Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 01/14 - The End of the Windows 7 Era

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Apple once again refuses to unlock an iPhone for the Feds, Visa buys Plaid, a macOS beta hints at future ‘Pro Mode’, super crucial Windows update you should download right away and why today is also the end of the Windows 7 Era. Sponsors: Metalab.co LegalZoom.com (promo code RIDE at checkout) Links: Apple Said It Is Helping In The Pensacola Shooting Investigation, But It Won't Unlock The Shooter's iPhones (Buzzfeed News) Visa to acquire Plaid, the fintech powering Venmo and other banking apps, in $5.3 billion deal (CNBC) Epic says its PC game store now has more than 100 million users (The Verge) macOS beta hints at future ‘Pro Mode’ to boost performance on portable Macs (9to5Mac) PC shipments grew in 2019 ahead of bet on 5G and dual-screen devices (VentureBeat) Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday (KrebsOnSecurity) MICROSOFT BIDS FAREWELL TO WINDOWS 7 AND THE MILLIONS OF PCS THAT STILL RUN IT (The Verge) Free Windows 10 upgrade still works for many Windows 7 users. Here's how to get it (CNET) (Potentially??) Free Windows 10 Upgrade Link Subscribe to the Ad-Free Feed Right Here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechBeam Ride Home for Tuesday, January 14th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple once again refuses to unlock an iPhone for the feds. Visa buys Plaid, a MacOS beta hints at a future pro mode. Super crucial Windows update for you to download right away. And why today is also the end of the Windows 7 era. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple has denied a request by U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr to unlock the two iPhones belonging to the Saudi Air Force cadet who allegedly killed three sailors and wounded eight others at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida last month.

Quote, we have asked Apple for their help in unlocking the shooter's iPhones. So far, Apple has not given us any substantive assistance, Barr said in a press conference. This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that investigators be able to get access to digital evidence once they have obtained a court order based on probable cause. We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of Americans and prevent future attacks, end quote. In a statement, however, Apple said, quote, we reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation. Our responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough, and are ongoing. We respond to each request promptly, often within hours, sharing information with FBI offices in Jacksonville, Pensacola, and New York.

The queries resulted in many gigabytes of information that we turned over to investigators. In every instance, we responded with all of the information that we had, end quote. But Apple alighted over the request regarding actually unlocking the two iPhones, saying this, quote, We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys. Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers. We feel strongly that encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users' data, end quote. Quoting BuzzFeed News. This is not the first time that Apple has squared off against federal law enforcement in defense of its users' privacy,

arguing that agreeing to such a request would require Apple to build a backdoor around its fingerprint based encryption and set a dangerous precedent. In 2015, Apple defied a court order to assist the FBI by unlocking the iPhone belonging to another mass shooter, one of two terrorists who killed 14 people in San Bernardino. In that case, the standoff was resolved after a private company working for the FBI found a way to unlock the phone. We are not trying to weaken encryption, to be clear. David Boutich, the deputy director of the FBI said, at the news conference, end quote. Absolutely huge news in the world of fintech. Visa has announced that it is buying Plaid for $5.3 billion, which is roughly double Plad's most recent private valuation.

You might not have heard of Plaid, but chances are you've used them, at least in a behind-the-scenes way. Quoting CNBC, Plad's API software. often referred to as the plumbing behind fintech companies, let's startups connect to users bank accounts. It's well known among financial technology developers, but the average person interacting with it most likely wouldn't recognize the name. High-profile Plaid customers include popular peer-to-peer payment app Venmo,

mobile investing app Robin Hood, and cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini. As of December, Plad said one in four people in the United States with bank accounts have connected to the fintech company through an app. Visa and rival MasterCard were early investors in the startup, along with the venture arms of City and American Express, end quote. Plad's last investment round was a $250 million series C in 2018 that valued the company at $2.7 billion. Rumors are that the price reached the level it did because MasterC was also bidding for Plaid. Several people on Twitter said what Justin Paterno said here,

