week. What brought that on? Well, Linux, I guess, technically. Okay. I mean, Linux is probably at fault for just about everything. Look, I set the podcast to upload on September 30th. and i scheduled it and i hit the button and i walked away from the computer and went did some packed up because i was on a trip and uh then

I didn't check to see that it actually saved and uploaded. And I just closed the laptop because I was like, oh, laptop's asleep. It must have finished. And then I didn't think about it until the next afternoon when I was on the airplane. And I was like, oh, hey, let's see what people think about that podcast episode.

I was like, there's no channel in the discord. And then I went and looked and I was like, oh, it didn't post. And then I went and looked at the Patreon page, the backend SMS, CMS. And it was like, yeah, no Patreon, no, no Patreon episode. So I uploaded it from the sky. I guess technically first I downloaded it from my Dropbox and then I uploaded it from the sky. Wow. Two way communication. It was not a fast internet connection. I was getting like 200 kilobits per second.

I bet not. My paranoia about everything leads me to triple check just about every form before I submit it. I usually I do that, but I was a little distracted as I was packing and trying to get other stuff done because I was on a trip. So, yeah, I can't talk about what I saw, but I was at the Intel tech tour for their new processor launches that will be coming at some point in the future. I'm excited to hear about that. But for now. Yeah.

How fast was the download on the airplane? It was the download was OK. The download took about eight minutes. The upload took pretty much the rest of the two hour flight. We're talking. Is this the MP3 I sent you for that podcast? This is the it's a 60 megabyte file. I got to know each and every bit as I was downloading and uploading. So it gets a patron episode. How big can it be? It turns out 60 megabytes, 61 megabytes. I'm looking at it right now. Yeah. 200 kilobits per second. Download.

It took a minute. Yeah. And by a minute, you mean several minutes? I mean, by several minutes, you mean like several blocks of several minutes? What I mean is, as they were saying, hey, you need to put your tray table up so that we can land the airplane. I was holding the laptop in front of me, just barely propped open to get the last 2%.

It was it was some real Mission Impossible business. Great. Great. No corruption. Are they using Starlink on those things yet? Some of them do, but this one did not. This was using the old one. Like I've seen that advertised, not as in advertising it being in use, but like Starlink is coming to the so-and-so, maybe Delta fleet of planes or something. So some of the, a lot of international stuff has it, but this was using the old, we point the.

thing at the cell towers at the ground. And I believe, is that how those things get internet? That's how it used to work for a long time. Like the Virgin America internet was, we have a big giant antenna that's bouncing and sending stuff to LTE towers on the ground. I guess that does explain a lot about the speed and latency. I see all kinds of weird stuff out there. I don't know how well this works about people like.

Getting free internet on the plane by tunneling all of their traffic through whatever port is open that allows you to, you know, you have to do their captive portal and pay for service. People finding ways to tunnel all of their traffic through whatever openings there are.

that allow that stuff my linux computer happily connected to the broad internet without paying oh really uh-huh interesting i think they're just getting dns maybe i'm not saying i would necessarily attempt something like that but No, I paid the $8. It was worth it. It's interesting that that sounds like it might be possible anyway. This podcast does not endorse any hijacking of...

Internet service. No. That's a federal crime, probably because it's on an airplane. I'm not going to fool around with that. I'll pay the eight dollars. Let's just leave that alone. Just pay the eight dollars. Bye. Welcome to Brad Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hello. Hi. Hello. Hello. Welcome back into town.

I am excited to be back. It has been a whirlwind week. I saw a roadrunner, a coyote, a scorpion. I just started to ask if you can say what state this was in, but I don't think I have to ask now. Where do you think I was? I'm guessing Arizona.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. I saw a hawk. We got hawks right out back here, but scorpions, that's a roadrunner. That's a different thing. Because roadrunners are really, truly, hideously ugly animals. Of all the animals that got a cartoon glow up, the roadrunner is the king. Really is a absolutely revolting looking bird. What? Yeah. And they all, every time I've ever seen a roadrunner in person.

They always have some like dead lizard dangling out of their mouth. OK, I started to say what's revolting about this bird. It looks kind of noble, but then I saw a close up of its face. They're not attractive animals. Now I see what you're saying. That's a face only a mother could love. yeah don't come at me uh arizonans i like it it's fine whatever i don't have any no it was just kind of walking oh i know i was i was uh look it was

Right now it's September. I was there in September. It was like it was so hot during the day that the evenings were even hot. So like the only time you go outside was like seven o'clock in the morning. So I went out for a walk a couple of mornings while I was there when it was still like 70 degrees and really nice. And I saw the Roadrunner and the Coyote on two separate days. The Coyotes there are bigger than our Coyotes here is the first thing I noticed. Our Coyotes here are pretty small.

You see a lot of coyotes around here to judge. Dude, I we have seen I've seen so many coyotes in the last like two years. Yeah. Wow. We saw one we saw when we were camping in the park a couple weeks in Golden Gate Park. Sorry, in the Presidio a few weeks ago, we saw one. Wow.

I see them down in Pacifica kind of regularly. If you're up in the mornings, you're out like duskish is when they seem to be out the most. And I hear them all the time. You only ever see single ones. It depends on the time of the year. So you see single ones. Apparently, when the cubs, that year's cubs are kicked out of the pack, when they go reach adolescents, the males, they kick them out and then they have to go find their own people or I guess coyotes. I've always been under the.

impression that coyotes are worst in packs packs are when they get really dangerous is my understanding yeah you don't i don't we hear packs okay we hear them talking to each other across the valley in pacifica fairly regularly But I've never seen more than one one or two together. So, OK, like I've always heard, like, that's how they will corner and kill dogs, for example, is when. Oh, yeah. Like one one coyote will drive the dog back into the pack and then that's a bad scene.

Yeah, I don't I don't I've seen like there are a lot of signs up in the Presidio and in Golden Gate Park now that are that are like, hey, beware because there's coyotes here. And we saw them, I've seen them like walking around down by Bayshore, like in the hills up above Bayshore. I've seen them walking around. I saw one down by Chase Center one night, actually, just like.

casually crossing the street down by where the Warriors and the Valkyries play. I think he was a Warriors fan. I assume he was a Valkyries fan. It was after the game. Anyway.

We got a news roundup this week. We got three hot stories. I think these are three. Three things kind of struck our interest. You want to start? Well, I guess. Should we tell people what they are? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Provide a menu up top here that they can then, I guess, like randomly seek through their podcast to find. Yeah. The first one is about smishing, which I thought was like when you smile and wish at the same time, maybe. Yes.

But it's SMS phishing, which is a new term for me. Phishing, phishing already some kind of portmanteau or mashup of. Why are cybercrime terms so goofy, I guess, is the real question. I think it's because the kind of people who cover that kind of stuff are goofballs. Yeah, that's very possible. That's kind of how we got bootstrapping or booting a computer, right?

