The Vergecast - Apple's encryption controversy, Bezos's hacked phone, and Sonos stopping old product updates

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

Stories from this week: Trump demands Apple unlock iPhones: ‘They have the keys to so many criminals and criminal minds’ How to FBI-proof your encrypted iPhone backups  Can Apple live up to Apple’s privacy ads? Apple rejects AG Barr’s claim that it didn’t assist with Pensacola shooting probe The FBI has asked Apple to unlock another shooter’s iPhone Senator asks Jeff Bezos for more information on Saudi-linked hack Saudi Arabian prince reportedly hacked Jeff Bezos’ phone with malicious WhatsApp message PSA: Never open a WhatsApp message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia Here’s a first look at Android on Microsoft’s dual-screen Surface Duo Microsoft’s software plan for the Duo Android phone is surprisingly realistic Introduction to dual-screen devices Motorola’s foldable Razr will launch on February 6th after delay Cruise driverless taxi: no steering wheel, no pedals Sonos will stop providing software updates for its oldest products in May Comcast plans price hikes for cable customers as it looks ahead to streaming Peacock launch Google’s ads just look like search results now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on Vergecast, we go deep on the Apple encryption controversy. The big Bezos hack, his phone got hacked. We talk about folding phones. We end talking about what's going on with Sonos and their devices lasting past May. That's next on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for news. nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the technology revolution.

Huh? Mm. I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Dieter Bono is here. I am your... I've run out of synonyms for not friend. All right.

Dieter's going to try real hard today. Paul Miller is here. Hello. And Russell Brandem is joining us today. Why, hello? Russell, you're here because you understand how mathematics can keep information secret. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, sure. Or at least the philosophical implications thereof. Yeah, I'd like to think so. Because there's like a lot. I think the problem isn't the math. The problem is where you put the math. It's the location of the math. Okay.

We'll get there a second. But also the location of the map can itself be mapped as mathematical coordinates. Whoa. Yeah. I'm just going to tell the audience, we're going to talk about folding phones. We're going to engage. We're going to talk about folding space. Layton.

Wow. Everyone's a latent frustration with stoned us off. We're going to do the gadget stuff. That's coming. The news of the week, the thing that dominated, I would say the, the tech foreign policy security access, huh? Yeah.

Was encryption. Yeah, certainly. And not because anything in particular happened. Well, some things. Some, like, things like conversations had, like people talked. Yeah. But no actions were taken. Well, so you mean in the Apple side, not the Bezos side, right?

Because those are the two. There are two, yes. There's the Apple ICloud encryption drama, and then there's the what happened to Jeff Bezos's phone drama. Yeah, yeah. Both of which are like, you know, you got to lock it down. Okay. Let's start with Apple. The Apple timeline is, as far as I understand it, the United States government, even into the Obama administration and now with some particular vigor in the Trump administration, has been begging Apple to unlock iPhones, to provide a back door to unlock the iPhone.

That's a thing that the government wants. Well, and specifically to allow law enforcement when they have a warrant to get into the local storage of the information that's like physically located within your phone. Right. Like it's on the hard drive of the phone. And often if you don't have the passcode that you put in when you unlock the phone, they have done a good job of making it very, very hard to get that. Right. Especially your passcode is like six digits or more. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And the specific instance here is William Barr, Attorney General, has been turning up the heat based on wanting to get into two phones that were related to the shooting at the Pensacola Naval Base. And as with the last go-round we had with this encryption stuff, it's a little bit unclear if they actually needed Apple to unlock the phones in order to get to the data that they want, or if the data was actually important. But that's like that's the thing that started to kick all of this attention. off. Right. We want to get into these...

Increased heat on that. We want to get into these terrorist phones. Apple won't let us. Apple's a bad guy. Give us back door. That's usually... This is how it went years ago with the San Bernardino case. Apple held fast. They didn't do it. It's happening again. A thing that is true that Apple does not deny, does not hide, is that law enforcement can get ICloud backups. And Apple has the key to unlock your iPhone backup encryption. Because they say...

Your iPhone backup. Your iPhone, right? Not your iPhone iPhone, but your iPhone backup. Yes. Yes. Which contains everything that's on your iPhone. Well, except for that window of time. Right.

If the criminal sends a text message, like in 20 minutes, I'm going to go rob the store. That doesn't hit the backup until they plug their phone in. I'll also say intangible terms. So I don't know 100% the details of the Pensacola case because it's still sort of coming up. But in San Bernardino, it was. specifically eight days. So they had the iPhone backup that had been made eight days before

the attack, and it seemed like maybe he had turned the, like, backups off because he decided he was going to do horrible things. But, like, the whole case, they were like, well, it was this terrorist's phone. And it was really like, do you think that he was talking to ISIS

in this specific week immediately before he went crazy? And like, I do think because this stuff is important and these like conversations are important and you have to draw the line somewhere and there's all these principal things, it is the conversation usually skates past how much of this data is already accessible to law enforcement. Right, because it's in the Eichlad backup. Yeah. Okay. That, that complex situation is just the context of the things that kicked off the conversation this week. the background.

Government wants to get in the phones. Apple gives them iCloud backups. There's usually a delta between the backup and what's on the phone today. Right? Yeah. Reuters publishes a piece this week saying Apple was going to fully encrypt. That's the wrong phrase. We're going to talk about it.

That's the wrong phrase. Apple is going to fully encrypt iCloud backups such that only you, the user, will have the key, no longer be able to turn that over to law enforcement, thus precluding law enforcement from seeing your backups. Well, no, no. That piece, people had said that right after San Bernardino. Yeah.

And I was very skeptical at the time because I was like, this is going to get them in a world of hurt. Right. And then Reuters, well, yeah, so continue. Yeah, so the Reuters piece is Apple was going to do it. This is very much in contention. Apple told the FBI they were going to do it,

and the FBI freaked out and Apple didn't do it. Apple, for its part, absolutely disputing the idea that it ever tells anyone about future products and services. Right? Like, they're just like, that's, you know how like, we would send them emails. We like, we heard new AirPods are coming out and we get either dead icy silence or we get

Apple does not comment on products, like upcoming products and services? This is like, did you tell the FBI about encryption and Apple's the same statement that we would get about like, hey, are there new AirPods coming out? They're like, we do not comment on upcoming products and services. So that's kind of their position. Like, we would never do that. It is true that there had been reporting back, like Russell said, around the Sanberto-Dita time, in the Wall Street Journal that Apple was probably thinking about strengthening, getting rid of its own key to get to your iCloud backup. Okay.

So I just want to make the two quick notes on this. One, I do think... Where's the bath? Well, no, no. This is, I think because of the architecture of the systems, I think it was reasonable to look at iCloud's circa like 20. 2012 and say some security engineer at Apple is building this in a way so that if they want to make it so that only a user can unlock it, that will fit with the way they've architected this, right?

So that, I think is a plausible claim. That is a far cry from being like Apple is going to do this. It's like this guy at Apple is sort of likes it when things work this way. The other thing is it's not like they really had to ask the FBI to know how the FBI would feel about this. Like it was kind of, like, the FBI's been pretty clear about it. Like, anyone reading the piece was like, well, that's going to piss off the FBI. So, like, I don't know why that, that feels like less of a sticking point where it was just

like they thought about it. And the guy's like, you're going to get me in trouble with the FBI. What if we don't do that? Like, that seems plausible to me. I would say Apple, they are in an uneasy truce in a position that is maybe not where they wanted to be or anyone wanted to be, which is they're going to hold the line on a backdoor into the hardware of the phone. That's where they are. They do not want to create encryption backdoors to the phone. They are in a position where a lot of people back up their phones.