Plad and Visa deal makes sense. Plaid has an existential threat from banks turning them off and not supporting them. Visa has an existential threat from wallets like Venmo Square, end quote. Quoting CNBC one more time, in a call with investors Monday, Visa CEO Al Kelly said Plaid has seen a compound annual growth rate of roughly 100% since 2015. Kelly said the deal was, quote, a long-term play and would position Visa for the next decade. It will help expand the company's total addressable market and relationships with fintech companies, as well as boost plaid's growth, according to Kelly, end quote. Epic says its PC game store, which also serves as Fortnite's launcher, has 108 million users and has generated $251 million in third-party game sales since its debut in December of 2018.

If you were to add in the Fortnite revenue also generated on the store, total sales in the game store would come to $680 million. Quoting the Verge, Epic says it's kicked in $23 million in coupons and discounts toward game sales, and it's also given away 73 titles as part of its free game program, with more than 200 million titles claimed. The company plans to keep up the program as well, and it's announcing today that it's extending the free game game

of OAs through 2020. Yet, Epic has a long way to go if it's to truly compete with Steam, the leading PC game marketplace, and the primary storefront Epic is trying to compete against with its more developer-friendly 88 by 12 revenue split. In 2017, Valve is estimated to have earned more than $4 billion in revenue for just game sales, not including micro-transactions, downloadable content, and expansion passes, and other digital goods, end quote. Epic also released a list of the nine most popular titles thus far in the store, though it didn't

release any actual sales figures, and it's sort of unclear if these are listed in order for most popular to least, but the games are as follows. World War Z, Borderlands 3, Untitled Goose Game, Metro Exodus, Control, the Outer Worlds, the Division 2, dauntless, and satisfactory. 9 to 5 Mac has found code inside of the Mac OS Catalina 10.15.3 beta that might hint at a future pro mode, which would boost performance on Mac laptops in certain situations. Some strings mention that apps may run faster, but battery life may decrease and fan noise may increase, and fan speed limit overridden when the pro mode is activated. All these strings are directly related to the macOS power management system. We think that it will be possible to temporarily improve the machine's performance by ignoring some restrictions to save energy. The internal fans will run at a higher speed with Pro Mode, probably to avoid thermal throttling issues.

Similar to Do Not Disturb, Pro Mode is supposed to be automatically disabled by the next day, end quote. no word beyond speculation about when this pro mode might be made available to users. One would suspect that it would only work with models that have the new thermal design Apple introduced with the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but Mac Rumors got an anonymous tip that said that the Mac Pro will also get a pro mode for improved thermal performance. We're going to wrap up the show today by talking about PCs and general and then Windows more specifically, but first the PC front. After years of bad news with declining shipment numbers worldwide, Gartner and IDC are both estimating that 2019 represented the first full year of PC growth since 2011. In fact, the PC market grew in

Q2, Q3, and Q4 of last year, following six years of quarterly declines. Gartner estimates global PC shipments grew 2.3% to 70.6 million units. IEDC estimated 4.8% growth to 71.8 million units. Why the uptick? Well, it seems like the bets on dual-screen devices and 5G-capable machines are paying off and exciting people. But also, and this is what we're going to talk about a little later, the end of the road for Windows 7 may also be playing a significant part,

Quoting Venture Beat. One big driving force has been the Windows 10 refresh cycle in the business market. With Windows 7 hitting end of support today, at least some businesses have tried to migrate to Windows 10 last minute. It will take a while before 5G PCs and dual-screen PCs drive the same amount of growth, if they do at all, end quote. According to both IDC and Gartner, the leaders in the PC market are Lenovo and HP with roughly 50, 50% market share, followed by Dell. All three of the leaders saw their shipments grow last year, while the bottom three in market share, Apple, Acer, and Asus all saw sales decline in 2019. CREBSOn Security is reporting that Microsoft is slated to release a Windows update today to fix what it is calling, quote, an extraordinarily serious flaw in the cryptographic component present in all versions of Windows.