Or really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That comes from I don't know how to pronounce it. Baron Baron. Help me out. Munchausen. Munchausen. Munchausen. I don't know how people say that, but I believe that's where that comes from. It comes from pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Same place as. The other use of that term. Yeah, the thing we all do. Or, you know, there's like so many terms that come out of Douglas Adams or Monty Python. Oh, yeah. Nerds. There is just yes, there is a specific kind of like.

70s 80s nerd humor that has informed so much of computing terminology anyway two different stories about the phenomenon of sms like text phishing and spam and Related cybercrime have both come out around the same time that kind of caught our interest. Yeah. So then the next story is Ars Technica flagged this story about the iRobot slash Roomba founder.

who's been doing robotics since the 70s, who won't go within nine feet of today's walking robots. That was interesting enough, but then the blog post from Rodney Brooks that they linked to that's the source for that. It's fascinating. We'll talk about that. And then the last thing is we're like two. This is it's not this podcast, but the next podcast, I think, is the last one before Windows 10 goes end of life. Yes, correct.

And there's some downstream consequences from that that I hadn't really thought about, but it makes sense. Some software getting retired in advance of or support ending for some software that depends on old versions of Windows, let's say. Let's say it marks the end of an era.

yeah yeah yeah say that so you want to start with uh you want to start with smishing yes i think there's a lot of meat on that bone can i can i just say i hate smishing like the name and everything about it the name's bad yeah

I don't think it's just the name. I don't think there's anything that anybody likes about this. Maybe somebody does. I don't know. Maybe occasionally you get one of these fake text messages from somebody going like, hey, are you free right now? And you go like, oh, man, somebody cares about what I'm doing. They want to hang out.

hi i thought i'd reach out and say hi or say hi to mike for me like what you're boarding your flight you're you're now boarding your flight to san francisco at gate e7 that's not a real thing oh wait no i actually wanted that one was real pretty sure that one was that one was right And intended recipient and so on. I got it. I got an amazingly specific one yesterday. Oh, okay. It's been a while since we last met and I miss you so much. I wonder how you're doing lately.

The weather is beautiful this weekend, and I wonder if I could have you on the course for a round of golf. Wow. That's funny. That's the random smish I got yesterday. I got one that said fogs out hogs out. So I was like. No, actually, that would be amazing though. That would be pretty good. Why, why the golf part? Cause people play golf. Yeah. But like, are they just trying to connect with you on a subject that you might be passionate enough about to respond?

I assume so. OK, so I've talked to some security experts about this. We had our security guy at PC World talked about this. Like the the messages are so random. Most of them, when they hook you, they feed you into like pig butchering schemes where people try to start, start trying to get, first they go for engagement and then they just keep working, grinding you down until suddenly you're giving them thousands upon thousands of dollars and you don't exactly understand how it happened.

And the common thread in coverage of those has been that even security experts are surprised at how easy it is to happen to them. Even people who know how this works, how the psychology of it works, how it happens. it's it's it's still easy to mess up and become engaged with this now i don't know if i believe that there's enough people that will buy into this stuff uh that that it actually that like

It's actually a profitable enterprise. But then you read stories about things like people who have Bitcoin ATMs in their convenience store having to shut them off at certain times of day because elderly people are coming in desperate to feed money into the machines and stuff like that because of these kinds of scams.

It would have to be profitable on an ongoing basis for them to keep doing it, right? Well, I mean, as we'll see as we get into this, these methods of massively scaling the capabilities of SIM cards and cellular connections have a lot of other uses besides...

garden variety scamming but but still like they have to be making enough money on this to make it worth it honestly the thing the thing that annoys me about this more than anything else is that i used to be excited when i got a text message remember that Sure. Uh, yes, yes. Okay. Yes. Remember you were like, yes, if we get back far enough and I, you know, I also happened to be in my twenties then and had a social life and like to go out and do things a lot and stuff. Sure.

I made the text message beep the Galaga insert coin sound because I was like, it's fun when I get a text message. I want it to sound fun. I want my brain to think I'm about to have some fun. And now I made it the Metal Gear. You got caught sound. Yeah.

Yeah, another popular one in the Whiskey Media office in like 2009 to 2010. Yes, the heyday of getting text messages and enjoying it. Yeah. Hey, we're at the bar across the street. You want to come over? Yes, I would love to go to the bar across the street and hang out for a little bit. Now it's just I get a text message. It's a sense of dread because it's either Verizon telling me you're going to hit me with a bill or somebody trying to scam me for something I don't have. Probably anyway.

This came up because a wired story is linked to all these stories are linked in the show notes. The Secret Service busted a sim farm that was a kind of insane scale. like a hundred thousand sim cards in these servers and like when i when i read the headline for the story i was i was expecting in my head i was seeing pictures of those old school Southeast Asian spam farms where you have like one person sitting in front of a rack with 150 phones on it. Yeah.

And they're just tapping each phone every 30 seconds. Right. Or in some cases. Yeah. Or in some cases, some of those that I've seen going around are not even they're not even fully assembled, mounted phones with like screens that can be interacted with. They've been like. They're like gutted Android phones that are just like the like the innards of the phones are slammed into racks and are being used for some. Yeah. Is that scale? And often it was like it looked it looked.

I don't want to say slapdash because that's not exactly right, but they were like PVC pipes with a bunch of phones zip tied to them. It didn't look like what I would think of as an organized rack. It looked like something that somebody hacked together. and plugged a whole bunch of power into and then somebody's hellish job becomes to click on these things often worth mentioning those old spam farms are involved with human trafficking as well so this was different

The racks for these things looked like, they almost looked like those, they looked almost like an audio mixer or something. It was like a row after row after row of SIM cards. with a bunch of antennas around the edges. Yeah, you're right. Looking again at the photo, I see what you mean. Like the console is kind of like a giant mixing board almost. Yeah. Or it looks like it looks like.

if you need to duplicate data across a whole bunch of usb thumb drives you buy this thing that has like 200 ports and then you just jam ports and you copy them to all of them at once in parallel yeah but the the key thing here though is that these i think Simbox is the term they use colloquially in this. I don't know what the actual name of the equipment is, but that's what they refer to them as in this Wired story. But those are illegal. Simboxes are not legal in America. Weird. Yeah.