They have a plausible story for why they need to hold onto that key, which is people often forget their pass codes. Yeah. So they can restore the phone from the backup because they have the key as well. That's like, it's very plausible. That's a very normal. thing that happens. I forgot my passcode. I go to the Apple store. Can you help me? Yes, but your data is going to be four days old because that's your last backup. But that's the best we can do. We keep your stuff private. We're the privacy company. So they've got this uneasy truths that also gives them an out to the FBI. We're helping you anyway. Don't move the line further. So that's like the Reuters piece talking about Apple's internal dilemma about moving the line further. Who knows if they want to the FBI or not? Right. Then Donald, Trump, Trump started talking. Like, that's just a real thing that happened this week. Gave an interview to Joe Kernan on CNBC at Davos, an incredible environment for him to be talking about encryption.

And he said, Apple has to help us. I'm very strong on it. They have the keys to so many criminals and criminal minds and we can do things. We can do things to their criminal minds. We can do things. And then this is. Trump is like a transactional guy. He said, I've given them waivers around tariffs.

I've given them waivers because it's a great company and it made a big difference. And he said, I'm not concerned about my relationship with Cook. You're dealing with drug lords and you're dealing with terrorists. And if you're dealing with murderers, I don't care. So the deal that Trump is very clearly putting on the table is, hey, I helped you with the trade war that I started. But in exchange for that, that, I want you to unlock the phone. So now Apple is in this very uneasy position, I think, where they've arrived at the, I don't think, by design position of we're not going to unlock

the phone, but we'll turn over the eye cloud to you. And now Trump is like criminal minds. Unlock the phone. Right. And this time, like the last time it was, well, if it really starts escalating, there'll be a huge lawsuit that'll eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. And like that, that's the consequence. But now there's a, there's that consequence. on top of the consequence that Trump will just like undo the tariff deal that he made with Tim Cook. And all of a sudden, like, because Apple made this choice, iPhone prices a lot tomorrow. And by the way, just to make that even clear because there's, of course, a tweet. The Trump tweet was, we were helping Apple all of the time on trade, all capital letters,

and so many other issues, yet they refuse to unlock bones used by killers, drug dealers, and other violent criminal elements. They have to step up to the plate and help our great country. Now, exclamation, I'll just, I'm going to. be an insufferable. Okay, killers, sure. Terrorists. Drug dealers?

I don't know. I feel like maybe it's... Yeah, it's a lot. So, okay, a thing about just the tariffs, just to be specific about what we're talking about, Apple did get... There were some carve-outs that they asked for. There were others that they didn't. But the real thing that Trump has given them is they were toying with the idea of

putting tariffs on computers and phones. And so all the Apple products that were hit by tariffs were sort of accessories. It was the possibly the wheels on the Mac Pro, but like that level of thing. And it wasn't like the iPhone. It wasn't the MacBook. So and that's a huge deal. It would have been disastrous for them. And also like the deal is still preliminary. Like it seems like things aren't escalating, but that kind of stuff can change. So it is true that there is this thing that could happen in trade

that would be catastrophic to Apple that Trump has mostly avoided. I think... Because he and Tim Cook hang out all the time. Before this interview on CNBC, he literally had had breakfast with Tim Cook and Davos. Right. There are like, obviously

lots of, like, why does anything happen? But it seems odd. It would be very... it would be hugely damaging, not just to Apple, to say, we're going to put a 15% tax on every phone that is imported from China to America. Like, that would be a big deal. That would be a problem for people beyond just Tim Cook. And, like, Tim Cook happens to be the guy who really cares about that and is standing

next to Trump. But it's weird to phrase that as, like, I did Apple a favor. It's like, well, you did, like, people who use phones a favor. I feel like you are maybe reading too much into these very explicit. tweet where he's like, I did you a favor. Oh, no, he's literally saying that. I'm just like, I don't know if that's really what happened. Anyway, again, this is all just the context.

Still, like that the Reuters article happened, the Trump tweet, and the Trump comment happened. What that led to is what I would say is a pretty remarkable conversation about what data Apple actually has, where it's encrypted, what the government can see. and it turns out, and I don't think this is by any fault of Apple, it is just so necessarily complex that I don't think most people understand

that Apple's billboard that said what happens in your iPhone stays in your iPhone is just like incorrect on its face because a huge amount of what happens in your iPhone is then transmitted to iCloud which Apple will like happily turn over to the police if they get a warrant.

And that I think is much more confused using for people to understand. There's also, we should have this conversation, an enormous problem with the language we're using to describe these things. This is the, it's not the, so the fully encrypted. And I said fully encrypted and they were going to fully encrypt eye cloud. And it's like, well, it was already encrypted. And also there's a lot of just like basic infrastructure that needs to be encrypted where it's like I'm using encryption to send my sort of credit card number to Everlane because I don't want like the guy working at my

ISP to be able to steal my identity. But he definitely wants to. Right. But like that's encrypted. It's not like a problem for the FBI that I'm using. So it's sort of tricky. As Deeter says, it's where the math goes. Yeah.

And like does a number exist or is it, can a concept be real? And if so, shouldn't it be in a physical location? Why did I walk into this with you? It's like Deeter's like opening the door. He's like gesturing me in. I know what's going to happen in the room. And I was like, I'm going into the room.

In the world of Bitcoin, the word that they use is custodial. You have non-custodial wallets. So I have a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet, as in I control the private key, and I'm the only person who's ever held that private key. And so nobody could, even if they wanted to, even if Trump wanted to, he couldn't get my Bitcoin. Well, what if he charged you tariffs on phone? bumper sticker, actually. Custodial wallet is something like Coinbase, you know, like typically exchanges have a

wallet, and so they are holding the private keys. And so theoretically, they can be compelled by a government to hand over those keys, which is why people like non-custodial wallets. And then there are sort of like semi-custodial. They're like gray areas where you get into it. And so Apple's obviously in a gray area where you are a custodian of your private keys. They are in the secure element of your iPhone, and that secure

element is designed to be only accessed by someone with your pen or your face or whatever. And then they also have a secondary set of keys at the cloud that can also decryp the same data, the backup data. Yeah, but not the phone. And this is, I think, the level of complexity here, because we tried to make the world's simplest how-to. Although it had a great headline in the end from Barbara, how to FBI proof your phone. And it was just like, we were just going to explain to you

what the different encryption settings do and how to end up in the most private state. We ended up going back and forth. We had to send a bunch of questions to Apple that had to come back. We had to understand what the answers. I ended up with a whiteboard drawing all of the states your phone could be in

with the different ICloud and messages in iCloud toggles? Well, the messages thing, like, added, it basically took the basic level of complexity and then multiplied it, right? Because, like, as however many different states of, you know, encryption you can have and access to keys and backups you can have on messages,

multiply that by your phone, and you just, like, you have a million different options. And the vocabulary problem here makes it even worse. So let me try to do this, and hopefully along the way, everyone will understand why the language in there. And I didn't even think custodial or not because, like, that's pretty good.

It still doesn't quite encapsulate the last turn or the screw of pain. Okay. So the first state is you have everything turned off, right? No iCloud backup. No messages in the cloud. By the way, Apple never talks about messages in the cloud. It is off by default. They built this whole thing.

And they, I don't know, they do not want people to use it as far as I can tell. I think one of the reasons they don't want people to use it. use it is because when you turn it on, the government... Their ads are false. No, when you turn it on, the government can't get it, right? Like, theoretically, your messages become end-to-end encrypted between all your devices. But let me start. The first state is everything is off.

Yeah. The government can't get into your phone without your pass code. Or they can, you know, go to one of these hacking groups, which we will talk about, and maybe they will find a way into your phone. But there's no front door into your phone. In this case, the math is on your phone. The math is on your phone. The second case, you turn on iCloud backup.

That's the primary case that we've been talking about. Your phone remains locked. You have to pay some group or the NSA to hack into the physical hardware of your phone, but Apple will turn over the key to your backup. Your text messages are in that backup. Your eye messages are in that backup. So government can get your eye messages. The math is on your phone and it's on Apple servers,

and Tim Cook knows how to solve the equation. Right. Okay. Sure. Just going to keep going. The third case is you've got iCloud backup on and you've got messages in the cloud on. This is Paul Worthett. It's just so dumb the outcome.