Microsoft has quietly shipped a patch for the bug to branches of the U.S. military and to other high-value customers and targets that manage key internet infrastructure, and that those organizations have been asked to sign agreements preventing them from disclosing details of the flaw prior to January 14th, the first patch Tuesday of 2020. According to sources, the vulnerability in question resides in a Windows component known as the Crypt-32 DLL, a Windows module that Microsoft says, handles certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in the crypto API. The Microsoft Crypto API provides services that enable developers to secure Windows-based applications

using cryptography and includes functionality for encrypting and decrypting data using digital certificates. A critical vulnerability in this Windows component could have wide-ranging security implications for a number of important Windows functions, including authentication on Windows desktops and servers, the protection of sensitive data handled by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers, as well as a number of third-party applications and tools. Equally concerning, a flaw in Crypt32DL might also be abused to spoof the digital signature tied to a specific piece of software. Such a weakness could be exploited by attackers to make malware appear to be a benign

program that was produced and signed by a legitimate software company, end quote. and there is a late-breaking addendum to this story. Apparently, the NSA discovered the vulnerability in question first, but rather than weaponize it themselves, the agency chose to notify Microsoft, quoting the Washington Post. The disclosure represents a major shift in the NSA's approach, choosing to put computer security ahead of building up its arsenal of hacking tools that allow the agency to spy on adversaries networks, according to the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, end quote. Finally, as I mentioned, today is the last day of the Windows 7 era. After today, Microsoft will no longer support Windows 7, which means

no more updates, no more security patches, no nothing. In a big way, this is the end of a major computing era. In a lot of ways, you could see Windows 7 as the high watermark for Windows in general and also maybe for the PC. Quoting the Verge. Windows 7 became so popular, in fact, that it took Windows 10 nearly four years just to pass it in MarketShare. Even today, millions of PCs are still running Windows 7,

and the operating system still runs on a massive 26% of all PCs, according to data from net market share. Microsoft spent years trying to get people to upgrade to Windows 10 free of charge, but tens of millions of PCs will now be left vulnerable to exploits and security vulnerabilities, end quote. And what with the advent of Windows as a service, quoting again, will likely never witness another giant release of Windows like we've seen with Windows 10 or Windows 7 in the past, even for foldable devices.

Microsoft's priorities have certainly shifted under CEO Sacha Nadella, quote, The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us, explained Nadella at the launch of new surface devices last year. Windows is still a significant part, of Microsoft's business, but it's not the future of it. Microsoft is embracing Android, cross-platform software and services, and the cloud. It's a company that increasingly embraces competitors like Amazon, Samsung, Sony, and Google to transform its own business, end quote.

Microsoft, of course, wants you to upgrade to Windows 10 and hopes that you'll pay to do that, but, and I have not yet tried this myself, though I do have an instance of Windows 10 running on a virtual machine that I probably should update. There have been articles making their way around the web that suggest you can still update Windows 7 to Windows 10 for free. If you are able to do this, it is thanks to a free upgrade offer that Microsoft ran through 2016 that they apparently never turned off. Again, I haven't tested this, but if you want to try and get a free upgrade, here's what you need to do. First, go to the download Windows 10 website. There's a link in the show notes. under Create Windows 10 Installation Media, click Download Tool Now and run.

Choose upgrade this PC now, assuming this is the only PC you're upgrading. If you're upgrading a different machine, choose Create Installation Media for another PC and save the installation files. Then follow the prompts, and when the upgrade is complete, go to Settings, Update, and Security, then activation, and you should see a digital license for Windows 10. That's all for today. I'm going to try to head home early and nurse this cold once again. Quick reminder, though, there is an ad-free version of this podcast. You can subscribe to the ad-free feed right in your podcast player, the one you're listening to me on right now.

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