So it seems like these have been smuggled in. This was I don't know if you mentioned this is all in the tri-state New York City area. All they said was that it was within 35 miles of Manhattan and that and then they said a bunch of really exciting things like, oh. This was involved in the swatting attacks on Congress members in December of 2003 over Christmas. Or 2023. Yeah. And the New York Secret Service said that the scale of this installation.

would have let them overwhelm cell towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City because they were able to send 30 million text messages per minute with the hardware that they had. Yeah, this quote from the Secret Service agent says. To put it in context, this could have been used to text every number in the United States in about 12 minutes. Yeah, so who uses this stuff, Brad? Do we know? As you said, I think they got on the trail.

for this because of the swatting attacks against Congress people, which I don't remember. Was that? I don't know that they made a big deal about it. It was Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan, I think. Rick Scott, I think, is the other one that they mentioned here. Anyway, that sounds like that's what got the Secret Service on the trail of this. Obviously, it's used for mass amounts of the random.

scamming phishing type text messages that we have talked about on here already. Um, swatting is another one. Like this is, I mean, obviously swatting against Congress people. What I mean is like swatting generally. Apparently this says. this, this is used as kind of a SWAT for hire middleman from the sound of things, or it's used as like infrastructure for like professional.

Again, I know I know we already said the Congress people thing feels like its own separate thing, but it sounds like this could also be used to swat kind of anybody at will. Well, the implication is that.

This probably wouldn't have been tracked down had it not been used in the Congress people thing. That was the thing that gave them the incentive to go after it because they were worried that it might be a nation state trying to interfere with the UN meeting that happened last week or the week before. Yes, right.

The amazing thing to me is that this thing can send out text to the entire population of the United States in 12 minutes, and that it took swatting some Congress people to make it worth tracking down. Because it's radio. It's not like they don't know which cells these boxes are connecting to, right? You'd think even that the network could say, oh, yeah, all of a sudden we're getting...

3000 times or 33 million times the traffic per cell in this region. Maybe maybe we should call the FBI or the FCC or somebody and track it down. Yeah, I think one of the things they mentioned in the story is these systems are very good at rotating SIM cards and phone numbers in and out, presumably to deal with maybe rate limiting and tracking and that kind of thing.

The law enforcement officers they quoted said it basically like predominantly this is used for fraud and scams. And then they do also sell services out to other other folks as well. Yeah, yeah, I found the quote right here. The technology behind these farms makes them highly flexible. SIMs can be rotated to bypass detection systems. Traffic can be geographically masked and accounts can be made to look like they're coming from genuine users.

These things are very good at covering their tracks, apparently. I don't understand how they can geographically mask their connection when they're clearly they have to connect to the cell that's in the region where they are. Maybe that means like IP masking, like maybe, maybe, maybe defeating IP geolocation and not like physically tracking the source of a signal, I would assume.

So they said each SIM box had 256 ports and associated modems for each of those cards. And they showed stacks and stacks and stacks of punched out SIM cards from Mobile X, which is a burner SIM card company. It makes me wonder some stuff about this. Like, I wonder, I don't know if you've seen lately, but they recently started adding the verified number thing to your phone calls and text messages when you get them on iOS.

So it'll say like if you look at your call log history or your text, I guess call log history is the main one, but it'll say. It's not it's not opening. There we go. uh it'll say potential spam or when you click on one that's not potential spam it'll it'll show you a little check mark uh that means oh hey this is a this is this person connected to the network

in a meaningful, calls with a check mark have been verified by the carrier. So I presume that that's the difference between burner people, burner calls and like a Verizon or AT&T contract number call. is that new in ios 26 no it came in at least last year maybe the year before okay it's in the it's in the contact if you go to the

like the contact setting for the call, for a call that came in your recents. But I have a ton of spam calls with those check marks, so clearly something's not working. I also wondered if eSIM helps with this, and I dug into that a little bit. Because presumably if you can't go buy a card that you then jam into this thing, then you'd have to have eSims and those eSims have IMEIs attached to them and all that stuff.

so that like they're permanently attached and if they get banned by the network then they're banned forever but it seems like yeah maybe but also realistically There's enough phones on the market that require SIM cards that we're going to be selling SIM cards in real life for the rest of our meaningful lives, it seems like. So the problem with eSIM is that they want it to be as usable as... a normal plastic SIM card.

you still can like when i traveled to canada i was able to buy an e-sim card for like 25 and he again an e-sim that connected to my phone had like 50 bucks worth of cell coverage or whatever in it that was good for the entire time i was there so So now I've only bought a phone once that had an eSIM on it. So I've only been through this process once, but you have to go through some kind of carrier infrastructure to access an eSIM, right?

you have to yeah you're whoever provides your whoever you buy your e-sim from you have to authorize it and connect it to the modem and stuff on the device yeah right And you can't just you couldn't just like move it from one phone to another on your own without going through their infrastructure. Right. Or again, maybe there is some way now. Yeah. But you also having done the moving your SIM card from one phone to another fairly regularly in the tested days.

You usually have to authorize it on the, even when you switch the physical card, you have to go in and say, yes, I did this. This is a new device. Please, please make this my phone. The thing that has the card in it that says it's my phone. It's not as easy as the old 3G days where you just swapped it over and it didn't know. Interesting. Okay. I have not swapped a SIM card since then. That is good to know. So part of it is that it's the SMS, sorry, the SIM card.

hacking slash cloning is one of the big fraud things. So they've they've tightened up how that works fairly significantly. Part of that may be also because I have my Verizon, my phone account locked down. So sure.

Anyway, there was another follow-up on this, another Shadow Stars Technica for really blowing it out of the water this week. uh they had a story about unsecured internet of things devices that have cellular routers and cellular modems in them yeah this one this one somehow is more mind-blowing to me than the like like organized crime like highly sophisticated

regimented operation doing telecom cybercrime. Of course, vulnerable devices sitting around hooked up to traffic lights and infrastructure that people are using to do this stuff like that one is. That one feels more insidious to me because who knows how many vulnerable devices are out there or how...

extensively this stuff could be exploited. Look, I never thought that I would agree with the people in Marin that are like, keep you smart meters out of my yard, man. They're killing my brain. They got the 5G. Well, I started to say maybe they had a point, but I'm going to say that's probably not the point they thought they had. Yeah, they had the wrong. I mean, sometimes the, you know, the worst person, you know, is right sometimes. Yeah. So that's the situation.

There were a bunch of these devices out in the world with a ton of known vulnerabilities that don't get updated. It's in stuff like smart meters, traffic lights, like you said. monitoring monitoring infrastructure for utilities and traffic and all sorts of other stuff industrial stuff that's connected to cellular because it's away from a dedicated network connection because it has a backup cellular connection and

These things are responsible for apparently billions of messages a month in scam SMS messages. Right. So this came out of this security research firm called Sequoia, and it's focused on this one model of this one company's device. Great. This is a UR35 cellular router made by a company called Milesight. And they go into, you know, this article goes into like, oh, specific firmware versions earlier than this are rife with vulnerabilities. And of course, all these devices that are being exploited.

are on old firmware that is not being updated. That's kind of what I meant about this feeling more insidious though, is because again, this is like, this is about one manufacturer's product line. Who knows how many other competing manufacturers there are out there with similar vulnerabilities in.

devices that and again this is the critical failure are not being maintained and not being updated i mean the thing that sucks about both of these is that they're not tractable like there's no easy fix for either of these You know, the hardware to put 100,000 SIM cards on a node seems inexpensive enough that it could just be abandoned in a... fake data center in a malware data center. Not even that. I mean, I think the last line of this R's story kind of summed it up nicely.