Your iMessages moved to be encrypted end to end, so only you have the key on your phone, which the government can't get to. Your iCloud backup still remains with Apple having the key. They can turn it over, but you know it gets backed up to your iCloud backup? The key to your messages in the cloud. In this case, the math belongs, it lives in your heart. The math is deep in your soul is where it comes from. So the government can get your iCloud backup, decrypted, get your key, and then go and unlock your message backup. Right.

That is, I think, not the outcome anyone was anticipating. Okay, so I have... That's very confusing. I have a theory as to why this is in terms of, like, Apple Kremlinology. Yeah. So, like, I think we see this in a lot of different Apple products where Apple will kind of get together and they're like, we're going to make a phone. We want it to be really expensive. What can we do that will allow it to be really expensive?

Here's this guy who does a lot of cool camera stuff. And we're just going to sort of put him in a room and he's going to do nuts of stuff with a camera. And then the end, they come out with the keynote and they're like, look at this camera. So security is kind of like that, I think, where they got like really intense people who are like, yeah, like I'm going to design this end-to-end hardware-coded messaging system and it's going to be completely airtight and no one's going to be able to get the messages under any circumstances. And then they're like, okay, cool, we want to, like, what if someone wants their messages? Like, they lose their phone and they want to back it up. And he's like, that's not sort of what I did this for. And then they're like, okay, you've done great.

Now we're going to talk to this other guy. And I do think there is like there are people within Apple who are trying to build extremely robust and secure systems. And often they're like given the leeway to do that. And you end up being like, wow, like I message encryption is really impressive. But they don't have control over what is built. Like once it's out there. And Apple is always and only focused on.

on like consumer experience. So they're just like backups. People want them. Do it. Like, and so you get these in, from some angles, like really airtight systems that then have weird holes punched in them. That it's like, why would you ever design it this way? Yeah. And I do think that the primary person who's going to get locked out of your phone is you.

Like the most likely scenario with all this encryption and all the security is that you, the user will just forget your passcode and be locked out of your phone. I hear all of this and I want to be the most paranoid person ever, but I also know that I kind of want Apple to save my ass. Yeah, right? Like, every time I do tech support for my family, I'm like, what's your password? And they're like, I don't know. And like, that's most of the task.

It's like, now I'm going to reset your password for you. Please write it down this time. So that's like the one state. Then there's a state where you turn off ICloud and turn on messages. in the cloud. I don't know who gets there, but in that state, the government can't get your text messages. Really? Yeah. Okay. Because then that's, that's end-to-end encrypted in messages, but there's no iCloud backup for them to retrieve the key from. But how would you describe that third state? How does your Mac get at the messages if the key stays on your iPhone?

Aha. So this is actually really interesting. Yeah. When they send an iMessage. So if I send an I message to your phone number. Apple, it's going to Apple's servers to see which IP addresses it's being sent to, and it has a log of all of your devices. And so it sends encrypted copies of the message, specifically encrypted to the key associated with that device, to all of the different devices simultaneously. This is also, like, this causes various problems if people switch from iOS to Android for some reason. Who would ever do such a thing? I know. But it is...

Okay, so the cool thing is that it's tied to the key within the secure enclave on the iPhone, which they can do because they make their own chips. That is not true for MacBooks, although it's another one where it's like, you could just start making your chips and make the... I message that much more secure at any time,

so you're sort of like... Clearly, someone was thinking about doing this at some point, whether they actually get that into the end zone ever is kind of up for grabs. But again, there's like the cranky encryption guy in some like portion of the glass ring of Apple who is like, guys, we got to do this. We got to get the secure enclave on the laptop.

Yeah. So it's just extraordinarily. Like, I'm saying, I don't think they're trying to hide the ball. I think even trying to describe the current set of possibilities has taken us 25 minutes. Yeah. And like it took that Barbara, post that she wrote, which is great. You should read it and send it to everyone you know.

Like that even that is very long and involves a lot of screenshots with arrows just to be like, look at this. Look at this part of the interface. I want to give the benefit of doubt that they're not hiding the ball. But at the same time, is it kind of the case that with a warrant, the government can basically get at any and all information in the cloud right now? Yes. Yeah. That is. Unless I personally encrypt it. Well, they can get the encrypted part. The thing you do is you encrypt it in the cloud and you hold the key. They can get, at some point, the feds show up to the server farm, and they're like, we're feds, here's the warrant, give us everything on this.

And the server farm's like, okay, if it's encrypted, then they have the encrypted data, but they don't have the key. So I can just do that in Google Drive now. But like anything in my Gmail, like basically any Google product, like, yes, all of that is, is, is, accessible. Although intriguingly, there are Android backups that are secured by Google's Titan Security chip, and it's down to the, like, on their server, it's encrypted. Google doesn't have the key. And if you go in and try and hack the encryption, in the same way your phone will erase your data if people punch in the wrong passcode too many times, the Titan security key will do that with your backup in Google's cloud. That is cool. That's neat.

See, that's surprising to me just because it really does feel like the sort of thing, like nobody wants to poke the bear and actually truly secure the data from the government. Well, I mean, it doesn't matter because it's Google, so they've got 50,000 other ways to find out everything about you, so whatever is secure in that server kind of doesn't matter, but it's there

if you want to. Yeah, but Paul, that is a pretty good point. Like, there are a lot of reasons that you want the government to look at a bunch of stuff. So... Well, also, there are like specific legal requirements, right? Like, if you're holding data, like,

you, there's a law that says you have to put it up. And so, and, you know, they'll cart you off if you don't at a certain point. But when you were saying. Right. So like, I don't know. Like there's the CSAI, child sexual abuse imagery, right? That gets thrown around these networks all the time. People are like, you should do something or we have to catch the people. There's not a lot of political will in the world to say the government shouldn't have access to every resource to go after those kinds of criminals.

But it means they need the evidence. And so, like, that is a deep, when I talk to security folks, that is, like, one of the deepest tensions that they are always talking about. There are bad actors in the world. We actually want the cops to go after them. But we need to keep everybody safe. Like, how on earth do we balance it? And right now, the thing that is happening is, at least as far as I can tell. Like, the four-digit pass code is, like, kind of weak and can be broken.

So everyone just sort of relying on companies like gray shift and a hacking team and NSO group. to be able to celebrate, to show up and be able to, like, get past the 10 try activation lock and then brute force a four-digit passcode. That's, I don't think that was the outcome anyone. Like, if you sat down and designed the policy, you would not be like, most people will use weak pass codes and the government will get into it, and that will forestall the problem for another round, which is more or less where we are. And, like, but how do you solve the problem of?

Right, but like, the government has a right to break into my house if they have a war. But they don't have a right to tell me like I can't have locks. Yeah, and I think that's why this is like a math problem. Well, I also think, you know, you start saying, oh, there are these bad guys, you know, we're using this to crack down on sexual abuse. But then eventually as these things get opened up, it sort of goes to more and more minor crimes until eventually you're using it to go after. Yeah, people who are just selling drugs and they're trying to provide for their family. And the whole problem here is that the discourse that we are. having about this issue is Donald Trump tweeting and Apple, Apple is in fact doing, like speaking

in some nuanced ways in some places, especially in like their documentation. But the vast majority of people's understanding of Apple's position on this is a big ass billboard that says what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone. So like the the actual like debate that we are having as like a nation is like so far a field of the actual complex. of the issue, that my level of hope that we're going to land at a place that seems like nuanced and reasonable is very low. Yeah, and I think that billboard did not do the many favors. Like, that billboard just created the opportunity for everyone to constantly attack them because it turns out most of the things that happen on your iPhone go to ICloud. It's just like, it's pretty true, actually.

Like, they don't, like, even if they don't go to the government, they flatly do not stay on your iPhone. Literally the whole point of the device is to communicate with other things. That's the other thing. Like, we're talking about this in the context of, like, only using Apple services on an iPhone, but, like, you're using an app. The app knows. Like, the app is also storing this data somewhere. So it's like, it's a networked device.

You can only, yeah. Let's take a break and come back and use that to transition to Jeff Bezos. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be. really scary too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions

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No endless searcher required. You can visit Upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business, That's upw-w-R-K-com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Russell, walk us through the Jeff Bezos story. Okay.