When they're talking about, I'll just read the whole paragraph. Given the prevalence and massive volume of smishing messages, people often wonder how scammers manage to send billions of messages per month without getting caught or shut down. Sequoia's investigation suggests that in many cases, the resources come from small.

Often overlooked boxes tucked away in janitorial closets in industrial settings. Right. Think about how many cases there must be where somebody like some overworked maintenance or infrastructure person goes out and has to deploy some equipment. tacks it to the wall in whatever place they can find like runs a cable through a gap in the wall and then never forgets it yeah and then everybody thinks about it again yes everybody associated just forgets that it's there fantastic so

That's just the idea of infrastructure just sitting around and being exploited by bad actors is it's kind of cool and exciting in one way, except for the part where they're using it for all kinds of bad shit, you know? Yeah, I mean, the fact that malware is scaling faster than we can improve our ability to deal with it is an issue. I think I've told this story here before, but there was a day, I think it was after the Whiskey Media sale.

when they had used an insecure comment script for the new tested website. It was a WordPress or Drupal plugin or something. And we just started getting.

thousands of spam messages posted on every blog post on the site thousands upon thousands of blog posts every minute and it was while norm and i were at maker fair in new york and like it was it was 30 people deleting them as fast as they could come in before we finally had the the devops guy figure out how to turn off comments for the day right and and like there's just no it's

It's an impossible. It's impossible to deal with that scale if people are able to make money off of those messages. So I don't know how we fix it. This reminds me of the story. I just pulled it up as we've been recording. It's been this is about a year and a half old and it's been that long since I read it. So I apologize. I don't have all the details front of mind. You may have seen this. This is actually on ours as well. The DOJ Department of Justice about a year and a half ago.

came out and talked about compromised ubiquity routers. Oh, I do remember this. More than a thousand ubiquity routers in homes and small businesses were infected with malware. used by Russian-backed agents to coordinate them into a botnet for crime and spy operations, according to the Justice Department. And, like, whatever hacker group had gotten in and compromised these things through vulnerability, I think the part that I really laughed at is that supposedly...

The U S government was then going out and using the same vulnerabilities to silently go into these same individual and small businesses routers to fix them. Right. Yes. To update them to, to. kind of shut off the vulnerability and update them and prevent this from happening like it's just this like cat and mouse game you know i mean maybe that's the solution it's interesting because like the router

The router saves people having a router that updates itself and you don't have to think about saves a lot of people who don't pay attention to this stuff from an enormous number of problems. Right. Like if you think it's one of the reasons that I actually kind of like having AT&T provide my router. Sure, it's the same hardware every single other person on the network has. And sure, I could put something else there, but it'd be kind of a pain in the butt.

every 30 days it updates itself and i don't have to worry about like i i know that i'm as protected as a as the the might of at&t's fiber internet security ops people can make me um And if I were running a PF Sense or OpenSense or something like that, that would be on me. So while I'm capable of doing that, it's nice to not have to. And I think when we talk about the Windows 10 end of life stuff.

The widespread existence of routers that protect people from the raw internet is maybe going to be the thing that saves Microsoft, but we'll talk about that in a little bit. To be clear, you know, the same thing is true. If you have a consumer router as well, you still need to keep it updated. Although I don't know, do consumer routers ship with auto updates as an option now? So the mesh stuff that I've tested and help people set up generally does.

it works like your phone does where it looks it knows when your downtime is and at two o'clock in the morning it'll run an update when when there's one available um i don't know about the kind of in between ones like the you know your your asus or netgear router with 12 antennas i assume that they do Or even lower tier than that. I feel like it's like your $90 TP-Link Archer is like the common cheap router recommendation these days. I don't know if those are auto-update or not.

The closer you get to the cheap end, the more likely they are to update because the less likely they are to want to have to have secure calls, support calls. Yeah, that would make sense. Anyway, anyway. What's the happy bow for this story, Brad?

I don't know that there is one. A lot of multifaceted ways that you are getting a million spam text messages or scam, I should say, text messages either through coordinated, like very organized cybercrime or... People just hijacking the thing hooked up to the traffic light down the street. There was an interesting post at the end of the article about the phishing, the attacked devices. from one ours user, Eustatius Zephyr, which says, why does cellular service provided need to have SMS enabled?

And they said, I created an ARS account solely to comment on this. I've been along SMS as an integral part of mobile connectivity. It's effectively embedded everywhere and cannot be removed because it would require a network overhaul of revolutionary proportions for that to happen.

It was born in 1G and 2G, persevered in 3 and 4G, all the way up to 5. And that's why it's hard to let go of even if people don't use it for P2P communication anymore. It's insecure because it's old and essentially upgradable. And that makes it an easy choice for a lot of services from mass alerts and things like hurricane season or delivery information or the best known case, which is one time password delivery.

One of these cases is also M2M, a precursor of sorts for IoT. Whether these devices in their original uses use SMS for H2P alerts manifesting as texts or A2A for automatic management, et cetera. Like you see your phone is using SMS messages that you don't see to do things like deliver microcode updates to the radio and stuff like that. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So they can't just turn off SMS is the answer. That makes sense. Yeah.

You would wonder with some of this unsecured public or random infrastructure out there if they would not be able to notice a massive uptick in SMS activity in and out of their stuff, but if they're not paying enough attention to update to keep the firmware up to date. Yeah, they're probably also not paying enough attention to monitor the cellular traffic, I assume.

I'm I'm honestly surprised that the carriers aren't paying more attention, but I wonder if the networks are such a hodgepodge of of like, you know, core Verizon traffic and government contracted traffic and. and virtual virtual provider traffic and all that that they don't actually have a good way to track what's going on on the on the nodes at any given time is this is this is a budding example of humanity losing control of one of the systems it has built to underpin modern society

Look, I watched a Mission Impossible the other day about a rogue AI, and this is how it starts, man. Yeah, I'm thinking more like the time machine, maybe, but we'll see. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about why the AI robot.

I wrote I robot founder is wary of humanoid robots. Yeah, I feel like robotics is something that we are going to have to talk about a lot more in the relatively near by near. I mean, like five to 10 years, probably. But like. I think I felt like the NVIDIA keynote at CES this year was kind of the bellwether for me. The amount of kind of bipedal or humanoid robots that they talked about their machine learning driving or.

you know, being built to drive in the future. It's been a common thread in Jensen's keynotes for the last couple of years now with the Omniverse stuff. But yeah, it's interesting because that actually ties into kind of... where they are. So this is this is based on a blog post by Rodney Brooks, who is one of the co-founders or one of the founders of iRobot. The Roomba people is what you know them as.

I was not familiar with this guy, but he's like he's like this classic academic turned industrialist, which I feel like you don't see a lot of these days. Yeah, I think that's how that's how a lot of the like big semiconductor companies of.

the mid 20th century came about. Right. Or I'm trying to think there are more recent examples. And those guys were, were nerds who made a bunch of money. Yeah. Or, or like, like sun microsystems is a good example of like a bunch of those guys were writing Unix stuff in, in.

academic university settings or at AT&T. And then they went off and founded a company that was worth many billions. You know what I mean? It's just like this classic like academic to, to guy who founds a company and changes the world and makes a bajillion dollars type of pipeline.

As opposed to the other traditional path, which is that you were the roommate of a smart nerd, and then you sweated your way into the CEO position eventually when he wanted to retire. Now you own a basketball team. Yes, and you happen to be very loud and pretty good salesman, let's say.

I've reached a point now with Microsoft that I look back on the developers, developers, developers days with fondness. So yeah, kind of bomber. Like when you're, when you're, when you're pining for the bomber days, you know, things are great, but anyway. The blog post is really, really long. It's super fascinating. It's definitely worth a read if you're into humanoid robots. And he kind of it's I kind of read it as the antithesis of Musk's. Hey, make my stock price go higher fueled optimism.

Because, you know, Tesla's been pushing, he's been pushing humanoid robots at Tesla for a minute as a, I think he said a $30 trillion potential industry, which is. Yeah, I bet he did. Yeah, of course. The site's another company called Figure that I'm not familiar with. Oh, yeah, they make humanoid robots. They make the little guys. They make the small scale ones. OK, their figure.ai is there. Wow, boy, their webpage sure is just a giant splash video of.

Humanoid robots doing dishes and folding laundry and watering plants and building cars. Yeah, his their their point. The point of this is there are two potential. robot assisting humans outcomes. One where we have a bunch of specialized robots that do one thing like you have a you have a machine in your closet in your bedroom that you put your laundry hamper of clean clothes on and then it spends the next six hours.

folding those and putting them in a nice stack so you can put them in the drawer. Right. And you don't have to fold your laundry anymore. Think of it as like a dishwasher, but for every task, including also loading the dishwasher. The other is that we just have one. human size robot that can move and walk like humans do. Um, and this, this, so even like 10 years ago, I, Norman, Joey, and I went with tested to the DARPA robotics challenge in LA where they did the.

um like a humanoid robot or actually wasn't it was a disaster recovery and response robot a challenge where basically the robots had to mimic the conditions that the human the people that went into fukushima to like turn off the reactor and make it safe had to go through And all the steps that they had to do in order to turn off the reactor when the tsunami happened. And because those people were exposed to a fair amount of radiation, it was unsafe. And they wanted to see if the challenge was.

can we build robots that can perform these same steps get in and out do the thing that needs to be done and then and then egress safely so that we don't have to put humans in these dangerous situations So a lot of them were like university teams that were bringing in Boston Dynamics Atlas robots, which are the big, like eight foot tall bipedal robots. They used to have a cage.

I'm sorry, did you say eight foot tall? They were very large. Why would you build a robot that big? That's terrifying. Well, it was. Or did it have to be at that point? Were they not able to miniaturize the internals enough to make it smaller? They were electro hydraulic. was how the movement all worked. So they had like hydraulics for the legs and I think the arms and then servos and motors for the pinchers and hands and stuff like that.

They were very, very large, and there were all sorts of rules that we had to follow when we were there about being around them when they were active. When they weren't active, they had to be hung from a gantry so that if it tipped over or somebody bumped into it, it fell when it wasn't turned on. You wouldn't get crushed to death under it like they were essentially industrial robots that were shaped kind of like people.

The idea was that they were shorter than a doorway opening, so maybe it was seven and a half feet tall, but they were taller enough than me that I was like, oh, this is what, you know, it was like looking up at Venpak, basically.

Sure. So his whole thing about this is I don't want to be anywhere near a bipedal human sized robot because they're way more mass than a human has. And they have a ton of stored up energy from balancing this big giant heavy robot so that they're fine when you're just walking around and they're doing fine. But as soon as something goes wrong and starts to tip over and fall and it doesn't recover.

It's going to really, really hurt people that are around it or destroy whatever furniture lands on or whatever. Yeah, that was one of the big takeaways for me. I mean, this is a physics way to look at this talking about stored energy.

In the limbs or whatever. I mean, I think really what they're just saying is it's going to apply a lot of force when it. But my understanding of this is he's not talking about it falling and landing on somebody. He's talking about the robots adaption adaptation to falling to restore its balance. Right.

You can imagine how rapidly the limbs would move to prevent the robot from falling mid-fall. And if somebody's caught in that, if somebody's struck by a leg or arm that is shooting out to stop the robot from falling... That seems like very, very bad injury territory. And in the paper, in the blog post, he talks about the mass differential between a human meat and bone and a robot arm. And it's basically 4X. So if your arm weighs 10 pounds, you fling your arm out.

And the small light end of your arm and your hand, which weighs a pound, hits somebody. The arm that weighs on the robot will weigh 40 or 50 pounds and the hand will weigh five or 10. And it's like getting hit by a brick in your face. Right. So. You know, and like I've I've been in I've been in like car factories where they have industrial robots. And it's one of the defining characteristics of that experience is that.

There are human safe areas of the factory and then there's areas of the factory where the industrial robot is and you don't go into the industrial robot like there's typically multiple. like it takes one person watching on the controls pressing a button to open the doors to go into the areas there's like motion sensors that stop the robot doing whatever it's supposed to be doing as soon as somebody's in the space

That's not supposed to be there to the point that like if if something rolls into an area, one of the no go zones, it'll stop the whole line because all the robots stop working. Right. And and like. I hadn't really thought about it in this context, but I do remember distinctly walking around that DARPA challenge and it being kind of unsettling. Now, there were a bunch of other kinds of robots. JPL had an octoped or a hexapod, I guess.

a six or eight legged robot that kind of scuttered in. There were some wheeled robots. There were some track track stuff. There was all sorts of different stuff there. We did a couple of videos there. They're still on the tested channel if you want to go find them. The other thing he talks about a lot.