The man is born. A while ago, Jeff Bezos, out of the blue, announced that he and his wife were getting divorced in, like, a weirdly public way. It wasn't really clear why. Later, it became clear that he was having an understanding. affair, possibly with his wife's knowledge. It was anyway, things were splitting up. And the National Inquirer had learned about it. And he believed that they had tried to extort him, but it was this sort of massively

acrimonious and bitter thing. And there was, in particular, this real question, they had gotten photos and messages that he had sent to his mistress and these very, just very private things that, like, you don't normally see from powerful people and were kind of embarrassing. and sort of they ended up coming out because the National Choir had them. So there's this real question of like, how did they get them? So fast forward a little bit. There were over time, like a couple people had some theories.

They were like, oh, it's the mistress's brother. Or maybe he got hacked by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is actually kind of the overlapping point here because that was also, they were also deeply implicated in the Pensacola shooting. But we found out today basically, well, this week, that there is very good reason to believe that he was not just hacked by Saudi Arabia, but specifically was exchanging WhatsApp messages with Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the crown prince sent him a message that had Spira on it,

and that was what compromised his phone and leaked all these messages, and then it was sort of relayed to the National Enquirer for complex political reasons. is the assumption. But there's, there's, like, there's, like, 99% it's true,

but there's like, they never found apparently direct evidence of the malware. They just, he got a weird video, and then, like,

two minutes later, it started exporting a ton of data out somewhere. Yeah. So the thing that I would say, which is kind of in the background, a lot of this coverage, is,

so the new thing that we have is, that there is this report, which motherboard obtained and published, which great work on their part, that is basically Jeff Bezos's personal security firm consultants, the sort of Liam Neeson-and-Taken type people who sort of he was like, something's wrong with my phone, sent it to a scary person. His name is Gavin DeBacker, and he does kind of look like Liam Neeson-Intaken.

Yeah. But so they are not like, if the question is like, was the DNC hacked by China, like there is a group of, there's like a kind of company you bring in, this is not really that kind of company. So the analysis that they did was not, like, sophisticated by the standards of cybersecurity investigation. And, like, that doesn't mean that there's nothing there. It's just like this is sort of the, this is like the entry-level analysis. And there's still a lot of other stuff that we need to look into to really nail it down.

And the thing that connects these stories to the earlier stories is apparently Jeff Bezos reportedly forgot his password for iTunes. Really? That is what I read in one place, yes. That is amazing. That's not the thing I think connects to stories. So the thing that connects to stories is state actors getting access to the contents of your phone. Well, right.

And this is a classic, like a Snowden revelation, is that even if you are the best at encrypting everything when it's on your disk and over the wire, if you ever want to look at the encrypted information, it has to be decrypted by the client application. and in this case that would be WhatsApp. And so we don't, I guess, know specifically the vulnerability, but WhatsApp has had a bunch of very similar vulnerabilities to what Bezos is describing where, like, you do a video call to somebody and that will cause, like a buffer overflow or something and then allow that person to exfiltrate data.

Or there was one with like a GIF that would cause like a double-free. and then they could exfiltrate data. One possible defense against this is some of the permission stuff that Google's been working on where you have apps have way less access to everything on your phone. But it's pretty obvious that WhatsApp

is going to have access to WhatsApp stuff. Yeah, so I think the real key here is there's an operating system level protection that is like WhatsApp does not need. I mean, WhatsApp actually does need, like, access to your photo role, but it doesn't need access to all of the data on your phone. But, of course, if you're making Spireware, you would like it to have access to all the data on your phone. So we're kind of getting back to the same ICloud thing. Like, it's the same people at Apple who are working to maintain. Like,

it's really hard to make sure that the video that you're playing doesn't have something spooky in it. Like that's just, what you want is once the spooky thing starts, it's isolated, you notice it, you can stop it, and you can keep it from getting the other parts of the phone. But that means you need to sort of maintain the system integrity of the operating system. And that's exactly what you would be breaking when you're sort of making the back door for, you know, the FBI. Yeah. So the argument that we were having right before we started was, is this, for these stories like, deeper related or are they different? Here's my argument for why they're different. Yeah. I think we've made some number of arguments why there's something. Does it have to do with the location of the math?

It does have to do with the location of the math. The first story that Apple, ICloud encryption, Trump wants to unlock the phone is a story about an individual hardware unlock. How do we unlock this phone? Right? Because we've made abundantly clear they can get to I cloud. That is disconnected from, is there a market for exploits in the world such that? that a rogue government can go buy one from, I think the reports of the NSO group, and then use that. Although we should say NSO group denies any involvement.

And I think Facebook is now suing the NSA group over this. They already were. WhatsApp has been suing the NSA group over a vulnerability that they found and didn't tell WhatsApp about, which is kind of standard operating procedure, but WhatsApp's not thrilled about it. Anyway, continue. Right.

So the existence of exploits for individual apps like WhatsApp or Gmail or, like a rogue PDF that, like, cracks your Windows PC, which is like the classic case, is almost like secondary to whether the government can a hardware unlock a phone. And so this conversation is just so complicated. It almost seems like everything is the same. But these are actually really different ideas. Well, there is the security vulnerability.

Let's say you are, let's say you're the drug dealer who got swept up into the reckless abandon of the government, right? Yeah. For the drugs that I was selling. Yeah. And then they get your phone. Uh-huh. Right. And there's no way to hardware unlock your phone, but they have a WhatsApp message that'll do it for them.

It's still not going to work because they've got to unlock the phone to open the message. Like, they're different. They're just like totally different. The goal, the end goal is to exaltreate, exaltrate my data. They want my data and it's encrypted and I hold the keys in this case. How do they get my data? Now, if it's Bezos, they send them a video message. If it's me and I've got all the drugs, apparently they asked Tim Cook to decrypt, you know,

like my ICloud backup or to invent a backdoor that dissolves the whole point of encryption or something like that. But the end goal, these are just different means to the same end goal, which is exfiltrating data. Yeah, but I think that, the actual difference in mechanism is critically important to the goal. It is true. I mean, so I would say the other way you can zoom out and sort of rub your eyes until it gets blurry enough that it looks the same is the answer for all of this is, one, to have the data in as few places as possible, accessible by as few, like, actors and programs as possible. and then two, to have systems that are robust in terms of not like just flying off the handle when some unexpected program runs into them.

And both of those, the question of like how plentiful is the data going to be, how many places is it going to be? And then how sort of sturdy are these systems going to be? Like the FBI, part of the reason security people don't like the FBI, even though they would like to, you know, many of them don't like drug. dealers either, is that the FBI is pushing both of those in the wrong direction. Right. The NSA hordes zero days, right? Like the sort of hack that broke WhatsApp. So the NSA hordes zero days so that the government can ostensibly go after bad guys by hacking into them. Right. But by not divulging those zero days, everybody, including Jeff Bezos, who we know in love, is vulnerable to hacks. Do you think when Bezos realized he's been hacked, he'd be like,

if only the fire phone had worked out. If only I ran this platform. No, Paul, you're correct. I've heard this argument made. I don't know if I buy it. But if Apple was more compliant in decrypting the phone, the government would no longer hoard zero days. They would actually disclose more vulnerabilities.

And everyone would be saying. I didn't say I believed it. That's not even the same. The NSA already, like the NSA already has them. stuff. They could get into the phone. I didn't say I believed it, but I guess, let me say that one other way. Apple's noncompliance is accelerating the market for firms like hacking team and celebrate and whatever to exist because there's demand that Apple could erase.

Do I believe that? I don't, but I've heard that argument made. And one of the ways to think about security is, and this is why Bezos is pretty much screwed no matter what, is that how high, like, how much is someone willing to spend to attack me, and then can I raise the barrier to being attacked higher than that amount? So if someone's willing to spend zero cents to attack me, you know, it's probably pretty unlikely I'll be hacked. If someone's willing to spend $100, it's a lot more likely. And so I have to do a lot more work on my part to defend against it.