Is that we're kind of not training today's robots to be dexterous. This this is the thing that was the actual I mean, the thing we just described is.

brightening but something that can be accounted for with enough safety precautions and proper training for the robots in place it was the it was the very slapdash way these things are being trained that was the like oh we are fucking this up bad this is like tesla's laissez-faire attitude towards self-driving times 10 well so okay so there's two things one is that the dexterity we don't we don't have robot equivalents of fingers we have grippers

that are just like slide in, slide out kind of pliers that are on a linear rail, basically. So they just open and close, but those aren't able to do something like pick up a match or a pencil or something like that necessarily. Then we have suction, which is used a lot in industrial situations where you're like pick and place machines often use suction in like an assembly context for electronics. As an example of that DARPA challenge.

The most common way that the robots opened a door was just by punching a couple of them just. Literally punched through the part of the door that held the door closed and then yanked it back and open the door without twisting the knob or anything because they couldn't work that they couldn't identify and work the knobs autonomously.

The he specifically cites 15 tasks that they've come up with that an eight year old human can do for like a how how are we doing Olympiad for robot dexterity? And it's stuff like. folding laundry where one sleeve is inside out and you need a button button to have the shirt folded properly.

um cleaning peanut butter off its own hand stuff that any human can do really really easily but that there's no robot equivalent and no and like a robot to clean its own hand is an unthinkable task right now so yeah Yeah, the biggest thing in this that seems incredibly obvious once you read it, but you don't really think about up front, is how incredibly dependent on the sense of touch humans are for guiding their motion and dexterity.

We're not building robots with any kind of sense of touch or like touch feedback mechanism at all. Well, it's not just on the. So two things about that. One is that even the robots that we do have that have finger equivalents. and do have touch on the fingertips aren't getting feedback from things like your wrist or the other parts of the arm, right? Wrist and elbow as much. The other thing I didn't realize is that those hand analog controls.

are not durable at all i didn't realize the the kind of number of cycles that those things can go through he talks about it a little bit but he's like there's a reason everything does grippers instead of fingers and it's because the fingers wear out incredibly fast in the robot form

So on the one hand, that's a huge amount of data that humans depend on to guide the use of their hands that robots are barely, if at all, getting. The other thing is that Tesla and Figure are the two companies being cited here. I don't know if this could vary for other startups that might be working on this.

It sounds like they're just using pure video to train robots behavior at this point, and that they have actually, in fact, even pulled back from more robust sources of data to feed into them pretty recently.

this is happening in more than just the humanoid robotics there's a lot of um car self-driving startups that was another big thing at ces and the nvidia keynote was the because that's that was the big venue for synthetic test data remember that they were like simulating a bunch of driving data to feed into the model yeah and and there's there's i've talked to i've talked to some people who work in those spaces

Because it's one of the places that game developers don't want to make games end up going anymore as they build fake worlds that the self-driving cars can learn to drive in. And it's easy to replicate. It makes it easy to create. millions of miles or tens of millions of miles, the kind of training that Waymo has been doing for the last 10 years on the streets of San Francisco and the kind of data set that Tesla has been generating for the last 15 years by essentially.

charging people to be a giant data collection machine, to drive a giant data collection machine. My understanding is that for cars, which is a system where there's a fair number, a tractable number of rules that are fairly well established. And it's a fairly... standard problem in that we know the edges and we know where the edge cases are and all that stuff. It works reasonably well.

up to a point. It'll be the first 20 million miles of train data that you need, and then you need another 10 million beyond that on real roads. Now, houses, as he said in this blog post, are wildly different. Like even a really tidy house is going to be a nightmare and your house and my house and everybody listening to this houses are all different.

We all have different expectations for things. We all have different levels of complexity in our homes. And it's a much more thorny problem. Yeah. And even if the home as a physical space is knowable at some point, but there's an infinite. combination of configurations of human beings and scenarios that can exist within the home at any given time well and just think about the product diversity of things you find in your home in terms of furniture and um you know there's people have

You don't see very many hundred year old cars on the road. So, you know, the machines can recognize the most if they recognize the thousand most common cars, that'll be 90 percent of all the cars that they ever see in the life of the driving. But. in your house you can have furniture that's 100 years old you can have you know cribs and chairs and and divans and like all these millions of different kinds of furniture and items on shelves and all this stuff and it's it's not

It's a noisy environment. The other thing he talks about is the speed at which it takes the robots to do something. So the example there. He talks about a robot taking 30 seconds to light a match where a human takes seven seconds. I have some friends who are working in the laundry folding robots, and their goal is to have a machine that will fold.

a basket of laundry over the course of a day, not, you know, not, not in 10 minutes or 20 minutes, however long it would take a person to fold the equivalent amount of laundry. They kind of don't care if it takes a long time because it's a passive experience for you, the user. It's a, like I said, fascinating blog post. He talks about building robots that work in warehouses, which are fully controlled environments in those cases.

There's a big section about hands that we just barely touched on. And the machine like this is one of the uses of machine learning that I think is actually really interesting and valid and valuable. But. Figuring out how to train it seems really challenging. Yeah, so back to the training thing, there's just a couple of gaps to fill in there. We're talking about this in the context of these companies training robots to do human jobs.

And of course, they need real people doing those jobs to provide data on how to do the jobs to provide to the robots. Previously, it sounds like Tesla was using motion capture suits. So you were at least getting motion data of a real person doing a job.

and teleoperation is the other term they use here i assume that means a remote operator like driving the robot yeah so that's how like waymo cars for example when they get stuck and the robot doesn't know what to do then somebody on a in a data center someplace in a call center someplace

Logs in, sees what's going on and gives it instructions. Right. So they were they were using both people in motion capture suits doing the work and also tell operators, I guess, driving the robots remotely doing the work as additional sources of data for training.

robots on doing the work but now they have shifted to purely video presumably internal and external from the workers perspective or maybe both maybe third person as well it's usually it's backpack plus a third person third person external cameras

Yeah, that sounds questionable to me. Like it's I mean, and this is just to be clear, in case anybody's like yelling at the radio, this is completely separate from the issue of training robots to do people's jobs at a time when people are already getting automated out of work rapidly. This is like leading to a level of dystopia that's kind of hard to wrap your head around in socioeconomic terms, but that's a whole other subject. Like, really, I'm just talking about the safety aspect here of.

teaching the robots who behave safely and responsibly around people with a very limited data set? Well, so there's a couple of things. One is that the fidelity and resolution of the data that comes from the motion capture suits isn't great. We're still not good at tracking fingers, frankly. So for a dexterous task, like taking, say, silverware out of your dishwasher and putting it in the appropriate slots.