But Bezos, I mean, I don't know all of the end goal of attacking Bezos, but you could conceive of a scenario where it's worth millions of dollars to attack Bezos. And zero days are like $100,000. I would just point out that like the other dystopian aspect of this is that Jeff Bezos has resources at his disposal that are on the scale of a nation state. Like probably not actually as much as like the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. but like in terms of like can an individual defend themselves against a nation state like Jeff Bezos would probably be my pick for like the individual who could and I think that's part of why this is so like weird is that if he can't then that actually does suggest that like there is something there wasn't like a like a box that he could throw money into where the more

money he threw into it, the more secure he got, because they're all just the same tools. He's using WhatsApp like everyone else. Yeah. It is there is just an element of comedy that like he got like a meme from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and opened it and his phone got hacked. Like

there's there's just an element of that what's like it actually doesn't matter how much money you have. Like the memes will kill us all. There's an alternate story where Bezos is mistaken and it wasn't the video from the prince.

And the prince is just so sad that Bezos thinks his funny meme was that. Yeah, there's, look, that's the claim that's being made. The timeline lines right up. And, like, who would have access to a zero day like this? It's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but it's like a lot of it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think people are going to look more at the FTI report. I think one of the frustrating.

things about cyber attacks generally, and I don't think this is going to be an exception, is that, like, a lot of times you just never get to 100% attribution, and there's always some hole to poke in it, which makes it sort of denial. But I don't know that we're going to get more sure than we are now. Yeah. Anyhow, that's a lot of hacking talk. Yeah. It's my favorite kind of talk. Russell, thank you so much for joining us. We are somehow going to seamlessly transition to folding phones. Nice. If you'd like to stay along for that. that run. No, I'm going to run in the opposite direction. All right, thanks, man.

All right, Dieter Bone. Hi. How you doing, buddy? I'm awesome. There's a lot of phones of fold in half. There are a few phones that fold in half, but there's about to be a lot of them, I think, is the lesson that we're learning this week. Do you want to start with the Surface Duo, or do you want to start with the actual folding

screens? So we can just do it kind of in order. So we have the MotoRaser. They said it wasn't a delay, but it was a delay. Sales start on the 26th, and they're going to be available on February 6th. And so I'm excited to see how that thing goes, especially because, A, Motorola has been very cocky about its reliability, and so hopefully they're right. and B, it's a Verizon exclusive, and Verizon has two ways of doing exclusives.

They have like, it's cool, exclusive, and they put a lot of money behind it, and then they have like what they did with Palm, which is, yeah, make a phone for us, please. We'll see if it works. If it doesn't, whatever. Presumably this will be somewhere in the middle, but how much effort Verizon puts into marketing the razor

with its exclusive is going to say a lot about their confidence and whether or not it's any good. There's a third option. We're going to hug you to death option, which is you made a cool phone. We would prefer that no one else uses it to steal market share from us. So we're going to buy it from you as an exclusive

and then never talk about it again. Yeah. Which is a real, when you say, like, is there going to be marketing support? Like the third option plays out way more than you think it does. Because when push comes to shove, Verizon's like, buy one Galaxy S-10,

get 45 additional ones. for a dollar. And that's like, that's, that's where they're built to go. Is there a possible world where this is a sensation like the razor before it? Yes. I think that it's an extraordinarily possible world because I continue to believe this. Like, executives that I've talked to do not agree with me. So take it for what it's worth. But even we asked Panos Penae about this, about the duo. I think folding screens, two screens, it is a form factor change on the order of like the big smartphone phone form factor change like not on the order of like the iPhone but on the order of people really wanted a bigger screen phone and for a minute Apple is losing share at Samsung because they don't have a big phone and now everybody has it's like it's in that. That's a good comparison.

Yeah. Right. It's like it's a form factor change. It's a hardware change. The phones are going to look different. That drives way more consumer demand than anything else. We know it to be true. So it's true.

Every time Apple redesigns the iPhone in China, their sales go up, right? Because those customers can switch easier because they're not like to night message. Wow, I really, that's every Vergecast keyword all at once. So I think this is like it's great for morning TV shows, right? It's the hot new gadget on the Today Show. It's like, what are the coolest gifts for Christmas? Have you seen the Motorola razor? It's back.

It unfolds. Oh, my God. The screen. Like, it's that product. And so I think, like, it will be a sensation of hype, at least, whether or not Motorola can make enough, whether or not the screen immediately blows up in your face. Like, many question marks after that. But, like, in terms of consumer awareness, they're just going to get it just because it looks different. And I think it's great.

And it's because it's the razor, right? Right. It looks like a razor. There'll be a bunch of old people. They're like, oh, I had a razor once. There'll be a bunch of young people going, what's, what are all the old people talking about? Yeah. And, you know, it'll be a confluence of attention.

The other thing is more leaks are coming out about the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. A bunch of these are coming from Max Weinbach over at XDA developers. And the big one that I think we should be paying attention to is apparently the screen is going to have a glass. It's going to be a glass screen and we'll have a little crease on it. Samsung ultra-thin glass, which has a crease is what he says, a dynamic ammo-led display. So it could be our very first glass folding. phone. Which would presumably not scratch as easily. Right, but it also presumably will like have a pretty visible crease, which we're starting to go away on some of the other

phones. So like the razor in particular because of the like in the hands-ons, it seemed like the crease wasn't very present. We actually have to review it to see if that turns out to be the case. So this might bring back a little bit of the crease. So we'll be looking for that on February 11th that Samsung unpacked. Yeah. What if the crease is actually just Samsung has figured out how to do an ultra-thin OLED that folds around and the screen goes edge to edge and you open it. Do you mean like? Like it's a screen, like it's a glass screen and then it's Ola's screen. They abut each other in that, again, a perfect way. Because that would solve the folding problem. Do you think they got it's a folding glass? Yeah. I think they, I mean, I hope so. We'll see.

I don't know. Maybe it's glass and then there's like a little plastic thing and then it's glass again. That would be amazing. I feel like if the, if the crease is really noticeable when you're watching Netflix or YouTube, then they might as well have done a Microsoft than just done two screens. But if it's not, I feel like you get best of both worlds. So this brings us to Microsoft, which who, yeah, this, I'm excited about this. And it's not only because they've proposed new web standards for CSS and JavaScript, but that is also why I'm excited. Yeah.

They have put out an SDK and an emulator for the duo, the Android phone. They've also put out that they're going to have more stuff for Windows 10X. They put out those web standards. And they've put out sort of their rules for all the different postures that an app could show up in on these devices. And they've given a little bit more detail about the duo. And what's exciting to me about it is they have set up a really good system for not having the phone suck out of the box. Yeah. Because no one is going to update their apps to work with a,

the Microsoft Duo, except for Microsoft. Sorry. But they are forcing every app to launch on one screen or the other, and they won't let any app launch across span both screens. And that has to be a thing that a user consciously chooses to do, which means that they don't have to solve, they don't have to wait for developers to make good full-screen apps. They just have to use it's already good right now,

which are portrait apps. The other thing I like about it, is with the Galaxy Fold, when you do multitasking, you'd like slide this thing over from the side, and then you'd like pick something from a list, and then you'd like pick another thing, and then it'd be a weird tile situation. It was a mess.

With the duo, they just like give you, they use the basic multitasking view, and then there's a big window, thumbnail of the window, and then you like drag it where you want it to go and you're done. So it builds on your understanding of how to move stuff around in a much more learnable way than what we've seen on other Android tablets. Yeah. And I think they're Microsoft's decision, and again, we did talk to PANUS about this on the VirtCast before, but they don't think the hardware of the folding screens is ready. They think two displays is the future. Here's a philosophical. And so I think they're correct to focus on how's the software going to work, right? Because everyone sort of agrees that the hardware is not ready.