The actual picking up and grabbing the silverware is something that you can't learn in the way that you would expect. um same thing for folding clothes it's a similar problem because you have to you have to hold and manipulate the clothing in a bunch of different ways to figure out where like the the shoulders and arms and buttons and all that stuff on the shirt are whether it's right side out or inside out stuff like that

um or or balling up a pair of socks is a is a finger task that we wouldn't you couldn't get good data from so that's why they it's one of the reasons they switched to cameras i know um like i don't know what the right solution is for this. Right. I think you have to do a combination of everything. And it's it seems like dogmatic approaches are probably not the right ones because you need to do the right.

training for the right solution for the right situation and sometimes it's gonna be camera sometimes it's gonna be motion capture sometimes it's gonna be depth cameras sometimes it's gonna be all of the above it's wild i this i would not have expected this to come from the rumba guy although I think the Roomba is a good example of a, we, um, built a thing to work inside the limitations of a specific kind of device. That's pretty good. And, and yeah, is it, is it, is it, is our story that.

says this guy has kind of shied away from humanoid robot development in general he they he specifically talks in the blog post um i skipped straight to the blog post i didn't read the art story um but he he skips straight to the blog post about

saying that they identified the problems with humanoid robots as being eternally 10 years off because the It was much easier to make single purpose robots or robots for controlled areas like factories and warehouses than it is for the chaotic environment that humans live in. That's exactly the point that the R's story ends on. Brooks predicts that within 15 years, there will indeed many robots called humanoids, but ironically, they will look nothing like today's bipedal machines.

They'll have wheels instead of feet, varying numbers of arms and specialized sensors that bear no resemblance to human eyes. That's it. That makes sense to me. Yeah. Some will have cameras in their hands or looking, looking down from their mid sections, et cetera. Rosie the robot will be a team of helper robots and probably will take, but then instead of washing our dishes and folding our laundry, we'll spend three hours a week in robot maintenance, I'm sure.

Also, who is the us in this scenario? Because you're not buying a robot. That sounds like the kind of thing that is going to be geared toward the very ultra wealthy, but I don't know. Well, you know, buy that lottery ticket, Brad.

Speaking of things that the very ultra wealthy aren't going to care about, Windows 10 end of life a couple of weeks from now. That's right. 64 bit processors. Yep.

not accessible to most people no look you you if you want to run that 32-bit code on a native 32-bit os i got bad news for you because it's all going away i hadn't realized but i mean i guess i had realized at some point but windows 10 is the last version of windows that shipped with a 32-bit option yeah uh i i went and tried to find the last 32-bit processor that intel sold and i couldn't wait don't tell me don't tell me okay

probably 2007 or eight, maybe. Couldn't figure out which one it was. I had to guess. I'm pretty sure the last 32-bit CPU I bought was around 2006, which was an Athlon XP. It was also the last single core CPU I bought. I don't know if they went to 64-bit right around the same time that multiple cores started becoming a thing. So...

I thought it was going to be, I thought the last thing that would have been mainstream would have been an Atom processor. Oh yeah. If you're, if you're talking like kind of low end and embedded, like I'm sure they were shipping 32, but only for a long time past desktop.

I think that there were a lot of e-machines that used Adam or sorry, e-books. What are they called? Netbooks. They used Adam, 32-bit Adam processors is the last thing that I could find that was like anything mainstream. But I don't know what the last 32-bit only. I couldn't figure out what the last 32 bit only processor was because it was kind of ambiguous. Like I wanted it's pretty easy to find the launch dates, but it's hard to find like end of sale dates.

So anyway, if you know, please write in. I would love to know. TechBot at content.town. But so 32-bit support with Windows 10 goes away on October 24th when they end of life Windows 10. Windows 11 didn't ship with 32 32 bit version at all. I think people have hacked them together or something.

i'm sure like people do all sorts of crazy stuff that they shouldn't do with windows these days wait how would you do that i mean like kernel would have to be recompiled for that right i think that they're probably pulling old versions of kernels and porting them forward i don't know

When I when I Google it, I found stuff that I looked at and I was like, oh, this is a bad idea. I'm not going to click into this link. I wanted to talk a little bit about the 64 bit timeline, though, because Microsoft shipped XP. AMD 64 edition officially in 2005, but there was a beta that was available publicly as early as 2003 is my understanding. Vista shipped with 64-bit versions on disks for most of the retail versions.

I think Ultimate and Pro, I think maybe on home you didn't get one or something. There was some division based on the SKU that you purchased. And PCs that had 64-bit processors shipped with support turned on out of the box, which was like a... Big deal at the time. For folks who don't remember, I think 64-bit let us go beyond four gigs of memory, I think was the big jump. Was it four gig? I think it was four gigs.

And seven defaulted to 64 bit unless you specified 32 bits. Now, the important thing to note for all these. back in the day it doesn't matter anymore is that for most of these to make the 32 to 64-bit jump you had to go you had to do a clean install except for the vista xp to vista install which would which would do a 64-bit upgrade i think for you

Sure. It was four gigabytes. I just went and looked. I used to know things like that. It hasn't been important for 20 years. You're fine to forget that. Fair. That's fair. So anyway.

it seems like this means that 32-bit support stuff is fading in general because uh valve announced that steam is going to drop support for 32-bit windows systems in january of 2026. yeah 32-bit client of steam to be clear like that's just that's just the the actual

Steam client you use to download and launch games. It sounds like any 32-bit games that you have on a 64-bit version of Steam are still fine to run and presumably are supported. I mean, support for those games is down to their developers, right? Yeah, well, and Firefox is going to stop shipping 32-bit versions of Firefox for Linux, I think is what they said. I couldn't find out whether they're still shipping 32-bit Windows versions of Firefox.

That didn't seem to be readily available. Linux kernels are starting to drop support for 32-bit processors now, which... Yeah, I think that may have been ongoing for a while. Actually, the thing I can say, because Debian Trixie just came out and Debian... especially Debian stable is, is very highly conservative about this stuff. They have not like 1000% deprecated 32 bit support with Trixie, which came out about two months ago, not quite two months ago.

Okay. But they almost have like they all they have all but I think the only thing you can do now is install 32 bit packages on a 64 bit install. But you cannot if I'm not mistaken, you cannot. install a fully 32 bit from the ground up uh debian install and again debian i think it's usually one of the last to do things like that yeah it seems like so there's like a big sea change like it just kind of it's happening industry-wide now

My first thought was, does this mean that Windows is finally going to get rid of the stupid program files slash program files parentheses x86 folder? Well, no, because that's for 32-bit applications, right? I know. Yeah, it's still going to haunt us. Yeah, really goofy, but it only haunts you if you look at your C drive. I just I gave up on the C drive as no man's land a long time ago.

How do you look at the C drive? I went completely the other direction from people who get really angry that you can't open like, um, what's the, uh, what's the Microsoft store, Microsoft store apps. Yeah. Like windows. I forget what the term is for that style of application that sandboxes the install. directory and um windows wsl or something is the api i can't remember well wsl is the linux subsystem but oh right anyway the point being you know some people

I know some people who like jump through hoops to make those directories accessible to them because they're indignant about not being able to look at files on their own drive, which on the one hand I get. On the other hand, it just feels like a losing battle. Windows app SDK and GDK is the games one now. Anyway, it's just...

It's just all Microsoft territory, huh? Like just messing with the install files for the operating system is just pointless at the point. Just let it do what it's going to do. What if you need to update your host file and put something in there, you know? I do that. I have, in fact, updated the host file on my Windows install in the last...

There you go. Me too. I love the host file. But then I, but then I moved to, um, I used to like, I used to use that to access certain local IPs like on my NAS around here, but then I just moved that into my blocky install. So now they work network wide. Oh, so you have DNS entries for them now? Yeah. So now they just, any client that gets DHCP on my LAN, it's those same addresses.

That was the one really nice thing about using DHCP on the pie holes. I was able to do that years ago, and it is incredibly convenient, it turns out. It's really neat. If you want to use shoe.vps to access the address for your VPS, for example. within your land you can do that i will tell you every client it works great right up until the point that you have a motherboard with two network cards in they both get different ip addresses and then everything breaks down when you do that so um

But yeah, so that's that's it. Let's see. We haven't talked about the Windows 10 end of life in a minute, but it still seems to be on like Donkey Kong. I still think they're going to blink. But also, I'm pretty confident that nobody that remains at Microsoft was there when Windows XP collapsed 20 years ago. And so maybe not. I think the routers the fact that everybody's putting their computers behind a router now might actually save them.

because it'll prevent the kind of rampant worm spreading that was happening in 2002 2001 with xp or 2002 2003 with xp from happening um but at the same time it looks like there's a better than even chance at the end of this month there's going to be a billion ish computers in the world that don't have security updates coming anymore and i guarantee you there's a bunch of zero day exploits that

malicious users have out there ready to go so we'll just waiting yeah just waiting for the clock to turn over it feels too late to blink to me it feels like if they were going to blink they would have done it by now well they've kind of done a staggered blink because they did the thing where

if you use windows backup which is there back up your computer to your one cloud cloud folder and also pay us more for storage every month service you can do that and that'll give you another year of xp support and then they also have a thing where you can trade in your microsoft uh points i can't where they have a whole like loyalty program thing that if you use bing or if you uh buy stuff from the microsoft store

It's called Microsoft Rewards, and it's part of Bing. You can basically, for I think a thousand points, you can get an additional year of service or year of updates, which at the point that they're doing this. I'm not as worried about the folks who are listening to this podcast and know that you can get a year of service, a year of Windows 10 updates or whatever, as I am worried about the other 999 million people.

who don't know about this stuff and are going to have computers that are just easy targets for malware in a month. Yeah, that's probably true. To be clear, you can also just pay for that. Extended support, which is called Windows 10 ESU extended security updates. Is that for normal users? Yeah, it's 60 bucks. You can just pay for the year if I'm looking at the Microsoft Ignite page on it right now.

For what it's worth, we did a thing. We tried to see how fast we could get a thousand points on the PC world on The Full Nerd a few months ago, and it took about 15 minutes. Because there's usually something that's like, hey, you want to get a thousand points, go click on this link and then you get you get your thousand points real quick. That's probably the low hanging fruit. I doubt that.

Could be replicated over and over, but that's enough to get you a year. Apparently, this is running for multiple years from the sound of things. The ESU is it gets more expensive each year. Yes. I don't know about the. the the bing giveaway the bing reward stuff so oh i'm sorry it's 60 a year through volume licensing yeah i don't think they let consumers buy buy into that last i saw maybe not actually

And that ends, that's going to end someday anyway. Like they're not going to do extended support forever. At some point, at some point you're going to have to move on from Windows 10 and that's a year will go by pretty quickly. The last thing they said was that they were going to do that for two years and the second year is going to escalate in price.

Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how this goes once we get to the date and whatever mitigations or backtracking they might do. I can't imagine. Yeah, I don't know. It seems it seems bad. It seems real bad. I've never been a huge antagonist on the hey, Microsoft is wrong for forcing people to use the upgrades to do upgrades.

in the post windows 8 windows is free for anybody who has an old version of windows era um but this one because they're requiring the newer hardware they're going to leave a whole bunch of computers on windows 10 that have no way no upgrade path and and that feels real bad to me yeah i mean we've talked about it before i'm kind of mixed on it because you you do have to move on eventually and like security is more and more

of a thing in the computing world these days. Keeping things updated and secure is more and more important than ever, as we have seen. I think I'd feel less bad about it if Windows 10 were better. You mean 11? 11 were better rather. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. I mean, the bigger question there, though, is was Windows 11 the time to rip off this Band-Aid or should they have given it one more Windows version before they forced the TPM? Well, yeah. And then the other thing is.

At this point, I remember Windows 10 as it was two or three years ago, not as it is today. And I'm sure they've been shitified Windows 10 at this point, too. I've heard it's the year of the Linux desktop. Might be worth looking into. Yeah, you know, wherever fine podcasts are found. Or the free BSD desktop, as the case may be. So that's Duelbook Diary Season 2? Yes, I heard that at the end of last week's episode.

Yeah. And then Haiku is season three. I think even I would not run a free BSD desktop, which is not to say you can't like it's certainly possible. But my my reaction to that was pretty strongly negative, if I recall. Yeah. Anyway. I think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up for this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks for supporting the show. As always, Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod is a listener-supported show, which means we wouldn't be here without you, the listeners.

If you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod, where for five bucks a month, you get access to the discord, you get access to the monthly patron episode, which. was uploaded from, well, let's say 35 to 22,000 feet this month. Apologies again. That's the real Mile High Club. Yeah, exactly. Hell yeah. I'm doing it at 35,000 feet.

We'll be back next month with another another patron episode. And if you had problems getting access to it because I posted a day late, please send me a message either on the discord or on Patreon and I'll take care. I'll hook you up. I don't think that we had any. I looked and I didn't see anybody that was over in the 10 or 12 hours or whatever it was that it was off. But please let me know.

And yeah, as always, patreon.com slash tech pod for access to that and everything else. The discord has been absolutely hopping lately in the Linux channel for not exactly sure why, but. A lot of good, a lot of good tips in there. And then we had a request for a ham radio channel the other day. I can see it. I mean, yeah, I'm not opposed to it.

People want knobs. We'll see if there's enough chatter in the common areas. We'll add a new channel. That's the rule. So as always, thanks to everybody who supports the Patreon. Thanks to everybody who supports the show. But a very special thank you to our executive producer. patrons, including Jason Lee, Infelicitous Rips, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Money, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and

Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Yes, thank you to all. That'll do it for us this week. We'll be back next week with another tech bot. Until then, please consider the environment before printing this podcast. Thank you.