But no one else is a software company the way Microsoft is. So they're chasing. Like Samsung is going to have some wild ideas about how to use its unfold. screen, but they're going to be like Samsung software ideas. Like you're going to unfold the Galaxy Z flip and the bottom screen is going to be Bixby. Like, it's just going to be a mess, right? What are the idea is that the hinge is sturdy enough so that you can set it down at an angle so that you can do video calls without having to prop it up? That's pretty good.

That's kind of clever, right? I buy it. But that's like more about camera. Anyway, Microsoft is like reasonably good at software, reasonably good at UI ideas, reasonably good at integrating that and your operating system and making the apps work. Like, they've got that set of chops that I think most of the Android phone vendors do not. Fair. Right.

So they're solving that problem. Here's my big question. Does solving that problem for two discrete displays map two, now it's one display that folds in half? Yes. Okay. Why not? Well, because when you have one display that folds in half, when you open it, you only have, you really only have one display. So automatically launching the apps on the left versus the right, like doesn't really do anything for you.

It doesn't do it. It doesn't make sense. Okay. That's fair. I think maybe by then they will have actually managed to get some developers to do what literally no Android developer has ever done in the history of Android, which has made good full-screen Android apps. Yeah. If you're an Android developer, I don't mean you, I mean everybody else. You're cool.

The rest of the ecosystem is terrible. What are the canonical examples, and I remember this way back when Google's first doing tablets is this idea of master detail. So like think of a message, like, your e-connellic. emails on an iPad. You have a list of messages on the left, and then on the right, you have the message that's selected, right? And so there's this concept that if you have a narrow screen, you just see one of those at a time. You click on the message, then you see the message, then you click back, and you see the list of messages. And when you go wide into a tablet, now apps can magically have two panes simultaneously. That didn't work out for Android for whatever

a reason. Or maybe it did. I just didn't spend enough time with Android tablets. What, what, what, because I like, I think Microsoft is really smart in this sense of like, let's pretend it's kind of two phones and it's really easy to send apps across between them. But, but these other ways of actually actively using both sides is, do you think Microsoft's really solving anything there? I kind of do. I mean, how often, how often does anybody with, like, say, a, a a note or a Galaxy S10 plus or whatever, actually do split screen on those phones. Probably not that much,

but how often would you, if you just had two screens, it was really easy to do? I think you'd do it a little bit more often, especially if the system for doing it was just a little bit more elegant and intuitive. The two apps at once thing. Yeah.

Yeah. I do think that's cool. So I saw Nadella using a duo last week, and he just was the coolest man. He pulled it out and he was like, he was scrolling. I swear to God he was doing it more. animatedly just to like rub it in our faces.

Like he was just like swiping. You can see that he was like on one screen on the other. That was great. Here's my question. All of this works if Microsoft gets into the market and they sell a lot of phones, right? It's a phone. It's supposed to replace your phone. And I am not 100% sure that they can take all the other boxes of phone stuff that they

need to do. For example, mostly what we talk about with phones now. is the camera. Right. Right? And so like, can Microsoft go from zero to computational photography tomorrow? Right? I mean, they can't.

They probably still have some of those old Nokia engineers hanging around, you know, who made those great, those great Lummias back in the day. She's like, finally, you guys. I've been waiting. Here's a gigantic 40 megapixel camera sensor. It's called the Pure View. Let's just bolt that to that. I hope so. That would be great.

But I think those are the open questions for Microsoft. I think they're going to do better on the software side and the thing looks compelling as hell because it is very thin when it's open and that's just awesome. But to replace your phone there's just a whole

battery life. Yep. Right? There's just a whole universe of things where in particular Apple and Samsung have gotten so good and Google orbits them, I would say. Google's just had a

year y'all it's so we it's it's like January 28th like what's the day today I meant I meant for the pixel 4 yeah I saw like a deal on the verge.com like pixel 4 discount I was like oh yeah they have a pixel 4 yeah I have a pixel yeah but like Google is very good at camera stuff that was their wedge in are they good at the other stuff they didn't quite get there yet and that's why we keep dinging them can Microsoft catch up on all of those fronts and execute a very novel idea about phone interfaces on a very unique piece of hardware where the app ecosystem isn't just going to chase them.

That is a big set of question marks. But I did see it like, dude, using it, and it looked super cool. So... Yeah. But I just think, like, we're going to... Everyone should be ready for... Even though it is only January 23rd.

Be ready for, like, late November, early December, just the wave of local news voices being like, Motorola's back with a folding razor, and you won't believe this screen. Like, that's just going to be around you. Like, do you remember when we're at the Apple event and we were watching? It was like the Today Show. It was good morning America, and they were talking about tips to improve your battery life.

Do you remember? We were like in the hotel the morning. We were like getting ready to go to the airport, and it was just like on the background. Okay. And all of their tips, like they were like, you don't need a new phone with great battery life. You could get better battery life right now by just turning your phone. phone off. And it was like, I don't, you're not, I don't know that Americans are being helped by this at this point in time. But like, that's, I think that's where we're going with the form factor stuff. The question is whether a consumer walking into the store with even an older iPhone, an iPhone 8 that has a reasonably good camera is going to trade down or trade sideways instead of getting the thing they're always expecting. I do think that there is such a pent-up thirst for a small phone. Even if people, like, deep down, don't actually want one. Everyone,

thinks they want one. And depending of what Apple does with the next SE that's sort of out there and rumored and how big that is, it's possible that these folding phones could pick up a bunch of people saying, you know what, I just want a small phone that fits my pocket. I don't care about the quality

of the camera or this or that of the other thing. And so I'm getting the razor because I can actually put it in my pocket without it sticking out. Yeah. I mean, it depends on how you've seen it. No, Heim saw it. Yeah. It's like pretty, it's so wide, right? It's like a wide phone. Yeah, and the Galaxy Z flipped from the leaked photos also looks pretty wide.

But I don't think it's much wider than a phone phone, a regular little smartphone. I can't wait to get these things. I'm sorry. I'm so excited about them. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. Literally as we have been speaking, Sonos has provided a statement about its product.

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Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, Paul, every week. Mm-hmm. You go in. You provide America the stability it's so desperately requires with a segment. Increasing desperation. It's called. I don't know that it's working, but we're going to do it again.

It's called Express Card, never died, and only slept. Wow. This is a false statement. It sounds good. No wonder America's falling apart, man. So there's these new, like, alleged leaked photos of the Xbox series of X. to be honest, I'm not like huge into leaked back panels of unreleased devices. It's not like totally my bag.

Although I did click on this, so maybe it is. So let's assume that this is a real photo of a real like dev unit of the Xbox Series X. You got two full-size USB plugs, an Ethernet port, a Spitif. There's no power brick, right? as far as I know. Anyway, I don't know. There's a power plug, right? But it's not like the one in the back of your desktop PC.

And HTMLI. But there's also this weird rectangular slot. Yeah. Long slide. And so according to the leaker, it's like, it's for diagnostics, right? Because this is a dev unit. This isn't a real Xbox Series X. But what if it was Express Card? And for people who maybe are a little younger, don't remember Express Card.

There was a time when most laptops came with one, sometimes even two express card slots. And this was for an expansion port that was basically PCI. You could plug in like a graphics card over this. Famously, they were perfectly timed so that there were a lot of these laptops that had express card slots, but were built before Wi-Fi was hot. So a lot of people added Wi-Fi to their laptop. and then later on put like LTE or 3G cards. Anyways, you know, obviously Express card is ridiculous for a modern thin laptop.

But I'm just trying to visualize some good reason. Yeah, exactly. I have two questions here. One, what diagnostics are you running that you need a slot? Like a 50 pin connector. I don't know. Like, okay, fine. And two, what do you connect you to an Xbox that you need?

this slot because it's basically a PC so why wouldn't you just like put a thunderbolt on it right because it's PC MCA and so they it's it's easier to code to the USB because you don't have to worry about drivers well like my first thought before I thought of Express card is like you could put like an extra NVME drive basically basically what I want is unadulterated access to the motherboard I don't want I don't want

to go through Intel's proprietary bridge from PCI to Thunderbolt. I just, I want to plug straight in. Yeah. We just did 40 minutes of conversation on security. You're like, I need hardware access immediately.

It's the Vergecast that we haven't mentioned it. So I just want to point out that that standard, the express card standard, PCMCA or whatever, it was the spec that was used for handspring visor modules and therefore it was the spec that the TRIOS radio used to

communicate with Palm OS. That's pretty good. Yeah. I buy it. At least on the first one. Didn't Palm also make a big bet on IRDA? I mean, that bet that could still pay off. You don't know.

It's still around. You can definitely walk up to another Palm user, be like, let me share my contact info with you, and then like send IR signals at that. Oh, look up Palm train commercial. There's an amazing commercial where, like, there's a man and woman on, like, opposite trains and they like see each other like, hey, you look, you look pretty hot. And then like as the trains are leaving, they managed to beam each other their contact information over IR across trains.

And then TVs for miles around had their volumes turned down. Okay. All right. Literally as we were talking, the CEO sent us Patrick Spence and note to customers. Yeah. Saying they got it wrong and clarifying some things. Let's just, I want to zoom out of this semi-breaking news. Ah, get it.

in talking about Spino's Sonos. So a few weeks ago, there was a controversy over Sonos' recycle mode. Yeah. Right? So if you have an old Sonos product,

you want to trade up to a new one, Sonos has a trade-up program, you tell them that you want to trade them up. They'll give you a discount on a new thing, and then they will send a software command to your old thing that disables it from working. And then you are meant to take it to a recycle center, and they have a list of those.

Or if you can't find one of those, you can mail it to Sonos, and they will recycle it. A person who works at a recycling center said this is bullshit on Twitter, which is how most problems start. These devices are bricked. The best way to actually get used to these things is to reuse them is to put them back in the field. It's very hard to recycle everything. Sonos is just breaking devices because they don't want to use them.

That was it like an illusion, right? It's like not quite true. You could just not participate in the recycle program. You could just leave your thing alone. it would keep working. You could just buy a new thing at full price and sell the old thing and, you know, recoup the difference. But if you took the recycle mode deal, then you would get a discount in your thing. So like one option out of many, but so knows who's not actively like breaking stuff to get you to.

But it's the internet. Some people got confused. I will say it is not great that recycle mode involved this bricking of devices. Yeah. But that's what it did. Okay, so that controversy is there. Sonos is like riding the wave. Then they announce the next thing, like last week, which is, hey, our old devices, they're

going to stop getting software updates in May because they're old. Like old, all the way to like 13 years old, the first generation play one, which is like between, depending on when you bought it, between like eight and five years old. It's like older things, not maybe as old as you want. in like only certain categories of them. So I have like a Sonos Connect that I bought like two years ago, not affected. Yeah. The Sonos Connect I bought like five years ago is affected.

So there's even internal variations. They say, you're not going to get software updates anymore. We don't think our platform roadmap can support those devices. And this is like hidden because it's complicated. They don't think changes in streaming service SDKs can be supported on those devices. Got it. So is this a DRM problem? Is that what you're saying?

I think it's, no. My guess is like, it's like a lossless music problem. It's like a streaming service gets bigger, more compute intensive, needs more RAM. Yeah. It's that problem. Whatever the problem is, it sort of doesn't matter. Like consumer electronics, generally speaking, unless it's like a PC or, I don't know, a TV, after five years, like, there are very few categories that still feel like they're good and continuing to get software updates and work as well as they did. Like an iPhone five years at the outside, an Android phone five years in, like you should be on your fourth one by then.

An Android phone like 18 months in is a little shaky. So everyone got this note from Sonos saying, hey, we're going to stop supporting the software. Importantly, everything is going to keep working. Everything just keep working. It's just not going to get new features in the software. And if you have modern Sonos products, they won't get new features either because once you have a bunch of Sonos stuff and has, it all runs the same software. Right. So this is complicated.

everyone just sort of muddled this together as Sonos is going to brick our devices in May. I mean, that's just 100% what happened because they mishandled the recycle mode controversy. Everyone thought they were breaking devices and they sent out this thing saying, hey, we're going to stop supporting the software on old devices and everyone just assumed their devices would stop working.

I got to say, we really live in this world where stop supporting often does mean bricking. Like, especially stuff that involves anything in the cloud. And it is true that if you have Joe Brown, he's at our popular science, he's like a friend of the verge, friend of ours, like, he's like, I got like

two or three thousand dollars with a sono stuff that like now has a clock on it. Like at some point, now I definitely know it'll stop working. Yeah. So they put out the statement today. I will quickly read it to you. It's just a text file on the internet, man. Just load.

Oh, don't try and load Sonos's webpage. It's down. Like they can't, They, their software can't run a web page, much less update older devices. That's amazing. Okay. So they put out a statement today. It's from Patrick Spence. He says, we, CEO of Sonos, we heard you.

We did not get this right from the start. First, rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for legacy products, they will continue to work as they do today. That is in bold. Like, they, people are so convinced that Sonos is going to brick their stuff that they're like, in bold, we're not breaking it. Actually, the next line is we're not breaking them. We're not forcing it's true.

We're not forcing them obsolescence. We're not taking anything away. The thing, and then it goes on to say, they're going to find a way to split Sonos. So if you have modern new stuff like a Sonos one, it can work independently of the old Sonos stuff. Probably not as seamlessly. But then you'll get updates, feature updates for the new stuff.

Your old stuff keeps working. You are a little bit less great. And they say they're going to try to figure out some ways through that too. Okay. That's like the problem. I think they're doing the best they can with a bunch of 10-year-old hardware in the field. I think the problem is like what you identify Diderot, Paul is saying, people expect their speakers to last forever. And the second you put a computer in something,

like the clock just starts ticking. And I think that is, that is the whole problem with the smart home, right? Like most of the stuff in your home you expect to last forever. Speakers and stereos are one of those things are part of your home, not so much part of like, like I have a amp at my house that is older than me. It's from 1974. It works just fine. It's great. I have a record player that's from 1994. It works just fine because it doesn't have any RAM in it. Right. Like, it's just like there's no, there's no computer in there and it's just going to work forever. Yeah, but it's really is that, I mean, we're playing, we're playing MP3 still basically. It is interesting. Like, I really wonder like at what point is the codec an actual issue for?

for them? No, but it's beyond the code. Like, think about actually the stack of software that you need to have a sono speaker run or any connected device. It needs a Wi-Fi radio. Wi-Fi from 10 years ago is very much unlike Wi-Fi today, right? Like, those things still have Wi-Fi, like 8021B radios in them. So they're not like the greatest Wi-Fi products.

They have to somehow mesh network with the new Sono stuff that has new radios in it. If they want to improve the new stuff, they stuff to somebody get back. compatible with the old stuff. And it's lost to work with, you know, in another five years, are you even going to be able to buy a B router? Like, who knows? Yeah, I mean, if it wasn't the codec, it would be the Wi-Fi. If it wasn't the Wi-Fi, it would be, you know, degradation of the RAM or whatever.

Like, it's going to be something. Computers just do not last that long the way that they are built in the Zuma Electronics and the way the software runs. So that's the Sano story, and maybe I'm being an apologist because I think, way, I have a lot of their stuff. B, I think, you know, a 10 year, they promise to support things for 10 years. They're just already longer than most things.

Right. So maybe I'm giving them like, I'm being a little too nice. But given that set of constraints, I think they're doing better than most other consumer electronics companies do. Like Apple is not out there being like, our phones from 2010 are like still in the mix.

Right. Hardly, hardly anybody even tries. I guess what I'm, I'm trying to think of like what sort of technologies could we embrace, like if I'm buying something right now, could I have a better opportunity other than just trusting a name brand like Sonos, who seems to have a good track record? What are the sets of technologies that I have a better chance of it lasting for a long time? I've got a very hot take that we were going to have to loop back to. But here we go. I blame Project Aura for all of this.

Dieter, remind everyone what Project Aura is. Google tried to make a modular phone and they way over promised and everyone made fun of it and they're like, this is dumb, this isn't going to work. And then turned out it was dumb and it didn't work. And then they tried it again

and it continued to not work. And Samsung actually tried this with their TVs. They tried to put the computer in a box that went on the back and no one did it. No one bought it. And the solution, the obvious solution to me is you build a speaker

that's designed to last 50 years and you've got a, a computer that's designed to last five years, and there's no way to make a computer last longer right now. So just make sure that you can separate those things and put a new computer on it when you need to. Are you talking about decentralized open source communication protocols? No, I'm talking about modularity.

I'm talking about just make the gadgets a little more modular so that you can take the old part off that doesn't work anymore and replace it with a new one that works better. But we as an industry have decided that, no, everything needs to be sealed and unitary and beautiful and perfect. And Sonos, like, played along. And maybe it's dumb or mean of me to demand that Sonos realized that they should have made the computer part modular way back when. But I don't know, man.

They always knew that speakers need to last longer. Maybe it was naive for them to think that they could make the computers inside them last longer, too. Yeah. And even they're somewhat modular products, like the AMP, or the Connect Amp, like that, the older version of the amp, which is like you plug your own. It is modular, right? You plug speakers into it. Well, that's on the list. And I'm sure the power amp inside the amp, the actual amplifier works fine.

It's the computer that went bad, and you can't replace that. Right. But, like, is anybody going to do that? No, that's the thing. It's like it's, it, my dream is that people, this will wake everybody up and I fix it will win and we'll get modular stuff everywhere. And batteries will become replaceable again. And like, yeah, like, none of that's happening. because there is apparently no consumer demand for it.

There's consumer outrage on the back end, but connecting that consumer outrage to consumer demand for things that are actually modular in the first place, I don't know that we're going to see that happen. So let me paint a much more negative picture. Just a little bit of optimism. I imagine there are enough people who have been burned by their phone having degrading battery life,

like once or twice now. It's like, wow, even when I took really good care of that phone, it got really, really bad at battery life, and I couldn't replace it, and that was frustrating, that a product with a replaceable battery is a strong selling point if someone can offer that.

Maybe, but, you know, your phone has degrading battery life and avals are on a processor, and they're like, there's a weird explanation for why. Like, you can get your battery replaced still, right? And you see the performance decrease, and you're like, my phone got slow,

it's time for a new phone, or I'm aware that I can replace the battery. I'm going to do it. If you have a bunch of, like, speakers or, I think way more dystopian is like smart home stuff. Yeah. Like my thermostat is going to stop getting software up.

Like it's like very obvious, right? Like it was the first thing I thought of. It was like, I have a Nest thermostat. It does its job every day. It turns the heat on and off. And I can look at the status of it from my phone. I do not need it to do anything more than that. At some point, Nest is going to say this processor is too slow.

The Wi-Fi radios are out of date. And I'd be forced to buy a new thermostat in a way that literally Ness promise was, thermostats have not been redesigned or replaced in 60 years. Like that was their selling point. That's like Tony Fidel said to me. And now I'm like every five years I've got to buy a new thermostat because like it's a computer and your web service needs wants to communicate to it differently. People who are installing smart plugs in their walls right now, what is going to happen to you?

We keep talking about ZWave and Zigby. It's like everyone who's buying one of, like stuff on one of those protocols right now. and then this new thing happens. It's like IP-based Zigby, weird thing that's out in the world. And all those manufacturers, like, we support this now. And like, you're just,

I've got a smart home full of Z-wave stuff and they failed. Like, that, I don't know how you connect that consumer demand to modularity or whatever, because you're not, you're not going to go around to all your smart plugs and be like, I'm going to replace this radio.

You're just going to throw it away. Yeah. And like, I don't know, that, this sonous thing to me is like, just, it's the first blip of people, being extremely unhappy about things they perceive to be part of their home going obsolete for computer reasons. Because you take these computer reasons and you apply them to standard computer stuff.

Like I bought, I mean, like, what's a classic thing? Like, you built your own PC and you buy a new GPU for it and you can't get the full performance out of the GPU because you don't have the right motherboard. So then you kind of end up buying, and like by the end of it, you've built a whole new PC, right? Like, that happens to people all the time. And that's just sort of like accept it. here it's like yeah i got to tear down my house i think because like that to me i like we're so

used to computer what is the show about this is Dieter has a newsletter about computers this is a podcast about computer problems right and like we we know what they're like we we know about the security issues you start applying that stuff to toasters and plug outlets and lights like the one thing that we never talk about is like all that stuff goes bad. The company goes out of business or they want to change the communications protocol it uses or the API changes and that stuff goes away. And in computer world, that means I'll just buy a new one. I get it. In house world, it means I'm extraordinarily mad at you and you're going to issue an apology that is basically we're doing what we said we're going to do. We're just saying it calmly, which is what this apology is. And that's as best as you can do.

But I mean, the question is, do you just, do you, well, I'm never buying a smart speaker. and ha ha, I told you also, ha ha. Like I don't like that answer either. But maybe, I don't know, it's... I just think there's an optimism in that there are a lot of technical ways to solve these things, like making things modular.

And there's nothing really... It's not like with physics are what keep us from, you know, being able to run, you know, Fortnite at 4K on our phones at 120 frames per second, you know? But there's no like real limitations like that that really stop. It's more of like a willpower, like there needs to be demand. And I saw this really interesting headline with, it wasn't the headline, but Adobe is teasing this a Premiere Pro collaborative editing thing.

And this is for, you know, film production, which has a very important secrecy component. So you don't always want film editors to be connected to the internet. And so one of their selling points is nothing, nothing is on the cloud unless you put it there, says Adobe. So it's like, you know, when you need to do, I mean, this is networked computing. Like, this is serious stuff. It just doesn't have to use the internet because it's not actually a technical

requirement of the solution. And because there is demand, they can eat, I don't know about easily, but they are filling that demand and a no internet required solution for something that for most of us, like we don't know typically how to edit documents collaboratively without using Google Docs or something else that's on the web. But they can figure this out for video editing

because there was a demand for it. We figured it out in 2002. Was it sub-etha ed? Yeah, my God. I think, Paul, you're correct. I mean, it's just like the Amazon's business model does not allow you to not be connected to their server, right? Like, they're going to sell you cheap Echo speakers

and hope that they make the money up on Alexa over time. How they're going to do it? We still don't know. Mostly so far as it's appeared that like Alexa screams at you about Black Friday from time to time. Like that is the commercial relationship I have with that product. Apparently they upsell you on Amazon music. Wow. Yeah.

55 million subscribers, man. I was not aware of that was. Right. But like that means like the amount of cheap hardware in your life is just like going up because they're all making it up on services. Yeah. And so like. But then the cheap hardware harms.

you and then you get some more cheap harder and that harms you too and then at some point you're like you know what this cheap hardware keeps on harming me and i think i'm going to try to find a new generation of teens like your market knowledge is not translate you don't think the teens are going to listen to me when i tell them that the cheap hardware will harm them i'm just saying welcome to my ticot channel oh my god yes paul's cheap hardware ticot channel let me tell you why this 30 dollar google home is actually a threat to democracy. Gather around, gentlemen.

All right, we're going to end it there. We've been going for a while. I feel like we were going to maybe talk about, I was just going to yell about Comcast for a while, but I can't. Just assume. Just assume that Eli has yelled about a Comcast.

I'm just going to say it. Proceeded by a clarifying discol. Comcasts had two things. Yeah, Comcast. Comcast Investor in Box Video, Jones, their earnings came out, and they said, one, they're raising prices on cable subscribers. which is amazing.

Two, their CAPX, their investment in the network has gone down by 10%, which is the exact opposite thing people said would happen when net neutrality went away. As you probably promised that CAPX would go up, the cast CAPX go down. And then three, they said, we stand to make more money in streaming than anyone with their new Peacock service.

And the reason is because they can bundle it with the internet service they own and then excuse it from data caps. It's the nightmare. I told you. I told you so. Okay, that's the Vergecast. I told you so

Rock and roll Paul No it's everything's great Thank you for listening I appreciate you Goodbye